On Heroes and Propagandizing

What happens to a culture when you take its heroes and change them — subvert them?

What happens when readers and viewers see their childhood role models presented differently, buying in to woke agendas or radically altering their behavior or discarding the beliefs they were built on?

I’m not talking about heroes from history — though identity politics certainly does its fair share of rewriting their stories. I’m talking about something even more sneaky, something harder to stop because there’s no evidence or historical facts to counteract lies. It’s insidious, this turning of symbols upon their heads, though unfortunately something our world is rather fond of — see the rainbow and our flag.

I’m talking about our fictional heroes. Our cultural heroes.

Recently, I saw two movies in short succession that were prime examples of this. The first was Disney’s adaptation of The Lone Ranger. I grew up on the black-and-white Lone Ranger. He was cool to a little kid, just as any do-gooder or superhero naturally is. He took down baddies and solved plots with his sidekick Tonto — and to this day, the mystery/crime geek in me still remembers how he realized a signature was forged because it was exactly the same as another one. After seeing this movie, I went back and watched the original show, and though my older self could see how corny it was, it was interesting to also see with a more discerning eye how the messages promoted in that show influenced me when I was young.

And let me tell you, the Lone Ranger from that old show was the stark opposite of the Lone Ranger presented by Disney. Oh sure, the backstory was more or less the same — but his character couldn’t be more different. Disney’s Lone Ranger refused to ever shoot to kill — a clear signal that Disney doesn’t like handling things like capital punishment — and sheer ridiculousness reality-wise, because in situations like that, you take down the gunman before he kills you or somebody else. Furthermore, he was a fool, always getting dragged around by the clearly more intelligent and politically correct Indian. Disney’s Tonto was straight-up animistic bizarre and always slipping in lines about colonization and white man’s oppression. Add that to a greedy white male villain who enslaves Chinese laborers and kills Indians, massive gaping plot holes, and a whole lot of historical inaccuracy, and there you have the movie.

There you have a fictional symbol of justice and goodness inverted on its head, smacked in the face, and marinated in wokeness before being shoved down the throats of unsuspecting moviegoers.

That was the first hero twisted.

Then enter Netflix’s Enola Holmes. I read the original Enola Holmes books and liked them. Sure, there was a touch of feminism here and there, but I could brush by it for the sake of a clean and interesting read. I also love the Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve read them all a couple times and I enjoy a good adaptation of them when I can find it. But this story about Holmes’s family and little sister was a far cry from the Victorian tales.

Enter an obnoxiously stuck-up heroine, a mother we’re supposed to like for abandoning her daughter in order to pursue terrorism, a shrimpy, unamusing, unmanly Mycroft who’s supposed to represent the evils of white patriarchy, and a Sherlock who finds himself over the course of the film being swayed by the propagandistic dialogue of female characters. Watson was notably missing — but I suppose a white family man and country-loving soldier would hinder the message of the film. Plus, a corpulent Mycroft would probably be taken as body-shaming. In the books, the few touches of feminism could be excused (as that was the time of bloomers and the beginnings of women’s rights, after all, so it was plausible the character could think such things) or ignored, but here, it was smeared across the entire film, so blatantly as to make the whole thing clunky. Enola is thrown in with a boy who is clearly supposed to be a love interest, but of course she remains stubbornly independent and insists she can take care of herself and so nothing ever happens, creating an awkward dynamic. How a petite girl manages to somehow take down an assortment of villains even though physics and nature are against her is never pointed out.

In that case, it was two heroes who were changed — though as Sherlock has certainly been around a lot longer and I prefer him to his sister, his radicalizing was the primary source of my ire. The Sherlock Holmes who was a courteous gentleman, had nothing to do with woke agendas, took down baddies, and had a notion of morality consistent with the prevalent Judeo-Christian culture of his time, even if he wasn’t Christian himself, is a far cry from the new one Netflix presents. As an extra dig at us ‘old-fashioned’ females, the ultimate villain of the movie is an old widow who would rather kill her grandson than allow a new culture where women vote and solve mysteries and apparently bomb in the name of civil rights — instead of get married and raise families.

And on top of that, the heroine’s supposed to be okay that her mother ran off to go make bombs instead of raising her. The whole film was sickening. Practically every bit of dialogue was a woke dig, terror is supported in the name of ‘justice,’ and suddenly we have a black woman leading karate classes in late 1800s’ London?

Neither of these films care about making something good or even historically accurate. Who cares if our heroes are irritating shells that spew out propaganda and slogans? The point is to indocrinate. The point is to make heroes in the hopes that we — or the next generation — will imitate them.

Pardon me for a moment while I bunny-trail. As I was writing this article, I looked up the definition of propagandize, just to make sure it was the right word for the title. Lo and behold, this word is suddenly marked as ‘derogatory.’

What?

So… apparently accusing someone of propagandizing is hate speech now, ya’ll. I’m also a huge fan of how ‘proselytizing’ is ostensibly a synonym for stuffing slogans and misleading information down our throats.

Funny how they shoot it right back at us, isn’t it? I wouldn’t be surprised if someday soon, it won’t just be limited to stocking library shelves with porn and culturally-sensitive characters, but actually taken so far as condemning us for writing straight, upright heroes. After all, we all share what we believe in a way when we write. Some more outright than others, but nonetheless.

But to pull this article back on course — this is my charge to you. I could rant about what other people are doing with their creative abilities all day, but what good does that do? The movie’s made. Sure, we can keep our kids from watching it, but so what? That’s only our kids. There’s a whole world out there that needs to have the bad messages counteracted with good. There’s a world that needs not propaganda, but art. Real art — real, beautiful, true, good art. There’s a world that needs heroes to inspire them. More patriots, more Christians, more family men and women, more brave figures who do what’s right even when evil is straining to pull them off the path. I think there’s a reason why I resonate more with heroes like Captain America and Hawkeye as opposed to Iron Man or the Falcon, or the cast of LOTR as opposed to Harry Potter. The former stand for values I care about. The latter… maybe they try, but they don’t have a reason to. They’re not fighting for some higher cause. They don’t have a selfless basis for the moral code they follow. They weren’t created to give us examples to emulate, to give us silhouettes to see ourselves in. (Now, could it also be that I find Iron Man irritating and Harry Potter derivative? Sure — but I can’t root for a character who doesn’t care about the same things I do. I should also add that I haven’t seen Infinity War or Endgame, and it certainly looks from the other movies that they’re setting Tony up for an arc that hopefully ends in his improvement, but here I go, bunny-trailing again.)

The point is, what sort of heroes are you going to write? Is all your hero cares about himself, or carving his own path, or finding his identity, or whatever other phrase used to disguise his selfishness and lacking sense of duty? Sure, a dark, edgy antihero with purely self-centered motives can be fun now and then. But make sure he serves a purpose. Unlike Enola Holmes, we are not meant to be alone, and there is more fulfillment in living a life in love towards others than in being a sassy little independent don’t-need-no-man ‘strong woman.’

And if your character is going to speak the words you want the audience to internalize, make sure he’s a good character in his own right, living out his justified beliefs, not just a propaganda robot. Your message should be presented in love, not screamed at us hordes of mindless consumerist puppets. Because that’s not what we are. We are people, precious, and created in God’s image. We have the curious ability to be drastically affected by a few keystrokes, a few pencil scratches. Sure, they try to program us and re-educate us. But the funny thing is that we can be persuaded to change our beliefs, to adapt our actions. All with a couple beautiful words.

So make sure your words shine. Make sure your heroes and your stories counteract this world of darkness by presenting truth. The darkness won’t like it. The darkness will settle for keeping its agendas hidden under shadowy disguises. We have a harder task, to do our work honestly and in the light. But if it’s beautiful, it will be all the more clearly seen.

Go write some awesome stuff.

Cheers.