Narrative Heroization

[bcholmes]

In film theory, the term narrative focalization refers to the process by which the audience is expected to identify with the (usually white and male) protagonist. Devices that contribute to narrative focalization include the amount of time the main character appears on screen, how important the character is to the story, etc.

I've been looking for a term to describe the aspects of films that contribute to making the protagonist unambiguously heroic. For example, in Terminator 2, there's a scene in which Linda Hamilton is being locked in her room in a mental hospital. The orderly, a big, muscular man, straps her down to the bed. In a few minutes, Linda Hamilton will escape from the room and knock this guy out with a stick.

But the guy was, after all, just doing his job. It's mean to knock someone out like that. So there's this moment in the film in which the orderly, after having securely strapped Linda Hamilton to the bed, licks her face. The orderly suddenly becomes the creep. When Linda Hamilton knocks him senseless a few scenes later, it's okay, because he was a creep, right?

Hollywood movies, especially, are replete with these little scenes. Scenes that make it okay for the hero to hurt another character, while still remaining unambiguously heroic. Anyone heard of any terms for this concept?

Comments

[jodawi.livejournal.com]

maybe ignore the film part and just think of terms for people who act like this in real life, interpreting the universe to fit their desired goals. think 'gloss' much be one such term, but suspect it's more general in definition, also, moo. i'd just call it "lion king syndrome" or "disney disease"

[jodawi.livejournal.com]

no no silly lion king syndrome is when the bad guy kills emself so the hero can be unblemished while still achieving death of bad guy.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Ah crud. I *know* this. Or at least *knew* it. There's a companion term for it wrt to hero characters, a stripping away of vices to allow what remaining vice the hero exploits to save the day to be permissable. Like in the old westerns, where the good guy doesn't drink, doesn't chase loose women, doesn't cuss, bathes, etc, all to be allowed the vice of violence necessary to rid the town of the bad guys.

You're right that there's enough of a class of these patterns happening that there's vocabulary to abstract it. But I can't remember what it *is*.

[jodawi.livejournal.com]

misc burbles which are entirely unrelated to anything ever

http://english.ucsb.edu/faculty/pabbott/courses/english236/glossary.htm
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/ENGB01/glossary.html
http://filmplus.org/thr/dict.html
http://www.calvertonschool.org/waldspurger/pages/glossary_of_literary_terms.htm

closest i've got is 'foil'

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I can't help you with the terminology, but I'd like to state for the record that a good deal of this sort of thing, on both sides of the coin (the excess of it and the absence of it) bugs the snot out of me.

The culmination of both sides at once came, for me, with Jurassic Park. On the one hand, there was the character of the evil computer guy. I don't remember his name. Anyhow, he was a bad guy. However, they wouldn't stop there. He had to be bad. He also had to be fat, untidy, eat a lot of junk food, have pornography for his desktop, and umpteen other things. The children, on the other hand, had to not just be good, heroic kids, but also had to be geniuses, computer hackers, friendly, loyal to their parents, honest, etc.

But then there was the lawyer, and that character disturbed me a lot. You see, lawyers who aren't main characters are nearly always evil in movies, and I think that they just banked on that and didn't provide a whole lot of reason for this guy being evil. He was the lawyer -- good enough, right? So when they arrange to have him go to the washroom at an outhouse, have a dinosaur knock over the outhouse, exposing him in his humiliation, and then bite him in half, you shouldn't feel bad at all. In fact, the overall tone is that 'he got what he deserved' for being the lawyer -- not that he was just a guy doing his job and it was a terrible way to die.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

But the guy was, after all, just doing his job. It's mean to knock someone out like that. So there's this moment in the film in which the orderly, after having securely strapped Linda Hamilton to the bed, licks her face. The orderly suddenly becomes the creep. When Linda Hamilton knocks him senseless a few scenes later, it's okay, because he was a creep, right?

i wish they'd start making movies where a person was shown to be the bad guy in a non-sexualized manner. i mean, couldn't he have just knocked her around a little, without the licking?