Useful As The Useful

I watched a very interesting film last night - Quentin Tarantino's Hero. Having never sat through a whole martial arts film before, it was fairly new territory for me. I'd always held the genre in a certain amount of contempt, and expected little of this movie - Unrealistic fight scenes cobbled together with a poor excuse for a story was my opinion. I still think that summary is an accurate one, but I know now that it leaves one important characteristic of this film (and its ilk) unsaid: Hero was beautiful. Beauty has been shunned as "old-fashioned" in the West, leaving films like The Lord of the Rings and Finding Neverland few and far between. We consider ourselves more adult, preferring works like Saving Private Ryan, Thirteen and Silence of the Lambs. Beauty is a childs bauble, we say, to be set aside when maturity is reached. It's a lie; deadly and pervasive. You can see its influence in our sprawling concrete cities, in the utilitarian harshness of modern household objects, in our increasingly spartan language. Beauty is as necessary for the welfare of the soul as food is for the body. As Victor Hugo's bishop said The beautiful is as useful as the useful. Perhaps more so. Children know this. But there is no question of "outgrowing" the need for beauty: children must sleep - do we think that one day we will not need to? And I would point out that any line drawn between beauty and reality is deceptive. Men did not create beauty - it was there before they walked the earth, and will always continue to be, though we fail to see it.