The Good-Bad Hero Comes to a Poignant End

The Good-Bad Hero Comes to a
Poignant End
TREATING THE purely evil protagonist is, at best, a dangerous
business. Even assuming that the writer does not make
the fatal error of seeming to sympathize with a bad man,
the editor, reading such a story, fails to see in it the moral
uplift which the slick magazine has dedicated itself to
presenting. When an editor does buy such a story, he does
so because he feels it is simply too "strong" a piece to turn
down. It has its change-of-pace value, but nonetheless,
essentially, it breaks with the formula. That is the main
reason why the bad men of these stories are so exaggeratedly
bad. The slick editor is afraid of being misinterpreted.
After all, he has proclaimed himself to be a
purveyor of high-type stuff, fit for consumption by the
entire family. If certain of his readers would find occasional
sex and violence interesting, they'll just have to look elsewhere.
The good editor can't afford to rock his boat; it's
too full of gold.
Strangely enough, stories about half-bad men and women
are even more dangerous to the position of slick editors .
Hollywood has made millions on them; book publishers
love them; Broadway, radio, and television thrive on them .
The legend and folk literature of every land are full of
them. But the slicks are slow to admit them to their pages
and suspicious of them when they do.
The quaint or noble law- and convention-breakers of
myth and history hold a tremendous fascination for the
public. And they should; they are a unique breed. Constantly
contravening the laws of the land, they studiously
abide by the codes of sportsmanship and gallantry. They
are every desperado the early Humphrey Bogart played in
motion pictures. They are Robin Hood and Jesse James.
When Willie Sutton, the notorious New York bank robber,
was finally apprehended-as an example of the public's
eagerness for this type of hero-the public set about making
him into a lovable rascal. The public smiled at reports
of his cleverness, audaciousness, and seeming sense of fair
play. Unfortunately, the literal-minded authorities revealed
him as a pathetic little man-bright as crooks go-
but otherwise just a lonely, frustrated, beaten neurotic.
The public was very disappointed.
The appetite for this kind of hero is strong in certain
segments of the slick-reading public, and he is so well
established as a familiar fictional type as to be inoffensive
to any but the professional evil-influence-sniffer-outers.
The natural urge of slick editors would be to use these
good-bad heroes and use them a-plenty. Well, they do use
them-but hardly a-plenty.
The reason for this editorial caution can be found by
inquiring into the social viewpoint glorified by these modern
Robin Hoods. They defend the individual's concept
of ethical behavior rather than the community' s. By their
actions they ridicule vested interests. They romanticize
rebellion against authority. Their approach to life implies
anarchy.
All this may seem unnecessary and arbitrary theorizing.
But there must be a reason for the relatively infrequen t
incidence in the slicks of this classically popular type of
story. Although slick fiction may appear to be a highly
organized medium of reactionary propagandizing, probably
neither advertiser nor editor nor writer is entirely conscious
of all the moral and social implications of slick
fiction. Yet, common to popular magazine fiction are these
taboos and strictures which definitely set slicks apart from
other communication media, and, consciously or not, editors,
advertisers, and writers have formed them.
At any rate, just as the gay, devil-may-care cavalier is
not the type the manufacturer wants as an employee in
his business, so he does not care to find that type in the
fiction he supports. What is to be done? Drop the type
completely from the pages of the magazine when the type
would so patently titillate readers? Not quite. The editor
will slip one in every now and then, taking the greatest
precautions when he does.
Here is a hero who is an admitted swindler. But he does
not swindle old ladies, he swindles racketeers. He makes his
living by stealing from the underworld (much as Robin Hood
stole from the fat and decadent privileged classes who, too,
were undeserving of their wealth). The hero is known to
members of the underworld. They are aware of his means of
livelihood, and most of them have been hoodwinked by him.
It is a sport among the big-time crooks to listen to the hero's
propositions, and to take him up on them; but if the racketeer
can catch the hero in his trick, whatever it happens to be at
the time, then it is understood that the racketeer will kill him.
To date, the hero has plied his trade without being caught.
When the story opens he has met and fallen for a blonde. He
has decided, after the manner of so many good-bad heroes,
that he will pull off one last job, then quit and settle down
with the blonde. With this in mind, he visits the suite of the
biggest, meanest crook in town. The boss is there like the
familiar little king surrounded by his henchmen. He is amused
at the hero's audacity in coming and challenging him to a
duel of wits. The proposition offered by the hero is a large
bet on a horse race at a local track.
The racketeer accepts the bet, directing his henchmen to
watch carefully for the hero's gimmick. They check the clock
in the room against telephone time to make sure the hero
can't pull off a post-race hoax. Then they sit the hero in the
middle of the room. The hero, for his part, uses his prerogative
of waiting to choose his horse until the very last minute.
While they all wait for post time, the hero excuses himself
and goes to the bathroom. The racket boss sends a henchman
to stand guard outside. In the bathroom, behind a closed
door, the hero manages to blow the electric fuse by tampering
with the bathroom light socket. This stops the electric clock
in the room where the gangsters are waiting. The hero returns
from the bathroom, calls his choice of horse after the race
has been run, which fact the stopped clock does not indicate.
The gangster boss gets the result of the race late over the
phone since his radio would not play and finds that he has
been successfully tricked by the hero.
The hero leaves intact, but when he goes to meet the blonde
at a prearranged spot he discovers she has had a fatal car
accident. The hero feels responsible for the accident because
he had had her park the car in an indicative position along
the street in view of the bathroom window of the gangster's
apartment, after she had picked up the race result over the
car radio. The reader is left with the impression that the
hero has had his spiritual back broken.
There is a subtle ambiguity to a story like this-or rather
a devious moral duplicity. Essential to the success of the
story, to any slick story, is a sympathetic hero. Essential
to the flavor of such a story as this is the illegal practices
of the hero. In a freer fictional form there would be no danger
in the reader equating the "sympatheticness" of the
hero and the illegal behavior. But in the slicks the equation
is poisonous. Consequently, what the reader should be
given is bad deeds done by a good man. The trick in separating
the doer from the deeds is accomplished by qualifying
the "bad" actions to the point where they become
only nominally bad. In this particular tale, of course, the
qualification is achieved by having the swindler swindle
swindlers.
Nonetheless, there is the chance that literal-minded readers
will take as strong exception to this kind of usage as to
any less subtle, so that the writer is compelled to provide
punishment for the transgression-as slight as that transgession has been made to seem. This is a stricture fully as
demanding as that which forces Hollywood movie-makers
to see that every motion-picture murder is avenged. The
reader has come to expect such a denouement and looks to
the writer to give him an imaginative and original punishment.
category:plot lines