America's Addiction to Badass
I’m sure you’ve seen it in movies and television, heard it in the most popular music of the day, you might have even seen flashes of it during political displays and in press conferences, places where it ought not to be but, curiously, has found a home.
I’m referring to this odd sense of bravado that keeps dripping out of our media, and the lingering sense that the public wants it, demands it and is immediately turned off if it does not get it instantly. I’m talking about this seemingly ever-present state of “badass.”
This display of arrogance and one-upmanship is not particularly new. Melvin Van Peebles released the independent film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song back in 1971. Clint Eastwood as “Dirty” Harry Callahan that same year. Charles Bronson portrayed Paul Kersey in Death Wish in 1974. Popular music has always led with a degree of braggadocio, mostly unwarranted.
What is different is that in older examples, the defiant crowing regularly came from a field where no others were exhibiting the same. One stood alone because the world would not rise to the occasion (or, at least, that was how it was framed).
Today is different. Now everyone has their swag on. Everyone has their quip, their catchphrase, their mic-drop. Indeed, it’s like most are barfing through 99% of what they say and do merely to get to the mic-drop, and while they stand there feeling like emperors of the world, it is a hollow reign built on purposelessness.
I see it continuously in movies and TV where each character seemingly gets their participation trophy of unearned glory. Had there been some degree of conflict that brought one character to a defining moment, a chance to stand proud from the quivering masses, that would be different. That would be dramatic and, also, good construction and storytelling. Yet, in the current sphere, everyone is rushing the stage to wave theirs around, and as we know only too well if everyone is shouting, no one voice means anything at all.
I was reminded of this malady by rewatching the 2017 Justice League movie. Truth be told, I’m not a hater. The film is severely flawed and is, in the final analysis, a botched opportunity for Warner/DC Entertainment to finally get the cinematic universe they’ve been craving for…but it is enjoyable, for the most part, as a bizarre distraction. It’s a slice of boom-crash when you have a taste for a dish of boom-crash, and nothing more nutritious.
What is not enjoyable is how every character seems to have their moment, their “King Kong” beat, their big run at the spotlight even if they’ve done nothing to earn it, or the earned spot comes off as the most laughable contrivance. You want to shout at the television screen, “That’s not an accomplishment! You’re proud of that?”
Upon further reflection, Marvel’s Avengers (2012) has plenty of similar sins. One could accuse Joss Whedon, writer/director of the latter and fill-in writer/director of the former, of being the culprit, but that’s not true either. You can’t blame Whedon when the man he replaced for Justice League, Zack Snyder, has been equally guilty throughout his career. Same with Michael Bay, who is unrelated to the superhero miasma but was the main proponent of the Transformers movies.
Go ahead. Look down the list of recent efforts across the spectrum. Listen to the music. See how everyone is strutting around without — say it with me — having earned it.
Can you imagine a movie like, say, Jaws (1975) coming out today? Everyone would be all up in the camera, from Chief Brody to biologist Hooper, to crazy shark hunter Quint. What’s more, even Mayor Vaughn would have to have his “awww, yeah” moment. The Kintner boy wouldn’t be an innocent victim, plucked under the water by vicious, toothy death, without landing a couple of punches on the shark’s snout. Would all these make for an exceedingly silly movie? Absolutely. That’s why our audio, video, and cinema now are just as unrelentingly silly.
If it was contained to the influences we absorbed, perhaps it would not be that big a deal. We could slough it off as one more singer being a jackass, or one more character stepping out of character to behave absurdly, all to get their clips in the post-game show. The problem truly is that we’re carrying these behaviors over to our actual day-to-day lives.
Reasoned thinking has been shelved for self-importance and bluster. We lead with our cannons first, again and again, showing off well before we have any right to. That cartoonish example of the 1980s hair metal band that finally got a number 1 hit, gets interviewed on MTV, insists “we’re at the top now, bay-beh, and we ain’t ever coming down!” and never have another hit song again seems to illustrate the standard operating procedure of our times.
Is there a solution? Sure, there are two avenues to rectification, but one is a drag and the other is too painful to contemplate.
The first: a rejection — at least mildly — of rampant egocentricity. We would have to finally admit we are not the biggest and the baddest. We’re trying. We want to do well, but until we finally reach that point of success, we can’t stake a claim on hubris. We would need to delay that gratification and, as we know too well, we’re not at all good at that.
The other way: a humiliation. It would take a humbling the likes of which we have not fully experienced to put us in our place. It would have to be bigger than the Great Recession and the Great Depression. We’d not only have to step right to the brink but probably need to go straight over. At that moment, we’d learn that we couldn’t do it on our own. We weren’t Paul Kersey or Dirty Harry, taking the law into our own hands. I don’t think anyone wants this as our clarifying solution because it would be painful by definition and necessity. I sure don’t want this.
And so, for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have endless parades of the imperious, audacity devoid of substance, flooding our culture. We’re addicted to seeing badasses, pretending to be badasses, and doing so without cause, acting as conquerors even amid failure.