The Hero-Victim Complex

While watching The Dark Knight Rises with some friends, I started playing with the idea of the hero-victim complex in my head. This is something that probably rings a bell since everyone is familiar with the idea of the protagonist in movies and novels; a character who faces insurmountable challenges, only to emerge as the ultimate victor in the end. But I’d like to think that the idea of the hero-victim complex is quite different compared to this well-known idea of the protagonist who overcomes adversities. The hero-victim complex is something that lives in the psyche and the metaphysics of a hero (superhero, revolutionary hero, modern day hero, unsung hero, microhero, etc.), and which heavily influences how heroism is manifested in the social, historical, and philosophical context, and which greatly affects how the hero and his or her heroism is perceived. The hero-victim complex also lives in the collective psyche – society, culture, art, religion, institutions, etc.

I myself find it challenging to structuralize and articulate this idea and so by writing this blog post, I hope to achieve some clarity myself. To start, I’d like to look at the characters of the hero and the victim separately. The hero is empowered and independent. The hero creates things, makes decisions, and takes action to initiate radical change, often for the better. The victim, on the other hand, is powerless and is a captive unable to escape. The victim is created, molded, and changed without any choice of what it is to become.

Now, the previous paragraph is easy to understand because the human mind is structured to think in terms of binary opposites – light and dark, good and evil, hero and victim, etc. But I’d like to think of the hero-victim complex as something singular like a magnetic monopole. I’d like to avoid using terminologies like sides, components, elements, etc. because these would imply the hero and the victim as separate. And I’d also like to do away with the bias of the hero-victim complex being an affliction of heroes (the hero taking precedence over the victim), and so from this point on I’d use hero-victim as a label instead of hero or victim separately or preferentially. Instead, I’d like to think of the hero-victim complex as a moving, two-directional cycle.

First, I’d like to think of the hero-victim as a living person (postmodernism aside). The hero-victim is born into a family, into a society, into conditions that are imposed (by nature, by social status, by geography, by family and social values, and other condition creators) and these conditions literally create, shape, and continuously change the hero-victim. At the same time, the hero-victim practices the capability of choice and action so at the same time that the hero-victim is created, shaped, and changed, the hero-victim also creates, shapes, and changes its reality or its “world.” But these capabilities of choice and action are likewise constantly created, re-created, shaped, and changed by the hero-victim’s world. But the conditions to which the hero-victim is born into are also creations of the hero-victim’s consciousness, changed and adjusted as it sees fit. And so it is not really the hero victim and its “world” changing each other from opposite sides. The hero-victim is its world (its reality) and the hero-victim’s world is the hero-victim. They are one and the same, and nothing takes precedence over the other. And so the hero and the victim are neither complementary nor independent nor are they two sides of something dual. The hero-victim complex is indeed singular.

Now if I think of the hero-victim as a character in general (in history, in fiction, in social aspirations, etc.), it is easy to see the hero-victim as a projection of its meta-reality and the meta-reality as an extension of the hero-victim, and the hero-victim and its meta-reality being one and the same.

I’m not sure if what I have written makes any sense but writing this blog post has been a pleasure nonetheless. I will close with some of my random thoughts about The Dark Knight Rises:

1. I like the way they used androgyny to create an unexpected twist at the end.

2. I found it ironic that the Catwoman is supposed to be an icon of women empowerment but in the film, her waist looked like it’s been bound by a corset.

3. I just had this thought that maybe civilizations follow something like the second law of thermodynamics, that as a civilization progresses it also becomes more chaotic and anarchic until it collapses – similar to the eventual heat death of the universe.

4. Marion Cotillard’s acting really stood out. I especially liked the death scene where she looked like she was doing a modelesque pose.

5. One of my favorite lines from the film: “There’s a vertebra protruding from your back. We have to put it back.”