When I was in high school, I often had too much time on my hands. Worse, I had a camera to document it! The below movies were the result of a boring Saturday when 2 friends of I were sitting around with nothing to do. Out of the blue one of us said: "Let's make a movie!" So we grabbed a video camera and pretty much started shooting. Fortunately, we had a lot of good friends who joined in when we asked (and did a pretty good job improving everything then and there). They may regret it now.

So, even though our reputations may never recover, I offer you the complete Clueless Detectives, a movie that stands as a a shining example of why you should never give a video camera to 3 high school boys with nothing better to do on a windy day.

Enjoy!

 

 

Mina, our youngest, loves to dance. Whenever she hears music she starts to shake her diapered booty. Here she is dancing at a corn maze we visited earlier this year. Isn't she cute!

 

A few nights ago, Jenna and I watched Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon. It was bad. Very bad. I haven't seen one quite that bad in a long time—since Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

DISCLAIMER: It was a very sad day when I learned that science fiction author Michael Chrichton passed away a few years ago. He filled my high school years with wonder and fantasy. And while I poke a little fun at some of his stories in this post, I mean no disrespect to him or his work. What terrible thing happened in Michael Chrichton's childhood to make him hate amusement parks? One park or another feature as the "real" bad guy of at least 3 of his stories (4 if you count The Lost World as separate fromJurassic Park). It's like he thinks that the worst evils of the world are manifest in those parks. Recently, Jenna and I watched Chrichton's first volley against amusement parks: Westworld. In that movie, rich people attend a theme park designed to look and feel just like the old west, medieval times, or Roman times. In the theme park, they interact with (and kill or have sex with) robots designed to look and act human. One of the robots, played by Yul Brynner (yes, THAT Yul Brynner—from The King and I) is a gunslinger who is constantly after one of the primary guests. Of course, he is programmed to always lose ... at least until some kind of computer virus glitches all of the machines and they turn against the park's guests. Then Brynner's character becomes dangerous and goes on a long, protracted hunt after the main character. Futureworld, the Chrichton-less sequel to Westworld, continued on the same theme, though borrowed a bit from Asimov's I, Robot at the same time. And, while it did feature some of the theme park ideas in it, it focused more behind the scenes, so the fun of the parks was lost. Of course, you can't talk about Chrichton and theme parks without talking about Jurassic Park. That is probably the epitome of a theme park run amok. I still think of the Weird Al song about that book/movie:

Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark All the animals are running wild! Someone shut the fence off in the rain. Now they scare me and alarm me, 'Cause they sure don't act like Barney, And I'm not sure I'll get home again. Oh no!

Lost World, the infinitely inferior Jurassic Park sequel, also focused on the theme park idea, though to a lesser extent. The movie pushed it much further than the book did, with InGen trying to bring the animals to the mainland for some kind of zoo, which ended in one of the lamest sequences in Hollywood history: the T-Rex loose in San Diego, except he doesn't do much except eat a dog. LAME! Chrichton's last volley against theme parks came in a book that, at first glance, seems a bit out of place in this list: Timeline. In that book, a mega-corporation discovered a way to essentially fax yourself back in time (no, I'm not kidding). What would they plan for this exciting new technology? Why, build a time-based theme park of course! The theme park idea was so shoehorned into the story that it was completely excised for the film version. And, quite frankly, the film benefited from its removal. So my question is, what did theme parks do the Chrichton to make him so adamantly opposed to them. Did Mickey Mouse bite him as a child? Did he see the characters unmasking and lost all sense of wonder? What? Actually, I think that he returned to the theme park idea so often because he was able to use it to magnify the problems of society. In Westworld, the uber-rich do whatever they please. They have sex, they kill, they brawl, whatever with no consequences—all for $1,000 a day (which was a lot more back in the '70s). They lower themselves to the lowest possible levels human beings can achieve. The Jurassic Park stories aren't much better. In those stories, man plays God to the amusement, once again, to the uber-rich. The move corrected this problem by making Hammond, the park's owner, a kindly old soul who just wants to bring real wonder to children around the globe, but the book's version of Hammond is much harsher. He is a prick, to say the least, and plans on charging an arm and a leg for anyone to have the chance to glimpse his creations. He shows no respect for what he has made and thinks he can control nature. In the end of the book, he is eaten by dung-eating rodent-like dinosaurs and no one really seems to care. Timeline is a bit different than the others. It is all about highlighting real history against the legends and ideas that have built up over time. In one memorable sequence of the book, the evil corporate leader is watching some video of George Washington crossing he Potomac. The leader is upset that Washington—THE ACTUAL GEORGE WASHINGTON—is not perched out on the bow of his boat, sword drawn, ready to face the enemy. Instead, Washington is huddled in the back of the boat under a blanket, trying in vain to keep warm against the freezing temperatures. In another part of the book, a college student sent back in time watches 2 knights fight and is shocked at how agile they are in their armor, because no one could possibly be that mobile wearing close to 100 lbs of steal, right? And that is the genius of Chrichton's war against theme parks. He uses them to illustrate modern humanity's ignorance, decadence, and greed. Theme parks are all about enlarging one aspect of life or another, so they work perfectly for Chrichton's purposes. And they once again remind us of the value of popular culture as a mirror in which we can see ourselves laid bare. Now, who wants to go to Disneyland?

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.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to the radio on my way to work. They were talking about Michael Phelps being caught smoking marijuana. Both newscasters expressed great disappointment in the Olympian and then one said something that really made me think. She said: "I wish that, just once, someone would stay on that pedestal."

It wasn't the first time I'd heard someone say something like that in the past few weeks. Earlier, I was talking to a co-worker about Phelps and she made a very similar comment. And even before that, people were saying the same thing about a cop here in Utah that, at great personal risk, saved a lot of people in the Trolley Sqare shooting a few years ago but is now being charged with sexual assault (he pled "No Contest" to the charges last week).

It all got me to thinking about my favorite topic - heroes - and why we are so disappointed to find out that they are human. I mean, if you think about it, just because a man can swim faster than just about anything alive doesn't mean he is a moral or virtuous person. And just because a man risks his life to save others, doesn't mean he is a good guy. Yet we persist in thinking of them that way and, as a result, are extremely upset when they fail to live up to our expectations.

And we don't just do this to sports figures and cops. We also do it for religious and political leaders, teachers, friends, and just about anyone else. I can guarantee that a lot of people will be very disappointed with Obama in the same way that many people were disappinted with Bush. Both are human and, as such, aren't capable of living up to all the expectations placed on them. It simply isn't possible and the fall from the pedestal can be pretty far and damaging.

It makes me think of the movie White Christmas (bet that wasn't what you expected, was it?). Specifically, I think of the scene where Bing Crosby is talking to Rosemary Clooney in the kitchen (yes, Katie, I remember the movie) and she says something to the effect that he is her white knight. He tells her to be careful who she puts up on that white horse because he's likely to fall off. Of course, in the next scene he does just that - or at least she thinks he does - when she overhears him making what seems to be a pretty coldhearted deal with a TV star. This being Hollywood - and this being Bing - he didn't actually do anything wrong, she just thought he did.

What is most interesting is that, by the end of the movie, despite the experience, she puts him right back up on the horse. Again, this being Hollywood, everything ends happily. But I wonder what happens after the fade out when he does something else she perceives as wrong - when he turns out to be human. The words "AAAAIIEEEEEEEE! Thump!" come to mind.

I think that the problem is that our hero tales deal with extreme examples. In programming, they would be called "edge cases" because they are at the extreme edge of possibility. They are examples of how to live, goals for life. It is important to remember that negative aspects have been stripped of those characters to better emphasize the desirable qualities (the goal of postmodernism is to peel back those layers and see the reality underneath - Watchmen is all about doing that for superheroes). The problem is that we often try to apply the same standards to our real life heroes. We tend to believe that, if someone does something heroic - even once - they must also be morally pure, when, in fact, they may be the scum of the earth.

Recently, Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dollhouse) released Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog, an Internet TV show (of sorts). It is basically the origin story of Dr. Horrible, an "evil" genius who battles Captain Hammer, his heroic nemesis. Through the course of the show, however, you realize that Dr. Horrible isn't that horrible and Captain Hammer isn't that heroic. In fact, Captain Hammer is a jerk and Dr. Horrible is really a shy, introverted person who is just craving attention. They are really just human beings with varying levels of moral ambiguity. Their heroism and evil are really just products of how the media spins events rather than their actual actions.

While the show is far from realistic and extremely hilarious (if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it), it's take on heroes and villains is thought-provoking. Isn't that really why life is like? Aren't we all a little bit of a hero and a little bit of a villain? So why does it surprise us to learn that our heroes are the same?

In the conclusion of Heroes & Villains, Mike Alsford makes a very valid point. He says that it is important to remember that, no matter how much we strive for heroism and villainy, it is important to remember that we don't have to be heroic or villainous all the time. And while it is good to shoot for the moral surety of Superman, it is important to remember that we aren't Superman or Wonder Woman.

We are just human.

Zombie stories don't usually do much for me. I'm just not that interested in the living dead, although I will admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Shaun of the Dead. But, when I heard that Max Brooks, the son of Mel Brooks, had written a documentary-type book about a fictional war with zombies, I was intrigued enough to put it on my list. I'm glad that I did.

I just finished reading Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). The book, which is written as a series of first-person accounts that had been supposedly collectedbythe fictional author (an unnamed U.N. employee)nearly a decade after the war was fought and won, was, quite frankly, exceptional. The stories were horrific enough to keep you at the edge of your seat, yet so grounded in reality that you really believed that, if the world were ever attacked by the living dead, this is exactly what would happen. The amount of detail in the book--from the names and layouts of cities around the globe, to local customs, to how the zombies moved and attacked, to the problems and solutions of the military--was completely engrossing. But the two most fascinating aspects of the book were how it described the incompetency of modern governments and the remarkable faith it showed in the human race.

The book goes through several different phases of the war, from "Early Warning Signs" to "The Great Panic" (the worldwide retreat away from the zombies), to "The American Front," to "Total War." It details early responses to the zombies, which mostly involved denial and blaming others, to the first disastrous attempts by the military to repel the zombies--mostly because their equipment wasn't designed to destroy the brain, which is required to "kill" a zombie--to the reconstruction efforts. While the book did have an entire chapter devoted to America, most of the book was focused in other countries, including Cuba, which, through a quirk of fate (it was easy to defend), became the most powerful economy in the world.

Interestingly, the book never attempts to define where the zombies come from. It gives no explanation, either scientific of fantastic, for the origins of the creaturs. It just accepts the facts that they showed up one day. The only real detail as to their origin is that they came from China--rural China, to be specific. That being said, the book does give a lot of details about them. You have to be killed by a zombie (which just takes one bite) in order to "reanimate." Theyonlydiewhen their brains are destroyed. They use far less liquid in their bodies than normal humans. They can "survive" underwater--even at crush depth (which means that they can, literally, walk across the ocean). And they are attracted to sound (the U.S. military draws them to battle by playing Heavy Metal music).

But, as I said, it was really its portrayal of modern governments and humanity that drew me in.

There are very few stories that critique modern society more than zombie stories. This started with George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), which attacked consumerism and the greed of corporate America. But the tradition has continued until today. Even the more recentShaun of the (2004), a hilarious send-up of zombie movies (while still a very good zombie movie on its own) was filled with biting social commentary (it attacked the drudgery of the service industry--essentially, people were zombies long before they became the living dead). World War Z is no exception. It is filled with spot on critiques of modern politics, consumerism, and the survival instincts of mankind.

For example, when the zombies first start appearing in isolated cases across China, the Chinese government's first thought is--not to eradicate the zombies, who they don't consider to be a big enough threat--but to squash any rumors of it so they don't look weak to the rest of the world. As a result of the crackdowns, which include imprisoning and/or killing people for having information about the zombies, many people escape as refugees, some taking infected family along for the ride.

Other parts of the world have their own difficulties. When Iran tries to seal its borders against the possibility of invasion, Pakistan objects. It leads to nuclear attacks that devastate both countries.

Israel, on the other hand, implements a voluntary quarantine, open to anyone who has ties to the area, including Palestinians. At first, they seem to be the best hope for survival, but they soon fall prey to civil war within their own, self-imposed walls.

In America, the first response is to send out covert teams around the world to take care of the problem surreptitiously. Then to appease the fears of the populace--and to appear like they are on top of things--Congress rushes a new, completely bogusrabies vaccine (theinfection was originally called "African Rabies")through the FDA and dispenses it to the people. Thus, they left their people completely unprepared when the real attack came.

When the zombies finally attacked America in force, the military organized a battle in Yonkers, New York, to demonstrate the might of the military. Missiles, rockets, mines, video uplinks, and countless reporters, were on hand. And all of them were completely useless. The battle was a disaster, and led to "The Great Panic," which drove many Americans to the far north (zombies freeze in the cold and have to wait for the next thaw to reanimate). But they left so unprepared that they soon fall prey to the cold and to cannibalism.

In other parts of the world, things were much worse. The Russians couldn't maintain their military discipline and so they "decimated" their own troops (killed one-tenth of them) in order to keep them in line. In China, the generals holed up away from the populace and sent the old and the young to die (and, ironically, to reinforce the other side), until the generals had to be wiped out by their own people. Many headed to the ocean, to die of starvation or thirst on one of the many ships that became stranded in the middle of nowhere.

The whole world retreated to the few secure locations. In the U.S., it was west of the Rockies, which presented natural barrier. In other places, it was in the mountain tops, in well-defended valleys, or in the far north and south.

Eventually, inspired by the urging of the U.S. President, the nations of the world organized and wenton the offensive. The descriptions of battles over land, in the air, under the sea, and even in the tunnels under Paris, were extremely detailed, horrifyingly realistic, and breathtakingly inspirational.

In the end, the book is about so many of today's problems: our willingness to blame others rather than take responsibility, our lack of truly useful skills, our life of so many distractions and so little meaning, and our ability to overcome. The end reinforces the will of humans to survive and to excel at all costs. As much as the first half of the book is about human incompetence, largely brought about by laziness, the second half is about human determination and strength in the face of overwhelming odds.

For example,one part of the book talks abouta blind Japanese waiter and gardener who trains himself to be a "warrior-monk" and, with the help of a former gamer that had no interest in the world beyond his computer, liberates Japan (Japan is evacuated in the early part of the war because it is overrun by zombies walking over from China). Another part, which I wrote about earlier in my post on Zombies, Superheroes, and Our Children, talks about a former movie director that turns to making inspirational films that practically save the American spirit.

One of the best recommendations that I can give to any book is to say that it engrossed me so much that I dreamed about it. Well, for the week it took me to get from the beginning to the end, my nights were filled with zombies.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

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.