Some of the earliest memories of my life involve movies one way or another: going to the drive-in theater with my parents to see Ghostbusters, stumbling upon the horror movies aisle for the first time at the video store, etc. I suspect it is the same for you, too. Whether you're a reader or not is irrelevant, fiction has shaped a part of your existence through movies, television series or sometimes through old fashioned media storytelling. Because it shaped just about everybody, except maybe the Amish.
Now, most of you will accept the fact that we consume fiction to transcend our otherwise inescapable reality without a second thought. Since I'm a crazy person, I don't accept this fatality that fuels an intangible billion dollars industry. What happens in movies sometimes echoes in real life, but we're so comfortable being lied to that we don't even notice. Take the underdog myth for example. Everybody loves someone who manages to beat the odds, right? Wrong.
Everybody loves to think of themselves as the underdog. If they can't project themselves into an underdog figure, they stop caring and the said underdog become prey to his enemies without the support of the riotous crowd.
Take mixed martial artist Nick Diaz for example. He is an American folk hero born in the wrong century.
1) Nick Diaz has publicly admitted being a daily marijuana user several times.
2) He was suspended despite testing BELOW the allowed marijuana metabolite levels.
The suspension is a shameful abuse of power unfortunately too coherent with the UFC's reign over Nevada sports entertainment, but I don't want to take about that. I want to understand what lead us there. What have we done to the greatest folk hero of the 21st century?
Nick Diaz is a 32 years old mixed martial artist who looks like your feisty pothead neighbor, mainly because he is somebody's feisty pothead neighbor. Point is, he looks like a regular dude. He doesn't have a chiseled body. His skin is not clinging to his bone structure, not even on weigh-in day, for lack of body fat. It is probably because he doesn't dehydrate himself for weigh-ins. In fact, he's arrived a couple points under the official weight for his fights, making him an anomaly.
It's not Diaz's weed consumption or average Joe biomechanics that make him great, it's his ridicously convincing in-cage performances. He became famous for beating the shit out of hypertrophied über-athletic guys. He whooped mixed martial arts' first ever poster boy Frank Shamrock on national television after repeatedly flipping him off during the press tour, dragged legendary British knockout artist Paul Daley into an epic slugfest and proceeded to knock his ass out, lied down in the cage in front of the most terrifying man in mixed martial arts in order to protest his refusal to engage in direct exchanges, and so on. I won't even get into his schoolyard beating of living legend B.J Penn.
Now, I know what you're going to say: Ben, flipping people off and then lawfully beating the shit out of them is not underdog behavior, it's being a thug. Out of context, maybe, but you have to appreciate Nick Diaz's unique situation: he was born, raised and still lives in one of America's crime capitals. he's never got anything going for him except martial arts and there is a reasonable doubt that he would be dead if he didn't find his way to a gym. According to him, several of his friends are and considering his background, it's a very plausible claim indeed.
Until he got his license revoked by the State of Nevada, Nick Diaz was beating one of the most powerful and tyrannical corporation in professional sports entertainment (south of FIFA). Win or lose, whenever he entered the octagon we were guaranteed two things: 1) that something exciting was going to happen 2) a Godlike fighting machine would look strangely human for a 15 to 25 minutes period and 3) that we would be reminded that some guys don't give a fuck about their employers and that sometimes, it's a good thing. A great thing even. If you can get paid handsomely to do what you love without compromising your integrity, you are the American Dream.
Nick Diaz is a living and breathing middle finger to everything I dislike about the UFC. This corporate culture modeling fighters into hollow role models who are all a spin off the same underdog archetype: they're all fighting their past, they all failed at normal lives and want to prove their worth by taking blows to the face, they have tattoos, shitty haircuts and whatever they're telling you is exactly what you want to hear. Nick Diaz is fighting his past, present and future. He fights because it's what he's always done and how he presents his best self to the world. The tragedy of Nick Diaz's life is that he needs fighting more than fighting needs him.
And we are to blame for that. Because we don't want to project ourselves in real human beings that actually act human on television. We preferred being lied to, worship people who present a constructed image of themselves. If Nick Diaz was born in the 19th or early 20th century, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, John Lee Hooker and other folk music legends of our time would've written songs about his legendary scraps and his timeless toughness. All the 21st century has for him is snarky social media comments and petitions to legalize weed. He doesn't deserve this and it's probably not going to change unless somebody makes a movie about him.
If success is the best form of revenge, here's to hoping Nick Diaz launches a million dollar-generating podcast broadcasting his iconic brand of unintentional comedy. I'll admit I'd prefer him in the cage, though. That's where we first learned to love him.