They are all heroes.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Rundle, Guy
• Date: 01 January 2003

Days after the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the executives at Warner Brothers studios decided to postpone the release of Collateral Damage, the recently completed and ready-to-roll action blockbuster featuring the not-yet governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Collateral Damage had been planned as a return to form for Arnie, whose career as an action super hero had been bogged down by too many tacky comedies and a disastrous attempt at a blockbuster--The Last Action Hero--which, as its name would suggest, was a reflexive and postmodern take on the genre. Reflexive and postmodern Collateral Damage isn't--being the tale of a happy suburban fireman whose wife and daughter are killed by a terrorist bomb planted by Colombian guerrillas at a Los Angeles bank. Nefarious politicking by the standard-issue mealy mouthed politicians lets the terrorists slip back to the Colombian mountains, so after briefly losing his marbles out of grief, Arnie decides to track them down personally and avenge his family's murder. Helped to smuggle himself into the guerrilla camp by a cynical yet amusing American expatriate low-life, Arnie sets a bomb to kill the cold-eyed sadistic guerrilla leader, only to realize at the last minute that it will blow up the man's wife and child as well. He saves them, understands that in fighting dragons he has a dragon become, and eventually dispatches the guerrilla leader in hand-to-hand combat, freeing the group's hostages and liberating the guerrilla leader's wife from her own mental bondage to him. He has transcended mere revenge to redeem a world in which careless violence has replaced the implementation of justice, state-administered or otherwise. Having been tempted to become a dragon, he has instead become a paladin--the good knight.

Taken at first glance, you would wonder why the producers would be so sensitive about the film's possible reception in the wake of real terror. Collateral Damage, as the title suggests, invokes the charge of moral equivalence: in one confrontation the guerrilla leader makes the point that state bombing is acceptable whereas guerrilla warfare is terror. Arnie answers this later--for himself as well as the audience--by saving the man's wife and child. The guerrillas are Saturday matinee baddies. When a fire starts in a prison they are raiding, they display no interest in helping the nonpolitical prisoners escape a grisly death (Arnie, locked up there, saves them with a handy angle grinder), and an under-performing comrade is punished by being fed a live snake. What film could be more salutary in the wake of cold-blooded mass murder?

But the executives made the strategically correct decision, for Collateral Damage was not seriously meant as a political film. It uses Colombians rather than Arabs as the bad guys because the Colombian guerrillas rarely use terror bombings as a tactic, and certainly never in the United States itself. The setting is a context for the journey of an individual, from the mundane world of settled life to a battle between good and evil. In completing this mission, the man not only becomes the hero he always potentially was, he also saves the world, either actually (as in the case of an asteroid disaster movie like Deep Impact) but more usually through moral redemption. Arnie, and by extension the United States, has not stooped to wanton nihilism in its use of judicious violence. That Arnie is a moral hero in a comprehensively amoral wilderness is reinforced by a brief scene in which right-wing paramilitaries massacre a bus load of peasants: there are no particulars to understand, the movie is saying, merely general moral situations. In the period of mourning, serious reflection and utter hysteria that consumed the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the ultimate frivolity of the film's detailed content would have been obviously offensive.

Yet if the content made the film a special case, the general structure of its plot and theme makes it an absolutely typical example of a type of drama film that has become so dominant within the genre that its specific nature is barely noted. Collateral Damage is a film in which story, plot and character are organized around epic and mythical, rather than dramatic and psychological, imperatives; in which characters have no significant internality that would lead to complex or contradictory outcomes; in which the messiness of action in the real world is pared down to a simple and resounding story. Yet this story is not merely one of external action: it is not an adventure tale. It is a myth which tells how ordinary mortals are all heroes waiting for the moment to prove themselves in a series of challenges whose eventual success will redeem and reground their threatened community and, in so doing, render the hero her/himself whole. Its dominance within popular American cinema within the last three decades has been a product of many factors, but more importantly it has been a key factor in the transformation of how Americans think about themselves and their world.

The theme of the hero as found in Collateral Damage will be familiar to anyone acquainted with studies of folk-tales or the anthropology of myth. It appears in key stories from a wide range of cultures, including the founding Western myth as written in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The myth has a number of elements, not all of which appear in each example of it. Some, like the hero's being drawn from everyday life and the initial refusal of the task are more-or-less universal. Others, such as the assistance to the hero of a 'mentor' figure and the gift of a magical item that will later save the hero, are sometimes present only in vestigial form. In traditional versions of the myth, the final redemption of the society and the hero is rendered in external terms. The hero might initially have been disgraced, but he is now welcomed back and honoured; not merely as an individual champion but as one who has saved his society from peril.

The story of the hero began to be recognized by folklorists in the nineteenth century as they collected the stories of rural societies that were beginning to change with modernization and the advent of a wider literacy. (1) In the early twentieth century the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp collated these researches and developed a framework of thirty-one story elements on which every folk story drew. Not every unit ('the hero is drawn out of normal life', 'the hero is confronted by a trickster/villain') is present in every story, but they are the vocabulary from which every story is drawn. (2)

At this point the relationship between the study of myth and contemporary culture began to intertwine in complex ways. What the folklorists and philologists were finding in folktales, anthropologists had found in the myths of the non-Western cultures that were becoming objects of study, and the power of myth as an alternative principle (to psychological and social realism) to organize artistic composition was soon recognized. After modern artists--Picasso, Stravinsky, Jarry, Nijinsky--became interested in what 'primitive' cultures could offer by way of an intensity and passion felt to be missing from modern existence, Carl Jung joined the individual psychodrama of psychoanalysis to the old idea of the 'key to all mythologies' via the notion of the collective unconscious. For Jung, the passage towards becoming whole and individuated--an independent selfhood capable of work, love, play, awe, etcetera, but not neurotically dependent on any one aspect of the world--could be understood as the integration of various psychic personae similar to the characters found in mythologies, for example, the anima, the animus (female and male poles), the shadow, the earth mother and so on. The interior drama of selfhood now had the character of a journey--one was on a journey to oneself, but one was the journey. (3)

The process went full...