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22 July 03 |
Superman 2002 |
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JULIAN DARIUS |
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This
essay was first published on PersianCaesar.com on 30 July
2002, and is reprinted here with permission of the author. |
Metropolis. A group of walking citizens suddenly stops on the street and
stares hopefully toward the heavens. “It’s a bird,” one begins, as if the first
one to stand at a sporting event. “It’s a plane,” two say simultaneously,
responding to the signal, raising their arms high. But the wave does not take; the prospect
of the glee of the mob has been dashed against the rocks, stillborn. “Fucking Mr. Majestic,” one mutters as
they walk away, but it could just as easily have been Supreme. |
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We are in the house that Clark built. But we don’t see much of him these days. |
You see, this is Metropolis. We are in the house that Clark built. And there are those of us who remember the
glory days when that red cape and stylized “S” sailed through the air, out to
stop some evil enslaver from outer space or perhaps to pull our beloved cats
from trees. You see, those of us who
have lived in this shiny city of super-heroes since those days past all
remember some time when we encountered that god who sailed down from the
skies before us and smiled warmly as we dwarfed in his presence. We remember Superman. Personally. Intimately. But we don’t see much of him these days. |
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In the late 1930s, Superman invented a genre -- or canonized it,
as super-powered beings had been favorites of our species for millennia. |
In the late 1930s, Superman invented a
genre -- or canonized it, as super-powered beings had been favorites of our
species for millennia. There were, of
course, the pulps from which Siegel and Shuster, those two Jewish boys during
the great impression, drew the most direct influence. And there were the films, the serials,
with horrible tales of powerful monsters, demons of the dark, of science and
humanity gone awry. Before them, we
had Martian invasions, literary beasts who stalked London and skulked in
Gothic palisades. And they too had
their ancestors on this family tree of wonders, once sacred and deified but
now horrible and profane: in the
Middle Ages, these two branches mixed as tales of saints and their miracles,
of the Flying Friar and the incorruptibles, existed simultaneously with folk
tales of monsters whose descendants would populate modern nightmares and
horror films, grim tales of witches and werewolves whispered to children to
scare them into parental obedience and sexual responsibility. In the eras before the miracles were more
accessible, less of transforming water to wine for a marriage ceremony, or of
dying to metaphysically change the world, and more of heroes made
invulnerable save their foot and of efforts so gargantuan that their
achievers’ names have passed into common usage as adjectives Herculean. Then too were there oracles, furies, and
witches feared for their ferocity, but it a different age with different ways
of constructing meaning, more the ripping fabric of victory and less the dark
piercing of a man-god’s side, or beasts crouching in the shadows hungry for
human blood. Oh, there was a rich and
long family tree indeed, one we have yet today to barely rediscover, but for
us it was that stylized “S” of red, that new universalism, that classical
freedom, constrained enough by twentieth-century morality so as to inspire
rather than to scare by plenty. |
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When the actor shot himself, the white hairs, the creeping
wrinkles, the sagging fat of middle age too much to bear for a man cast from
a deity, it was not so much a suicide as an exorcism. |
He went through changes. In the 1940s he was a vigilante of heavy
steel, bounding powerfully over ruptured dams, smashing saboteurs,
nationalistic, melancholy in love but inspiring in the image and in
disembodied voice. There were the bad
years, the years of inherited momentum, of transition, of black-and-white
television growing old and stale.
When the actor shot himself, the white hairs, the creeping wrinkles,
the sagging fat of middle age too much to bear for a man cast from a deity,
it was not so much a suicide as an exorcism.
The icon, you see, had to shed its skin, to rid by bleeding the
weighty blood of World War II, of post-war nuclear anxiety and demonstrations
of domestic bliss applied like make-up over the heaviness of Soviet and
Korean and American killing fields.
Out of this shedding gradually came a new esprit, light as a
feather, one of unaided flight, as easy and minimalist as Pop Art but as
unendingly various as jazz. In 1960,
he hovered, his nationalism easy, his unrequited love more humorous, his life
a game, a comedy inspiring to joy and wonder rather than the steeled nerves
of his past incarnation. Here,
weightless, was the thin body of a god, his might infinite but never
visible. It was a time of grace, of
imagination, of wonder, as fleet as the ideas of a child at play among mirror
selves and bottled cities. And he had
accompaniment in this airy symphony, a girl as light as him, their pets, a
child self at play with magic and devices so thoughtlessly possible that they
felt the same. It was a pantheon of
light, of bizarre inconsequence casting cultural shadows equally interesting. |
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The stories grew longer and longer, and all these epics, episodic
or not, with even those few short legends and tales, combining into one
greater epic whole, an epic cycle that needed policing for continuity errors,
lest our god in scene 192 be wearing a tie found absent in scene 193, or
holding a cup in his left hand in scene 438 and in his right in 441, no
explanation offered. But gods do not
lend themselves to single stories, nor to any one man’s dreaming. |
In the 1970s came the move away from such
things, from the freeform to the harsh reality, and those shadows beneath the
dance of weightless light and wonder seemed to harbor grubs, worms, poisons,
problems. It was the riots, the Black
Panthers, the ever-more-visible disaster that was Vietnam, the time when
drugs became a social scourge, acculturation impossible, when a President
resigned in disgrace and the economy took a nosedive without a hero to grab
it effortlessly by the wings and carry it once more into the light. It was a world of terrorism, of Reagan, of
Thatcher, of economic practicality and war, war, war: on drugs, on terrorism, on ideas. And so the god of ideas, unbounded, became
increasingly real, increasingly manifest, manacled to the world, updated for
the times, rendered less imaginary, more concrete, revised for believability
-- as if one cannot believe in ghosts or gods, as if stories, transparently
so, have not power, as if dreams of flight, of freedom, or of rape, of death,
were not themselves real. By the
middle of the 1980s, the efforts to bind our god to our ground and make his
stories cohere as one single, “realistic” narrative being ever hampered by
the past, irreconcilable, they killed that past, those stories, and in doing
so mistook them for having happened, for history in need of
reconciliation. The stories grew
longer and longer, an Iliad or an Odyssey almost every one, and
all these epics, episodic or not, with even those few short legends and
tales, combining into one greater epic whole, an epic cycle that needed
policing for continuity errors, lest our god in scene 192 be wearing a tie
found absent in scene 193, or holding a cup in his left hand in scene 438 and
in his right in 441, no explanation offered.
But gods do not lend themselves to single stories, nor to any one
man’s dreaming. There was, it should be said, those other
tales shot on celluloid, not expected to cohere with fifty years of
lore. The first was a glory, a
weightless man of power hidden as he had been of yore, yet bound to this
world and to tales of it, to story restricted by itself, as we have come to
expect it. His world was one of a
device or two, of science fiction wonders placed, magically, in the real, a
mélange of 1960s light imagination and 1980 physicality, appropriate to the
medium. The billboards proclaimed
“you will believe a man can fly,” and we did -- we did both believe,
in a way with which that silver effervescence had never been concerned, and wonder
at this easy flight amidst the clouds, with the woman he loved, as the music
reeled our minds and made them dream.
The second film, though less in grace, kept that sense of wonder,
though more for its villains, for its wondrous stakes, than for our god and
his human mate. After this, things
declined apace, but there are some things of which are best not spoken, the
memory prison enough. |
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We can only blame the custodians of his cult as tales that
yesterday would have been cast for him are cast for minor gods themselves
cast in his resemblance. |
And now, having commenced a new
millennium, this twentieth-century deity eclipsed by video games and films of
lesser gods, the pulpy visual fictions in which he found birth holding him
still but lower than newer generations of sons, we wonder. We wonder why our god is known yet no
longer read save by the most devout.
We wonder why those demigods born in his Metropolis, the city of marvels,
long given to the shadows of jungles like Rome centuries after the fall, the
city for which he drove the first foundation of its rebirth, now host to new
families of sainted wonders, have altars larger and more visited than his
own? It is a puzzlement, yet we can
only blame the custodians of his cult as tales that yesterday would have been
cast for him are cast for minor gods themselves cast in his resemblance. Their tales are not so bound by
history; in them, we can tell new legends as we see fit, unburdened by the
demand of the real, craft new narratives of singular vision, tales the length
one man might tell but no more. The
best Superman stories no longer star Superman, while his cult languishes,
continuing its sacred project of the master epic of his life complete, week
after week, month after month, laboring on, inaccessible to all but the
initiate. |
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They even made him a resurrection deity, letting him sleep
inconnu for three months as Christ slept three days. |
They even made him a resurrection deity, letting
him sleep inconnu for three months as Christ slept three days, but still were
are unaroused, his Babylonian captivity having recommenced, its style of
government hardly altered. And so we look up, hoping to see him there
in all his glory. There are glimpses, painted stories not
meant to cohere with the canon, or of which the priests who guard the canon
seem unconcerned. These days we seem more inspired by newer
capes, stranger gods who do not bear the weight of such a history, and who
fly freer for it. And still we crave their progenitor, who
changed so much and still might do so. |
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A god cannot be so bound and live, cannot have his tales cohere
so much, cannot have his life all sexless so that his image is as welcome in
the marketplace and amongst the moneylenders. |
A god cannot be so bound and live, cannot
have his tales cohere so much, cannot have his life all sexless so that his
image is as welcome in the marketplace and amongst the moneylenders. For in his absence, in his captivity, we
are busy forming new gods. They may
not be so iconic; his history is priceless and not for sale. But we may yet create another god of his
mold, guard him more carefully by not holding so tightly, and in time our new
god may slay his father and inaugurate a new Olympus. Consider this a word of warning. It is a grave thing, whether by
inheritance or by design, to be entrusted with such gods. |
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Read about the author on our About page. Julian Darius can be reached at julian@sequart.com. Discuss this article online on Sequart.com’s messageboards. |
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