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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Heroism really seems to be missing from our culture these days, doesn't it? | |
| You know, you take the adventure movies, for instance. | |
| Take the recent Tin Tin movie, which was surprisingly good, or the original Indiana Jones trilogy. | |
| And in these films, you've got a character that's primarily an intellectual who's doing what's right, who's going up against all odds and thinking his way out of problems, and yet it all seems pretty easy for him, doesn't it? | |
| It's a fun ride, don't get me wrong, but you never really feel like he's against mortal threat. | |
| There's a certain cartooniness to the whole thing. | |
| Then you got the action movies. | |
| You got those great flicks with guns and explosions and helicopters. | |
| But once again, the action movie hero seems to lack a certain element of heroism. | |
| That this hero never really worries about anything. | |
| It's always a cocked smile. | |
| It's always dodging the bullet by some impractical physics. | |
| He's never really at threat. | |
| You're there for the spectacle, rather than to see the character overcome anything. | |
| There's a certain bruteness to the action movie hero, isn't there? | |
| And then the genre that truly begs for heroism, you've got horror. | |
| And in horror? | |
| Do we see heroes? | |
| Do we see bravery in horror movies at all? | |
| Of course not. | |
| All we see in horror movies are vile little human beings turning against one another and deserving the torture porn that eventually exists. | |
| No, heroism is almost entirely absent from modern cinema, aside, of course, from war movies, which have a very distinct and very isolated demographic which they appeal to, so I think we can safely ignore those. | |
| It brings up the question, where has heroism gone? | |
| Why has heroism been replaced with this comedic spectacle manifesting as heroism? | |
| On the answer, heroism has been democratized. | |
| Your modern hero is not the man who overcomes. | |
| It's not the person that goes against all odds and does what's right even when the situation is hopeless. | |
| The modern hero overcomes adversity. | |
| They overcome racism. | |
| They overcome economic oppression. | |
| They overcome drug addiction. | |
| Welcome to your democratic hero, the most vile of the vile, the degenerate, who managed to overcome their own foolish mistakes. | |
| Modern heroism is oprah heroism. | |
| It's the democratic heroism that we can all aspire to be. | |
| You too can be a heroin addict or a meth addict and overcome that and write a book about it and get on national TV. | |
| Our modern heroes are just as degenerate as the incompetence on daytime television. | |
| The talk shows which encourage debased behavior for the sole sake of getting on television. | |
| Be a screw-up, be a loser, be oppressed, be whatever sort of failure you want. | |
| Then you get to be on daytime television, then you get to be a hero. | |
| And what has happened to the actual heroes? | |
| What's happened to the actual people that sacrifice or overcome or go against all odds? | |
| What has happened to those people? | |
| Well, we mentioned action movies earlier, didn't we? | |
| I seem to remember a certain Austrian kid, fifteen years old. | |
| He told his friends and family that he was going to be a famous Hollywood actor one day, and they laughed at him. | |
| And so he moved to America, and he started bodybuilding, became a world famous bodybuilder. | |
| Then he became a world famous actor, universally recognized. | |
| And then he became the governor of that state. | |
| And what do we say about this kid from Austria that went out and lived his dreams? | |
| Well, it doesn't count because he took steroids for bodybuilding. | |
| Oh, what? | |
| What? | |
| He slept with his mate. | |
| Obviously, he's a horrible person. | |
| He's probably privileged or something. | |
| He's not a real hero. | |
| He didn't really overcome. | |
| We celebrate the basest and demand constant apologies from all, while those that actually do something admirable and actually overcome we say they're not a real hero. | |
| To be a real hero, you need to meet a standard that Christ himself could not achieve. | |
| But these degenerates that overcame being fat, that overcame suicidal idiation, that overcame race. | |
| These are the heroes in our modern, topsy-turvy, upside-down, perverse, decadent, and corrupt society. | |
| Quite frankly, folks, I don't mind it when I get called a villain. |