see yourself become the villain

It’s maybe the most famous line from The Dark Knight, which has more than a few great lines. In the context of the movie, I always took the meaning to be that a hero in a given era will inevitably be reassessed in light of changes over time — at best, the hero succeeds and improves things so much that looking back, the hero’s actions seem less heroic. In the case of Batman, for example, a Gotham City that changed in the way that he fought for would probably frown at all the extrajudicial vigilante beatings.

These days I keep circling a different version of that idea.

You die a hero or live long enough to have the downright evil shit you were actually up to come light.

When I was a kid, we were broke. It was the 80s, so there wasn’t streaming or the internet, but we did have a VCR. That meant that most of our entertainment came from whatever was on the three channels we had or from videos we got for free from the local library. The local library back then wasn’t extremely well-stocked with kid-friendly videos, so we watched a lot of them over and over.

One we watched a lot was about dinosaurs.

And one of the people featured in it was a paleontologist named Jack Horner. I remembered his name through repetition, and later I’d see “Horner” in movie credits and think of him — though it turned out I was mixing him up with James Horner (the late film composer).

Anyway, I wouldn’t say he was a hero, but he was someone I remembered fondly as a nice, bearded, dino-guy. And now I’m in my 40s and he’s resigning in disgrace after his Epstein-related proclivities have come to light. And these, of course, date back decades… so he didn’t “become” a villain, he just got found out.

It reminds me of how Bill Cosby used to go around lecturing to crowds about how young Black men needed to have some self-respect and pull up their pants and whatnot. And he was drugging and raping women that whole time.

But if Bill Cosby had died in 1998 or whatever, the world would’ve mourned and hailed him as a great, heroic man.

I’m not sure if I’m coming to a point, exactly, except to say that there are, maybe, a lot fewer heroes and good people than we once were told. I don’t think it’s a good thing, exactly, but my kids are growing up in a world where the leader and the people being celebrated (at least somewhat) are inarguably bad (the president and his goons, people who kill protestors and get away with it). Maybe they’ll have a cleaner perspective on what’s heroic and won’t be blindsided when people they were raised to respect turn out to be abusive pedophiles.

It’s bleak. But maybe it’s more honest.