E.G.

"Me! Hear! My foreign ear–the sounds of welcome near!"

Moral reasoning in action movies.

March 23, 2005

The movie "Speed" makes an effort to show that the hero (the Keanu Reeves character) is not stupid. For instance: Throughout the movie there are several scenes in which the hero pauses, stares ahead for a moment, and then produces an accurate prediction of the villain’s next move. Such scenes are meant to establish that the hero is smart, or at least insightful. But despite being smart, the hero isn’t supposed to be very wordy; he does not speak much, and it’s hard to imagine him engaging in extended conversation. By contrast, the villain (the Dennis Hopper character) speaks often and excitedly; he is delighted by the cleverness of his evil plot, and seems barely able to restrain himself from explaining it in full detail to anyone who is willing to listen. As I recall, he even explains it to himself when nobody is around.

I think "Speed" is, in this regard, a fairly typical action movie. Action heroes are generally supposed to be just as smart as action villains, though smart in a much different way. Action heroes can often "just see" what is the best or right thing to do; there is often "no time to explain" how the hero knows what he knows, though the hero always does turn out to know it. On the other hand, villains almost always seem to have time to explain. Action movies tend to give their villains plenty of time to go over their plans and motives with their underlings, with their victims, and eventually even with the hero himself. As a result, action movies usually contain a villain’s elaborate attempt at justification for doing evil, but fail to include any counterargument.

Another example: Consider "Apocalypse Now," in which the Marlon Brando character (the villain) provides an engaging and potentially persuasive, though mostly incoherent, defense of his weird death cult. The movie does not provide any real response to Brando’s diatribe. Nobody, to my recollection, ever gives any reasons against Marlon Brando’s view. The Martin Sheen character, who is the movie’s hero (if the movie has a hero), simply sits quietly, listening and waiting, while Brando explains. Of course, in his voice-over, Sheen does say that the Brando character is obviously insane, but that is not a counterargument; Sheen does not say where or how Brando is mistaken. (Anyway, that is how I remember the movie; I may have forgotten important details.)

Generally speaking: Heroes pronounce, and report what they know; villains explain, and attempt to compel assent. Why is this so often the case in action movies? Maybe the explanation is simple. Anyone can come up with a bad argument, but it is sometimes difficult to come up with a good one. But any argument for doing evil is going to be a bad one (hopefully), so writers have no problem coming up with arguments to give to their villains. But perhaps writers don’t want to go to the trouble of coming up with a good argument for the hero’s view, so they just give him a kind of deep, inexplicable insight into the truth of his view instead.

Maybe that’s not right; maybe the explanation lies in audiences’ demands rather than in writers’ choices or limitations. Maybe audiences would be suspicious of any attempt to explain how what is right is right; perhaps they feel that they can "just see" what is the right thing to do in their own lives, so they think that any good hero will "just see" it as well. Or maybe audiences think it would be undignified for a hero to engage in debate with a villain. Submitting to a debate carries the risk of losing the debate; what does the hero gain from taking such a risk? At any rate, if the hero is perceived to have lost a debate with the villain, this would significantly diminish the amount of satisfaction the audience is able to feel when the villain is eventually slain by the hero.

For one reason or another, anyway, it seems that action heroes tend to keep the verbiage to a minimum, leave the reasons to the villains, and simply kill villains whenever given the chance. I wonder if this has any negative effects on audiences. Maybe it makes people feel entitled to refuse to give reasons for their views. Or maybe it leaves people with the impression that rightness does not require, or cannot be given, an explanation.