“Being a Hero”: The Lost American Dream?

The Scent of “America”

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Dmojo’s periodic take on the cultural themes, mood and psyche of “America” as seen through Hollywood movies and sci-fi/horror tv serials.

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Superheroes are worshipped around the world in the temples of cinema and at the alters of our flat screen tvs. Our digitised comic book gods are created in our own image, viciously infected with our neurotic and paranoid prayers and their foibles are super-sized by superhero powers.

The world adores the comic book “superhero” and its an enduring symbol of true red-blooded America that goes hand in hand with burgers, fries and baseball. If we were to pose the light-hearted question “if America was a superhero, what kind of superhero would it be?” We’d have our answer… a superhero like all of “us”, with the same problems, but worse… perhaps a super-clumsy, socially inept, drunken bum (i.e. “Hancock”) or one desperately in need of a shrink; to work out how life, the world and their parents screwed them up (i.e. “Heroes”, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” and “Supernatural”). Despite the Oprah-style psycho-doublespeak swirling around in their heads, they nevertheless resolutely muddle through to save the world “by the skin of their teeth”. Superhero life is getting really tough as everybody knows something’s gone very wrong but exactly what is illusive and unfathomable; superhero victories over evil are complex half won battles and the war is bent on continuing in the next episode or sequel; buying us all a little time to work it out.

We troop out in droves to worship our revamped heroes; reincarnated to be confused, super-powered versions of “us”. “Redemption” is the word graffiti-ed on our foreheads; everybody “needs” it and Hollywood sells it. The superheroes among us are now recognized by their strenuous, angst-ridden and perplexing role of finding “redemption” for one and all. Hollywood gives us moral fibre “fixer-uppers” reassuring us that everything always works out in the end… but only just and the “happy” endings aren’t completely happy; poor Batman got his girlfriend killed and the good guy went ugly and bitter, Spidey and Hancock never get the girl and Ironman got rich on manufacturing and supplying weapons to kill loads of people with. In the make-believe world of Hollywood, where everything is possible for digital age couch potatoes, our collective shortcomings get photoshopped.

Modern day Superheroes are really meant for the army of children that grew up to be disappointed, disillusioned adults and Hollywood does a supreme job of making them feel better and even “good” about their mediocre, mundane and suburban lives, as “even Superheroes can’t have it all, even they can’t get it right”. It makes the disappointed and disillusioned feel “special” about themselves; “reproduction” and “rearing young” become a sublime destiny, built on the foundation of “ultimate sacrifice” (for the children) of a life-sucking, mind-numbing job and everyone gets to be super-daddys and mommys… but our superheroes don’t do that; they don’t settle down and play happy families as they’ve got better things to do, like saving the world.

Perhaps that’s why superheroes are ultimately freaks and deep down we hate to love them, but can’t help ourselves. Secretly, we all like the “grim-world” realism/cynicism creeping in and inhabiting the magical-world of the fantastical; the last thing we would want is that these freaks become in any way a criticism of the way we live our lives. We may get reminded of the “incidental” and undesirable side-effects of the not-so-cute-anymore teenage kids, faded youth and endless preparation for the planned descend into death aka the scheduled holiday called “retirement”… OMG, we may even think there’s something more to life; parents don’t drop dead when you leave home and reproduction/rearing young isn’t extraordinary; animals are pretty good at it too. We can’t let the superhero freaks possibly “have it all” as we’d question our own raison d’etre.

Superheroes are probably the tip of an ice-berg of profound regret and hidden unhappiness; we never let ourselves entertain the thought we could “have it all” so we never did anything about it… guaranteeing we’d never “have it all”. However, “Superheroes” are only a tiny figment of a collective imagination upon which we’ve inflicted our mental limitations; just incidental collateral damage soothed away by the Hollywood “feel good factor”. So, what is the true price that’s paid for curtailed imaginations, impoverished hopes and stunted dreams? Perhaps, what we forget is that all of us, individually and combined, are still and will remain the architects of the future and thus, we are all superheroes and gods; what more extraordinary thing could we have in our hands but our own destiny and lives to sculpt? Today’s and tomorrow’s achievers, visionaries and builders need powerful imaginations, aspirations to achieve the unbelievable and the sheer daring to create a better world to live in… but for everything else there’s Hollywood

dmojo

© Dmojo, 2008-200