How to Fly

"Leonna we don't have the trust of the public anymore!"

"GET IT BACK!"

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I like Aaron Sorkin, he's a good writer. For all the people who don't know he wrote The Social Network, A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and that little snippet I opened with was from his current show "The Newsroom". A lot of people like Sorkin because he writes smart people walking and exchanging witty dialog, in fact that's what most of his shows are about, but that's not what I like most about him. I like that he writes aspirational characters who are trying to do their best to make the world a better place.

It's easy to be cynical, It's easy to get upset when they miscast batman, to think the Obama administration only wants to go into Syria to get back at Russia for the whole Snowden thing, it's easy to see the whole system we live in as mostly bull shit and to write about it as such, but Sorkin doesn't do that. Sorkin writes about a world full of very smart people, who know a lot of things, are witty, capable, and most of all moral, so its fair that the detractors of Sorkin's writing usually say that his characters are unrealistic and to be fair that is true, but it also misses a point. Aspirational characters are not there to be someone you relate to, they are meant to be someone you look up to. Aspirational characters set an example for us all, they set a standard to live up to, Superman is one such character.

You want to know what my biggest problem with Man of Steel was? It was that he killed the Zod in the end and got in a fight that killed who knows how many. Why is it a bad thing, because if anyone of us had powers and were put in that situation that's what we would have done. I want Superman to be better than me, I want him to be the guy who finds a way to save us all from the big bad and does it in a completely morally perfect way. Seeing that is the thing that gives Superman his luster, it's the thing that makes us as impressed as we once were with the idea of a man flying. They didn't give us that, they thought that the reason superman isn't as popular as they want him to be is that he is too powerful, he's too nice, he's too much not like us, but that is the soul of what makes him so important, and they chipped away at that a little in that movie.

I like Aspirational characters and writing, I like believeing that even if I'm limited in what I can do, in what I would do, maybe out there is someone who is doing the right thing and that if I was in that situation I might do the write thing too.