The Story as a Guide
It is said of Alexander the Great that he loved to read Homer; that he was inspired by the heroes of the siege of Troy, and particularly identified with the self-absorbed and disobliging hero, Achilles. Julius Caesar is said, in turn, to have studied Alexander’s life. And Napoleon is said – if we allow ourselves a long leap into the future – during his childhood to have devoured all possible biographies of history’s great heroes, with Alexander the Great and Caesar at the top of the list.
Idols and ideals have always been important to people, whether war heroes, conquerors or rulers. Not to mention the equally important religious figures who, ever since the dawn of time, have raised the question: how would Hercules / Moses / Jesus / Mohammed / Buddha / Shiva have acted in a similar situation? Or latter-day explorers and scientists. Tell me who your heroes are, and I’ll tell you who you are – or at least who you want to be. All those who devour heroic tales, as we all know, do not themselves become great leaders. Some end up as the Emperor of Portugallia: as victims of their own dreams of greatness. And most mature, quite simply, growing out of such hero worship.
The importance of good role models is emphasised remarkably often in public discourse. Almost every group, and particularly those seen as weak or vulnerable in society, are seen to be in need of positive role models who will inspire, guide, and to show that, after all, it is possible to succeed. At the same time, one should be clear that role models increasingly have come to exist independently and that their capacity to influence cannot be determined from above; if young people today want to identify with a gangster like Tony Montana in the movie Scarface, or the coolest local tough guy, it matters little whether parents, teachers and other wise adults think it is better to identify with more positive characters such as Christer Fuglesang and Marie Curie. But why do we need role models, how do they actually function, and how do they relate to the cautionary examples?
The classic James Cagney movie Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) is about two childhood friends from the toughest neighbourhood in New York: Hell’s Kitchen. One of them, Jerry, succeeds in childhood to escape the long arm of the law and manages to leave behind his life of crime and instead becomes a priest. His best friend, Rocky, however, gets caught, and grows up in juvenile detention schools and prisons, and becomes a hardened criminal. After many years, their paths cross again. As fate would have it, Rocky must hide from the police, and he chooses his old childhood neighbourhood of Hell’s Kitchen, where Jerry is working to help young people to escape crime.
There are, of course, problems when the tough gangster settles there. He is admired by the young guys who all want to be like him, rather than the faint-hearted priest. Rocky builds up his league from among the young people, but one day he is arrested and sentenced to death in the electric chair. In his cell, he is as tough and confident as ever, but his childhood friend Jerry visits him in his capacity as a priest and asks him to show himself afraid and to scream and cry, to humiliate himself so that the young people of Hell’s Kitchen will stop looking up to him. Rocky refuses and mocks the priest. But in the film’s final scene, when he is taken to the electric chair, he starts crying, complaining and begs for his life. Does he break down for real or is he listening to his childhood friend? It is not important. What is essential is that the gang splits up and the young people see through the tough gangster as a bad example when he breaks down during the execution.
One of the most counterproductive examples of how some, from above, wished to positively influence young people is the now classic black-and-white label on album covers: Parental Advisory. It was introduced in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, to help parents ensure that their children did not listen to coarse lyrics, with sexual innuendo and drug propaganda. The only problem is that it has become like a badge of honour. Children and teens can boast to one another about listening to ‘forbidden’ music, quality stamped with a Parental Advisory sticker. And artists can profile themselves against the kind of paternalism and double standards that the label has come to symbolise.
Most reviews of the label’s history and its outcome makes one come to the conclusion that the labelling of different types of artists and genres was fairly arbitrary. Hip hop and rap seems, for example, to be judged more severely than some other genres, which have not received the same negative reputation. Of course, I remember from my years in high school, I started smoking around the time that the first warnings were put on cigarette packs; my friends and I thought the labels made smoking an extra ‘tough’ thing to do.
It should be noted that stepping over the line is a virtue of youth – or sin, if we want to see it that way – and we should therefore seek to draw boundaries in the most productive way possible. Regulations that are too arbitrary and unreasonable, and which are difficult or impossible to comply with, often act against their intended purpose and inspire young people to do as they want, because those who create these laws appear to be smug authority figures without a basis in reality.
Among the most common role models for contemporary youth are sports stars and artists. The TV shows that have made it possible for everyone to test whether they can become an ‘idol’, have certainly mass-produced role models for young people, but have also reduced the status of pop-stars. The artists that were previously considered unreachable and especially gifted could now be anyone from the neighbourhood.
The exceptional talent is now reserved for sports stars. Of course, they also come from next door – with Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Rosengårds pride, as the most magnificent example – but there is undoubtedly a much greater talent, and above all a lot more hard work in the form of training to become a sports star than to become a recording artist. While artists today are voted for, and the right people seem to come straight in off the street into the studio and make success happen overnight (and, for that matter, disappear just as quickly), it’s sports stars that are in a completely different way-driven by the will: the will to excel, the will to win, to defeat their opponents, and to make it through talent, hard-work, strength of character and exceptional technical virtuosity.
Sport is also a popular subject in youth films. Particularly in the United States, there is a genre of so-called ‘inspirational sports movies’ (although they are rarely to be seen in theatres in Sweden) that have a steady audience of young people with sporting dreams. These films belong to the most archetypal form of heroic stories. The hero meets continual resistance. Nobody believes in him or her, on their team or in their school. The dramaturgy is that those who are most despised and vilified, and of whom no one expects anything, can rise up. The baseball team wins victory after victory against bigger and stronger opponents, the football team (American football, of course) works its way up despite stiff opposition and makes its decisive touchdown.
The genre is significant and important, at least in the U.S. context. It teaches loyalty, concepts such as school spirit and team spirit – that it pays to fight and that whoever wins does so because they deserve it. ”Clear eyes, full hearts, cannot lose,” it says in the movie Friday Night Lights, subsequently converted to the fine TV show of the same name about life in a small town in Texas, where everything revolves around the high-school football team.
In Sweden, it is probably the people in most of the northern cities, where hockey or bandy is most popular, that fully understand the local population’s relationship with American football in this kind of movie. It is something remarkable that no Swede, to my knowledge, has had the idea to do a sports film about a young hockey player, for example from Ornskoldsvik. But the real heroes are perhaps so strong as role models that there is no reason to think of fictional characters. Could a novel about a fictional football star be just as fascinating as the real Zlatan’s autobiography? Is there currently room for books and movies about the Swedish successes of Åshöjdens BK of the 1970s?
Heroes in the traditional sense are not the most popular of role models today, not if we think of the conquerors, pioneers, groundbreaking explorers and the like. They belong probably, unfortunately, to older eras. But, if we consider the hero from a slightly different perspective, he seems to be alive and well. The hero who dares go against expectations, who breaks out of the given framework, who may even be rejected by society, but that comes back and returns home in triumph. Part of the fascination with Zlatan is in the second, that he so obviously comes from below, that the established team did not want him, partly because he is not entirely sympathetic – something for which he does not apologise.
This kind of hero story is repeated in story after story, it corresponds to the traditional rites of passage, and largely reflects the teen’s life experience, the sense of alienation and desire for revenge. Therefore, it is also easy for criminals to become role models. The criminal hero fights from below, he is ejected from the community and looked down on, both by society, perhaps even his family – compare with Scarface where Tony Montana (Al Pacino’s character) is rejected by his mother who refuses to accept his money, after which he raises himself up on his own, by his own intelligence, with his skill with weapons.
In the best-case scenario, the gangster gets so far that no one dares but to respect him, like the characters in the Godfather movies, or in Scarface. Note an interesting feature that makes Tony Montana more comprehensible as a heroic figure: he never killed any innocent in the film, only gangsters and corrupt policemen. At the end, even his own destruction occurs because he refuses to kill any children. He is brutal against the brutal and ruthless against the ruthless, but he is also a man who both created his own destiny, and actually has a sense of honour. They who killed him at the end of the film are not the police, but a ruthlessly brutal drug smuggling ring – the same gang that wanted to get him to commit infanticide.
Film has been the largest creator of fictional role models for almost 100 years. Several of the biggest movie role models, however, were literary before they were filmed: cowboys of the Wild West, Indians, sheriffs and lone avengers, d’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers as well as Sherlock Holmes, whose latest incarnation of the updated TV-version is played by the brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch. With its neurotic Aspergers-favourable interpretation of the figure, he is well matched to the Sherlock of the books, unlike the overly honest and manly Basil Rathbone in the 1930s films, or the strange action version with Robert Downey Jr.
Sherlock Holmes is a fascinating hero, an intellectual, law enforcement role model who simultaneously and constantly finds himself dangerously close to insanity and crime. As a type, he builds directly on the Edgar Allan Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin, literature’s first solver of complex criminal mysteries. But he also has features reminiscent of Milton’s elegant Satan – the archetype of the transparent dandy, which is a prominent figure in 1800s mythology from Lord Byron onwards, one can also associate with the knowledge-hungry Faust, who sold his soul and disdained love for the sake of knowledge. Sherlock Holmes is a neurotic, brilliant, cocaine-user, and the closest person to him is not one of his decent clients or his ‘Sancho Panza’, Dr. Watson, but the father of all super-villains, Professor Moriarty.
The same peculiar identification between hero and criminal is repeated in many of the modern hero-sagas. Batman is, in the later films, the same kind of personality as the psychotic criminals who he fights. Like them he is in disguise and capable of great cruelty in his hunt for criminals.
Even such a mundane hero like James Bond stands out, through all his transformations – whether he is a macho figure like Sean Connery or as ironic as Roger Moore – because he feels at home in the criminals’ world of vulgar luxury. He also has a consistently indifferent view of his fellow human beings: the ultimate goal will always be to defend Her Majesty’s international interests. Even in the latest round of films, with Daniel Craig, where he is made more human in the sense that he at least sweats, and he obviously enjoys killing his opponents, who obviously deserve it – but, does a true hero really enjoy killing?
Some would perhaps argue that there is something wrong with our time, whose heroes are so dark and twisted in nature. But the question is whether the heroes were really so much brighter in previous eras. Whether you opt for the Athenian or the Biblical track, we end up in mythical tales of crime as the foundation of human civilisation. In the Bible, there is the original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge. Similarly, in Greek mythology, we have Prometheus, who gave us the fire, the original technology, by stealing it from the gods.
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The Bible continues its history of civilisation with the myth of fratricide: Cain kills Abel, while the Roman myth is based on Romulus killing Remus, his brother, after they disagreed over the wall that would enclose the new city of Rome. Different civilisations’ myths seem surprisingly often to be associated with various types of crime.
One of the biggest role models in the world today is the Muslim prophet Muhammad – a historical figure who is so exalted and admired that it is not permissible for a believer to say anything critical about him. Yet he could also be seen as a fascinating literary figure, doubting in his calling. Even when he is most devout in his faith, he wavers between peaceful persuasion and violence. Like all true heroes, he is forced to fight from an underdog position, against established rulers and authorities, for a victory against all the odds. It is a heroic story that follows the template, and there it is, in the simple drama, that the secret probably lies behind Islam’s ability to attract new converts: the legend is as clear as any inspirational sports movie.
The idea of ??martyrdom, which in Islam is originally taken from the early Christian saints, lives on strongly and, while it’s easy to scoff at the idea of ??all the rewards that the martyrs are promised in paradise, it’s still shocking that young people, time after time, choose to sacrifice their lives for something in which they say they believe so adamantly. Just the fact that faith seems so absurd in its self-assuredness and the ruthless violence makes, paradoxically, a big impression on many. In part, it may perhaps be explained by the fact that young people have such a strikingly serious attitude to life, and are so keen to put their personal imprint on the world. The danger of these martyrs as role models should definitely not be underestimated, but the best way to overcome them is probably not to be so horrified and highlight their dangerousness.
Rather, it is important to deprive them of their status, much like James Cagney when he starts crying on his way to the electric chair. These so-called ‘martyrs’ should be seen as individuals, they should be reduced in status, preferably through psychological and sociological understanding, which could help to give them their proper proportions, while their victims should be raised up and given back the human dignity that the suicide bomber wanted to take from them.
To grow up and mature as a human being largely grows out of childish thinking and ideas. First, we stop believing in Santa Claus, then perhaps disappears the other beliefs of childhood and then we even see our parents’ shortcomings. Teenagers look instead for their role models across borders and in adventures of all sorts, even if only in the type of modern rites of passage such as smoking secretly, being drunk for the first time, or the first overseas trip with friends. And later, as we become adults, individuals, and a part of social, national and ethnic groups in the world, so we free ourselves from role models, we abandon hero worship and try to live a full and genuine life.
But even on the road to such freedom, we need role models, heroes to keep nearby, just as we need the cautionary examples – albeit only as mind games. Life cannot be reduced to a story, but stories teach us to better understand ourselves and each other. Who knows, maybe that awkward type, the troublemaker who does not fit in, could come back with knowledge or wealth that we never could have imagined? Or maybe the troublemaker could become a professional in Milan or Barcelona! ”Sing, O goddess, of the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles ?and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.”
Författare.