Political commentator Mark Steyn makes the case in this article for Macleans. (Thanks to Four Color Media Monitor for the heads up.) In the article, Steyn going into everything from super hero movies, to Hollywood’s treatment of heroes and adaptations in a post-9/11 world. The last paragraph, however, speaks right into my perspective for both Hollywood and comics.
The critic James Bowman thinks the current vogue for big screen superheroes helps to “isolate and quarantine heroism in fantasy-land.” “Heroism” is what people who’ve been bitten by radioactive spiders do. Until that happens to you, best to steer clear. And so a world of superheroes leads to a world without heroes. Gone now are the amateur adventurers of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, chaps who’d find themselves caught up in something, and decide to give it a go, initially because it’s a ripping wheeze but also because, in some too-stiff-upper-lipped-to-say way, they understood honour required it. Now the conventional romantic hero is all but extinct, and as giants patrol the skies those of us on the ground are perforce smaller. In The Incredibles, there’s a famous line aimed at the feel-good fatuities of contemporary education: when everyone’s special, nobody is. The failure of storytelling in today’s Hollywood teaches a different lesson: when everyone’s super, nobody’s a hero.
Unless I’m misunderstanding him, I’m not sure we completely agree here. If anything, the “super” is being drawn out of the “super hero” as of late. They’re supposed to represent an ideal, a way to hope beyond hope for…the godless, I guess. I don’t know. I’m not good with the philosophical stuff. Nowadays, the super heroes haven’t been that heroic, and the medias like to make real-life heroes (soldiers, police, even doctors, but that’s mostly the lawyers) look as bad as possible. The dominant media as a whole, both fiction and news, almost seems determined to take down heroes in any form, and revel when “goody-good” celebs and those who put their life on the line every day (like the ones we were supposed to have honored Monday) turn out to have some secret they can exploit to make them crash and burn (sometimes after building them up themselves) in the name of ratings or “the story”.
I wonder if Steyn has heard about Identity Crisis or Civil War? Super heroes just aren’t the same anymore, and there don’t seem to be any other heroes to take their place.
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