Every hero is a victim first
Feel victimized by frog-marching militants? Wizened democratic socialists? Pill-peddling conspiracy theorists? Charmless lady politicos? Black people? White people? Brown people? All people?
Our heroes are victims first.
Logan was tortured, Peter Parker was uncool, Steve Rogers was a twiggy-wristed wimp.
Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered, Kal-El was the orphan of an exploded world.
Princess Diana, molded from clay, had no father (and yet, to Hollywood’s surprise, was able to overcome the worst superhero stigma of all: that of being—gasp!—a woman).
In funny underwear parlance, we call these backgrounds “origin stories”.
We think about them as transformative events. A happenstance or a happening. A thing that made the hero less normcore, mo’ super.
Mutant genes. Radioactive spiders. Super soldier serums. Like that.
Less considered tho, less sexy, less CGI-able, is this: origin stories are wounds.
And, because the origin story is a wound, it lends moral authority to the hero’s journey.
We forgive Logan his bloodthirst (and root for him) because Canadians (of all people) fused adamantium to his bones.
We forgive Spider-Man his extra-legal antics (and root for him) because he neglected to stop the thief who killed his uncle.
We forgive Captain America his zealous do-gooditude (and root for him) because the Army judged him too nancy-panted to serve.
This is why we, the readers of the hero’s story, care.
We see our struggle in theirs.
(This is also, by the way, why the brightly-colored brands of fast food restaurants look like super hero insignias — the Brotherhood of Everyday Annoying Evil has contrived to make you dissatisfied, and a Big Mac is the hero you deserve.)
All of this is to say: there’s another word for “origin story”. That word is trauma.
Logan’s torture. Peter’s hubris. Steve’s tiny, can’t-pull-ass muscles. These are traumas.
The reason the hero fights is to bring meaning to that trauma. To exorcise the demons. To make the pain worthwhile for themselves and others.
Superpowers, you might say, are defense mechanisms.
You may doubt this, but the Jews who made the first comic books? Because anti-semites wouldn’t let them work for newspapers?
They knew this lesson well.
Versailles versus Vader
Of course, “in defense against trauma” is a universal story.
It’s the story of Gilgamesh, seeking meaning in his brother’s death. It’s the story of Odysseus, returning home from a war he never wanted to join. It’s the story of all aggrieved parties who believe they’re punching up a weight class—from Lebensraum to Luke (as in Skywalker).
Your correspondent isn’t justifying the evil of Nazism.
Rather, I’m acknowledging the internal logic of the hero’s journey.
Nazis don’t think they, themselves, are evil.
Mass shooters don’t think they, themselves, are evil.
That was Arendt’s message, in part, at Eichmann’s trial. Evil isn’t extreme. Evil is a norm within the world that evil created.
Within the logic of the hero’s journey, it doesn’t matter whose name is on the cover of the brightly-colored comic book. It matters which comic book you choose to read. Suffer at the hands of Versailles or suffer at the hands of Vader, no difference. Revanchism is revanchism.
What matters is your struggle, and how convincing the story of that struggle is — whether that story is told by you (on a stage, at a rally, fists jabbing and jowls flapping), or told by others (behind a camera, on the news, reading a teleprompter in a regionally indistinct accent).
The audience cares about how far you’ve come, and how quickly you got there. The audience cares about the relative change in circumstance. And the audience cares whether the actions taken to reverse that circumstance are justified by the trauma.
In other words: we don’t care about ends, we care about beginnings. We care about whether the beginnings justify the means.
Whether, as they say, the struggle is real.
No wonder that phrase caught on.
The Internet is Your Iron Man
Funnily enough, we have superpowers, too.
Our superpower is twitter.
Our superpower is the omni-polis of Facebook, and the glamour shot of Instagram, and the mini-moviedom of YouTube. The apps and platforms that allow us to be bigger, better, more beautiful, more assiduously fucking zealous about, y’know, whatever.
Our superpower is getting attention.
Our origin story—our trauma—is anonymity.
We put on the internet like Tony Stark puts on Iron Man.
May you tweet in interesting times
Consider: The medieval carnival, Situationist International, radio jamming.
Ant Farm, Adbusters, The Billboard Liberation Front.
Street Wars, war blogs, blog blogs, flash mobs.
The Onion.
Clickhole.
Each is method of jamming the signal. Of reversing the ritual. Of trying, like one Tiger Beat heartthrob said, to Pump Up the Volume — a movie which, by the way, does not reward repeat, decades-later viewings, but which is nevertheless useful to the argument I’m making.
Which is this: The history of media, especially recent media, is the history of reversal rituals. The history of talking back to the voices that talk to us, and loudly. Some methods are serious, some are funny. Sit and see, the Bard said. We mind true things by what their mockeries be.
This is skipping around a bit, but consider, e.g., the cult movies of the ‘80s — Videodrome, Buckaroo Banzai, They Live. Movies which expressed anxiety with mind control at the very cultural moment that CNN was beginning its all-the-time beat.
See also the flourishing of anti-heroes: The Punisher, Rambo, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. Yes, some of these characters were birthed by post-Vietnam stress syndrome. But then, some of post-Vietnam stress syndrome was birthed by disillusionment with institutions (not least, the media).
Anyway, the point is this: in the pre-internet era, reversal couldn’t be at scale. But these days if we wish to celebrate a ritual of inversion, we don’t have to learn QuarkXpress, or photoshop our face onto Time Magazine, or pretend to enjoy Cronenberg, or fight lizard people.
We need only go about our (online) day. Pick up your phone. Every day can be a reversal ritual on whatever topic you want.
Feel victimized by frog-marching militants? Wizened democratic socialists? Pill-peddling conspiracy theorists? Charmless lady politicos? Black people? White people? Brown people? All people?
We are our own oscillation overthrusters. A mosquito fleet of go fuck yourself.
Every tweet is a musket.
Every topic is a Bastille.
Always be yourself, unless you can be Batman
The hero is always outnumbered. The hero is always outgunned. The hero is always the underdog in underoos. That’s what information overload is. That’s why we complain about how busy we are.
Victim first, hero second. That’s how it works.
From Jesus to the Justice League.
From Orion the Hunter to Obi-Wan the Kenobi. Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Superpowers are defense mechanisms.
We are the victims the world deserves.
