Firehouse Dog/Hot Fuzz

Perhaps, like many regular viewers of mainstream American movies, you spend a lot of time contemplating the disparity between your own crappy life, and those of your cinematic heroes.

Back in the 30s (for example), audience envy was mostly about the glamour. You wished that you could switch places with Cary Grant or Ginger Rogers because you wanted the opulent lifestyles that their characters typically enjoyed. It was a class thing: the typical audience member was a "have-not," vicariously enjoying the lifestyle of the "have": clothes, cars, chandeliers, what have you. The differences between the actors and their characters weren’t nearly as important as the differences between the actors/characters and the audience. Those movies seldom implied that movie-goers had a shot at a movie-star life; they were impermeable but ostensibly transparent portals through which regular people could observe the rich and powerful.

Now, things are different. What’s truly supernatural about the Hollywood hero is not the position into which he was born, but his finely-honed awareness of self and purpose. Even a quick perusal of the most superficial screenwriting text will tell you: a cinematic hero wants one thing very badly, and he spends the entire movie trying to get it.

This being the case, any extraordinary talents that the hero displays in pursuit of that one goal are, in
this model, merely metaphorical embellishments on the same theme. It doesn’t matter whether the character can fly, or fight ten opponents at once, or is preternaturally witty and charming. The point is that the hero, unlike the viewer, a) knows exactly what he wants, and b) absolutely cannot be stopped. Like Hermes with his winged sandals, movie heroes are implicitly gifted with some remarkable attribute – unwavering integrity, a bottomless love of dolphins, bulletproof skin, or whatever – that protects them from this cruel world that has done such a good job of battering down the rest of us.

The fact that these superpowers (actual or virtual, mysterious or obvious, physical or spiritual) are so nicely tailored to their characters – almost, in fact, an extension of something surprisingly normal in those characters’ personalities – is comforting to regular people. For example, most of us fall in love, we just don’t quite fall in movie-love. Some of us can fight, but we just can’t movie-fight. Some of us have a lot of integrity, but we don’t quite have movie-integrity. These movie- characteristics are manufactured so as to seem just out of reach. Your love for your dog won’t give him the power to put out fires and rescue innocent people…but it almost could, right? I mean, sometimes doesn’t it feel like you’re just this close to breaking through some metaphysical barrier, tapping into the part of your brain you don’t normally use, and exploding into a tightly focused machine that does nothing but kick ass and chew bubble gum? And adopt dogs?

Enter the "hero with sleeping powers" story. Sometimes the power and the way it’s sleeping is more obvious than others, but as far as audience manipulation, it’s the same thing. The average Joe’s/Jane’s specialness might be awoken by a traumatic incident, or by a mysterious visitor who has already found his or her own special power.

When the source of the magic is made out to be Hollywood itself, the writer is entering risky territory. Gone is the Golden Age; if you want a modern audience to accept that Hollywood is glamourous, then you need to earn that mystique within the movie you’re making. Modern audiences don’t enter the theater (especially for a movie like Firehouse Dog) like it’s a temple at which they are allowed to worship; they enter it like it’s a convenience store that most likely has the standard fare composed primarily of high-fructose corn syrup. Few people who are regularly allowed to leave the house are under the illusion that actors – human or otherwise – can really do the things their characters do in the movies. To posit a story in which a bunch of regular people (i.e. analogs for audience members) believe that they can is clumsily arrogant and fairly insulting.

Compare to Hot Fuzz, which we’re told was made by "the guys who have seen every action movie ever
made." In other words, the hero is not literally supposed to be from Hollywood. Rather, he has been created by regular people (no superpowers, like you) who are familiar with the Hollywood tropes. The writers are inviting us to share a fantasy. They are implicitly in the theater with us. Together, we laugh at, and marvel at, our shared fascination with these demigods whom we have willed into existence in order to make our own lives just a little bit easier to bear.

Firehouse Dog trailer

Hot Fuzz trailer