Broken Frontier

For the next few weeks, Library of Babble will explore the myths behind the superheroes.  People in all times and cultures have built myths to explain the essence of being human, making mythmaking a quintessentially human trait.  Myths explain the origins of a people, the world, and the nature of good and evil.  Myths attempt to give reason to what may appear to be a fickle existence.

This week I'll examine how the stories of superheroes can give us perspective on the human condition.  What does it mean to be human?  Are we created by a knowing and caring God, or are we fleeting effects of a complex web of natural causes?  Are we the very image of God, or are we temporarily animated dirt?  Are we spiritual beings in physical form, or are our sacred beliefs a function of brain waves, extinguished at death?  Are we determined by our past?  Do we have a future?  Are we all alone?  What is our responsibility to each other?  Is this all there is?

We speculate on these questions when we tell stories.  Most of our superheroes live within our time and speak to us as contemporaries.  They struggle with events that are familiar to us.  This is the "historical human" aspect of their story.  Many also struggle with the timeless issues of being human: anger, jealousy, forgiveness, loyalty, etc.  These are conflicts that thrive at the very heart of the human experience. 

Consider a cheerless and despairing society, one in which commercial pursuits have overwhelmed more human concerns of love, caring, and sacrifice.  Fear, suspicion and paranoia feed a dark political agenda that involves prisoner torture, domestic wiretapping, suspension of constitutional guarantees, and official denunciations of common humanitarian conventions such as those written in Geneva.  In a word, consider contemporary America, a nation bitterly divided against itself as a plutocracy makes a bid for permanent control over American democratic institutions.  This is the world with which every contemporary American must negotiate, however unbalanced the distribution of power, and however ill-equipped we are to press our own case.  Most of us feel utterly powerless to stop the lies and injustices that we see unfolding daily, and most of us feel entirely alienated by the bitter acrimony that passes for public discourse.

In a word, most of us are Clark Kent.  We are good and kind, but we are powerless.  We work day jobs in which we have almost no autonomy, our decision-making power seems all but gone in our political lives, and we feel helpless to confront war, rising prices, ballooning health care costs, spectacular executive bonuses, and the grinding tedium of our daily lives.  We dwell in hope because hope is our only refuge, since the American Empire gives us so little joy in our existence.  And part of what we hope is that our secret identity, that splendid part of us that remains free at the boundaries of our impotence, will prevail over this adversity.  Our carefully guarded secret selves will ultimately deliver us into an exceptional existence, one that demonstrates that being human really is something very special, that being alive is justified.

We cling to our secret selves because they are immune to the demands of submission made by our government and our employers.  The superhero's secret identity is an expression in American mythmaking of one of our most profound theses about what it means to be human.  To be human is to be free, free from tyranny, regulation, despair, and submission.  And being human also means reaching for ultimate freedom, from such apparent limitations as gravity, and even death.  The secret identity is one of the most profound expressions of the human desire to find a meaning to existence beyond the everyday routine of life in modern America.

This is the key to understanding just why Marvel's summer blockbuster, Civil War, is so gripping.  At the heart of the plot of Civil War is a government attack on secret identities.  In other words, the plot involves an attack on one of the most profound and essential aspects of the superhero myth. 

The secret identity of the superhero is connected to our own hopes for freedom and autonomy.  It is a private space to be safeguarded from suspicious and paranoid regulatory agencies.  In Civil War the government wants to register all superheroes, to make them into drones of the bureaucratic machine subject to the pervasive authority of the government.  Although a superhero is super powerful, the government wants to take away the superhero's decision-making ability, forging that superpower into a tool of government.  The registration act threatens one of our main hopes, and, we suspect, threatens to turn our heroes into weapons to be used against us.

The myth of the superhero with a secret identity can be heard as the yearning of the ordinary human struggling to believe that there is more to existence than a daily grind in the service of the money-making machine of corporate America.  In a genuinely terrifying world of war and environmental degradation, we cherish the private pleasures of family, church, school, and hobbies safe from the invasive oversight of government agencies.  To posit a government attack on our last bastion of freedom is nothing short of brilliant.  Civil War might be the most exciting, most insightful, most piercing story launched by Marvel in many a moon.  Will you read it to discover your own outlet for resistance?  I know I will.

Next week: the myth of the superhero and morality.