This summer, I watched Twisters with my mom and sister. I had seen the trailer and thought it looked tacky and ridiculous, but our goal was family bonding and mild entertainment, so I didn’t need much. I left the theater as giddy as a teenager. I FUCKING LOVED IT. Why?!
A few reasons:
Country music is my jam. I have no shame.
Yes, I am v gay. But Glen Powell?! Woof. How can a man wear a white t-shirt with a cowboy hat in the rain and not be too cheesy to bear? Please read this amazing substack about why Glen Powell is a true movie star.
I have a major hero complex. (Spoiler alert) A girl with a complicated and tortured past drives into the eye of a storm and pretty much certain death to save everyone she loves and redeem herself? Count me in!
A little backstory:
My hero’s complex has been a long time in the making. It started with Mulan. I had a drawing book filled with illustrations of Mulan with her horse, Kahn. I went to bed every night, fantasizing that one day, I, too, would save my country, my family, with the strength of my loyalty and the power of my convictions. I’ll Make a Man Out of You was the soundtrack of my life.
I’m never going to catch my breath, say goodbye to those who knew me.
The hero I found after Mulan was Alanna of Trebond. Alanna: The First Adventure was published in 1983 and written by Tamora Pierce. Alanna cross-dresses as a boy and trains to become a knight.
The final notch in my hero complex was delivered on my thirteenth birthday. My uncle gifted me The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on DVD. Every night after my family fell asleep, I watched the entirety of the film alone in my room (in addition to a hero complex, I might have a little OCD 😬).
Nothing in my real life could compare to the pure, unadulterated joy of watching Aragorn, torn and broken but still standing, arrive at Helms Deep and force open those great oak doors just in time to save the people of Rohan. I, too, wanted the strength to rally a wounded group of people! I, too, wanted to survive when all the odds were stacked against us!
I cried when Legolas—angry and resentful about being trapped in a palace of rock awaiting ten thousand, huge, blood-thirsty Uruk-hai to brutally attack—says to Aragorn, “They’re all going to die!” and Aragorn says, “Then I shall die as one of them!”
What loyalty! What selflessness! What a hero!
The problem with heroes:
A few summers ago, I attended a writer's workshop with a well-known queer author. It was a generative workshop, and I was looking forward to creating in a queer space. On the first day, the author told us all that if we ever wanted to succeed in publishing, we would need to follow the Aristotelian plot structure. She mapped it out for us: inciting incident, rising action, climax, blah blah blah. It was not the queer, genre-bending workshop I hoped it would be. Sure, she's most likely right. You need to follow the expected structure to get published, at least by the big publishing houses. This plot structure is so ingrained in our psyches that we notice when a film or book doesn't follow this pattern. If a movie doesn't have a dark night of the soul or denouement, you feel hungry when you leave the theater. You crave the seductive burst of serotonin released when you watch a hero assigned an impossible task struggle against all odds and ultimately succeed.
The Aristotelian plot structure is how I teach the students I tutor how to write. I often have them watch Lessons from the Screenplay, a YouTube channel that examines the plot and pacing of famous films. There's also a book called Save the Cat that many novelists use when writing their first novel. It teaches a writer to lead a character from an inciting incident through the dark night of the soul and out the other side.
Who doesn't love a good hero? Like I said, I am a hero fiend—a wannabe. And we have had so many! Where to begin?! Odysseus? Moses? Jesus? Muhammad? But heroes have three major problems. First, the hero is always singular. Yes, they can have a fellowship (Lord of the Rings slightly subverts this, so LOTR fans don't come at me), but in general, the hero is one single being. He is also problematically often a he, but I don't have either the time or energy to get into that right now. This singular being spends the entirety of the story fighting the villain. The big baddy. Think the Emperor in Star Wars or Voldemort in Harry Potter. This villain is his own entity that can and must be defeated. Sometimes, we get a little humanizing backstory for the villain, like Tom Riddle's mom was isolated by society and abused by her father, but aside from a few facts, Voldemort is just a tool to demonstrate that while Harry was also orphaned and raised by people who didn't love him, Harry was able to do good; Harry was able to stay true to his innocent, pure, authentic, heroic self. And this takes us to the second problem with the hero: the hero is good.
A hero is someone you can root for, so he needs to be good! He needs to be fighting something big and universal. Aragorn is fighting to defend Middle Earth from Sauron–a force that plans to destroy all that’s good and green in the world. Luke is fighting the Emperor, who wantonly blows up whole planets. And, except for the dark night of the soul part of the book or movie, the hero doesn’t stray from his good objectives. He is the champion who fights the unbeatable foe, who rights the unrightable wrongs! (unless you’re talking about the anti-hero, which is much more nuanced and arguably creates better fiction–think Native Son or Giovanni’s Room)
The third and final problem with this whole setup is the idea that there is an end. The hero goes on a journey, and that journey ends. An end means a beginning and a conclusion. The bad guy dies, the curtain falls, and good springs eternal.
Why do I care that this structure is the dominant storytelling structure for Western civilization? I care because we expect it and if we expect something, it means that it's so familiar it has become invisible. There is a Fernando Pessoa quote: We are stories telling stories. If that’s true, what happens when the story we are made of and the story we continue to tell contains three truths: that there is a singular good guy and a singular bad guy and that all suffering will end if the good guy murders the bad guy? We become a species that can't tolerate nuance, that can't understand our enmeshment with all the other living creatures surrounding us. No matter where we live or to which ideology we belong, we think of ourselves as the good guys instead of what we truly are: humans entangled in a world so interconnected it is impossible to be good, even if we want to. (Provided we could even align on a universal definition of goodness).
The first problem: A hero is good.
Aragorn appealed to me because of his stoic strength. He watches, observes, and barely speaks, but when he does, he’s honest. He puts the whole of Middle Earth before himself. He loves Arwen and doesn’t want to see her suffer. He’d rather let her go than let her die. He’s not possessive. These strengths make him unique as a man and a king, leader, and warrior because he embodies historically and culturally feminine traits: putting the joy of others before his own, putting his pleasure last, fighting for those he loves when all hope is gone, being quiet, observant, and unassuming. 1
Who does this selfless martyr, the son of an ancient and revered line of men destined to rescue humanity, remind you of? Aragorn’s classically “feminine” traits—compassion, altruism, and generosity—are the tenants upon which Jesus based his actions and teachings. So, not only is Aragorn the pinnacle of masculinity for all nerdy boys aged 8-100, but he is also a feminine Christ figure—an image of purity and virtue.
In our culture, we want to be perceived as good. Who’s to say if this is the influence of Christianity or our ego, but we’re constantly telling stories about ourselves to feel we are the valiant and virtuous hero of our lives. In bygone eras, we crafted our stories of ourselves through which neighborhoods we lived in, the events we were seen at, and the clothes we wore. How we physically moved in the world managed how well we embodied good thought and right action. But, with the dawn of Instagram, it’s storytelling on steroids. The internet has become the new place to flaunt our right ideas and our correct beliefs. Not only are we trying to prove our “goodness” in the material world, but the immaterial as well.
Heroes also get us confused about what it means to take action. To be a hero, you must take a stance! You must declare yourself against evil with grand and heroic gestures! You can’t just be good; you must put your character on the line! There’s nothing heroic about buying a coffee at your local coffee shop. That’s not action! Going to the grocery store, the atm—those aren’t actions! Who is there to witness me?! To take action must be radical and performative. And once we’re seen, we want to construct our character so as to put us on the side that we believe is good.
Some people believe that what I, as a singular individual, post on the internet is taking action and that by not posting, I am not only apathetic but committing harm. With Instagram and the internet, we all believe there is a right side and a wrong side, and not only must I be on the right side, but I must publicly posture this position. This is divisive thinking. It’s polarizing and dangerous, but is it unexpected?2
Problem two: A hero is singular
In her book, The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard says humans have two bodies.
In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside it's own skin… You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself to be whole, to be one. You need to take care of yourself, it says. You need boundaries. You have to be either here or there. Don't be all over the place…. Even the patient who is aneasthasized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeon's lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on Earth…. You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach.
I read this book, loved it, logically believed it, and still didn’t feel it to be true for me. I thought that my body, my life, my self, was contained within the boundaries of a white, medium-height, thirty-something woman. I thought I could choose what actions I wanted to take, for good or evil and those actions would be enacted by my physical body moving around in the world. Ultimately, I thought I had the power to control the impact of my body.
I “daylight” as a technical writer. For a long time, I avoided truly learning about technical stacks, frontend, backend, blah blah blah, until it became clear that if I didn’t begin to take my work seriously, I’d be out of work. But I didn’t want to work for the big bad tech company. I did want their amazing health benefits and competitive salary. I thought that if I didn’t fully understand the work we did, it would be pretend and I wouldn’t really be participating. I wouldn’t be a character in the story that destroyed San Francisco, that contributed to the ever-growing wealth gap, to a downtown Seattle where men and women park their Teslas and then literally step over the body of a houseless person on their way to the office. But passivity does not negate complicity. So, I started to learn how applications are built. I studied computer architecture to understand how technology works: everything from your phone to the place you host your blog to the app that holds your bus pass. Once I had a basic understanding, I wanted to laugh at my naivety.
Imagine you are buying a coffee at your local coffee shop. You’ve picked this coffee shop because it’s not a chain, and you want to support local businesses. You also know they use compostable cups and energy-efficient practices. Sounds great! So you buy the coffee, a physical action made by your hand and the baristas. But wait! That action is then broken down and sent all over the world. Something as simple as a transaction at the company Square might be created from a hundred or more tiny pieces. Each of those pieces has a little job and a destination. There is the physical you standing in the coffee shop and then there is an army of yous feeding off the energy in rural Virginia, stored as data in Amsterdam, sorted through a data table on a computer in Hyderabad. In the modern world, our bodies and the consequences of our actions are nearly infinite, and to completely abstain from harm, we’d have to make like Into the Wild, and we all know how that turned out.
I’m not trying to justify my choice to work in tech (although who am I kidding? Who doesn’t want absolution); I am trying to suggest that now, more than ever, the idea that any human could be considered boundaried, singular, or wholly good is the stuff of myth. We are enmeshed. Every choice we make, even one so seemingly innocuous as ordering an espresso, has a consequence. Everything we do–from ordering a cup of coffee to opening this newsletter has a global repercussion. Post whatever you want on the internet, but no amount of political posturing on TikTok can make you the hero. Our complicity and our responsibility are much more complicated.
The third hero problem: The story/time ends when the hero kills the villain
But I didn’t just love Aragorn because he is good. I wish I could say I admired him for his demure acceptance and quiet fortitude. But at that moment in The Two Towers when Howard Shore’s score quickens and Aragorn raises his sword, I get a thrill because I know he's about to beat his enemies back! In a series of glorious shots, you see Aragorn’s bloodied knuckles against the hilt of his sword as he slices through one Uruk-hai and then another, all perfectly timed with the beat of the drum. Heads roll. It feels good. In this violence, there is the physical expression of a body fighting back against the world, saying: I'm alive! I'm here! This is the life I will fight for! You shall not pass!
Even though the battle scenes in Return of the King won the film an Academy Award, mass cinematic death and destruction didn’t really take the stage until the dawn of Marvel. Marvel movies are frequently featured on the YouTube channel Lessons from the Screenplay. These films are basically designed as a crash course in Aristotelian plot structure. There's always the bad guy, and there's always the hero, even if they have some dark, complicated past like the black widow or they’re insufferably cocky and arrogant like Tony Stark.
The Marvel series started with a villain we could understand. The first Marvel film, Iron Man, came out in 2008 when we were all still painfully aware of the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. The villain in Iron Man is Terrence, a corrupt weapons manufacturer–pretty human scale. Yes, there were a lot of explosions, but not too messy or too bad. Then you have the first Thor, and aliens get introduced, but it's still pretty tame. The little New Mexico town is destroyed but looks mostly abandoned anyway, and no one really dies. Plus, Natalie Portman is a hot scientist. But the villains had to get flashier and bigger as the series progressed. Soon, you have an alien spaceship swimming through the skies of New York, crashing into hundreds of buildings and flattening them into cement dust. People are screaming. The death toll of such a battle has to have been in the millions. But by the time we have gotten to this movie, we are nine movies deep into the Marvel universe. Suddenly, when people get squashed and flattened, they're just little CGI blips, snuffed out in a nanosecond before the next shot. It didn't take very long, but in less than a decade, global, planetary warfare became something that didn't even phase us—instead, it’s a blockbuster.
Then something very interesting happened.
For millennia, the hero's journey has always had to end. It was a one-way road. Villain vanquished, hope springs eternal. Then came Marvel’s Infinity War. At the end of the film, half the population of the universe (not just Earth) is turned to dust. Dead. Never to be seen or heard from again. Can you imagine the gravity of such a loss? Could you imagine if half your family, half your city–just died? One minute, you’re looking at your wife over a cup of coffee, and the next, she is gone.
A little aside about death and loss:
When I was young, my family went to a church called The First Divine Science Church. One of the ministers, Karl Kopp, wrote plays inspired by William Blake; he honored children and made sure there were roles for young people in all his plays. After my parents got divorced and my dad moved to California, I latched on to Karl like his very own imp. I stole into the church library to pour over his books of poetry, which, while beyond my comprehension, I cherished in my bones. I still remember when Karl, my hero, over 6 feet tall, a gray-haired giant, was standing on stage with us at rehearsal when he suddenly collapsed. It was like watching a tree felled. He suddenly caught at the knees. We all ran to his side. When he stood up he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a little smile. I never saw him again. He was the first person I ever loved and lost. He was diagnosed with ALS and went quickly. I tried to visit him at the hospice, but he wouldn't let me in the room. I remember being so angry with him for not letting me say goodbye, but now, after holding the hand of three dying people, I can see why he wanted me to remember him as the lyrical, nerdy giant, not a man who couldn't move.
After Karl died, I started having panic attacks about death. I began to think I was dying at night, that my heart had stopped, and it was the end. I had panic attacks in physics class, before bed, in the park. Periodically, these panic attacks will return the way they did when I was 15, and I'm faced with the truth that this life of mine will end.
The self-centered aspect of death is still there for me–what will happen when I lose my own life? What will happen to my memories, etc… But now, after the death of my father and several friends, I am learning about what it’s like to lose the people we cherish the most. Losing a being you love is a grief so profoundly painful you have to escape your body to lessen it. It’s why when people grieve, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they literally want to deny their bodies.
We can't live constantly awake to the truth that one day we will lose everyone we have ever loved lest it paralyzes us, but we can't escape the truth of it either. Because if we ignore death, if we don't give it our attention, we also don't give life attention. Death grants life weight. And vice versa.
Back to the third problem:
In Infinity War, half the population of the universe dies. Imagine what it was like to lose your parent, your sibling, your friend. Now, picture that on a massive, interplanetary scale! Is there a name for that colossal grief? Until now—for all of history, the story was the story! The hero dies, and then they’re dead forever. But suddenly, in 2019, the Marvel movies declared that the dead don’t need to stay dead! Half the POPULATION OF THE UNIVERSE dies, only to be resurrected in the next movie!
And just like that, superhero movies entered a battle with time.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the superhero movies now have to do with time. Time has become the villain. Because that’s what we’re really fighting, right? This is what we’ve been at war with all this time. Our true enemy is this: that there is only one time, and it is now. There is only one choice, and it’s the choice I’m making right now. And the present isn’t something you can make more of! It’s not something you can put in an accelerator program and grow. You can’t put it in a high-yield savings account and check on it five years later. Now isn’t something you can buy or multiply; it is singular and defined only by one thing: our attention.
Our fear of our finitude is not new. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrestled with it in the 1800’s. Dante confronted death in his own way in the 1200’s. What’s new, I think, is our belief that we can stop our own death, that we can prolong our experience in time. Modern medicine, our ever-increasing lifespans, botox, and a capitalist society obsessed with exponential growth have given rise to the belief that our battle with death is a fight we can win. And now, our stories have shifted too. Now, when the heroes lose, there’s a second chance.
Sure, there might be a multiverse. In a book I read about time, I learned that it moves slower at sea level. The moon is making our days longer. It’s true, time is fluid and not linear, and maybe it’s theoretically possible for you to die in this universe and still be a famous chef in another, but the truth is that our perception of time, in this universe, in this now, can and does end. One day, there will be no more now.
The moral of the story is:
The problem with the hero's journey and stories about the one righteous hero fighting against the villain is that in real life, when that villain is vanquished, the story doesn’t end. The curtain doesn’t fall. Time goes on. The only thing that ends is that person’s, that “villain’s,” now.
I think we’ve lost our cultural understanding of what it means to die. This isn’t a Marvel movie. We can’t turn back time. When people die, those deaths aren’t something that happens in a nanosecond before we cut to Robert Downey Jr’s face.
Marvel is proof that in fiction, at least, we’ve run out of villains. There’s only time. Which isn’t really a villain, provided you can look it straight in its toothy, scaly jaw and recognize: I cannot run, I cannot fight—I can only surrender. And when we surrender—surrender to this one, precious now—it becomes even clearer that if there’s anything we should not be doing with our wild, precarious present, it is depriving someone else of theirs. When we end someone’s life, it’s over. This is not a game. They’re not a number on a chart. Their now is just as fragrant and rich as this moment of mine: sitting on my front porch in the sunlight, my dog at my feet. I don’t want to lose this experience, I cherish it. So what right do I have to take it from somebody else? And I’m under no illusions. That is what I am doing. While I sit here, with my coffee and my pup, I am depriving someone else of their now. Because I am not singular; my body and my actions are nearly infinite, and my tax dollars, my 401k, and my newsletter hosted on servers powered by Amazon are all politically and financially entangled. The multiverse is already here in our present. Yes, my body is here in Olympia, Washington, but it is also in a bomb dropped on a country I have never seen with my own eyes.
I no longer want to teach my students to model the hero’s journey in their writing. It’s barbaric to me now: two forces–one for good, one for evil–pitted against each other. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, she sums up the history of literature as having two essential pieces: a hero and a conflict. She says, “I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag… A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
I don’t want to teach young people that stories need to follow a structure I have blindly adhered to for most of my life. What if we wrote without antagonists and heroes? What if we wrote as if we were beings held in a powerful relation to each other? What if we lived this way, too?
In high school, my teacher, Jana Clark, had us read an Ursula Le Guin story called The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas. In the story, we’re told that the prosperity of one little town is dependent upon the extreme suffering of a child. The people of the town are given a choice. They can live with the knowledge that their world, their laughter, and their joy are contingent on the misery of another, or they can walk away, never to be seen again. My teacher asked us if we would walk away. As young, idealistic teenagers, we all said Yes! I will walk away! But the truth is, we don’t. This is Omelas, and none of us are walking away.
I've recently been attending ACA meetings (Adult Children of Alcoholics), and we have our own serenity prayer.
Higher power, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one that I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me.
It’s true, I can’t be a hero, and you can’t be either. And it’s also true that I have very little control over the infinite versions of myself scattered across the globe. And, while I don’t have a solution to the problem of Omelas, I know that, at the very least, in the end, it’s just as Gandalf says: the ultimate choice is what to do with the time that was given to us. And, as much as I can, I want to choose to commit acts of kindness from within the body I can control.
Afterthought:
There is an end, but there is also a way to make time, if not grow, at least expand. Attention.
Mary Oliver wrote:
It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.
P.S. I didn’t think of this all on my own. Duh! I am greatly influenced by the work of my dear friend, Daria Reaven. Listen to her here and read her here.
I also loved Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell and The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard.
My hero's complex was developed as both a survival technique and a romantic desire to be the hero of my own story, but wanting to be a “hero” in the way Aragorn, Alanna, and Mulan are heroes, became a dangerous trait as a queer woman. In a world that’s systemically designed to make it difficult for me to voice my needs and declare my independence and identity, it does no good to be the Aragorn of my dreams—self-effacing and stoic. I don’t live in Gondor and while at times it does feel like we’re batting Sauron, the last thing I should do is hide my pain. I shouldn’t endure what is unendurable. I shouldn’t bind my body and hide who I really am to fight for what I believe in. I’d argue that female-identifying humans who embody “heroic” traits are further subjecting themselves to the very tyranny and oppression they want to fight. But that essay is for another day :)
Posting about a political issue on Instagram doesn’t only allow us the stage to perform our goodness, but it also allows us to feel as if we’re doing something in a world in which we feel increasingly impotent. But, I’d challenge our perception of what it means to do something. See problem 2.
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