With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on the way, AJ wonders… is the traditional cinema hero set to become a thing of the past?
Heroes have existed in the history of cinematic culture comparatively as long as they have in the sweep of myth and literature. Whether they’re the white hats of a western or the costumed heroes of derring-do serials, we’ve always consumed the concept of a saviour able to protect our village, city, world, galaxy, or sometimes even the universe.
This became particularly apparent in Hollywood when the New Wave of US cinema, rising in the 1970s following the collapse of the studio system, gave way to blockbuster filmmaking often fronted by avatars of mythological gods. The likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone dominated screens in the 1980s and 90s – they were one-man armies saving lives and nations.
They were supplanted largely by not just the arrival of the franchise but also the comic book hero, nascent in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, but truly burgeoning in the 2000s with Spider-Man and X-Men. Then came Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a 2010s defined by costumed heroism, the stakes growing ever higher until the villain is wiping out entire populations with a snap of his finger.
We now seem to be heading into a new phase of heroism on the big screen – one in which the established, underlying reasons heroes fight are fundamentally beginning to change.
So what exactly have these heroes been fighting? Ostensibly, they’re trying to save lives, be it from crazed supervillains or terrorists or whatever the source of danger might be. Yet simultaneously they’re either looking to protect a broader conceptual idea of society, often while fighting their own personal demons. Name a legendary hero who is not, in some manner, tortured and I’ll find you a three-headed monkey. Comic book heroes, for example, are rarely comic-book heroes if the loss of at least one important parental figure hasn’t heavily informed their psychology or their need to put on a costume.
Heroes are often equally reluctant in their quests, forced into their circumstances by events beyond their control, whether it’s John McClane trying to save his wife in Die Hard or Jack Burton just trying to get back to his truck in Big Trouble In Little China (though in truth he’s really the comedy sidekick, not the hero of that film, he just looks like he is). Certain comic book heroes also fit this bill, many tortured enough that they never enjoy putting the suit on but do it because they have to, because great power equals great responsibility and so on.
Or they’re fuelled by pure vengeance, transforming more into an anti-hero; a crusader who looks inward for their own gain or cathartic resolution than outward for the good of people around them. Lee Marvin in Point Blank and Frank Castle (aka The Punisher) are often more interesting to watch than, say, a Superman who fights for truth, justice and the American way. They’re less earnest and driven more by a recognisable human trait, where self-preservation and satisfaction trump selflessness. In a simpler world, they would have been black hats. Now they’re murkier approximations of our own duality.
Traditional heroes, then, are designed to protect and maintain a status quo. Be that a system of government, a function of law or a societal expectation. The gunslinging lawmen of the Old West upheld the rule of law across the frontier from bandits and, worse, Native Americans. Costumed heroes worked with law enforcement to protect their cities, often Gothic constructions built on old world money and power, from chaos elements, ruthless developers or plain lunatics who’d removed themselves from societal norms. Many of the one-man army heroes of the blockbuster era had a similar motive for fighting terrorists, kidnappers or murderers.
Villains often work as disruptive elements to not just society but structural organisations. Supervillains either want to burn everything down or fundamentally bend society to their will and control. The Joker in The Dark Knight represents the former, Blofeld in Spectre the latter. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, bridging as it did the beginning of the economic crisis that laid the seeds for today’s techno-populism, hinted at the wider sociological effect our changing relationship with heroism would have on the world, especially in The Dark Knight Rises. That film has Bane partly revenge-motivated but largely a disrupter who wants to use Batman’s tainted heroism to foment a revolution among Gotham’s masses.
Perhaps a reason why comic-book heroism took hold across the 2010s was not just about how Marvel married traditional comic-book movie structures with must-see episodic television, but also our own growing awareness that the structures said heroes have long protected are decaying in western society. Captain America learns that HYDRA has corrupted SHIELD, that bastions of American freedom have been infiltrated by fascist extremists. Thanos seeks ultimate population control as a means of balancing resources. So many of these films speak not just to disrupters with arch plans but how they expose the frailty of government or democratic systems in their disruption, sometimes even working within them.
This also could explain the ‘lone hero’ trope that has taken hold in recent years to a more intense degree. McClane, John Matrix, John Rambo were all lone heroes, but as an audience, you never doubted they would prevail. They existed within a cathartic, controlled and safe geopolitical sandbox either during the end of the Cold War or the unipolar security of the United States. After 9/11, it all started to change. Jason Bourne realised his own government, with its mass surveillance, was an Orwellian nightmare. James Bond returned to a complex world where CIA agents worked with brokers to help dictators as part of a scheme to control the supply of a natural resource (as we saw in Quantum Of Solace as an example). And Ethan Hunt steadily became, even within his own storytelling, “a living manifestation of destiny” as one character describes him.
Hunt and the Mission: Impossible franchise is, to me, the prime example of how the idea of heroism has changed and is evolving. Hunt began as part of a traditional 60s era MI team, as Brian de Palma in post-modern fashion subverted traditional espionage storytelling and imploded that team from within. It was from then on never a traditional adaptation of the TV series, partly thanks to Tom Cruise’s uniquely intense star power. He constantly reinvented Hunt, first trying to make him an American Bond of old, then a family man, and finally a tortured hero who becomes a living legend. Only John Wick probably bests him as an example of heroic mythology who cuts through his own world-building.
Mission: Impossible has reached the stage, going into Cruise’s apparent last bow as the character in The Final Reckoning, that Hunt is near-comically referenced in the films themselves as someone almost religiously committed to saving the world. It feels on the one hand a nod to Cruise, on the other an awareness of just how ludicrous the idea of one (particularly white) middle aged saviour is in a complex world of shifting geopolitics, social media, advancing climate change and artificial intelligence. Hunt’s final battle is with AI, the Entity, the ultimate example of a disrupter in action.
Has heroism reached a point of no return? In a world as nebulous and knotty and, frankly, morally questionable as the one western society now finds itself part of, can we really take the idea of a lone hero or a superhero team capable of saving the world and protecting democracy and free will seriously? Perhaps. In a world of blocs and ideologies, a simplistic hero could cut through to shore up a worldview or a way of life, but how can Hunt cope against an all-powerful artificial intelligence? If the threat is embedded into our nation states and broadly an intertwined online ecosystem, how can any one man stop it? And lest we forget, relying on a man, predominantly, in a world built on not just female empowerment but fully integrated female power within our institutional structures, seems equally just as archaic.
Will Ethan Hunt die at the end of the final film? Possibly. Is that the fate of such heroes now? Without spoiling too many films in one sentence, some of the biggest heroes in pop culture have perished in the line of duty in recent years. If you’ve seen them, you’ll know which films we mean. Are they dying because what they stand for is crumbling around them? Is their death a herald of the demise of what they’ve fought so long to protect? Time will tell; maybe Ethan Hunt won’t die at the end of The Final Reckoning after all.
Maybe, as the decade reaches its halfway point, heroes in cinema will get busy living again, rather than dying, and reassure audiences once again that everything will be okay. Even if, deep down, we know it might not be.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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