Hal's American-hero essay (pp. 140–141)

Heroism defined entirely as an object of the gaze. Hal's whole method is to read the hero not by what he is but by how he is watched — the drama isn't the case (the audience already knows who's guilty), it's "watching the hero," the camera's "steady tripodic close-up" that the essay compares to "romantic portraiture." The insight underneath the schoolboy prose is that in this culture heroism has no content apart from its watchability; the hero exists to be looked at, and each era gets the hero its audience's attention-span can sustain. That the audience has "favored" and then, the essay hazards, become "trapped" in a taste for ever more reactive, ever less active heroes is the theme's quiet spine: spectation isn't a neutral window on heroism, it is the thing that shapes what heroism is allowed to be.