When Nothing Explodes

There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from action movies where men are fierce yet tender. They love their loved ones, and will stop at literally nothing to protect them. Even as I type this out it sounds, well, noble.

Men and far less often women with ruthless warrior attributes don’t care who they have to blow up to save the ones they love on their way to fixing their world. (Note the their, and look up the acronym FYIGM, because it’s satisfying embedded in the savoir subtext of movies featuring heroes faced with impossible situations.)

But hold on. As gratifying as this cinematic conclusion might feel as the credits roll, the world of the movie is more deeply damaged. So why does our satisfaction that justice was somehow served land as unquestionably absolute?

Fact: love is the only thing that can heal the world. Period. I’m talking the kind of love that extends to strangers, people who are not us, flora and fauna, the exhilaration of small, wholly inhabited moments that we can’t own, only experience. Such love is real and not overly optimistic; it is always working a potentially losing battle.

Still.

I watched the movie The Running Man two nights ago, and was absolutely okay with it on an entertainment level, even with its insane body count. You accepted the nobility of the family-man-good-guy, a trope we have been raised on not to examine. Vindication! Then, last night, I watched Sorry, Baby, and understood that what I was seeing was love, powerful and real- no fake pyrotechnics or evening of scores. Just the tentative way love, if allowed, fills in the cracks, and beautifully, imperfectly mends us. Love isn’t a fist pump. It’s our only hope.