One of the pleasures of summer is to not only have the time to do things like go to the movies but also the time to think. Yesterday Anne, Mary & I saw The Green Lantern; it was a fun diversion for a warm, humid Sunday afternoon. As a movie, I would have to give it 3-4 stars (out of 5). The plot was somewhat formulaic & predictable; but the writing was otherwise good enough, and the actors accomplished enough, to keep it one’s interest going. I would recommend seeing it–for fun. But this is not going to be a movie review.
As we were waiting for the movie to begin, I found myself thinking about the spate of superhero movies over the past several years. It has long been argued that we tell ourselves stories about superheroes during times of uncertainty, unrest, or dramatic social change. The argument goes that people need reassurance that their world is an orderly place, where truth & justice will triumph in the end, where a few special individuals will rise above the norm to restore order & defeat the forces of chaos & destruction. The appearance of Superman (1938) and Batman (1939) after ten years of Depression and on the brink of another World War are held up as classic examples of the theory. In a capricious & mutable world, these characters and their exploits provided not simply escape but the reinforcement or reaffirmations of beliefs and values. Certainly the superheroes of the War years–Captain America, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, The Flash, et al–were obvious responses to those dark times. But my point here is not to cover territory that others with more knowledge & talent have already discussed (Wikipedia articles on Superhero and Superhero Fiction are as good a place to start as any, but Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay gives an excellent, Pulitzer-Prize-winning overview of the topic). Rather, I wanted to look at the society that is giving new life to this venerable genre.
Hal Jordan, the protagonist of the story(-ies), is a Top-Gun-style test pilot. The Hal Jordan test pilot character goes back to the 1958 rebirth of The Green Lantern (the original Green Lantern was a train engineer), a time when test pilots really were superheroes, so the character is not an Everyman by any means. The movie tries to soften this a little in making Jordan’s pre-Lantern personal life a mess: at one point he admits to his young nephew that he is irresponsible & negligent (although he can really fly). Still, Jordan possesses extraordinary qualities from the start, which already raises him above the mortal sphere.
I find it interesting that most superheroes are, at their core, “super.” Of course, there are those who are by nature “others,” insofar as their pedigrees are extraterrestial (e.g. Superman), divine (e.g. Thor), or mythical super-human (Wonder Woman, Aquaman). But those who begin life as humans already have, generally speaking, personal qualities that set them apart: Jordan is a test pilot, Bruce Wayne/Batman is exceptionally rich, Brit Reid/The Green Hornet is a wealthy newspaper publisher, Tony Stark/Ironman is a billionaire industrialist & engineering genius, Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk is a brilliant physicist, and so on. The inborn “super”-ness of mortal superheroes leads to a couple of conclusions that seem to speak volumes about contemporary life. [Note: There are a few notable exceptions, such as Spiderman, Captain America, The Daredevil, etc.; perhaps I will devote another posting to discussing these deviations from the superhero norm.]
Given the above argument that superheroes speak to anxieties that people experience when their society is unstable, their futures uncertain, their values challenged, it follows that “ordinary people” experience some degree of powerlessness. Moreover, the mechanisms by which people feel empowered have been undermined, eroded, or destroyed altogether. We know that society is not working for us “ordinary” folk. We also know that those for whom it is working live lives wholly different from our own–politicians, the upper echelons of business-people, celebrities, professional athletes, and so on. Even if we do not see these people as villains, we are still conscious of the fact that “they ain’t like us.” If, however, we do see as malign either the successful people or the society that separates us from them, then clearly the person-in-the-street does not have much hope of success, even if success means simply keeping what one has. Only someone with “super” abilities can stand up to the super-villains who have corrupted our world. We need saviors.
Basic to the struggle between the superhero and his or her nemesis is what Tom Wolfe discussed in The Right Stuff as the lone-warrior-in-single-combat motif. Even if we stretch a super-villain into a metaphor for some aspect of modern life–Parallax, Hal Jordan’s/The Green Lantern’s adversary, gains his power by feeding on fear, so it could be argued that he represents the fears & anxieties that define late-industrial, capitalist society–we are prevented from seeing the superhero as a representation of modern humanity by his or her super nature. The superhero is and always will be an “other.” It is the superhero, the lone warrior, who battles for humanity against forces that mere mortals cannot resist. Collective action is laughably useless: at best hopeless martyrdom, at worst ignominious destruction. Our role is to run or/and die.
The superhero genre is at once conservative and liberal, at least in the more sociological definitions of those words. Because superheroes battle against nemeses that seek to tear down society–literally or figuratively–they struggle to preserve the common good. In a world where individuals feel helpless–be it the fictional world of superheroes & super-villains or the real-life world of depressed economies, wars, political corruption, and corporate greed–we want to feel reassured that those values and beliefs upon which we have built our lives can be successfully defended against the scoundrels who attack them. We want things to be the way they were (even if “the way things were” was not really all that great to begin with). Superheroes are not revolutionaries.
In the same sense, superheroes reinforce liberal beliefs. Liberalism, as it has been understood in this country since the 19th century, holds that one’s society can be improved through thoughtful, systematic change. Sometimes such changes can be unpleasant, even drastic (e.g. “The New Deal,” “The Great Society”), but liberalism does not believe that the fundamental system is itself at fault. The superhero, again, is not a revolutionary. His or her role is to mitigate and rectify the damage to society inflicted by those forces too powerful for the collective action of ordinary people. The superhero will change things, through his honesty and her sense of justice, but he or she will not change things too much. Only villains do that.
It is probably obvious where I am going with this train of thought. Superheroes and superhero fiction entertain us, but they also disempower us in subtle ways. Although they are born out of the fear and anxiety we feel as a result of all the pressures put upon us in and by contemporary society, they also take away the idea that ordinary people like us can stand against the forces, the super-villains, that create those fears and anxieties. We are the damsels in distress awaiting our white knights. Moreover, that white knight is not going to change the system that imperils us in the first place; he is simply going to remove the peril and restore what was. And await the next peril, of course.
In disempowering the common person, the superhero motif points to a very real danger: believing that this politician or that businessperson, this religious leader or that self-help guru can correct our problems and restore order to our world. On both individual and social levels, entrusting our futures to others has generally proven to be unwise. Literal superheroes are fictions, and figurative superheroes are by definition rare (how else can they be “super”?). Our world is not threatened by intergalactic monsters, nor by evil geniuses in subterranean lairs. Rather, our threats are of a much more mundane nature, though not necessarily any less destructive. Such threats do not require superheroes. These dangers can be met & overcome through the principled actions of individuals, acting collectively.
People like me want very much to see fundamental, systemic changes in our society. But, you know, I would be happy with simply tackling the worst problems for the time being.
Yes, yes, I know: superheroes and super-villains are works of the imagination and should be enjoyed as such. Hey, I was English major, and I teach literature (and film), so I both know and embrace the argument. I enjoyed The Green Lantern, as I have enjoyed the Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Ironman, Megamind, Kung Fu Panda and all the other movies starring superheroes. They are fun. But their entertainment values should not dissuade us from looking through the genre, through the motifs, to see the very real world from which they spring. And having seen that world, we cannot sit and passively await for a superhero to show up & make things right.
