Superhero Update

Best. Superhero. Ever.

For the past few days, nearly everyone I know on Facebook has updated their status to some combination of the words “The Dark Knight”, “saw” and “fucking awesome”. This makes me feel all the more left out for not having seen it yet, but as I work 7 evenings a week, it’s really tough for me to get out to the theater. Sure, I could go watch a matinee, but I feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong about watching a movie called The Dark Knight at 1:40 on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. When I leave the theater after seeing The Dark Knight, I want to be afraid that Batman will swoop out of the darkness and hit me with one of his Bat-somethings. For me, that’s part of the movie experience. That’s what I’m paying for – being scared shitless of Batman. And Batman doesn’t do stuff during the day, because it seems that Gotham City is either located somewhere in the Artic Circle or has a strict daytime curfew for everyone, because all really memorable Batman moments take place when the sun has gone down, presumably so it can hide from Batman.

A lot of people who study pop culture have opined that superheroes are the gods of modern America – I myself always thought that God was the god of modern America, but then again, he doesn’t have the Batmobile, so I guess we know who’s cooler. I’m just about as knowledgeable about our world saving, Justice League member gods as I am about our world creating, long white robe wearing God. It’s sort of embarrassing at geeky social events – everybody starts going on about the latest issue of Spider Man and I’m suddenly out of my element, for the only thing I know about Spider Man is that he does whatever a spider can (which, honestly, is pretty freaking obvious given the fact that his name is Spider Man – if he did whatever a mongoose could, that would be pretty impressive; both because it would be unexpected and because I really don’t know what a mongoose can do). I’m a frequent victim of That Guy, the one who reminds you that you’re stupid for liking the movie because the comic book was way better, the one who says, “It’s not a comic book, it’s a graphic novel!”, the one who will give a 15 minute lecture about Wolverine’s gradual development as a character after you mention that your family was mauled by a pack of rabid wolverines. For whatever reason, I just can’t bring myself to religiously follow comic books.

It just seems like an awful lot of work to me – a whole canon to familiarize oneself with, remember, and then keep up with on a regular basis. Characters duck and weave in and out of storylines, love interests die or turn evil, and planets seem to explode on a regular basis. So that’s complicated enough on its own, but it turns out that by the mid 1980s, DC Comics had created four separate Earths – one in which Batman was perpetually young, one where superheroes aged normally, a pseudo “real” world, and of course the requisite Bizarro World, all of which inexplicably converged in the mid 1980s. It’s like if there was the normal Bible where Jesus is the son of God, and then there was a Bible where Barry is the son of God, and a Bible where Jesus knows ju-jitsu, and a Bible where Bizarro Jesus is the son of Anti-God, and then to clarify things Barry and the other Jesuses all fight to the death on Noah’s Ark. The whole thing requires a lot more mental processes than I want to be using during my leisure time, and for the record, my money is on the Jesus that knows ju-jitsu.

I’ve done a bit more reading in the mysterious, pseudo legitimate world of the graphic novel, which attempts to separate the men from the boys with darker plotlines and more complex characters, despite the fact that they’re still essentially picture books that feature large breasted, scantily clad women. A good example of this are the Sin City comics, wherein all the men are steadfastly dedicated to gruesomely murdering one another in new and exciting ways, and all the women are steadfastly dedicated to being naked and gruesomely murdering one another in new and exciting ways. Maybe my inability to enjoy this sort of thing is why I’m not really cut out to be a fan of this medium – for the record, That Guy, I didn’t like the movie either. To be honest, it makes me sort of uncomfortable when the most level-headed character in a story is the guy that nearly drowns a criminal in his own piss. That’s just really not my thing.

Now, there was graphic novel that I enjoyed immensely – Watchmen, the trailer for which you were probably confused by before The Dark Knight. Watchmen answered the question I’d always been asking, which was “What if superheroes were burned out, morally bankrupt, sexually confused, and occasionally insane losers?”, and it managed to answer it with just enough violence to keep me entertained but not so much that I had to get up on my high horse like I did with Sin City in the previous paragraph. However, Watchmen is all contained in one volume; it features a cast of original characters and was humble enough to make do with only one Earth. I guess my feeling is that maybe all the best stories have a clear and definite ending – if things keep going on forever, then you have to start creating bizarro worlds just to cover your own tracks.

My other problem with comic books is that I find it hard to identify with superheroes on a long term basis. It’s not because I think they’re infallible or anything – Batman is, after all, sort of a nutcase, and Spider Man has women, money, and “I killed my best friend’s dad” troubles. It’s because, when blessed with such incredible powers as they’ve got, these superheroes actually go to the trouble of using them for good. That’s something I just can’t see myself doing. I mean, if I had super powers I wouldn’t necessarily use them for evil – I’d just use them for fun and, if possible, profit. If I could turn invisible I’d get my own reality TV show and put David Blaine out of business, if I had claws that came out of my hands I’d use them to scare the crap out of customers at work who don’t say “please” or “thank you”, and if I could fly I probably wouldn’t, because I’ve got vertigo. But no matter what power I had, I can’t envision myself taking on the considerable physical and psychological burden of cleaning up the mean streets of Portland. I mean, that’s a whole lot of work. Like, a lot a lot of work, for which I’m getting nothing in return – no money, certainly, and I doubt that there’s any college credit available for that sort of thing. So despite all their faults, the fact that the superheroes in these comic books would willingly put themselves through thankless hell all in the pursuit of justice makes them hard for me to see eye to eye with. Such a deep seated, selfless quest for the greater good is the sort of thing that I don’t think I or a lot of people I know would ever be capable of. So I guess that for me, what’s really super about superheroes isn’t so much that they possess superior powers, but that they possess the perseverance and brass cajones to keep using them to fight crime rather than just fly places to bypass traffic or turn invisible to spy on Jessica Alba in the shower.

All that being said, I really do love superhero movies. Batman Begins, Spider-Man 1&2, X-Men 1&2 – I’m a big fan of all of them, and not just because Kirsten Dunst looks good in the rain or because I like seeing Magneto pull all the iron out of a guy’s body through his skin. The stories told in these superhero movies are pretty well trimmed – they don’t grow to be so huge that they flop over and start spewing out alternate universes like in the comic books; they present one story, tell it really well, and then get the hell out of there. In a short span like that, I don’t really have to worry about identifying with the hero – I can just enjoy the fact that he relentlessly beats the living crap out of the bad guys. Sometimes, when you go to the movies, that’s all you want to see.

Truman Capps is your worst nightmare.