he's arm'd without that's innocent within

[freckles_and_doubt]

So. Superheroes. The vague throwing around of concepts like "innocent" and "naive" in yesterday's post, together with the fact that I've spent all day wrestling with an attempt to define Disney's moral high ground in under 200 words, means that bells and whistles blow, red flags are waved, Cultural Analysis Alert!

It's possible that superheroes are innocent in my mental construct of them because of their origins: children's comics, and 1950s morality, which is basically a sort of squeaky-clean hard-work ethic in which self-betterment is always subordinate to the Greater Good. (It's also possible that they're thusly defined because of the incredible, knee-weakening but basically very innocent crush I got on Superman when I was about 13, which must, on mature reflection, have been Christopher Reeve in the third movie, where he Went Bad owing to faulty Kryptonite, thus sparking my long line in bad relationship choices. I hasten to point out, for the sake of my argument, that naturally he also Got Better and sorted out all the evil things he did when Bad, except perhaps the night of passion with the supervillain's sexy sidekick, which was moderately irrevocable.)

Above all, certainly in their original form, superheroes are about clear-cut moral choices: defend the weak, beat up the bad guys, use your powers Only For Good. Even postmodern versions of superheroes such as Watchmen gain their effect precisely from the invocation and deliberate undercutting of a binary opposition we take for granted: grimy postmodern superheroes are only effective because we expect them to be unambiguous and are alarmed - and intrigued - when they aren't. When the classic superhero suffers angst, it's superficial: romance, responsibility, the conflict between normal and superhero identity. Most superhero angsts are momentary darkenings of the Good Guy bit which are never allowed to disrupt its essential functioning. If they Go Bad, either it's temporary (and excusable for some good reason) or they're supervillains. QED.

All this is pretty obvious. What intrigues me, though, is why, in our increasingly complex day and age, we have such a huge attraction to the essential innocence of superheroes? We live in a postmodern, capitalist era which has taken self-centredness, redefined as a virtue, to incredible heights. Identity and morality are no longer simple: they shift, flex and continually reconstruct themselves among the multiplicities of media society. A superhero is, by definition, a superlative: a distillation of the desirable into a symbolic notion of power. The realistic superlatives of power among which we live are quite simply those of money, or, in the Hollywood system, beauty; not of protective strength. A superhero, in the crime-busting sense of the original, is a hopeless anachronism: evil is no longer susceptible to having its lights punched out. (More's the pity).

It's vaguely worrying, because it suggests that we have taken the notions of selfless action and moral activism, exaggerated them to unambiguous, unrealistic and essentially symbolic heights, and thus defined them solely as fantasy. We love superheroes not because they offer an ideal, but because they define what we are not, and can never become again, because after all, we are no longer innocent.

Comments

[pinkthulhu.livejournal.com]

I think that aside from the fact that after 20-30 years we're just tired of "superhero with grimy human foibles", it's more a symptom of our modern, frenetic, fear-ridden culture and perhaps a yearning back to simpler times when things were (ostensibly, at least) more clear-cut. (Russians bad, Americans good, that sort of thing).

Just my 2p.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Every 2p helps ;>. Yes, definitely nostalgia there: but it interests me that there's this huge cultural tendency, currently, to express the nostalgia in fantastic rather than realistic terms. We're not making movies about clear-cut realistic choices in the 1950s, we're making movies about an ostensibly contemporary world on which that simpler morality has been artificially overlaid in a way that makes no realistic sense at all. I mean, look at Harry Potter - same thing. Retroactive school story with symbolic morality, embedded in the real world. There's a very strong sense, to me, that that nostalgia is for something we know is impossible, which says rather bleak things about our current world.