1/23/23
Newsletter #228
The Crack of Dawn
What is a hero? As per Webster: “2. any man admired for his courage, nobility, or exploits, especially in war; as, Washington is a national hero. 3. any person admired for his qualities or achievements and regarded as an ideal or model.” Definition number one is “descended from the gods,” so we can skip that. Obviously, the reference to gender needs to be updated (although there used to be an understanding that the use of the word “man” in this context meant “mankind,” which certainly includes women). My question is: do we have any heroes anymore?
As a 12-year-old kid I was more than happy to pay homage to my heroes by putting up posters of them on my bedroom wall. I had an original Lolita (1962) poster with Lolita licking a heart-shaped lollipop; The Harder They Fall (1957), Humphrey Bogart’s last movie; and a blacklight poster of Jimi Hendrix. The Lolita poster wasn’t for the actual movie, or cute little Sue Lyons, it was for Stanley Kubrick. The Jimi Hendrix poster was pretty common in those days (and I didn’t even have a blacklight).
Who are our heroes now? No recognizable heroes came out of any of the wars since WWII, where we had Audie Murphy (see To Hell and Back [1955]) or Al Schmidt (see Pride of the Marines [1945]). I personally found it impossible to admire Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) in American Sniper, who killed 150 civilians from long-range, even if the civilians had bombs under their burkas. We had no good reason to be in Iraq to begin with; how can I possibly respect a guy who shoots non-military personnel from a safe mile away who are attempting the protect their own country?
As soon as I heard the term “Toxic Masculinity” a few years ago, I suddenly understood why many of my scripts never sold. Hollywood, always on the cutting edge of stupid ideas, went PC and Woke very early. Now they’ve got themselves so backed into a corner that they can no longer hire older, highly-experienced, male directors, but must hire young female Asian or African-American (which is a bullshit term: they’re Americans of African descent; just as I am an American of Eastern European descent), none of whom has had time to learn what they’re doing yet. Or they hire young males of any ethnicity right out of film school so they can pay them as little as possible, and never get any backtalk because they’re so deathly frightened that they’ll be fired and never work again.
Several of my scripts are about unsung war heroes, like Gunnery Sgt. Dan Daly, the most-decorated enlisted Marine of all-time; or Commodore Stephen Decatur, America’s greatest naval hero (and still the youngest U.S. Navy captain ever at 25). These guys were heroes because they had balls of steel. Dan Daly had two Medals of Honor going into WWI, where he proved himself to be the greatest hero of the Marine Corps – for an enlisted man. The most-decorated officer of the Marine Corps is Lt. General Lewis “Chesty” Puller who fought during WWII (his most famous line was, “We’re surrounded? Good, now we can fire in any direction”). I seriously thought about writing a script about him, too, but I’d gotten so little traction with the others that I didn’t bother.
So, who are our heroes now? Kylie Jenner? A fat-assed rich girl with 1,000 pairs of shoes, who has never had a single interesting idea in her life, but has 200 million subscribers? Honestly, who do we look up to now? Certainly no one in politics. Even George Washington, whom Webster’s Dictionary chose as their example of hero, is shit upon these days. Rosa Parks? I’ll go with that, she was absolutely heroic in not giving up her seat on the bus, and I’m sure it was a scary situation. But not nearly as scary as running headlong into German machinegun fire, over and over again. Rosa Parks only had to prove her heroism once; Daly and Decatur made careers out of it.
So now, in lieu of actual heroes, we are force-fed “superheroes” – pretty boys and pretty girls in colorful unitards flying through space shooting death rays out of their palms. Well, I thought that was as stupid as hammered shit was I was 9 years old, 55 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any smarter in the interim.
Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but if I’m going to watch a two-hour movie about a hero, I’ll take Dan Daly or Stephen Decatur any day of the week. An actual human, like Daly, Decatur or Rosa Parks, is 1,000 times more interesting than some asshole who rides a surfboard through space.
And now I feel sanguine – my blood’s up and my cheeks are ruddy – and I’m ready to meet anything this day throws at me.
Don't hold your breath. About the closest you can get to it is "The Lost Battalion" (2001), which is a pretty good movie. But it true, it's about the Americans, and it's right near the end of the war, and there are no trenches.
Still holding out hope to see your Dan Daly movie get made.