Atara Stein,
The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004
ISBN-13: 978-0809325863
US$45.00 (hb)
272pp
(Review copy supplied by Southern Illinois University Press)
Narratives that detail the gradual absorption of subcultures into the mainstream would do well to follow the lead of Atara Stein, an American scholar interested in the interface of Romanticism and popular culture. In her book The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television, Stein invites her reader to contemplate one such process, namely the popularization of the melancholy leader trope, which she interprets as a return to the long-marginalized anxieties that lead Byron to develop his particular brand of hero. Stein develops her case as both comparison, a study of the evolution of the Byronic hero, and socio-political commentary, an analysis of what distinguishes artists of the Romantic period from contemporary novelists and screenwriters. For Stein, the re-emergence of the Byronic hero into mainstream fiction and film is of broad historical and sociological interest.
In the first instance, Stein succeeds in demonstrating the ubiquity of the Byronic hero is contemporary media. This is particularly evident, for example, in the procession of material that has emerged from the no-man’s-land of fandom to score major success in Hollywood films and network television, often to considerable critical acclaim. The trend of adapting graphic novels and comic books for mainstream film and television, which has a relatively long history, has only truly come into its own in the past decade. As distinct from the adaptations of the 1980s to mid-1990s, the more recent trend has also seen the emergence of fairly coherent generic traits, particularly evident in the many franchises (drawing from old and new material) that exploit the digressive, mythological narrative style associated with highly committed communities of fans.
Ready explanations can be found in technological innovation, which has made this material more viable, and also in studios’ marketing and sales policies, naturally given to investing in sequels and series. And yet, this does not quite account for the surprising thematic connections that tie together fictive mythologies as disparate as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and the Wachowskis’ Matrix. By approaching the Romantic concern with heroic leadership as an engine rather than a by-product of this cultural trend, Stein offers a bold insight into a truly transnational development.
Drawing almost exclusively from the traditional material of fandom, Stein argues that this trend reveals itself through its transformations of the Bryonic hero. She does not quite get around to commenting directly on the link between fandom, its movement toward the mainstream, and the logic behind Byron’s heroes. Instead, she develops what she calls “an informed fandom that includes an awareness of the political and cultural background and assumptions underlying the texts that we, as fans, enjoy” (p. 7). Stein draws a portrait of the moody and remote Byronic hero from thoughtful readings of Childe Roland, The Corsair, Don Juan, Lara and Manfred, in order to find common links between an impressively diverse collection of material: three films by Clint Eastwood; The Crow and its sequel; Anne Rice’s vampire novels; Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series; the Alien and Terminator franchises; two Star Trek series; and Joss Whedon’s Angel series. Writing in an unpretentious and accessible style aimed at “both academic and nonacademic readers” (p. 7), she uses the Byronic hero as “a powerful lens with which to view the Romantic period… its pervasive influence and impact on subsequent generations.” Although in some places her arguments are not as strong as they could be, she largely succeeds in this goal.
Stein’s discussion of the historical and political significance of the Byronic hero, which is meticulously developed in an introductory chapter, is particularly strong. She demonstrates an impressive familiarity and ease with Byron’s poetry, and does a fine job grounding several key themes in the rhetoric of heroic leadership that emerged in response to the Napoleonic wars. This socio-political thought, drawn from Byron, Carlyle and Mill, stresses the dysfunction of the Byronic hero as leader. For Stein, the figure’s appeal is equally a function of its ability to take the mantle of leadership when a community faces impossible difficulties as well as its inability to retain that leadership when the crisis has passed, although the precise reaction to the hero’s departure has changed with time. Stein portrays the Byronic hero as an ultimate, but not entirely satisfying leader; although arrogantly remote and frustratingly self-sufficient, it serves its ideal with unparalleled ability. For the Romantics, Byron had fashioned a hero to be respected, but neither followed nor emulated. But as Stein quite insightfully notes, the contemporary Byronic hero has gained a new dimension without abandoning any of its socially dysfunctional elements: it is now a figure to be followed, if only temporarily. It is on the contemporary Byronic hero’s elevated claim to leadership that Stein builds her general critique of the trope.
The second chapter, dealing with the leadership role of three Eastwood characters, Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Eric Draven (protagonist of the two Crow films), is the least successful in the book. Essentially an argument against vigilantism, the chapter lacks the depth and variety of the following analyses, and in several places, Stein overplays her hand. The chapter begins with a discussion of what has become the orthodox reading of Eastwood’s early protagonists, namely that they are little more than a vehicle for dramatizing the fascistic impulse inherent in the action hero. This is an argument that was famously attributed to the “Dirty” Harry Callahan character by Roger Ebert and other major reviewers, and has neither matured nor developed in its articulation here. In this case, Stein discusses the unnamed protagonists of High Plains Drifter (1973 – Eastwood’s second film as director) and Pale Rider (1985 – his eleventh). In both films, Eastwood’s direction hints that his character is a resurrected, avenging spirit, supernaturally powerful and possibly invulnerable, who arrives in a small town that desperately needs protection from ruthless, corporate interests. From here, it is a logical step to interrogate each character’s Byronic resonances.
A factual error in her description of High Plains Drifter (she attributes the prostitute’s act of defiance to the innkeeper’s shrewish wife) is the first suggestion that this topic has not received her full attention. Stein is quite critical of the vigilantism of Eastwood’s Western Byronic heroes because she interprets them as inspiring precisely the sort of unquestioning obedience that discomforted Byron, who saw its inevitable abuse in Napoleon. Since both Eastwood characters do in fact adopt a leadership role and behave in violent and profoundly anti-social ways all while gaining the audience’s sympathy, there is clearly a case to be made that Eastwood emphasizes the fascistic impulse of the actor hero. And yet, it strikes me as simplistic to read the films as endorsing the fantasy of immediate and extralegal justice.
On one hand, Eastwood locates an idealization of vigilantism in the highly charged context of the villagers’ desire for justice, which differs drastically between the two films. High Plains Drifter describes a quite literal ‘Hell on Earth’, where the community leaders have abandoned all but the pretence of justice in order to protect the interests of a mining company. Eastwood’s character rages against the townspeople’s indifference to the tyranny and hypocrisy of their leaders, repeatedly pushing them to rise up against authority by taking it upon himself to become an intolerable tyrant and hypocrite. The conceit of the film is that, despite himself, he is utterly incapable of exploiting them to the degree that they will revolt or reject him. Indeed, the nearest he comes to leading the villagers to embrace justice, namely the prostitute’s lone attempt to kill him after he has raped her, is both thwarted by other villagers, and more importantly, was provoked not by the rape itself, which, Eastwood makes clear she enjoys, but rather by callously abandoning her afterward. Thus, although Eastwood’s character does resemble a Byronic hero, he is distinguished from that trope through his constant efforts to lead the villagers to free themselves from both himself and from their normal leaders. By utterly failing in this regard, despite the training and preparation they receive from him, they express a deeply dysfunctional relationship to tyrannical leadership that marks them as well and truly living in hell. The dwarf’s grotesque, gleeful and utterly passive spectatorship hideously distorts the viewer’s vicarious pleasure, further undermining the apparent justice of the Eastwood character’s acts of violence. These acts are after all motivated by his indignation that the town witnessed the murder of the former marshal without intervening. Stein’s interpretation of the film seems to me to badly miss the mark, in effect assuming the very idealization of violence against which the Eastwood character responds.
On the other hand, Pale Rider (following its model Shane), describes a passive community of panhandlers who require help in battling the immoral corporate objectives of the villainous LaHood. Here, Eastwood is eager to demonstrate the corrosive effect violence has upon such a community. Despite the religious overtones of his character (dubbed ‘The Preacher’), Eastwood’s presence is divisive and corrupting. The point here seems to be rather that institutionalized violence is a necessary evil when confronting the anarchy and tyranny of LaHood’s corporate objectives, and is not a celebration of such violence in and of itself. Thus, I think that both films offer fairly complex commentaries on extra-legal justice; in both cases, Eastwood’s protagonist functions more as a Socratic guide, leading the villagers rather painfully toward a corrected social vision, than an embodiment of violent and anti-social subconscious impulses.
This is not to diminish Stein’s quite thoughtful commentary on Unforgiven and, in the rest of the chapter, on the two Crow films and the two Terminator films (which are themselves much more simplistic interpretations of the Byronic hero as vigilante). Indeed, Stein partly makes up for her rather limited reading of Eastwood’s earlier work by developing a quite sophisticated reading of his explicit critique of the Byronic hero in Unforgiven(although here too her arguments echo the critical consensus rather than blaze a new trail). Her interpretation of the Crow and Terminator films stresses their often quite alarming idealization of violent vigilantes, and particularly in her discussion of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, her writing really comes alive. Eric Draven (‘The Crow’), Sarah Conner and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s kindly terminator all clearly fascinate Stein, not just for their buried political commentary, but, one suspects (although she never quite makes this clear), for the aesthetic values that tie them to the recent emergence of fantasy and science fiction in mainstream cinema and television.
Stein follows her reading of the Byronic hero as vigilante with discussions of the hero taken to its egotistical and feminist extremes. Both discussions bring together a wide range of material that share a common origin in science fiction and fantasy genres or subcultures. With the exception of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, all have achieved levels of mainstream acceptance. In her discussion of Sandman’s protagonist, Dream, and in her discussion of Anne Rice’s character Lestat, her arguments are particularly compelling. Both figures “express[…] the very paradox of Romantic desire – desiring that which makes one miserable once attained” (p. 101), but equally, both characters are explicitly designed to bridge the Romantic origin which they embody aesthetically and the contemporary world that they embrace, if at times ambivalently. In these two figures, Stein finds many inroads into the question of why the Byronic trope in particular is of such interest to this genre of an emergent fandom: through their deeply contradictory relationship to their varied objects of desire, they metaphorically enact a profound longing for the past that is deferred precisely through the dynamism of that past, its continuing engagement with the future.
The chapter on the feminist Byronic heroine mainly returns to the vigilante conception of the trope, and is structured around Sarah Conner of the Terminator franchise and Ellen Ripley of the Alien franchise. Both characters are chastised by Stein, who sees them for the most part as either chronically dysfunctional role models or simply drag versions of the Eastwood, Eric Draven or Terminator figures. She looks to the cult film Tank Girl (1995) as a positive example of feminist Byronism, which strikes me as a very arbitrary choice. But although this chapter does not quite achieve the depths of her discussion of the egotistical Byronic hero, Stein may have simply completed her research at a very inopportune moment. Indeed, a strong case could be made that the feminine feminist Byronic heroine has only recently come into her own in Hollywood and in mainstream television. Thus, for example, while Stein briefly mentions Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, his feature film Serenity develops a more emphatically Byronic heroine in Summer Glau’s character River. Stein would have also benefited from Lena Headey’s take on Sarah Conner in Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles; from Summer Glau’s appearance as the Byronic female terminator in that series; from Kristanna Loken’s evil female terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines; and, in a similar genre, the character of Starbuck (played by Katee Sackhoff) in the new Battlestar Galactica. The sudden prominence of this character type, which has come to make the spunkiness of Tank Girl look rather quaint, should be taken as proof in itself of the usefulness of Stein’s thesis.
Somewhat quixotically, Stein interrupts the thematic approach to the material by inserting a full chapter dedicated to the character Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Although it unbalances the book somewhat, the chapter nevertheless works as an opportunity to bring together the vigilantism, egotism and humour of the trope in a single character. In one of the more striking asides in the text, Stein notes that the actor who portrays Q, John de Lancie, bears a physical similarity to the well-known Phillips portrait of Byron (1814). At this point, the reader may turn to the seven images included in the text, where Stein has assembled the principle subjects of the book, all wearing the same pouting expression as the Phillips portrait – an effective device reminiscent of one used by Godard in the collaborative work Letter to Jane(1972).
A peculiarity of this book is that, by way of justifying her selection of this material, she merely indicates their common engagement with the Byronic hero trope, thereby bypassing any suggestion of a coherent, general aesthetic trend. I suspect much of her reluctance to comment on deeper historical unities emerges from her use of the Eastwood material, which skews her time-line and undermines the overall unity suggested by the rest of the material. Since, as I suggest above, the Eastwood material does not earn a very nuanced reading in the first place, it would probably have done better as a stand-alone article. Nevertheless, the five chapters of the book each approach distinct facets of the Byronic hero, ultimately cohering into a sophisticated interpretation of a contemporary trope of exceeding popularity. If the Romantic cult of the hero is alive and well these days, Stein reminds us that it has a decidedly Byronic quality. This may or may not be a comfort to those who seek a maturing sense of moral accountability in this superficially nihilistic and anti-social character.
Stein ends her book by noting, “the connections between Byron’s heroes and the Byronic hero in contemporary culture have an almost unlimited potential yet to be explored” (p. 218). Inevitably, other minor objections can be raised, and there are far too many typos (almost fifty by my count), but Stein does a fine job of clarifying just how and why the Byronic hero has come to the sudden prominence it has, and what that has to do with its Romantic origins.
Tom Crosbie,
La Trobe University, Australia.
Created on: Thursday, 17 July 2008