Celebrities and our Quest for the Human Ideal

It is a bummer to discover that someone who has embodied a human ideal for us—and I’m thinking here particularly of our culture’s picture of what a man should be—is nothing like the person we hoped he was.

For years, Bill Cosby gave millions of Americans Cliff Huxtable, an extraordinarily appealing picture of the ideal father: loving, wise, funny, decent. Then we discovered that the man who embodied that ideal on our screens had done terrible things to women.

Mel Gibson gave us another kind of human ideal in Braveheart: the courageous hero fighting for freedom. Then came the revelations of his ugly anti-Semitism and abuse of women.

We get fed by celebrities who embody things that we value, and we want them to be thoroughly worthy of our appreciation. We want what we see to be what we get. With Cosby and Gibson, the contradiction between the ideal and the actual person could hardly have been more extreme.

But in our quest for the perfect hero, consistency doesn’t altogether solve the problem either. Like John Wayne.

John Wayne played John Wayne practically every time. His heroism is almost a standing identity. He is the fighter for the righteous side, with pretty much the same set of virtues from one role to another. You’d WANT a commander like John Wayne if you were in a shooting war and your life depended on his leading well. There are people I’d want to have with me in my World War II platoon whom I wouldn’t much want to be around in civilian life.

And John Wayne is said to have increasingly seen himself as that John Wayne character, and increasingly became that character—for better but also, it turned out, for worse.

During the post-war years, a paranoia took hold in the United States about the danger of a communist takeover. A terrible person, Senator Joe McCarthy, was using that paranoia to cut a swath through the American body politic, by waging a war on communism based on lies and an opportunistic willingness to destroy lives to increase his own power.

The role that John Wayne played in that battle as it was waged in Hollywood displayed the same kind of certainty and bellicosity we admire in other situations. But it is a bummer when we come to know that John Wayne played a despicable role in that drama, because he lacked the good judgment to see what was really the danger. He thought the role for the hero to play was to be a red-blooded American anti-communist, waging battle against the reds. Lives were needlessly ruined by the side that consistent John Wayne took in that battle.

John Wayne’s character is always SURE, as we want his kind of hero to be. But his judgment was not nearly good enough to warrant such certainty. He was too full of himself to warrant being so sure of himself. He lacked the humility to recognize that he could be part of the problem and no part of the solution.

We love John Wayne’s certainty when he’s leading his troops into battle. But his certainty wasn’t a virtue when his understanding was deeply flawed. Qualities that are virtues in a variety of movie situations can become a way for Evil to harness that character structure to do damage rather than make things better.

A lot of the qualities of the American male hero make him good in heroic roles, but not necessarily so good at playing the part of the human being in human relations and human society. John Wayne’s movie situations generally call for courage, toughness, loyalty, certainty, a willingness to fight. They don’t require him to be much of a mensch. And a man magnificently equipped for those heroic situations might be something of a jerk in situations that require empathy, humility, or understanding. He might even go off cock-sure of what a patriot should do when he doesn’t have the judgment to recognize where the real danger to his country lies.

But sometimes the movies have given us a different kind of hero.

Gregory Peck specialized in playing this different kind of hero. With Peck—from Roman Holiday to To Kill a Mockingbird to The Big Country to The Stalking Moon—one got a man who had the heroic virtues but whose humanity was part of the heroism. Atticus Finch could not be the hero he was without being the mensch he was. His courage required compassion, moral understanding, and the ability to see other people clearly. He was all of a piece.

And, from all appearances, Gregory Peck himself didn’t let us down. The man who embodied those qualities on the screen seems to have been recognizably the same kind of man when the cameras weren’t running.

So also with Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips. Captain Phillips is a mensch who proves to have what it takes to play the role of the hero when an extreme situation requires it. Being a hero isn’t his general posture in the world, as it is with John Wayne, stuck in hero mode. It is a once-in-a-lifetime role that a regular human being is compelled to play.

And Hanks, like Peck, has so far given us no Cosby/Gibson contradiction between the human being we’ve been invited to admire and the human being behind the image.

So, it can be done.

That, I think, is part of what celebrity is about. We want our idols to match our ideals. We want the person we admire on the screen—or on the playing field or wherever—to be worthy of the admiration we’ve given him.

Underneath that, I think, is a craving to see someone who’s precisely what a human should be. The act of heroism. The possession also of the virtues that make a mensch a mensch. And when some celebrity turns out to be actually the decent guy we want him to be—like Tom Hanks, from all appearances—there’s a feeling of coming into possession of a treasure of some sort.

(We also seem to want to bring our idols down to our level—hence the appetite for celebrity scandals. “See, they and their lives are as flawed as you and yours.” There’s an ambivalence about raising another human being to something like divine status while one is stuck down here in the all-too-human. We want to raise people up into embodiments of the human ideal, and we also take some satisfaction in seeing them brought back down.)

The question of how a human being should be is a pretty big question that’s been asked in every culture. One of culture’s essential tasks is furnishing us with models of human excellence.

Our species is born so unformed that it is ready to shape itself to fit whatever culture this human is born into. Culture completes the job of making us human. So we are dependent on culture to teach us how a person should be. “Thou shalt not.” “Do unto others….”

Different cultures provide different pictures, and work in different ways to form their young into what each culture has decided people should be. And anthropology and history — and even the daily newspaper — show that sometimes these pictures of what people should be can be deeply flawed.

(In some family cultures in America, there might be no qualifications or additions to the idea that “a person should be like John Wayne.” The idea that John Wayne might play a destructive role in a fraught moment in American history—the post-war, post-nuke, Red Scare—doesn’t occur to them. We have seen in the America of our times that certainty combined with bad political judgment is one way that people in our culture can go dangerously wrong.)

But however flawed and incomplete our pictures of what a person should be, THE QUEST FOR HUMAN PERFECTION is on, built into us cultural animals.

And celebrity culture is one of the places where we enact that ancient search for humanity in perfect form: the most beautiful face, the perfect body, the person it is pleasurable to IDENTIFY with, the hero, the mensch—the human being who shows us something of what a human being can and should be.