Amateurism

Only recently did I find out that the creator and chronicler of my favorite teenage detectives was a pseudonym, which got me thinking about the characters he (they) brought to life.

Now, to be fair, I'll buy into the idea that being the son(s) of renowned NYPD detective Fenton Hardy can lend you some biological skill in the field of, um, detection. But it usually took Frank and Joe 150 pages at least to figure out that the swarthy foreigner was really the one who killed the film director. Or something.

Batman, however, was well-known to be the World's Greatest Detective, and I was seriously miffed when Liam Neeson didn't constantly refer to Bale as such in Batman Begins (in retrospect, probably best that he didn't ad lib with Bale). But it is pretty much the bedrock of all Batman canon that the guy devoted his life to his craft, practicing Krav Maga before we knew what it was and just generally inventing new ways to be raw and advertising this to his loved ones, thereby alienating them.

That's the throat chop right there. On the one hand, you've got some lady from Scotland who can sing opera real good and generally seems like the most fun person to drink with in the history of the world, and on the other, and on the other, you have a cyborg marketing machine raised by a Green Beret to be one of the greatest athletes in the history of the world.

America, nay, the world, loves the amateur. And this isn't the definition the IOC used to use; we all know that being a team of de facto professionals didn't stop the Soviets from getting their asses kicked at Lake Placid (WOOO AMERICA!!!!).

The amateur is less nuanced than the underdog. The underdog is willing to sacrifice everything and wins his peers over with his work ethic and pluck, but does not necessarily produce; if Dan Devine had let Rudy Ruetigger go for more than one sack against Georgia Tech, he would have ended up straight in the hospital. The underdog perseveres in his effort, if not his results (McConaughey, I am looking at you) while the amateur rolls out of bed and galumphs to glory.

Would that there were a synthesis! Some sort of golden mean, someone lazy and rakish enough that he is relevant to the common man, while at the same time crafty enough to cash in on his or her fifteen minutes of fame and never let go of that handful of helium balloons carrying him across the sky.

God bless wikipedia. World, I give you Eugène François Vidocq.