20 May 2012

Be your own hero, it's cheaper than a movie ticket! (Doug Horton) Article by Jenguiz



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 Of course, they save good people, but they personify an outdated type of revenge justice.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...

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