Has anybody noticed the similarity between Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Russell Crowe’s Maximus in “Gladiator”? In a sense they are selling the same soap: You’ve got a brooding, tragic guy, who is clearly a man’s man. Men respect him, women draw to him like flies. He’s a guy who understands that he has responsibilities, a code of honor he must live by. But at heart he’s really good at one thing: Killing people. Not just killing people, but killing lots and lots of people. He kills efficiently, balletically, forehand, backhand, left and right. He could probably kill just fine with his eyes closed. It’s what he does<\/i>.<\/p>\n
But so far we’re describing lots of action heroes. What sets these two apart, what makes them brothers under the skin, is that both Craig’s and Crowe’s action heroes are very sorrowful that they have to kill all those people. A lot of time is spent in both movies on loving closeups of the hero’s face, brooding, looking inward, searching his tormented soul, a soul which is tough on the outside but tender as a little fluffy bunny on the inside. Because he feels really sad that he needs to spend the rest of the time wielding a big weapon, like a Ninja from hell, causing buckets of blood to spurt from the freshly dismembered bodies of his opponents. Really, really sad.<\/p>\n
I think we’re supposed to see the poetry within the wistful, ruefully contemplative eyes of these two men. We’re supposed to feel their pain. And it’s important that we do. Because if we can all get together and feel their pain, then we will realize that deep down they are not killers of countless people, on a scale so large that it borders on the obscene. No, we can forget about the body count, the holes through bleeding torsos, the body parts flying off in all directions, that hired guard unlucky enough to work for the wrong side who ends up blinded, convulsing, screaming in agony and maimed for life because in one scene he happened to be in our hero’s way.<\/p>\n
Instead we remember that melancholy look in the hero’s eyes, his poetically regretful gaze, his soft inward sigh at the burden he must carry. And we realize that it’s ok, that we don’t need to worry about all of those casually severed body parts and brutally hacked off limbs.<\/p>\n
Because this is the good guy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Has anybody noticed the similarity between Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Russell Crowe’s Maximus in “Gladiator”? In a sense they are selling the same soap: You’ve got a brooding, tragic guy, who is clearly a man’s man. Men respect him, women draw to him like flies. He’s a guy who understands that he has responsibilities, … Continue reading “Good guys”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}