8 Responses so far

1. 1. Josh Kidd on Feb 23rd, 2009 at 5:53 pm

   For me, I think the appeal of the “lawless elite” has less to do with an anger at the world’s stupid rules (as with Michael Douglas in falling down) and more to do with the belief that very often our governing structures can be corrupt and the appropriate moral choice is to break the law.

   You might say, for example, that George Washington was a lawless elite. You could even say that men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were lawless elites even though they used nonviolent tactics.

2. 2. Tobias Buckell on Feb 23rd, 2009 at 5:56 pm

   Yeah, but action heros never try to gain justice by going on hunger strikes or peaceful organization…

3. 3. Angie on Feb 23rd, 2009 at 6:10 pm

   Have you seen Taken, Liam Neeson’s new movie? He’s a retired special-ops type whose daughter has been taken by sex slavers and he tears through Paris looking for her. He goes through bad guys by the truckload, beating up or shooting people in his quest for information about his kid, and I was cheering up until about halfway through the movie when he shot a guy’s completely innocent wife just to get the guy to cooperate with him. So far as he was concerned, the fact that it was “only a flesh wound” made it okay. o_O

   It absolutely worked from the POV of showing his intensity of purpose, that he’s a father whose young daughter is in considerable danger and he’s willing to do anything to rescue her. But still, when he shot that woman without even thinking twice, that distanced me from him. I could still hope he found his daughter, but he was no longer someone I’d necessarily want to have as a next-door neighbor, you know? Hopefully the filmmakers meant me to feel that way. But whether it was deliberate or not, it definitely made me think about this genre, and this kind of hero, and where the boundaries are.

   Angie

4. 4. Kate Nepveu on Feb 23rd, 2009 at 6:34 pm

   Well, there are some rare pacifist action heroes, but they are still _action_ heroes . . .

   What I tend to like about action hero-y stuff is the fun of compentence and improvisational intelligence, which I can also get from capers and whatnot, where it’s often less ethically problematic.

   As for _Sly Mongoose_, the last scene was particularly what I was thinking of, fwiw.

5. 5. David J. Williams on Feb 23rd, 2009 at 8:15 pm

   It’s a really interesting issue, and I think it goes well beyond the vigilante framework: at its essence, this is really about characters functioning as (fantasy) vehicles for the unrestrained id. TERMINATOR is particularly interesting here; Arnold was playing a killer robot, yet Cameron very cagily set it up so that he ends up being the “hero”–certainly he upstages everyone else (and for pure “id-ness” that’s utterly devoid of moral context, it’s hard to top the police station massacre). And obviously Cameron has talked extensively about the covert audience identification with the Terminator, calling him the “ultimate rude person” (which I suppose is one way of putting it).

6. 6. Ben S. on Feb 24th, 2009 at 12:18 pm

   Interesting point on TERMINATOR.

   I have always been a fan of stories which were split down the middle in terms of following the villian and following the hero. I’m wondering now if that’s because it provides a story structure which allows the hero to act in a manner which is more pro-social than those of “lawless elites” while still providing the villain’s angle for the rush of the id-ish power fantasy of simply using violence to solve problems.

7. 7. Julia on Feb 24th, 2009 at 10:15 pm

   Wow, I’m so glad you expanded on this topic–I was thrilled to see Kate taking it on in the 50books_poc LJ (I’m icecreamempress at LJ, and posted on that thread), and delighted that you engaged with it further, and in such an insightful way.

   Delighted, but not surprised, because it is so clear from the book that you’ve done lots of thinking about this stuff, even while you’re writing squealing page-turning action scenes. And I have to say that the action in Sly Mongoose is some of the best space-adventure I’ve ever read.

8. 8. Steve Buchheit on Mar 1st, 2009 at 3:18 pm

   Sorry I’m late to the conversation, but I was actually just talking about this last night, but from a different direction. There were several stories I had read where I fully expected a character (protag or secondary) to be violent and they went a non-violent or softer direction (when the violence would 1, fit the character and 2, fit the situation). When this happened I was thrown out of the story. And then typically the non-violence was followed by extreme violence off screen (by the same character). This also tracks to my tendency to yell at TV shows that betray characters tendencies when they would be too violent (ie. why didn’t Picard vent Data to space after the third time he high-jacked the Enterprise I’ll never understand, or in “Chuck” how the good guys have the drop on the bad guys but fail to shoot so they can do the girl-fight scenes, or why Lucas had to have Greedo shoot first in the updated Cantina Scene). I think it’s the author’s reluctance to “be a bad person.” If the major violence happens off-screen they aren’t responsible for it. However, when you create a character/society/situation where violence is required (which happens in a lot of TV and movies) and then you mute that response I think you betray what you’ve previously written.

   I think the appeal of the “lawless elite” all revolves around “fantasy violence” (like “cartoon violence”) even if it’s in real life. The viewers/readers have no stake in the issue (ie, they’re neither the victim or the perpetrator), but feel they can live vicariously through the action (mirror neurons) and they don’t have to live with the consequences (both the actual psychology of the kill, the physicality of the body/uncanny valley, and the resulting fall out of the action).