Contributors
John Mark Reynolds- Contributor

John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy, at Biola University.

Too Many Matchstick Men
Hollywood and the Anti-Hero
[John Mark Reynolds] 9/16/03

My oldest son is a pleasant young man, polite without being Eddie Haskell-ish, a good student, obedient without slavishness. I guess he will never amount to much.

Today's culture is not looking for good boys, but for bad boys who can be redeemed. The new movie Matchstick Men reminds one that deviant personalities are more interesting to moderns than normal ones. Do what you should and Hollywood yawns, but become a con artist with enough foibles to keep a team of exorcists busy for a year and you get your own movie.

It isn’t quite fair to pick on the pleasant Matchstick Men, with Nicolas Cage. As films go this year, it is not that bad. Cage is a con artist with a good many odd tics and what used to be called a heart of gold. He has robbed lots of little old ladies, but he is still has his values. All he needs is the love of an estranged daughter and some pipe puffing advice from an avuncular psychiatrist to become the good man he has always been inside.

Cage has been here before with Family Man. This is a longer and more serious film, and it feels longer and more serious. If you enjoy watching a man smoking cigarettes from odd camera angles, then this is the film for you. If you are looking for a decent role model for yourself or others and have not already committed several felonies, then this film is unlikely to be helpful.

Of course, as a traditional Christian I believe in redemption. Heaven knows I have needed a second chance myself. The future Rushmore president George W. Bush famously needed a few second chances to grow up to be president. However, in making the redemptive point that scars can deepen character, the culture often forgets that a scar is still a scar. It would be better if it were not there.

But isn’t the good guy dull? Don’t those scars produce character? One need not earn hard life experience by being immoral or wicked. A life of service and challenge is a better way to add depth and soul without the regrets of a misspent life. Service is hard and requires sacrifice. Moderns prefer moral pornography that pretends a misspent life can be meaningful. It can even be made meaningful quickly. Almost all the matchstick men end up in jail for years of their lives, but Hollywood pretends that most of them are almost painlessly fixed and led to middle class comfort.

It was not always this way. My children love the old fifties television show Superman. Superman never lies or does anything wrong. Ever. The best of these charming shows for children rely on mystery where Superman must use his brains and not just his brawn to solve crime.

Of course, adults need more complex story telling that recognizes the flaws in heroes. The heroes of the traditional story are such men, flawed but basically sound. Sherlock Holmes was a good man with some vices. His virtue was dominant and was easy to spot and he lived a life of duty to justice, like his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Men in the Middle Ages understood that the adulterous Lancelot missed the vision of the Holy Grail. His sin helped destroy Camelot. Galahad experienced the greatest adventures of all romance and climaxed a life well spent with the highest honor of knighthood. Galahad saw the Grail. Moderns love Lancelot and are bored with Galahad. The musical Camelot seems to wish that everyone had just lightened up and let sleeping sinners lie. Of course, it fails to account for the torment that made this solution impossible. Like the Pythons in Search for the Holy Grail, most of us cannot really stand Galahad and imagine he was a bit effete. Lancelot is our hero.

Oddly enough, the older view is more realistic since most of the men who benefit a community are not matchstick men, but good men. Abraham Lincoln would not have saved the union if he had spent half his life being a matchstick man. Mother Theresa saved thousands, because she brought redemption instead of demanding it.

Partly, this dislike of good men helps justify our own smaller sins. We hope that if we never judge, then we will not be judged. We are patrons of vice, tolerating the moral decadence of pop singers like Madonna so that our own sins will seem less. The harm we do our souls, our children, and our culture is ignored. Rich celebrities appear to get away with single parenting. By the time the shelled children of these stars grow up to write tell all memoirs another generation of abandoned kids have filled the trailer parks of America as young women destroy their lives emulating their movie role models. Even religious groups will not punish wrong doers, because repentance and restitution have been forgotten in a rush to redemption. We continue to sin and our grace abounds.

In real life, bad men are mostly bad men. Sometimes they are changed by religion, though in Hollywood it is usually by a good woman. That may happen, but I have never known anyone to whom it happened. Bad men are interesting dates, but horrible husbands. Most women seem to be like Anne of Green Gables' friend Phillippa -- who did not want a man who actually was bad, but one that could be.

Bill Clinton proves that marrying the bad boy is a ticket to marital hell. This is especially true since most men like Clinton don’t do nearly as well as Clinton. They lack the skills to cover up their vice and end up middle aged men selling used cars in Arkansas while impotently leering at their secretary and most of their customers. They become that ancient horror, “the dirty old man.”

Redemption is a good thing, but not needing it is even better. If one keeps being self-centered and living wickedly, it grows ever more difficult to contribute positively to the culture. Personal redemption is possible, but mostly bad men, even if helped, are a net cultural loss. That is why working with struggling young men can be beneficial, but an investment in an older man determined to be wayward is usually a dead loss. There are heroic souls who help such men and they are real heroes, but the wicked older men themselves need not be glorified in films, at least not very many films.

American religion may have started all of this with an over emphasis on the story of redemption from gross vice. As a child, I read scores of “testimony books” which were fascinating in descriptions of lives badly spent, but became dull when the person was “saved from sin” and became conventional. Sometimes these books served as titillation for evangelical children who otherwise would never have been exposed to such behavior.

Only rarely did one read a well written book that praised a life well spent, like Through Gates of Splendor, the story of the missionary martyr Jim Elliot. More books like this should be written celebrating lives well lived that are full of service.

Here is a good rule for life: generally it is good to be good. Socrates managed to start philosophy without starting life as a match man. Of course, he also irritated the decadent establishment and they killed him. A film on Jesus Christ irritates American popular culture, partly because it is a film about a good man who did well by being good. He helped redeem prostitutes; he did not need to be redeemed by them. Of course, he too was killed by the leaders of his dying culture.

Matchstick men are users. At the very least, they require huge amounts of culture resources to fix. Thank God there are some people who have not become matchstick men available to redeem us. These are the real heroes with the stories that deserve more attention than they get. My son is a good boy and I hope he finds a culture that can appreciate that fact. Maybe someday someone will make a film about his fine young boyhood.

copyright 2003 John Mark Reynolds