Here is a thought-provoking statement by a British film critic who comments in his Batman review:
The cinema is awash with comic-book superheroes - but none of them is truly heroic. Heroes, in our egalitarian age, no longer embody the dream of the superior individual who is greater than humanity; nowadays, superheroes must be as flawed and screwed up as we are. They drink too much (Hancock), have anger issues (the Incredible Hulk) and are self-obsessed (Iron Man). Things have come to such a sorry state that, as we shall see, even Batman (Christian Bale) is not allowed to be the hero of his own movie.I highlighted the bit that caught my attention. Interesting! And timely too. Check out Disney/Pixar's "The Incredibles," which has an excellent embedded theme about this. "Everybody's special. That means nobody is."
Decades before this, the great C.S.Lewis, commenting on academia, said that the day was coming when the mediocre would tear down the excellent for daring to be excellent -- and that the excellent would start tearing themselves down so they could be mediocre like everybody else.
Now on the business of heroic superheroes, there is a related issue of making these characters human, relatable, multi-dimensional, and nuanced . . . but this isn't the same as the point about making heroes less heroic.
Pretty soon, the villains will be the ones who get all the attention, the more wicked and monstrous the better and more fascinating -- oh, wait, that's already happened. In the theater. But we should all rue the day when it happens in real life. Oh, wait, that's already happened too.
3 comments:
Harrison Bergeron
In actual comics, we've seen the turn to non-flat characters since the mid-80s. Stories of emotional distress and conflicts of morality within comic heroes have been quite common, and some of the greatest comics of the last 50 years have focused on anti-heroes (think Neil Gaiman's Sandman). It's actually a very similar transition as happened in science fiction. The very earliest stories were quite basic in their plots and the characters were archetypal heroes, but by the 40s and 50s, there was a lot of changes in the genre where the heroes became every day men and women.
The thing is that, except in a few cases (i.e. Superman), the heroes and protagonists are actually human. So it is completely acceptable, and even expected, that the characters experience emotional distress just like normal people do. Even the non-human heroes who are very much humanish, like Superman, are frequently depicted as facing moral dilemmas and emotional attachments.
That critic is a moron. What makes a person into a hero? It is their ability to raise themselves above their common human problems and to do the right thing on a grand scale. Even more, his comment shows a glaring unfamiliarity with comic book hero history. The Hulk, Iron Man, Batman, and many others are OLD characters and their human flaws have been present for quite a long time. It isn't anything new.
I don't think the complaint is about having flawless heroes, as much as some modern interpretations have actually *fetishized* neuroses. Or at least that's how I took it. I don't know...I hated "Spider Man 2" because I thought the whole thing was one big Peter Parker whine, to the point that his own self-involvement took away from the whole idea of him fighting bad guys.
Flaws and personal difficulties are fine and realistic and INTERESTING. But when the presentation overemphasizes them, then they can be a huge anvil around the ankle of the story. Call me shallow, but I think heroes involve confronting or overcoming or dealing with flaws -- and then going on to do something for someone ELSE, as you said.
Plus there's always the problem of how to translate things from the comic book to the movie screen, because --let's face it -- the movie versions have mostly been lackluster. (Thank goodness for the Nolan Batman, though!) Maybe part of the problem is that sometimes the movie version of a hero's personal dilemmas just comes off looking like a ham-fisted hackapalooza.
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