During Antiquity,
literature and drama, including of course Homer's Iliad and
Odyssey, were inspired by mythology. Heroes and gods were
models for young people, though they were not always moral, not in
the way we understand it today at least. Even the god of the gods,
Zeus himself, was far from being a paragon of virtue...
Today, I think that the
heroes on TV, at the cinema, in books and videogames, serve for the
most part as bad examples for young people.
Violence is ubiquitous;
all the media is filled with it, and what is terrible is that it is
this violence which makes films and the rest popular. Examples are
the Call of Duty videogames, which consists in shooting
several hordes of zombies, all in HD, with the resulting gallons of
blood, numerous gory books, and all those war, vigilante, and
superheroe film epics.
Superpowers don't allow
these daft film characters to make trees grow or water appear, it
just enables them to destroy and kill easily. How do you save the
world? By killing the super-villains of course! And the child who
sees his favourite hero do just that will probably think that he is
right to act as he does. The death penalty is a just punishment in a
sense. When you think about it, most super heroes are mass murderers.
Of course, they save good people, but they personify an outdated type
of revenge justice. And these heroes are portrayed as nice people,
they are supposed to be examples to immitate! And this fact does not
only hide the bad side of their behaviour, worse than that, it makes
it look right...
Another problem is that
the notion of effort has nearly totally disappeared from those
movies. In the case of superheroes, their strength is a sort of fate,
and doesn't depend on their willpower; Superman is an
extraterrestrial, Spiderman has been bitten by a spider, Captain
America has become strong thanks to an experiment... Sometimes heroes
do have to practice to become stronger, but they generally need less
than a year to become stronger than ordinary people who have to work
all their life long... The message seems to be that hard work,
perceverence, commitment, are a waste of time and effort. But it is
not only shown through fiction, there are shows like Star Academy
that promise to form real artists in just a few months... In reality,
it only gives these instant stars fleeting popularity. It takes time
to become good at something and unfortunately people today are lead
to believe that everything can be got in a second, with little
talent, skill or effort...
One of the worst
influences on today's youth, in my opinion, is reality shows. These
programmes have invaded television. And who are the people shown?
Losers, stupid people who only want to be seen by a big audience, who
are ready to do any despicable act that could bring them fifteen
minutes of fame. We are in a society in which being famous is
confused with succeeding in life. Reality TV encourages voyeurism and
debauchery. People apparently feel pleasure just watching other
people living, and it is even better when they are stupid, because
the one who watches feels himself less worthless. Spectators feed on
other people's mediocrity, instead of having examples that incites
them to become better people.
Today's heroes, be they
super or the loser next door, are no better than those of Antiquity,
indeed they are far worse...
