Our world today seems fraught with peril: everywhere you look are threats to your safety and well-being. If it’s not the U.S. housing market’s collapse affecting economics worldwide, it’s the failure of Cypriot banking affecting the global economy. If it’s not Iran threatening an attack on Israel, it’s North Korea threatening South Korea (and Japan and the United States and likely the moon and the Kuiper Belt, too, for some damn reason). Hydraulic fracturing is leading to both a new oil and gas boom and to earthquakes and flammable tap water...
The list of potential causes for doom and gloom goes on and on, and it can indeed cast a pall over even the sunniest of days if you dwell on it. So today, we thought we’d take a turn for the positive, and give you fewer things to worry about by crossing some issues off your “Things I Worry About” list. (Also, for the record, if you have a list like that, you may want to talk to someone about the larger, underlying issues.)
I’m not here to take a stand for or against the MPAA or anything like that—there is chatter enough about that subject on the Internet already. No, what this missive today will discuss is the phenomenon that often occurs in movies ostensibly made for children, or at least families, wherein one or more of the plot points seem to roll right off the backs of children but, when considered from an adult perspective, are goddamn terrifying.
Since time immemorial, human beings have been artists. As soon as anything approaching an established society was, well, established, our artistic endeavors began. From the caves of Lascaux to the carvings of the Inuit to the pictographs gracing canyons in the American west, humans have long been creating works of art.
It is with at least a permissible dash of hubris that the literary and artistic population of any (that is to say, every) generation considers itself on the forefront of something. We are always looking for the pulse, the zeitgeist, the movement; be it an “ism” (say, modernism or futurism, both of which are, ironically, long past their sell-by dates) or a “school of,” or an identification based on location (Denver for the Beats, Paris for the ex-pats). As creative folks strive to create art and literature, they of course aspire to break new trails and inspire, shock, and/or perplex (Dada . . .) The People. That or they seek to resolve some conflict within. This is not to say that attempting to affect externally while grappling internally are in any way mutually exclusive.
First off, let me be clear: we’re talking about crime in literature, on television, in games, etc. That kind of crime. Not like actually getting your car stolen or reading a blotter note about a CPA defrauding a charming little mom-n-pop bakery, for example. Those things don’t seem sexy at all, right? Now, an insanely well-planned bank heist, replete with an inside man, multiple drop vehicles, awesome shorthand bank robber lingo, and some serious assault rifles . . . that’s awesome, right? Pretty much. That’s why people watch and re-watch movies like The Town and Heat, to name two out of a thousand.
Few historians or art critics will argue with the notion that art culture reflects the culture from which it arises. (Some may claim, often accurately, that art forecasts cultural shifts or upheavals as well, of course.) Take the ever more chilling paintings of Goya as Napoleon’s jackboots ran roughshod over much of Europe in the early 19th century. Take ever lighter and brighter works of Monet, Manet, and their ilk as the world—or at least the Western World—grew ever more peaceful and profitable toward the end of that same century (never mind about that whole thing that started a bit later in 1914).
First, let me clarify what I mean when I use the term “antihero” in this piece. (Or should I say qualify? You decide.) I mean not a traditional hero. I mean someone with flaws or with blood on their hands. Or at least dirt. And their motives may be focused rather inward, at least much of the time. Or at least initially. So I don’t mean, say, Superman. Or Elliot Ness. (Fighting for the enforcement of prohibition laws? That man was not looking out for No. 1.)
