Is Life Really Beyond Our Control?
Entertainment-The Movies
My wife and I were recently watching one of the escapist super-hero movies and I began to think about why they have become so popular recently. People have always been drawn to stories of heroes. but these super-heroes are not exactly human heroes. Instead, these heroes have super-powers, and they are often fighting evil villains with inhuman super-powers.
It also caused me to think of past movie and TV fads. We had a whole raft of vampire movies, followed by zombie movies. Again, these depicted the threat of special kinds of human beings, beyond ordinary humans and beyond the ordinary morality. These appear to be forces over which humans have little control.
I suppose an analogy in real life is the kind of vulture capitalism that takes all your resources and leaves only a shell of your former self as you begin to serve that kind of capitalism as your new master.
As for zombies, we are currently living with a zombie reality here in America. Certainly, the lure and spell of certain ideologies seem to have sucked the human brains from a growing number of Americans who now see their goal as either sucking the human brains out of the rest of us, or simply consuming us.
Although these are simply entertainments it may give us some insight into how we tend to see our world. Certainly, we are living in a time in this nation in which most of the moral markers are up for grabs and chaos seems near, so we may feel that events happen beyond any control we may have. There is certainly some truth to that, but even then, it is a mistake to abdicate our personal responsibility for such events.
It is a very convenient rationalization to see things as being beyond our control since that absolves us of any responsibility. “It’s not my fault.” “What could I have done?” We begin to see ourselves as simply caught up in lives which are controlled by outside forces.
Our world is not controlled by some super-human evil, and we do not need a super-hero to save us. That is simply an illusion to get us to believe that we are powerless in this world and should give over our responsibility to leaders who pretend to be experts, gurus or wizards. When we begin thinking like that, we begin to give up responsibility which is the heart of our humanity.
We need to remember that we are capable of becoming our own ordinary heroes with extraordinary power to make changes in lives. Maybe it is time to pick up that responsibility again.
Perhaps the movies and TV are telling us something about ourselves besides just being a distraction.
