Perfect Love

The latter John Wayne movies all had a similar thematic structure.  John was usually the lone knight on some sort of solitary quest.  (i.e. get the bad guy, find the kidnap victim, etc.)  An ensemble cast personified people either overcoming personal problems or coming of age, its own special personal problem.  And oh yeah, there was always a love interest, because that's the way Hollywood roles. This theme and its fairly generic subplots along with occasional twists, was played out in other movies of the era as well.  Somehow, John Wayne movies always managed to be somewhat entertaining, while at the same time being among some of the most predictable.  ("The Shootist" is a notable exception to this construct.  It is more in the vein of tragedy that Hemingway popularized at the beginning of the 20th century.)

This genre gradually gave way and eventually disappeared all together.  These days, there's usually no back drop of a heroic quest of any sort.  As a society, not necessarily as individuals, we seem to have abandoned heroic quests.  These days, movies tend toward either a tragic or comedic version of Midsummer Night's Dream.  Essentially, feelings are initially hidden behind masks either of our construct or assigned to us by family or culture.  Gradually as the masks come down, mass confusion erupts and eventually the boy and girl either get each other (the comedic ending), or they don't (the tragic one).

I guess quests do still exist in movies but usually these seem to be more forced upon the individual then they were in the past.  To my mind, these stories are not so much about heroism as they are about survival.

And survival is really only ever survival; it is never heroism.  This is the case even though extreme maybe even desperate measures may be needed to preserve survival.  Survival is self based.  Heroism is self-less, either for others or even purely for principle alone.  My assertion of the day is that there is no such thing as heroic survival.  Survival's current elevated societal status is narcissistic and unwarranted. 

I don't think it stretches the point too much to say that all these constructs regardless of form and time period are in the end, attempts to manage and direct our fears, doubts and even angst about our existence.  We attempt to do this by assigning values and in turn meaning to activities and people. 

The interesting thing is, these entertainments are all really just band aids.  They always were, even if they were written by Shakespeare or Hemingway or acted by John Wayne or Will Smith.  We used to hold a greater grasp of this as evidenced by a tacit nod by all in society to the personal need and even causal necessity of an appeal to higher authority for values an morals.

In the course of this change, we've lost the prescription and even the drug store.  From where we now find ourselves, Google maps, GPS and even self esteem won't help us navigate selflessness.

The prescription is love.   Perfect love is love that God has for anything and everything he loves.  Human love in its' best form in this life is an ongoing co-conspiracy between God and the individual human to perfect love of the "other" in the individual human.  The love object is God and others in that order.

That probably all sounds pretty dry and abstract.  If you've never read this or haven't read it in awhile or just want to, read this now:  1 Corinthians 13

When that sort of love starts to be the ascendant part of the soul, the person in question starts to care less and less about the options and solutions that are self centric.  There's no longer a place for fear and/or fear management.  And to be clear, here's another passage that addresses the issue directly:  1 John 4:18

In his famous WWII speech another 20th century icon, Franklin Roosevelt built a great rhetorical construct that was as dead wrong as it was powerful in the moment.  "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  No we don't.  Not now.  Not ever.