In a film theory class I took my sophomore year at Yale, one of the films on the syllabus was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We watched it, we enjoyed it, and that’s no surprise. And when we began to discuss it, we naturally focused on the famous “Vertigo Shot”–that weird camera effect produced by simultaneously tracking back and zooming in, used in Vertigo to convey Scottie’s paralyzing fear of heights. (You’ve also seen it used in Jaws (Chief Brody sees the shark in the crowded water), The Fellowship of the Ring (Frodo senses the Ringwraith coming down the road), the video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller (Michael gets zombie-fied), and a whole bunch Nexium commercials (some sap with acid reflux panics while being told about the effects a delicious meal will have on them).)
“What’s going on in that shot?” our professor asked. We weren’t really sure what she was after. I mean, there’s the technical trickery behind it, but other than that, isn’t it obvious? It’s a point-of-view shot that shows how scared Scottie is. “Is anyone here scared of heights?” she then asked; I raised my hand, as did several others. “When you feel vertigo, is this what you see?” Uhh, well, no, not exactly… “Of course not. When you are scared, your eyes don’t suddenly work differently. This image is impossible to see without a camera. It doesn’t and can’t represent anything in nature. And yet you all knew exactly what it was supposed to represent–the terror of vertigo.” And what’s more, she went on to argue, it represents the spiraling chaos of Scottie’s life (connected as it is to the ever-present spiral motif of the film’s mise-en-scene), and his fixation on a point (the zoom/Madeleine) and his inability to actually reach that point (the track-back), and indeed by its very impossibility suggests the fundamental wrongness of Scottie’s life.
All that meaning, all that power, would have been lost if Hitchcock had eschewed spectacle for realism.
When Tim O’Neil argues that there is something inherently silly or stupid or not worth taking seriously about the superhero genre, he’s committing the self-same sin that Hitchcock, thank God, refused to commit. Tim sets up a whole lot of problems with superheroes that are, indeed, problems, and are in fact problems I myself decry all the time–the business-motivated need for “trademark servicing” with characters who have outlived their usefulness and depth, the ossified conventions and continuity that have become impenetrable for the layman, the bizarre domination by the genre of the entire American comics industry, the way talented creators occasionally eschew more artistically rewarding and personal products for phoned-in cash-in runs on supercomics, and so forth. But quite obviously, none of these are inherent problems, as Jim Henley points out, and as such we needn’t go into them here. And as far as those ossified conventions go, Dave Fiore reminds us that all fiction is conventional. No, the real “inherent” aspect of superhero stories that O’Neil identifies is that there aren’t any superheroes in real life. People don’t act that way, he says. And God help us if this is our barometer for whether a work of art is any good, I say.
I understand the root of O’Neil’s critique. One can accept all manner of fantastical contrivances in fiction, provided the patterns of human behavior depicted in those fictions are recognizable to us. This is why, when talking about Star Wars (which I love), the fact that Princess Leia should be paralyzed with grief after the destruction of her entire planet is a much more cogent critique than the fact that you can’t really hear explosions in space. We easily suspsend disbelief on technicalities. We don’t on the fundamentals.
I happen to think that The Superhero (and The Supervillain) isn’t as alien a behavioral pattern as O’Neil and other anti-superhero critics believe. Costume and pageantry have been a major part of human society forever and a day, and have often gone hand in hand with feats of strength and athletic prowess (football uniforms do a lot more than protect the players and enable the spectators to tell the two teams apart), public performance and “stardom” or “idol/hero” behaviors (look at the career of David Bowie and the entire glam movement, just for example), and even actual heroism/crime-fighting/battle against evil (aside from bright red firemen’s uniforms and the shiny badges of the police, take a look at the history of military dress). On the flipside, it’s impossible to produce a more theatrical and ambitious comic-book supervillain than actual, real-life supervillain Adolf Hitler; and as Jim once again reminds us, there currently lives (or lived) a man who dresses up in consciously evocative garb and heads a worldwide conspiracy dedicated to global conquest, and does so, moreover, because God had told him to. And if you want analogous aliases and code names, look at hip-hop. And if you want analagous secret identities, look at intelligence agents and narcs. Quite simply, superheroes aren’t as far from reality as people think.
But again, all this is really just a dodge. Even if you readily accept the use outlandish “unrealistic” powers as standard sci-fi/fantasy devices, and even if you point out the countless similarities of superhero behavior to real-life human behavior, the fact remains, there is no real-life superhero. A character like Batman could exist in our world. There are certainly people with enough money, intelligence, and drive to build a vigilante empire from the ground up, as did Bruce Wayne. But no one has done so. And this, in the end, is supposed to deflate the entire genre.
I say, so what?
In opera, people act in the absolute broadest strokes and sing songs. People don’t behave that way in real life. And yet from opera we receive profound illustrations of love, lust, jealousy, hatred, and despair, that affect us in ways that more realistic theatre cannot. In film, cameras do things that the human eye cannot possibly do. And yet in film we are sometimes able to “see” things that are pefectly true, even if the way we see them is false. In superhero stories, people costume themselves, and fly, and fight for their beliefs as presented in the starkest way possible. And yet in superhero stories, those costumes, those fights, those explosions, those battles, those impossibly high stakes, those impossibly fit and explosive and exploded bodies, those baroque plots of conquest and single-minded pursuits of justice free us from the bonds of quotidian reality and set us on a plane of pure imagination and morality–a theatre of self-sacrifice, vengeance, justice, self-definition, madness, megalomania, duty, honor, glory, loyalty, betrayal, power, impotence, bravery, cowardice, ethics, love of man, denial of self, love of self, denial of man, cruelty, kindness, villainy, heroism.
For those whose imaginations have not failed them, the spectacle can be more real than reality.
As Dave Fiore points out, those who characterize even the best superhero stories as “escapism” miss the point not just of those stories, but of fiction itself. “Real” and “true” are not synonymous, and to claim that a genre is “inherently uninteresting” because it refuses to conflate the two terms is itself inherently wrong. If the school of thought propagated by the Comics Journal, for whom Tim is a writer, will be remembered–and I think it will, mostly for the good–this enormous failure of imagination, given birth when a justifiable antipathy toward the industry’s excesses took precedence over honest and ongoing critical inquiry, will be one of its legacies. And it’s a legacy I am both duty-bound and proud to combat.