The Nature of Political Heroes: Some Aesthetic Considerations

When our heroes are broken, it's up to us to remake them.

We are giving over our time and attention and our hard-won platforms to people too frightened and angry to build lives for themselves that don't involve tearing down others. And we need to stop. There are many ways to silence a woman, and not all of them involve getting her to stop speaking. Sometimes it's enough to simply ensure all she speaks about is you.

So when people tell me that including "so many" nonwhite characters in my fiction is "political" or that I'm trying to make some kind of "statement," I can't help countering with the fact that the "statement" made by every writer with a white monochrome world is also deeply political, even more so because it's based on a false sense of normal that's been carefully and systematically constructed for hundreds of years in [the United States and elsewhere].… As a creator, as a media-maker, I know I can choose to blindly perpetuate those myths, or help overturn them. But I couldn't make that choice until I stopped eating up the lie of what the world was really like.

—Kameron Hurley

I once shared the widespread infatuation with superheroes. After all, superhero comic writers and screenwriters worked within real constraints so that their protagonists could only defy some but not all social and physical rules. The results were lovable and fascinating, because they combined being extraordinary with having real and profound limitations. They were also often carefully contextualized in historical and political moments, inviting readers and viewers to explore the relation of the actors' agency to what the circumstances would and could not permit. More recently, however, blockbuster superhero film narratives and characterizations have become flabby. Written as if we still live in the Cold War period with unchanged sovereign power and geopolitical fault lines, they are equally marked by a distinctly twenty-first-century brand of disenchantment with the possibility of transformative politics or governing institutions.

I can no longer pay money or spend time to watch these movies. Doing so contributes to an economy of antipolitical cynicism that needs no further support. In this same period, however, my appreciation for characters not cast as superheroes but who function as such has grown immeasurably. In what follows, out of exasperation with popular images of heroes that are in the widest circulation, I revisit three brief classic discussions of features of national or political heroes, using them to identify what is so special about Okwe, the Nigerian male protagonist in Dirty Pretty Things, the black British detective chief inspector John Luther in the crime drama Luther, and LeBron James, an African American small forward for the National Basketball Association's Cleveland Cavaliers. I close by considering why our aesthetic depictions of heroes are so politically salient.

Three Dimensions of Political Heroes

In his classic study Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud, drawing on the work of Otto Rank, described the ubiquity of a particular set of tropes in the myths of national heroes evident in "almost all civilizations."¹ Stories about Moses, Romulus, Oedipus, and Perseus cast them as heroes who were the sons of parents of high rank. Their conception is first impeded by sterility or legal sexual prohibitions and then by fathers who are warned that their child would seriously endanger them. The father insists that the child be killed outright or exposed to extreme danger, but the child is instead found, saved, and nurtured by animals or poor people.² The hero only discovers his noble origin later in victoriously overcoming his father, which enables him rightfully to assume the leadership merited by the greatness of his deeds. Freud writes that "When the imagination of a people attaches this myth to a famous personage it is to indicate that he is recognized as a hero, that his life has conformed to the typical plan."³ The core features of the hero's life include his being born against his father's will, being saved against...