Perhaps I am not unlike you that when I watched Disney and other "hero wins and gets girl" movies as a youngster, I would identify with the hero. Often a scrawny lad, almost too innocent and pure, would get the crap beaten out of him by life and peers, eventually learn to handle himself and fight back, fall in love in a girl who it's hopeless to attain in his immature state, experience a variety of rite-of-passage adventures to attain maturity, and not only defeat the enemy but "get the girl." At 13, those movies gave me hope that a similar experience might happen to me someday. Of course, it didn't.
Explaining Star Wars's popularity, these worlds tug at some paradisal longing in our heart that's entertaining but painful to some - the sensitive sort who identify deeper than most, and realize that the world will never be that way.
Now, that's just a psychological reflection. This isn't going to be a rant about how such movies are misleading or corrupting our children.
However, it's interesting how the true stories that inspire us, and that are not necessarily popular in a McDonalds Happy Meal way, are ones with imperfect characters.
Henry Fielding, in Tom Jones, stated:
"To say the truth, I a little question whether mere man ever arrived at this consummate degree of excellence, as well as whether there hath ever existed a monster bad enough to verify that 'Whose vices are not allayed with a single virtue' in Juvenal; nor do I, indeed, conceive the good purposes served by inserting characters of such angelic perfection, or such diabolical depravity, in any work of invention; since, from contemplating either, the mind of man is more likely to be overwhelmed with sorrow and shame than to draw any good uses from such patterns; for in the former instance he may be both concerned and ashamed to see a pattern of excellence in his nature, which he may reasonably despair of ever arriving at; and in contemplating the latter he may be no less affected with those uneasy sensations, at seeing the nature of which he is a partaker degraded into so odious and detestable a creature."
Maybe I'm weird, but I've left some of the Stars Wars movies rather disappointed as the Jedi philosophy, which seemed so doable in the movie, dissipates once your friends start making jokes and wonder where to go grab dinner. Likewise, much of my fiction writing is stoked and motivated by some of my favorite villian characters - people who had severe issues as children that turned them to the dark side in their adult lives. There is a dark fascination that you feel a bit guilty about - tapping into the dark sides of our minds.
These complex characters can be seen in Lord of the Rings, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and of course in classic literature. For me, it reaches its apex in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment - where the murderer and the saved Christian are the same person. A bit too complex for a Happy Meal, I'm afraid.
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