When Heroes Become Slogans

Mr. Davidson is a man with his eye in the right place; he sees that something vital has been lost from our tales. There is a hunger abroad; not for box-office recipes or demographic tabulations, but for the old, odd human foods: romance, danger, laughter, sorrow, the sense that a soul has been asked to do something more than buy a ticket. If Disney were simply to fling wide its doors and let the age-old choruses of knight and martyr, pioneer and pilgrim, enter at will, it would find not only boys and young men but all the hungry folk of the city waiting at the gates.

But here I must put in a warning. Nothing is so safely converted into a new tyranny as the zeal to correct a former tyranny. We have had in our time the tyranny of mawkish sentiment and the tyranny of didactic contempt. The cure for one is not always the opposite: the remedy for a preachy idealist is not a brash, blunt dogmatist. If you intend to create “masculine” films by waving patriotic banners and assigning villains by nationality or identity, you are only changing the color of the uniform; you are not restoring romance. A story is not strong because it hates something; it is strong because it loves something.

Let us speak plainly. Young men do not come to the cinema to be told manhood is a brand. They come to stand beside a character who is tested; they come to see virtue practiced, not lecture preached. That virtue wears many faces. It is sometimes a soldier's stoutness; sometimes a father's patience; sometimes a scoundrel's sudden shame. The true hero is he who faces peril because he loves a particular thing enough to lay down his life for it: a home, a child, a belief, a promise. To reduce that sweet and thorny courage to a marketing bullet point is to miss its flame.

A hero proves himself most manly when he honors the dignity of those he would protect, not when he reduces them to props in his self-assertion.

There is also a mischief in turning heroes into marble statues of ideology; whether the statue be carved by a committee of market research, or by a committee of moral indignation. The old romances were not merely patriotic lies; they were particular truths. The reason St. George is loved is not because he is English, but because a man shall yet strike at a dragon to save a village. If you make the dragon merely a foreign nation or a demographic category, you have not reawakened the imagination but trained it to be resentful. Patriotism, rightly understood, is the love of one's place so intense that it becomes an argument for universal goodness; patriotism wrongly understood is the belief that all other places are worthless. Art that exalts one country by debasing another is simply a poor form of advertisement.

Nor must we forget a simple truth. To praise manliness you must not despise womanhood. The “rescue the girl” motif, which some nostalgians tout as the essence of masculine yearning, was never meant to make women mere scenery. The very heart of chivalry is a reverence for the beloved, and that reverence is a kind of theology. If modern makers of tales imagine a drama of men alone, they will discover the stage empty. A hero proves himself most manly when he honors the dignity of those he would protect, not when he reduces them to props in his self-assertion.

Nor must we mistake the Christian story for a political club. The Passion and the Resurrection are the deepest romances; they are not to be enlisted as slogans. If a film of Christ is to move men it must be the same thing that moved the world for two thousand years: the spectacle of suffering met by love. Men of action crave the spectacle of sacrificial courage not as propaganda, but as a revelation that life is not petty. To make Christianity into an emblem of a nation is to flout the very scandal of the Cross, which is precisely the scandal of humility in triumph.

So what, then, should the wise filmmaker do? Three simple counsels:

• Tell true stories; that is, stories that are particular and full of truth, not abstractions. A local village saved from a dragon will speak across continents if the dragon is truly terrible and the courage truly costly.
• Make characters who are comic as well as tragic. Real men laugh; they stumble; they are foolish; they repent. The ancient romances had room for jest and for tears. A hero who never errs becomes a hero in the catalogue sense, not in the living sense.
• Beware contrivances of hatred. If your plot depends on making a whole class of people into the enemy, you are doing politics, not art. Art heals by sympathy; it does not heal by gloating.

If Disney or any studio truly wishes to “bring young men back,” let them not ask a pollster what will attract them, but a poet what will astonish them. Make films that are not simply anti-something, but pro-something: pro-adventure, pro-sacrifice, pro-beauty. Do not be ashamed to be Christian in spirit or patriotic in affection, but let these be matters of the heart rather than of the office memo.

Finally, if there is a lesson here that pleases both those who fear the “woke” and those who fear the “wrathful,” it is this: the world is not saved by slogans but by stories. Give a young man a story in which a small, stubborn good triumphs by strange ways, and he will go away strengthened. Try to sell him ideology disguised as entertainment, and he will only grow hungry for the truth.