Posts Tagged secret identities
Superheroes (If You Squint)
Last night, Joss Whedon spoke at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Whedon fans get a bad rap online – obsessive, evangelical – so I first want to say that this Q&A was the most sane I’ve ever seen at the festival.
(According to my rigorous statistical math, this proves regular book nerds are much, much crazier than Firefly fans.)
Whedon spoke a little about taking on the Avengers movie for Marvel. He said that until Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, he wasn’t convinced you could do a true superhero film – but also that Hollywood’s now jumped far too quickly to films like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Dark Knight. He wanted to enjoy more examples of ‘straight’ superhero movies before we started deconstructing them, and tearing their poor heroes apart.
It made me remember how superhero films used to be a rarity. Franchises were kicked off by Donner’s 1978 Superman and Burton’s 1989 Batman, of course, but nothing like the avalanche of onscreen superheroes we have now. Some of the best comic book movies weren’t based on comics at all, just inspired by them: Raimi’s Darkman is one of my all-time favourite B-films.
Sometimes, though, there’s nothing to do but squint if you want movies featuring your favourite superheroes.
Like David Fincher’s Se7en. (Do I really have to type the number in the middle?) It’s secretly one of the best Batman movies ever made. It has the endless rain, portentous dialogue, villain with a ridiculous gimmick, and the hysterical masculine dramatics that good Gotham City stories require. There’s only one difference: in a true Batman story, Brad Pitt’s detective would soon return as a grim new villain, out for revenge.
It was about halfway through the Bourne trilogy that it hit me: an amnesiac, capable of great violence, tortured by that same capacity, struggling to uncover his past but soon realising he might not want to know? If only Matt Damon had less height, more hair, and pointy retractable claws, these would’ve been ideal Wolverine films.
I’ve always thought Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop perfectly captured the mix of arresting violence and blacker-than-black comedy that defines Judge Dredd. There’s a new Dredd movie coming, and they’ve promised to never take off his helmet. It sounds superficial, yes, but it’s a good start. Still, Dredd is such a strange character (so political, so funny, so British) it’s hard to believe even a well-meaning American-filmed version could do him justice.
And it might’ve taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer until recent issues of her new ‘Season Eight’ comic books to become faster than a speeding bullet, but she was never less than a great Spider-Man. She suffered through secret identity blues in exactly the same way, and her regular-life-versus-heroic-calling provided a perfect example of Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility” curse.
Whedon said being offered Avengers was a thrill because he remembers reading the comics when he was eleven years old. Comic book influences have always been obvious in his writing. TV shows like Heroes would later take on the trappings of superhero stories while getting everything else about them horribly wrong, but Buffy showed the real meat of Marvel Comics.
The Hulk as Hamlet
“I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”
That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)
Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.
Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.
No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)
It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?
Frankly, I’m not sure why.
It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.
The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.
Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.
Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.
And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.
A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?
Superman is the Mighty Newspaper
From Overheard in the Newsroom: a conversation about the demise of pay phones.
Editor: “Where would Superman change nowadays?”
Reporter: “Change? Where would he work?”
You might’ve read that Peter Parker recently lost his job as a newspaper photographer. Don’t worry: it’s hardly the first time in Marvel Comics’ history that Spider-Man’s infamous no-good-deed-goes-unpunished luck has cost him his job – and it wasn’t just your typical downsizing, either. (Poor Parker lost his job for doctoring a photo to prove the innocence of his long-time journalistic enemy – and current Mayor of Marvel’s New York City – J. Jonah Jameson.)
But with the growing numbers of doomsayers claiming the real-world newspaper industry is failing, I wondered: can superheroes live without them?
Superheroes and newspapers share some mutual strands of DNA. Newspapers still contain comic strips, of course, and it’s common knowledge that even the term ‘yellow journalism’ was named after a comic that ran in the last years of the 1800s. And superhero comics and newspapers were sold side-by-side for decades, too, until the former became the domain of specialised comic book stores instead.
Peter Parker and the Daily Bugle; Clark Kent and the Daily Planet. The journalistic careers of Spider-Man and Superman’s alter-egos are almost as much a part of their core identities as radioactive spiders and last-minute rockets from other worlds. Heroic reporters aren’t just limited to handy secret identities.
DC Comics has Lois Lane, of course, but she’s never gotten the respect she deserves. It’s partly because she’s always existed first and foremost as a love interest for Superman, but it certainly didn’t help that she was forced to fail to notice that Clark Kent’s real identity for so long.
Marvel has Ben Urich, a reporter who first appeared in 1978. He’s an investigative journalist of the hardboiled school – incessantly smoking, rumpled trenchcoat, code of honour – made more famous in Frank Miller’s legendary run on Daredevil. He’s now the hero of his own occasional series that offers a behind-the-scenes look at Marvel’s crossover events, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meets All The President’s Men.
What about a tabloid-sponsored superhero? One of the interlocking series that formed DC Comics’ Seven Soldiers ‘mega-series’ in 2005 was The Manhattan Guardian. Taking his superhero identity directly from the newspaper that employs him, ex-cop Jake Jordan agrees to become publicly what others are only in secret: a superheroic reporter. He’s a revamped version of the original 1940’s Guardian, a vigilante who was aided by a group of orphans called – adorably – the Newsboy Legion.
The Manhattan Guardian works because its hero makes obvious the same logic that links superheroes and newspapers. Lois Lane always wondered how Clark got the best Superman stories; cruel irony meant that Peter was providing the photographs used to defame Spider-Man in the Daily Bugle. Superheroes are, almost by definition, where the action is – so who’s better to bring home the scoop?
While writing about superheroes and their relationships to the cities in which they live, theorist Scott Bukatman discusses the connection between Superman’s never-ending battle and Clark’s work at the Daily Planet:
“In a way, then, Superman and his alter-ego, crusading journalist Clark Kent, are fighting the same fight using the same methods: ubiquity, speed, enhanced powers of vision and perception, and incorruptibility.” In fact, Bukatman continues, “in a strong sense, Superman is the mighty newspaper.”
One of my favourite details in DC’s epic Final Crisis series from 2008 was that Superman has an emergency printing press in his Fortress of Solitude. Here, interdimensional villains use electronic media to spread the deadly “anti-life equation” that removes all traces of humanity’s free will. How will superheroes get the news out to the resistance? They become heroic newsboys, spreading the good word one paper at a time.
Underwear On The Outside
In Superman: Secret Identity #3, the Man of Steel wonders if his costume might be a little snug. It’s the latest of god-knows-how-many updated retellings of Superman’s origin story, so we get to see him wearing his costume in public for the first time – uh, again – and muttering: “All right, Clark. Don’t think about how tight it is.”
As far as catchphrases go, it’s no “Up, up, and away!”, is it? When even Superman is worried that he looks stupid in his iconic, entire-industry-inspiring costume, you can understand how difficult difficult it is to wear your underwear on the outside.
The popularity of superheroes used to be able to force anyone into costume. In his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (2006), Peter Coogan uses a character called The Scorpion to illustrate this trend:
“The Scorpion, created by Howard Chaykin, exemplifies this shift. The Scorpion’s adventures were set just before WWII, and the character himself was a pulpy soldier of fortune with some science fiction elements. The Scorpion debuts without a costume, wearing a leather jacket, flight scarf, riding boots, and armed with pistols. A new creative team was brought on after the second issue, and the Scorpion was made over, appearing in the third and final issue in a blue-and-orange cowled affair sporting a large scorpion chevron.”
Like I wrote when talking about Power Girl and her costume’s notorious cleavage window, you’re currently more likely to see superhero comics apologising for oulandish outfits than embracing them. The first example I can remember was a decade or so after the Scorpion’s crisis, when John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad ditched their costumes altogether.
The Suicide Squad was a team consisting of various villains and sociopaths, forced into good deeds by their government in order to reduce their prison terms. It was a serious espionage story with an alarmingly high body count. (At least it seemed high when back in 1987; now, a smattering of character deaths seem to be expected in even the most lighthearted superhero books.)
In time, the supervillains on the Squad ditched their costumes altogether, deciding on a more ‘serious’ look for their serious stories. I can see why. This year, DC released JSA Vs. Kobra. It’s a grim tale of global terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and suicide bombing that took itself absolutely stone-faced seriously – even while starring a character called Mister Terrific who has the words FAIRPLAY written down the sleeves of his jacket in giant letters.
I’ve spent my whole life honing my ability to suspend disbelief, and I still had to stifle a giggle at this yawning chasm between style and content.
For the non-comic-reading public, costumes can be an even harder sell. Recent superheroic TV shows don’t dare. Smallville is still clinging to its long-standing “no flights, no tights” policy for young Clark Kent. And NBC’s deservedly-maligned Heroes is happy to be one of the stupidiest shows on TV – but god forbid they’d ever put their characters in costume, because that would just look dumb, right?
Coogan suggests three elements to define a superhero: mission, powers, and identity. Costumes, he says, is an integral part of the latter – “iconic representations of the superhero identity”. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins agreed, concreting the importance of Batman’s “theatricality” in the minds of the millions who saw it. However, it still required his costume to become practical military-style armour, rather than just bright fabric for symbolism alone. (Well, okay: symbolism and ease of impromptu dancing.)
The costumeless Suicide Squad later find themselves unwillingly involved in a major crossover called “War Of The Gods” in issue #58 (1991). Before they head off to battle angry mythological figures, they’re told to put their old costumes back on by the immortal antihero Black Adam:
“Everyone who has one should be in costume. [...] We go to fight gods and magic. Ceremonial garb has a value and should be worn.”
Maybe it’s that simple. Superman should remember this the next time he’s feeling shy.