MENTAL DINING

Villains of Black and White and all shades in between

Right-wing whacko’s and far left looney tree-huggers. Seems that if you take the pulse of the United States (and many say-the World) that those two extremes are all we find. And why not.
We have separation of Church and state (good) so we can’t have a Christmas Tree at school (Bad). We don’t want gun control (good) so when people go insane and kill a whole bunch of people we get mad at the NRA (Bad). Look I realize that there are some issues to be extreme about-Child Pornography is bad. Period. There is not one argument (of any intellectual status) that can be made to say different. However, We can all be against using abortion as birth control (I’m against that) but if someone needs help (a relative or parent raped them, they were molested by a priest, they were drunk and stupid and forgot – at least the first time that happens) why destroy their lives, risk the woman’s health or traumatize a dozen people in the family just to protect the possibility of a life?
What I am essentially saying is that we have forgotten how to walk a middle road. Why? What is it about the middle, about shades of grey, that threaten us so? Have the issues become so important that we have forgotten-or ignore- the fact that these issues affect PEOPLE! Individuals.
So, now we have an issue. Let’s look at the cause. My therapist told me recently that the cause doesn’t matter-it doesn’t matter why something happens, whatever you think caused it, does, as long as you can use it to change the behavior. Well, I think that is a very good truth when it comes to individuals. Individuals can put aside seeking a cause and accept that the behavior must be changed. But when the whole are being led in one direction, it becomes harder because we can’t be looking for an individual change, we have to be looking for a change in society as a whole and it’s harder by far to change direction of a stamped or a riot than to alter the course of a single pedestrian.
All of the foregoing is really set up to look at one of the causes I believe underlie this issue. Movie Villains. I went to see “A Law Abiding Citizen” a few days ago. (for those of you who haven’t seen it I’ll try to be general but there may be spoilers ahead). The film posits that a good ma, loving father and husband, has his family taken from him in a brutal act and that in order for the ADA to keep his conviction rate high (“Some justice is better than no justice”. He says) he allows the murderer to get off with a slap on the wrist and the accomplice to face the ultimate penalty. Now here, the bad guy is despicable. He kills a child, rapes and murders a woman, does drugs, mistreats women in general. We thoroughly dislike him. However, the “Hero” in the film kills a dozen or so people who worked at their job everyday in order to try and help protect and defend us from people of that villainous sort. And how did they portray the “Hero”? They cast Gerard Butler, a fine actor who is very popular right now, they made hi sympathetic (we can all feel for a man who loses everything) They make him smart and far more likeable than the ADA in the case. I mean, I really liked the character, felt bad for him. If he had just killed the bad guys who did this to him, I would be cheering. But he kills more. And More. Finding fault not only with the system but everyone in it. Eventually even I realize that he cannot be pardoned for his sins. But why make us like him in the first place? Why make us empathize? Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Die Hard with its charming yet sociopathic villain Hans Gruber, played by Alan Rickman. Darth Vader? Khan from Star Trek? Freddy Krueger, Matt Damon as Frank Abagnale Jr in “catch me if you can!”. We love the villains, we want them to win, we want them to succeed and succeed spectacularly. Yet we would never want them to succeed in real life. Did we want the Muslim Extremists to kill all those people and bring down the twin towers? Did we want the Fort Hood Shooter to kill and wound dozens of our soldiers? Did we cheer for the DC Sniper when he killed so many randomly on our highways? Yet in movies, books, etc…the villain is often more entertaining, more gloriously fun and exciting than the hero.
So, how can we see issues in shades of grey, identify with both sides and want to try and work out a compromise when we idealize the very sort of villains we daily deal with. Terrorists. Con Men. Murderers. We cheer and love them every day in fiction-TV, Movies and Books-and then decry them in real life…and yet even as we decry them, we remember (perhaps subconsciously) how we cheered someone similar the day before. I hate what happened at Fort Hood this month. I cheered quietly for Gerard Butler in the movies. No wonder we can’t feel for the individual as well as the crowd. No wonder we can’t act as harshly as perhaps needs to be done. We like our villains. We hate our villains. We want our villains.
Rarely in fiction is there a world of victims or a nation of victims. It’s almost always drawn down to seeing a very few individuals actually affected. And that’s what we start to see. One group or one individual or one side of an issue vs. the other group or side or issue. No ones in the middle. No innocent bystanders. Just bad guys and good guys and our opinions set in stone about both. Simultaneously liking and hating both. The shooter at Fort Hood was a hideous man and he may very well have had some terrorist motives. But what does that mean for other Muslim Americans in the service today? Can they all be innocent? Of course. But will they be treated that way? Maybe but I don’t hold a great deal of hope for that. We have to have our Villains and cheer for them, but in the end, destroy them and feel good about ourselves. Me, I wonder why it was okay for the ADA in “A Law Abiding Citizen” to get a happy ending, be successful, while the “hero" (or anti-hero if you will) ruins what’s left of his life with hate and vengeance and death. The world is not black and white. It is constantly moving shades of grey. Think about the individuals involved, work on making a decision one at a time and stop thinking that compromise, even a little, will be the same as defeat for your position. The world is not the movies. It’s not Comic books or TV shows. It’s you and your neighbor and the lady down the street and the Muslim across town and the Afrikaner in the next town. It’s everyone altogether and it’s each person as an individual. It isn’t simple or easy but it’s what will eventually find us a solution and survival that we can ALL live with!

posted by Chris Cook-Sussan @ 12:02 PM