Hero (aka Where Have All The Good Men Gone And Where Are All The Gods?)

Note: This entry was written for the Disaster Blogathon being hosted by The Midnite Drive-In and Dubsism from 10th - 12th June.

Also, spoilers.

So, last time we touched on that sequence in the Simpsons episode "Fear of Flying" where Homer attempts to assist Marge in overcoming her titular phobia by renting a series of VHS titles on the subject of air travel. The titles in question are Hero, Fearless and Alive, and they all have tell-tale plane wrecks on their box art. If you follow Homer's suit then you've got yourself quite the weekend marathon of early 90s flight paranoia, although be warned that the quality of those pictures varies drastically. As I acknowledged in my previous piece, he picked out a real winner with Fearless and an absolute dud with Alive. But what of the third film that falls straight down the middle? Stephen Frears' Hero, or Accidental Hero as it was known in some territories, is a much trickier one for me to categorise because I have something of a love/hate relationship with it. In theory, I should be every bit as scathing toward it as I am Alive, since in the end I have to consider it a failure. It's a film that bites off way more than it can chew, simply because its teeth are not sharp enough, and spews out its various intriguing ideas and narrative developments in an unsightly, salivary mess. Hero frustrates the hell out of me, but there's something about its obnoxious little world that I find inexplicably captivating. It's an enjoyable film, for the most part, with a number of good key ingredients, and an engrossing set-up, even if it doesn't yield adequate solutions to any of the issues it raises.

What Alive, Fearless and Hero all have in common is that their respective in-flight catastrophe occurs early in the running and the bulk of the picture is taken up by examining some aspect of the longer-term consequences. Whereas Alive is a raw tale of survival at all costs, Hero is superficially closer to Fearless, in that it's more interested in the emotional fall-out of this kind of deeply traumatic experience among people attempting to resume their day-to-day lives and discovering, for one reason or another, that things can never go back to the way they were. Hero, though, does so from a more jocose angle than Fearless, its pet interest being in the nature of heroism, and the stark discrepancy that exists between the real individual who just so happened to pull off an extraordinary act, and the idealised hero who exists only in the public mind and in media sensationalism. Hero takes its inspiration from the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges, most notably Hail The Conquering Hero (1944), in which an army reject is mistaken for a war hero on returning to his hometown, to tell a more modern story of misguided lionisation. In the process, it raises a plethora of fascinating questions. Do terrible events bring out both the best and worst in our human nature? If so, then could we be either the hero or the villain of the story if you happened to catch us at the right time on any given day? Or is it the case that humans are fundamentally bastards, and that whatever good deeds we might be capable of are inevitably balanced out by our innumerable moments of weakness? For as long as it entertains the latter position, Hero is a delectable ride. It's at its strongest where it's at its most sour, and for the first fifty minutes or so shows plenty of promise, until it develops a lethal appetite for sugar and all goodwill goes out the window. In the end, I'm not sure what point Hero is trying to make and I'm not convinced that Hero knows either.

The hero of Hero is one Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman), who at first glance appears to possess very few traits of the archetypal chevalier. Bernie is deeply cynical and embittered about the human condition and prefers to spend most of his time hiding under a proverbial rock, although his penchant for pick-pocketing credit cards occasionally brings him under legal scrutiny. As we open the film, we find Bernie in court, having just received a conviction for receiving stolen goods, and the likelihood of a prison term when he returns next week for sentencing. This couldn't have come at a worse time for Bernie, who is in the process of attempting to reconnect with his ten-year-old son Joey (James Madio), whom Bernie walked out on some years ago. Bernie is a scavenger, an opportunist who preys off of other people's moments of weakness, although he is self-aware enough to recognise his own - early on in the film, he gives a remorseful speech to one of the few individuals willing to lend him a sympathetic ear, Chick the bartender (Tom Arnold), about how he didn't grow into the great individual he assumed he would he would do as a child. At the top of Bernie's regrets is his failure to provide for his son, either financially or as a role model.

As it turns out, Bernie's shrinking, disheveled exterior conceals an abundance of physical courage, something he demonstrates when he witnesses a plane crash while driving along an empty road outside Chicago, and valiantly (if gracelessly) approaches the scene of the accident and opens the emergency door, allowing most of the passengers to escape the burning aircraft. A boy pleads with him to go inside for his father, who was knocked unconscious and left behind; Bernie reluctantly does so, and ends up saving several more passengers who were trapped within the wreckage - among them, Gayle Gayley (Geena Davis), an ambitious young TV reporter hot off receiving her award for Excellence In The Pursuit of Truth. Although Bernie is clearly a tremendous man, he is far from your ideal hero - in part because he is a felon, and his heroism does not exactly signify redemption for his history of misdeeds, as demonstrated when he swipes Gayley's purse while in the process of hoisting her to safety. There's also the generally uncouth manner in which he conducts himself while roaming the wreckage for additional casualties, hurling various curse words at his rescuees, and at one point contemplating leaving one man to his death because he isn't the man he came in for. This sequence is one of the film's most successful, for it's in that moment of gut-wrenching crisis that Hero seems quite happy to be as thoroughly mordant and unromantic about its subject matter as possible. Saving people, it posits, can really be a pain in the neck, but on the flip side, a tragedy can be an opportunity for personal gain, signified not only in Bernie's sticky fingers, but in Gayley's howls of territorial rage as she is loaded into an ambulance: "This is my story! I did the research!" Despite saving numerous lives, Bernie considers himself a failure, because he was unable to locate and rescue the father of the child who originally implored him for aid (unbeknownst to him, the man in question had regained consciousness and left under his own steam). Rather than face the child he assumes he has let down, Bernie chooses to slink off discreetly into the night, as befits his general style, with a pocket of ill-gotten plastic and only one of his $100 shoes. The public is left in awe at the bravery of this mysterious man, and Gayley spearheads a media campaign to identity him, their only lead being a blurred video image and the shoe he left behind.

Bernie is not an amazingly endearing character, but his assorted contradictions make him engagingly enigmatic. Is he a bastard with a hidden heart of gold? Is he simply doing what anybody would have done under the circumstances, confronted by the plight of his fellow humans? Or is there something special about Bernie that makes him cut out for heroism, however ill-mannered? Could it even be Bernie's more inhuman qualities - his more feral, animalistic side, and his tendencies toward reckless plundering - that makes him better suited to handling wild situations that most people, in their prosaic, everyday existences, would be utterly thrown by? Is, as one character suggests, there a fine, fine line between the kind of heroism Bernie exhibits and unbridled stupidity? These are all juicy enough questions, but the film ducks out of exploring them in any particularly substantial depth. For the plot thickens, but ultimately falters when Bernie crosses paths with drifter John Bubber (Andy Garcia), a fellow societal outcast who figures out how to exploit the situation to his advantage. Hearing Bernie's story, and acquiring his remaining shoe, he manages to pass himself off as the so-called "Angel of Flight 104", securing the $1 million reward and the adoration of the public. Bubber's arc is, unfortunately, the film's major weak link. Whereas Bernie is a miserable sleazebag, Bubber is truly detestable. He has a comprehensible enough motive for wanting to claim the glory as his own (he wants to be noticed and be treated as a valid human being, for a change), yet the film seems curiously oblivious to just how mawkishly, odiously manipulative his character is. It aspires to have it both ways, using Bubber to satirise hero worship and the creation of celebrity while equally imparting that he is somehow worthy of his lionised status, because he is a terrific and wonderful person in spite of his gargantuan exploitation of Bernie's confidence and the public's trust. And the film certainly has no interest in exposing the hypocrisies of the public's reaction to Bubber (eg: the general disdain with which they treat the homeless, despite reveling in the fuzzies of his rags to riches story), instead suggesting that he genuinely is inspiring them to be better people, while showing little in the way of evidence. It's at this point that Hero suddenly seems terribly confused about its own agenda, and we catch it swallowing its own tail-end in sheer disorientation.

Hero has fun sending up the media's manufacturing and exploitation of celebrity, notably in a sequence promoting an upcoming TV dramatisation of events in which all of the people involved are slated to be playing themselves, an idea that feels as if it should have been taken a whole lot further than it actually is. In practice, the dramatisation amounts to disappointingly little, other than providing the first point in which Gayley becomes even vaguely aware of the discrepancy between the uncouth gentleman who hustled her out of the plane and the heavily romanticised Bubber. There are times when Hero fully embraces the goofiness of the culture it's lampooning, such as when a small girl approaches Bubber asking him to sign her Bubber doll, and other times when details of Bubber's personal history (eg: his war record in Vietnam) seem so perfectly aligned with the kind of person the public wants to have rescued them from a burning plane that the man's existence plays like one great cosmic joke at Bernie's expense. And then there are times when the film leans dangerously toward mistaking the kinds of highly public displays of virtue it ought to be skewering for assurances of genuine virtue. The film's most misjudged plot point involves Bubber making a televised trip to a children's ward (jeez, that's probably the oldest ploy in the book), where he has a nauseating moment delivering a pep talk to a kid in a coma (think about this for a second - he hones in on the one individual in no fit state to object to his using him as a prop in his ongoing publicity campaign). In a more focused film, this could have been tremendously funny (it puts me strongly in mind of that Smashie and Nicey skit where they visit a children's hospital and attempt to bring a child out of his coma by singing the most flagrantly self-congratulatory song about the good work they do for charity). Unfortunately, Hero sees fit to bestow Bubber with genuine powers; the child comes out his coma soon after and the media brands Bubber a miracle worker. Actually, the kid's humdrum non-sequitur upon emerging would appear, beguilingly, to suggest that the whole thing was nothing more than a dumb coincidence, and yet in the climactic sequence Bernie himself (who's been observing Bubber's deception from afar with furious eyes) has decided otherwise, insisting to a despondent Bubber that he actually helped the child, supposedly confirmed by the fact that he actually remembered the kid's name (Alan). Oh yes, that's the other misjudged thing about Bubber. The film's climax requires him to have a crisis of confidence that compels him to step out onto a window ledge and consider hurling himself off, an act of desperation that feels wholly unmotivated based on everything we've seen. We do get hints that Bubber, for as much as he accepts the media attention, feels guilty and unworthy for his fakery, but I don't buy that he feels so entrapped by his ill-gotten celebrity that he wants out via his own destruction. That too would be an interesting narrative development, but the film simply doesn't do the work to get us there.

Bernie, meanwhile, abhors attention and has no interest in being lauded a hero. He does, however, have use for the $1 million reward that's rightfully his, which would not only cover his legal expenses, but also finally enable him to ensure a decent college education for the son he's been failing his whole life. By the end of the film, Bernie and Bubber have come to an arrangement - Bubber continues to take the credit for Bernie's heroism, on the condition that a cut of the reward money goes to Bernie and Joey, and that Bubber uses his celebrity to pull a few strings with the Chicago courts and convince the judge to suspend his prison sentence. Although the film has by and large lost me at this point, the one aspect of the conclusion I can genuinely get behind - the implication that Bernie walks away scott-free in all regards while Bubber remains ensnared by the obligations of his public profile, having to perpetuate the deception day by day and live up to an idealised version of himself, knowing that all eyes are trailed upon his every move. As Bernie so shrewdly informs him, "Why should you be comfortable? Uncomfortable is what you should be." Sadly, Hero does kind of blow that too, as it remains charitable enough toward Bubber to give him the opportunity to prove that he is capable of genuine heroism. He saves Bernie's life when he nearly slips off the ledge, thus adding more supposed credibility to his final speech about how, deep down inside, we're all heroes, even if we're also predisposed to do crummy things. It's certainly hinted that a critical factor in why the public accepts Bubber's heroism so unquestionably is because he says all the right things and makes them feel good about themselves. As such, it would be a fatal mistake for the film itself to become suckered in by Bubber's ludicrous Hallmark rhetoric, but apparently it does. Hero remains connected enough to its ironic trappings to know that the cost for a closing speech as pandering and mawkish as Bubber's is to follow it up with a sardonic dismissal ("Have you ever heard so much bullshit from somebody who isn't the president?"), a tactic that plays less like an affirmation of the film's satiric underbelly than an audacious attempt to have its cake and eat it.

Hero finds more authenticity in the more muted, contemplative moments in which it reflects not on the nature of heroism, but on the nature of weakness. The idea that the great unifying factor is not our latent capacity for Herculean greatness but the simple fact that we are, none of us, gods, and therefore bound to screw up, is leagues more compelling than any of the feel-good sentiments articulated by Bubber. And the suggestion that the individual humans behind the news stories are inevitably more nuanced and complicated than their media representation lets on is not an amazingly revelatory one, but always worth exploring. Multiple characters struggle with the notion that somebody noble enough to save a woman's life could sink so low as to rob her at the same time, while Bubber tries to make sense of the desperation that compelled him to assume the life of a charlatan. In one scene, Bernie's ex-wife Evelyn, (Joan Cusack) comments that Bernie is at his best in moments of crisis, when he forgets to be Bernie and remembers to be "sort of like a human being"; on the surface, this plays like another facile attempt at rationalising the contradictory elements in Bernie's character, but it becomes infinitely more curious when we consider the film's implicit suggestion that our moments of weakness might be our most prevalent human characteristic. As Chick so delicately observes, we're all assholes.

The question of Bernie's humanity was raised earlier, when Evelyn lambasts Bernie for attempting to mold Joey in his own misanthropic image. When Bernie insists that, "it's a jungle out there", Evelyn suggests that he "go back to jungle". Bernie, clearly, is out of place in the domestic world, despite his efforts to make good with Joey, yet the reference to the jungle hints at ways in which he, in a more metaphorical sense than Bubber, is homeless. If we think back to a sequence toward the start of the film in which Bernie and Joey are seated on a bench at the zoo, watching a tiger pace up and down a harrowingly spartan cage, we might question just what jungle there is for him to go back to. The initial zoo scene is a small moment that nevertheless encapsulates so much about the film's central concerns. The verbal exchange between the father and son - Joey speculates that if Bernie were to step into the tiger cage, it would kill him, with which Bernie does not disagree - speaks of Joey's dented faith in his father's abilities and Bernie's awareness of such. The caged tiger signifies the characters' general fear of entrapment (both Bernie's fear of his pending incarceration and Bubber's later predicament). It also conveys the apparent order of modern living, in which the jungle has been eliminated and the big cats confined to tiny cages, in a manner that is evocative of the meagre barrier that exists between safety and danger. There is also an extent to which we sense that Bernie identifies with the agitated tiger - the magnificence of the beast might signify his unlocked potential, and its languishing outside of its natural habitat his alienation from the world. Joey remains Bernie's sole link to the world of domesticity - at one point, Bernie uses Joey very explicitly to assert his humanity, yelling "I got a kid, you know! I'm a person for Christ's sake!" For much of the film, Bernie's concern for Joey serves as an easy means of bestowing him with humanity - we do have the obvious interpretation that Bernie chooses to enter the wrecked plane because in the pleas of the desperate child he finds himself haunted by the vulnerabilities of his own son. But I think a far more gratifying explanation (and far more so than any of Bubber's insufferable bullshit) would be that Bernie's heroism is motivated, to a large degree, by his misanthropy. Bernie chooses to help his fellow human because he has such great contempt for them, and he knows that they cannot be relied upon to help themselves in a terrible situation. It's this same embittered understanding of how much people suck that also causes him to think nothing of helping himself to their property while he's at it. In the film's closing punchline we find Bernie once again at the zoo with Joey, and confiding in him the truth of the preceding events, before he finds his heroic services in demand once again. A child has (somehow) ended up inside the lions' cage, and with no authorities coming to help Bernie ends up passing his shoes to Joey and making his own down toward the action. We don't get to see it, but he is implied to actually enter the territory of one of those caged big cats - a sign that he has finally become the man his son desires him to be, that he has finally embraced his own magnificent nature or, most likely, that the rest of the world remains so inept and so bound for calamity that Bernie has no means of escaping his begrudging obligation to save them from themselves. Thus, there is an extent to which Bernie remains trapped at the end, but it's an entrapment of the rest of the world's making.

The third major player in all of this is Gayley. She, like Bubber, is a fake, a point illustrated perhaps a little too obviously in an early sequence where she delivers a speech on journalistic integrity to a showroom of colleagues and uses an onion as a prop, causing herself to shed distinctly unemotional tears. Her infatuation with Bubber certainly never seems convincing, and it's hard to say to what extent this is intentional. The film seems only vaguely interested in exploring the extent to which her phoniness blurs into her self-delusion, although Davis imbues her with a vulnerability late in the film as she struggles to deal with the increasingly transparent likelihood that the man for whom she has fallen may not be as wonderful as she first assumed - the realisation that her savoir (whom, until the very end, she still believes to be Bubber) pocketed her purse in the process sends her spiraling off into a ludicrous harangue about how "John Bubber is more of a hero than we ever imagined." Hero also benefits from a handful of entertaining supporting figures. In particular, Chevy Chase and Stephen Toboloswky both give fine comic performances as a couple of media executives who gradually come to realise that Bubber is a phony, but also that their station has backed his supposed heroism for too long to walk away unscathed, and that they, too, are now prisoners of the ongoing deception. Whenever they're on screen, the film pops with all the right levels of screwball energy.

Finally, here's a fun fact. The song "Hero" by Mariah Carey was originally written for this film. The plan was to have Gloria Estefan sing it, only Carey was convinced that the song was too good for this picture and that she should keep it for herself. It's no big loss. No knocks to Carey's song, but that kind of inspirational power ballad most assuredly did not belong in this film and probably would have been the final nail in the coffin from a tonal standpoint. Instead, we get an airy gospel number from Luther Vandross and a choir of children, which at least has the virtue of sounding appropriately goofy.

Marge Rating: Dog and cat wedding. This is arguably the "nicest" of Homer's VHS marathon from an aerophobic perspective, given that, in this particular aerial accident, nobody dies, and the impact itself happens off of screen (we see only Bernie's reaction, which suffices, but possibly betrays that they didn't have the budget to pull off the crash). I suspect those claustrophobic shots of the trapped passengers will still prove highly gut-wrenching to anybody with a pervasive terror of sky-borne disaster, however. And eventually we do get the alluring sight of the aircraft completely erupting into flames.