Years ago, I wrote a script, and the big note I got back from the network and the studio was, “Can the main character be a little more heroic?”
It was an office comedy, so I was a little unclear about how, exactly, a guy in an office could be “heroic,” but after thinking about it for a bit, I rewrote the opening scene and had the main character announce to his friends that he was adopting a rescue dog.
“Perfect!” they all said.
Meaning: Heroes don’t have to be heroic — in Hollywood, anyway. They just have to be nice to dogs.
It’s an ironclad rule in the movies. We’ve all been watching some truly violent picture when suddenly an animal is introduced, and we say, “Oh, man, I hope nothing happens to that horse.” After 90 minutes of human carnage, that kitty better be OK.
In the John Wick movies, which are a symphony of gunfire, guts, and death, it’s the protagonist’s relationship with his dog that allows us to root for a person who is, essentially, a mass murderer.
How a character treats animals is a shorthand, sometimes a cheap and easy one, which is why I like it, for introducing him or her and what he or she is really all about. It’s often instinctive and involuntary. We know (I think, I hope) that World War I was a terrible thing without saying, and those poor horses!
How we think about animals (the adorable ones, anyway) raises some complicated issues. Some of the people behind the new technology of self-driving cars, for example, have been trying to sort out how to install complex human priorities into the self-driving software. How can we teach driving machines to make the kinds of intuitive judgments that we humans are capable of making, even when the situations that demand them are, thankfully, rare? Or how can we teach driving machines to make better intuitive judgments than we humans make?
For instance, if a person is facing an unavoidable accident and he or she is going to hit something, a living thing, what’s the instinctive human response? Should an autonomous vehicle spare the lives of innocent creatures, human, pet, livestock, whatever, or hit a pedestrian who is jaywalking?
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology surveyed 2 million people in 233 countries, and unsurprisingly, the overwhelming vote was, hit the jaywalker. But they also developed an almost worldwide consensus on a whole range of options.
Babies in strollers, girls, boys, and pregnant women top the list of Who Not to Hit rankings, which isn’t all that controversial. Next up are “male doctors” and “female doctors.”
If you’re reading this and you’re a doctor, you might want to wear your lab coat and stethoscope around more. You’ll want to telegraph your line of business as quickly as possible. It won’t be easy, barreling down the road at 80 miles per hour, hysterically shrieking and mashing on the useless brake pedal, to tell the difference between a doctor and a lawyer. And let’s be honest: Most people will voluntarily steer toward a lawyer, so be smart, doctors, and wear your scrubs.
Right below a “doctor” is a person identified as an “executive female.” Right below her is “male athlete” and then “executive male.” The position of those three alone pretty much guarantees some spirited dinner table arguments.
But here’s where the rankings turn mean.
At a certain point in the survey, respondents no longer expressed a bias in favor of sparing a certain type of person. Instead, they indicated a small bias against certain types. Sorry in advance: This gets a little dark.
When it comes to picking someone to hit with a wayward automobile, respondents revealed a slight bias for an obese woman. They’d hit her before a doctor, executive, or (male) athlete. But the good news for heavy-ish females is that before respondents chose her, they said they’d go for an obese man. This, too, should spark some dinner table debates, though one hopes over a low-carb kind of dinner.
There’s a bias against homeless people, but there’s a bigger one against old people.
This brings us to dogs. They are ranked lower than the groups already mentioned, but the survey respondents said that before they allowed their car to hit a dog, they’d hit a “criminal.” Once again, they didn’t specify how, exactly, they’d know a criminal when they saw one. It seems to be a fraught issue, to say the least.
Ranked even lower than criminals are cats, which makes sense to me. But then, I’m not really a cat person.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
