Baron Wormser: The Hero

What Americans are currently contending with (or applauding, since many Americans are quite pleased with recent events) runs deep in the American psyche. The nation elects a president but what it wants is a hero. In his essay entitled “The Hero,” the film critic Manny Farber identified two types of Hollywood heroes, or as he puts it, “two idealized personalities, whose common bond is an allegiance to Superman.” Farber proceeds to note the following: “One, the older, is a mixture of Abe Lincoln, Dick the Chimney Sweep and a cowboy, in which goodness and lonesome bravery are the main ingredients. The other is a belligerent, egocentric character who is as malevolent and aggressive as the other is pure of heart and backward . . . .” Gary Cooper personifies the first hero, Humphrey Bogart the second. Though as the world’s most virtuous people, Americans are supposed to identify wholly with the first hero, in their dark heart of hearts they identify intensely with the second. Virtue is boring and even if the Gary Cooper hero gets the girl, he doesn’t seem to much notice her: “He is a conscientious, non-professional lover.” The Bogart figure, however, displays a “noisy violence in which nothing is hidden.” The Bogart figure “expresses the hostility and rebellion the existence of which the Cooper tradition ignores.” Both heroes represent the “man of action, with as little emphasis as will make sense on thought and emotion.” Again, as the current situation shows, it may not make any sense but that doesn’t matter because the “anti-intellectual, anti-emotional and pro-action life is in the historical American pattern.” And life is a movie. Right? Or at least a celebrity TV show. And some hero is better than no hero. 

   Part of Farber’s considerable shrewdness lies in his understanding that the United States wants both heroes. Destiny isn’t gained by sitting around and compromising with people. Destiny is gained by the lone figure riding off into some vast sunset and thus exemplifying not a compulsion but a courage as vast as the West.  The lone figure has to put up with other people but cultivates a distance that keeps him pure. When he kills someone, a tinge of ruefulness is present, though only a tinge. Just rewards are just rewards. That’s what heroes deal in, though the lone figure is well above saying, “You’ll get yours buddy.” That is up to the second figure, the gangster or detective (they can be hard to tell apart) who in Farber’s words “is the soured half of the American dream.” He believes unequivocally in the power of money (unlike the first hero who barely knows what money is) but not as an end to any especially worthwhile endeavor. What matters foremost for him and for the lone cowboy is “the untroubled string of physical victories that Hollywood feels Americans need and desire.” One way or another, be it by excessive virtue or excessive nastiness, by patience or by stratagem, the hero will prevail. He (of course the hero is male) is impregnable. The armor that warriors once wore has been internalized. 

   Hero worship is not confined to adolescence. It may be that as an adult gets wearier and wearier and more and more discontented, the allure of the hero becomes even stronger. The hero, after all, offers a deliverance untainted by religion and belief. He may cursorily nod in that direction, he may not. The crux of his being is opportunistic. If the town needs to be rescued from the vigilantes who have cleaned out the bank and taken the local schoolmarm as a hostage, the lone cowboy knows how to handle the situation. Similarly, if the beautiful heiress is being blackmailed, the wise-cracking detective can handle the situation. The hero may have to resign himself to a degree of solitude as a hero but his ego makes up for it. The ego may be polite, as in the Gary Cooper case, or not so polite, as in the Humphrey Bogart case where any humility is strictly for show or as the Bogart character would put it, “for suckers.” 

   Amid Donald Trump’s hubbub machine, it may be hard to discern that what is happening is not a rogue event but one that is ingrained in the American character, a yearning that only occasionally dares to speak its name but that clearly is speaking that name right now. The yearning for action and victories cannot, apparently, be sated by nonstop televised athletic contests. Losses and victories start to blur. One game merges into another however intent the spectator may be. Presidential politics is so much better since the grudge-bearing president does not have to bother with being a leader of the American people if he can be the hero who takes care of everything. In Trump’s case, he may, indeed, see himself as some ultimate, death-defying hero whom no one can effectively oppose. In his view, other nations are just so much nomenclature. How could they stand to be so inferior? How could they not want to be Americans? The American hero has never had much use for dissent but then, as an avatar of mindless action, what hero has? Achilles wasn’t much help when he was moping in his tent. Any twinge of regret beyond a wistful momentary gaze out at the prairie or at a departing ship must be spurned as weakness.  

   That virtue will triumph is the American credo that the two heroes enact in their different ways. Doubt has no part in their doings nor does criticism. How reassuring! In the case of Donald Trump, it’s easy to see him in the gangster role. He has that snarl that signals thorough contempt. One can see him holed up in whatever apartment or warehouse shouting to the cops: “Come and get me, you bastards.” Indeed, Trump is shouting that each day. What may be harder to discern is that for many Americans, Trump is also the Gary Cooper figure, the lone avenger who takes on the forces of whatever insidious menace is troubling the good folks’ dreams. In picking up their fears, he gets to define reality and if he is persuasive, people rally to what has become his reality. Monomania, whether of the quiet sort or the noisy sort, compels allegiance, and the hero is a monomaniac. Mere daily exigent life will not do. Farber was not kidding when he evoked Superman, an American guy in the extreme. 

   Myth in 2025 appears then as something more than a subject to be studied in a college classroom and left at the door. Each hour all manner of news hectors the populace with events and talk but the undertow that is producing those events feels very swift these days. The hero is a made-up figure but the longing inside human beings is not made-up. The hero is linked to action at any cost, the premise being that the cost will be a beneficial one. Right must triumph because the American people are God-blessed, geographically-blessed, and capitalist-blessed. Anyone who gainsays that is a subversive who deserves the tough guy’s expletives. Who is an American is another story, as is asking what the point is of a heroism that has neither stature nor dignity, that postures and lashes out for the sake of posturing and lashing out, that is nothing more than aggrieved prejudice masquerading as—what else?—aggrieved virtue. 

   Some of Trump’s persona came to the presidency through the magic of standing before a camera. For Cooper and Bogart acting was their vocation. When the day was done, the camera disappeared, but for Donald Trump, a man who must be a hero each minute, the camera never goes away. He is a willing prisoner of that camera. For the rest of us, myth may be odious but it will not be denied. It can, however, be exposed for the sham it all too often turns out to be.

Copyright 2025 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry 2023). Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife.