If you follow this blog, you know that I've been less than in love with the rebirth and recreations of the superhero franchises recently. In fact, I wrote a blog under this same headline back in June 2013.(you can read through the link).
Now comes this article about the impending Superman/Batman fight, which I posted on my Facebook page, Though the headline is silly, its logic is hard to argue. How on earth did it come to this, that the heroes and subsequent movies about them I and many others idolized as children have taken such a painful turn? We are actually having discussions about whose moral compass is more warped then whose.
That's when it dawned on me, pardon the pun, as I watched and re-watched the trailer for Batman v. Superman Dawn of Justice, that there's a reason that if you critically assess the plot of these movies, of course it leads to these discussions. There's one good reason.
Superheroes are for children.
I'll repeat that. They were intended for children.
Superhero comics and cartoons were intended to be simple. The hero was the best of us as humans, rolled up into a ball of incorruptible moral goodness, something none of us can claim in the real world. It was clear who was good and who was bad. There was one big problem that good had to overcome in each episode or comic, and it was clear what side we wanted to win.
Then it changed.
While Frank Miller's redux of Batman as the Dark Knight as a vigilante was certainly the most appropriate of reincarnations (the guy was originally borne of the murder of his parents in front of him), it also put Batman truly on the wrong side of law. It set up a moral conundrum that Batman himself becomes a part of. This was realized brilliantly, if not painfully, in the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy; What Batman has to do if he chooses to reduce himself to the lowest common denominator in order to bring to justice those willing to commit atrocities puts him on a journey into the darkest parts of the human psyche, which includes his own.
But while Miller's rebirth of Bruce Wayne/Batman was both believable and acceptable, the rebirth of Superman/Clark Kent in both Superman Returns and worse, Man of Steel, has left this hero bereft of any sense of who or what he is.
If you doubt this, you need look no further than the trailer for Dawn of Justice, where Ma Kent, in a moment of counsel to her son states: "People fear what they don't understand. Be their hero Clark. Be their angel. Be their monument. Be anything they need you to be. Or be none of it. You don't owe the world a thing. You never did."
WAIT, WHAT?
This is the tutelage from which Clark Kent arose to become our greatest and mightiest hero? Then no wonder why he's destroying half of Metropolis at the end of MAN OF STEEL without any foresight or idea to the numbers of innocents he's taking with him. Sure, it's all so our planet will survive, but the real Superman would have made sure this fight never made it into a city. Or a populated area. And if it did, his concern would be for those around him who are less than he is first and foremost, then for Zod and his army. Superman's magnanimous nature would have made the fight at the end of MAN OF STEEL, the subsequent set up for DAWN OF JUSTICE, impossible.
Thus, as that article above points out, you actually have a reason to choose Batman as the hero and Superman as the foe at the outset of DAWN OF JUSTICE, and just how scary is that? That we as a society would root for the vigilante, free from the bonds of our legal system and the proper way of handling things so he can be the one-man army for all of us, taking the law into his own hands and destroying that which we are all afraid of.
So sad it seems how much this parallels reality when it comes to humankind at this very minute.
My cousin pointed out to me recently that children of this generation often grow up thinking Darth Vader was cool. But to kids of our generation, Vader was the scariest and meanest evil guy there was. Sure, at the end of Part VI he gained some redemption, and it made for a nice bow on the entire serial package. But the truth was, you can't forget he was a murderer and a killer. And we did. The new generation did. Anakin Skywalker became someone our kids admire. How screwed up is that when you think of it?
The reason we can't have Superheroes that work logically in films for adults is because the characters' purity is impossible to create in an adult world; one where problems don't have simple black and white answers; one where ego of the doer often jousts with the good intentions, and those on the receiving end often bite back with cynical zeal. Superheroes aren't supposed to undergo mental torment. They are the guardians of right and wrong. There is no middle ground for them because the problems and their corresponding solutions are obvious. At least, they used to be.
They no longer exist. The nuances of mixed good with mixed evil will be lost on your kids. They'll be confused as to who the good and bad guys are. And for your children's sake, don't acquaint them with these new versions. It will make their world a little darker, a little more uncertain, something that we as adults already have a hard time handling in our day to day life. We all would prefer that problems had simple solutions. In the adult world, they don't. Don't rob your children of the simplicity of childhood.
It's time to let them go.
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