Heroes have been around since long before Western—let alone white—civilization. The earliest surviving epic poem, transcribed onto clay tablets over two thousand years before the birth of Christ, recounts the adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the strength of the latter “as mighty as a rock from the sky.”³²

For the Ancient Greeks, drawing on that much older tradition which merged the historical and supernatural, heroes were either gods themselves or, often, the mixed offspring of gods and mortals—demigods. Heracles and Achilles were demigods who drifted (sometimes uncomfortably) between worlds, performing feats that amazed humans and angered the heavens.

From the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles is vocal about his fate without being a slave to it. He remains in control, choosing the direction his life takes. Like him, Barack Obama is self-possessed and self-aware about his destiny. He has qualities of forbearance and force of will. His image is of a more conventionalized, mild-mannered Achilles.

Perhaps Keanu is a hero of a different, less obvious kind—akin to sly, slippery Odysseus. A mortal king, Odysseus’s superpower is described in the first line of Homer’s epic poem: he is polytropos, a man of “many turns.” Emily Wilson, the classics professor and recent translator of the Odyssey, argues that this word foregrounds the question of Odysseus’s passivity. Is he “much turning” or “much turned”?³³ A trickster or himself easily tricked? Either way, his is a form of heroism that doesn’t come from clubbing a hydra to death but from his extraordinary changeableness. In Wilson’s translation, she calls him “complicated.”³⁴

“It’s not my ambition to be an action hero,” said Keanu in an interview with The San Francisco Examiner after the release of Speed in 1994. “To me it’s an ensemble piece, not a hero piece. The protagonist isn’t in the prow.”³⁵

More recently, in a conversation for The Nerdist podcast in 2017, Keanu talks about how he often plays “very reactive” characters.³⁶ Doesn’t this show, says the interviewer, that they could be anyone, that anyone could become an Übermensch or superman? Keanu says “only through the struggle,” which does sound quite Nietzschean. But what he’s trying to emphasize, I think, is that most of his heroes, rather than being in control, are manically trying to keep up. They lack that sense of already-accomplished greatness you’d associate with a superman.

Keanu relates this to the character of John Wick, a contract killer who, in spite of his superheroic gift for kicking ass, is nonetheless constantly getting his ass kicked. “John Wick keeps digging a deeper hole for John,” he says. “It’s that conundrum of, yeah, I want my self-agency, but in order to achieve it I’m compromising any possibility of that actually ever happening.”³⁷

John would rather retire peacefully and brood on the memory of his late wife, but people keep trying to kill him. And every person he disposes of is replaced by two more, and then four more with bigger guns (it’s like that fight scene in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo has to fend off endlessly replicating CGI copies of Agent Smith).

This feels true to the snakes-and-ladders logic of the Odyssey and Gilgamesh. Not long after Odysseus sets sail back from Troy, he can see his home, Ithaca, glinting on the horizon, only for his ship to be blown off course. It takes him another ten years to travel the six hundred miles or so back across the Aegean.

Obama is always deliberate, his speeches mapping out a clear “journey” or “quest,” whereas Keanu’s heroes give us the sense that, in spite of their strength and guile, they’re at the whim of the gods.