ONCE IT COULD HAVE have been said that, like Willie Nelson’s,
Hollywood’s heroes have always been cowboys, though they obviously
aren’t anymore. Now they are always, or nearly always, brainiacs.
Even little Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the Mission:
Impossible franchise triumphs not because of bravery or
strength or fortitude or any other of the traditionally heroic or
cowboy-like virtues, but because he is smarter than everybody else.
It’s called acting. Not that there is any great brainpower involved
in pulling out of his magic M:I bag whatever hi-tech gizmo
may be necessary to counter the hitech gizmo the bad guys have put
in his way. But the wonderful thing about technology in the
computer age is that it confers a kind of vicarious intelligence on
those who know how to use it, even if they only bought it off the
shelf at Radio Shack. The guy who designs the programs is more
likely to be the sidekick, like Ving Rhames’s Luther Stickell in
M:I. The hero is the boyishly handsome sex symbol who
performs in public the music from his score.
Even the bad guys these days make themselves worthy adversaries
by virtue of their technical nous and their cool moral nihilism,
like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. Often, they
are expected to be well up on philosophy or art history as well,
like the ones in The Guard or In Bruges by the
brothers McDonagh. This reminds us, or at least reminds me, of the
ultimate bad-guy brainiacs—those who call themselves
intellectuals. They are hucksters for some utopian scheme that’s
supposed to take the place of reality. In an age like ours that has
been fed a steady diet of fantasy for a generation or more, the
alternative realities on offer don’t even have to look like
realities anymore, just as the Mission: Impossible heroics
don’t have to look like real heroics. They just have to be the
product of romantic loners, riding the intellectual range and
lassoing with their agile brains those big ideas that promise to
transform the lives of all of us for the better—whether or not
they actually do so.
Aaron Sorkin has long been a primo romancer of this sort of
hero, and there is no doubt in my mind that the election three
years ago of the alleged brainiac president Barack Obama in spite
of an almost total lack of relevant political or administrative
experience owed something to his fictional brainiac predecessor,
Mr. Sorkin’s Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) of The West
Wing. Since The West Wing went west in 2006, the same
gentleman has written the screenplays for three more intellectual
romances, Charlie Wilson’s War of 2007, last
year’s megahit The Social Network, and, now,
Moneyball. Having turned away from brainy presidents —
and in this category we must also include Michael Douglas’s
President Andrew Shepherd in The American President of
1995 — to brainy outsiders, Mr. Sorkin shows that he is intent on
exploring the more romantic side of these romances, and in each
case with real people who can claim, along with Tom Hanks’s Charlie
Wilson, that “these things happened. They were glorious, and we
changed the world.”
Changing the world, by the way, has been the romantic
intellectual’s main desideratum since his prototype, Karl Marx,
penned his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, to the effect that
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however,
is to change it.” That might sound like a practical task, but at
least since Lenin’s day, it has been taken for granted among the
world-changers that the revolution must be led by intellectuals.
This idea has by now become so far internalized (at least in
France) that you get Marxist fantasies like Mona Achache’s The
Hedgehog in which the workers and peasants themselves are
secret intellectuals, only awaiting the right moment to reveal
their extensive libraries and range of cultural reference to their
astonished social and economic betters.
In America, of course, changing the world is a task more likely
to be left to people like Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) of
The Social Network or Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) of
Moneyball, as both were and are successful
capitalists whose transformations, such as they may prove to have
been, were wrought for the sake of enriching themselves and their
backers and not to create the workers’ paradise. But that only goes
to show that “change” has a mystique all its own and independent of
what is being changed into what—as the election of 2008 also
showed. As with President Obama, too, there does not even have to
be any real change, or any change for the better, just a new
idea of change to put a gloss upon the intellectual hero’s
romantic image as the agent and thinker-up of change.
The supposed revolution in baseball wrought by the real life Mr.
Beane, for example, and recorded by Michael Lewis in his
best-selling book (also called Moneyball) of 2003, has
since been widely debunked. Mr. Beane’s teams at Oakland haven’t
even made the playoffs since 2006. Obviously, this doesn’t matter
to Mr. Sorkin, his co-writer Steven Zaillian, or the movie’s
director, Bennett Miller. Near the end, they include an anonymous
traditionalist in voiceover who says, mockingly, that “nobody
reinvents this game,” but this is clearly meant to be just some
naysayer’s negative thinking and not a spokesman for the
reality of baseball’s non-reinvention. Mr. Beane could not
be the film’s hero, as he is undoubtedly meant to be, without our
willingness to ignore that reality—and also the conditional mood
in Billy’s excited prediction: “If we win with this team, with this
budget, we will have changed the game; that’s what I want.” As
with other sorts of cinematic fantasy, his wanting it is easy for
us to take as earnest of the change itself, whether or not such a
thing has happened or ever could happen in real life.
THE REAL CHANGE, of course, lies in the cultural currency of
such fantasy, both in general and in this particular form as the
fantasy genius who changes everything merely by being, like another
fantastical Straw Man, an honorary doctor of thinkology. The point
is underlined for us in Moneyball by the presence there of
the very guy who, if the movie had been made from the 1930s to the
1950s, would have been its natural hero—the grizzled old scout
(Ken Medlock) whose knowledge of the game and how to put together a
winning team, painfully acquired over years of hardship and loss,
ultimately puts to shame that of some upstart Ivy League knowit-all
who threatens to supersede him. Here, however, the upstart Ivy
League know-it-all (Jonah Hill) really does know it all, really
does supersede him and is made almost a co-equal hero with Billy
Beane—the Luther to his Ethan, the Robin to his Batman, the Biden
to his Obama. Character counts, they used to think, both in
Hollywood and in the culture at large. No more. Now it’s only
brains that count.
Even when the change is real, even when it has been brought
about by character and courage rather than brainpower, we look for
ways to cast its heroes into the current romantic mold. Just look
at The Help by Tate Taylor, based on the best-selling
novel by Kathryn Stockett, which manages to make the fictional
“Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), a slip of a girl fresh out of Ole
Miss and working in her first journalistic job as Miss Myrna, the
cleaning advice columnist for the women’s pages of the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger in 1963, the real hero of the civil rights
revolution in Mississippi. She is called to such an exalted moral
position in this wish-fulfillment fantasy not because she’s white
or a woman—or not just because she is white and a woman.
Rather, it’s because she’s the writer and intellectual without
whose leadership we can hardly imagine any genuinely transformative
revolution taking place anymore.
Here’s how it happens. The black maids of Jackson all turn to
her to write up their grievances against their white employers in
an article for a New York magazine and, later, a book. “We
gon’ help you with your stories,” they say—and do. Later, one says
to Skeeter: “No one had ever axed me what it was like to be
me.” Once she got that off her chest, she knew what it was to be
free. That so few of the multitude who have flocked to see this
feel-good film have apparently been able to see how appallingly
patronizing is its version of history suggests that we are all
Leninists now, prepared to believe implicitly not only in the
revolution that will change the world but also in the necessity for
intellectuals and theorists to lead it. And how else, when you
think about it, are we to explain not only President Obama,
allegedly the brainiest president ever, but the desperation in the
media at the multiple failures of his administration which we
antiintellectuals were the first to predict? Which is not to say
that the inveterate fantasists of Hollywood won’t continue to
regard him as their hero.
