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World Without Heroes

Posted: June 11, 2004

By Kevin Forest Moreau, Fallen Hero

Right at this moment, it's a difficult time for people who believe in heroes. It's not hard to tune your antennae to a host of signals to that effect, scattered across our cultural and sociological bandwidths: Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan, both respected and beloved figures held in the highest esteem in their fields, have both died in the past week. The images of abuse and degradation at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq recently ignited a firestorm of indignation by politicians and media types, shaking some peoples' faith in the time-tested American ideal that says that we respect and honor our troops, no matter our feelings about the war they're engaged in.

I'm not here today to memorialize Ray Charles -- not that he's not deserving of it. He was a great performer who wrote some timeless songs and had a true gift for mining beautiful music from pain and heartbreak. But we won't be lacking for Ray Charles tributes, and although some detractors of this site might disagree, I pride myself on keeping silent when I don't have anything significant to add to a discussion.

Nor is this column intended to discuss the legacy of Ronald Reagan. This isn't a political site, after all, and thus it's not a forum for my thoughts and feelings on our 40th president. But he was a hero to many, and the massive outpouring of grief this week brings home the notion that we as a nation, regardless of our individual situations or beliefs, are suffering through a constant reduction of people we can look up to. And since this is an entertainment site, I just happen to have a couple of pop-cultural examples handy, including one, oddly enough, from the world of television.

And no, before you get excited, I'm not talking about Friends. (Am I the only one who thinks that the end of that series is actually a check in the good column? Now if only Everybody Loves Raymond would hurry up and die.) And I'm not talking about American Idol either, so stand down: There'll be no fresh barrage of ridiculous hate mail today. No, I'm talking about the overlooked Angel, and in particular the overlooked Wesley Wyndham-Price, who (Spoiler Alert!) met his untimely end in the series' grim finale.

What?!, I hear you thinking to yourself. But bear with me. Wesley (Alexis Denisof) began as a stuffy, officious prick on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; his supercilious manner was an attempt to make up for the fact that he was a bundle of self-conscious awkwardness. When he moved over to Angel after having been fired by the Watchers' Council, he was still nerdy, tongue-tied and clumsy, but being cast out on his own, and taking up with a vampire on a Quixotic mission to help others, agreed with him. Angel was a show about redemption (watching Angel attempt to atone for centuries of evil; watching Cordelia blossom from a shallow bitch into a world-saving champion), and charting Wesley's progress from a bumbling milquetoast to a confident leader and capable magician and warrior was one of the series' most rewarding facets.

In a way, I identified with Wesley the same way I did with Clay Aiken: Both, in their way, are examples of geekiness redeemed. Well, granted, Clay is still pretty geeky (Uh-oh! Bring on that hate mail!), but, as with Wesley, it was a treat during Idol's second season (the only one I've ever watched; let's just say there was a girl involved) to watch him break out of his ugly-duckling shell and mature (or at least change) before our eyes. Anyway, as upsetting as Wesley's death was, it was the ultimate redemption: He died fighting the good fight, knowing there was a good chance he wouldn't survive.

The second entertainment figure on today's list isn't quite a hero, but he has matured over the past couple of decades into an impressively gifted actor. Too bad he's decided to chuck all of that in the trash for a paycheck. Yes, Bill Murray, I'm talking about you. I think I speak for half of America -- the correct half -- when I say: How could you? I'm referring here to Murray's decision to lend his vocal talents to the title role in the big-screen adaptation of Garfield, which opens today.

There's a strange kind of synchronicity that the movie opens within a week of Ronald Reagan's death: As someone (I believe it was the cartoonist Lynda Barry) once adroitly commented in The Comics Journal, Garfield -- an obese, self-absorbed feline who delights in picking on others and champions laziness as the highest virtue -- is a perfect personification of the "Greed is good" excesses of the Reagan '80s; not for nothing is it known as the "Me Decade."

This isn't to say that actors can't lend their voices to animated features: Orson Welles' last role, you may recall, was in the Transformers movie, and no one's claiming that that invalidates his contributions to the cinematic arts. But Garfield is a different animal. There are two kinds of people in this world: People who despise the Garfield comic strip, and people who can't be trusted with their own opinions. It doesn't matter which camp Bill Murray falls into; it doesn't matter what his politics are. What matters is that he's now a part of the Garfield franchise. Bill, the movie's got Breckin freakin' Meyer in it, for crying out loud! I mean, come on!

When Lost in Translation started racking up all that (mostly deserved) buzz, there was all this talk about how difficult Bill Murray could be to pin down for a role, how discerning and hermit-like he was, how it was almost impossible to get him to commit to a project. To that I say: Fucking Hogwash. If Charlie's Angels didn't invalidate that myth, Garfield kills it once and for all and kicks dirt on its grave. And it's much harder now to feel bad for Murray for not getting the Oscar for Best Actor. (I was actually pulling for you there, Bill.)

There's no gray area here, no room for ambiguity. Garfield is crap, and Bill Murray has tarnished his reputation by associating himself with it. What's next, Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench in The Lockhorns? Patrick Stewart as Marmaduke? Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in Family Circus? No wonder it sometimes feels like there's no one left to look up to. These are dark days indeed.

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