ill LYTeracy - A Cinematic Decade of Dickishness

(Cue Don LaFontaine voice)

"In a decade...when the world seemed led by self-righteous bullies..."

Okay, pause there for a second. I know some of you are instinctively jerking the knee, and assuming I’m going for a cheap Bush bash in a column about movies. It is true that Bush was something of a self-righteous bully, but I am by no means narrowing my focus to him. I’m talking every major world leader of the past 10 years you can think of: Putin, Ahmadenijad, Blair, Berlusconi, Kim...all convinced of their own righteousness, yet all quite transparently acting primarily in their own self-interest.

So yes, in a decade when the real world was dominated by self-righteous bullies, it is perhaps not so surprising that the reel world featured them most prominently throughout the aughts. Self-righteous heroes aren’t new, of course, nor are the bullying kind – but what was a noticeable recent development is that the movies they appeared in started tipping their hand, letting you know that the filmmakers know these heroes are often on the wrong track with their moral crusade.

 

Perhaps nothing epitomizes this trend more than the decade’s most profitable franchise, SAW. The story revolves around John Kramer (Tobin Bell), an engineer with terminal cancer who decides that too many people do not sufficiently appreciate their own good health. His solution is to place them in elaborate mechanical traps (and, in more deserving cases, twisted horror mazes) which can only be escaped by either killing another person or somehow maiming yourself. Those who survive, he surmises, will appreciate life all the more.

And yet, brilliant as the character is (he has the amazing ability to predict almost every single thing his adversaries will do), his plans as conceived are a total failure. Only two people actually manage to survive their initial traps: the first, Amanda (Shawnee Smith) is an emotionally volatile junkie who does use the occasion of her release to kick the drug habit, but becomes so dangerous in other ways that Kramer reluctantly has to test her again; this time, she fails and dies. The second survivor, Agent Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) becomes such a gleeful sadist that Kramer arranges a second test for him, too...as of the ending of part 6, he’s alive, but with half his jaw ripped off. Some success story. Culture warriors have criticized the SAW series for their dubious morality, but the abject disaster of Kramer’s plans is a major indication, should one even be needed by this point, that he is no role model.

In the non-horror realm, we have the eternally rebooted Batman and James Bond. As played by Daniel Craig, Bond lost his sense of humor, gained a new level of brutality, and became motivated primarily by a personal vendetta rather than queen and country, so much so that in QUANTUM OF SOLACE, he doesn’t even bother to seduce the leading lady, and leaves the villain stranded in the desert to dehydrate rather than either fighting him to the death or bringing him in for questioning.

 

As for Batman: in his first Christian Bale incarnation, he unveiled a convenient exception to his code against killing – “I’m not going to kill you, but I don’t have to save you.” Second go-around, he foreswore the killing and even saved the Joker’s life, yet proceeded to wiretap the entire city, in a move that offended Morgan Freeman’s sense of morality, so you know it was bad. Batman has always had a layer of self-righteousness, particularly in the Dini/Timm animated series, but there were restraints on calling too much attention to it in a show so bound by kiddie-show restrictions that Batman had to don a helmet every time he rode the Batcycle. And yes, Batman, had been “dark” before – in the original Dark Knight comic (in which Frank Miller completely justified his behavior as a contrast to the simplistic good-guy stance of Superman and Ronald Reagan), and in the Burton-Schumacher series (where Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer both played him as a lost child looking for a family). This, however, was the first time his darkness played out on film as somewhat undesirable, if a necessary evil at times. Others, both pro and con, have already enumerated the parallels to Bush and the War on Terror; we need not rehash them here. Frank Miller’s other major comics creations on screen, SIN CITY’s Marv and 300’s Leonidas, had noble intentions but generally sadistic means of realizing them.

Other cinematic icons got similar era-appropriate upgrades. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was no longer sufficient with just Leatherface; now he became the henchman of a perverted and power-mad sheriff played by R. Lee Ermey (the prequel revealed him to be an impostor sheriff, but a self-righteous bully nonetheless). Jason Voorhees, no longer rampaging simply to get back at the lifeguards who let him drown, was reborn as the ultimate libertarian, just wanting to be left alone and not have punk kids steal his weed stash. Rambo and the Punisher were retooled as slasher-killers with guns; the former more successfully than the latter, though I’d argue that the Ray Stevenson Punisher is in fact the best one, and suffered at the box office primarily from reboot fatigue. And lest we forget, though we might want to: John Singleton’s remade SHAFT had no sense of fun at all.

Even the most arguably inspirational of films spotlighted the obnoxious and unreliable. Tyler Perry became one of the decade’s big cinematic success stories for his ability to keep cranking out Christian morality plays – yet at the heart of his most successful features was Madea, a cranky, elderly aunt played by Perry in drag, who straightened up wayward characters with threats (and occasional actions) of violence, and a dubious understanding of scripture...ultimately, the redeemed soul would have to be set right a little more by an obviously noble character who could gently correct the errors made by the crazy lady. As I noted in my review of CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY, many of the same characteristics endemic to Madea were also embodied by Michael Moore, who tried to get moviegoers on his own path of righteousness by being comedically obnoxious in a different fashion.

 

We cannot, of course, discount the most petulant bully-hero of them all: Anakin Skywalker, as played by Hayden Christensen. Others take aim at his acting, but I say it’s what the character needed. A sneering, self-righteous, spoiled-brat heir to the throne of power, as influenced by a dark veteran of government, lurking in the shadows of an unknown location? Okay, that IS a Bush-bash, I admit. But so is “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” And even Obi-wan, the ostensible good guy in the whole thing, is forced to admit “I have failed you” at the end of REVENGE OF THE SITH. Yet the movie ends with the promise of A New Hope (and Change?).

Not every hero fit this mold, however. Frodo Baggins and Harry Potter remained essentially noble in their fantasy realms, while Rocky Balboa resurfaced to show us that a strong second-place showing isn’t quite the same thing as a loss. Villains were even reformed in the likes of RATATOUILLE and the SPY KIDS movies. And childhood favorite Optimus Prime remained a stalwart good guy amid a sea of stereotypes and dick jokes in Michael Bay’s re-imagined TRANSFORMERS; it is more than a little ironic to note that this robotic bastion of integrity was invented as a means to get kids to buy expensive Hasbro toys.

Then there was Peter Parker, who usually did the right thing as SPIDER-MAN, but suffered a miserable life because of it. When he finally got self-righteous in part 3, fans jeered, but the grosses skyrocketed. Let us make only brief mention of SHREK, who showed kids how awesome it was to be fat, disgusting, and anti-social.

Thankfully, at decade’s end, the world seems to have had its fill of false righteousness, as the bitter fruits of it all have become a tedious diet. Cinematically, it is notable that the decade ended with AVATAR, in which an initially self-interested hero finally repents, takes on a cause greater than himself, and becomes more than he ever thought he could be. The movie’s record-breaking profits have mostly been attributed to visual spectacle, but it’s entirely possible that it also signifies a willingness to believe in good guys again.

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.