On Mon, 14 Aug 2006 08:05:32 -0400, Ubiquitous <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:
> 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.
I am going back through my thousands of posts to read some of them.
While doing that I came across some that I hadn't looked at yet, must have
been during my busy weeks. Anyway, Thanks for sending that
>
> 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.
>
> ===============================================================
> Mr. Bowman is the author of "Honor: A History."
> ===============================================================
>
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