Acting Heroes: Heroes, Homos, and the Postmodern in Recent Hollywood Cinema

“The modern hero is no hero, he acts heroes,” Walter Benjamin tells us (1973, 97). In recent Hollywood cinema, this statement seems more relevant than ever. Instead of a monolithic, homogenous concept of heroism we are faced with a wide range of heroes and anti-heroes all playing their part in the show of postmodernity. The term ’acting heroes’ refers to both the film hero who executes rather than plausibly incorporates the myth and to the actor himself who clearly performs and acts heroes. The classic film trailer “Clint Eastwood IS Dirty Harry” seems rather comical today. To totally identify an actor with the mythic hero he embodies is like believing in Santa Claus or assuming that babies are found in the cabbage patch. The actor as an integral entity seems to be just as dead as the proverbial author in the Foucauldian argument. The playful intertextual reference to various circulating myths and cultural ideas has gradually replaced the illusion of essence, truth and universality that was once associated with the hero figure. The hero has stepped out from the movie screen and has entered not only postmodern culture, but also our mind. He has become, more and more, a product of our cultural symbolic production and the machinery of our imagination.