Heros we know, and why are they?

In the age of entertainment that we live in, there is a constant paradox in both movies and in the music industry to continually be fresh and cutting edge on the market. This has been the driving factor of artists becoming famous or flops, in fact the unfortunate result is that being popular is often reliant on being in the right place at the right time. Artists that are ‘ahead of their time’ often experience strange looks and then are ignored, or often can be the brunt of ridicule. David Bowie hit the music scene and through his persona of Ziggy Stardust became a legendary personality for being beyond envelope pushing. But in fact, he took the foundation of his persona from an earlier artist who was actually sincerely  trying to tell a story about the spiders from mars and about this man who fell to earth. This Ziggy couldn’t sing at all, but after appearing before boo-ing crowds he disappeared into obscurity…he was just so far out that the audience didn’t know what to do with him. Bowie however was inspired and channeled that confused attention into an almost drawing card of fetish-like glam androgyny which was excepted in a self-indulgence of the late 70s.

Although cutting edge and new sound has been the driving force of entertainment and business, there is an amazing market for stability. Consider the genre of classic rock. It is inherently not cutting edge and new, it in fact glorifies how for a period of time that sound was the expression of a real feeling of the time. However now DVD box sets and re-union tours are bringing in money for the industry at constant rate, which leads to the question of what exactly prompts our culture to pursue supporting hardly established artists and yet exalt artists which often are past their time and sometimes are dead and gone. For the record I am an avid fan of the majority of classic rock artist which made ground-breaking history, but the subject of the real reason and sustain for their success has always intrigued me.

Specifically for the purpose of this entry i would like to draw to light the phenomena of Comic book series being made into blockbuster films. Now this has long been a genre of movies since the time of Christopher Reeve’s Superman and the Tim Burton take on Batman, however with the rise of advancement in the industry of special effects, making or re-making superhero movies has been an increasing industry. I would venture to question however that there may be in fact an element of reason in a similar fashion to the popularity of classic rock, that the mass audience enjoys an fundamental aspect of having an identification, often in a feeling of nostalgia. The classic rock audience is of either reminiscing (if they were present at the time) about the time of their youth and feeling of the times, or if the were not alive in that period, identifying with the feeling of the time and the style of music. In the case of comic books and fictional heroic characters there is a similar identification with the feeling of idealism. However, in this case, most readers were often younger at the time of being exposed and there is an almost moral founding in identification with the stories. This therefore is what I would venture is a main root for the phenomena of the production of superhero movies that has been growing since the end of the 90′s.

One might argue that it simply sells, and that by making sequels and prequels there is a sure draw to the box office. But I would venture that the fuel behind this is the tying to forming period of our youth. For example, during the 1950s there was a massive amount of films release of monumental proportions of productions that had the theme of Bible based and historical stories such as The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, Ben Hur, and El Cid..just to name a few. Millions of dollars were spent on these films in the post-War boom in Hollywood, which many consider to be the ‘golden years’ of film, and considering that these epics were accomplished with full sized sets and extra due to minimal special effects, the implications of this time are…well, epic. However, the reason for the mass audience’s acceptance of these is possibly what I ventured above, that the movie goers of the time had come from a morally based back-round where they had grown up on Sunday School Stories and more classically based stories which they were enticed to see acted out in action on the big screen. Thus now many of us have had a majority of our ideas about role models and what action should be formed from hours of cartoons and comic books. This is in no way judging, just assessing the differences in influences of different generations.

A slight difference in the way our generation idolizes comic book heros and funds a system of continual production of movies on them is that we have a healthy love/hate with the characters. In popular culture there is always the sub-genres of the elites; those who truly delve into the culture created by expression, for example those who really understand the nature of the heros and who are purists in interpretation. Before any one starts having visual pictures of the stereotype of a comic book shop owner, this can be manifested by fans, and readers who really just get the characters. As in any movie interpretation of a book, fans of comic books continually critique how the director changed the story to fit the movie. This has happened with everything from Jane Austen to Tom Clancy, but the visual aspect of comic books there is a more inherent visual underlying quality which can make or break the film. The director of the film The Watchmen purposefully strove to not fit into the stereotype of the hero action film and chose to make the film darker and more visually unforgiving than a typical Spiderman or even Batman movie. This both alienated some fans, and bought the respect of others, but that may be purely dependent on personal taste.

In the amateur video imbedded, an interaction between Batman, Spiderman and Superman occurs, with the vague formating of the well known Mac and PC commercials. Some may not be aware, but there often is contention between comic book fans, where some think the other publisher is corny and goody-goody. Personally I’m partial to DC, but that is dependent of personal preference based on fond memories of Wonder Woman, Batman, AquaMan, and the Twins from Space. But a Marvel fan may disagree, similar in the way that Mac and PC owners form sides as to preferring operating systems.

Here however we see the typification of idolizing and yet making fun of the superheroes. Despite being all orphans they have very different ways of dealing with issues, and their personalities and identified with their powers. The video is funny, but the way that we interpret and derive humor from it is based on our preformed feelings and opinions on the characters. In Lawrence Grossberg’s book We Gotta Get Out of This Place, the author analyzes this idea of authenticity. We invest in imagery, and to cut to the chase of his theseus, by sentiment we celebrate impossibility. “What enables that possibility in not any specific affective investment but rather the intensity, the quantitative measure, of the investment itself.” The creator of this video used a good amount of this preconceived sentimentality of acceptance, and yet dosed it with a good amount of humorous critique of asking why do we admire these characters. This video is indeed an example of how one parodying manifestation of a cult classic genre can be interpreted on several different levels based on the individual’s pre-exposure to the original.

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