The Virtue of the Weaponed Hero.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken a light from the shadows shall spring renewed shall be blade that was broken the crownless again shall be king.

THE POEM ABOVE, penned in Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien of his beloved king-in-exile Aragorn, called Strider by millions of adoring fans who know this poem by heart and this character with all their hearts, draws an unbreakable connection between the hero and the weapon. In this case, the weapon is a sword and its renewal shall mean the restoration of the rightful king to the throne.

Although Tolkien's story is a very modern one, the association of hero and killing tool is a very old one. It is ingrained in our culture, almost to the point of being part of our genetic heritage. All of the great heroes of the Western tradition, all the way back to Achilles, have been defined by their arms. Even Hercules had a wooden club --the only weapon he would use and the one that became associated with him in artistic representations. The more "civilized" Achilles received his chosen weapon--the spear of the Greek warrior aristocrat--from his father, reinforcing the powerful identification of a hero of the Homeric world with his patronym.

During the Middle Ages, weapons began to have names and identities, almost personalities, of their own. Beowulf's magic sword, Roland's Durendal with relics of the saints on its hilt, Charlemagne's Joieuse from which the Franks took their battle cry "Monjoie," and most famously Arthur's Excalibur are part and parcel of every myth of every hero of the past. Even Robin Hood, that early humanitarian hero, could not have accomplished robbery of the rich without his skill at archery.

Is it any wonder then that this sort of fascination with weapons should have translated itself into the Old West--perhaps the only true and definitely the earliest American mythology? The translation of the killing tool is wholesale; the western lawman, the romantic outlaw he fought, and even the cowboy who could be either or both of these, all relied on their weapons and were defined by them. The weapons in question were treated with all the reverence of the old swords, given pearl handles and pedigrees and sometimes even names. The heroes themselves often got names that related to their weapon of choice, such as Hawkeye and the Rifleman. But the weapons in question were guns.

And herein lies the problem for most people who blame Hollywood's fascination with guns for the violence in society today, and especially violence among children. They see Hollywood as a grand monolithic structure that glorifies violence--especially gun violence--and they posit all sorts of reasons why this menace to society would want our children to kill each other, whether it be greed, stupidity, political efficacy, or the like.

They don't take into account that these films are popular. And not only among children. There is a reason for that: films that glorify violence--that portray weapons as heroic--fuel a drive that goes back so many generations that it is indivisible from the dreams and desires of most humans. The fairy tales that people read to their children, the animated Saturday morning programming, songs, poems, even the nursery rhymes children memorize are inhabited by the most basic of weaponed heroes --and they are just the beginning. Mythology follows, with its inherent fascination for children and adults alike. No child, indeed no person at all, can be truly sheltered from the weapon-hero association without seriously stunting her or his understanding of Western culture. And I don't think they should be. The association--the exploration of the hero and the killing tool of choice--can be rewarding, enriching, and revealing.

This is because heroes can be righteous. They can teach "morality"--whatever that might be for the culture they represent. For the Greeks, filial piety and elite values were handed down with weapons from father to son. In the Middle Ages, sexual avoidance and abstinence accompanied really good sword skills. Weaponed heroes can embody characteristics that most humans, regardless of cultural bias, would recognize as good qualities. They can use their might in the service of right. They can right wrongs and fulfill justice and protect the innocent. They can be loyal and courageous in the face of desperate odds. They can have personal honor and integrity and teach all of these things to willing and eager minds.

But, and I believe more importantly, these stories can also be fulfilling and enriching because weaponed heroes are dangerous by their very nature. Achilles, for example, was full of wrath, full of vengefulness, so self-centered that he was destructive to both his own people and his enemies. Hercules was a violent child who killed his lyre-teacher in a fit of madness, a violent adult who killed his wife and children in another rage. Roland got himself, his best friend, and Charlemagne's entire rear guard killed through his pride and stubbornness. And the generic medieval heroes--the King Arthurs of the world--could have been knights in shining armor but often also the oppressive tax-collectors for their feudal lords and armed warriors coercing unarmed peasants.

It is true that most people in the Old West, in colonial times, in the Middle Ages, and in ancient Greece didn't own or wield weapons of any sort. Critics of violence in Hollywood are absolutely right in taking umbrage with the National Rifle Association's propaganda that would portray gun ownership as a venerated tradition in the United States or elsewhere. Reality makes little difference to the stories, however. In fact, the lack of weapons in the lives of most people made the stories and myths more attractive, more compelling.

Even the dangerous heroes, the exploitative knights, the vengeful Achilles are compelling and can be educational and enriching. The dangerous hero, the antihero, confronts the audience with a line in the sand, the concept of right and wrong, the idea of "moral" which is constantly being challenged, moved, restored, and smudged. The dangerous hero, through challenging, overstepping, and coercing that line, can sometimes teach more morality than the righteous and infallible one. And the weapon enhances this struggle and therefore this ability to teach by giving the dangerous hero the power to make terrible mistakes.

Can Hollywood really be that different? It uses and reuses the same stories but with modern twists and turns. Can it really be a surprise if the elegance of the sword has become the Jedi knight's light saber, Indiana Jones' whip, the ninja's nunchaku (nunchucks), or even the bludgeon force of the automatic weapon? Guns aren't nearly so personal or poetic as swords, and therefore directors have been forced to multiply them, in number and power, to fill the romantic gap left by a lovely piece of metal that could embody the spirit of the warrior-hero.

And already the gun as the weapon of choice is beginning to lose its charm, probably because the overwhelming violence of some of these movies obscures the content, denies the satisfaction that comes with the exploration of the hero and the use of a killing tool of choice. Those who say there are too many guns in films these days aren't watching very carefully. Gun violence peaked with the Schwarzenegger films of the 1980s. Moviemakers have been left with a dilemma: where to go from here?

Some have gone backwards into historical fiction, such as with Gladiator (2000) and A Knight's Tale (2001): back to swords and jousts and one-on-one fights--all so much more heroic than spraying a room with bullets and watching enemies fall. Some have tried to stylize the guns and those who carry them with choreography and artistic effects. Jon Woo is a leader in this effort; his Face/Off (1997) is perhaps his most effective effort to make violence into art. The Matrix (1999), already a cult classic, isn't Woo's creation but is probably the best example of this genre. Others have rejected guns entirely. Jackie Chan, for example, never uses them in his movies, although other characters do. There are whole reams of superheros of animation and comic books who don't use guns, although they are no less violent than the gun users. Superman and Batman head the list. Most recent in film are the X-men (2000).

Still other moviemakers have chosen to address the weapon issue from another angle: attacking gun culture. Unforgiven (1992), for example, features an old gunslinger questioning everything about the Western ethos that made him. Saving Private Ryan (1999) is quite the most violent and weapons-filled film I have ever seen, with a realism to the violence more disturbing than any of the rather unbelievable Schwarzenegger-era movies. Standing in line to Saving Private Ryan, I heard a teenage boy tell a friend, "Just wait till you see. This guy's head comes completely off!" His voice was awed, though I thought that something in his expression was uncomfortable with the vision as well. He was returning for another look at this gore-fest of a movie that certainly cannot be accused of glorifying violence.

What answer can be given for the fascination of children with violence, some to the point of their own violent actions? I believe it must be in a complex of factors that involves the instability of a very small percentage of children and a greater availability of weapons than the world has ever known. The hero with a weapon is supposed to be something that is part of stories, part of the subconscious mind, and preferably limited to those venues. When a troubled child can actually get access to a gun, then the mind of the troubled child is confronted with the actual means to become the central figure of the stories in his or her own conscious. Psychoses can then be allowed out into the world in a way that has never been seen before. I don't believe that guns in movies have any more part in that process than swords and spears did in the tales of the bards of ancient and medieval times. But swords and spears weren't as easy to get as guns are today. And they had their own type of safety locks: they were heavy and unwieldy; they required skill; and they could only kill one person at a time.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is routinely named in polls that ask for the favorite book or the book that most influenced the life of the respondent. It nearly always ranks in the top five in such polls, right next to the Bible. Its forthcoming film adaptation (December 2001) will probably make it even more popular. The famed Aragorn, exiled king and anonymous wandering hero, is a major character. The broken sword establishes his identity with more certainty than his face, voice, or fingerprint ever could. Its renewal returns him to his rightful place in the world. The sword, in effect, stands for the man. In fact, all of the book's major characters carry weapons, even the humble hobbits.

Such is the power of the weaponed hero, even in our modern world. We love them, we fear them, and we can't ignore them. Those who wish to get rid of guns in movies need to come up with other stories, heroes with other types of weapons or no weapons at all.

I believe this process is already underway, and with some other much-welcomed changes, such as the rising prominence of the female cast as hero. No longer the sheltered and protected object of the medieval knight's affection or the nearly invisible war-prize of the Homeric Greeks, the women are finally stepping out into modern mythology in their own right. The heroine provides an opportunity for society to explore and re-create its relationship to weapons because women don't have the same ancient connections to them that men do. As a result, some still choose weapons but ones that are very different from the swords and guns of male heroes. Wonder Woman, for example, has a lasso that makes people (usually men) speak the truth. Xena Warrior Princess wields a shakrum, a cyclical bladed weapon something like a boomerang. Other heroines--like UPN's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Fox's new Dark Angel--possess unnatural physical prowess but have no preferred weapons at all.

Although film lags behind these television heroines, this summer promises at least unorthodox action in heroine Lara Croft through an adaptation of the very popular video game Tomb Raider. The weapons Lara chooses or refuses are important to us as a culture because, until and unless firearms can be written out of the American psyche as a suitable weapon for the hero, the guns in our theaters won't be silenced.

Almira F. Poudrier, administrator for Friends of Religious Humanism, is a graduate student of the State University of New York at Buffalo and both teaches and is completing her Ph.D. in the classics.