I’m not thinking of real life here, but I’m sure that there are many who find themselves in a moment of adversity or personal challenge acting in a manner that the rest of us recognize as heroic despite the fact that the hero(ine) was just trying to do the best (s)he could in the moment. I was reflecting on a few fictional heroines that we saw last night. The first was Jennifer Walters, the heroine in Disney’s new series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law played by Tatiana Maslany. The first episode aired this past Thursday; it is an origin story. It is light-hearted and not the least self-absorbed. This heroine is a litigator trying to bring the bad guys to justice; she has no desire to be a superhero. Her cousin, Bruce Banner, does his best to convince her that having acquired Hulk power, she has no choice but to become a super-hero. She’s having none of it. Unlike Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, she is not conflicted being two different entities in one body. She is simply herself with the ability to Hulk Out.
Later in the evening, I caught just a bit of Late Night with Seth Meyers. One of his guests was Iman Vellani who plays Kamala – the title role in Disney’s Miss Marvel mini-series. Kamala is a high-school student who inherits matrilineal superpowers. She begins her feats of heroism with a certain degree of reluctance and trepidation. It fits perfectly because we are all just a bit tortured by our insecurities and the vagueness of our futures at that age.
When I went to bed, I found Susan watching the last 30-minutes of Sheng-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. “Change it if you like,” she said. We both like that movie, and I wasn’t about to change the channel. While there is nothing reluctantly heroic about Shaun, his friend Katy is a different matter altogether. Katy’s human superpower is unpredictability – her ability to throw off an opponent by doing something totally unexpected if not overtly absurd – like fending off an attacker by bursting into song. Yet, it turns out that there is more to her superpower – the kind of thing that can turn the tide in a conflict that without her intervention might be lost.
As Colossus says in Dead Pool, “Four or five moments – that’s all it takes to become a hero. Everyone thinks it’s a full-time job. Wake up a hero. Brush your teeth a hero. Go to work a hero. Not true. Over a lifetime there are only four or five moments that really matter.”
Those are the moments when not only ordinary mortals but even superheroes reveal themselves. Â