The Phoenix Network:
 
 
 
About  |  Advertise
 
Features  |  Reviews

Our superheroes, ourselves

What the current crop of comic-book action movies tells us about America's identity crisis
By JAMES PARKER  |  July 9, 2008

080711_heroeS_main

Shrink wrapped: Gamma rays got you down? The doctor will see you now. By Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg
Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer? To put it another way, has there ever been a bigger sucker? Year after year, he stands in line and hands over his money, to receive, year after year, the same treatment: i.e., Hollywood shivering in icy gratification as it pisses on him from a great height. It’s become one of nature’s biorhythms, like the return of the swallows to Capistrano: the dog days come around, the asphalt softens in the heat, and the megaplexes begin to bloat and boom with big-budget idiocy.

And idiocy, being always the sequel to some other idiocy, is never original. You’ve seen it all before! National Treasure 14: Hell’s Gate. . . The Matrix Deionized. . . Son of Son of Fool’s Gold. . . No Way Can You Die This Fucking Hard. . . The product is poor, the contempt is palpable. If you bought it once, goes the thinking, you’ll buy it again. In fact you’ll never stop buying it — why should you?

This summer, however, things are a little different. True, we’re getting the usual rash of run-ons and sequelae — Hellboy II (opens this weekend), a second attempt at the Hulk (from a few weeks back), our seventh installment of Batman (next weekend) — but when you add Iron Man and Hancock (which have earned $312 million and $112 million so far, respectively) to the roster, a more interesting picture begins to emerge. There’s a certain thematic density to these nearly simultaneous releases. We seem . . . preoccupied. Indeed, we may be said to be obsessed. A sensitive interplanetary visitor, alighting at AMC Boston Common and watching a few of these movies back-to-back, might conclude that we are in the middle of a national nervous breakdown.

The lean green schizophrenia machine
Just take a look at the protagonists: Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a repentant billionaire arms dealer; Hellboy is a demon outgrowing his infernal beginnings; Bruce Banner is a cool-headed scientist incorporating a maddened green monster (that would be the Hulk); Hancock is a celestial being descending gnostically through bum-like levels of mortality and despair; and Batman . . . Batman broods on the turrets of Gotham, ears pricked, phobias squashed, dispensing terror to the bad guys. Common to all these movies is a CGI-blowout of an ending, in which the hero faces down his fear, his temptation, his vengefulness, his will-to-power, his not-self. Good Hulk battles Bad Hulk; Nice Iron Man battles Nasty Iron Man; red-and-blue Spiderman battles all-black Spiderman; Hellboy, who has been assiduously sanding down the stumps of his demon horns (see the hell sparks fly!), sprouts a whole new pair . . . and on and on.

Movies, of course, are just movies. These projects have been in the works for years — chugging along Hollywood’s trillion-dollar poop-chute, now stalled or un-financed, now flush and moving again. Nobody associated with their production planned to make any great statement. And cinematic trends are not clinical symptoms. But the Zeitgeist works by coincidence, and the fact is that all of them, all these noisy dramas of superheroic identity crisis, have popped out now — at a moment of intense national self-interrogation. Are we liberators or torturers? Decent men or sadists? Are we chained to our fears or ready to embrace “change”?

Congressional committees and op-ed pages are dinning these questions into our ears. “Could the president order a suspect buried alive?” enquired Representative John Conyers on June 26, of Justice Department torture groupie John Yoo — and the answer was not “Are you out of your mind?” but an ass-covering, “Uh, Mr. Chairman, I don’t think I’ve ever given advice that the president could order someone buried alive. . .” It’s enough to turn you into Allen Ginsberg, apostrophizing the continent: America, you complicated bitch! Your Liberty torch is the flare of a pyromaniac! America, you big clanking bastard with your double-chambered heart, do you know who you are?!

Marvel knarvel
The theme of the troubled Übermensch, embarrassed or threatened by his own power, is no novelty. Apart from Hancock, all the aforementioned superheroes have their origins in the comic books of the past century, and even the youngest of them — Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, who first appeared in 1993 — is firmly in the tradition: a grumpy, lopsided, blue-collar epigrammatist, spiritual brother to Wolverine and the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm. Divided selves, divided sensibilities: looking back, we can see that the primordial fission occurred in 1941, when Stanley Milton Lieber, teenage staffer at New York’s Timely Publications, sawed his first name in half and became Stan Lee. It would be another 20 years before the genesis of Marvel Comics, but with the naming of his freewheeling, rapid-fire editorial alter ego — a vector for the genius of artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko — Lee opened the portal through which the Marvel universe would eventually come swarming.

1  |  2  |  3  |   next >
  Topics: Features , Ang Lee , Christian Bale , Mike Mignola ,  More more >
  • Share:
  • RSS feed Rss
  • Email this article to a friend Email
  • Print this article Print
Comments
Re: Our superheroes, ourselves
Mr James Parker, After reading your article"Our Superheroes,Ourselves" I've come to the conclusion that brain of yours is too fricking big for you head because you have no FUCKING idea what you're talking about when it comes to comic book movies.  Most of the article is just blah,blah,blah to take up space on the pages,quotes and other nonsense from people most of the readers have never heard of, nothing to do with the actual reasons why people like going to see these comic book movies.  Granted, some of the movies did suck, Ang Lee's Hulk for one and there are others but most of the people who see these movies are people that grew up reading the books and just enjoyed them for reasons that are different for every indivdual.  Then to go on later in the article and poke fun at Stan Lee,"and a sequence of creaky cameos from Lee himself,now 85" how dare you?? The man is a legend and a genius.  When DR. Rosenberg gives her well thoughtout opinion on the reason people like the movies and that she's a DC person I can just picture your snobby turned up nose getting all bent out of shape and a look like she was crazy.  In closing, get your head out of your ass!!! I know peoples opinions are their own but it's obvious that people enjoy these movies and comics in general so let them be. Go back to sipping your tea and enjoying whatever dust covered books you enjoy. Tim BATMAN RULES!!!!! 
By kiss05 on 07/13/2008 at 11:25:35

ARTICLES BY JAMES PARKER
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   A SMOKER’S TALE  |  November 26, 2008
    Will Self’s The Butt
  •   BLOOD SUCKS  |  September 02, 2008
    HBO does the ‘Southern Vampire’
  •   THE TRUTH IS UP THERE  |  August 22, 2008
    Clouds, sun dogs, and the dream of an atmospheric education . . . How one former TV reporter brought his sky gospel to the people
  •   BEIJING STING  |  August 08, 2008
    Exposed: A top-secret government memorandum, obtained this past week by the Phoenix, gives the games away
  •   VISIONS FROM LILLIPUT  |  July 28, 2008
    The rise of the minisode

 See all articles by: JAMES PARKER

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 



Tuesday, December 02, 2008  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2008 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group