The Post-Ideological
Hero: Comic Books Go to
Extended Director’s Cut by Doug Mann, 2008
1. The
Films starring comic book heroes
have been big box office at least since Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, which appeared the same year the Berlin Wall fell,
heralding the end of the Soviet Empire and thus the Cold War. Since the turn of
the millennium there has been a steady stream of blockbusters based on comic
books, from X-Men of 2000 to The Dark Knight in 2008, with yet more in
the wings. Most of them star Marvel Comics characters. An obvious question
emerges: even though comic book superheros have been
around since Superman’s first appearance in 1938, and have appeared in
animation and movie serials since the 1940s, why did it take until the 1990s
for them to appear in serious cinematic narratives? And now that
One curious thing about this new
brand of comic book hero, making him ideally suited to our own period of
history, is his post-ideological nature. He no longer fights grand ideological
struggles against
So why the hero at all, whether
ideological or not? Joseph Campbell has convincingly shown us in The Hero with a Thousand Faces how hundreds
of ancient myths and epic tales feature the same monomythic
hero on the same three-stage seventeen-part journey. From Odysseus to Luke
Skywalker, the classical hero gets a message, leaves home, enters the belly of
the whale, fights many battles, then returns home with
a fabulous prize. Jewett and Lawrence later showed us how the heroes of
American popular culture repeat over and over again their own tightly
structured adventure. So heroes are everywhere, from ancient Sumerian myth and classical literature to modern cinema and professional
sports. Why? Heroes are projections of the hopes and fears of the cultures
which create and worship them. They express a desire for power over the self
and others, the hope for a saviour to protect us against dangerous enemies.
Little boys don’t dress up as bureaucrats on Halloween, with mini-briefcases
and rubber stamps in their hands: they become Superman, Batman or Spider-Man.
One needs no ghost of Nietzsche coming from the grave to tell us that heroes
are avatars of personal power and of social salvation. They are Hector and
Achilles, Boudicca and Arthur, Luke and Han, dark knights and supermen. They
save us, or inspire us to save ourselves.
When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
re-booted Marvel Comics with a new stable of superheros
in the early 1960s, thus inaugurating the Silver Age of comics, they created a
series of characters who by and large avoided the burning political issues of
the day. The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Hulk rarely
addressed such issues as the civil rights and anti-war movements, the war in
Part of this absence of serious
comics-based films is connected to the limitations of special effects until
well into the 1980s: after all, even George Lucas’s cutting edge Star Wars (1977) relied almost entirely
on hand-crafted models and rear-screen projection for its dramatic space battle
sequences. Yet on a deeper level it can be explained by the political-cultural
landscape of the entire postwar period until 1989: cinematic heroes like Luke
Skywalker and Rambo did have
ideological causes to fight for, and audiences expected to see them fighting
these battles. The fact that Rambo III (1988)
finds Sylvester Stallone’s hero in
These
comic book films are not only post-ideological, but also postmodern in a number
of key ways:
$ (1) They are a case of a hyperreal
media culture where images precede reality, of what Jean Baudrillard
called the Third Order of the Simulacrum;
$ (2) They
symbolize the breakdown of high cinematic art (if this ever existed!) and its
mixture with what was once considered a very low brow medium, comics;
$ (3) They
show us an aesthetic where style can all too often triumph over substance -
after all, the heros and villains of comic books are
fantastic beings wearing colourful uniforms showing us a division between good
and evil that is usually quite Manichean;
$ (4) They
involve the uniquely postmodern impulses of pastiche and recycling, in this
case the recycling of comic-book narratives in cinematic form,
$ (5) And
in keeping with their post-ideological nature, they symbolize Lyotard’s very definition of the postmodern condition, our
incredulity toward meta-narratives.[4]
The coincidence of
post-ideological politics and postmodern culture is by no means accidental:
after all, in an age where capitalist democracies reign supreme, alternate
political meta-narratives can’t be taken seriously. Our incredulity toward them
in the Western world is connected in part to their lack of global power. A
possible threat to capitalist democracy comes from Islamic fundamentalism,
whose terrorist arm has certainly caused much death and destruction throughout
the world of late. Yet the danger of a Islamic
terrorism is hardly existential (i.e. as long as they don’t have nuclear
weapons), while the appeal of the sort of Moslem theocracies that Al Quaeda and the Taliban seek to establish is almost zero in
the West. No propaganda war is needed to defeat the vague political ideology of
Islamic fundamentalism in the West, while such propaganda campaign is almost
pointless in
Liberal Hollywood seems to
recognize the ethnic and cultural nature of Islamic fundamentalism. Due to
politically correct fears about alienating Arabs, Persians and other Moslem
nations, Hollywood has avoided ethnic stereotyping of villains in films about terrorism
to the point where realism is thrown out the door (unlike American action films
from the 1940s to the 1970s, which had no problem stereotyping Germans or
Russians as monomaniacal ideological enemies). A classic case of such a refusal
to replace Germans and Russians with Arabs as the villains du jour can be seen in Phil Alden Robinson’s 2002 film The Sum of All Fears, based on Tom
Clancy’s thriller about a group of Al Quaeda
terrorists who find an Israeli nuclear bomb, transport it to the US, then detonate
it. In a bizarre case of bad writing, Clancy’s Moslem terrorists become a
German-Russian secret cabal of powerful business and political leaders seeking
to foment a nuclear war between Russia and America, in the wake of which a
Fourth Reich of fascist regimes will take power in the West. They do manage to
blow up
If asked “when it all changed” and
the post-ideological world-view replaced the ideological struggle of the Cold
War, we can point to the period 1988-1991. A cinematic metaphor comes
immediately to mind: John McTiernans’ 1988 film Die Hard, wherein Bruce Willis’s
hard-as-nails
This essay will offer an overview
of the history of the use of comic book heroes in film and to a lesser degree
television to chart the emergence of the post-ideological hero, showing how he
came out of the unique political and culture landscape in the West after 1989.
2. Other Theories about Comic Book Films
Although hundreds of reviews of
the second wave of superhero blockbuster films have been published since 2000,
there is precious little scholarly reflection on the general cultural meaning
of these blockbusters. One thing is clear from the most cursory glance at these
reviews: major studios such as Fox,
Three
general types of explanation for the popularity of comic book blockbusters come
out of the literature - though only the first explanation specifically
addresses the post-2000 films as a collective phenomenon. First comes the
“marketing” theory put forward by McAllister, Gordon and Jancovich
(2006). They argue that comic art has been adapted to two very different types
of films: the “popcorn” blockbuster superhero film, with big budgets, big
stars, big distribution and big profits; and “art house” film adaptations of
graphic novels such as V for Vendetta,
American Splendour and
Yet
the “marketing” explanation is dubious as best: for one thing, it hardly
explains the move away from historical blockbusters (think of Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia) that dominated
American screens in the 1950s and 1960s, nor why comics-based films have more
recently outpaced science-fiction blockbusters such as Independence Day. Certainly blockbusters have always been popular,
though they sometimes crash and burn as (think of Heaven’s Gate and Godzilla). Yet
why have a combination of comic book movies and fantasy films such as Harry Potter, Pirates of the Carribean and The
Lord of the Rings run up such big box office over the last decade?[5]
Further, are the characters and plots of these blockbusters always simplistic?
Sometimes yes; though the two most successful comic-book blockbusters of 2008, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, feature both strong character development and
complex plots, especially the latter. In the end the “marketing” explanation is
for the most part a “shell” hypothesis, tautologically reminding us of
something we already know: that a lot of people like big-budgeted comic book
films.
Second
comes a number of “spiritual” explanations. Niall
Richardson (2004: 695) sees Spider-Man (2002)
as a Christian parable where Peter Parker must atone for this sinful flesh for
lusting after Mary Jane and accidentally letting his Uncle Ben die by
converting his general sense of shame into an expiable guilt. The Green Goblin
stands in for the devil, quoting scripture, tempting Spidey
with power and trying to force him to make the grim choice between saving a
trolley car of children or an imperilled Mary Jane (he manages to do both).
Admittedly,
A
related “spiritual” explanation is the much more comprehensive position on
American popular culture in general found in Jewett and Lawrence’s The American Monomyth
(1973). Their view is that deeply embedded in American popular culture is a
monomyth at odds with the classical monomyth explored by Joseph Campbell. This American version
tells the following story:
A community in a harmonious paradise is
threatened by evil: normal institutions fail to contend with this threat: a
selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out a redemptive
task: aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisical condition; the superhero then recedes into
obscurity. (Jewett and Lawrence xx)
They go on to argue that the supersaviors of the American monomyth
act as substitute Christ figures with divine, redemptive powers in a culture
where belief in the actual Jesus Christ has been eroded by scientific
rationalism. They offer American culture a “mythic massage,” relaxing it
sufficiently to believe that extra-democratic heros
will save the day in times of crisis should they be needed (xx).
Superhero
films do administer a mythic massage, though not especially the pseudo-Christian
one hinted at by Jewett and Lawrence. Some of the superhero stories fit the
American monomyth quite well, notably the one they
focus on, Superman. Yet other key superhero narratives are either ambiguous
cases of the American monomyth at best (e.g. the
X-Men) or simply don’t fit it at all (the Hulk, Iron Man, Batman). The fact
that in the last scene of Iron Man (2008)
Tony Stark starkly proclaims, “I am Iron Man!” gives away the monomythic
game: he’s out of the secret identity closet, and can’t get back in. As I write
this Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008)
has just broken first-weekend box office records across
A
third explanation for the popularity of comic-book films of a sociological
nature comes indirectly from Matthew Wolf-Meyer’s analysis of the hostility to
utopian narratives amongst comics fans. Wolf-Meyer (511) argues that comic book
readers are a conservative lot who ironically cherish their “subcultural position of difference” within consumer
capitalism: they are against its hegemony, yet sure enjoy the comics it
provides them with, even if that system creates social injustice. As a result,
they favour their superheroes fighting an endless array of super-villains
rather than changing society for the better and thus ending their own monthly
usefulness.[6] Comics fans know the
majority don’t understand them, and that’s the way they like it. Stories about
utopia achieved are out of the question:
...if the
discourse were to alter significantly to allow such things as utopian
narratives then fandom, and its position of difference, would collapse,
eradicating difference and solidifying comic book fans as typical citizens
within hegemonic capitalism, deprived of their discourse and their difference,
maintaining only their conservative ideology, trivialized and commodified within the constraints of hegemony... Hence,
comic book fans trade “utopian” narratives for the utopia of a subculture standing
against hegemonic capitalism. (513-514)
Wolf-Meyer’s
theory does seem to explain why comic book fans accept the conservative status
quo in the alternative universes where their superheroes live - though a simple
economic explanation, that comic book publishers want to keep publishing their
most popular superhero titles so they avoid creating utopian “end of history”
scenarios, would suffice. One could try
to apply his theory to comic book films. Yet there’s no indication that the
majority of non-comic book reading audience members at superhero films,
probably 80-90% of the audience - judging by monthly comics sales - are
anti-capitalist rebels, or members of any subculture at all. In addition, most
superhero films take place outside of the decades-long continuities of the main
DC and Marvel characters: they start over from the beginning (e.g. Batman, Spider-Man, The X-Men), and feel
free to kill off secondary characters and villains for dramatic effect (e.g.
the Joker, the Green Goblin, Harvey Dent). So these films are partly free from
the seriality and endless repetitions that many comics fans at least tolerate, if not treasure. Within a
single “reboot” (e.g. the four Batman films between 1989 and 1997 or the
Spider-Man trilogy of 2002-2007) utopia
can be achieved - though admittedly rarely is - without either disrupting
any cinematic “continuity” or alienating mainstream popcorn movie fans.
In
the end, all the meta-theories that seek to explain either directly or
indirectly the post-1989 popularity of superhero blockbusters are either
tautological or partial theories, missing key elements or overlooking key
films. Let’s now return to comic books’ Golden Age and review the history of
the interaction between the print and cinematic versions of the superhero to
see how the post-ideological simulacral hero has
emerged.
3. The DC Superheros: Superman and Batman
The most famous superhero is probably DC Comics’ Superman, who made his first appearance in Action Comics in 1938, getting his own book a year later. The Man of Steel, a refugee of the planet Krypton, is almost invincible: he can only be defeated by the element kryptonite, a fragment of his home world. He can fly, lift huge weights, deflect bullets from his chest, and jump tall buildings with a single bound. He is the all-American hero.
Superman
crossed over from the comic book page to film and television soon after his
first appearance in 1938 in Action
Comics, and has had an almost continuous existence outside these pages.
George Reeves starred as Superman in Adventures
of Superman, a TV series based on the comic-book character broadcast from
1952-1957. Several other series concerning Superman have aired, including Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of
Superman (1993-1997), which made Teri Hatcher a minor celebrity for playing
the role of Lois Lane, and Smallville, on the
air since 2001, about the young Clark Kent. The characters on this show take
themselves rather seriously - it’s part superhero
story, part teen drama. There have also been a number of cartoon versions going
back to the package of seventeen shorts created by Max and Dave Fleischer for
Bryan
Singer’s 2006 film Superman Returns pictures
him as a Christ-like redeemer straight out of the American monomyth,
with the voice of Marlon Brando substituting for the voice of God. In this
enthusiastic adventure the Man of Steel once again battles Lex
Luthor. Singer’s Christian metaphysic is thinly
disguised at best. After being clobbered by Lex
Luther, we see Superman fly into the heavens to renew his Sun-powered energy as
he spreads his arms in a Christlike pose and a choir
of angels sings on the soundtrack. He then plays the role of humanity’s
saviour, lifting Lex’s expanding kryptonite
island into space, then falling back to Earth in another Christ-like
pose. He hovers near death in a Metropolis hospital for days, but is reborn,
presumably healed by the Platonic love of
Superman
is comparatively stiff compared to most of the other superheros,
a do-gooder without emotional depth. He doesn’t have the personal problems of
the Marvel superheros, other than protecting his
secret identity from nosey reporters. In a lot of ways he’s more like the
heroes of 1930s serials than later comic book characters - he’s not a model for
real people and doesn’t care about social problems.[7]
In fact, he’s not even human, but a refugee from the planet Krypton. He harkens
back to an earlier age of science fiction and comic books, when the heroes were
lily white, and the villains dark and nefarious. The films certainly illustrate
the way that
Batman
also goes back to the innocence of the pre-WWII period in American comics,
making his first appearance in Detective Comics in 1939, getting his own book
in 1940. His adventures were turned into a set of serial shorts in 1943
(Superman had to wait until 1948 for a serial adaptation). Batman became part
of kitschy pop culture in the 1960s with the tongue-in-cheek TV version of the
comic book starring Adam West as the main character. Batman dresses in a bat
costume made of tights and boots, rides around in his batmobile,
and uses his brains and all sorts of neat gadgets to defeat enemies like the
Penguin, the Riddler, and Catwoman.
In the TV series he is shown with his partner Robin (Burt Ward) the Boy Wonder
in place right from the start. The fights are corny, adorned with cartoon
bubbles with “zowee” and “kaboom.”
The best written episodes, especially those by Lorenzo Semple
Jr., are full of sly humour and visual puns. This incarnation
of Batman never took itself too seriously - in its own way it was part of the
pop art movement lead by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
The
polar opposite of the campy 1966-1968 TV series was Tim Burton’s evocation of
the later, much grittier version of Batman based on the 1986 The Dark Knight Returns series of DC
comics written and drawn by Frank Miller (later published as a popular graphic
novel).
The
first sequel was Batman Returns (1992),
with
The
faltering Batman franchise called for a cinematic re-envisioning, which it got with Christopher
Nolan’s more dark, serious and camp-free version of the caped crusader in his
2005 film Batman Begins. In one scene
we actually see Bruce Wayne lying in bed battered and bruised after a battle,
unimaginable in the Val Kilmer and George Clooney Batman films. Also, Nolan
used very few CGI shots in his version, adding to its air of naturalism.
Interestingly, Nolan featured mainly British and Irish actors in key roles:
Christian Bale as Batman, Gary Oldam as Commissioner
Gordon, Michael Cain as Alfred the Butler, Cillian
Murphy as Dr. Jonathan Crane AKA The Scarecrow, Tom Wilkinson as Carmine Falcone and Liam Neeson as Henri Ducard. One presumes that his goal was to add some gravitas to an otherwise lighthearted
filmic heritage for
In
Nolan’s followup The
Dark Night (2008) we see the ultimate in grim noir realism applied to the Batman mythos.
In this long (two and a half hours) and complex film, we witness a triadic
struggle between reformers in the Gotham City administration and police force
led by D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Lieutenant (later Commissioner) Jim
Gordon (Gary Oldham); Mafia-style gangsters led by Salvatore Marone (Eric Roberts), who have bribed or threatened a
number of cops into betraying the cause of justice; and the demented Joker
(Heath Ledger) and his ever-changing gang, true agents of chaos. Batman is
obviously allied to the good cops and later to Dent, though throughout the
movie has crises of faith about his role as populist hero: we see several
“copycat” Batmans injured or killed as they try to
battle crime. There is no ideology at all in Nolan’s film: Batman’s main goal
is to stop the Joker from killing innocents, which the clown prince of crime
does with glee, supported by an existential nihilist philosophy that sees the
average human being as weak and selfish. There’s no external enemy or
threatening belief system in The Dark
Knight: Batman’s goal is to battle chaos and death itself - in two scenes
he refuses to kill the Joker, though he could easily do so, once by running him
over with his batcycle, the other by dropping him off
a building. This battle is punctuated by the fact that death is all around him:
a raft of minor characters and two major ones actually perish when caught in
the Joker’s maelstrom. Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman has his own inner
demons, yet they pale in comparison to the Joker’s psychosis. There’s no
explicit reference to fascism, capitalism, communism or Islamism in this film:
it’s about revenge, madness, and survival. The
Dark Knight perfects Batman’s status as DC’s post-ideological hero par excellence: he’s both insider and
outcast, both criminal and defender of justice.
Batman
is the perfect post-Cold War hero: his primary motivation for fighting crime is
revenge over his parents’ death at the hands of criminals. There’s no grand
meta-narrative to explain Batman’s raison
d’etre: he is an instrument of personal
vengeance. He fights evil, though this evil isn’t ideologically motivated:
instead, it consists of a coterie of colourful
criminally insane enemies such as The Joker, Two Face and Poison Ivy. Arkham Asylum replaces the penitentary
as the usual place of residence for Batman’s enemies for good reason: their motivation for being criminals are their various
psychopathologies.
In addition, the Batman franchise is a
powerful example of TV and film recycling comic book culture. We can also see
it as an example of the breakdown of high art and the penetration of pop
culture into mass consciousness - more people know and take seriously Batman
than characters from the novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky or Jane Austen. He’s as
famous as any poet or composer, his image and story instantly recognizable by
most people under the influence of American mass culture. Yet there is a shadow
of the old good-versus-evil meta-narrative in the Batman stories, even if the
Dark Knight’s motives for fighting crime have more to do with revenge for the
death of his parents than any high-minded concern with truth and justice. This
is certainly ambiguous, with one bat foot in modernism, and the other in the
postmodern. To be continued.
4. The Marvel Superheros: The X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Hulk and Iron Man
Though
the Batman films from 1989 on are an interesting prologue to the emergence of a
new type of simulated heroism, it wasn’t until the new millennium that we see a
marvellous (pun intended) explosion of
post-ideological comic book heros on the big screen. X-Men (2000), which stars
the distinguished British actors Patrick Stewart as Dr. Xavier and Ian McKellan as the villain Magneto, is the movie version of
the Marvel comic book series The Uncanny
X-Men, which dates back to 1963. The X-Men are mutants, human beings who
have been given special powers due to genetic mutations. They share some of the
characteristics of all Marvel superheros: they have
ordinary lives when not being superheros, are
misunderstood by the masses, and have the same personal problems as everyone
else, magnified times ten due to the heavy burdens of super-herodom.
The
X-Men include Cyclops, who shoots a powerful ray from his eyes (he is thus
stuck wearing sunglasses when not in his crime-fighting gear), Storm, who can
control the weather, and Jean Grey, who has telekinetic powers. They are lead
by Dr. X, played by Patrick Stewart, who is crippled but has tremendous mental
powers. A late addition to the group is the popular character Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), a Canadian who sprouts claws from his hands and
has a bad attitude toward authority. The interesting thing about the film is
that there are also “bad” mutants who don’t trust ordinary humans. Yet this is
for good reason - American politicians led by Senator Kelly (a postmodern
stand-in for Joseph McCarthy) are seen trying to pass a law registering
mutants, if not imprisoning or banishing them as a dangerous “alien” influence.
In a flashback at the start of the film we see the leader of the “evil” mutants
Magneto as a young boy in a Nazi concentration camp, driving home the supposed
central theme of the movie: the wrongness of discrimination against groups of
people based on biological difference.[9]
However, this theme is old hat in Hollywood, being played out time and time
again from the anti-Nazi films of the 1940s from Warner Brothers and other
American filmmakers to Spielberg’s Schindler’s
List (1993) and Amistad (1997),
that it is in danger of becoming hackneyed. Yet this old-fashioned liberal
homily is played against the backdrop of a virtual world populated by
We
see impressive special effects in the film: the evil mutant Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) changes her physical appearance several times;
her boss Magneto levitates through the air and lifts police cars, guns, and
other metal objects with the power of his mind; while Storm (
Overall,
the X-Men are vaguely ideological at best, in the sense that in their various
incarnations in comics and film they have fought against prejudice based on
biological difference. The problem is that so do Magneto and his merry band of
“evil” mutants: both sides want to improve the plight of mutants,
it’s just a question of how to accomplish this. Yet at its core the
anti-discrimination theme in the X-Men corpus is rather hollow: after all,
there are no mutants, good or evil,
in the real world, while the mapping of these fictional mutants onto any actual
minority groups is a slippery process at best. The process of seeing the
mutants in the world of the X-Men as symbols of groups of people in the
non-comic book world is fraught with difficulty, in part due to the internal contraditions in the X-corpus. In the end, the X-Men are
simulated post-ideological heros
just as much as Magneto, Toad and Mystique are simulated post-ideological
villains, with some pretense to real world political
significance.
Spider-Man
is one of the most famous of the Marvel superheros.
He is in the Marvel mould of being an ordinary guy thrust into the role of
being a hero by a freak accident - he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and
as a result gained extraordinary strength, the ability to climb walls, and a sixth sense that is aware of danger before it
happens. He develops a device that shoots sticky webs from his hand across
large distances, hence his nickname “the webslinger.”
His motives are suspected by J. Jonah Jameson, the publisher of a tabloid
newspaper that ironically Peter Parker, the real man behind the mask, works for
as a freelance photographer. The spectacularly drawn special editions of The Amazing Spider-Man comic book drawn
by Todd McFarlane in the late 1980s and early 1990s helped to revive the
character. There was also a crudely drawn cartoon TV series dating from
1967-1970 directed in part by Ralph Bakshi that
spawned the theme song for Spiderman: “Spiderman, Spiderman, Does whatever a
spider can...,” of which the Ramones recorded a delightful cover.
The
film version from 2002 uses spectacular special effects of an all-virtual CGI
Spiderman swinging from building to building as he does in the comic books,
which would have been technically impossible a couple of decades ago. It’s
directed by Sam Raimi. His foe is the Green Goblin, played
with verve by Willem Dafoe, a millionaire deranged by his own experimental
nerve gas. In it we are given a glance of insight into Peter Parker’s teenage
angst - just enough to make the film true to the spirit of the comics.
Spider-Man was an existential hero right from his origin in Amazing Fantasy #15. Even in his early
days in the mid-60s he rarely fought for abstract ideas or national causes, but
out of a very personal sense of existential responsibility fuelled by the death
of his Uncle Ben at the hands of a theif who Peter
Parker for selfish reasons let escape just before the murder. The film
emphasizes Spider-Man’s existentialist origins by having the spirit of Uncle
Ben repeat Spidey’s famous mantra in a voiceover:
“with great power goes great responsiblity.”
Spider-Man’s loyalties aren’t to his nation or to any given ideology, but to a
very personal (and thus very contingent) sense of existential responsibility.
In
2004 a successful sequel appeared, Spider-Man
2, in which Spidey fights Dr. Octopus. Once again
his enemy is a deranged scientist who is tragically driven insane by his own
invention. Peter Parker is still tormented by problems in his school, love and
personal lives, with Mary Jane set to marry someone else and J. Jonah Jameson’s
Daily Bugle trumpeting the idea that
Spider-Man is the true menace to society.
The uneven Spider-Man 3 appeared
in 2007, featuring Spidey’s battles with three
villains: the Sandman, Venom, and the son of the Green Goblin. Peter faces the
real danger of losing his true self when a black alien
goo enhances his powers, making him arrogant and overbearing. Yet he manages to
triumph over these threats to his existential integrity, at the end of the film
offering these thoughts to the audience in a voice-over meditation on the death
of Harry Osborn:
Whatever
comes our way, whatever battle we have raging inside us, we always have a
choice. My friend Harry taught me that. He chose to be the best of himself.
It’s the choices that make us who we are, and we can always choose to do what’s
right.
In summary, Spider-Man was
envisioned by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko as an
existential hero who had to daily face both his own inner demons (e.g. his
responsibility for the death of his Uncle Ben and his doubts about being a
crime fighter) and problems with personal relationships (e.g. his sick Aunt
May, his chronic money shortage, and his hapless love life). Sam Raimi’s films capture the existential spirit of the classic
Spider-Man stories of the Silver Age of comics quite well. In doing so they
make manifest what was latent in the early Spider-Man comics: his status as a
post-ideological hero.[10]
Daredevil
is a blind lawyer who fights crime mainly with his radiation-enhanced strength
and extrasensory awareness that’s a bit like radar. He’s a sort of poor man’s
Spider-Man. Certainly the vulnerability of a blind man to enemies is a far cry
from Superman’s near invincibility, another indicator of Marvel Comics’ unique
narrative strategy. He’s played in the 2003 movie version by Ben Affleck in a
dark red rubbery suit, armed only with a multi-purpose nightstick. The film was
critically panned by both fans and professional critics, though it does serve
an important role as an example of simulated heroism mixed with identity
politics: Daredevil’s being blind makes him a champion of the handicapped.
Daredevil is thus post-ideological in a politically correct, feel good sense:
he battles the criminal mastermind the Kingpin and his flippant hitman Bullseye as a super-hero
while acting as socially concerned sight-impaired attorney Matt Murdock in his
everyday life, an attorney with so much conscience that he refuses to defend
the guilty. Added to the mix is Murdock’s devout Catholicism, which adds an air
of spiritual gravity to the character as he leaps from one cathedral spire to
another. A fourth Marvel comic book title, The Incredible Hulk, was given the
blockbuster treatment by
With
Iron Man (Jon Favreau,
2008) we get a curious mix of ideological and post-ideological narratives. Tony
Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) starts out as a dedicated member of the American
military-industrial complex who in the wake of new geopolitical realities has
found his arms-manufacturing business turned by Obadiah Stone (the company’s
second in command) into a more mercenary way of doing business, selling weapons
to whomever has the cold cash. When captured by an Islamic militia with its own
mini-imperialist goals, Stark becomes aware of the mass destruction his weapons
have caused, so he manufactures his Iron Man Mark I suit to escape from the
militia and destroy the Stark Industries weapons they’ve managed to buy on the
black market. When he returns home, he decides to turn swords into
ploughshares, moving Stark Industries away from arms production, while using
his much improved red-and-gold Iron Man Mark III suit to wreck some more mass
destruction on Stark Industries weapons in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.
Opposed not so much by the American military as by his own
right-hand man Obadiah Stone, in the finale they battle it out in powered
armour suits. At the end of the film Stark reveals his “Iron Man” identity
against the advice of his friends in the military, thus severing the story from
anything like the American monomyth. Robert Downey
displays all his roguish charm in the lead role. Yet in the end we’re not sure
where Iron Man stands: has he become a pacifist? Or is he merely revolted by
the possibility of his weapons being used to kill Americans? This highly
entertaining film manages to mix post-ideological pacificism
with the legitimacy of the “war on terror,” suspicion of the American military
and large corporations with support for the
In the case of all these comic book heroes from
Batman on, their heroism is post-ideological: they fight simulated (not symbolic)
enemies who are motivated not by ideology or money (at least in most cases),
but by a combination of pathology and power. They also evoke some of the
central elements of postmodern popular culture: recycling characters and
stories from less serious to more serious cultural forms, the emphasis on style
over substance, the breakdown of high art, and the decline of grand narratives
(except insofar as themes like the struggle against racism can add a bit of
spice to the techno-virtual stew of films like the X-Men). Comic book culture was once largely the innocent preserve
of excited young boys handing over their precious dimes and quarters to
convenience store clerks for the latest number of Batman, Spider-Man, or The X-Men. Now it
has washed over adult cultural industries as a veritable pop entertainment
tsunami, its narratives shifting from the good-versus-evil simplicities of pulp
fiction to the deeper, darker characters and stories found in the later Marvel
and Dark Horse Comics series.[11] Yet in the end these heroes don’t fight the ideological
enemies of the West, whatever their personal intricacies. They fight virtual
enemies in a post-ideological environment. History may not be over in the real
world, but in the world of Batman, Spider-Man and the X-Men, it is frantically
gasping for air.
******************
Videography - Films
Superman. Directed
by Richard Donner. Characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. Written by Mario Puzo, David Newman,
Leslie Newman and Robert Benton. 1978.
Superman Returns. Directed by Bryan Singer. Story by Bryan Singer, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. Screenplay by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. 2006.
Batman. Directed by Tim Burton.
Characters created by Bob Kane. Story by Sam Hamm. Screenplay by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren.
1989. [Villain: The Joker]
Batman Returns. Directed by Tim Burton.
Characters created by Bob Kane. Story by Daniel Waters and
Sam Hamm. Screenplay by Daniel Waters. 1992.
[Villains: The Penguin & Catwoman]
Batman Forever. Directed
by Joel Schumacher. Characters created by Bob Kane. Story by Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler.
Screenplay by Lee Batchler, Janet
Scott Batchler and Akiva Goldsman. 1995. [Villains: The Riddler
and Two Face]
Batman and Robin. Directed
by Joel Schumacher. Characters created by Bob Kane. Written by Akiva Goldsman.
1997. [Villains: Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy]
Batman Begins. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by David S. Goyer and Christopher
Nolan. 2005.
The Dark Knight. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay
by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Story by
Christopher Nolan and Jonathan S. Goyer. 2008.
X-Men. Directed by Bryan Singer. Story by Tom DeSanto and Bryan Singer.
Screenplay by David Hayter.
2000.
X2. Directed by Bryan Singer. Story by Bryan Singer, David Hayter and
Zak Penn. Screenplay by Michael Dougherty and Daniel P. Harris. 2003.
X-Men: The Last Stand. Directed
by Brett Ratner. Written
by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn. 2006.
Spider-Man. Directed by Sam Raimi. Original comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
Written by David Koepp.
2002. [Villain: The Green Goblin]
Spider-Man 2. Directed
by Sam Raimi. Written
by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Michael Chabon and
Alvin Sargent. 2004. [Villain: Doctor Octopus]
Spider-Man 3. Directed
by Sam Raimi. Written
by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi
and Alvin Sargent. 2007. [Villains: Sandman
and Venom]
Daredevil. Written
and Directed by Mark Steven Johnson. 2003.
Elektra. Directed
by Rob Bowman. Original character created by Frank Miller. Written by Zak Penn, Stuart Zicherman and
Raven Metzner. 2005.
Hulk. Directed by Ang
Lee. Original comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Written by John Turman, Michael
France and James Schamus. 2003.
The Incredible Hulk. Directed
by Louis Leterrier. Written by Edward Norton and Zak Penn. 2008.
Fantastic Four. Directed
by Tim Story. Original comic by Stan Lee and Jack
Kirby. Written by Mark Frost and Michael France.
2005.
4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Directed
by Tim Story. Story by John Turman
and Mark Frost. Screenplay by Don Payne and Mark
Frost. 2007.
300. Directed by Zack Snyder. Based on
graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley.
Written by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad
and Michael Gordon. 2006.
Watchmen. Directed by Zack Snyder. Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Written by David Hayter and Alex Tse. 2009.
Videography - Television Shows
Adventures of Superman. TV series
starring George Reeves as Superman, 1952-1957.
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. TV series, 1993-1997.
Smallville. TV series
on the life of young Clark
Spider-Man. Animated TV series. Written by Ralph
Bakshi. Directed by Ralph Bakshi and various others. 1966-1968.
Bibliography
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Faces. Princeton:
Jewett,
Robert and John
Gordon,
Ian, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew P. McAllister eds. Film and Comics.
Lang, Jeffrey S. &
Patrick Trimble, “Whatever
Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? An Examination of the American Monomyth and
the Comic Book Superhero,” Journal of
Popular Culture 22.3 (1988): 157-173.
McAllister, Matthew P.,
Ian Gordon and Mark Jancovich. “Blockbuster Meets
Superhero Comic, or Art House Meets Graphic Novel? The Contradictory Relationship between Film and Comic Art.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 34.3
(Fall 2006): 108-114.
Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. DC Comics, 1997 (10th anniversary edition).
Neil Rae and Jonathan
Gray.
“When Gen-X Met the X-Men.” In Gordon, Jancovich and McAllister eds., Film and Comics, 2007, 86-100.
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Meaning Without My Latest Marvels!’ ”Journal of Popular Culture 17.2 (1883):
67- 87.
Richardson, Niall. “The Gospel According to Spider-Man.” Journal of Popular Culture 37.4 (2004): 694-703.
Strinati, Dominic.
An Introduction to
Theories of Popular Culture.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. “The World Oxymandias
Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of
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Wright, Bradford. Comic
Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in
Comic
Books (most of these series have spin-offs):
Action Comics/Superman (DC Comics,
1938/1939 and on)
Detective Comics/Batman (DC Comics,
1939/1940 and on)
The Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel Comics
Group, 1963 and on)
Daredevil (Marvel Comics Group, 1964 and
on)
The Incredible Hulk (Marvel Comics
Group, 1966 and on)
The Invincible Iron Man (Marvel
Comics Group, 1968 and on)
The X-Men (Marvel Comics Group, 1963 and
on)