After watching the first few episodes of Elite Force again, I realised that INSECURITY actually plays quite a big role in all of the characters - each has at least one episode where they’re seen struggling with it. And as a concept it is actually really interesting as it normalises them more - instead of just being super/bionic humans who take down evil and save people all the time - they become teenagers with emotional struggles which audiences can relate to. It shows them battling against their own psychological demons - highlighting that nobody’s perfect - even with super powers - emotions always play their part.
(Some personal stuff about me) In my art practice I have started exploring the ideas of emotional nonsense and using a range of original characters, which represent my own versions of the seven deadly sins, as a means of understanding my own mind to achieve more balance in my day to day life. They are MOTIVATION, LACKLUSTRE, STUCK, DELIRIUM, COMPULSION, OVERWHELMED and INSECURITY (you can check out more under #thesins). I created them after falling into a bit of a creative rut, where I couldn’t do anything, think of anything and found myself just going to the studio - doing nothing - then going home to do nothing. This went on for weeks and really started messing with my head, surprisingly putting me in quite a bad place emotionally (and I am not a very emotional person, I can assure you now.) I realised that I had no control over all the things I was feeling and that was causing me to feel completely overwhelmed and was hindering my productivity. Emotions are extremely powerful elements which have a massive influence on the mind - but because they’re invisible, they are incredibly hard to fight against when they overwhelm you. But by assigning a character/physical being to those emotions I found I could reclaim a bit of control back from them and gain a greater sense of balance in my day to day living (they’ve been a huge help in keeping me sane throughout lockdown.)
But back to the actual point I’m trying to make - I am now fascinated by how emotional struggle is portrayed in characters onscreen, and though I didn’t immediately realise it - all 5 members of the team face their own issues with INSECURITY - which is actually really cool. Though overall I don’t believe it’s utilised to the standard it could have been, which kinda goes back to them wasting time with all the filler episodes instead of building a half decent plot, and is never really discussed so to help combat the problem for each of the characters, but it does provide interesting insight into the minds and personalities of these fictional growing teenagers.
I want to see how these insecurities influence the characters in the context of the show to highlight how they have developed with the changes they have been subjected to. As, despite the lack of plot or structure, there is something very interesting to be found in the way the characters have been written and the decisions they make throughout the series.
So to avoid this getting too long, I’ve decided to split it up into parts - a separate post for each character - that way I can go into more detail should I need to and get things posted more frequently. Also I’m intending to keep these more positive as to break up the more negative focused posts - because like I’ve said before, I don’t hate Elite Force. I’m gonna tag this little sub series as #INSECURITYseries, so stay tuned as I’m gonna try getting the first one out for tomorrow - however I haven’t actually started writing it yet so we’ll see if that actually happens.
