My sister, Katie, is a glutton for punishment. She keeps asking excellent questions that inevitably lead to long blog posts. I think it’s great because it helps me to firm up my own thoughts and conclusions about what I am researching: it helps me put things into order and make sense of them. I just wonder how the rest of you feel about it.
After my post on why heroes are getting darker (which also stemmed from one of Katie’s questions), Katie asked a very good follow up question: how will darker heroes affect our childrens’ worlds of pretend and beyond? This question is a lot harder to answer than the first one for a couple of reasons. First, my area of research has been primarily focused on proving that heroes are getting darker and what that says about post-9/11 America. I have not been researching what the changes mean for the future. Second, making those kinds of predictions is extremely difficult because hard evidence is very hard to come by. There aren’t any really good studies that show long term impacts of these kinds of changes. That being said, as a father of young children that will grow up in this darker reality, I recognize how important the question is and, since I have come across a few things in my research that may shed a little light on the subject, I’ll take a stab at it.
I think it is important to remember that I am not suggesting that darker heroes are making our world darker. For the most part, I believe it is the reverse: our heroes are reflecting the darker, post-9/11 world. At the same time, darker hero stories with little optimism and hope feed our pessimism, making the world seem darker. It is a cyclical thing that feeds on itself.
Over the past few days, I have been reading a very fascinating book called World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). The book, which was written by Max Brooks, Mel Brooks’ son, is a collection of first hand accounts of a long war with zombies wiped out a large percentage of the earth’s population 10 years earlier. It is a very fascinating read and I will likely write up a review of it once I’ve finished reading it (I’m about half-way through).
One of the first hand accounts in the book appears in the chapter titled: “Home Front USA.” It is about Roy Elliot, a man who was a movie maker and well-known actor before the war. As the US began the process of retaking and fortifying the country, he was ranked as an F-6, which means he had no useful skills (useful skills are classified as those that could directly help with the war and reconstruction efforts: gardening, metallurgy, weapons training, construction, etc.). But, after a long struggle, he found himself a very important role.
In the story, one of the major problems faced by the Americans (in fact, faced by the whole world) was what they called “ADS,” which was Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome. Essentially, it was people giving up on life. They could be barely wounded or completely healthy when they went to bed but never wake up. In all, it was claiming over 100 people a day. The problem wasn’t physiological, it was psychological. Elliot was the one who found the cure.
He went to the battlefield and recorded key victories. He got the army to bring high tech weapons that provided great visuals (specifically, lasers), and recorded them whomping on the undead. The fact that the lasers were highly impractical in real combat, didn’t matter. They made for a thrilling show that seemed to “prove” that the Americans were winning. Elliot travelled from camp to camp, screening his movies and scattering copies everywhere possible. The first time one of his movies was shown, ADS dropped by 5%. After a few months, it had been cut in half.
Toward the end of the story (which is written like an interview), Elliot asks the interviewer if he has heard of The Hero City, which was made by a similar filmmaker during the Zombie War (from what I gather, The Hero City was where the Americans finally overturned the zombies, but I haven’t got to the specifics, yet). When the interviewer says that he has heard of it, Elliot expounds: “Great film, right? Marty made it over the course of the Siege. Just him, shooting on whatever medium he could get his hands on. What a masterpiece: the courage, the determination, the strength, dignity, kindness, and honor. It really makes you believe in the human race… You should see it.”
The interviewer responds that he has seen it, to which Elliot asks: “Which version?” At the interviewer’s confusion, Elliot explains: “There were two… Marty made both a wartime and postwar version of The Hero City. The version you saw… Did it show the dark side of the heroes in The Hero City? Did it show the violence and the betrayal, the cruelty, the depravity, the bottomless evil in some of those heroes’ hearts? No, of course not. Why would it? That was our reality and it’s what drove so many people to get snuggled in bed, blow out their candles, and take their last breath. Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they’re going to be okay. There’s a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”
While obviously fictional, the preceding section from World War Z brings out an interesting point: the power of pop culture to influence the psyche.
I’m not talking about making people behave in certain ways. Arguments over whether pop culture makes children and adults act one way or another have been going on forever (even Plato got in on this one!). And, no matter how many studies come back with conclusive results one way or the other (many people don’t know that studies have proved both sides of the debate, which kind of rules science a moot point), the argument will likely continue far into the future.
No, what I’m talking about is different than controlling people’s actions. I am talking about changing or enhancing feelings.
Did you ever come out of a movie feeling better about the world around you than when you went in? Why? Has the reverse ever happened?
In 2006, Metta Spencer, a retired professor from the University of Toronto who studies peace and currently edits Peace Magazine (see Metta Spencer’s blog), published a fascinating book titled Two Aspirins and a Comedy. The book examines the impact of television and movies on the human psyche, specifically, their ability to influence negative and positive feelings which can then influence our health. The book describes how movies and television shows draw our emotions to the surface and that, as emotional beings, those emotions can make us either sick or healthy. Essentially, the book demonstrates that, what Roy Elliot’s character does in World War Z (make movies that promote hope over despair) actually works in the real world!
So, what does all this have to do with superheroes and our kids? Plenty.
Hero stories are teaching stories and always have been. They reflect (and therefore, teach) the values and highest ideals of the society that created them. Villains, on the other hand, reflect the darkest nightmares of that same society. These reflections are magnified on a large scale to make the lessons obvious. In reality, no one could quite measure up to the pure evil that is the Joker. At the same time, no one could be as morally good as Superman. But, then again, we’re not really expected to be. They are archetypes–examples–not models.
Even stories of real life heroes fall into the archetype model. That is what “Marty” in World War Z was doing by omitting all of the bad things done by America’s “heroes”: he was focusing on the archetypes. Archetypes are not really human, they are what Plato called “shadows” of reality. As a result, they do not have the baggage that humans carry with them. They are neither fallible nor flawed (sorry, just had to throw that out there).
Plato was very worried about Homer and other poets of Ancient Greece bringing their heroes and gods down to the human level. In his Republic, Plato spends a great deal of time slicing and dicing their works to cut out any mention of mistakes or overtly human passions. Heroes and gods, Plato argues, should be perfect so they can be examples to the youth.
The danger Plato most feared was imitation. He worried that bad examples of the gods or heroes would make the youth want to act the same way. What he didn’t consider was the impact on emotions and what that would do to society as a whole.
Contrary to popular belief, violence in the media isn’t really the problem (I am not saying that it isn’t “a” problem) with society. In fact, some types of violence in movies can be very productive as long as it resolves well in the end.
One of the greatest movies I have ever seen is Glory, which is about the first black battalion in the Civil War. The movie is incredibly violent and even difficult to watch, but few things have inspired me more than the courage and character demonstrated by the characters in that movie. Another painful example is Life is Beautiful. That movie is horrific, largely because of the violence it doesn’t show, and yet, you walk away from it uplifted and inspired.
Some would argue that those movies are historic (or at least in an historic setting) and, therefore, don’t count. But the thing is that our brain doesn’t really distinguish between reality and fiction when producing emotions. People can get just as intense emotional thrills watching Star Wars or The Dark Knight as the movies listed above. The sacrifice of a fictional character can be just as moving as those made by characters based on real people.
Okay, so where am I going with all this? It’s pretty simple. Because of 9/11 and a dozen other catastrophes that have occurred in the past seven years, our society is becoming far less hopeful and more pessimistic than before. This is being reflected in our heroes, who are becoming darker than ever before. However, as our archetypal heroes in movies, comics, and the rest of popular culture, become darker, they feed the darker mood of the country. Things get darker and darker until all we have left is darkness.
That is, I fear, the great danger of what is happening to our society. The darker our overall mood becomes, the worse off we will be. If Metta Spencer is right, then there will be more sickness, poverty, depression, suicide, and perhaps even crime, all around.
Doesn’t sound like fun, does it?
Please remember, that is the extreme. It depends on a lot of people losing all of their hope.
Speaking of hope, that is what heroes, both real and fictional, are all about. They give us hope when, perhaps, we no longer have the right to have any. And, no matter how bad things get, the example of our heroes can always bring us back from the brink.
Of all the superhero movies that have come out since 9/11, I think that The Dark Knight best embodies this idea. After going through everything that they do, the people of Gotham still aren’t willing to blow each other up. Even the convicted murderers and all around “bad guys” won’t do it. And, when Batman becomes a “villain” (or, at least, is perceived to be one) in the end, he still embodies the selfless sacrifice that so many of our leaders embody. So, even though the movie is arguably one of the hardest superhero movies to watch because of the violence and terror it embodies, it ends with hope.
Hope is a powerful emotion. If there is enough of it, it drives out fear and darkness. It makes life worth living.
Getting back to Katie’s question, how will these darker heroes affect our children? If things do not change, I can say with a certain amount of surety that it means that our children will grow up in a world that is much darker than the one we grew up in–or at least perceived to be that way. On the other hand, I think that they will also grow up in a world that is slowly beginning to hope for the future and even believe in the overall goodness of humanity.
In reality, it all comes down to what we teach them. It is impossible for us to shield them from the terrible things in this world, and I personally believe that doing so is a disservice to them. Find those good things. Find those seeds of hope. Teach them to your children and help them grow.
Maybe we can change the world.
