Every hero has his kryptonite, and for the best heroes, the kryptonite is often another person. So Luke Skywalker will not use the Dark Side of the Force until Darth Vader voices aloud the prospect of turning Luke’s sister instead. So Spider-Man cannot be opposed until he is distracted by a threat to Mary Jane.
These kryptonites are not merely a useful plot device, a way of luring the hero into greater dangers than his inherent virtues and discretion would normally allow him. They are also a symbol for one of society’s most potent weapons against the individual. To wit, his friends. No man who cares for someone else is without weakness. No man who loves someone has nothing to lose. And so in the end, even the most passionate revolutionary has a stake in the status quo.
Only by learning to abandon such things can the hero be free from weakness. So Keyser Soze, when enemies attempted to take his family hostage, chose to shoot the family rather than gives his enemies a constant weapon against him. So George Clooney says in Heat, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat…” So Eastwood’s “Man with no Name”, or his Dirty Harry, or most of his heroes, while defending the innocent with a caring detachment, are all unattached monoliths, emotionally impregnable. Only this way can they engage in total war.
The weapon can be used in reverse, too. So in “Living In Harmony”, once the woman Number Six decides to care for is killed, Number Six himself is provoked to violence. In wars throughout history, the defense of loved ones and domestic safety are almost universally at least nominal casus belli.
As in “Living In Harmony” so in real life. At the end of the episode, it is revealed that the entire conflict Number Six entered upon, and the city and people he had fought, were all illusory, and that he was still a prisoner in the Village. Just so, the tools that authority uses to manipulate our wills are mostly dreams and lies, and when we learn to look beyond them, we are only in a very cleverly-constructed prison.
