Heroes Among Us

As normal people, you could say that it is rare for us to be heroes yet we have placed that title on so many people. If you asked a child who their hero is they would probably tell you a comic book hero or someone along those lines rather than how some people think of as heroes. This isn’t necessarily wrong and this is the definition that many people hold through their lives that all heroes need to be superhuman in one way or another. There isn’t anything wrong with having that definition of a hero, but you are doing yourself a disservice by not looking around you to see if the people you already know can be your heroes.

This idea of heroes being in and around us is played up in almost all different formats. Some examples are from the books and movie that we covered in this unit; in all the different formats there was a section where they were just normal citizens going about their normal days. This is what Montag is and what Bruce Wayne is, they are both playing the role of a normal citizen while being a hero to people around them behind the scenes. This can also be seen in the movie Unbreakable where the main character is essentially just told that he has superpowers after he is a sole survivor of a train crash. He spends the rest of the movie struggling to try to balance his responsibility as a hero while remaining faithful to his family. This movie does a good job of showing that the people we view as heroes could be the person that is right next to us rather than some stranger in some strange place.

Anytime that our heroes are simply the people that are next to us it is because that is how heroes work with our society. An example from The Dark Knight is when Commissioner Gordon says at the end of the movie  “he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now” entailing that heroes can function in a cycle between being needed and not being needed. Gotham needed Batman not because they didn’t want to deal with Joker but because they couldn’t. This is the same with our other characters Montag and V, both of them are able to become heroes in that situation because society didn’t know how to fix itself. You could say that the reason that any hero exists is that there is a villain to oppose them. Batman is a hero because the Joker is a villain, Montag is a hero because their society was villainous, and V was a hero because the government was a villain. All of the heroes that we analyzed were mostly normal people until they had some villain against them and only then did they step into the role of a hero.

To continue on the idea of villains causing heroes, there is rarely a time in modern stories where we know the hero before we know the villain, or the villains goal. We need to have a reason for the hero to be in the story as if there is no villain or evil plot the hero has nothing to fight against in which case they just go back to being the people that are around us every day. If you take all your hero examples as Marvel heroes than none of the heroes in those stories are normal people, whereas in Fahrenheit 451 and Unbreakable both of the people that are turned into heroes are nothing necessarily special until they realize that there is something that they could change in their society. They are normal until they find something wrong or someone to oppose them, at that point, they become the heroes of their respective stories because they are willing to act against what is wrong and attempt to make it change.

In the society that we currently live in we cannot deny that there are heroes around us, granted they may not be as obvious as say Batman but we may run into a Montag who just seems like a normal person. If we simply open our eyes to the people around us and in various places that we hear about it can be quite simple to point out people that are heroes in the community that they are placed in. Montag and V are heroes in their own communities respectively, but they are not necessarily the same type of hero as Batman who is fighting with fists rather than with ideas and thoughts like Montag and V. Each of these characters are heros to the people around them, but you couldn’t necessarily put them in another community and they still be considered a hero. In many communities V would be considered a villain simply because he didn’t care who got trampled as long as his goal was accomplished. The same can be said about Montag who while being a hero to the people who valued the knowledge he had, the society that he was fleeing from viewed him as a villain as he wanted to change the normal.

In conclusion, if we just look at the people around us we can find the heroes in our community regardless of the community, and without a villain to oppose the hero, there wouldn’t be a hero. These are seen through my examples of Unbreakable, Fahrenheit 451, V for Vendetta, and The Dark Knight as each of these showcased the various points that were the purpose of this paper.