Vox Populi:

What Americans are currently contending with (or applauding, since many Americans are quite pleased with recent events) runs deep in the American psyche. The nation elects a president but what it wants is a hero. In his essay entitled “The Hero,” the film critic Manny Farber identified two types of Hollywood heroes, or as he puts it, “two idealized personalities, whose common bond is an allegiance to Superman.” Farber proceeds to note the following: “One, the older, is a mixture of Abe Lincoln, Dick the Chimney Sweep and a cowboy, in which goodness and lonesome bravery are the main ingredients. The other is a belligerent, egocentric character who is as malevolent and aggressive as the other is pure of heart and backward . . . .” Gary Cooper personifies the first hero, Humphrey Bogart the second. Though as the world’s most virtuous people, Americans are supposed to identify wholly with the first hero, in their dark heart of hearts they identify intensely with the second. Virtue is boring and even if the Gary Cooper hero gets the girl, he doesn’t seem to much notice her: “He is a conscientious, non-professional lover.” The Bogart figure, however, displays a “noisy violence in which nothing is hidden.” The Bogart figure “expresses the hostility and rebellion the existence of which the Cooper tradition ignores.” Both heroes represent the “man of action, with as little emphasis as will make sense on thought and emotion.” Again, as the current situation shows, it may not make any sense but that doesn’t matter because the “anti-intellectual, anti-emotional and pro-action life is in the historical American pattern.” And life is a movie. Right? Or at least a celebrity TV show. And some hero is better than no hero. 

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