Our culture is saturated with superhero stories, but as those stories turn towards action adventure narratives it's up to a detective story and an epic vampire horror serial to ask "just what is a hero?"
I can sort of understand the turn away from heroism as a subject in itself.
It's sort of a boring topic--I wrote one big essay collection on (super) heroism, for example, and then tried to do more and realized I was bored to tears of
writing about superheroes, and scrapped it. And now I'm facing down the
prospect of introducing this article and going, "oh god, what the hell do I
mean by 'heroism' anyway?"
I guess it's at heart a question of what one, as an individual, can do to be a
good, probably exceptionally good, person. This takes as given a sense of
goodness through individual actions, rather than the realm of "join your local
revolutionary communist party or at least try to get your workplace
unionized". If you've come here looking for a narrative about the heroism of
abandoning individual action for collective organizing, sorry, you want HIS
310 Andor And The Russian Revolution, in the next lecture hall over. No, we're
gonna take that premise of individual goodness as given, if only to
deconstruct it a bit later.
What's wild to me is how much super*hero* media foregrounds the super part,
relegating heroism to an assumed position within a narrative framework that
comes with a flashy costume and enables wild adventures. For the stories that
do take up the question more directly, it seems profoundly metatextual, a
question not of "is this the best way to be a good person in the world?" but
"can I, Starlord, convincingly position myself within the narrative as a
heroic lead?"
This is the particular focus of the weirder superheroes right now, characters
like those in Doom Patrol or Umbrella Academy. Fitting for their postmodern
origins, these characters face two core struggles: first, whether society and
the audience can accept misfits as heroes, and second, whether they can get
over their interpersonal drama and stunted psychologies long enough to save
the world. Fighting for "heroism" as metaphor for social acceptance and
personal growth is a reasonable narrative framework, I suppose... though one
that's hampered in these shows by--I am so so sorry, gays--frustratingly flat
character writing, a tendency to introduce moments of catharsis that are
quickly reversed to accommodate interpersonal drama and the ongoing need to
leave the central conflict unresolved, and a reliance on people shouting
"FUCK!" as an all purpose punchline. Look I said I was sorry, gays, I'm not
happy to say this either! The show in this genre
I was *most* invested in, The Nevers, jettisoned the dead weight dragging the writing down (Joss Whedon) then
immediately went on hiatus for two years and got cancelled with its episodes
dumped on *Tubi*. The world is full of tragedy!
If it makes you feel any better, at least we can give these shows points for
effort and an occasional glowingly brilliant idea, which is more than I can
say for most superhero media right now. The phrase "phoning it in" comes to
mind. I honestly could not tell you what Love and Thunder is going for beyond
"getting Taika Waititi more money for Our Flag Means Death". Certainly I don't
think these stories are particularly interested anymore in broad questions of
what "heroic" behavior might be, unless they want us to apply seriously a
conflict as abstruse as "should you wipe the memories of all your friends and
loved ones so they don't know you almost collapsed the multiverse", or
whatever the plot of that spiderman film was. I mean on the whole it's pretty
hard to take seriously any moral message you could derive from a film that
quite literally was "what if we did
Enter the Spiderverse
but everyone was a white guy", a morally repulsive exercise.
The last bastion of heroism-as-subject winds up being either the
quasi-arthouse DC flicks (The Batman, Joker)... or something that comes
completely out of left field. Maybe it makes some sense that questions of
heroism, finding themselves submerged within the genre that has "hero" right
in the name, would ooze its way out of culture through other genres and shows.
Shows like the mystery series Poker Face, for example.
Poker Face is certainly structured, shot, and written much more like Columbo
than like a contemporary superhero show. Every week we see a new murder in a
new locale in the first half of the episode, and then in the second half
reluctant hero Charlie Cale wanders into the story and eventually finds some
justice for the victim. We know whodunnit; the show is instead an episodic
*howcatchem,* a subgenre with its own history and heroes distinct from
superhero stories. But it seems notable that its central hero does have her
own superpower. Sort of. See, Charlie has an uncanny knack of knowing when
someone is bullshitting her.
If Charlie's superpower, such as it is, were played up just a little bit more,
a la Sherlock, it'd be annoying as hell to watch episode after episode.
Luckily, her super- or mildly-powered capacity to instantly and accurately
tell when someone is telling a lie mostly involves, for the viewer, her
occasionally saying the word "bullshit" when she didn't mean to, or her brow
furrowing and her smile slipping a bit out of place. It really only works
because Natasha Lyonne can so perfectly capture, through expression and body
language alone, the pivotal moment in a conversation with a stranger where you
realize, "ah jeeze buddy you're a real piece of work--wait did I just say that
out loud?"
The great thing about Poker Face, from a hero narrative kinda perspective, is
how little time it spends fucking around. It's episodic, structured, each
episode has its own little self contained setup and resolution, which means
that every episode sort of has to get to the point and start making use of
Charlie's powers.
You know Doc Future's Surf Dracula tweet? "back in the day if u did a tv show called surf dracula you'd see that fool
surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st
season gotta be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you
finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale". We can see see Charlie
Cale surfing in a new adventure every week.
However, to stretch the metaphor further, Surf Dracula can surf each week...
but to what end? While the show has an episodic structure, it also has a sense
of seasonal progression that grapples with this question. Charlie starts and
ends the season in pretty much the same place--deliberately, comically so in
fact. Instead of Ron Perlman hunting her down across the US, necessitating her
episodic wandering, she's got... Rhea Perlman (no relation, very funny Rian ha
ha) hunting her down across the US, necessitating her episodic wandering. What
changes is her self perceived agency. She's presented with the option to go on
the run and continue, as her sister puts it in the finale, "the Charlie Cale
show", or go to work for the mob, and she chooses to keep getting herself
reeled into situations.
Let's linger on that conversation with her sister Em for a bit, actually, as
it sort of makes up the crux of my sense of Charlie as a hero. It's a weird
conversation, coming right at the end of the season and acting as something of
a centerpiece of the final episode. Charlie is on the run from a frameup, and
goes to her sister for a way out of Atlantic City. Her sister gives her a
dramatic dressing down, blaming her for... something to do with their father,
calling her ruinous, and suggesting that she chooses to get herself in these
kinds of traumatic situations. The upshot is that Charlie isn't welcome in
Em's life.
I think there's a sense in which the show is presenting Charlie's sister as
basically correct that Charlie chooses the somewhat madcap life she leads. I
also think the show ultimately views that choice as heroic.
Now, I'm gonna be a bitch here in a way that I don't think the show
necessarily intends--this is my politics not necessarily the show's. I think,
all things considered, the show treats Em as a somewhat sympathetic character
and there's something very interesting in how she really does seem like she's
from a completely different series which Charlie's sort of collided into.
But I turned to Sarah after that sequence and I said "I fucking hate
suburbanites. They're all scum."
Cause I think that sorta fundamentally what Charlie does, all this getting
into situations that she does, is what is known as "being a good person". And
it turns out that "being a good person" means being maybe a little bit ruinous
from time to time because "being a good person" is hard and often bites you in
the fucking ass and gets you tangled with other kinda ruinous people.
I think that there is a fundamental sort of middle class suburbanite ethos
that getting into situations is a prime sin far beyond anything else, the
ultimate crime of being disruptive. Like, you don't get involved in
Situations, because that's what the police are for, and the notion of someone
like Charlie who gets in Situations but is resolutely Not A Cop is just *such*
a major faux pas. Call it... nextdoor mindset, or true crime mindset: a kind
of alienated busybodydom, an atomized paranoia where you're simultaneously up
in everyone's business, but not particularly interested in looking past
surfaces. It can be found everywhere but feels particularly at one with the
atomized psychogeography of the suburbs, with their untrained barking dogs,
sterile lawns, and multi car families necessitated by a lack of transit
infrastructure. Yeah they're doing just fine.
The structure of the show, contra nextdoor posting and true crime podcasts,
invites sitting with a whole variety of weirdos and figuring out hey, what's
the deal with these guys?
The conversation with her FBI contact Agent Clark, "uber for stoolies" as she
puts it, is interesting in the context of the show's wider themes. He's very
blunt about the fact that despite being a fed, he can't protect her--he has to
use a burner phone to talk to her, presumably because he doesn't trust his own
organization. But also, due to their chance meeting, he was able to nab an
incidental villain from the first episode, a character whose secrets her
friend was killed over. In Charlie's words: "She did the right thing when she
saw something awful, and she actually did something about it, and you killed
her for it." A chance meeting with Clark in an otherwise unconnected episode
set off the chain of events that lead him to both resolving that dangling
thread in the first episode, and get her out of immediate danger in the last
one. None of that would have happened without Charlie's own willingness to do
the right thing when she sees something awful, but also her willingness to try
to understand and suss out the actual truth of situations, not just their
appearances.
So you have a series of individual episodes that are self contained moments of
surf draculosity, that come together in a pleasing whole as Charlie's actions
come together to get her out of a scrape. In this sense the show actually has
the exact same structure as anime classic masterpiece Golden Boy, another
celebration of
absolute freaks. It's a good structure, and it's weird how little serialized superhero shows
seem to have hit on it as a formal solution to the genre.
What I suppose it does lack is a certain amount of badass avenging beatdowns.
Charlie might be a great detective but she's not the World's Greatest
Detective--who for a long time now has mostly "detected" some gang members or
goons on which to inflict lasting head trauma. There's a whole power fantasy
model of heroism that seems to amount to being a bit better than whoever
you're punching. The token agonizing over whether a character "is a hero" can
be resolved by the presence of someone who's dropping a busload of children in
the river. As Sarah put it to me when I described this article to her, heroism
seems to be having the opportunity to utilize the skills you already have to
accomplish an outcome you already wanted to achieve.
The central deal with the devil in the recent serialized Interview with the
Vampire adaptation between narrating character Louis de Pointe du Lac and the
seductive and amoral Lestat de Lioncourt is a deal of this self serving
nature. The series is fairly open about this, in fact--Louis describes to his
modern day interviewer, newsman Daniel Molloy, how trapped he felt in his home
of New Orleans at the turn of the century, and the seductive power Lestat
offered. The results are bloody. As Molloy sardonically summarizes, "Take a
black man in America, make him a vampire, fuck with that vampire, and see what
comes of it."
Oh, right, I should specify that Louis in this adaptation is a creole man. It
probably says something that I nearly forgot to mention that, and while I was
writing about forgetting to mention it I realized I also forgot to mention
that Lestat and Louis are full on screen canonical gay lovers, no subtext
about it. The racebending is surely to help solve the uncomfortable racial
politics of the original, in which Louis is a white plantation owner. But it,
and the explicit queerness, also feels shockingly natural, so natural that
it's overtaken the film (haven't read the books, sorry Anne) in my mind as the
image of the story.
Its successful sell of the change is deeply tangled with the nature of
Lestat's gift. What Lestat offers Louis is precisely the power fantasy of the
contemporary superhero. It's not just strength and agility but the ability to
slow time, control minds, effortlessly impose your will upon a human. Why, you
can even fly! Well, Lestat can. "like Superman?" Molloy asks incredulously.
"Not like Superman," Louis responds contemptuously. "Superman is a fictional
character." Maybe so, but the comparison--to Superman and to himself, a
vampire who *lacks* the "cloud gift"--seems to be a point of some sensitivity.
The show can make reference to Superman in this way because superheroes are
part of the cultural cloud we're all floating in. No sense in denying it.
Oh Louis, Louis. Every time he tries to play the superhero it all goes
dreadfully wrong. Not that he doesn't look great while doing it, of course. If
Louis stands and allows the white alderman persecuting him to shoot him with a
pistol a few times, before calmly inviting him to reload, well, that's a
familiar scene isn't it? Goons love to use guns on superheroes impervious to
bullets, and we love to watch them. When he leaves the man's mutilated corpse
hanging on the gates strung up over a "WHITES ONLY" sign, it feels well
deserved, particularly after several episodes of witnessing how Louis, despite
being the successful owner of a night club and brothel frequented by the best
of the city, is treated with contempt by his own patrons for his race and the
open secret of his homosexuality.
But this act of individual terrorism doesn't serve as any propaganda, but
rather a pretext for a retaliatory race riot that reduces Louis's prosperous
business and wider community to smoking rubble. Louis attempts to justify
himself, to mockery from Lestat: "That garish display of his body like some
public art piece, was for your people?" Horrified by his actions having
consequences, Louis then saves a young girl from the resulting
conflagration... and when she nearly succumbs to her injuries he implores
Lestat to turn her into a vampire, their young ward, sentenced to eternal
prepubescent stasis. She has an even more deformed morality, her childish lack
of forethought paired with endless hunger and the power to bend the world to
her whim.
What stands out to me here is not that there's negative consequences for
Louis's actions or that he agonizes over them--after Miracleman that's just
the status quo of the contemporary superhero. Everyone's got to go through the
underworld in the hackneyed heroes journey of Hollywood. And like I said,
heroism often winds up defined by simply the presence of someone (the racists
and homophobes in Louisiana high society, or Lestat himself) capable of
providing justification for what the hero already wanted to do.
No, what makes this stand out to me is the sense in the show that Louis is
fundamentally misguided in his attempt to play the hero. He feels guilty for
taking Lestat's gift, which is ultimately a gift of personal gratification and
empowerment, a way out of the life he finds restrictive. It's an
understandable desire but one that clashes with Louis's sense of
responsibility to his community and morality (in part because he hates the
idea of eating human beings). So he tries to turn his selfish motivations and
actions into something more personally heroic--not unlike how he reframes his
brothel owner business as a kind of heroic entrepreneurship for his family and
community, another instance of doing the work that needs to be done, that
others will not.
As a hero, we might say that Louis is precisely emblematic of the "individual terror" that "belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness,
reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards
a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his
mission". A great avenger indeed...
It's interesting that this show, with its deep skepticism of individual
heroism, stands diametrically opposed to the conclusions of Poker Face. Maybe
that will change in the future--unfortunately, and absurdly, Interview only
has *seven episodes* in its first season, which makes for a tantalizing taste
but not really, like, a *real* season of television you know? This short
season thing is getting a bit silly. Anyway, so far the serialized
storytelling lends itself to a sense of deconstructive saga, a delving deep
into the sordid history of the central character and his ongoing attempts to
justify his existence to himself and to his interviewer. Maybe it's fitting
that Poker Face has a more optimistic perspective on heroism. Charlie may be
apart from any fixed community, but the episodic structure and her
characterization lends itself to small, contained stories defined by finding
personal connection. Oh, and of course there's the fact that Interview is a
horror series about gay vampires... though, let's be fair again and note that
a weekly murder mystery series could have a *much* more reactionary view of
humans than Poker Face or Charlie do!
I'm not sure the contradictory positions of these narratives need to be
reconciled per se or reach some final state of synthesis. Rather they're
facets of an ongoing questioning of what it is to be, essentially, a good or
even heroic person.
And for all the pretentions of modern superhero media toward grandeur and
significance, it feels like these visitors from two very different other
genres do a much better job interrogating what heroism or villainy are,
expressed through what are ultimately, superpowers aside, just more imperfect
humans.
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