Our superheroes, ourselves

Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer? To put it another way, has there ever been a bigger sucker? Year after year, he stands in line and hands over his money to receive, year after year, the same treatment: i.e., Hollywood shivering in icy gratification as it pisses on him from a great height. It's become one of nature's biorhythms, like the return of the swallows to Capistrano: The dog days come around, the asphalt softens in the heat, and the megaplexes begin to bloat and boom with big-budget idiocy.

And idiocy, being always the sequel to some other idiocy, is never original. You've seen it all before! National Treasure 14: Hell's Gate ... The Matrix Deionized ... Son of Son of Fool's Gold ... No Way Can You Die This Fucking Hard. The product is poor, the contempt is palpable. If you bought it once, goes the thinking, you'll buy it again. In fact you'll never stop buying it -- why should you?

This summer, however, things are a little different. True, we're getting the usual rash of run-ons and sequelae -- Hellboy II, a second attempt at the Hulk, our seventh installment of Batman -- but when you add Iron Man and Hancock to the roster, a more interesting picture begins to emerge. There's a certain thematic density to these nearly simultaneous releases. We seem -- preoccupied. Indeed, we may be said to be obsessed. A sensitive interplanetary visitor, alighting at Muvico Baywalk 20 and watching a few of these movies back to back, might conclude that we are in the middle of a national nervous breakdown.

The lean, green schizophrenia machine

Just take a look at the protagonists: Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a repentant billionaire arms dealer; Hellboy is a demon outgrowing his infernal beginnings; Bruce Banner is a cool-headed scientist incorporating a maddened green monster (that would be the Hulk); Hancock is a celestial being descending gnostically through bum-like levels of mortality and despair; and Batman -- Batman broods on the turrets of Gotham, ears pricked, phobias squashed, dispensing terror to the bad guys. Common to all these movies is a CGI-blowout of an ending, in which the hero faces down his fear, his temptation, his vengefulness, his will-to-power, his not-self. Good Hulk battles Bad Hulk; Nice Iron Man battles Nasty Iron Man; red-and-blue Spiderman battles all-black Spiderman; Hellboy, who has been assiduously sanding down the stumps of his demon horns (see the hell sparks fly!), sprouts a whole new pair -- and on and on.

Movies, of course, are just movies. These projects have been in the works for years -- chugging along Hollywood's trillion-dollar poop-chute, now stalled or unfinanced, now flush and moving again. And cinematic trends are not clinical symptoms. But the Zeitgeist works by coincidence, and the fact is that all of them, all these noisy dramas of superheroic identity crisis, have popped out now -- at a moment of intense national self-interrogation. Are we liberators or torturers? Decent men or sadists? Are we chained to our fears or ready to embrace "change"?

Congressional committees and op-ed pages are dinning these questions into our ears. "Could the president order a suspect buried alive?" inquired Representative John Conyers on June 26, of Justice Department torture groupie John Yoo -- and the answer was not "Are you out of your mind?" but an ass-covering, "Uh, Mr. Chairman, I don't think I've ever given advice that the president could order someone buried alive. It's enough to turn you into Allen Ginsberg, apostrophizing the continent: America, you complicated bitch! Your Liberty torch is the flare of a pyromaniac! America, you big clanking bastard with your double-chambered heart, do you know who you are?!

Marvel knarvel

The theme of the troubled Übermensch, embarrassed or threatened by his own power, is no novelty. Apart from Hancock, all the aforementioned superheroes have their origins in the comic books of the past century, and even the youngest of them -- Mike Mignola's Hellboy, who first appeared in 1993 -- is firmly in the tradition: a grumpy, lopsided, blue-collar epigrammatist, spiritual brother to Wolverine and the Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm. Divided selves, divided sensibilities: Looking back, we can see that the primordial fission occurred in 1941, when Stanley Milton Lieber, teenage staffer at New York's Timely Publications, sawed his first name in half and became Stan Lee. It would be another 20 years before the genesis of Marvel Comics, but with the naming of his freewheeling, rapid-fire editorial alter ego -- a vector for the genius of artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko -- Lee opened the portal through which the Marvel universe would eventually come swarming.

"Marvel was a new birth," wrote Geoffrey O'Brien, who gorged on the comics as a '60s teenager, in his 1988 memoir Dream Time.

In Stan Lee's model of a fluxing and multileveled universe, the nearest event -- Peter Parker boarding the cross-town bus -- cohered with the most distant: the Watcher, say, surveying the apocalyptic upheavals in which he could take no part. ... Everything impinged on everything else: To understand where the Avengers or the Inhumans or the Silver Surfer fit into the overall pattern was to get a visceral inkling of the cosmic plan.

As Marvel gets translated into Hollywood, the cosmic plan appears to be: Flog the brand into the ground! The fluxing and multileveled universe, meanwhile, is represented by franchise convergence (the appearance of Tony Stark, for example, at the end of The Incredible Hulk) and a sequence of creaky cameos from Lee himself, now 85 years old. The Marvel stamp is no guarantee of quality, as you will be well aware if you sat through the new Hulk. But the closer the movies get to Lee's original writing style -- salty, aphoristic, playfully dissociated, a sort of bargain-basement Vonnegut -- the better they seem to be. Jon Favreau's Iron Man does it just right: As Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr. flutters and swells with all the energy that has apparently been evacuated from Ed Norton's drooping, colorless Bruce Banner.

Blow thyself

Religion sloshed liquidly and somewhat unstably around the Marvel universe, whose core was occupied by a radiant God-being kind-of-thing, or at least an infinite self-organizing principle. O'Brien again: "The implied space in which all past and future episodes were linked was analogous to a higher consciousness. At times, as in the Galactus episode of the Fantastic Four, this consciousness displayed itself openly, with the austere eloquence befitting religious art." But Galactus, eater of worlds, and his herald, the Silver Surfer, were Jack Kirby's babies -- Kirby with his taste for the sublime and the tremor of awe in his line. Lee was different: his instinct was for bathos, for the contrast -- essentially comedic -- between enormous power and the nerds and nobodies to whom it has been arbitrarily awarded. "I never believed in religion," he told the authors of Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book (Chicago Review Press). "To me, faith is the opposite of intelligence, because faith means believing something blindly. I don't know why God, if there is a God, gave us these brains if we're going to believe things blindly."

The key, then, was self-knowledge, self-understanding -- to reconcile one's capacities with one's circumstances. The Hulk's great dilemma is the impossibility of such a reconciliation. Peter Parker and Spider-Man share a mind, as do -- however contentiously -- puny med student Donald Blake and the hammer-wielding Thor. Bruce Banner and the Hulk do not. Each experiences the other as a kind of nightmare. You're either immensely green and furious or pale and small-chinned and Ed Norton--ish.

So which is it, buddy? Which is you? In Ang Lee's beautiful but entirely humorless Hulk (2003), Bruce Banner's dad (Nick Nolte) raspily assures him that the Hulk is his true nature, that mega-gamma-greenness is his birthright and that "Bruce Banner" is merely "a flimsy husk of consciousness ready to be torn off at a moment's notice!" Yowsa! Hellboy, similarly, has a ready-to-go demonic identity: Anung un Rama, he of the curling horns. "Your true name is inscribed around the locks that hold you!" whispers nasty Rasputin in Hellboy. All very potent and Marvel-esque (even though it's published by Dark Horse Comics) -- the father seducing the son back to his apocalyptic origins.

The incredible shrinking woman

"I'm a DC Comics person," says Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg, Ph.D., during an interview in a coffee shop near Harvard University. "By temperament, I suppose. Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman -- they have a lot more moral clarity for me, a more serious code to which to aspire. Marvel is kind of the arena of the neurotic superhero, beginning with Spider-Man, who, of course, is a New Yorker. A neurotic and very introspective New Yorker! Now Batman is thoughtful, too, but he doesn't think about himself. He broods, but what he's doing is figuring out what action to take. So it looks like rumination, obsessive thoughts, but it's actually problem-solving. Whereas Marvel characters seem to go around and around."

Rosenberg is a practicing clinical psychologist who specializes in eating disorders, depression and anxiety. She is also the editor of The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration (Benbella), a collection of essays with such titles as "Prejudice Lessons from the Xavier Institute" and "Coming to Terms with Bizarro." She is small, quick, gray-eyed, and she really, really digs Batman. "I'm very much looking forward to The Dark Knight. I thought Batman Begins was so true, psychologically. Batman's great struggle is between revenge and justice -- he's really the go-to guy for that issue. And, of course, that's something we're struggling with as a country right now."

I express to Rosenberg my concern that, in so many of these superhero flicks, the bad self is rejected -- electrified or exploded or otherwise done away with. Shouldn't it be embraced, tamed? "Well, there is that side of American culture -- we're so big and pleasure-seeking, and there's that sense that, if there's someone you don't like, you can just cut that person or that part of yourself off and just reinvent yourself." But isn't there some terrible psychological consequence to that? To the amputation of one's lower self? "Yes and no," says Rosenberg. "There are parts of ourselves that aren't as morally or ethically righteous as we would like, and we may succumb to those aspects of our nature, but we can also rise above them. The question is, when you have a relapse, how quick can you recover? What interests me is the villains who keep returning. In the Batman stories, it's the Joker. For Superman, it's Lex Luthor. These figures, these problems, recur. They don't go away, which to me is very real. They come back, and you have to figure out how to deal with them. It's about figuring out how to deal with yourself, and them, over and over again."

And what, finally, of the argument that comic books and comic-book heroes and movies about comic-book heroes, are stoopid? That we are being infantilized by this trash? Rosenberg takes her time. "The concept of someone who just wants to have fun and be like everybody else but at the same time is compelled to do the right thing -- I think that's a lesson that kids can't see too often, and there isn't enough of it anywhere else. Our culture is filled with celebrated figures who do morally reprehensible things, and kids are getting mixed messages about that all the time. So to have these models is very useful, I think."

Up, up and Obama!

It's not easy creating a superhero -- and if you think it is, try it. Me, I pondered for two days, scratched in note pads and pulled my beard, and the best I could come up with was Tiny Cat Boy: a bovine pro football player who in moments of moral jeopardy becomes as simpering and ineffectual as a kitten. Hardly a figure, you'll agree, to illuminate the national psyche. No, the men who invented the superheroes were tapped in, in the way that only junk artists can be -- this junk was Jungian. It was Jung, Stan Lee, Bob Kane: poets and forgers of myth. Their legacy surrounds us: Can there have been a more superheroic occasion, a scene more cast in Marvelline bombast, than the appearance of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton together onstage in Unity, New Hampshire? Their 16-month slugfest concluded, the two faces, the two aspects, of the Democratic Party, appeared to achieve a state of perilous integration -- Obama bending to murmur sweet political nothings in her ear, Clinton responding with that deep, hacking and (to me) rather attractive chuckle. He's a long cool drink of water; she is compact and rumpy, pugilistic, with a smile like a cattle prod. In combination, surely they are unstoppable! We'll see, we'll see -- the opposing team is led by a broken-down Captain America.

For those of us not running for office or dosed with cosmic rays, the question boils down to this: how to transcend our crude selves? Our Anung un Ramas, our inner John Yoos? The twin discs of Hellboy's sawn-off horns, to which he continually attends with brimstone-filing tools, offer us one excellent and salutary metaphor: practice spiritual hygiene! Another is offered by 2005's Batman Begins, when the Dark Knight dons his cape of special "memory cloth" -- a flexible material with a unique molecular structure, such that an electric current shot through it from microcircuits in the right batglove causes it to become rigid, to form, with a splendid snap of wind, the night-embracing batwings. Get the point? The magic cloth remembers its true design. Make a fist, flick the switch, and galvanize those semi-angelic pinions. Fly, O True Believer!

James Parker is a staff writer for The Boston Phoenix. For more on The Dark Knight, read Creative Loafing film critic Lance Goldenberg's essay.