Query: the incompetent hero--responses after Mike

From: Dicandeloro, Zachariah Joseph <[email protected]>

Mike wrote that we are looking for "incompetent guys who nevertheless 'save
the day'."

But Darryl makes an interesting point about perceptive relation (see
dropped block quote below). Think Inspector Gadget. Behind every great man,
there is someone somewhere who knows what an idiot he really is. Or again,
behind every idiot, there is someone somewhere to whom said person is a
hero etc.

The whole idea of the "incompetent hero" seems to suggest an irrevocable
syntactic relation. There will always be an "outside" and "inside" view.
Two sides to the coin, as it were. There are plenty of characters who are
heroes to their friends or families, but who are incompetent where civic
virtue is concerned (Sopranos fans?... I mean, The Sopranos?). And there
are heroes who are great with civic virtue, but who fail miserably in
private life, e.g. Batman.

Instead of treating "incompetent hero" as a syntagma, perhaps it would be
more useful to think of it as a constructive binary opposition:
Incompetent/Hero. Meanwhile according to complexity, the Same/Other
relation vis-a-vis said binary shall be determined according to perceptive
relation---i.e. to account for a viewer-response which may identify the
heroic qua heroic in Freddy Krueger (God help us).

But, as Darryl points out, even viewer-response does little to actually
resolve the question because there is still an Inside/Outside relation of
character functions within the story itself. This is a very important
point, I think. ...And then there are similar recursive questions about
whether the Incompetent/Hero actually works to subvert real world heroism!
Darryl's discussion of D. Craig's Bond sharpens this distinction nicely:
Skyfall Bond gets the job done in spite of himself, but to what purpose
after all? Rin Tin Tin makes a better icon of the hero in just about every
way (on the outside).

Darryl wrote:
[...] But in the examples I cited -- The Great Escape, Runaway Train, Going
in
Style -- the hero perception is rooted in the perception of other
characters in the story. The police characters, or prison officials
certainly wouldn't see them that way (and those who tend to dislike such
films largely share the view of such characters), but to others within,
they clearly are. It's the same divide that exists in the Inspector
Clouseau/Pink Panther comedies, as well as similar stories -- one set of
people (usually outsider characters) who only see the heroic results, vs
the inside characters who know the buffoonish truth, and that their results
are not by design, but by bizarre chance.[...]

--Joseph