Friday, July 4, 2008

The Great Denial


I saw Hancock today. It was an entertaining movie, but nothing you should necessarily jump out of your seat and rush to the movie theater for. There are others that you should go see intead like...well, maybe not. There will be no spoilers here so reading this won't ruin your fun if you choose to see it.
John Hancock is a man with extraordinary powers who is out for his own good. So much for the magnanimous superhero that we are so used to seeing in comic books, movies and on TV. He only is motivated to do good as long as the doing is on his terms with no care given to collateral damage. He causes millions of dollars in damage to stop a couple of criminals who have done wrong, in his eyes, by calling him names never mind the fact that they are jeopardizing lives by shooting at cars on the California highways.
Hancock is a reluctant superhero. He wants to deny what he has and who he is and that's why he is so prone to drinking even while he is "saving the day." It's an interesting premise, but one which the movie fails to really exploit to a logical conclusion. But I wonder, what would happen if other great ones would deny the use of their power?
In Dante's Inferno, we meet Celestine V, who was elected Pope, but decided that he would rather be a monk and a hermit so he denied his election and went into the wilderness. In the meantime, the papacy came under the control of a French cardinal who moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon, France where it remained for 70 years. This is called the Babylonian Captivity of the Roman Church. For his denial, Celestine is neither in Hell nor out of it. He walks with the 1/3 of the angels who declared for neither God nor Lucifer. He is a pariah.
What if Christ had denied taking up the cross and running away when the guards came to take him at Gethsemane? This was explored in the movie, The Last Temptation of Christ. In this movie, Christ is allowed to come down from the cross by Satan where he ends up living a "normal" life with marriage and kids. However, it is only a dream and Christ ends up back on the cross to fulfill what he was sent to do.
You can apply this to all the great heroes of mythology, ancient and modern. What if they had denied their powers, their gifts to the rest of the world? I think it is safe to say that the world would only be a bad place, not a super screwed up place. But just because we have such gifts and talents, are we required to use them and, what's more, are we required to use them for the greater good?
Christian thought would say unequivocally yes, invoking as its guide the parable of the talents (Matthew 25: 14-30). Talents are given by God and thus are meant to be multiplied and the return given back to the master. Nothing there about greater good, but you can infer that from other parts of the Gospel.
But why not simply let the talents remain idle especially if all it causes us is self-sacrifice and pain and even loneliness? Such was the case with Superman and that is why he became mortal, but look at what happened during his absence?
Too many of us want to be anonymous. The rest want their 15 minutes of fame to show how they can belch the national anthem or do some other crazy and inherently worthless feat. Has our society devolved to such a point that great talent must be shelved away and mediocrity favored? Are we so loathe not to stand out with what makes us special? Unfortunately, yes.
Ours is an interesting society--we want people to use their talents especially in the sports industry but in other fields, we denounce so-called "experts" because why should their opinion be greater than ours? No wonder why we fear intellectualism in this country!
The premise of Hancock is not so strange then because we are doing this each and every day. We are denying what we have been given to use because we don't want to risk standing out and being perceived as different or even dangerous unless it's for reasons that can get us a lot of laughs at the expense of our own self-respect. Too many of us want to avoid responsibility so we deny what we are given so someone else can do it. If we do decide to take up the task what is in front of us, then we do it for our own gain and we insist we do it our way. Hancock is not a movie about a superhero. It's a movie about each of us. It is the same with the Greco-Roman heroes of mythology. The stories aren't so much about Achilles or Ajax or Oedipus or Antigone or Electra or Hector, but about each and every one of us.
I don't know if the world will be a better place if we continued to deny ourselves (and I'm not talking in the Christ-like way here, mind you), but it would at least be a lot more interesting not so full of daily tedium

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