It is now Friday evening and outside we have a bitter cold settling in. There is a blustery wind that has picked up, and while I haven't had a chance to venture out (I've been very sick these past few days), it wouldn't have been a good day to do so if I was looking for an outdoor activity. Indoor activities in enclosed spaces do not really appeal to me in my current physical state.
I thought I would mention a few of the books and films I have been reading and viewing lately. It may be that no one else reads this blog, but at least I'll leave a record.
I had a chance recently to read Garth Ennis' The Boys, volumes 1-3. It details a world in which superheroes actually come to exist, but in the corrosive, subversive and wildly creative style that characterizes the works of this author who had also created the perverse, funny, warm and dark book Preacher, it is also satisfying and doesn't stick to the tired mold of superhero comics.
The eponymous "boys" (a unit that includes a mute, disturbed Asian woman with mysterious powers) are a group of individuals who are dedicated to battling back against the superheroes, and they all seem to be misfits of one sort of another. We really don't know that drives them, for some of them seem to hold grudges, while others seem to have what would amount to a need to satisfy an urge for confrontation. Are they superheroes? Well, it turns out that they have been exposed to "Substance V", some concoction that originated with the work of a European scientist during WWII, and which confers on those who injest it a "reboot" or their DNA such that they gain superpowers. It is supposedly notoriously difficult and expensive to manufacture (one imagine it as a form of liquid plutonium, at least in my imagination), and yet it is being circulated in unrefined form (like crystal meth) so that superheroes are proliferating throughout the world. However, there are tiers of superhumans, and it is those that are corporate-branded who are able to thrive.
What will happen when you have beings who have so much power that no one is able to stop them? Is it not natural to conclude that they will become tyrants, and that they will crush and overpower the rest of humanity, reducing it to thralldom, such as is recalled in the famous dark fantasy in George Orwell's novel 1984 of a humanity crushed by a boot forever and ever? This would seem to be the case, if it weren't for the fact that, for all their power, these superheroes have weaknesses, and they need to preserve the prevailing social network to satisfy their wants. They are depraved, given in to narcotics addiction, to lust and to all manner of perversion, and this is one of the reasons why they can be controlled by humanity, or at least by selected humans, such as those that head monstrous corporations. The immense majority of humanity otherwise engages in hero worship that suggests the desperate level to which they need to satisfy their own need to believe in phantasies of moral perfection. Ask the traditional demographic of comic books, adolescent and literate young boys, and you will find this same narrative of redemption, of misunderstood boys who wish to belong and be accepted and worshiped, or at the very least, recognized.
It is still haunting to reflect, nonetheless, on the parables of social and species division that is represented by these superhumans. In Olaf Stapledon's novel Odd John, it was natural for these super-evolved beings to seek out similar beings, and then to withdraw to their island, behaving in a way that escaped any moral restriction. The characters may have been misfits, but the way in which they chose to experiment on Polynesian women in order to carry out their breeding experiments anticipated the worse atrocities that would leave the realm of fiction and would be enacted by men such as Dr. Mengele during Nazi Germany. These superheroes, despite their public image, are similary callous, but also, strangely, juvenile, in the way that teenagers are when you reflect on the dynamics of the average high school here in the USA, and the casual way in which those groups in power (the jocks) dismiss everyone else. For all those who profess nostalgia for their high school years, I ask them to consider to which group they belonged. I knew they were difficult years for me.
As mentioned by one of the characters in the series, if you have beings who can swim across the surface of the sun, how much would they have in common with regular human beings? We would necessarily have the parable of the Ewoks and the Morlocks once again, one in which the sinister element would reside in the group that exercises unrestrained power. This is evolution at work, one lacking in any moral considerations.
I always did have difficulty accepting the premise of humans being able to life peacefully with superhumans. How could they ever interact? As I recall, Umberto Eco had published an essay long ago in which he addressed some of the physical constraints, and he wrote most tellingly of the impossibility of any physical communion between the two. In my case, I always found it extremely exasperating that superheroes were always fighting either with tinpot figures who wished to conquer the world, or as in the old Spiderman series, were trolling the allies and canyons of Manhattan, putting a stop to muggers and bank robbers, as if there were no other paragons of evil and injustice operating within our system.
A mugger snatches a purse from a timid stroller, and maybe obtains $50 in cash, as well as documents (drivers lincense, credit cards, etc.) that would allow him to go on a modest spending spree. What about the devastation wrought by rougue financiers, who come up with exotic financial instruments (credit default swaps, for example), and systematically hallow out the economy and create lasting crisis such as the one that has affected Western countries these past few years? And we don't even have to add the qualifier of "rogue"; increasingly this is business as usual, and we have no regulatory agencies able to restrain or control them, and instead we have a political party that wishes to destroy any last vestiges of regulation, as well as political leaders who are in thrall to corporate interests. We have a judiciary who, in the infamous "Citizens United" decision, grants corporations with protections by investing them with a sense of "collective personhood", one that is bound to hallow out the economy and contribute to the steady erosion of public (political, economic, etc.) independence. Are there superheroes who can cope with those threats?
To his credit, in his presentation of superbeings who are thoroughly corrupt, and who are controlled by corporations, we have a book that touches on a few of these issues. However, we also are dealing with dark fantasies of societies that are coming apart, and of a unit ("the boys") who represent one of the few restraining elements.
The graphic novels (these are comics, after all) are profane in the way they attack the mythos of the pristine, uncompromised, virtuous super hero. We have the "Seven", and the leader of this group, "Homelander", looks like a blonde superhero who harks back to a young John Wayne. He is the embodiment of cultural fantasies that have held up the nordic superman as an ideal, and yes, I am suggesting that he is an American version of the German ubermensch.
I am looking forward to continuing to read this series. The corporation (Vought-American) seems to operate as we would fear any corporation is capable of operating, with a degree of impunity and self-interest that has immense scope for action, given the immense economic resources that a corporation, especially a defense corporation, is able to command. We may not have superheroes in our modern world, but we do have a faulty, corrupt, desintigrating institutional framework that is melded into the narratives of this story.
And, there have been so many other books, CDs, movies and other items that I have been reading, listening to, viewing and coming into contact with that they are difficult to mention in one blog entry.
More to come later. I need to take some Sudafed for my cold.
