Recently sitting on my couch I was flipping channels when I
came upon Dark City on HBO. For those unfamiliar with the film, it deals with a
mysterious city that is in perpetual darkness and the people who live there.
Every night when the citizens of this city fall asleep they are implanted with
new memories and placed in new homes all by a mysterious alien race that is
trying to study the human soul (I know, trippy, right?). It’s a cool dark film
that should be in any Sci-Fi fan’s queue. But the thing that struck me was that
the final battle of the film involves the leader of the aliens doing battle
with a human who has gained the same reality altering abilities as the aliens.
The human of course wins. And of course my question is “why?”
This alien leader was born (or hatched or spawned, they
don’t really get into the origins of these aliens) with the ability to alter
reality with his mind. While we don’t know how long he has lived, let’s assume
his appearance as an elderly person indicates he is old (there were young
aliens depicted as well, who are very creepy). My point is he has experience
altering reality. Our human protagonist? He has literally just discovered these
abilities that afternoon. Now through memory injection our human hero gets a
course in how to use these abilities but still, the evil alien has spent years
doing this. Yet the hero wins.
Now yes, I know this is drama and the hero is supposed to
win. And yes it is always more interesting for an underdog to beat a superior
foe. But fiction is full of characters who are not just underdogs. They are
downright beginners. Star Wars features Luke Skywalker getting a crash course
in Jedi training and defeating a fully trained messiah Jedi Darth Vader. Harry
Potter, who essentially dropped out of Wizard school, defeats the all powerful
master of all evil magic Lord Voldemort. The Last Starfighter learned how to
pilot from a video game. The list goes on and on. An ambitious beginner with
good intentions will always defeat a more seasoned villain.
My complaint is not that good triumph over evil. Good is
SUPPOSED to triumph over evil (unless the story is about a dark anti-hero but
that’s a whole ‘nother blog entry). My complaint is why can’t good be a bit
more experienced. Judge Dredd (yes the bad Sylvester Stallone version, bare
with me) wins out in the end of his film. But Dredd is a seasoned law
enforcement officer. He has experience. His winning in the end makes sense. Robin
Hood (the not so bad Kevin Costner version) spent years fighting in the
crusades. Why can’t heroes be people with the ability to win? In the real world
the underdog rarely wins.
Just because audiences love an underdog does not mean we
need to make the underdog so completely handicapped that his victory is nearly
impossible. That’s just bad filmmaking. I can suspend disbelief only so far.
Even for the most engaging stories there is only so far I am willing to believe
a hero has come in order to defeat a villain. And so I am going to commit an
act of sacrilege and attack the most beloved of underdogs, Luke Skywalker.
Luke Skywalker is a believable underdog for one simple
reason. He loses. Like a lot. True he blew up the first Death Star. True he
killed the Rancor. But other than that, Luke Skywalker gets his ass handed to
him pretty regularly in all three (soon to be six, or at least four) movies.
Vader cuts off his hand while he is running away. He gets electrocuted by the
Emperor. He even gets caught by a bunch of Ewoks. In fact the few victories
Luke manages to get notched on his belt could almost be considered luck (though
Obi-Wan would say “There’s no such thing as luck”).
Part of the reason why I believe the underdog is so
prevalent in American cinema is because America itself was an underdog. We became
a country despite being a mostly untrained and unorganized fighting force
against a much more powerful foe. And certainly all telling of American history
reinforces this notion. So it would make sense that this idea of the underdog
triumphing overwhelming odds would seep into our fictional media. Especially
sports movies. You can’t watch a film about a team sport without seeing the
championship (and dislikeable) team take on a group of misfits and screw ups
who manage to band together for glory.
The simple truth is that the only way the underdog story can
really be believeable is if we see a lot of pain and effort from our
protagonist. It can’t just be a magic injection that unlocks the secrets of the
universe. There needs to be work and persistence so that the victory of the
underdog is earned.
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