After about a year-and-a-half of effort, I finally finished Fallible and Flawed (my book) ... sort of. I finished the version required for my master's degree. It is now at the printer (I had to get it printed and bound to meet the requirements of my field project). Now, I'm adding one more chapter (about female superheroes) and then I will revise it a few more times and then send it to a publisher. My goal is to send it to a publisher before my birthday.

The picture above is the cover on the version I am printing. I'm sure that the fully published version will look a lot better.

In other news, I will now be teaching part-time at Salt Lake Community College. I will be teaching two English 1010 classes (Intro to Writing). I am really looking forward to it and have spent quite a bit of time lately working on lesson plans, etc.

Lots of fun.

When I was younger, I had a poster hanging above my computer (okay, it really was the family computer but I sure used it more than anyone else). The poster showed Snoopy sitting on his doghouse with a typewriter in front of him. Above him were the words: "It's exciting when you've written something you know is good."

Man, what I wouldn't give for a poster like that again.

Today, I finished Chapter One of Fallible and Flawed (my book about superheroes and 9/11) again. I finished it the first time a few weeks back but had some problems with it. First, it was WAY too long (over 50 pages) and it kind of lost focus after the first 20 pages or so. So, I decided to split the chapter in half, toss some unneeded sections away and add a new one that focused it better. Today, I finished that chapter. And, if I do say so myself, it's pretty good.

That may sound conceited, but it isn't really. I'm just saying that it is better than the original version (it's only about 15 pages). And, just like Snoopy said, it is very exciting when you've written something that is good. It just feels right, like all the stars have lined up just for you or something like that.

I can't wait to see Chapter Two!

In this post I discuss Watchmen at length. I include several spoilers for both the book and the movie. If you do not want them spoiled, you might want to skip it.

On Saturday, I went to see Watchmen. My purpose in going was research. The last chapter of Fallible and Flawed is going to be about Watchmen, the graphic novel, so it was important for me to see the movie. I'm glad I did, because they made some significant changes that speak directly to my thesis. But more on that later.

Honestly, I was expecting to dislike the movie, largely because I have never actually decided whether I like the book or not. I fully respect what Alan Moore and David Gibbons succeeded in doing with the book, but the whole thing made me feel very uncomfortable. The story is extremely dark and very violent. To top that off, it has a very low opinion of humanity and, more than anything else, that really got under my skin. So I was surprised that I actually enjoyed the film.

That being said, I don't really recommend it. It is kind of like The Passion of the Christ. Both of them are very good movies. They are exceptionally well made and have the ability to reach their audience in profound ways. However, they are both extremely difficult to watch. The violence in Watchmen is over-the-top (it is so gut wrenching in a few places that I actually gasped), the sex and nudity are as explicit as they can be without getting an NC17 rating, and the story is a real downer. It isn't really a fun experience.

So you may be wondering why I enjoyed it if is was so bad. I think that the only answer to that is that I knew what I was getting into and, even more than that, I knew what the story was trying to say. I have no idea what someone without any background in the novel or the philosophical debates around it would think of the movie. My guess is that they wouldn't get it and, as a result, would hate it. But that is just a guess.

The story is a perfect example of post-modernism. It is an incredible example of deconstruction focused on what really lies beneath the mask of a superhero. Alan Moore said that he wrote the book as a statement against hero worship. He said that he couldn't believe that anyone would trust their lives or their salvation to some of these "heroes" and he set out to show that heroes aren't all they're cracked up to be (incidentally, this dovetails nicely with my recent post about flawed heroes ). And so the book is an examination of what it would be like if superheroes existed in the real world.

The story, which takes place in an alternate 1980s universe where America won Vietnam and Nixon has been elected to a fifth term (he asked Dr. Manhattan to intervene in Vietnam which won the war within a week and, as a result, became so popular that he got the term limits repealed), focuses on a group of masked "heroes:" the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, the Silk Specter, Ozymandias, and Rorschach (for the uber-fans out there, yes, I do know that it is actually "Nite Owl II" and "Silk Specter II"). Of them, only Dr. Manhattan, who was created in an accident in a nuclear physics laboratory has any super powers. And, due to the Keane Act passed by Congress years earlier, only Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian, and Rorschach are still active - Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian because they are government sponsored, and Rorschach because he refuses to give up.

The heroes are amalgams of popular superheroes. Both Rorschach and Nite Owl are parts of Batman. Dr. Manhattan is a take on Superman. And the Comedian is something like Captain America in that he goes to war for the country and has the government's backing. But the most important aspects of these characters are their problems. That is what it is all about, and to miss that is to miss the entire crux of the story.

Dr. Manhattan (the blue one) is a perfect example. After the accident, he becomes, essentially, a god. What would happen to someone who was given limitless power? Would they be able to maintain their humanity? Would they have any connection to Earth at all? As Dr. Manhattan says "In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon." As the story progresses, he moves further and further away from humanity. Visually, this is shown by him losing more and more of his clothing until he wears nothing at all.

Rorschach, on the other hand, is mentally deranged but morally exact. He enacts retribution on the guilty in the most violent manner possible, typically ending in their death. But he is certain in his morality and never wrong. When he attacks someone, you can be sure that they are, indeed, guilty. In the same way that, when Batman takes down a criminal, you know they deserved it. The difference is Batman's "one rule" to not kill, which Rorschach abandons after he tracks down a kidnapped child and finds that her kidnapper raped her, cut her into pieces, and fed her to his dogs. After that, there is no mercy for him, only justice.

The Comedian is, as Dr. Manhattan says, "the most amoral man" you have ever met. He believes that humanity is one big joke and relishes in retribution and anarchy. In the course of the movie he rapes two different women and, when one becomes pregnant, he murders her in cold blood. And yet, his actions are fully sanctioned by the government.

Ozymandias, the world's strongest/smartest man, on the other hand, is a megalomaniac that only wants to make the world a better place. This is actually brought out more in the film than in the book. In the book, he is just a very successful businessman who capitalized on his alter ego. In the movie, he working with Dr. Manhattan to find clean, renewable energy. He wants to make the world a better place but is willing to pay any price for it. In this way, Ozymandias is the most like a comic book villain. He is like Lex Luthor if Luthor's intentions were noble instead of selfish.

Nite Owl and the Silk Specter are the normal of the group, but even they have their issues. The Silk Specter has mommy issues (and daddy issues when it turns out that the Comedian, who raped her mother, is her father) and Nite Owl has adequacy issues which he compensates for with the costumes and violence.

All in all, not the nicest bunch of people. And they're the "Watchmen," those set up to protect humanity.

And, in the end, they do - sort of. To prevent nuclear war and the complete elimination of mankind, Ozymandias orchestrates a scheme that wipes out millions of people but unites the world against a common - albeit, imaginary - enemy. This was the one place where the movie differed dramatically from the book. In the book, the plot involved a giant squid and a supposed invasion from outer space. The movie, it involved framing Dr. Manhattan.

This change - which fans will no doubt debate for all time - was very interesting. It was definitely a statement, though an obscure one. It is almost a philosophic statement about religion in that Dr. Manhattan is set up as a god who is "up there watching them" and who punishes the wicked. It suggests that belief in God is just as risky as trusting these heroes - that mankind must look to itself for salvation. Very interesting given the political climate today.

As I said, this isn't a fun story, and anyone who heads to the theater thinking that it is going to be just another superhero flick is going to be seriously put out. Instead, it is an examination of what makes people heroic, what makes people villainous, and what makes people human. Like the superhero stories it deconstructs, it uses archetypes - amplified examples - to prove its point. The only difference is that these archetypes are not the nice kind.

But the most fascinating part of the movie came towards the end. In the beginning, Laurie (the Silk Specter) goes to see her mother (the original Silk Specter) about the murder of the Comedian. Her mother, who had been one of the women raped by the Comedian is unable to condemn him and actually speaks affectionately of him. At the end of the movie, after discovering that the Comedian was her father, Laurie's mother asks. "How could I condemn him when he gave me you?" Earlier, Dr. Manhattan is awed by what he calls miracles, including the fact that even someone as amoral and "evil" as the Comedian could produce someone like Laurie. Those two moments struck me as being more redemptive for humanity than the book was for me. They spoke to our ability to forgive, repent, and move past our mistakes. They speak of our ability to improve life, no matter how bad or how bleak.

So, in the end, I think I enjoyed it for what it was: an examination of humanity and heroism with all its warts and dark little secrets laid bare. It isn't an easy film to watch, but I think that, despite its flaws, it was a worthwhile experience. Just know what you are getting into before watching it.

The purpose of this post is to clarify part of yesterday's post about Zombies, Superheroes and Our Children. You probably want to read that first so that this one makes sense.

After reading yesterday's post on how darker heroes will impact our children, Jenna asked me a question that made it clear I hadn't adequately expressed what I was trying to say. Her question was: do you really things will get so bad?

The short answer is "no." I don't think that things will get that bad. I think that we, as humanity, will eventually pull out of it. Like William Faulkner, "I decline to accept the end of man... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail!" (see Faulkner's brilliant Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech) That being said, I do believe that things are likely to get worse for the immediate--and, possibly, somewhat distant--future, until there is a critical mass and a turning point.

Last night, Jenna and I went to see the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Unlike many critics, I thoroughly enjoyed it and was pleased to see that it kept much of what made the first movie so powerful. I admit that some parts were a little over-the-top, but much of it was very good, and Keanu Reeves has never had a more perfect part (no emotion, you can't beat that).

For those who have seen neither the 1951 classic or the remake (I recommend both), they are about an alien that suddenly lands in New York City. He is accompanied by a giant robot named "Gort" (in the remake, GORT is an acronym but I can't remember what it stands for. "Genetic" something or other). It turns out that he is there to determine whether humanity should be destroyed or not. The first movie is about nuclear proliferation, the remake is about environmental concerns (the idea is that there are only a handful of planets capable of supporting life and that this one cannot be lost).

Both movies have a lot in common. They both portray the government in a very close minded and militaristic (this was much riskier in 1951). The big robot goes on a rampage to wipe out most of humanity at the end, though it is obviously much bigger in the remake with larger effects.

In both films, Klaatu goes to see a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. The scientist tries to convince him that humans, while violent, are not worthy of destruction. I don't remember if this is from the original, but in the remake, the scientist (wonderfully played by John Cleese) tells Klaatu that every civilization can and will change, but it first requires going all the way to the brink.

If history has taught us anything it is that the world--and our individual lives--move in cycles. Things will be dark until we turn things around and move back into the light. Sooner or later, we will over-correct, so to speak, and plunge back into the darkness.

As I said in yesterday's post, I believe that the world will continue to get darker and, as a result, our hero stories will also grow darker, which will push things even darker. However, there will come a point where the darkness reaches a critical mass, a point when we've been taken to the brink. And that is when the ray of hope will shine through and save us. Sooner or later, people will not be able to handle the darkness anymore and things will change.

I have no idea how long this will take for this to happen and I have no idea how bad things will get before it does, but I have faith that it will. As a race, we cannot exist in darkness for too long.

The whole point of superheroes is to bring us that hope. In the past, they did so by presenting us perfect gods. The problem is that it is impossible to relate to those gods in today's darker world. So they have become more human, more fallible and flawed. This change feeds the darkness, yes, but it also gives us the seeds of hope. They let us believe in humanity and believe that, no matter how fallible and flawed we are, we can also be heroes ourselves.

I put the quote from Henry V at the top of this post because I believe that it is the job of all of us to combat the darkness. If enough of us rush "once more to the breach" and fill the world with hope and optimism, things will change and we will not only endure, we will prevail!

My sister, Katie, is a glutton for punishment. She keeps asking excellent questions that inevitably lead to long blog posts. I think it's great because it helps me to firm up my own thoughts and conclusions about what I am researching: it helps me put things into order and make sense of them. I just wonder how the rest of you feel about it.

After my post on why heroes are getting darker (which also stemmed from one of Katie's questions), Katie asked a very good follow up question: how will darker heroes affect our childrens' worlds of pretend and beyond? This question is a lot harder to answer than the first one for a couple of reasons. First, my area of research has been primarily focused on proving that heroes are getting darker and what that says about post-9/11 America. I have not been researching what the changes mean for the future. Second, making those kinds of predictions is extremely difficult because hard evidence is very hard to come by. There aren't any really good studies that show long term impacts of these kinds of changes. That being said, as a father of young children that will grow up in this darker reality, I recognize how important the question is and, since I have come across a few things in my research that may shed a little light on the subject, I'll take a stab at it.

I think it is important to remember that I am not suggesting that darker heroes are making our world darker. For the most part, I believe it is the reverse: our heroes are reflecting the darker, post-9/11 world. At the same time, darker hero stories with little optimism and hope feed our pessimism, making the world seem darker. It is a cyclical thing that feeds on itself.

Over the past few days, I have been reading a very fascinating book called World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). The book, which was written by Max Brooks, Mel Brooks' son, is a collection of first hand accounts of a long war with zombies wiped out a large percentage of the earth's population 10 years earlier. It is a very fascinating read and I will likely write up a review of it once I've finished reading it (I'm about half-way through).

One of the first hand accounts in the book appears in the chapter titled: "Home Front USA." It is about Roy Elliot, a man who was a movie maker and well-known actor before the war. As the US began the process of retaking and fortifying the country, he was ranked as an F-6, which means he had no useful skills (useful skills are classified as those that could directly help with the war and reconstruction efforts: gardening, metallurgy, weapons training, construction, etc.). But, after a long struggle, he found himself a very important role.

In the story, one of the major problems faced by the Americans (in fact, faced by the whole world) was what they called "ADS," which was Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome. Essentially, it was people giving up on life. They could be barely wounded or completely healthy when they went to bed but never wake up. In all, it was claiming over 100 people a day. The problem wasn't physiological, it was psychological. Elliot was the one who found the cure.

He went to the battlefield and recorded key victories. He got the army to bring high tech weapons that provided great visuals (specifically, lasers), and recorded them whomping on the undead. The fact that the lasers were highly impractical in real combat, didn't matter. They made for a thrilling show that seemed to "prove" that the Americans were winning. Elliot travelled from camp to camp, screening his movies and scattering copies everywhere possible. The first time one of his movies was shown, ADS dropped by 5%. After a few months, it had been cut in half.

Toward the end of the story (which is written like an interview), Elliot asks the interviewer if he has heard of The Hero City, which was made by a similar filmmaker during the Zombie War (from what I gather, The Hero City was where the Americans finally overturned the zombies, but I haven't got to the specifics, yet). When the interviewer says that he has heard of it, Elliot expounds: "Great film, right? Marty made it over the course of the Siege. Just him, shooting on whatever medium he could get his hands on. What a masterpiece: the courage, the determination, the strength, dignity, kindness, and honor. It really makes you believe in the human race... You should see it."

The interviewer responds that he has seen it, to which Elliot asks: "Which version?" At the interviewer's confusion, Elliot explains: "There were two... Marty made both a wartime and postwar version of The Hero City. The version you saw... Did it show the dark side of the heroes in The Hero City? Did it show the violence and the betrayal, the cruelty, the depravity, the bottomless evil in some of those heroes' hearts? No, of course not. Why would it? That was our reality and it's what drove so many people to get snuggled in bed, blow out their candles, and take their last breath. Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay. There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope."

While obviously fictional, the preceding section from World War Z brings out an interesting point: the power of pop culture to influence the psyche.

I'm not talking about making people behave in certain ways. Arguments over whether pop culture makes children and adults act one way or another have been going on forever (even Plato got in on this one!). And, no matter how many studies come back with conclusive results one way or the other (many people don't know that studies have proved both sides of the debate, which kind of rules science a moot point), the argument will likely continue far into the future.

No, what I'm talking about is different than controlling people's actions. I am talking about changing or enhancing feelings.

Did you ever come out of a movie feeling better about the world around you than when you went in? Why? Has the reverse ever happened?

In 2006, Metta Spencer, a retired professor from the University of Toronto who studies peace and currently edits Peace Magazine (see Metta Spencer's blog), published a fascinating book titled Two Aspirins and a Comedy. The book examines the impact of television and movies on the human psyche, specifically, their ability to influence negative and positive feelings which can then influence our health. The book describes how movies and television shows draw our emotions to the surface and that, as emotional beings, those emotions can make us either sick or healthy. Essentially, the book demonstrates that, what Roy Elliot's character does in World War Z (make movies that promote hope over despair) actually works in the real world!

So, what does all this have to do with superheroes and our kids? Plenty.

Hero stories are teaching stories and always have been. They reflect (and therefore, teach) the values and highest ideals of the society that created them. Villains, on the other hand, reflect the darkest nightmares of that same society. These reflections are magnified on a large scale to make the lessons obvious. In reality, no one could quite measure up to the pure evil that is the Joker. At the same time, no one could be as morally good as Superman. But, then again, we're not really expected to be. They are archetypes--examples--not models.

Even stories of real life heroes fall into the archetype model. That is what "Marty" in World War Z was doing by omitting all of the bad things done by America's "heroes": he was focusing on the archetypes. Archetypes are not really human, they are what Plato called "shadows" of reality. As a result, they do not have the baggage that humans carry with them. They are neither fallible nor flawed (sorry, just had to throw that out there).

Plato was very worried about Homer and other poets of Ancient Greece bringing their heroes and gods down to the human level. In his Republic, Plato spends a great deal of time slicing and dicing their works to cut out any mention of mistakes or overtly human passions. Heroes and gods, Plato argues, should be perfect so they can be examples to the youth.

The danger Plato most feared was imitation. He worried that bad examples of the gods or heroes would make the youth want to act the same way. What he didn't consider was the impact on emotions and what that would do to society as a whole.

Contrary to popular belief, violence in the media isn't really the problem (I am not saying that it isn't "a" problem) with society. In fact, some types of violence in movies can be very productive as long as it resolves well in the end.

One of the greatest movies I have ever seen is Glory, which is about the first black battalion in the Civil War. The movie is incredibly violent and even difficult to watch, but few things have inspired me more than the courage and character demonstrated by the characters in that movie. Another painful example is Life is Beautiful. That movie is horrific, largely because of the violence it doesn't show, and yet, you walk away from it uplifted and inspired.

Some would argue that those movies are historic (or at least in an historic setting) and, therefore, don't count. But the thing is that our brain doesn't really distinguish between reality and fiction when producing emotions. People can get just as intense emotional thrills watching Star Wars or The Dark Knight as the movies listed above. The sacrifice of a fictional character can be just as moving as those made by characters based on real people.

Okay, so where am I going with all this? It's pretty simple. Because of 9/11 and a dozen other catastrophes that have occurred in the past seven years, our society is becoming far less hopeful and more pessimistic than before. This is being reflected in our heroes, who are becoming darker than ever before. However, as our archetypal heroes in movies, comics, and the rest of popular culture, become darker, they feed the darker mood of the country. Things get darker and darker until all we have left is darkness.

That is, I fear, the great danger of what is happening to our society. The darker our overall mood becomes, the worse off we will be. If Metta Spencer is right, then there will be more sickness, poverty, depression, suicide, and perhaps even crime, all around.

Doesn't sound like fun, does it?

Please remember, that is the extreme. It depends on a lot of people losing all of their hope.

Speaking of hope, that is what heroes, both real and fictional, are all about. They give us hope when, perhaps, we no longer have the right to have any. And, no matter how bad things get, the example of our heroes can always bring us back from the brink.

Of all the superhero movies that have come out since 9/11, I think that The Dark Knight best embodies this idea. After going through everything that they do, the people of Gotham still aren't willing to blow each other up. Even the convicted murderers and all around "bad guys" won't do it. And, when Batman becomes a "villain" (or, at least, is perceived to be one) in the end, he still embodies the selfless sacrifice that so many of our leaders embody. So, even though the movie is arguably one of the hardest superhero movies to watch because of the violence and terror it embodies, it ends with hope.

Hope is a powerful emotion. If there is enough of it, it drives out fear and darkness. It makes life worth living.

Getting back to Katie's question, how will these darker heroes affect our children? If things do not change, I can say with a certain amount of surety that it means that our children will grow up in a world that is much darker than the one we grew up in--or at least perceived to be that way. On the other hand, I think that they will also grow up in a world that is slowly beginning to hope for the future and even believe in the overall goodness of humanity.

In reality, it all comes down to what we teach them. It is impossible for us to shield them from the terrible things in this world, and I personally believe that doing so is a disservice to them. Find those good things. Find those seeds of hope. Teach them to your children and help them grow.

Maybe we can change the world.

It is amusing to watch the reactions of people when I tell them that I am writing a book about superheroes. Almost inevitably, they grin at me with the same grin I use when my kids say something adorable yet ridiculous. "That sounds like fun," they say, and you can just see them thinking "Geek! Geek! Geek!" It becomes even more comical when I tell them that I am writing about how 9/11 changed superheroes. The brow furrows in a slightly confused expression and they look at me out of the corner of their eye. "Oh, that sounds... interesting," they say.

What I think is interesting is that very few people actually ask me the question that they are obviously dying to ask: why? I guess that most just assume that I'm an overzealous geek and leave it at that. And there's probably (okay, definitely) some truth to that.

But beyond my excessive geekyness (who wouldn't want to study superheroes?), I actually believe that studying superheroes is very important. And, lucky me, I have Academia on my side.

It doesn't seem like many people think much about popular culture. They regard it as fluff entertainment and nothing more. But what history has demonstrated and psychoanalysis has verified, is that the stories that attain resonance speak directly to and about the culture that generated them. In other words, stories--especially fictional ones--both reflect and lead the people that produce and consume them. Studying a story reveals a lot about a culture.

A few months back, I observed an undergraduate class on popular culture. In class one day, the professor asked what movies the students had seen recently. After the embarrassed pause that always seems to follow a question like this when it is asked by a professor, one student admitted to having watched Enchanted, which she then brushed aside as "silly entertainment." Her answer both surprised and dismayed me. In one offhanded sentence, she wrote off a film that out-right defies seventy years of cinematic tradition and that is one of the most timely films ever produced.

Among all the Disney canon, Enchanted is unique because it is about real love, rather than the true love that had been peddled for so many years before. In Enchanted, the heroine Giselle starts off as a typical Disney princess, waiting for her strong and bold prince charming to come and sweep her away with true love's kiss. But, in the end, she realizes that she doesn't want prince charming. Instead, she finds real love in a divorced, single father--the first person she has actually become angry with! She isn't satisfied with the happily ever after peddled by seventy years of Disney princesses. She would rather have a love she has to work at.

One of the most telling sequences in the movie involves a couple on the brink of divorce. These two are so embittered to one another that they fight over everything, just to hurt the other. After Giselle reminds them of why they fell in love in the first place (and that they have to continually "see" each other), they decide to call off the divorce. When their incredulous lawyer points out to them that they "have problems." They respond: "Everyone has problems." The point is that true love takes work and that "problems," by themselves, aren't a good reason to give up on someone you love. It is more important to continually ask yourself "How Does She Know?"

Most interesting about Enchanted is its take on stepmothers. Think, for a moment, about words you automatically associate with the word "stepmother." What is the first word that comes to mind? For most people who have never had a real relationship with a stepmother, the number one word is either "wicked" or "evil." Sometimes, it is even hard for people to say "stepmother" without first attaching one of those words.

The vilification of stepmothers is largely due to Disney's influence. Over the past seventy years, the studio has never portrayed stepmothers as anything but evil (though, in reality, Disney films feature more absent mothers than wicked stepmothers: Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, etc.). Even Enchanted features a wicked stepmother. But, the most interesting part about the movie is that, in the end, Giselle becomes a stepmother! For the first time, ever, a Disney princess becomes, not just a bride, but a mother of her own little girl!

See, Enchanted, while being an admittedly silly and very entertaining film has two powerful messages that fly in the face of seventy years of cinematic tradition and hundreds of years of human history. The first is that real love takes effort and that "happily ever after" doesn't mean you won't have problems. "Everyone has problems." The second, is that stepmothers, who have traditionally been portrayed as evil usurpers of motherly authority, are not bad. In fact, they can be just as good as a real mother. What powerful messages to a world of quick and easy love (and just as quick divorces) and broken homes!

So what does all this have to do with superheroes? Well, not much, actually. But it is a good example of why it is important not to dismiss popular culture as just "silly entertainment. There are messages there that are not always apparent at first glance.

Hero stories have always been message stories, even if it is unconscious.

In the 1940s, Joseph Campbell opened the academic world to the messages buried in heroic tales. In his landmark book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he effectively demonstrated how hero myths have existed in every culture that has ever been documented around the globe. On top of that, these myths all followed the same basic pattern, which he called the "monomyth" or they "Hero's Journey" (incidentally, Enchanted also used the Hero's Journey as the basis of its plot, as have several other movies in the past three decades). Campbell hypothesized that the myths are universal because they speak directly to the human condition. In life, successful human beings (those that die content and happy) also follow the same basic steps of the Hero's Journey. In other words, the journey is symbolic of life. Additionally, it provides instruction on how to live life well.

Campbell said "It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prim discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth" (2008).

Hero myths differ only in those things that most accurately reflect the society that created them. The Odyssey reflects the values and specific trials of Ancient Greece. Davey Jones represents the values and trials of sailors who set sail on the vast deep with only a compass to guide them and wind to propel them. And so on.

Today, our hero myths play out in various forms, but the most resonant exist on the silver screen as superheroes, spies, or other larger-than-life men and women who battle evil for the common good. But what is interesting about them, is that they are changing. Even the reincarnations of old iconic characters are growing darker, more violent, more fallible, and more flawed. The question I am pursuing--the one I think I found the answer to--is why? And what does this transformation say about us?

We just got back from a screening of Disney's newest Pixar-animated creation: Bolt. It was a fun movie and the kids loved it. I had seen pieces of it--many of them incomplete--at Comic-Con earlier this year and I was excited to see the finished product. I highly recommend it for all families.

For anyone who doesn't already know, the movie is about Bolt, a dog in an action adventure TV show. The thing is that the cast and crew of the show work very hard to make sure that Bolt doesn't know it is all fake. So he really believes that Penny, his "person" is in danger and that he has superpowers. When the network puts pressure on the show to make it more edgy, the show does a cliffhanger where Bolt and Penny are separated for a day. He goes nuts and sets out to find her, which, through a series of events, lands him in New York City.

With the help of Mittens, an alley cat that Bolt kidnaps (because all cats work for the the evil Dr. Calico in the TV show), and an overenthusiastic hamster with the unlikely name of Rhino, Bolt makes his way across the country to get back to Penny. Through a series of hilarious sequences, he learns the truth about the TV show and how to be a real dog.

All in all, a fun movie, and the conclusion is great. But the part that caught my eye was a speech that Rhino gives to Bolt just over halfway through the film.

It takes place after Mittens has been captured and taken to the pound. Bolt has just learned the truth about his powers and feels pretty worthless. When he tells Rhino that he can't go to save Mittens, Rhino gives him a speech that just about sums up why heroes--even those that are fallible and flawed--are so important to society.

He says that Bolt inspired him, a lowly hamster stuck in a ball, to know that even he can be a hero. Even when the odds are stacked against you, you can still succeed "if you're AWESOME!" Powers don't matter, what matters is what's in your heart.

That really is the point of heroes. They inspire us and give us examples--albeit, exaggerated ones--of how to face adversity.

It has often been observed that the classic hero's journey mirrors the stages of life. We start at home, a place of safety and refuge with kind mentors and caretakers. And then something happens--we go to college, we get jobs, we start a family, etc.--that causes us to step out of the safety and comfort of home and onto the road of trials. We make friends and possibly enemies on the way, and in the end, we cross the return threshold (death) with the elixir of life (knowledge, experience, courage, love, etc.). Sometimes the journey is easy, and sometimes it is impossibly difficult. Heroic models, historic and fictional alike, show us what a true hero does when things get hard. They do not sit down and give up because they don't really have powers, they get up and keep moving. They do what is right, no matter the cost. And, when they make mistakes--when they fail--they pick themselves back up and try again.

Sure, Bolt is a cartoon dog, and Batman, Spider-man, and the entire comics universe are just characters drawn on a page or actors in costumes, but the ideals that they embody mirror the best of humanity. They show us the way. They show us that we can... if we're AWESOME!

Originally posted on Thursday, November 27, 2008

Yesterday, I finished reading Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel (novel-length comic book for those who have never seen one before) by Frank Miller. The book was first published in 1986 and, along with Watchmen by Alan Moore (soon to be a movie) transformed the comic book world into a darker, grittier place, more rooted in the "real" world. To some degree Miller and Moore worked together (Watchmen is even dedicated to Miller). As a result their respective works have dozens of similarities, which have been analyzed to the nth-degree by comic book fans and academics alike. Both portray much darker superheroes living in gritty, violent worlds filled with ambiguity and chaos. Both take place during the Cold War and deal with nuclear weapons and heightened tensions with the former Soviet Union that, in both cases, evolve into war. Both deal with superheroes having been banned with limited exceptions that are sanctioned by the government (think The Incredibles but with exceptions). Both end in a catastrophe that kills thousands of people and changes the world forever. But what fascinated me about Returns more than Watchmen, was its eerie pre-echoes of 9/11.

Except for die-hard comic book fans and a few others, most people are unaware that there have been multiple Robin's over the years (as in "Batman and..."). Dick Grayson is the one most people are familiar with (he was the one in Batman Forever). After he had been Robin for a long time, he eventually joined the Teen Titans and became Nightwing. Grayson was replaced by Jason Todd, a former street orphan and smalltime thief (that is the revised origin story. His original origin mirrored Grayson's with his circus family killed by a mob boss). Todd, however, met a brutal end at the hands of comic book fans who, via a telephone poll, voted to have him offed by the Joker (he was beaten to death with a crowbar). In The Dark Knight Returns, Todd's death so affected Batman that he vowed to hang up the cape forever.

Returns starts 10 years after Todd's death. Gotham has sunk lower than ever and is being terrorized by a youth gang called "The Mutants," who are particularly known for their brutality. One night, Bruce Wayne is confronted by two Mutants in the same place where his parents were murdered. It stirs the beast within, but it is the release and return to crime of the "cured" Harvey Dent (Two-Face) that pushes Wayne to take up the mantle again.

But Batman soon learns that, at 55, his reflexes and strength are not what they once were. Additionally, his reception by the media is more negative than before with psychologists publicly blaming him for the deaths caused by the Joker and other villains who, they claim, were only reacting to Batman's violence (to some degree this was also addressed in The Dark Knight movie). He is soon joined by Carrie Kelly, a new Robin (and the first girl, though there was one other girl Robin as well), whom Batman saved from some Mutants.

Batman takes out the Mutant leader (who has been working with Two-Face in a war on Gotham) and the Mutants splinter into several factions, one of which, The Sons of Batman, take on the vigilante role but with far more brutal methods than the Dark Knight ever employed, such cutting of hands for stealing a candy bar.

While all this is happening, Commissioner Gordan, Batman's primary ally, is being forced into retirement. He is replaced by Ellen Yindell who promptly issues a warrant for Batman's arrest, forcing him to fight the police as well as the Joker who was also declared "cured" and released upon society where he promptly kills everyone in the audience of a talk show where he is invited to "shoot the breeze."

Also coinciding with Batman's return (but not caused by it), are escalating tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. Even though President Reagan claims everything is fine, it is clear that full-scale war is imminent (this is particularly similar to Watchmen).

Eventually, Superman, America's lone sanctioned superhero (and the only super-powered being in the book) is called in by the president to deal with the Soviets. In response, the Soviets fire a "Coldbringer" nuclear missile. Superman manages to push the missile to the desert but its detonation creates an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) that wipes out the American electric grid and causes a black cloud to blot out the sky.

Gotham, afraid that this is the end of the world, collapses into chaos with riots erupting across the city. Batman and Robin round up the Sons of Batman and turn them into a type of militia—becoming the law of Gotham.

In the aftermath, Superman is sent to deal with Batman, who has become too much of a political liability (i.e. he makes the politicians look bad). In the climactic battle (in which Oliver Queen—the Green Arrow—plays a small part), Batman uses synthesized kryptonite and a souped up batsuit to level the playing field. He defeats Superman (who is only referred to as "Clark" in the story) but does not kill him. As he revels in his victory, he has a heart attack and dies.
At the very end of the book, it is revealed that Batman faked his own death. The last scene shows him gathering with the Sons of Batman in the ruined Batcave, plotting how they will "cure" society. Batman observes that he has discovered that "more is wrong with the world than crime."

The story itself is very dark and more than a little disturbing. Throughout the book, the story is interrupted by a television show where various players debate the good and evil of Batman. The show also includes "man on the street" reactions to what is going on in Gotham. Some support Batman, some oppose him. No one is neutral. This part of the story—the media portrayals—were some of the most frightening parts of the book because they so accurately portrayed today. Think of it, they bring a mass murderer—who is known to have killed more than 600 people!—onto a talk show because they know he will bring a large audience. Also, the "man on the street" commentary often seemed to echo things you can read everyday on chat rooms or listen to on political radio. "Batman? Yeah, I think he's A-okay. He's kicking just the right butts—butts the cops ain't kicking, that's for sure. Hope he goes after the homos next" (p. 45).

The book also points out one of the biggest flaws of television: its focus on the most negative aspects of humanity. Soon after his return, Batman-inspired attacks begin happening all across the city. A man kills three people in a porn theater, the story is carried by the evening news. Another dresses up like Batman and attempts to murder someone in a restaurant but is killed instead. The news carries the story. The owner of a small bakery overhears a mugging, grabs a rolling pin and chases the villain away. "Nobody is hurt badly enough for this to make the news" (p. 30). 1986 was just one short year after Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, a brutal critique against the "And now this..." entertainment-driven culture that had been created by television. He would have been proud of The Dark Knight Returns' portrayal of television and how it showed its flaws.

But, as I said before, it was the strange pre-echoes of 9/11 that really caught my eye. There were several, but three were the most obvious.

The first parallel occurred during the blackout. A passenger jet, its electronics knocked out by the EMP, smashes into one of Gotham's Twin Towers. Just having a plane crash into a building is enough to bring back memories of 9/11, but to have it be a "Twin Tower" was flat out unnerving, and put me on guard for the rest of that section.

The second parallel also occurred during the blackout. The building hit by the airplane collapses, sending dust and smoke into the city streets. This is where Frank Miller's imagination led him astray. I'll come back to this and explain in a minute.

The third—and perhaps the most frightening—are the startling parallels with the current War on Terror. These moments mostly come in television broadcasts by Present Reagan who, at first assures the people that there is no war, and then that there is but that it won't become nuclear, and then that, although a nuclear missile did go off, he is still the president and the world continues on. The frightening part is how closely his rhetoric matches that of the Bush Administration. It is almost as if Miller were channeling news from 20 years into the future. For example, when war first breaks out, the president tells the public: "American tr...excuse me...heroic American troops are now engaged in direct combat with Soviet forces...now there's been a lot of loose talk these days about nuclear war...well, let me tell you, nobody's running off half-cocked, no, sir...but we sure as shootin' aren't running away, either. We've got to secure our—ahem—stand up for the cause of freedom" (p. 115). And, with a wink, he assures the people that "those cute little Corto Maltese people, they want us there. Just you ask them...meanwhile, don't you fret...we've got GOD on our side" (ibid).

It isn't necessarily the politics that bothered me, it was the fact that the rhetoric was exactly the same as President Bush. "My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger...Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder...May God bless our country and all who defend her." (March 19, 2003). "Our mission in Iraq is clear. We're hunting down the terrorists. We're helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We're advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren" (June 28, 2005).

Sounds similar, doesn't it? And that was what bothered me. 20 years later, with a completely different enemy, the rhetoric is still the same! Have we really progressed so little in that time? Or is it simply that evil is evil and politicians are politicians? I fail to believe that we have reached the height of our existence.

And that brings me back to the building collapse. As I said, this is where Miller's precognitive abilities went awry. In The Dark Knight Returns the building collapse sends the city into a full blown riot. Stores are raided as people battle for food in the streets. Even a priest who, earlier, had condemned Batman for his violent acts is shown attacking people, especially those that look different (the story takes place in the punk-rock era, remember). "Try not to judge...too harshly. It was a cruel test, for all of us...and, we can hope, a lesson. None of us can look back on that night without shame" (p. 180). Another man lead a full-scale attack on other citizens who just raided a grocery store and later claims to be the victim of violence when Batman pulls him off an innocent bystander. "I still can't believe it got as bad as it did. You'd never have known that just a few minutes earlier, we'd been...I was strangling somebody when I heard the horses..." (p. 181—Batman and his militia rode horses because cars weren't working).

But see, that is where the difference is. 9/11, as frightening as it was, did not turn Americans into a mob. In fact, it did the opposite. There are countless reports of people running towards the buildings, risking their lives to help others.

This was also briefly portrayed in The Dark Knight movie when the Joker sets up a "little experiment" with people on two separate ferries. Each boat is rigged with explosives and has the detonator to the other boat. They are given until midnight to blow up the others and save themselves. If the deadline (what an appropriate word!) is passed, both boats will be destroyed. The people on the boats (one of which is filled with criminals) debate their options. One boat votes to destroy the other boat but, when it comes to it, they can't pull the trigger. In the other boat, a criminal takes the detonator saying that he will do what the captain can't and then promptly throws it out the window. The others look at him in shock and then, calmly, accept their fate.

See, that's the difference between Miller's (and, for that matter, Moore's) portrayal of common people faced with what seems to be ultimate destruction. In both Returns and Watchmen, the people devolve into their baser animal instincts. But reality is very different. As humans, we are much more willing to help others, even at the cost of our own lives. The media only portrays the darkness and, when that is all we see, we think that is all there is. The truth is that there are many more "good" people in the world than evil, no matter what the politicians and the news says.

In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi's critique of the media's excessive use of strong, male figures in the wake of 9/11, she quotes Ruth Sergal, who gathered 9/11 stories from hundreds of people. Sergal observed that "The real reaction to 9/11 was to make everyone more human" (p. 288).

I believe that.

WARNING! For anyone who hasn't seen The Dark Knight yet, you may want to skip this post as I discuss some of the critical plot points in great detail. If you are interested in the debate over what makes a hero and what makes a villain, I can't recommend the movie highly enough.

The other day, Josh (Jenna's cousin) asked me what I thought of Harvey Dent's observation in The Dark Knight that you either die a hero or live to see yourself become the villain. Since I've been meaning to blog about The Dark Knight for a while—because it is LOADED with goodies as far as my research is concerned—I decided to use Josh's question as a way to discuss the difference between heroes and villains using Batman and Harvey Dent as examples.
As incredible as it was, The Dark Knight was not a subtle movie. Everything about it was displayed visually. For example, Harvey Dent's introduction as a "hard-hitting" attorney was visually played out when he physically punched a witness in court after the witness pulled a gun on him. This makes his comment and the visual portrayal of his own fall into villainy all the more interesting—the comment was made to illustrate a point. The question is, what point? That all heroes become villains? That is hardly the typical blockbuster message. And how does Batman play out in all of this? Is he, too, a villain?

The idea behind Dent's comment comes from Nietzsche who said that "When you stare into the void, the void also stares into you." Basically, you can't deal with evil without it rubbing off on you. In his book, Heroes & Villains, Mike Alsford (if you are curious about Alsford's book, see my post on August 16th) points out that "the potential for the hero to collapse into villainy is an ever present one..." Batman, himself, struggles with his own demons every time he dons the mask, and only barely keeps himself in check by refusing to break his "one rule" (not to kill).

But, just because they struggle with their "dark side" doesn't necessarily mean that all heroes will one day fall into villainy (if they don't die first), does it? Well, maybe that depends on what you consider to be a hero and a villain.

One of the best ways to think of a hero is in terms of mythology. The Mythic Hero, discovered by famed mythologist Joseph Campbell (The Hero of a Thousand Faces), comes into being after answering the call to adventure and crossing the threshold into a fantastic world. He must pass a series of trials, often building up to face a final villain before returning home with "the elixir of life" he received along the way (the elixir could be a physical item or could be power, knowledge, or a billion other things).

There are countless examples of the mythic hero in religion and popular culture. Moses, for example, is a perfect example as is Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Probably the best example in film is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, which was written to match Campbell's theories.

In his Republic, Plato also discusses a mythic hero when he gives the allegory of the cave. In this allegory, a group of people are born as prisoners in a cave and kept there throughout their lives. They are chained in such a way as to only see the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a fire and, on occasion, one of their captors steps in front of the fire (but still behind the prisoners) which casts a shadow on the wall. Plato's contention is that these people, having known nothing else, will believe that the shadows on the wall are, in fact, reality.

But one day, one of the prisoners escapes. He goes back through the cave and climbs into the light. Of course this is a very painful experience, but once he can see, he begins to recognize that all he saw before were shadows and that the real world is much grander and more beautiful.
The question then becomes: now what? Should the freed prisoner enjoy his great fortune? Should he go back to free the others? Should he return to the simpler life of the cave and try to forget what he found? Should he take his revenge on his captors? In Campbell's mind (and both Plato and Alsford agree), this is the point where heroes and villains are born; heroes go back to save the others, caring little for themselves.

Alsford elaborates upon this example by introducing the concept of "the other," or the stranger. Heroes consider "the other" to be an end by themselves, filled with inherent worth, regardless of how vile or evil their life has been. This is why the hero returns to the cave. It is also why Batman cannot kill the Joker. Villains, on the other hand, view others merely as tools, resources, or trash to be thrown aside. For the villain, there are no rules because people do not have inherent worth, they are merely objects or toys to play with. The Joker demonstrates this time and again throughout the film.

So what does all this have to do with Harvey Dent's question? Here is the answer:
Despite the fact that, at least twice in The Dark Knight characters directly say the opposite, Batman is a hero. He is willing to give everything to protect everyone. This is beautifully illustrated when he protects the life of a man about to reveal his identity to the world. It doesn't matter that the man can expose him or not, Batman still considers his life worth saving. It is also the reason why he allows Gotham to think of him as a villain—because it is what they need—he thinks more of them than anyone else.

Batman has gone on his journey. He crossed the threshold at the beginning of Batman Begins when he sought out Ra's al Ghul, but he became a hero when he refused to kill a thief, not willing to become one of them. He remains a hero every time he has to fight his own dark side and wins.
Harvey Dent, of course, has a different story.

Despite his "White Knight" appearance, even before his transformation into Two-Face, the movie reveals that Dent has his own dark side when he kidnaps one of the Joker's men and tries to torture the truth out of him. The scene is staged in a way that the audience believes he will go through with it, even though the truth is that Dent is kept in check by his "lucky" coin which will always come out the way he wants. More importantly, he is kept in check by Batman who arrives just in time to remind Dent of who he is and what he stands for.

In the end, it is the coin that separates Batman and Dent. Dent always required an external force to keep him in check. He required a coin that always gave the right answer or Batman or Gordan to remind him who he was. So when his own convictions were challenged in the most brutal way by the perfect "agent of chaos," he slipped from heroism, to villainy. He went back to the cave, not to free the prisoners, but for revenge on his captors.

Batman, on the other hand, keeps himself in check. And therein lies the answer to Josh's question. Heroes are often put into situations where their convictions are challenged—they are continually given the opportunity to fall. At least in the comic book world, the difference is in whether the hero is able to win that internal struggle every time he dons a mask

Mike Alsford ended his book by reminding the world that, in real life, people are not heroes or villains. They are often heroic (when they give of themselves) and they are sometimes villainous (when they act selfishly) but there is no need for them to be so all the time. The idea that anyone is always a hero or always a villain is something that can only exist in the comic book realm. In reality, we are all a little of both and, despite the strict dichotomy between good and evil portrayed in movies or in comic books, most of us are somewhere in between.

---

Sorry for the rambling post. It is late and I have too many ideas floating through my mind. At the very least, I hope that it demonstrated that the only difference between a hero and a villain is a choice. In the end, Batman chooses to put others above himself, Dent—Two-Face—selfishly puts his own pain ·(and revenge) first. At any time, they have the ability to change, but in the end one will die a villain and the other a hero.