The Broken Hero
Why modern storytelling distrusts resilience.
“Because it is there.”
George Mallory’s reply when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest has become emblematic of a particular type of 1920’s pluck. For the decade saw an explosion of adventurism. Alcock and Brown and then Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, the Bentley Boys dominated racing at Le Mans and Percy “Expedition” Fawcett became a global celebrity for his ultimately doomed attempt to find “The Lost City of Z” in the Amazon jungle.
Technology obviously played a role but so, it is thought, did the events of the previous decade. Many of those who captured the public imagination had served in World War I and would have agreed with Adrian Carton de Wiart (whose Wikipedia entry has made him an internet celebrity) when he said, “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.” Civilian life, even in the incipient Jazz Age, just did not give the same thrill, leading some to seek alternative if less violent methods of risking life and limb.
This schema - individual suffers trauma, it changes them and they go on to attempt great feats - underlies many of the stories we currently tell, and is retrofitted on to the stories we re-tell. A recent BBC adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, explained Phileas Fogg’s project as a response to the ongoing suffering caused by the decision in his youth to call off his engagement because he was scared to leave England on honeymoon. The fastidious, cold life he has led drives him to undertake a feat of great daring.
Verne’s original, however, is far simpler. Fogg is just a man, orderly sure, but representative of his time and class. Travelling around the world was an interesting project. Finding out whether it could be done in a set time frame was an interesting question. As an educated man of leisure, he had the time and the skills to try. So why not?
And such figures do exist outside of literature. Mallory’s climbing partner in his final, fatal ascent was Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, a student at Oxford. Born in 1902, he had been too young to serve in the war. And too young to acquire motivating trauma. From what we can tell, he really did do it, “because it is there”.
If mountaineering need not always, then, be a trauma response, in popular culture, it can be positioned as a trauma therapy. Blofeld’s father, we learn in Spectre, took the young James Bond climbing to help him recover from the loss of his parents. Whether this works or not, the recent films leave unclear - it is possible that it is early loss which sets him on the path to becoming an assassin. But what they leave no doubt about is that being an assassin is, in itself, traumatic.
Daniel Craig’s Bond is the suffering Bond. His job and the losses he suffers extract a toll on him. A toll he tries to self-medicate away. “Just look at you, barely held together by your pills and your drink,” his enemy Silva tells him in Skyfall. In a world which is drinking less, Craig is by far the series’ most alcoholic star, consuming about 20 units per film, almost double Pierce Brosnan’s runner-up.
Little wonder that he needs to drop out so often. Presumed dead after the pre-titles sequence of Spectre, he doesn’t correct this misapprehension, but disappears, only returning when he discovers (in a bar, of course) that MI-6 is under attack. In No Time to Die, he has dropped out again, living off grid in the Caribbean before being brought back by the CIA. Bond, the films imply, may have saved the world, but he can no longer live in it.
A similar suggestion is made in the recent French remake of The Count of Monte Cristo which ends with the hero abandoning society and returning alone to the nautical life he had at the beginning of the story. He has suffered imprisonment, he has achieved revenge, but he can no longer live.
Dumas’ ending is rather different. Revenge mission complete, he goes off with Haydee, the former slave with whom he has fallen in love, to start a new life. With obvious issues of power and a large age-gap, many adaptations (such as the recent RAI mini-series) choose instead to get him back together with Mercedes, the fiancee from whom he is snatched at the novel’s beginning, allowing love to conquer all and preventing evil from triumphing. Whichever version one chooses, the lesson is clear, the Count may have suffered and he may have achieved, but he is still able to form normal human relationships.
Earlier Bonds were similar. However much he may suffer in any particular film (say his meeting with Goldfinger’s laser), there is never any indication that it has affected him. He is the same (allowing for the different portrayals) in every film, moving from adventure to adventure with no mental damage and no follow-through (save his lengthy conflict with Blofeld). Whatever happens, he can still flirt with Moneypenny and annoy Q. The most traumatic event in his life, the murder of his new wife, Tracy, is referenced just once more in the series - when he visits her grave in For Your Eyes Only’s pre-title sequence.
Since the beginning of literature, this is how heroes have behaved. In the Iliad, Achilles suffers the trauma of losing Patroclus and responds with an orgy of god-like violence, carving a swathe through anyone he meets. Once he has gained his revenge by killing Hector, however, he returns to the mortal plane, not just in terms of his martial competence, but also his performance of social roles. He organises his friend’s funeral, and presides over the games which accompany them, resolving a tricky diplomatic dispute between his comrades. He sees in Priam not his enemy’s father, but his own, a reminder of the mortality which binds them more than the quarrel over Helen can ever separate them. He has suffered, and gone beyond human competence, but the experience has not broken him, if anything it has made him more human.
“It would be a pretty cold-hearted bastard who didn’t want revenge for someone he loved,” Judi Dench’s M tells Craig’s Bond. But in the books and earlier films, a cold-hearted bastard is exactly what Bond is. It is partly why he does the job he does. He is an outlier, not just physically and mentally, but emotionally. “It’s a big thing to kill a man,” M tells C in Spectre. “You have to look him in the eye.” Bond is able to do this repeatedly and carry on. By updating him to show the effect this has, the filmmakers have kept him in the tails of the competence distribution, but moved him back to the middle of the resilience distribution.
On the surface, this makes modern heroes appear more realistic. Trauma does exist as numerous veterans can attest. There is a noted link between intelligence (Bond took a First at Cambridge) and alcohol use and a suspected, if not yet proven, link between high-functioning and self-medication. Given Bond’s experiences, we might be quite surprised if he didn’t drink heavily.
And there is an element of democratisation. Most of us would, if we were being honest, suspect that being whipped on the testicles while tied naked to a chair would not be an event we would easily forget. Showing the cost of heroism reduces the distance between the hero and the audience. We may look up to the Count of Monte Cristo for his competence across domains from fencing to chemistry and his limitless wealth, but we can also pity him if he ends up alone, condemned to roam the seas.
But we know that the response to traumatic events is not universal. The Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski developed his theory of Positive Disintegration in the fifties and sixties after noticing that people react to misfortune in different ways. Some are genuinely broken, but others use their trauma as a springboard to become more integrated than before.
Surprisingly, however, for an idea developed behind the Iron Curtain, Dabrowski’s ideas were unashamedly elitist. Not everyone would be able to undertake the developmental path he laid out. Firstly, they needed what he termed “over-excitabilities”. They would already be outliers - intellectually, emotionally, creatively. And they would have what he termed the “X Factor” - durability. His process was a long, drawn out affair as those who undertook it developed and integrated new values. Only the most dedicated and resilient would be able to complete it. In other words, those with the traits required to be heroes would also be the most likely to be able to process their experiences heroically. Outliers in some dimensions were more likely to be outliers in others.
Far, therefore, from making heroes more realistic, the traumatic turn in modern story-telling may actually make them more fantastical.
There is a loss here. Not just for those of the type whose stories we no longer try to tell. But for others too. For literature has often functioned as a source of inspiration, an encouragement to try and to persist. Stories which focus too heavily on the downsides of heroism are not stories which inspire us to be heroic, to go further than we think we might. Dumas offered wealth and love after years of struggle. His most modern interpreters only loss and loneliness. With that future, why would the Count want to leave prison? Why would a viewer want to leave their own metaphorical prisons?
But while we seem increasingly to need to break our heroes, there is still a demand for the more traditional approach - whether because we still want to believe in true outliers, or because the old stories still shape how we think a hero should behave.
Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise is betrayed by his boss, his government, watches his protege and various teammates die and separates from his wife so he can concentrate on his job. And he just carries on. Whenever the world needs to be saved. Ethan is there. And he stays there until the task is finished, no matter what sort of outlandish feat is required. Importantly, he does it all at no obvious cost to his humanity. He has a tight-knit group of colleagues who form a surrogate family. His relationship with Ilsa Faust shows that, whether anything happens between them or not (the films leave it unclear), he is still capable of forming romantic entanglements.
Similarly, Batman, the most tortured of superheroes, ends Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises by leaving Gotham behind and forming a relationship with Catwoman. Jason Bourne, the product of state-sponsored trauma, is not only capable of forming a new relationship, he explicitly seeks one out at the end of The Bourne Identity.
All of these characters suffer as much as Bond, but they are all able to return to the world, possibly remade, but certainly not broken. Because that is what heroes do. In life as much as in art.
The ancients knew that. Dumas knew it. We still want to believe that “there are people who have suffered greatly, and who did not die, but raised a new fortune on all those promises of happiness fortune made them and on the debris of all the hopes God gave them.” Because there are.
Adrian Carton de Wiart lost a hand and an eye in World War I. He was recalled to active service in 1939 and, after serving in Poland and Norway, was captured in Italy at the age of 62. He made five escape attempts, one (similar to the Count of Monte Cristo’s) involving months digging a long tunnel. Of course he did.