July 14, 2005
Where are our heroes?
March 13, 1992
One of the most often-repeated observations being made of late is that heroes in comics have changed to their very core...and not for the better.
There have been, to my mind, three stages of comic heroes so far. The first was the Element Age, so-called for two reasons: It encompasses gold and silver age, and the heroes of the time were elementary. Their purpose was clear. Their morals were spotless. If there was any initial flaws in their characters (Batman originally killed people and was hunted by the police, notions that were clearly ahead of his time; relatively quickly he stopped packing guns and became an extension of the Gotham police force) they were done away with. Oh, maybe the Spectre was somewhat creepy, but he pretty much had God backing him up, so it was okay.
Perhaps it helped that, at the time, there was such a clear and present evil in the world--namely the Axis powers. The good guys of fiction had to be that good because the bad guys of reality were that bad. Heck, perhaps it's no coincidence that as America moved into the 50s, leaving Hitler and his evil behind, comic heroes lightened up more and more. Superman and Batman, notably, had less and less of an edge to them. But they were still morally stand-up guys.
Then we moved into the second hero age of comics, which can only be termed the Marvel Age, because the angst-ridden characters were so closely associated with those published by Marvel. The tortured Thing, the hard-luck Spider-Man, the Thunder God who could command elements but not a woman's heart...they wore their difficulties on their sleeves, and were extremely appealing to readers. Teen-agers in particular, who are, by definition, little more than angst on two legs.
The emotionally-plagued heroes became so popular that DC even endeavored to graft angst onto their own characters, which is like trying to parallel park an 18-wheeler into a space large enough for a VW: You can do it, but the final result isn't going to be pretty.
An outgrowth of angst was "relevance." Excessive aggravating about their own problems began to wear thin, so heroes began agonizing about the problems of society as well.
And then we rolled into the third age of heroes. The age that I refer to as: The Mess Age.
Why? Two reasons. First, because heroes went from having problems to being complete societal messes. The hero community of the Mess Age includes, among its membership: alcoholics, drug addicts, emotional cripples, psychos and mass murderers.
And second, because the more popular a hero is seems to be directly related to how much of a bloody mess he can leave in his wake.
Look at Superman, for heaven's sake. Once upon a time, the icon of perfection and flawlessly moral behavior. But in "Dark Knight" he was portrayed as a puppet of the American government, a mindless object of scorn. In his own title, he carefully and deliberately killed renegade Kryptonians and agonized over it for months afterwards.
And Batman, Superman's long-time pal? He became dementedly singleminded, alienating Kal-El, Dick Grayson, and going through kid sidekicks like they were potato chips. (The last thing you want to do is really draw attention to the fact that Batman routinely engages in child endangerment, as Bob Ingersoll has pointed out. But that's precisely what they've done.)
Jailing badguys was no longer enough. Their bodies piled up like cordwood, as the Punisher, Wolverine, Lobo and their brethren cut a bloody swathe through the legions of the nasty. The line between heroes and villains has blurred as to be invisible. Not only are the most popular heroes guys who you can't count on for rational and just behavior...they're not even people you'd want to share a cab with.
Why has this happened? Why is the notion of a hero with a stable moral center...a hero who is heroic... suddenly so passe?
Look around you.
Art reflects society, and at this point, society is extremely aware that many of its heroes are hardly paragons of purity. Each new revelation, each new sordid action, each new headline that's splashed across supermarket tabloids or ballyhooed on the evening news, rips away at the fabric of heroism in this country.
(A recent local newscast led off with politicians hurling racial epithets, and closed with covering a new sport: Nude Bungee jumping. Personally, I think they should have combined the two stories: Any politician who's into nude bungee jumping would get my vote. It beats heaving on the Japanese Prime Minister.)
Where do we look for our heroes? Who have our heroes been in the past?
Sports figures. Magic Johnson recently played what will probably be his final game, voted to his position by fans who didn't care that he hadn't played a single game this season. And he responded with a bravura performance that earned him the game MVP award. He deserved the accolades, and it added to his rightful stature as an heroic figure.
But what can't be ignored is that he became exposed to AIDS through sexual conduct that was--to put it delicately--not thought out. If he'd had the moral center that heroes are "supposed" to have--the moral purity that people wax nostalgic for when they speak of the current crop of the comic book Mess Age--he wouldn't have been sleeping around in the first place. The one who's really heroic is his wife, who is standing by her man rather than, say, appearing on Oprah and complaining about his less-than-sterling conduct.
What's heroic is that Johnson has tried to turn his own misfortune into the potentially life-saving message of, "Heterosexual transmission of AIDS is a real threat." Hopefully that will pierce through the notion of "Yeah, but it couldn't happen to me" that pervades our population.
Then there's Mike Tyson. Here is a man who beats people up for a living. Who has a history of violence in and out of the ring. Who raped a young woman that the defense was so desperate to discredit, that they put forward the notion that she was sexually hyped up from listening to rap music. (Thank God I wasn't on the jury, because my doubtlessly audible "Aw, come on" would not have endeared me to the judge.)
But each day, when he was escorted to and from the court house, the path would be lined with well-wishers and supporters. Even after the conviction, his old neighborhood of Brownsville clung to Tyson as a hero through and through. Jesse Gibson, 38, told one reporter, "He's a great guy who got a bum deal... Anytime somebody looks up to somebody, they want to break him down." Other residents echoed the sentiments. "He was made an example of," said Lyman May. "Now they can show you another black man who has failed," who pointed out that Tyson failed where the white William Kennedy Smith succeeded.
(To my mild surprise, there hasn't seemed to be all that much emphasis on the notion that Tyson was given unfair treatment because of skin color. Actually, you can look at the Tyson case from the other angle: Tyson's accuser, a black woman, succeeded in making herself a credible witness, whereas by all accounts, Smith's accuser, a white woman, did not. So what does that say about race relations?)
So to some Tyson remains a hero, while to Judge Patricia Gifford he is simply another criminal for sentencing. Again, I'm no lawyer, but I've been wondering...maybe they should have tried an insanity defense. My (limited) understanding of the law is that it has to be proven that you understood you were committing a crime. I'm convinced Tyson did not, and still does not, understand.
Let's face it, the guy's not a rocket scientist. For the past ten years he's been consistently told that sometimes it's okay to beat people up, and sometimes it's not (as opposed to the average child, who is told it's never okay.) Not only that, but his own testimony makes it clear that he doesn't think of women as people, but rather sacks of meat to be grabbed and used. Hitler thought of Jews not as people, but as subhumans, and nobody thinks Hitler was a candidate for the mental health poster boy. Tyson is hardly Hitler, but his grasp of male/female interaction is certainly not societal norm.
Or maybe it is. Maybe he just personifies what all men secretly think, especially when hormones first kick in... but whereas other men clean up their act, Tyson never did. Never had to. And now he'll probably he slapped away somewhere, which is good, because he's a rapist and dangerous. But it's sad, too. Especially to those people who held him to be a hero because he was black and uneducated, but still successful. Because they could aspire to that, too. But who wants to aspire to being a jailed rapist?
More heroes. Look around. Who are the traditional heroes?
Policemen? By and large hardworking and dedicated. But look at the travesties over the years. The police corruption in New York and Philadelphia. The brutality of some LA cops immortalized on videotape. Who can overlook the notion that the Milwaukee police stumbled over a blood-covered boy who had escaped the horrors of Jeffrey Dahmer...and when Dahmer told the cops that it was just "a lover's quarrel," gave the hysterical boy back to Dahmer who killed the kid in short order.
Astronauts? Anybody heard from the space program lately? No one notices astronauts anymore. Most kids don't know the significance of the names Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. And NASA is the outfit that blew up the Challenger.
Doctors? Once they were almost Godlike beings, typified by the fatherly, all-knowing Marcus Welby. Nowadays, though, doctors have to be just as worried about malpractice as they do about their patients. House calls are a thing of the past. We desperately want to trust our medical practitioners--but everything you read and hear makes you afraid to do so.
Soldiers? Absolutely heroic--and yet look what this country did to the returning Vietnam soldiers. Indeed, they might have been the very first of the heroes to be pilloried by changing societal mores. Like Rip Van Winkle, they returned to a country that was not what they left behind. The lionizing of Desert Storm participants, while a tribute to people who did their duty, comes across like a nation trying to assuage its guilty conscience over the lousy treatment of the Vietnam vets.
Our nation's leaders? Living or dead, they're objects of attack. George Bush, without the winds of war puffing his sails, finds himself becalmed on the seas of America's financial frustration and despair.
And whether you're John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton, your sexual exploits--in the eyes of the media--take on far more import than your political agenda or the desire to do right by your constituents. I wonder why Clinton hasn't tried to attack the focus on the Gennifer Flowers business by claiming that it's a conspiracy to bring down the uppity white man. After all, Clarence Thomas pushed his way past sexual harrassment charges by claiming it was a plot to bring down the uppity black man.
The Supreme Court? Now there's a group of people who used to be my personal heroes... until the make-up of the court changed, and it went from being a body of justices out to protect free expression for the people, to being a group out to protect people from free expression.
Firemen? Well... uhm... hm. Okay. Firemen. Nobody badmouths firemen. Ultimately no one cares what firemen do in their private lives, or what their motivations are in their chosen line of work. You're just so damned glad to see them if your house is burning down that, unlike the Bridge over San Luis Rey, what brought them to this moment in time is of no consequence. Thank heavens they're there. Firemen, America's last undisputed heroes.
But they're outweighed by the battlefield of destroyed individuals that, back in the Element Age, were held up to the heroic ideal. We've become a country that knows entirely too much about entirely everything, and as a result we're basically cynical and disbelieving. Perhaps that's why we love the Olympics so much... once every four years, we get a set of pristine heroes to enjoy and take pride in. Guys like Team USA, or the intrepid Paul Wylie. And the beauty of those heroes is that they'll fade into obscurity, or go on nice tours, or become announcers... stuff that will do nothing to diminish their places in our hearts and minds so that we can continue to treasure those fond memories without the heartbreak of subsequent disclosures (Film at 11).
So why are so many heroes cynical, nasty, angry... even unheroic?
Look around, babe. Look at the newspapers. Look at the mirror. Just... look.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can now be written to directly c/o To Be Continued, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, New York, 11705-0239.
Posted by Glenn Hauman at July 14, 2005 01:34 AM | TrackBack | Other blogs commenting