kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ode to the Good Guys I just finished watching "The Adventures of Zorro" for the second time in two days. It's a great movie--Antonio Banderas, explosions, Catherine Zeta-Jones, explosions, funny one-liners....explosions.... I have a huge fondness for action adventure movies in which things blow up--it's a fondness that my sister and I share, to the point of having a ratings systems based on the explosions, with extra points for movies where either cannons or nuclear weapons are used as personal armament (Cutthroat Island, Sahara, and Broken Arrow all got bonus style points.) I've always liked a good rousing adventure story--swaggering machismo, mild misogyny, and all--I suppose in part because I never really thought of myself as a girl, a lot of the anti-chick stuff just sort of floats over my head while I go oooh-wow at the things that go boom. Recently, though, I started thinking about WHY I loved all these movies so much--Die Hard, ConAir, and the like. And since one of my ex's has decided to resurface recently, it brought something even more to mind. This ex is someone who always lands not on their own feet, but other peoples'. The universe just seems to rearrange itself for her--whatever she ever wanted, somehow she would get someone to get for her. People have ruined their lives for her, while she trips merrily through. As another friend of mine noted sourly once, "which pixies pissed in HER rice crispies to make her so fucking lucky?" Most people, including me, aren't like that. We slog through day to day, and get the job done. We end up with spouses or lovers who may care for us, but still bring up the Beloved Ex or the time we threw up at just the wrong moment. We get sore feet, sunburns, and have to haul out the trash ourselves. We go along in ordinary life, do the right thing, and don't get much in the way of fireworks or even thanks. There's no way to definitively WIN--the best you can do is slog along day to day. Aside from the occasional magic person like my ex, who manages to skate from disaster to disaster (from which someone always rescues her) most of us fall down and go boom and then have to pick up the pieces our ownselves. There is no janitorial crew for life for us, the way there is for my ex, and the rare few like her. Sometimes I wish I could learn the trick of that, but it's not my style to leave messes of her proportions for others to clean up. The thing that I love about action movies is whether the hero is a Navy Seal or a New York cop or even an ordinary joe from nowhere in particular, they slog along, get beat up, stomped on, and generally pummelled, but they get to fight back, and in the end they win. The bad guys are vanquished, the money is returned, the nuclear weapon goes through the bad guy instead of exploding above a city...it's all done and everyone is safe, and life is wonderful thereafter. Every day I read news stories about horrors--children starved, pets abused, bridges collapsing--there's nothing I can do about these things, and not much anyone else can do about them either. There's no way to win. There's not even a way to blow the shit up. There's not even a way to get people like my ex, who dance merrily through, littering in other peoples' lives, to understand that someone has to clean up the mess and it might be nice if they did their share. Action movies, no matter how messy or explosive, end, and end clean. The days when I wish for a few pounds of ANFO to blow up my problems are legion. And in the meantime, I will cheerfully hang out and watch ConAir, because in that movie, profane and misogynistic and violent and explosive, for once, the good guys win. 10:07 p.m. - 2007-08-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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