It's our destiny, but the future is not written in stone

Over the past three days, I have, along with a group of between ten and fifteen other people, rewatched the entire first season of Heroes. A good show, especially for network television. One of the things I was struck by while rewatching is its thematic coherence, something I'm fairly certain is quite rare for television in general: from the beginning, the message of love through togetherness and the need to unite to overcome is clearly emphasized without hitting you over the head with it, dealt with in a number of different ways without it getting monotonous. The themes themselves are not particularly original (indeed, are glaringly unoriginal), but my point is that they're presented well.

There is another theme, however, also developed from the beginning, that I find disgusting and deeply offensive -- and that, like its others, is something very common to a variety of entertainment. It's the theme of destiny (destiny is good, fate is bad, even though they're the same thing) -- that we all have a purpose, that we're "special" (though I love how it plays with people's conflicting desires for conformity and individuality, in this sense it's ugly), that we are a part of larger plan.

While I hate the idea of such control itself, if a narrative was honest about its point I wouldn't mind that much -- in fact, if dealt with realistically I think it could be fascinating -- but what is so disgusting is that it isn't treated realistically and it isn't honest. Everyone has a destiny until that destiny (sorry, fate) is for something bad to happen, like Heroes' nuclear New York -- then "the future isn't written in stone" (a passionate cry from Claire Bennet in the finale undermined by both its cliche nature and this inherent contradiction). Then we can change things -- by fulfilling our real destiny, to have a good ending. Because our destiny is always to have a good ending, and when that doesn't happen -- well, someone screwed up. It was their fault, not destiny or fate or God's.

You can't put forth the idea of destiny and then have your heroes change theirs when they don't like it. Another of Heroes' strengths is the tendency for its villains (usually Sylar or Linderman) to twist a thematic message to their own purposes, making it into a plausible argument for their own obviously immoral intentions. But here's where Heroes drops the ball, because while Linderman's reasoning behind the bomb is abhorrent, his crap about destiny is just as legitimate as everything Peter or anyone else says about it in the series. (Or maybe I'm just bitter and Linderman's full of shit. Take your pick.)

As I mentioned this contradiction is present in a lot of mainstream entertainment. It's not the creators' fault, exactly -- it's an obvious result of our own contradictory feelings towards the idea of fate. We want to know that everything's going to be okay, but we want to be in control. We want to be safe but we want to be free. The truth is that it's not possible to do both, and that's where Heroes and all the others fail, by presenting it as if we can. The job of art is to confront and reveal that which we don't have the strength to face ourselves. Not presenting that contradiction and forcing a choice between the two (especially nowadays, when the issue of control and safety vs. freedom and danger has become explicitly political) is not only untruthful (and therefore immoral) but dangerous.

Someday I'd like to write something about a character that rejects destiny, rejects fate and God and everything else, and then is slowly forced to accept that it's true, that their life is on a set path and that they can't do anything to change it. And then, faced with a life that's not theirs, they take control of their life by ending it. Bang, shot to the head, down for the count, story ends without resolution, epilogue, even much of a climax. Just dead and end. I'm sure someone has already written something like this, much better than I could, and I'm not even sure it's right (moral) to do it in a linear medium, because of course in such a story even the suicide is really an act of fate rather than the character's decision, because fictional characters can't make decisions separate from the writer (unless you do something like when Phillip K. Dick supposedly used the I-Ching to write The Man in the High Castle).

Which is also why I've thought that the best method to present this would be as a video game that drives the player character and thus the player toward the realization that everything is out of their control and that the only way to achieve a measure of victory is to commit suicide. Even then I'm not sure it's right -- if you're driving them toward it, is it still their choice? At least it's a real human making the decision then is the thought I guess, but I'm not sure if that's enough. Maybe this is one thing that art can't convey -- if, as I once argued, purpose is a fundamental attribute of art (even if we, including the artist, don't know what it is), then it may well be impossible to create a work of art that attacks purpose with any success (though one could certainly tell a story of attacking purpose without success -- e.g., if in the story above the protagonist doesn't succeed in committing suicide, or if they were supposed to commit suicide all along).

Is this, once more, the difference between art and life? Art has meaning and life does not. We create art to communicate life, but is it even possible? Direction cannot convey a lack of itself.