"and we can be heroes, just for one day"
David Bowie

A quick listen to the Kinks' "Celluloid Heroes" or David Bowie's "Heroes" will give you some sense of just how far removed the modern hero is from the ancient hero. In modern film and literature the hero is often an anti-hero: a character who is clearly the protagonist, a character for whom we are rooting, most likely because we see something of ourselves in him/her, a character who is not larger than life, not wiser than sages, not stronger than titans, not purer than Galahad.

I loved a show back in the 70's called The Night Stalker starring Darren McGavin as reporter Carl Kolchak. He was unkempt, cynical, sarcastic, able to anger his boss (and several other bosses; he'd been fired from a dozen newspapers) with his insubordination. He was always tracking down or being tracked down by juicy tabloid stories featuring resurrectied Jack the Rippers living beneath the city, modern-day vampires stalking Las Vegas. He was a regular guy. Nervier than most, perhaps, with a tenacity that few possess, and with an unyielding desire to dig out the truth that rivaled Oedipus. He was the sort of guy that regular people could identify with. He had car payments, alimony payments, problems getting dates, a habit of sticking his foot in his mouth. He is a wonderful example one sort of modern hero. Arnold Schwarzenegger is another, but that's for another day.

Kolchak can trace his lineage back to Don Quixote, though it is a long and winding line.

If Petrarch brought attention to the human componant, the significance of the individual, it was still a well-educated, aristocratic, cultured, pious individual (last time I looked in the mirror I had some trouble seeing myself as a modern-day renaissance icon such as Michelangelo's David). Cervantes brought attention to the quirky individual--the normal, flawed human.

Quixote is a madman. He sees giants where there are windmills, armies where there are sheep, a fair lady where there...well...isn't one. He frees crooks imagining he's helping the opressed and assumes that his self-imagined knighthood commands respect when all about him are teasing, tormenting, abusing the poor old man.

He is the outsider, and as such he is one of the first truly modern heroes. He's certainly one of the all-time most popular modern heroes.

But if he's mad (at one point he thinks his brains have fallen out of his head when the cottage cheese Sancho Panza stuffed in his helmet drips down over his face, so if he's not mad, he's at least addlepated), how can he be a model for us; what values does he express that modern audiences need to be reminded of; in what way can he be considered heroic?

Perhaps to a modern sensibility, hero and mad are synonymous. Think of the dozen soldiers charging a machine gun nest, the mother rushing back into the burning building to save a child; wonder at the bumper sticker that say, "Practice random acts of kindness," and marvel at the student who takes a class not on the required list.

Those acts defy logic, reason (sanity)?

To make sense of it we may have to go back to the very beginning (the beginning of this class, of literature, even of thought) and re-examine the fundamental question: "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" (the answer is, of course, "42," but Deep Thought's pronouncement from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series could stand a bit of interpretation). Tony Randall, in the guise of the wizened Chinaman in The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao captures something of the answer when he says, "Life is a circus, a wonderous adventure."

I suggest you go rent a film called They Might be Giants (1971, starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, directed by Anthony Harvey). Although most of the plot revolves around Scott's character imagining himself to be Sherlock Holmes in search of his nemesis Moriarity (by a wonderful coincidence, the psychiatrist sent to observe him is named Dr. Watson), note the title, and be sure to listen closely to the soundtrack at the end of the film.

The giants are, of course, Quixote's windmills. Or are they? They just might be giants.