Che Part One, The Spirit, Slumdog Millionaire

Recently, I've watched three movies about heroes, three very different movies, from three very different genres. It’s almost odd to compare them, but I think the exercise might be worthwhile, especially when considering the nature of contemporary myth-making, a subject I’m very much interested in.

In the first film--the heavily art-directed The Spirit -- the hero presented is a bit of a buffoon, a skirt-chasing comedian, blessed due to some genetic sci-fi with the ability to survive being stabbed, pierced, hacked, shot, blown up, and in one scene gratuitously beaten over the head with a ceramic commode. To give this much abused protagonist an aura of faux emotional complexity, writer / director Frank Miller has the cardboard creation deliver long, meandering monologues about the nature of his own spiritual and heroic significance to the city. These somewhat pretentious introspections don’t fit with the rest of the film which features homicidal belly-dancers, mutant henchmen, and one particularly surreal segment where Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlet Johansson strut around in S.S. garb for no apparent reason other than to appear even more villainous than they already do.

The film’s script left much to be desired, the acting was wooden and corny, and ultimately despite all the pyrotechnics the feature failed to entertain. And there was also the fact that it’s hard to sympathize very much with a protagonist who seems to be pretty much near invincible in the first place, and yet not particularly noble.

The second film I saw was Che Part One, directed by Steven Soderbergh. The hero in this case was a real-life figure and the mode of the narrative was a form of documentary realism, so it’s unfair perhaps to compare it to The Spirit. So I won’t push the comparison very far, other than to say, perhaps rather redundantly, that Che’s (a.k.a. Benicio Del Toro’s) introspective monologues in this film, being based on the writings of an actual revolutionary who fought real wars in pursuit of a cause he really believed in, were far more compelling. Resonances with contemporary world events, including the war on terror added an interesting layer to this film devoted to the creation and rise of a legend and an icon. There were moments when I felt very uncomfortable, as I found myself drawn into Che’s worldview, found myself buying it to a certain extent, and then had to step back and really consider the implications of what he was saying. According to Guevera, a revolutionary is motivated by love above all else. A romantic and poetic notion, the sort of thing that certainly sounds beautiful and captivating. But how, I struggled to understand, in real terms does love translate into a series of politically-motivated violent actions? Sure, the revolutionary loves his cause, and he loves his ideals, and he loves his own sense of self-righteousness. But does he really love people? Because in any revolution or insurrection, innocents are bound to suffer, to be hurt, raped, killed. And these innocents unlike the hero, unlike the legend, remain nameless and do not have the ability to be or act invincible. True, injustice when it is clear cut, when it weighs heavily on one side, seems to demand some sort of action to correct it. The problem of course, lies in the fact that it’s not often clear cut. The young men who brought terror to Mumbai this past November, very much resembled Che’s band of guerilla fighters in their lightning strike methods and their battle-cry against decadence and wealth, and perhaps in their fanaticism as well, in their arrogant belief that their cause was so just that it didn’t matter who they hurt in its pursuit. But these young men did a terrible thing, and I would cringe if anyone even tried to label them as heroes of any sort at all.

And speaking of Mumbai, and also of class-struggle, that brings me to the third film—Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s urban, somewhat disturbing fairytale. Here the hero was the lowest of the low, a noble underdog trying to pull his way out of the stench and squalor of Mumbai’s poorest districts. And here again, while the hero was extremely heroic, the villains that thwarted him in his quest for upward mobility were extremely villainous—child abusers, pimps, slumlords, brutal policemen, rioting mobs—the protagonist had to endure quite a lot before he could safely make it to the Bollywood dance number at the end. Though many westerners have liked this film, I have to say, that I found it overly simplistic, that though it pretended towards realism, it fell apart for me at multiple points. It was sort of a whirlwind tour of stereotypical social evils, mixed together like an ill-conceived masala. What’s sad is that these issues really do need to be explored and talked about, but in a rather more considered manner, and not in such a cursory way that they reek of cheap emotional manipulation and perhaps even a little bit of cross-cultural satire. Having said all that, I must say that the children who performed in the movie were truly exceptional—they held up the film with their charm and their mischief. For them alone, the movie is worth watching.

More on heroes later!!!