Finn of “The Force Awakens,” a hero for our times

This note contains mild spoilers about "The Force Awakens."]

For me, the best part of the new addition to the Star Wars series, "The Force Awakens," is its three new heroes. And, contrary to what Tina Turner might have to say on the matter, we need another hero. We almost always do.

The movie wastes no time introducing us to two of these new heroes: Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a dashing, x-wing fighter pilot, who is the top-gun of the beleaguered Resistance, and the unlikely FN 2187, a storm trooper serving in the infantry of the evil First Order. We come to know him as Finn (John Boyega). A short while later we meet our third young hero, the beautiful and resourceful, Rey (Daisy Ridley). Rey is stuck in a dead-end job as a parts scavenger on Jakku, a planet that is little more than a junkyard for crashed and abandoned spaceships.

We don't learn that much about Poe in this installment of the series. Whatever his backstory is, it remains to be told in future episodes. Rey is easily the most prominent of the new heroes. As the movie unfolds, it is Rey who will be positioned to take up the mantle of Luke Skywalker and begin the proverbial hero's journey, one which will lead her from a solitary life as a scavenger on a desolate planet to become a citizen of the Galaxy and a leader of the Resistance in the struggle against the First Order. But it is everyman Finn who wins my vote for the kind of hero we need most right now.

I'll be the first to admit that there's no shortage of heroes on movie screens these days. Superheroes, especially, bound and abound. Endowed with special powers, either at birth or by fateful accident, they fight, often after much kvetching, to save the world, all the while battling inner demons and bickering with their super friends. You could get a movie green-lighted on less of a pitch.

Now, it is the case that both Finn and Rey possess special powers. There are hints early on that the Force is strong with both of them. And much of the suspense of the story has to do with whether and when their powers will be revealed. But having superpowers is not what defines the two of them. Instead, their heroism is rooted in character and talent. And, in Finn's case, it is firmly anchored in his sense of common decency.

When we first meet Finn in his guise as FN 2187, his face is hidden behind the mask of a storm trooper's helmet and he is kneeling to come to the aid of a fallen comrade whose bloody hand print marks him for us to follow for the rest of the scene. What follows in that scene is a massacre of disarmed villagers by Finn's stormtrooper platoon. Finn's defining act of heroism is saying "no" to participating in this atrocity.

Finn does this despite the fact that he understands that his disobedience will lead to his being cast out from the only family he has ever known. He also is aware that his refusal will mark him as a despised traitor who will be hunted down relentlessly by his former First Order comrades-in-arms. But Finn says "no" to killing the prisoners, not because he imagines himself a hero, but simply because saying "no" is the right thing to do.

Finn's act of unselfconscious heroism is reminiscent of the stories of the Europeans, many of them Dutch, who saved the lives of Jews seeking refuge during the Holocaust. It is fascinating to watch interviews with these people made long after the war. They appear sometimes genuinely puzzled by the notoriety that has come their way and seldom regard themselves heroes. Quite the contrary, they often protest the designation, saying that they were only doing what conscience demanded, insisting that their deeds were what any right-thinking person would have done under similar circumstances. If only that were the case.

This same "ordinariness" is what makes Finn's kind of heroism such a refreshing change. It doesn't originate with his being rocketed away as an infant from some faraway, doomed planet or from a bite from an errant radioactive spider. And his kind of heroism doesn't set him apart from the rest of society like, say, a misfit with a bizarre genetic mutation or an ancient Norse god unwillingly exiled to Earth.

Indeed, what makes Finn a hero is not how he transcends his humanity but how, in spite of years of inculcation by his First Order captors, he recovers it.

And it is the masterful performance by Boyega that brings Finn's everyman hero convincingly to life. His Finn is unassuming and vulnerable - a veritable ingénue, who casts the shell of storm trooper uniform aside to find himself freshly hatched into a brave, new, uncertain world - but also a person capable unalloyed courage when circumstances demand it.

So, to my delight, what we discover with Finn in "The Force Awakens" is, perhaps, the first fully human character of the Star Wars saga. (R2-D2, a droid more human in most respects than his human masters, is the long-standing contender for this title, at least in my opinion.) It is Finn’s humanity that reminds us that real heroism emerges not from super powers or royal birth, but from a compassionate regard for our fellow beings and a willingness to say "no" when the world around us would have us forsake our obligation to their welfare in favor of a life of security and predictability. He is indeed a hero for our time.

District 9 - Yes, We Need Another Hero

I've been working on a essay about Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" since late summer and it has morphed into a dissertation.  What follows is a summary - my take on the movie as a first installment in a film saga that a re-imagines the "hero's journey" in new and interesting ways.

Cutting-edge science fiction films are expected to be technically ambitious, to employ the latest in computer-generated imagery and bring to life alien creatures, other-worldly environments and marvels of engineering which previously existed only on the printed page or in a director's imagination.

Neill Blomkamp's District 9 succeeds in this regard. And it does so in a way that reminds us that special effects are most - shall we say - effective when, like accomplished supporting actors, having been introduced with modest fanfare, they retreat from the limelight and allow the lead performers to get on with the show, all the while laboring diligently, but unobtrusively, in service of the production.

What one doesn't expect is that a science fiction film introduce us to an intriguingly different kind of hero and launch him on a remarkably different kind of journey. District 9 does just this.

We are accustomed to our cinema heroes being promoted from the ranks of rogues. They may start off as hard-boiled detectives or egoistic renegades, for example, but they are soon revealed to be fundamentally decent, and even to posses the capacity for selfless courage. Such reluctant heroes are good - even noble - men, beaten down by life's tragedy or by lost love, who have cynically turned their backs on the world of good deeds.

This is not at all the case with Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely), the more-than-reluctant hero of District 9. We first meet him in a non-descript contemporary office setting where he is an undistinguished middle-level bureaucrat, a cog in a paramilitary corporation that goes by the name Multi-National United (MNU).  (Think Blackwater Worldwide on steroids.)  MNU has been contracted to manage the lives of the million or more extraterrestrial castaways, referred to disparagingly as prawns, who have been marooned in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1989.

Twenty years on, the prawns live in a squalid squatter community, the District 9 of the movie's title, on the outskirts of the city. Disliked and unwelcome, they are about to be forcibly relocated to a new home miles away, which turns out will be little more than an out-of-sight concentration camp. Possessing none of the ambition that it would take to advance on his own, Wikus has been designated by his scheming father-in-law, a high-ranking MNU executive, to lead the prawn eviction.

Although the epithet "little Eichmann" has been recklessly misapplied of late, it is hard to come up with a more fitting characterization for Wikus. Like Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's final solution, Wikus is not a bad man, at least according to any superficial reckoning. Friendly and self-effacing, he offers a ready, if somewhat nervous, bonhomie to co-workers and strangers alike. Hardly menacing, so desperate is he to avoid confrontation that he comes across as a dithering coward. And, to seal his "good man" bona fides, Wikus is a devoted husband to his beloved wife, Tania (Vanessa Haywood). So besotted is he with her, that the mere mention of her name sends him into a worshipful reverie.

But Wikus is also professionally engaged in a monstrously brutal enterprise, one which asks him to commit morally reprehensible acts as a matter of daily routine. For example, he does not hesitate to threaten the well-being of a prawn child in order to elicit compliance from its father with a relocation order. Similarly, for nominally "hygienic" purposes, Wikus orders the torching of a nursery of prawn larvae, explaining to the camera crew documenting the eviction that this approach to the problem is far more efficient than the cumbersome procedure of destroying the developing infants one-at-a-time.

What distinguishes Wikus, a veritable Eichmann manqué, from the maestro himself is that he is not the author of the oppression that he dispenses. Not much more than a rule-bound MNU functionary, he follows orders and does his job, all the while trying not to draw much attention to himself. In fact, Wikus is  thrown off balance by the promotion that his father-in-law foists upon him. No company man, he would prefer, given the option, to be at home with his adored Tania, basking in the glow of their eternal puppy love.

To put it bluntly, the problem with Wikus is not so much that he is evil, the problem is that he lacks a soul.

The challenge for Blomkamp in District 9 is, therefore, to stir Wikus from his ethical torpor, to awaken him to the reality of the suffering of others, to afford him the opportunity for redemption for his sins, and to launch him on the essential hero's quest, and that is the quest for a deeper understanding of oneself and a more humane appreciation of a wider world.

In this way District 9 announces itself as the first installment of a film saga in which Wikus, an unlikely Ulysses, is forced kicking and screaming into a miserable exile - ironically in plain sight - whence he begins his own odyssey, a desperate struggle to find his way back home and back into the arms of his beloved Tania.

Blomkamp's creative re-imagining of the beginning of this epic story is both creative and exciting.  I look forward to seeing how Wikus's voyage continues.



District 9 - Yes, We Need Another Hero by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.