Anti-Romanticism
People nowadays love the notion of film that portrays the real world by highlighting the negative sides to it. If we look at the hit tv shows of today we’ll find the likes of Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon (HoTD), The Boys and Rick and Morty to name a few. But all of these portray the world in very negative lights, there aren’t heroes and villains, just a harsh and cruel world that doesn’t discriminate between the two. In HoTD and the Boys characters are killed in often brutal ways, there is rampant sexual deviancy and degeneracy and supposedly an exposition of the truth of human behavior.
(Warning the following clip gets a bit graphic to the end)
And yes, these things are a reflection of things that occur in the real world, there is death, there is degeneracy and there are people who are absolute scum. However, these are the worst traits in the world and if we simply accept this to be the norm and want it represented in all of our tv shows and movies then how are we to ever move past it? In GoT most of the heroes die unheroic deaths, in fact they are almost always ridiculed and their deaths are all dishonorable. In The Boys they show that if some were given superpowers that the power would immediately go to their heads and they would use that power to exploit people and get whatever they wanted. In the adult cartoon Rick and Morty it is constantly reinforced that life is full of pain, suffering and heartbreak and that things like love and hope are for naïve fools who chase a fairytale dream in a harsh and cruel reality.
All three of these shows serve to reinforce the delusion that the real world is ugly and messy and there is no good, no truth, no justice, and no inherent meaning on a larger scale. But we can always contrast fiction like GoT and HoTD with Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is a novel series that is written in a time of darkness, but the characters forever seek and choose the path of light. This is what makes the novels and even the films so powerful. They inspire courage and hope. And it is not without some reflection of ugliness. The orcs are brutal creatures that will murder mercilessly and there are deaths in the series with the likes of Boromir and Théoden King. There are even ugly deaths, like that of Denethor who burns himself alive as he is consumed by his own despair.
If we have to compare the Boys to other superhero films I have to give credit to the Nolan Batman trilogy as well as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. I wrote a previous post on why Batman is a symbol of hope and why he inspires hope and the three-part trilogy shows how he is able to achieve his goal of inspiring hope in Gotham. In Spider-Man there is the same message, and in both the ugly side of things are shown.
But people nowadays seem to shy away from metaphorical evil, that which is not explicit. They crave the overtly explicit violence and gore, they want to see the sexual degeneracy and they want to hear this idea of anti-Romanticism reinforced. But why I wonder? Perhaps it is because the opposite would mean effort or ambition or drive toward something greater than just what is here. Perhaps it is because people don’t want to shoulder the burden that they are a part of something meaningful and they don’t want to live up to the expectations of a creator or don’t want to contribute to the group. Instead people want to live for themselves. Their jobs are really just a means of making money and not really a way of giving back to society. If everyone were to receive a paycheck regardless of whether they had worked or not, then hardly anyone would bother (until it became an issue that affected their personal lives once more).
Suffice to say that fiction is something very powerful in shaping the way people view the world and if we have fiction that is Romantic and embraces the hero’s struggle and focuses on the positive things then people reading or viewing it will also begin to embrace these notions. There are true love stories in the real world, there is a Karmic reward for choosing good, there are positive and wonderful things in the world, you just have to look for it.