Comic Books, Heroes and the Post-9-11 Psyche

So, I'm back. I need to be back because I feel the faint pain of my brain shriveling up every day I spend devoted to the tumultuous state of....... multichannel marketing. It's almost like saving lives, no? Oh, I guess my bosses just treat it as such.

Anyhow, moving on, I saw Spiderman 3 with my dear friend The Town (aka J Town the intellectual metalhead) last weekend and was struck once again with the sheer number of comic book movies being made these days. I am not ill-informed enough to think that I am the only one who has noticed this or who has tried to establish the linkages between this genre of film and the contemporary state of political instability. With that disclaimer stated, I think there is still more to be said about the proliferation of super heroes (literally) flying our way: apart from the Spiderman franchise, we have the revival of Superman, Batman, the Hulk, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

We have to remember that many of these comic books were created in the aftermath of WWII, the "good war," by a nation confronting a communist force thought to be universally evil. What then are we to make of their resurgence during the wars on terror (of terror?), which have brought us face to face with both ultimate evil and devastating levels of collateral damage in our pursuit of freedom. In short, unlike WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, ours is not a time of broad-based support for our political leaders stemming from confidence in our political decisions. This is not to state that our leaders of yore always acted justly and thus, the clear cut dichotemy between good and evil accurately reflected the poltical reality. Rather, the absense of a long and costly war where victory could no longer be easily identified enabled the the public to embrace polarized views of good and evil (it is no surprise that the public's disillusionment with this paradigm would come with Vietnam). If these are the conditions under which comics initially flourished, what is the significance of their revival at a time where notions of the good, the evil and above all the just war have become increasingly ambiguous?

Joseph Campbell, the former professor of Comparative Mythology at Sarah Lawrence and one of America's great public intellectuals, spoke often of the psychological need for mythology as a means to comprehend the great suffering inherent in human existence. Myths, according to Campbell, "are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story... We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are." Campbell contends that we have largely abandoned the classical corpus of mythology that sustained us and that we are worse off having not found a replacement. However, as The Town postulated, comic books (and their cinematic spin-offs) may well be the mythology of our time. Awkward teenagers are almost certainly more likely to associate with Wolverine than with any figure from Greek mythology, but yet the functional qualities of the myth remain intact. The classical mythology is echoed within the confines of the comic book, through its presentation of justice, tragedy and above all, the hero's struggle.

Not unlike their printed counterparts, watching a comic book movie is a profoundly comforting experience. Within the neatly demarcated space of the film, we can rest assured that good will prevail and order will be restored, in a stunning reversal of the political situation we confront in our morning news. Spiderman can even appear against the backdrop of the American flag en route to saving the day, creating a convergence of emotional goodwill that, within the context of the cinematic experience, is simply exhilarating. Thus, while initially conceived during the uncertain battles between good and evil, these stories also have the capacity to provide reassurance during times of ambiguity. We as a public want, demand and perhaps need a more simplistic narrative into which we can escape the reality of 3378/"countless" dead (as keeping track of freedom's victims was never the goal of freedom). Again, I do not pretend that my conclusions are in any way profound or original (this is after all an exercise in "mental masturbation"), but I'm excited by them anyway.

So why do we need these heroes? The Town, in his infinite wisdom, spoke of 9-11 as a day both horrifying and strangely familiar. While we watched the towers burn and eventually crumble, it was as if we had seen the film footage somewhere else before -- perhaps in an end-of-the-world summer blockbuster or a political thriller. The imagery of destruction has become so cemented in our collective memory from countless on-stage depictions that, when the horror left the screen, we could not help looking to the sky for Spiderman or his peers to intervene and save the day.

Perhaps we need heroes because the world so often does not provide them. And perhaps we embrace these films wholeheartedly -- despite their lack of realism, convoluted plots and occasionally bad acting -- because we wish the world would. And until then, they help us believe that someday it will.