The Lone Hero

So the other night, I was again embroiled in combat with my abdominals, pectorals, and triceps, this time to the tune of Blade: Trinity. Yes, I am, in fact, going to write about Wesley Snipes’ latest offering on a website devoted to a Christian’s take on film. The truth is that I enjoyed this movie, I bought it, I’ve watched it several times, and now I’m going to write about it.

The film is, at its core, a stupid action caper, replete with a central badass hero, a badass woman-hero (with large… tracts of land), a wise-cracking badass hero, and a number of badass villains (again, including a badass woman-villain, albeit with less noticeable assets). The action is over-the-top, with vampires burning and ash-ing left and right while thrumming techno and hardcore rap give rhythm and attitude to the chaos. In short, it’s a Blade movie.

On the whole, I guess the movie is pretty formulaic, but it comes off as good-natured, even self-aware at times. Ryan Reynolds’ opening voice-over is brilliant writing, in my opinion, and Reynolds himself is indicative of the movie’s strongest point: its characters. Blade needs no introduction, though as the traditional badass he ends up lacking the originality of the others. Still, he gets props for being the only good guy cool enough to use a sword. Jessica Biel is cool because she’s a girl, she’s pretty hot, and she trained like crazy to be able to actually do the stuff you see her do on the screen. Rounding out the cast, Ryan Reynolds is hilarious in a stupid, sophomoric way (and MAN, is he ever cut. That’s devotion to a physique). I’m not at all above ad-libbed goofiness, though when I heard he got the part I was initially worried that the humor would end up derailing the whole operation. It doesn’t, and it works.

But at best, this is still a dumb action/martial arts flick. It’s A-quality, but it is what it is, and what it is isn’t Shakespeare.

So why write about it? I guess I’m not really interested in the particulars so much as in the general idea of the lone hero. The Blade movies have always been, in some measure, about the loneliness of the titular character. He loses Whistler in the first one, he loses his vampire love-interest in the second, and re-loses Whistler and everyone else in the third. He doesn’t say much, he just whips out the weapons and turns the bad guys into dust. And most of all, he doesn’t like company. He’s a hero out to save the world on his own; he’ll be better off if you and I stay out of his way.

When I think about these movies, I find myself oddly attracted to this model. There’s something liberating about having nothing to care about; the promised freedom of having nothing to come home to, and thus nothing to lose/worry about, is comforting in a strange way. Similar to the feeling I get from Fight Club, I wonder sometimes if my life would be better if I cut away all the unnecessary, even cancerous possessions I have surrounding me. And when I say “possessions,” I am including, to a large extent, my relationships to people around me (much of which seem to be dying of their own accord anyway). I wonder if being alone is really so horrible, or such a crime against God as we all seem to subconsciously think it is. And when I say “alone,” I mean just that; no friends nearby, no enemies, and family that lives far enough away that I don’t see it everyday.

I had something of a mentor in college who seemed to think that it was good for a person to rely on the people around him, and I’ll admit, I’ve never understood his reasoning. It went something like this: In order for man to rely on God, he first need to rely on others, and since we need to rely on God, we therefore need to rely on others. Now, it’s very possible that I just butchered that, but I can’t really think of a way to correct it. I agree that every Christian needs to rely on God for every ounce of energy and fortune that makes his life possible, but I fail to see the connection to others that this somehow implies. In certain areas, sure. My parents supported me financially for years, and still do, and thus I rely on them in that respect. More than that, my family and certain friends are often sources of comfort and intellectual support that, whether necessary or not, make my life easier and more complete, for sure.

At the same time, I’m at something of a transition period in my life, and as many of my current friends are getting married and moving away and doing grandiose things with their lives, I’m not sure how interested I am in replacing them with new blood. Don’t get me wrong, my friends have been great; I’m just not sure that I shouldn’t spend some time between myself and God. It seems to me that a certain amount of tempering stems from hardship, and so if spending even a few years alone, honing my mind, my body, and my will, ends up leaving me a smarter, harder, and more determined Christian, then I’m not sure why I shouldn’t.

I can hear it now, the chorus of voices telling me about how being “hard” means being cold, or how cutting myself off from others will invariably cut down on my “ability to love,” or some variants thereof. I’m sure there’s some truth in those statements, but at the same time I’m not sure that the alternative is any better. It seems to me that if a man were to spend a year in solitary confinement, at the end he’d be able to go anywhere and endure anything, while the man who spends a year schmoozing with other people ends up popular, but fat and weak.

I wonder if spending some time working toward being self-sufficient, as long as it is done under the recognition that self-sufficiency is actually God-sufficiency, is not categorically better or worse than surrounding one’s self with others, it’s just different. As such, I bristle sometimes at the insinuation that a guy like me, who spends a lot of time alone and does not mind, is somehow backward, weak, or deluded.

In short, I guess I like the idea of the lone hero, at least at this point in my life. I recognize that it has shortcomings, I just wish other people would recognize that the mob of Christian interdependence has its own.

Oh, and girls with muscles are hot. So long as they’re not WWF-muscles; then they’re gross.