Fiction movies revive idea that good guys always win
COMMENTARY
Katherine Ortega Courtney

This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but last weekend as I was filling up my car with gas, someone dropped a large heavy object making a loud banging noise. I jumped and felt a sudden twinge of anxiety.

Everyone else who was at the gas station jumped up and quickly looked around as well.

It is not unusual to jump at a loud unexpected noise, but I jumped much higher and felt much more anxiety than I would have if I had not just watched news of the Beltway Sniper claiming his latest victim at a gas station in Fredericksburg, Va.

Another victim was killed two days later in a covered parking lot in Falls Church, Va., bringing the total to nine people killed and two people injured. Understandably, people in the Washington, D.C., area are scared. Guardian Angels are pumping gas, children are not allowed to play outside and life is just not normal.

These sniper shootings have served to remind us all how easily this can happen. Any psycho with a rifle could get the urge to shoot some innocent people in a parking lot or a gas station. This could happen anywhere, although in Texas there would be a good chance that someone in that parking lot would have a gun of his or her own and would give the sniper a quick Texas-sized punishment.

It goes without saying that the sniper killings in Washington, D.C., are not the only events that have reminded us how vulnerable we are in everyday situations. I don’t think I am the only one who has started warily watching low-flying planes since last year. Given all these reminders that we are constantly vulnerable to who knows what kind of attack by who knows what kind of people, why on earth would “Red Dragon,” a movie about not one, but two serial killers, be the No. 1 box office draw two weeks in a row?

I think the answer is simple (no, it’s not because we get to see Ralph Feinnes naked). I think it is because no matter how scary or how suspenseful the movie is, we know that the good guys are going to win in the end. We know before we even enter the theater that Will Graham (played by Edward Norton) is going to stop the bad guy and go home to his wife and child and live happily ever after on the beach. We don’t have this kind of comfort in real life, but we crave it. We want to see the bad guys stopped. They may fascinate us (as Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector seems to do), but we know that there is a Clarice Starling or Will Graham waiting to take them down and protect the innocent in the end.

We don’t get to know the real life Will Grahams and Clarice Starlings, but perhaps movies like “Red Dragon” serve to remind us that there are heroes out there working to protect us. Maybe we take some comfort from that.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes truth resembles fiction. Things are much more entertaining when they are not real. If the sniper killings had been in a movie starring Mel Gibson as the hero cop who puts a stop to them, it probably would have been a blockbuster, but that certainly does not mean we wanted to see these killings really happen.

Truth can be scarier than fiction, but maybe sometimes fiction can help us to believe that the good guys will always win. Sometimes we need to believe that.

Katherine Ortega Courtney is a psychology graduate student from Santa Fe, N.M. She can be reached at (k.e.ortega@tcu.edu).