Hollywood brings us too much X-ray vision and not enough true grit.
BY JAMES BOWMAN
Friday, August 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
David Gemmell, the British fantasy novelist and the author of "Legend," who
died last week, once said that he had been inspired to write fantasy by the
debunking of such historical heroes as Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, George
Armstrong Custer and Davy Crockett. "Societies need heroes," he was quoted as
saying. "So we travel to places where revisionists cannot dismantle the
great." But perhaps it is worth considering whether, as a society, we are
paying a price for abandoning to the revisionists the rich heroic material
supplied by reality.
It is surely no accident (as the Marxists say) that the fashion for debunking
real-life heroes has coincided with the rise of fantasy heroes. Superman,
still the most popular of the latter, made his first appearance in DC's
Action Comics in 1938 when post-World War I disillusionment with ideas of
honor and heroism was at its peak. Not long afterward came Batman, Captain
America and others.
Such fantasy figures enjoyed a huge popularity once America entered World War
II. "The desire for some big, bright escape that had something to do with
fighting off big, bad scary things was a big part of that," says Gerard
Jones, the author of "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the
Comic Book" (2004). But it also tended to isolate and quarantine heroism in
fantasy-land.
Even real heroes eschewed the name. "I'm just a guy doing a job," said
William Bendix in the war movie "Guadalcanal Diary" (1943), and this was a
common way for fighting men to talk about what they were doing. Talk of
honor, patriotism or noble sacrifice was frowned on by the comic-book-reading
soldiers at the front.
Superheroes enjoyed another growth spurt in the Vietnam era, when a whole
raft of new ones, including Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, were
introduced by the two major players in the comic book world, DC and Marvel.
At the time, Hollywood was still portraying fighting men that were real, if
not always realistic. But with the post-Vietnam reaction against the military
and its culture, the U.S. armed forces came to be routinely depicted as
institutionally vicious and corrupt and individual soldiers as pathetic
victims. There was no shred of heroism in the spate of Vietnam movies that
began with "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter" (1978) or "Apocalypse Now"
(1979).
Instead, the movie business joined in the cultural migration to fantasy with
the first Superman movie (1978) and the original "Star Wars" trilogy--in
which heroism existed but only in "a galaxy far, far away." In "First Blood"
(1982), even patriotism abandoned military institutions in favor of Sylvester
Stallone's John Rambo, who was a solitary superhero in all but name, taking
on whole armies singlehandedly.
Since 9/11 the trickle of superhero movies has become a flood. There have
been two "Spider-Man" and three "X-Men" movies (the first of which came out
in 2000), as well as "The Fantastic Four" and "The Hulk." They have joined a
revival of the Batman and Superman franchises in last summer's "Batman
Begins" and this summer's "Superman Returns." Plans for sequels to the Hulk,
X-men and Spider-Man movies are well advanced, and Captain America, The
Phantom and Ghost Rider are also waiting in the wings.
The latest in superhero fashion is for irony, in the manner of the animated
feature "The Incredibles" (2004)--who seem to have gotten their name from the
epithet discarded by the Hulk a year earlier in a bid to be taken more
seriously. After all, "incredible" can be pretty much taken for granted of
all superheroes--unless, like the ironic cartoon ones, you want to make a
point about their unbelievability.
In a similarly ironic vein, last year, we had "Sky High," about a high school
for budding superheroes. The arrival of their superpowers is analogous to if
not precisely coincidental with that of puberty. Today there opens "Zoom,"
which has basically the same idea. It follows hard on the heels of "My Super
Ex-Girlfriend," which is about the perils of breaking up with a girl who has
superpowers.
It's all a lot of fun, I suppose, but the more we indulge our appetite for
the cultural junk food of the superheroic, the harder it becomes to digest
the real thing. This is especially true for children, for whom this diet has
been primarily designed. The pre-eminent childhood hero now is Harry
Potter--to all intents and purposes another superhero. Kids have come to
crave the sugar-buzz of superheroism to the point where, if they encounter
ordinary heroism (if that's not an oxymoron) in old books, it must seem bland
and unexciting.
Can it be entirely coincidental that adults, too, have had their appetite for
the heroic spoiled? Both of this year's big 9/11 movies, for instance--Paul
Greengrass's "United 93" and Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center"--have played
down the real and undoubted heroism of some of their characters in order to
emphasize the passive suffering of others.
On the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, we know the names--Todd Beamer,
Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett and Mark Bingham--of at least four of the men
who led the passengers' revolt against the hijackers, but Mr. Greengrass
doesn't mention them. Nor does he show them as being especially distinguished
for their heroism.
This reticence, we know, was in deference to the wishes of the victims'
families, who co-operated with the film-makers on the understanding that, as
the coordinator of Pennsylvania's Sept. 11 victim-assistance program told the
Washington Post in 2002, "we feel we have forty heroes, and not just four."
Why? Because all 40 suffered and died.
Real heroism, for us, is scarcely conceivable apart from victimhood. That's
why, in Mr. Stone's film too, almost all the attention is on the two Port
Authority policemen, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael
pinned helplessly beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center, while their
families are waiting, equally helplessly, for news of them.
We may begin to suspect that American movie audiences scarcely know what the
old-fashioned hero even looks like anymore, the sort who dares greatly and
succeeds by mastering his enemies. On the rare occasions when we have seen
one, as in last year's boxing movie "Cinderella Man," he has been a
box-office disappointment.
Old-time heroes like Wyatt Earp or Davy Crockett may not have been all that
we would now wish them to be, but they did have one big thing going for them
that the superheroes don't. Their undoubted bravery, resolution and fortitude
in the midst of real dangers made them examples for us to emulate, not just
fantasy figures to admire.
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Mr. Bowman is the author of "Honor: A History."
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