Hero’s Heart
It's the legendary Hercules' turn on the sofa this month, as K. Stoddard Hayes examines the strengths and weaknesses of this all-too-human hero...
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 13
“You're Hercules. In case you forgot what that means. I'll remind you. You're at your best when things are at their worst. You give people hope when they don't have any of their own.”
Nebula, Descent
A tall, handsome hero with godlike strength who always does the right thing, always protects the helpless and the innocent, and always defeats the evil gods and warlords who plague mankind with suffering. Is this guy too perfect to be believed?
Not in Hercules: the Legendary Journeys. The creative team of Hercules and the hero's real life alter ego, Kevin Sorbo, have taken great pains to ensure their Hercules is completely human and fallible. They show us this vulnerability in many different ways, starting with the painful way Hercules picks himself up when some oversized baddie has knocked him flying. Even the strongest man in the world can get hurt. Then there’s his long-suffering good humour when his friend lolaus is being more than usually manic. Or the aggravation he shows whenever a gang of thugs gets in his way just as he’s rushing to save someone.
“I really don’t have time for this!” he’ll mutter as he throws them right and left and overhead. And if anyone still thinks Hercules seems invincible, watch his reaction to 50 beautiful princesses who all want to have sex with him. He runs for his life!
To make sure the world's strongest and noblest hero doesn’t win too easily every week, the writers have not only matched Hercules against bigger and better monsters, but they have also constantly set him more and more difficult dramatic challenges. Plenty of these are humorous, from helping a social outcast win a prestigious dance contest, to turning into a pig. But the strongest dramatic challenges involve the people with whom Hercules has his closest ties: family, friends and gods. The twists and turns of these enduring relationships are the most important factor in making this hero vulnerable.
Hercules has had three important romantic relationships in his life. Deianeira, his wife of many years and the mother of his children, is the most important person to him. This despite the fact that, to the audience, she is part of the past as she and Hercules’ children die in the very first episode of the show.
Deianaira and the children represent a loss that is always with Hercules, the memory fresh in his face whenever he hears how someone lost their wife or child. She is also his benchmark of romantic love. After her death he believes he can never feel such love for another woman, and this love is powerful enough to cure him even of Cupid’s spell. When he does fall in love again, he feels compelled to visit Deianeira in the Elysian Fields to ask her permission to marry again.
Serena offers Hercules a second chance at love and happiness, or so it seems to him when he first falls in love with her. To free her from Ares’ control and to win the right to marry her he is willing to give up his own immortal half, sacrificing his great strength to become an ordinary man. The discovery that she has been murdered by Strife as a way of attacking him affirms his conviction that he is a dangerous person to love. His grief is only partly assuaged by the strange twist of fate that wipes his marriage and Serena’s death out of time, leaving her alive and happily married to someone else.
Hercules has more in common with Morrigan than with any other woman he has loved. Like him, she is a half god and a warrior, and she could therefore share the kind of life Hercules leads, fighting for justice and the innocent. Although he is afraid to get involved with her at first because of his superstition about causing the death of everyone he loves, he eventually yields to her persistence and his own tender feelings. What finally separates them is not death but destiny. Morrigan belongs to Ireland as Hercules belongs to Greece. Neither one could be happy away from their own people and the place allotted them by the Fates.
Hercules’ mother Alcmene may seem a secondary figure, yet she is as important as anyone in his life. It is she, and not his absent father Zeus, who is the primary source of his positive virtues, especially the quality that his nearest and dearest call “stubbornness”: the strong will that makes Hercules, like his mother, never give up hope, and never surrender.
Just how much Hercules loves Alcmene is best seen in the opening sequence of Twilight. Hercules runs for miles through woods and fields and villages, runs as we’ve never seen him run before, simply to reach his mother when she is ill. She is also unique among those close to Hercules in that she dies peacefully and he feels no guilt for her death. Yet when she is gone, Hercules still feels lost, and he accepts Zeus’ offer to become a god, mainly because he knows Alcmene wanted Hercules to put aside the differences between him and his father.
The feud between Hercules and Hera is so important that the opening narration tells us each week that Hercules “journeyed the earth battling the minions of his evil stepmother, Hera.” She is his most relentless enemy, with a seemingly endless army of worshippers and monsters to send after him, including the sorceress Medea, the Blue Priest, two lethal Enforcers, a two-headed sea monster and armies of priests and warriors. And Hercules only has to hear that Hera is behind some problem or dispute to decide instantly to put a stop to it.
The two finally meet face to face when Hercules accepts Zeus’ offer of godhood and joins his father on Olympus. Hera first tries to get Hercules on her side, believing that he despises Zeus as much as she does. But while Hercules may feel anger at Zeus, he can never feel anything but hatred for Hera, who murdered his innocent wife and children. Her determination to finish him is her own downfall, when he knocks her into the abyss of Tartarus.
Yet when Zeus rescues Hera from Tartarus, Hercules can accept the good side she shows before her memory returns and help her to hold on to it and give up her vengeance against Zeus. Although Hercules can never forgive Hera for the deaths of his family, he is still man enough to accept her offer of help in protecting Xena’s child. It’s poetic irony that Hera dies because she helps Hercules fight against Zeus, and in fact it’s Hercules’ lifelong example of compassion and heroic sacrifice for mortals that inspires Hera to sacrifice herself and the gods for the sake of humanity.
Hercules’ relationship with Zeus shows him at his most human and most flawed. It’s a contentious relationship from the start: the father who feels love for his son but is too shallow and self-centred to act on it; the son who both longs for his father’s love and approval, and hates him for his life-long neglect. As a youth, Hercules dreams of meeting his father, not only to have a dad like other boys, but to learn what’s expected of someone with immortal blood. As an adult, his longing for a father is replaced by his frustration and anger at the father's indifference.
When Zeus invites Hercules to join him on Olympus, promising that they can get to know each other, Hercules replies, “There was a time that would have meant a lot to me. I’m not so sure any more.” (Top God) Hercules soon discovers that Zeus made him a god, not out of love, but because he needs Hercules as an ally against Hera and the other gods. The quarrel that follows is a classic example of the bitter wounds between father and son.
“Don’t you walk away from me! You've had my protection since you were a boy! You owe me the same!” Zeus shouts.
“I owe you? You’ve permitted the greatest sorrows of my life,” says Hercules. “Where was your protection then?”
“If you leave now, don’t come back.”
“Take care of yourself, dad, it’s what you’re best at.” (Reunions)
Despite his anger, Hercules can't abandon his father to Hera, and he saves Zeus’ life, this time. Yet in the end, Hercules’ war with the gods brings him to a lethal conflict with his father. When Xena tells him she will kill Zeus if it’s the only way to protect her child, he insists that she must let him talk to his father first. But Zeus’ determination to destroy the child who heralds the Twilight of the Gods forces Hercules to stop his father in the only way he can: by killing him. Then he catches Zeus in his arms, crying out in anguish, “This didn’t have to happen!”
“You’ll always be my son,” says the dying god. “Hercules, you’ve never disappointed me, especially today.” (God Fearing Child)
These words may be some comfort to his son, but the tears on Hercules’ face and the way he shouts “Father!” as Zeus’ body dissipates, tell us that words alone can’t make up for the loss of a father Hercules both loved and hated.
Hercules’ relationship with Iolaus is the most important in the series and provides the greatest drama. Iolaus was established in the very first Hercules TV movie as Hercules’ best friend, and he develops over the first two seasons into the indispensable compassion of the hero, a friend closer than many brothers, a partner who’s always there to watch his back, to make him laugh, and to remind him of who he is.
“Whenever I lost sight of what we were fighting for, Iolaus reminded me with his own courage and strength… I can’t imagine my life without him,” says Hercules. (Redemption)
Iolaus may sometimes feel slighted by a world which remembers him only as the sidekick of Hercules, but Hercules sees his friend as a hero in his own right. When Hercules decides to give up his godhood and return to Earth, the first person he seeks out is Iolaus. When the astonished Iolaus asks why he came back, Hercules replies, “I realized how much my family means to me. And you’re it.” (Reunions)
When Dahak kills Iolaus, Hercules is forced to confront his primary dramatic challenge: the burden of guilt he carries for all those he loves who have died. When Deianeira and the children are murdered by Hera, he not only swears to destroy all of Hera’s temples, he destroys his own house and tells the villager who has come to seek his help that he is no longer the Hercules who helps people. When he believes he might have murdered Serena, he rushes into a fight with his enemies, a fight in which he knows he will die. Even the exposure of Strife and Ares as the real murderers can’t lift the guilt he feels for her death. And when Iolaus tries to comfort him with the knowledge that he didn’t kill her, Hercules retorts, “I did kill her! If I hadn’t fallen in love and married her, she’d be alive today.” (Judgment Day)
Iolaus’ death breaks Hercules’ heart. He is so consumed with anger and self-hatred that he does something he has never done before: he hurts innocent people. And as he did when Deianeira died, he turns his back on being a hero and flees from everything he knows. When the Celts ask for his help, Hercules tells them, “I’m not in the hero business anymore… I’m no good to you. I’m no good to anybody.” (Resurrection)
And he no longer has the heart to fight, even to defend himself. The beating Morrigan gives him is the surest sign of the sickness in his soul. In the past, every time a warrior, god or monster has knocked Hercules down, he’s got up and kept getting up. This time, every one of Morrigan’s blows beats him down further, in pain, bitterness and self-loathing, until he falls unconscious.
The druid Mabon’s teachings restore Hercules’ inner balance and tranquility, and help him find some illumination. But it’s not enough to heal him. “I don’t think I can be the man that you need me to be,” he says. “When Iolaus died, a part of me died, too.”
Only when he is allowed to meet Iolaus’ spirit does he discover that he’s not really lost his friend. “Just because I’m dead, doesn’t mean that I’m not with you,” Iolaus tells him. “I had a great life because of you, and when I died I was doing the thing I loved the most. I was by your side, fighting the good fight. If I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
When Hercules emerges from that encounter to find Morrigan’s thugs waiting for him, he is his old self again. He answers the thugs’ mocking laughter with the sarcastic laugh he saves for thick-headed ruffians like them, who think 10 of them are enough to beat him. “I always get the last laugh,” he tells them, just before he scatters them across the landscape. (Resurrection)
Even after Hercules frees Iolaus’ spirit from Dahak to join the Light, their friendship isn’t over. The two fight side by side against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and their friendship, as much as their courage, proves to the Archangel Michael that humanity is worth saving. He rewards them both by returning Iolaus to the mortal world to share Hercules’ legendary journeys once again.
His strength, courage and nobility make Hercules a hero who we can admire. Yet admiration alone isn’t enough to make a compelling lead character. We identify with Hercules because we share with him the laughter, anger, love and grief of all these complex relationships. These human feelings make him a hero to be loved.