The Hero Project #2: Are Hero Stories Actually Empowering?

Yesterday, I talked about how reading a bunch of myths made me question Joseph Campbell’s premise that hero stories were inherently empowering. Instead, many stories went out of their way to make it clear the hero did not actually exceed expectations. They were descended from Gods, their coming was foretold, and there were portents at their birth. Weren’t they just fulfilling their destiny? Ah, but there’s a twist: in story after story, there is some problem right after they’re born requiring that they be sent away and raised in humble surroundings.

This is a neat trick, in that it allows the hero to be both a self-made man and a self-fulfilling prophesy at the same time. Yes, the storytellers seem to say, this person grew up with nothing, and earned everything they have from scratch, but they are nevertheless of noble birth, so they always deserved this exalted place, unlike you. (Of course, it’s possible to assume that the self-made part of the story came first, and it was only years later some king insisted that the portents be added to the beginning, so as to make it clear that no one should should actually try to rise beyond their station.)

So is the purpose of storytelling to empower the reader, or to keep the reader in their place? Well, it depends on the story. This is the difference between Ben-Hur and Spartacus. Ben-Hur was the big Oscar winner of 1959, but Howard Fast and Darlton Trumbo didn’t find it particularly inspiring, so they responded with Spartacus in 1960. There’s an exchange in Spartacus that seems to be aimed directly at Ben-Hur. Throughout Ben-Hur, people keep going on and on about how unfair it is that the hero has been enslaved even though he is of noble birth. Spartacus is also a slave who rebels, but he frees every slave he meets and leads his newfound army against Rome. Along the way, Spartacus meets with the merchant Tigranus, who is very impressed by all that he has accomplished. He eyes Spartacus narrowly and ventures…

Old school leftists Fast and Trumbo (this was the movie that broke the back of the blacklist) were specifically shooting down the idea that only slaves of noble birth deserved better.

So which is a real hero? Does a hero merely discover inborn powers or do they create skills where none existed before? Both traditions continue today. This is the story of Superman vs. Spider-Man. The Annointed vs. the Everyman. Now I personally prefer Spartacus over Ben-Hur, and Spider-Man over Superman, but it’s not always so simple. What about Keaton vs. Chaplin? I prefer Keaton’s comic persona over Chaplin’s (though I love them both). But Chaplin is the everyman, starting from scratch, while Keaton usually relies on his under-appreciated native abilities.

This brings us to another way to phrase the question: Does a good protagonist go from zero to hero, or do they merely find a way to be recognized for the skills they already had at the beginning of the story? Let’s pick up there tomorrow…