Heroes

“Heroes” is the song heard on the drive home when Peter and Eva sing together and Peter resolves to break the cycle of jealousy he sees damaging his marriage. The track gives their shared declaration a moment of grandeur, but its promise of being heroes lasts only for a day; the change Peter imagines remains something he has yet to explain, let alone establish between them.

The song on the drive home

Peter and Eva are making their way home at walking speed. His head is still buzzing and he is badly sunburned when Bowie comes on the radio. Eva turns the volume up, and the two sing loudly together. The moment is bodily and immediate: they share the music before Peter can put the idea forming in his mind into words. Their joint singing makes the song a brief space of connection, but does not itself resolve the tension that gives his thoughts their urgency.

The song’s sound is part of the scene’s contrast. Its guitars are described as ominous, even as Peter and Eva feel like the heroes Bowie sings about. The buoyancy of their participation therefore sits alongside a darker musical texture. The passage does not present the drive as a settled happy ending; its exhilaration and unease coexist, like the desire to begin again and the knowledge that jealousy has already shaped their relationship.

A borrowed language of possibility

The lyrics imagine two people taking on royal roles: “I, I will be king” and “And you, you will be my queen”. Peter and Eva sing those lines as well as “We can be heroes just for one day”. The image offers them a temporary, shared identity, larger than the ordinary drive home and the conflicts that await them. Its qualification matters: the song promises heroism for one day, not a permanent cure or a guaranteed future.

The later refrain, “We can be us Just for one day”, shifts the emphasis from heroic status to togetherness. In the scene, that idea resonates with Peter’s wish to change how he responds to Eva’s other relationships. The song cannot tell them how to achieve that change, but it supplies a language of unity while they are still singing in unison. The distance between the lyric’s imagined couple and the couple’s unresolved conversation remains open.

Jealousy named as a cycle

On the drive, Peter connects his thoughts to Steef’s claim that jealousy, like shame, is learned and can therefore be unlearned. He accepts the argument that jealousy is rooted in fear: fear of losing someone. The insight is not abstract for him. He recognizes that he feels jealous of everyone who receives love from his wife, including Eva’s friends and family, the children in her class, their dead child Lieve, Steef, Rebecca, and Hetty.

That list broadens the problem beyond rivalry with a single person. Peter experiences Eva’s capacity to love others as a threat to his own place, even when those others include family, children, and their dead child. He sees the result as a vicious circle: jealousy contributes to the very loss it fears. The song’s image of two people briefly being together thus accompanies a sharper recognition that his possessiveness may drive Eva away. His resolve to break the cycle gives the music its significance in the scene, without suggesting that recognition alone has broken it.

A moment, not a resolution

Peter tries to express what he has just realized, but Eva does not understand what he means. Her response is gentle: she says it is all right and suggests they talk the next day, when they are both sober. The exchange sets a limit on the song’s apparent unity. They have sung the same lines loudly, yet Peter’s new conclusion has not reached Eva as a shared understanding.

The scene therefore makes “Heroes” an emotional accompaniment to an intention rather than proof of change. Music lets Peter experience, for a short stretch of the drive, the possibility that he and Eva might do things differently. Eva’s postponement leaves that possibility open while returning it to the practical work of a later conversation. The song’s one-day promise fits the moment precisely: the couple can feel united in its refrain now, but what follows depends on whether Peter can turn his recognition of jealousy into a different way of living with Eva.