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Subj: Storytelling Tropes That Need to Go Away: The Monolithic Public Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 at 09:42:05 pm EST (Viewed 456 times) | |||
If you think about it, the way in which superhero comics  or, indeed, many other genres of stories  tend to treat the general public is indicative of the uneasy balance that lies at the heart of the American superhero. After all, the superhero is the modern-day incarnation of the epic hero of myth and legend; he is The Great Man, and almost by definition, he excites the imaginations and sensibilities of those who either actively subscribe to, or might even merely be tempted to buy into, The Great Man Theory of History. But part of what makes him a modern-day superhero, as opposed to being a hero of ancient folklore, is that the modern-day superhero rarely completes the journey arc that Joseph Campbell ascribed to his archetypical predecessors, in no small part because the modern-day superhero CAN'T step up to assume the throne of his own kingdom, because with rare exceptions, there AREN'T any kingdoms left for modern-day superheroes to claim, because the vast majority of them live in democracies, which are ostensibly ruled by The People. This is the tension that exists at the heart of the modern-day superhero, which makes him exciting and problematic all at once. After all, the joy of a character like Superman is that his stories say that people with what we'd consider to be impossible powers (and what many among us might consider to be no less impossible morals) can indeed exist in a world that's so similar to our own. However, once such a character's powers (and morals) reach a certain threshold, the reader winds up having to do mental gymnastics to try and reconcile such a character with a world so similar to our own, because either a) that character, as a result of his powers and morals, would change our world beyond recognition, or b) if such a world remains unchanged, then maybe the powers or morals of such a character aren't as impressive after all. Some superhero comics have tried to reconcile this schism, either through a vastly transformed world, or through deeply flawed superheroes, or even both (see also: Alan Moore's Watchmen), but for the most part, superhero comics simply tend not to address this point of potential cognitive dissonance, and even the ones that attempt "realism" in worlds populated by superheroes merely offer slightly different versions of un-reality in their portrayals than those that have come before. With that in mind, it's little wonder that the general public gets treated so poorly by so many superhero comics. In the early decades of superhero comics, Things Were Different, as they say, but not as much as anyone would like to believe. In those early years, superheroes did things like perform lobotomies on their enemies to "turn them good," and if they couldn't turn their enemies "good," by wiping away their free will or otherwise, they wouldn't think twice about resorting to (admittedly, relatively G-rated versions of) the sorts of tactics that have given places like Guantanamo such deservedly bad names in modern times. And how did the general public respond, in these worlds populated by superheroes? They responded with near-universal approval. Back in the 1960s, Batman and Robin were fully deputized members of the Gotham Police Department, and nobody cared about the fact that an anonymous vigilante was leading an underage boy into gunfights with murderous thugs. Back in the 1950s, Superman was beloved by almost the entire population of the fictional Earth that he inhabited, and even during the height of Cold War paranoia, it never occurred to anybody in this world that he was an alien being who was a walking Weapon of Mass Destruction. There were exceptions to this rule, but they were extremely rare, and you could bet money that, by the end of the story, they'd be revealed as either a) secretly villainous or b) woefully misguided, and inevitably led to see the error of their ways. In short, if it was the Golden or Silver ages, and you hated Superman, you were either in league with Lex Luthor, or you were a bleeding heart dope who would eventually realize what a fool you'd been not to love Superman unconditionally. In the later decades of superhero comics, Things Have Changed, except, again, not nearly as much as people claim. Whereas Superman and Batman had represented the Yin and Yang of superheroes in the Golden and Silver ages, the 1960s and 1970s saw Spider-Man and the X-Men assume those mantles in the Bronze and Dark ages of superhero comics. And yes, these newer superheroes were more prone to personal flaws, ranging from various shades of ineptitude to selfishness, but ultimately, they were still mostly decent people, who were largely concerned with doing the right thing. And how did the general public respond to this new generation of superheroes? If Spider-Man rescued a busload of nuns, J. Jonah Jameson would brand him a "menace" in the pages of The Daily Bugle, and inexplicably, everyone in New York would believe it, including the nuns that Spider-man had rescued. Likewise, no matter how many times Professor X and his X-Men saved humanity from Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, it would be the X-Men themselves who would be branded as "evil mutants." As the decades drew on, and comic writers sought to draw parallels between the mutants in the X-Men and persecuted minorities in real life, this became even more absurd, because for as much as blacks or gays or women have suffered through a "one step forward, two steps back" march of progress, the fact remains that, if (for example) the black civil rights movement had been as unsuccessful as the mutant civil rights movement, the Emancipation Proclamation would have been repealed in real life. Which means, then, that either Professor X is the most inept civil rights leader in human history, or else Magneto was right all along about humanity being nothing but scum. There are fans of the Golden and Silver ages of superhero comics, when Batman flashed big grins as he went Medieval on the asses of his opponents, and there are fans of the Bronze and Dark ages of superhero comics, when Spider-Man spent more time going emo over his love life than he spent on catching crooks, and both camps of fans like to think of themselves as being SO DIFFERENT from each other, but I'll say it again; neither camp is anywhere near as different from the other as they claim, because in both cases, they live in utterly unrealistic worlds populated by The Monolithic Public. The Monolithic Public is hardly unique to superhero comics  indeed, it probably has its fullest expression in the fictional worlds of old-school video games, when all you needed to do to bring down an entire Evil Empire was to kill off The Final Boss  but it stands out even more in the worlds of most superhero comics, which aspire to the pretense of somehow resembling our own world. Yes, it's absurd to think that killing off Emperor Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi would, in and of itself, end the Empire once and for all, but then again, the Star Wars movies are set in such an outer-space fairy-tale-land to begin with that the audience is more inclined to handwave away this discrepancy. By contrast, if you establish a character like Superman or Spider-Man as living in a world of CNN and YouTube and Michael Moore and Jay Leno and congressional oversight committees and watchdog organizations of countless political stripes, then you've rendered The Monolithic Public irreconcilable with such a world. What is The Monolithic Public? It's the group of people that breaks into a wave of thunderous applause for Our Hero's speech, after one guy starts a Slow Clap. It's the general public in any storyline in which any public figure or famous person has sustained popularity and/or approval ratings of 90 percent. For fuck's sake, folks, in a world as petty and bitterly fractious as ours, not even A CURE FOR CANCER would be able to win over the love of 90 percent of the general public. The Monolithic Public, in short, is a way of "acknowledging" the fact that The People ostensibly rule the pseudo-democratic worlds in which such stories are set, while at the same time negating almost all of their identities, individuality, diversity or motivations. The Monolithic Public reduces The People to One Voice, either cheering or booing, so that the writer can pay lip service to the realities of the modern world, while nonetheless enshrining the modern-day superhero as The Great Man upon whose shoulders History rests, far away from the reach of the snickering little bastard people who are so much lesser than Our Hero. Yes, in any story that's centered more on a solo protagonist (Y HALO THAR DOCTOR WHO AND HOUSE), there are necessarily limits to how much you can focus on the general public, but it's still imperative that you, as a writer, create the illusion that even the most Mary Sue-riffic starring character is merely one inhabitant of a vast and rich universe of possibilities. | |||
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