I'm occasionally characterized by others as having very strong opinions on various things in popular culture. Some of this charactization is accurate--if it wasn't accurate, I probably wouldn't write these blogs, after all--but I don't think I hate as many things as people think I do; this being mostly an illusion caused by my devoting more time to talking about what I find negative. Positive things, in my opinion, simply don't need to be discussed as much; they should just be experienced. Overall, my opinion of most popular things is best characterized as ambivalent. The vast majority of cultural things I don't care enough about one way or the other to say or write much. However there is one writer, well-known as the creator of one very popular fictional universe, on whom and which I've said little because my feelings on them were not dispassionate, but rather conflicted. That writer is the late (and during his life, barely recognized) Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and after my most recent encounter with his work, I've decided that now is the time to organize my thoughts and share them.
People reading this likely assumed, when they got to the part about my conflicted feelings, that I was about to say something like "He was a wonderful writer, but a horrible racist, so I feel bad enjoying his great stories." In actuality, my opinions on both aspects of the man and his work are more nuanced.
First, the controversial parts of Lovecraft's mentality run deeper than racism. Racism back then was part of culture, and it was easy for someone to get away with being casually racist--at least among readers of the same race! However, Lovecraft's work reflected a deeper psychological factor, which he self-identified as "Fear of the Unkown". It's this fear that his work ran on, and would have still run on if prohibited from discussing race, but even absent that most controversial manifestation, I'm not convinced many people actually share this phobia--particularly to as great an extent. So this calls into question whether Lovecraft's ideas are really as scary as his most passionate promoters allege. Second, the claim that Lovecraft was a wonderful writer is a hard one to quantify by most metrics available. The most likely validation people would give for his writing quality is that his work is still celebrated today, despite its problematic content. However, as argued in my last point, the "problematic content" runs deeper into his writing than just outdated racial opinions and into a controversial opinion of what is actually pleasant or unpleasant; leading to potential creator and audience dissonance.
That is not to say that none of Lovecraft's sentiments have aged well. On the contrary, growing up in an era of rapidly advancing science regarding the nature of the cosmos and prehistory had a big effect on Lovecraft's fiction. His stories often star curious explorers and researchers delving into the unknown, and discovering that humanity and its values are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Many find this revelation maddening, if they even survive the journey. Lovecraft's constant assertions the geocentric (and as a result, human-centric) views that animated much of history were in fact, naive, have since become widespread scientific consensus. At the same time, there is something of a moral component to his stories, albeit subtly. The notion that scientific progress could undermine values and spell disaster for humanity was not a new one even in his day, but while many reactionaries like the Christian Apologetics proposed the retention of values out of a belief that their underlying historical sources were to at least some degree true, Lovecraft offered arguably a more flexible, nuanced argument: Even if you can prove that the underlying historical sources of those values aren't true, perhaps you should hold onto them anyway. A lot of culture, careers, and related things have been built upon them, and even if the collapse of them all is ultimately inevitable, it could behoove you not to do things that hasten that collapse. (Note that for a time, Lovecraft considered himself both an atheist and a conservative; a combination of traits many modern Americans would find odd--though he abandoned the latter attitude toward the end of his life.) This message, much like the haunting cosmic philosophy Lovecraft framed it in, remains tremendously valuable to many people writing many stories (as illustrated by the future statement of Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes, "I'd advise you not to look for answers; you might not like what you find"), though of course there will also be many who hold that scientific progress has helped far more than it has hurt.
Yet if the worrisome philosophy Lovecraft espoused towards delving deeply into things remains pertinent even now, likewise even during his time it must have seemed odd for a man to draw on inherently unpleasant notions to write stories meant to bring readers pleasure. I observed last post that stories get awkward when awkward contradictions underly their narrative; particularly when the show must go on despite the intended message. Such an issue arguably runs deep in Lovecraft's work; the message is that people shouldn't go looking for the truth about the world and beyond, such as defined in his canon, but for anything interesting to happen, they must, with contradictions alternately constraining what can happen and sending mixed messages about what can happen. When putting humans up against overwhelming odds to inspire fear, there's a bit of a balancing act writers have to figure out. If humans can just defeat, or at least escape (sometimes a bit of both) the cosmic horrors, they really aren't too scary. If humans stand no chance against these horrors, then there is no real suspense either, since people will know how it ends, which also lessens the incentive to become invested in a story. In practice, on occasion a hero in Lovecraft's stories will beat the odds and survive a daunting encounter with the cosmos, but more often the inevitability of an unhappy outcome constrains the plot to a character simply finding out about the cosmos, either ending before it's too late or ending just as it becomes too late. Whether the story in the process contained much or any action or intense, quickly escalating scares, seemed less important to Lovecraft than to most other horror writers.
As to the actual prose by which Lovecraft advanced his alien-themed horror stories, it can certainly be said to display his erudition, but how well this lends itself to horror stories is quite up for debate. Lovecraft's penchant for long-winded descriptions, not just of that which was alien but also of any familiar things he found picturesque, adds tremendous artificial length to his stories. This can be particularly galling in the aforementioned stories that deal more with revelation more than resolution, as they then come off as killing time and ending abruptly just as they're getting good; almost as though Lovecraft ran out of time. Worse still, to returning readers whose appetites have been whetted by the promise of fascinating alien entities beyond the threshold of what we regularly perceive, it can be irritating just how many stories spend an unnecessary amount of time bringing a whole new protagonist to that threshold.
All things considered, then, speaking as someone who read a lot of his work back around 2004-2008, I am going to express the possibly controversial opinion that HP Lovecraft was not a particularly good writer; frequently falling prey to his own ego and putting his stories in a bind with a cosmology whose scope made it hard to wield well, but somehow despite all this, he managed to create a few great things that saved his legacy. Every time I attempt to revisit his work, I find much of it tedious, but reaffirm that The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth are great stories. Actually, as I'll go on to explain, there's some evidence that this opinion isn't controversial.
It's no secret that the most famous thing Lovecraft created is Cthulhu, the giant, octopus-faced, bat-winged humanoid monster imprisoned under the ocean but always preparing for his apocalyptic return with the help of his sociopathic cultists. His name has, since the death of Lovecraft, become the name for the mythos in which Lovecraft's stories were set, and even is featured prominently in works that actually have little to nothing to do with him. It should be noted, for example, that The Call of Cthulhu is the only story Lovecraft wrote in which Cthulhu personally appears, though he is referenced in many of Lovecraft's other stories. Why, then, is Cthulhu such an enduring--and at times, even endearing--icon of his work?
I would argue, and I am not alone, that Cthulhu's appeal, rather unique among Lovecraft's entities, owes to being highly and rapidly conceivable upon description. A tremendous advantage The Call of Cthulhu has over many of Lovecraft's stories is that its titular monster is described near to the beginning of its narrative; in the form of a statue. Moreover, he has fewer features than many Lovecraft monsters, which allows readers to visualize him easily based on the description--an especial bonus considering how long it takes Lovecraft to describe details! Too many other Lovecraft stories feature a protagonist moving towards the revelation of an otherworldly entity, inevitably at a pace that at least seems slow given Lovecraft's tendency to over-articulate everything. Then the entity can underwhelm when it finally appears, due to the same over-articulation crawling over such a mess of features that it takes a great attention span to visualize. However, The Call of Cthulhu's namesake is teased early on, and kept constantly on the readers' minds from the start, building suspense up for when he appears live. While the murderous occultists that also feature in the story can be scary on their own, it's the epic creature that holds it all together. Also, the story has multiple action scenes, with police trudging into the woods to confront Cthulhu's cult, a pirate battle, and finally the harrowing encounter with Cthulhu himself. The framing device of the first-person narrator piecing this all together also comprises something of a story arc; while the theme of a character coming to regret his curiosity is common to Lovecraft, here it feels like actual character development.
In sum, The Call of Cthulhu is a great story, but its greatness often feels in-spite, not because, of Lovecraft's infamous tendencies. (Though it does have a lot of racism, but more on that in a moment.) Lovecraft was afraid of alien and incomprehensible things and fond of longwinded prose, thus he conceived many overly-detailed monsters based on both. Yet it's his rare monster who hits close to home by drawing on a few things most humans recognize and not much else, that has been his biggest success. Lovecraft's penchant for longwinded prose is present, but Cthulhu's a classic design that even his longwinded prose can't render dull to many readers. Cthulhu has a long, complicated occult history attached to him, but he can work just fine as a standard, rampaging kaiju, and does get the chance in the climax of the story. There is an arc, with a setup and a resolution. Lovecraft often rebelled against standard expectations of what makes a good story, and when his most-loved story is an anomaly that conforms more closely to said expectations, for whatever reason, it doesn't feel quite right to see it as a mark of true brilliance.
The second most famous thing Lovecraft created, I would argue, is his dark and under-explored version of New England, dubbed "Lovecraft Country" by his successors, and featuring dilapidated, creepy and broadly shunned towns such as Innsmouth and Dunwich. There is an autobiographical component to this setting, as it is where Lovecraft spent most of his life. The other notable place he lived for a time was New York City, whose multi-ethnic population constantly triggered and intensified Lovecraft's xenophobia, ultimately inspiring him to move back to his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. While his unpleasant time in New York City inspired him to write the stories, He and The Horror Of Red Hook, ironically it was the rural New England setting, which he found more comforting, where he set most of his horror stories. It was dark at night, the extensive tree cover made it easy to get lost there, made the few outposts of humanity seem remote from one another, and provided potential cover for places where bad things could happen without outsiders knowing. This, blended with old Puritan worries about evil supernatural forces, made the region a good microcosm for Lovecraft's worries about the whole world, and beyond, where civilized people--which to him meant those of Northern European descent--were outliers against savage peers.
Such underlying xenophobia has aged terribly, yet Lovecraft Country has survived its demise. The aforementioned story, The Call of Cthulhu, was not set primarily in Lovecraft Country. Instead, in more ready reflection of Lovecraft's fears of the foreign and exotic, it visited many more locations, Louisiana, Scandinavia, Australia, and the Oceanic Pole, where Lovecraft set Cthulhu's home of R'lyeh. However, despite the ensuing popularity of Cthulhu himself, he tends to get folded back into Lovecraft Country, or at least gets his name applied to it for publicity's sake. For example, the video game The Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, is in fact based mostly on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, set in and around that haunted town. There is also called a movie called Cthulhu, also based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Cthulhu himself doesn't actually appear in either! We've read why Lovecraft himself saw Innsmouth and similar thinly-populated New England locales as good places to set horror stories, but why has this setting endured so much for modern audiences?
Once again, I would argue that it is in spite of Lovecraft's propensities rather than because of them. Modern popular sentiments do not consider foreign countries necessarily scary, nor cosmopolitan cities with people from those foreign countries; many find these places romantic, instead. What can scare people of these sentiments, then, are essentially the alternatives. If foreign countries and big, (multi-)cultured cities are romantic, then logically more rural, less-traveled, less (multi-)cultured regions of the United States, passed over by progress, commonly (though not exclusively) referred to as redneck, are places to be shunned. Ironically, while Lovecraft was afraid of race-mixing, he was also afraid of inbreeding, which he called out in the Lovecraft Country story, The Dunwich Horror. The association he observed between inbreeding and rural America is one that has lasted to this day, and unlike race mixing, the unhealthiness of inbreeding has been scientifically validated. Lovecraft's observation of these sorts of places being less conventionally educated, overall, also holds true in the modern cultural perception. Thus, for modern audiences with "politically correct" views on race, it is still entirely possible to write an effective story of evil afoot in antiquated, remote places that most Americans have the good sense to avoid.
It is partially for this reason that The Shadow Over Innsmouth remains such a compelling story; easily my favorite of the Lovecraft stories I have read. The other big reason is it possesses narrative qualities akin to the aforementioned The Call of Cthulhu; there is a character arc, with the narrator-protagonist going on a harrowing journey, his attitudes and goals changing as he learns more. Also like The Call of Cthulhu, there is action, although in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the narrator is the one who experiences it. The story is not just about his discovery of the shunned town, but also his adventures within it--and they do have a substantive ending. Lovecraft's xenophobia is manifest in the particular nature of the evil afoot in Innsmouth; a fish-based religion imported from Asia, but the events it sets up, wherein the hostile locals hunt the protagonist through the dark, aging town, can be scary for anyone of any background. Indeed, while they may be practicing a foreign religion, within their own town the Innsmouth folk themselves are effectively the xenophobes, determined to ensure that a visitor from the outside world never leaves alive to tell their secrets. So the story may feel particularly relevant to anyone who has ever been a noticeable minority in a town that dislikes said minority, in a way many other Lovecraft stories obviously would not. Granted, the Innsmouth folk are also scary for another important reason that I won't spoil here. As with Cthulhu, then, Innsmouth, and the surrounding region reminiscent thereof, has an appeal so much more universal than many other Lovecraft creations that it almost feels like an accident.
Some would say this isn't being fair to Lovecraft, and it is only fair to acknowledge that he, like many people, was complex. He considered himself a cultured intellectual, undoubtedly a self-designation shared by many modern readers who deplore his racial views, and as if in preview of that irony, his writing was full of notable contradictions. Lovecraft was a curious researcher who saw a great risk to curious research. The alien was frightening to him but this fright was compelling to him. He was constantly unafraid to write about his dated values that have since died but also constantly writing about being afraid that his dated values would soon die. He often depicted non-European people as scary in his stories, but paradoxically in his brand of horror that also meant depicting them as being more correct about the true nature of Earth and the cosmos. Perhaps these contradictions, born as they are of a mind that considered moral values illusory, help Lovecraft's canon resonate with people whose moral values differ from his.
Nevertheless, I find myself cringing whenever I read modern Lovecraft aficionados denigrating other writers' takes on his creations, with such criticisms as they aren't hopeless enough. (As if there was any objective logic to the idea of entertaining people with thoughts of hopelessness!) For me, the contradictions in Lovecraft's psyche and work are manifest in some stories being much better than others, and while I admit to not having read the vast majority, of the ones I have read I hold only the two I praised here in any major esteem. I may change my opinion upon reading more of his work, and I intend to, but suffice it to say I do not find his work easy to read, so I can't say when.
PS: Some readers will argue that I write a lot like HP Lovecraft; particularly after reading that last sentence. To these people, feel free to suggest a shorter way to convey all of the ideas in this post, which I trust you have read in its entirety!
Friday, June 28, 2019
Friday, June 14, 2019
The Big Problem with Superhero Ethics...and plots
Recently on a forum, I brought up my ire at the many, many superhero stories that preach Kantian ethics despite depicting events that imply that they just don't work. I was asked to clarify what about this contradiction annoys me.
Another day, another politically-oriented post on my supposedly apolitical blog! It seems like only yesterday I was blogging about what the message of The Incredibles was...or was not. Here, as with there, I'm going to blog about something that touches a bit on politics, but I'm not going to express any specific opinion on the related controversy. Rather, I'm going to explain why there's a big contradiction in these stories, explain why I think it's a problem for their expressed purposes, state my theory of why these stories keep doing this, and finally provide a number of alternative ideas. First, though, a video from PBS explaining superhero ethics and a common alternative:
This video uses Batman as an example, but in fact, it applies to most superheroes. They refuse to kill people, even villains, even when killing a villain appears the only way to prevent the killing of innocents, heroes who take a more utilitarian view of morality are set up just to be strawmen declared wrong, and then come the next time the unkilled villain escapes and kills more innocents, the strawman arguably seems proven right. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Expressing a comprehensible opinion on who is actually right is beyond the scope of this blog, but let's address one big elephant in the room: There are a lot of people who operate like the strawmen these stories frequently disparage, and aren't seen as monstrous for it. I won't begrudge anyone for personally having a Kantian policy against killing, but it has been the case throughout history that military and often even police forces operate on the idea that if you don't kill some people, they're going to kill you or some other people you care about, which often means your civilians. That is a consistent part of civil service, and again, many people see these civil servants as heroes. Certainly, there are times when one's own police and the military go too far, but very few Americans would actually accuse their troops of being no better than the Nazis just because the US troops took up arms and were willing to shoot the Nazis dead. American cops slip up at times, but they've shot dead a whole lot less civilians than other civilians have. They try to find other solutions, but they're open to killing criminals if it seems the only way to stop a greater loss from occurring.
Expanding on the above, it is important to recall that cops are also present in many superhero stories. Batman himself deals plenty with Commissioner Gordon. These cops aren't exactly effective on their own, but as usual, they are willing to kill to halt criminals. Batman almost always chews out his allies who don't share his ethics, but somehow he has no problem with the cops not sharing them! (I know what you're probably going to say to explain it, and keep reading; we'll get there.)
This contradiction is extended even further in the TV show, The Flash. I used to like the show, but the more I watched, the more I was convinced that its writing process consisted largely of coming up with a new excuse to have Grant Gustin get emo, or failing that, picking out an old one they hoped enough time had passed for people to have forgotten it. That, however, was not what made me drop the show; rather it was the aforementioned Kantian preaching despite a huge contradiction. Barry "The Flash" Allen is one of the most preachy Kantian superheroes in recent memory, and yet he doesn't just work with the cops. His stepfather is a cop, his wife is the daughter of that stepfather, and finally, he's a cop! True; he only works in the forensics department, but it still is him working with an organization that sanctions the use of lethal force. In real life, people who have a moral opposition to all killing, such as various religious sects, abstain from working in such organizations, and can obtain exemptions from military service; Barry's dual-role, meanwhile, makes him seem like a big hypocrite demanding of his fellow heroes a sort of morality that his own line of work doesn't abide by. Thus, the show is full of all sorts of weird contradictory events like the Season 3 finale, where he sticks quiverlingly to his refusal to kill a villain, who then tries to kill him, only for his wife Iris to grab a gun and kill the villain. Come Season 4, Flash still hasn't abandoned his policy--but he doesn't ever take his wife to task for that, either. He'll shove his morality down other heroes' throats, but not his own wife's, for whatever reason. I can name several reasons, but none really lessen my view that Barry is a hypocrite.
Now to get to the most likely explanation people would give for why superheroes can abide by Kantian morality, demand it of potential superhero allies, yet be fine with working with police forces who don't: As vigilantes, superheroes feel like they're on legal thin ice as it is, and thus need to exercise some restraint, deferring to the law to make the final judgement on the fate of the villains they help the law to apprehend. This is a decent justification, but it's not usually the one superheroes give; instead going into a predictable speech about falling to the level of villains, without much quantification of what determines the level of villains and how, and of course, with no criticism of the police for being willing to kill. Still, I have an answer to that legal explanation, but first let's talk a bit more about police.
As noted, many police have the right to kill in order to halt a crime, when there seems no other way to incapacitate the criminal. This is quite different, however, from being allowed to kill someone who has been incapacitated and detained non-lethally. After a criminal has already been stopped, the legal question is what can be done to punish the criminal for the crime. The death penalty--often euphemistically referred to as capital punishment--is still around in much of the world, but is rather uncommon in democracies. As is true with any real-world political controversies, I'm not going to take a side here, save for noting that states that don't have capital punishment haven't seen a collapse of law and order, as confinement is effective in those states. Also, even in states that have capital punishment, it's still for the judicial part of law-enforcement to decide on it, not the people carrying guns in the field.
However, here we find the final issue plaguing superhero ethics: The legal system in their world does not work. This holds true whether you favor the death penalty or incarceration; thanks to a combination of corruption and incompetence, police in these worlds fail to do either. Villains keep escaping and keep killing innocents. It would be possible for me to admire a superhero with a code against killing villains, if only the canon that hero was placed in didn't constantly imply that nothing else will really solve the problem, but since it's not, the heroes come off, at best, as not fully comprehending their situation, and at worst, as sanctimonious hypocrites who care more about their own self-esteem than the public good. Quite an awkward position for writers to put their supposed moral exemplars in, but I think I know why, and it's possibly the most common one-word explanation for odd things ever: Money.
Before going on here, a characteristic personal disclaimer: I hate that the words "comic books" or "comics" are commonly used to describe any and all stories that are advanced by illustrated panels. I hate it because it misrepresents every story done by that medium as akin to the humor-centric strips associated with newspapers, for which when the word "comic" was applied, had nothing to do with their pictorial medium and everything to do with their humorous genre. Medium and genre are not the same thing and claiming such understates the variety of stories a medium can tell. It would be one thing to use this term if, much like "villain", its original (quite politically-incorrect) meaning was now extinct, but as "comic" still implies humor in most other modern uses, such as with a person who performs humorous monologues on a stage, the ambiguity still troubles pictorial stories. While "graphic novel" is commonly used as a substitute for longer stories of other genres, it seems more fitting for those works released in their entirety at once, such as V For Vendetta; therefor, for the purposes of this essay and the works specific to it, I will call them "Serial Epics", or SEs for short.
Why this obsessive drive to define a subset of literature? It pertains much more to the financial problem plaguing these stories than any other term previously available. The "epic" part simply refers to the superhero aspect, but it's the term "serial" that deserves a closer look; it implies that a story is told in a series of installments. You may notice that the pictorial medium wasn't referenced in my new term for this genre, since as the aforementioned The Flash TV show attests, such is not the only medium to tell superhero stories; nevertheless, originating in the pictorial medium certainly helped establish tropes common to it. These superheroes got their start in magazines that typically began episodic but eventually turned to telling ongoing stories, building up a cast of memorable characters and utilizing cliffhangers to prompt people to buy the next issue, or even subscribe to the series and get each new issue mailed to them. When people kept reading and buying in order to learn what would happen next, presumably the creators of these things soon realized a dirty little secret: If the story never ends, then neither will the profits! Thus the worst possible combination of superhero operations and legal operations to keep villains down and out once they're defeated, because so they suppose, we will never get tired of seeing Batman fight the Joker.
Lest people think I'm being presumptuous, blaming one trope on a devious business policy, rest assured there are many more tropes to blame on this, such as Comic Book [sic] Time, wherein many characters cannot age. In order to facilitate this, among other things, their origin story will constantly be retconned to a more and more recent date; it is particularly noticeable with Iron Man, since this requires setting his origin story in a new war each time. Then there's the pesky issue of death; while most superheroes don't kill, plenty of other people in their worlds do! This should mean that soon enough, fan favorites will end up dead and mourned--not! Myriad contrivances will instead be used to bring them back!
Except when they can't be. All of those people the Joker slaughters because nobody can manage to stop him permanently; they stay dead, but readers don't care about their lives, so to the crows with them! Really, there's no apparent low these writers won't sink to in order to preserve their precious status quo; don't get daring and make a character step out of his iconic loserdom to marry his crush, become successful and reveal his identity, or soon by some contrivance a tragedy will happen and he'll make a deal with the devil to revert him back to formula!
If it isn't clear yet, I'm irritated by far more than just the codes of ethics these heroes abide by, which as noted above, wouldn't be a problem in other cases. The formula running these sorts of stories, and the cliches it has spawned, are all obnoxious. In a cruel twist of fate, these cliches are perfectly positioned to irritate the very audiences their cliffhangers are manufactured to keep on board. Sleazy business produces low-quality literature, and I could tolerate this if only they limited their stories to entertaining pow-wham-kazow fluff, but all of the vacuous moral grandstanding makes it utterly intolerable to me. If you're going to lecture us, expect some of us to raise our hands for questions or comments!
However, I don't want to make it sound as if I demand these stories become a specific thing; just that I want them to stop being the same thing they've been for far too long. There's plenty wiggle-room to get us out of this rut in the realm of ethics alone, and here are just a few possibilities:
1) Superheroes resolve to kill villains in some cases. Not just people like Deadpool and the Punisher, who get a rush out of doing it; people who greatly regret it but come to the unhappy conclusion that it's the only option, and that sleeping less soundly at night is their burden to bare for the sake of the innocents they saved by killing a killer.
2) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but instead the law enforcement becomes effective at keeping them permanently neutralized. New villains arise if the plot needs to keep going.
3) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they stop preaching about it. No more strawmen to set up and attack with non-arguments, while events imply the strawmen right.
4) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they come to the realization that incapacitating them and passing them on to the police isn't enough. Maybe have Batman start to make an active effort to improve Gotham Police Department, or maybe he and his closer allies, of which he now has many, can start their own jail. Superheroes, with their prodigious talents and abilities, should be able to make a good, permanent difference in the world, even if the devious status-quo-defending writers don't let them yet.
Of course, by now the "side" effect of such innovative writing should be obvious: The stories would probably have an ending. This might sound depressing to people who still want experience more stories from these characters--every once in a while, they manage to turn out something mostly new! However, don't forget that continuity itself is constantly changing, starting and stopping in these franchises. Retcons get introduced all the time; effectively and sometimes officially swapping out an old canon for a new one. Alternate universes are legion, both within the original magazine format of SEs and in the many other media that carry adaptations. So here's a thought; if continuities aren't going to last anyway, why not give them a good ending before they go out? The ending doesn't have to be Batman killing the Joker, but maybe it could be some other thing happening to finally neutralize the Joker, which lets Batman move on to other things. Why not give the current Iron Man the chance to invent something great and world-changing before he's thrown out in favor of a new Iron Man who starts in whatever war is going on now?
I think I've made my case here: I like endings. Maybe not final endings, but definitive places wherein at least one of a hero's stated goals is unambiguously accomplished. How it's accomplished is a matter of great flexibility, but it should be accomplished, and I am confident superhero media can be better at that than it has been. If I'm to support these characters, they have to have realistic mindsets about how to take up the cause of justice.
Meanwhile, there are other prominent bits of literature I can also attack for never reaching they tease, and those who know me well can guess what's next on that chopping block...
Another day, another politically-oriented post on my supposedly apolitical blog! It seems like only yesterday I was blogging about what the message of The Incredibles was...or was not. Here, as with there, I'm going to blog about something that touches a bit on politics, but I'm not going to express any specific opinion on the related controversy. Rather, I'm going to explain why there's a big contradiction in these stories, explain why I think it's a problem for their expressed purposes, state my theory of why these stories keep doing this, and finally provide a number of alternative ideas. First, though, a video from PBS explaining superhero ethics and a common alternative:
Expressing a comprehensible opinion on who is actually right is beyond the scope of this blog, but let's address one big elephant in the room: There are a lot of people who operate like the strawmen these stories frequently disparage, and aren't seen as monstrous for it. I won't begrudge anyone for personally having a Kantian policy against killing, but it has been the case throughout history that military and often even police forces operate on the idea that if you don't kill some people, they're going to kill you or some other people you care about, which often means your civilians. That is a consistent part of civil service, and again, many people see these civil servants as heroes. Certainly, there are times when one's own police and the military go too far, but very few Americans would actually accuse their troops of being no better than the Nazis just because the US troops took up arms and were willing to shoot the Nazis dead. American cops slip up at times, but they've shot dead a whole lot less civilians than other civilians have. They try to find other solutions, but they're open to killing criminals if it seems the only way to stop a greater loss from occurring.
Expanding on the above, it is important to recall that cops are also present in many superhero stories. Batman himself deals plenty with Commissioner Gordon. These cops aren't exactly effective on their own, but as usual, they are willing to kill to halt criminals. Batman almost always chews out his allies who don't share his ethics, but somehow he has no problem with the cops not sharing them! (I know what you're probably going to say to explain it, and keep reading; we'll get there.)
This contradiction is extended even further in the TV show, The Flash. I used to like the show, but the more I watched, the more I was convinced that its writing process consisted largely of coming up with a new excuse to have Grant Gustin get emo, or failing that, picking out an old one they hoped enough time had passed for people to have forgotten it. That, however, was not what made me drop the show; rather it was the aforementioned Kantian preaching despite a huge contradiction. Barry "The Flash" Allen is one of the most preachy Kantian superheroes in recent memory, and yet he doesn't just work with the cops. His stepfather is a cop, his wife is the daughter of that stepfather, and finally, he's a cop! True; he only works in the forensics department, but it still is him working with an organization that sanctions the use of lethal force. In real life, people who have a moral opposition to all killing, such as various religious sects, abstain from working in such organizations, and can obtain exemptions from military service; Barry's dual-role, meanwhile, makes him seem like a big hypocrite demanding of his fellow heroes a sort of morality that his own line of work doesn't abide by. Thus, the show is full of all sorts of weird contradictory events like the Season 3 finale, where he sticks quiverlingly to his refusal to kill a villain, who then tries to kill him, only for his wife Iris to grab a gun and kill the villain. Come Season 4, Flash still hasn't abandoned his policy--but he doesn't ever take his wife to task for that, either. He'll shove his morality down other heroes' throats, but not his own wife's, for whatever reason. I can name several reasons, but none really lessen my view that Barry is a hypocrite.
Now to get to the most likely explanation people would give for why superheroes can abide by Kantian morality, demand it of potential superhero allies, yet be fine with working with police forces who don't: As vigilantes, superheroes feel like they're on legal thin ice as it is, and thus need to exercise some restraint, deferring to the law to make the final judgement on the fate of the villains they help the law to apprehend. This is a decent justification, but it's not usually the one superheroes give; instead going into a predictable speech about falling to the level of villains, without much quantification of what determines the level of villains and how, and of course, with no criticism of the police for being willing to kill. Still, I have an answer to that legal explanation, but first let's talk a bit more about police.
As noted, many police have the right to kill in order to halt a crime, when there seems no other way to incapacitate the criminal. This is quite different, however, from being allowed to kill someone who has been incapacitated and detained non-lethally. After a criminal has already been stopped, the legal question is what can be done to punish the criminal for the crime. The death penalty--often euphemistically referred to as capital punishment--is still around in much of the world, but is rather uncommon in democracies. As is true with any real-world political controversies, I'm not going to take a side here, save for noting that states that don't have capital punishment haven't seen a collapse of law and order, as confinement is effective in those states. Also, even in states that have capital punishment, it's still for the judicial part of law-enforcement to decide on it, not the people carrying guns in the field.
However, here we find the final issue plaguing superhero ethics: The legal system in their world does not work. This holds true whether you favor the death penalty or incarceration; thanks to a combination of corruption and incompetence, police in these worlds fail to do either. Villains keep escaping and keep killing innocents. It would be possible for me to admire a superhero with a code against killing villains, if only the canon that hero was placed in didn't constantly imply that nothing else will really solve the problem, but since it's not, the heroes come off, at best, as not fully comprehending their situation, and at worst, as sanctimonious hypocrites who care more about their own self-esteem than the public good. Quite an awkward position for writers to put their supposed moral exemplars in, but I think I know why, and it's possibly the most common one-word explanation for odd things ever: Money.
Before going on here, a characteristic personal disclaimer: I hate that the words "comic books" or "comics" are commonly used to describe any and all stories that are advanced by illustrated panels. I hate it because it misrepresents every story done by that medium as akin to the humor-centric strips associated with newspapers, for which when the word "comic" was applied, had nothing to do with their pictorial medium and everything to do with their humorous genre. Medium and genre are not the same thing and claiming such understates the variety of stories a medium can tell. It would be one thing to use this term if, much like "villain", its original (quite politically-incorrect) meaning was now extinct, but as "comic" still implies humor in most other modern uses, such as with a person who performs humorous monologues on a stage, the ambiguity still troubles pictorial stories. While "graphic novel" is commonly used as a substitute for longer stories of other genres, it seems more fitting for those works released in their entirety at once, such as V For Vendetta; therefor, for the purposes of this essay and the works specific to it, I will call them "Serial Epics", or SEs for short.
Why this obsessive drive to define a subset of literature? It pertains much more to the financial problem plaguing these stories than any other term previously available. The "epic" part simply refers to the superhero aspect, but it's the term "serial" that deserves a closer look; it implies that a story is told in a series of installments. You may notice that the pictorial medium wasn't referenced in my new term for this genre, since as the aforementioned The Flash TV show attests, such is not the only medium to tell superhero stories; nevertheless, originating in the pictorial medium certainly helped establish tropes common to it. These superheroes got their start in magazines that typically began episodic but eventually turned to telling ongoing stories, building up a cast of memorable characters and utilizing cliffhangers to prompt people to buy the next issue, or even subscribe to the series and get each new issue mailed to them. When people kept reading and buying in order to learn what would happen next, presumably the creators of these things soon realized a dirty little secret: If the story never ends, then neither will the profits! Thus the worst possible combination of superhero operations and legal operations to keep villains down and out once they're defeated, because so they suppose, we will never get tired of seeing Batman fight the Joker.
Lest people think I'm being presumptuous, blaming one trope on a devious business policy, rest assured there are many more tropes to blame on this, such as Comic Book [sic] Time, wherein many characters cannot age. In order to facilitate this, among other things, their origin story will constantly be retconned to a more and more recent date; it is particularly noticeable with Iron Man, since this requires setting his origin story in a new war each time. Then there's the pesky issue of death; while most superheroes don't kill, plenty of other people in their worlds do! This should mean that soon enough, fan favorites will end up dead and mourned--not! Myriad contrivances will instead be used to bring them back!
Except when they can't be. All of those people the Joker slaughters because nobody can manage to stop him permanently; they stay dead, but readers don't care about their lives, so to the crows with them! Really, there's no apparent low these writers won't sink to in order to preserve their precious status quo; don't get daring and make a character step out of his iconic loserdom to marry his crush, become successful and reveal his identity, or soon by some contrivance a tragedy will happen and he'll make a deal with the devil to revert him back to formula!
If it isn't clear yet, I'm irritated by far more than just the codes of ethics these heroes abide by, which as noted above, wouldn't be a problem in other cases. The formula running these sorts of stories, and the cliches it has spawned, are all obnoxious. In a cruel twist of fate, these cliches are perfectly positioned to irritate the very audiences their cliffhangers are manufactured to keep on board. Sleazy business produces low-quality literature, and I could tolerate this if only they limited their stories to entertaining pow-wham-kazow fluff, but all of the vacuous moral grandstanding makes it utterly intolerable to me. If you're going to lecture us, expect some of us to raise our hands for questions or comments!
However, I don't want to make it sound as if I demand these stories become a specific thing; just that I want them to stop being the same thing they've been for far too long. There's plenty wiggle-room to get us out of this rut in the realm of ethics alone, and here are just a few possibilities:
1) Superheroes resolve to kill villains in some cases. Not just people like Deadpool and the Punisher, who get a rush out of doing it; people who greatly regret it but come to the unhappy conclusion that it's the only option, and that sleeping less soundly at night is their burden to bare for the sake of the innocents they saved by killing a killer.
2) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but instead the law enforcement becomes effective at keeping them permanently neutralized. New villains arise if the plot needs to keep going.
3) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they stop preaching about it. No more strawmen to set up and attack with non-arguments, while events imply the strawmen right.
4) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they come to the realization that incapacitating them and passing them on to the police isn't enough. Maybe have Batman start to make an active effort to improve Gotham Police Department, or maybe he and his closer allies, of which he now has many, can start their own jail. Superheroes, with their prodigious talents and abilities, should be able to make a good, permanent difference in the world, even if the devious status-quo-defending writers don't let them yet.
Of course, by now the "side" effect of such innovative writing should be obvious: The stories would probably have an ending. This might sound depressing to people who still want experience more stories from these characters--every once in a while, they manage to turn out something mostly new! However, don't forget that continuity itself is constantly changing, starting and stopping in these franchises. Retcons get introduced all the time; effectively and sometimes officially swapping out an old canon for a new one. Alternate universes are legion, both within the original magazine format of SEs and in the many other media that carry adaptations. So here's a thought; if continuities aren't going to last anyway, why not give them a good ending before they go out? The ending doesn't have to be Batman killing the Joker, but maybe it could be some other thing happening to finally neutralize the Joker, which lets Batman move on to other things. Why not give the current Iron Man the chance to invent something great and world-changing before he's thrown out in favor of a new Iron Man who starts in whatever war is going on now?
I think I've made my case here: I like endings. Maybe not final endings, but definitive places wherein at least one of a hero's stated goals is unambiguously accomplished. How it's accomplished is a matter of great flexibility, but it should be accomplished, and I am confident superhero media can be better at that than it has been. If I'm to support these characters, they have to have realistic mindsets about how to take up the cause of justice.
Meanwhile, there are other prominent bits of literature I can also attack for never reaching they tease, and those who know me well can guess what's next on that chopping block...
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