I'd been wanting for a while to write about some of the very disparate movies we've seen since returning to Malaysia. (Amazingly, we've been back for not that much more time than we spent on the road from London to Baku. We have faced so many challenges and transitions that it feels as though we've been here, doing battle, for much longer.)

Anyway, movies. We'd seen a few, but nothing seemed to really tie them together. Then I read this discussion of Homer's Odyssey:

"The Odyssey is a song, as Homer declares, 'for our time too,' in part because of the poet’s subtle misdirection: by laying the blame for the death of Odysseus’ men at their own feet, Homer lays a trap for his audience. We gradually discover that the blame must instead be assumed by someone else. Homer thus forces us to reconsider Odysseus’ heroic stature. Is a hero someone whose recklessness and greed endanger the lives of his men? Who cherry-picks information in order to persuade others to do what they should not? A man who lies so much that he risks becoming incapable of telling fact from fiction, truth from falsehood?"

(This whole question of whether Odysseus is a hero has been canvassed way more often than I would ever have imagined, by the way...)

The ambivalent status of this hero made me realize that the common thread in all these movies is an interrogation of heroism. Let me explain.


"A great nation is a nation that values the services of its heroes..." But who are they exactly?

1.
Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a counterfactual. What if Sharon Tate and her companions had not been murdered by associates of Charles Manson back in 1969?

What if those would-be murderers had targeted the house next door, and been neutralized in a massive struggle? What if the end result was innocents still alive, and only attackers dead? Certainly preferable, from the point of view of those who in real life met their end that night. Those who could beat off such an attack might well be seen as heroes.

But what if those "heroes" were a) an aging, insecure actor, familiar only with cowboy roles where he routinely takes the law into his own hands, and b) a reckless, violence-prone stuntman who is rumoured to have killed his wife? What if they jointly represent an entertainment industry that has consistently glorified violence (even while unspeakable and very real violence is taking place in Viet Nam)?

And what if the way they ward off the attack involves the shredding, pulping, and torching of the would-be murderers? And what if that violence affects the dashing duo not one jot -- as though it really is all part of a day's work?

Are they still heroes? Or something else?

(Incidentally, because it's 50 years since the grim Manson saga, there's been a lot of coverage of where they all are now after their various crimes. Some have died of natural causes; many are still in prison, from which position one runs a Christian website; one or two have been paroled. Manson himself died in 2017. To some, he is "the man who killed the 60s". But the 60s had many chickens coming home to roost by then, so I'm a little sceptical of that view.)



2.
The Bravest, by Tony Chan Kwok-Fai, is specifically about heroes. Although the film is the first of the "China's Pride Trilogy" (aimed at commemorating and celebrating the 70th anniversary of the PRC), it doesn't gloss over the kind of chaos that would ensue in any large city threatened by fire and explosion, and features officials who are not always as forthcoming with information as they should be.

It also spotlights the problems of heroism. Captain Liwei is haunted by the loss of a team-member under his command in a previous blaze. On account of this tragedy, he has been stood down from active service, and his son's classmates portray him as a murderer. So when the big fire comes -- the one that threatens millions of lives because of potential chemical explosions -- Liwei is first hugely concerned to prevent further loss of firefighters' lives. But his commanders tell him to adjust those scruples. "These people joined up knowing they might be called upon to sacrifice their lives," he is told, as he tours the wards of injured firefighters.

And that's what Liwei and one other firefighter end up doing.

I'm sure, as a threatened citizen, I would be in awe of such heroism. As a dispassionate observer (and a profoundly unheroic person), I'm never sure how much these guys should really be required to give. They have lives too, after all. And their children and parents and partners have lives, which will be radically rerouted if their fire-fighting family member doesn't come home.

Do heroes have to be willing to sacrifice everything? I guess I would have liked more assurance that there really was no other way.



3.
James Gray's Ad Astra was absolutely not the movie I thought it was going to be. I'm not a fan of science fiction, and went partly to escape the smoke pollution we were still suffering at the time. But I found it very thought-provoking.

It's set in a future where commercial flights to the moon are already available (but you need to put your hand deep in your pocket if you want extra comforts like a blanket). The space port looks somehow familiar. There's even a Subway.

Clifford McBride is the heroic astronaut who led a doomed mission to Neptune. At least everyone thought he was heroic until they began to suspect that McBride was still out there, alive and well, and somehow targeting the earth with destructive energy surges.

So they send his son, astronaut Roy McBride, to find him. Roy, effectively abandoned by his father, is a kind of ice man, always calm, always ready to respond appropriately to his pre-trip psych evaluation questions, and never experiencing a pulse over 80. The business of finding his father, however, starts to shake that impenetrability.

Over the course of the film, we learn that the legendary older McBride has not only been a glaringly absent parent, but also bears responsibility for the deaths of his crew (and indirectly for the surges), and is now a recluse of the deepest order -- a man who is "unforgiving, morose and terrifying at the same time".

The message for Roy, therefore, "is that he must avoid turning into his father". After all, Roy's defiance of orders, as he goes it alone to track down his father, has already cost the lives of several crew. And back home, his relationship with his wife is struggling.

Roy ultimately lets go of Dad -- quite literally, as requested by his father himself.

But he has at least succeeded in giving his father a choice. (If the brass had found him first, presumably they would have just wiped him out, no questions asked.)

And he has realized the implications of his father's failure to find intelligent life: "We're all we've got."

Is that realization, made despite all odds, and conveyed despite all adversities, actually the truest sign of heroism?

Not long before seeing this movie, I watched this amazing montage of film captured by the Hubble Telescope. "Awe-inspiring" doesn't even begin to express what is going on out there... If only I were gifted with the artistic ability to respond.



4.
When you start to watch M for Malaysia, you do wonder whether it's going to be an exercise in propaganda. It is produced by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir's daughter, and one of the directors, Ineza Roussille, is his granddaughter. It opens with a montage castigating former Prime Minister Najib.

But fairly quickly you realize that it's going to be much more interesting. Roussille freely admits that although she loves her grandfather, she's not a fan of everything he got up to during his previous long premiership. Scenes of the suppression of protests under former PM Najib were hauntingly matched with scenes of suppression under Mahathir-1.

Although the movie revolves around Mahathir and his family, giving us quite intimate glimpses of the real man behind the role, ultimately it is about the victory of Pakatan Harapan at the polls in 2018.

And here is the key site of the heroism: Politicians who would have had no real cause to trust Mahathir (some had suffered grievously at his hands) agreed to join forces because they thought this cooperation would offer Malaysia the best alternative to Najib and Barisan Nasional, the former ruling coalition.

So, yes, it was pretty heroic of this nonagenarian premier to admit that he made mistakes last time round. And yes, it was pretty heroic of large sections of the Malaysian public to put their faith in this stuck-together coalition of old and new. (As one reviewer puts it, the movie "summed up our struggles, our desire for change ... and painted Tun Mahathir not as an unblemished angel who descended from the heavens, not as a great man, but as a flawed man who accomplished great things with the support of us, the people". I remember coming back to Malaysia from study leave last year, and experiencing the euphoria that this electoral change had induced.)





But the biggest heroes were the ones who were prepared to put their grudges and grievances behind them for the sake of the nation. If only more politicians were capable of coming up with that sort of heroism.

5.
It's a huge leap from political drama to teenage pregnancy, but Gina S. Noer's Dua Garis Biru (Two Blue Lines) presents one more facet of heroism. It is a reminder that fallible humans are called upon to be heroes all the damn time.

When 17-year-old Bima and Dara find they have inadvertently created a baby, there's a lot of very unheroic angst and recrimination from the respective sets of parents.

But eventually people step up.

You can't help but feel that Bima's poor but pious family stumps up with the heroism a bit quicker than Dara's rich parents, with their aggressive search for face-saving ways out. But hey, we all have our learning curves.

So, solutions are proposed. Lives carry on. True, the protagonists will never be the same again. Now there's a baby. Dara, as apparently sometimes happens to very young mothers, has contracted an infection, and had to undergo a hysterectomy (consent for which now has to be given by her young husband). The school pressured her to quit her studies during her pregnancy (the less academically gifted Bima was allowed to study on), so she has that time to make up. And a relationship that might not have lasted beyond school (they're so different after all) is now much more difficult to dissolve.

But no-one ends up in the gutter. No-one ends up way outside his/her milieu. You feel there is still some possibility that each of the protagonists might still be able to achieve some of his/her dreams.

So, don't despair. Don't give up. We all have it in us to be heroes.