George Hutchinson
Contributor
Action movies are designed to enslave you.
They’re designed to motivate stupid young men to pursue powerless careers as soldiers, secret agents, assassins and bodyguards. They’re designed to inspire you to be a pawn and serve the interests of men greater than you.
Watch action movies and you’ll see stoic, “strong but silent” muscle men, with faces locked in a perma-scowl, who single-handedly fight and win battles against small armies. You’ll see the heroes getting the girl, the glory and, most importantly, the power.
But this isn’t the way it works in real life. In real life, powerful men wear suits, not camouflage; they have potbellies, not six packs; and they work behind desks, not behind enemy lines.
In real life, the laconic super-soldier who only speaks when spoken to (and in as few words as possible) is the guy who gets left behind. He doesn’t make the contacts, and doesn’t get exposed to nearly the same opportunities or empowering information as the yappy, emasculated comic relief character.
Naturally, powerful men want you to watch and become enthralled with action movies (and comics and video games) because they need slaves like yourself. In order to get you, they’ll feed you whatever you need to hear. Whether it’s to liberate women and instill democracy or to resist globalization and the American oppressor (because, really, who cares about the plot?), you want a socially acceptable excuse to shoot guns, kill people, slide across the hoods of cars and dive off the balconies of exploding buildings in slow motion.
The men on top know that, so they exploit your instinctual thirst for violence, glory and warfare. They benefit even if they don’t use you directly; the more Rambo-wannabes there are, the less competition there is for the things that count, like money.
You could listen to the lessons of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Jason Statham. You could spend your life perfecting your kung-fu grip and sculpting yourself into a super- soldier-samurai-ninja-assassin: you can become “the ultimate weapon” (read: tool).
But take a moment and consider all the time and energy it’d take. Consider that, in a second, the rich man can simply buy for himself an army of super-soldiers he can use to oppose whatever heroic mission you’ve decided to take on as a lone, comparatively weak, vigilante.
I know what you might be thinking: “I’ll be the exception this time, I’ll make the vigilante thing work. Screw the man!” Sorry, that’s just not likely; only in the movies does the lone action hero break into headquarters and bring the fat old business mogul to his knees. In real life, it’s the business man who gets to do the Bruce Willis squint and then whisper “Yip-pie-ki-yay, motherfucker,” right before he sends action man to jail for attempted assault, buys his house for a song and, to add insult to injury, picks up his wife on the rebound.
Once vigilantism is out, there is not much you can do besides sell your super-skills and risk your life doing the dirty work for men more intelligent than yourself. How glorious!
As a tool, your masters will pat you on the back and say, “now this is a real man!” And when you die they’ll celebrate your life, glorify your death, build monuments and write poems about you (in order to encourage the same behavior). But when those same powerful men are alone and in private, they’ll snicker and whisper to each other, “Oh man, what a tool!”
