What Kind of Hero?
On Saturday
afternoon between Good Friday and Easter, after the Mariners game I resorted to
channel surfing. I chanced to watch a
few minutes of The Legend of Hercules. Other than those minutes, I knew nothing
about this movie until I looked it up.
Wikipedia
facts: released in 2014, The Legend of
Hercules was panned by critics and quickly ignored by the movie going
public. Its box office take did not cover
its costs of production. The film was
nominated for several “Gold Raspberry” awards, including worst picture, worst
leading actor, worst director, and worst leading actress. The convoluted story line starts with
Hercules’s birth as son of Zeus and a human mother, Alcmene, the wife of King
Amphitryon (Hera, Zeus’s queen, approved and abetted the sexual liaison between
Zeus and Alcmene). Since Alcmene never publicly revealed her liaison with Zeus,
Hercules grew up as son of Amphitryon and brother of Iphicles. The story then jumps twenty years to
Hercules’s adulthood, when he fights in battles, against gladiators, against his
half-brother, Iphicles, and eventually against King Amphitryon himself (who
meanwhile had murdered Alcmene).
In short,
it’s a soap opera—sex, secrets, betrayals, alliances, surprises, reversals, and
so on—with swords and sorcery thrown on top.
I’m not condemning The Legend of
Hercules on that ground; there have been fantasy stores made into fine
movies. But by all accounts this wasn’t
one of them. (It holds a 3% rating on
the Rotten Tomatoes website, which gives a consensus judgment: “Cheap-looking,
poorly acted, and dull.”) My reaction
matched those of the critics; I quit watching after about ten minutes.
So why am I writing about it?
The only scene I watched comes late
in the story. In this scene Hercules has
been captured by King Amphitryon’s men. They
chain Hercules, spread-eagle fashion, between two stone pillars. Amphitryon commands Hercules flogged and
executed. While Hercules still lives,
Amphitryon brings out Chiron, the long-time faithful servant of Alcmene and
orders Iphicles to kill him while Hercules watches. (Chiron knew Hercules’s true parentage from
the beginning and helped Alcmene raise the boy-god.) Thus physically and spiritually tormented,
Hercules cries out to his true father, Zeus, who answers by giving Hercules
super-strength. Hercules pulls the
chains binding him, and the stone pillars break into pieces. The chains still intact, Hercules swings
massive stone blocks like gigantic scythes, mowing down his enemies.
At this point I could stomach no
more and surfed to another channel.
It cannot be an accident that this
horrible movie played on Holy Saturday.
Consider the scene I described.
In it, the “son of god” is tortured in a crucifix position, having
fallen under the power of an evil king.
He appeals to Zeus, calling him “father.” The god answers his prayer, giving him power
to slaughter his enemies. According to
Wikipedia (since I watched no further), Hercules goes on to kill Amphitryon and
Iphicles, save his true love from a forced marriage to Iphicles, and rule the
kingdom in peace and harmony.
Walter Wink, a Bible scholar,
coined the phrase “the myth of redemptive violence.” It’s an archetype, showing up in story after
story, beginning with the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish. In the myth of
redemptive violence a great hero (the god Marduk in Emuma Elish) saves the world from chaos (represented by Tiamat and
her servants) by killing his enemies in inventive and gory detail.
Our stories—on television, in
films, in novels and graphic novels—repeat the archetype so often that we don’t
notice it. Star Wars, Batman Begins,
Taken, the list goes on and on. It’s the American way, right? No matter what your problem, the answer is to
find your enemy and kill her, even if she is not yet born.
But of course that’s too
simplistic. The myth of redemptive
violence is far older than American popular culture, and it is found all around
the world. Wink argues that the biblical
creation narrative may have arisen in opposition to the violent mythology of Enuma Elish. In the Hebrew Bible, God creates by speaking;
he does not have to destroy prior gods.
Of course, Wink cannot deny that the Bible also contains many episodes
that seem modeled on the myth of redemptive violence: Pharaoh and his chariots
are drowned in the sea. But as a
Christian Wink points to the New Testament for the definitive story of God’s
action in the world. Real redemption
came via redemptive suffering, not redemptive violence.
And that’s what made my viewing
experience on Holy Saturday so jarring.
Salvation came to my world not when the son of god called for super
power to destroy his enemies and make everything good, but when the Son of God
bore the sins of the world and endured the violence of men, dying with words of
forgiveness for his oppressors.
What kind of hero do I want? The
Legend of Hercules is a lousy movie, but its hero is a very familiar type. We like heroes who put things right by
killing our enemies. But it seems to me
that followers of Jesus would want something better.
