Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

The Nature of a Hero in Fantastic Four: First Steps

A long time ago (and no, I won’t finish that sentence…), in the before times, I started writing a series of reflections on the Nature of a Hero. I added to that periodically through the subsequent years, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been motivated to re-consider these themes. Largely disappointed with what has become a mass market of superhero stories recently, I had forgotten the power that these stories can have in the lives of the viewer or reader. Marvel’s latest cinematic installment, Fantastic Four: First Steps, had brought me back to thinking about this theme, though, because it has a depth that has been missing in recent Marvel and DC films.

I’ve written a more general review elsewhere of the movie, and here I want to focus on the theological themes, but I’ll say up front that this is the first movie since the most recent Spider-Man installment in which I’ve truly felt as though I’ve seen an exploration of heroism. The character of a superhero is, at it’s surface, someone who has some sort of advantage over those around them, whether that be resources, abilities, or metahuman powers. They can do things that the rest of us can’t. In reality, those are only storytelling devices to get to the depth of the nature of a hero, however, as the constitution of a hero is ultimately the choice to take what they have use it for the better (usually in the defense of) those around them, often at great cost to themselves.

The Fantastic Four, as the team was originally concieved, is ultimately about family. The characters go through a life-changing crisis with each other that results in them gaining their abilities, and that crisis could have proven catastrophic. They get through it because they are there for each other, as a family, both in the biological and extended sense of the word. They are role models for how family members support each other, without question and without condemnation. They are heroes to each other first, and by extension, heroes to the rest of the world. This movie introduces the Fantastic Four to the MCU in a separate timeline, where they are the only heroes, and have been world-changing, positive influences to the world around them. The world-building shows a dream of a planet at peace because of their heroism, but the focus, established by a positive pregnancy test in the first scene, is inward, as a family unit. This is the state of their timeline when they are visited by the Silver Surfer, heralding the coming of Galactus and the destruction of the Earth.

As the plot progresses and the Fantastic Four encounters Galactus for the first time…not as adversaries, but as explorers…we’re suddenly gut-punched by a theological metaphor that’s difficult to miss. To spare the Earth, Galactus demands Franklin, Sue’s unborn child. Reed refuses. Insistent, Galactus uses the power cosmic to induce Sue’s labor then and there, and the heroes narrowly escape.

They return to New York, already being celebrated as heroes. When the gathered crowd is advised of Galactus’ demand and their refusal to pay it, the crowd becomes angry, demanding an answer to “are we safe?” There remains an uneasy tension as the Earth wrestles with the ethics of sacrificing one to save millions. The good of the many, as Spock tolds us decades ago, outweighs the good of the few. And so we watch Sue Storm fiercely protect her son from a public desperate to ensure their survival.

There’s no escaping a Christological metahpor here: the sacrifice of one’s child to save humanity. This is compounded by the fact that comics readers know that Franklin will grow up to possess a nearly omnipotent ability to re-write reality to his will. Of course, all metaphors break down at some point, and I’m not sure that this one in particular was intentional on the part of the writers, but it’s certainly there. Of course, Sue and Reed refuse to sacrifice their child, and any mortal parent would make the same choice, I think, hero or otherwise. This reinforces the higher level of love showed by Christ, “…in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, NKJV).

There is a different spiritual theme that’s driven home, as well. Not necessarily theological, but spiritual in a more secular sense, is the focus on saving the family. Sue’s monologue to the gathered crowd is beautifully written, and she does something very important in this speech. She re-defines her family as all of those gathered. The important message here, and one to which I think our culture would do well to listen, is that we all have more in common than we think. What Sue does that’s so important in this scene is to break down the “us vs. them” mentality, and the result is a world-wide cooperation in a plan to save the planet that would seem to be an impossible dream in our world today.

The concept of heroic self-sacrifice enters the story at least one more time, as the Silver Surfer wrestles with her role in contributing to the deaths of billions of people on various planets in her role as Galactus’ herald. She accepted this role in a self-sacrificial gesture, choosing to be indentured into this servitude to spare her own planet and family, but appears to come to a realization of the lives she’s traded by the end of the film. Ultimately, she chooses to sacrifice herself in a more complete sense by defeating Galactus, pushing him through the portal and away from Earth instead of Johnny. Here, she chooses again to take someone else’s place in a heroic act, but in this moment, she chooses repentance from her lethal travels as Galactus’ herald.

Part of the reason I’ve been so enamored with this film is that it’s the first superhero film in some time that I’ve seen do what superhero stories should do: provide a metaphorical depth that causes us to theologically wrestle with the human condition or, at best, our relationship to God. At its core, this is the reason I’ve always loved comics and superhero stories, and it’s been absent in most movie ventures of late. I’m thrilled to see it return. I encourage you to see Fantastic Four: First Steps, and see how it causes you to think about these themes.

Where Have All The Good Guys Gone?

Last week, I finished watching Ironheart, the latest installment of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. My disappointment is difficult to overstate, but this isn’t intended to be a review of the series. Rather, I observed it solidify a theme that’s become increasingly obvious to me since I recently heard the death of post-modernism proclaimed.

If we rewind into comic book history a bit, Marvel’s take on the heroic narrative has always been different from DC’s. DC came first, with Marvel appearing soon after, and they each have distinctly different perspectives on their characters, but what has remained consistent is that Marvel injects a gritty realism into their characters while DC tends to hold theirs above the fray, as it were.

Each of these mainstream comics lines, as they developed from nascent pulp into a new literary genre, encapsulated a cohesive mythology in their stories, what in today’s pop culture terminology we would refer to as a “universe.” While its noteworthy that antiheroes have always been present in both (DC has always had Catwoman, Marvel has always had Namor the Sub-Mariner), the focus was on the fight of good vs. evil, and that’s what’s compelling about these stories. We are all instinctively aware that there is an evil that we can’t fight, and we desire someone to help, to fight that battle for us and win. The difference, over-simplified, is that DC has historically held these heroes who fight our battles up as larger than life, more than human, an over-arching theology from above approach. Marvel has historically taken more of a theology from below stance, focusing our attention through the eyes of those with the same flaws as ourselves.

While this has morphed over time to adapt to the current moment (something at which this art form is particularly adept), the foundations have proven to be persistent in the DNA of the different universes. I think that’s why, as deconstructionism has been the watchword for a generation, we’ve seen the suspicion that all good must inevitably turn out to be disappointing play out more in Marvel’s narrative than in DC’s.

Let’s think back to what we now know as Marvel’s Phase 1. This was the first legitimate attempt to reproduce the cohesive mythology of comics on film, and it was successful. As such, it began with normal people taking on extraordinary challenges…Tony Stark builds his iron suit, Steve Rogers takes the super-soldier serum…and are rooted in the greatest generation and the purity for which it stood. We’re then introduced to Thor, who holds good above all else, and even Bruce Banner is willing to sacrifice all of his dreams to prevent the monster raging within him from wreaking havoc. As this universe has expanded and unfolded, though, we’ve seen it adapt to the modern age. All heroism has become suspect. The Scarlet Witch became the villain, driven mad by grief. Tony Stark loses sight of morality and creates Ultron. Loki, a villain, saves the day through his self-interest. Steve Rogers gives up his shield to live a life he feels he deserves. Dr. Strange chooses to meddle with dark forces to defeat a threat to humanity, believing that the ends justify the means. The list goes on, culminating in the Thunderbolts, a team of antiheroes held together by a “why not” mentality, replacing the Avengers in a world that needs heroes, but is seen as incapable of producing them. Of the past 3 years’ worth of the deluge of Marvel offerings, only Spider-Man truly embodies the nature of a hero, and he ultimately must suffer from that decision.

In Ironheart, we thought we would see a hero, but instead are presented with a troubled character who occasionally does good, but ultimately holds a similar tragic flaw as Stark. It’s difficult to define Riri Williams, who writers forced into Wakanda Forever. While certainly not a hero, I have difficulty defining her as an antihero, either. Rather, a character who could be intricately and compellingly written becomes a symbol of the collateral damage of what could barely be called an age of heroes, someone who ends her series making a Faustian bargain to resolve her grief.

Having never been an adherent to postmodernism, I’m exhausted, and think many others are, as well. The ultimate end of deconstruction is a void, in which there is nothing to believe, no faith to hold, a cycle of cynicism that destroys from within. In my reading of comics, I think that’s why I’ve gravitated more toward DC in recent years, because in print they have often avoided the emotional morbidity of their films.

What has always drawn me to superhero mythology is good vs. evil, the hope that the good guys win over the bad guys. This collapses in on itself, however, when good and evil are not defined. There has always been space for antihero narratives (the Watchmen being the ultimate example of this), but even in these lie a recognition of good and evil that is lacking in most of these recent films and series.

Comics as an art form have always held a mirror to the current moment. Postmodernism is troubling in its belief that all is relative, that good is often evil and evil is often good. I’m interested in the new Superman film, even with all of the flaws I see in its trailers, because it appears, at least visually, that this could mark a return to true heroism. As we look up in the sky, I’m in hopes that we’ll be reminded of what a hero looks like. If our cultural interest in deconstruction truly is waning, then the art form would be holding its mirror to that, showing that we’re ready for good again, ready for a hero.

How refreshing would that be?

To Dream a Dystopian Dream

In the before times, and certainly when I was a grad student, I wrote in this space weekly, if not more often. Contrast that with the present, when I never cease to surprise myself with the gap of time between one post and the next whenever I return here. The intention is there…my traveler’s notebook is packed with things to write out…but the time seldom is, although that’s a work in progress. Part of the problem, though, is that when I think of writing…here or anywhere else…I struggle to be positive. I want to write about the cool things I’m reading and watching, the spiritual insights that being a parent gives me, the random thoughts that drift through my head. Certainly, all of those things are still there. They’re tempered, though, with this spectre of dread in our current age.

Don’t get me wrong, I have little about which to complain. I would never presume to say that we are not blessed as a family. I have never been in a position to wonder where my next meal is going to come from. I woke up this morning to a wonderful family, and will go to bed thinking about the job I return to tomorrow and considering retirement and vacation plans. I’m living the suburban dream, in all of its tragic grace.

Regardless, though, we seem to live in an age (whether by true degree, or just because I’ve started noticing more) in which the darkness comes knocking.

Early in our marriage, my wife lovingly pointed out how much time I spent reading the news. I’ve gotten better about this, and one of the ways that I have is that I do my best to avoid news on weekends. I take a sabbath. This morning in church, though, as I was chatting with a friend, he mentioned a major international event that could spiral into a war. I, of course, had to pull out the curse that is having the Internet in my pocket and check the details. I tried to avoid it, but it found me.

At some point in my adult life, my dreams of creative and academic pursuits dissolved in favor of doing my best to provide our children with the loving stability that I had as I grew up. That was more a decision of instinct than anything else, and at times I question it, especially as I’ve come to realize that we live in a system that is designed to be able to yank the table-cloth of stability from beneath you at any moment and for no reason…a system almost sentient in its malevolence at times, and growing more so as we dare to create the AI that science-fiction authors have spent decades warning us about. Also, a quest for stability brings with it, by necessity, a certain degree of striving for financial success. And yet, I am reminded that we are to cease striving, to know that He is God.

Tying these threads together, I have difficulty writing anything positive because I’m scared. Despite our blessed state and relative freedom from worry, I am scared of the world that we leave our children, that they have to grow up in this mess. The excitement and optimism that I experienced at their age is potentially not even possible now as a faceless, opaque algorithm makes critical decisions for us without accountability, when money and science are worshipped as the gods of our age, when corruption is obscured by an inability to think critically, and when objectification of human beings is normalized. At least, when I grew up, we had a sense that we would learn and gain wisdom from our experiences, and be able to pass that down to our children in predictable environs. For the last decade, though, I’ve watched that vanish, progressively crumbling as we do things simply because we can, without ever questioning whether or not we should. Work and good intentions stand for nothing. We’re just waiting for floor to fall out.

So, I suppose I don’t write as much because my head is always full of…that.

Perhaps I’ve gotten it out, now.

Perhaps there’s something positive to hope for.

Perhaps…

Hello? Is This Mic On?

Where have all the blogs gone?

I was thinking this this morning as I was perusing my RSS reader. Being a sucker for fond remembrances of days gone by, I’ve gone through many iterations of RSS readers through the years. Each time, I port over all of the feeds that were in my previous reader. As a result, I have…well, a lot…of feeds in NetNewsWire at the moment, only a fraction of which are ever currently updated. As I scroll down the sidebar list of blogs that I have subscribed to through the decades, I remember so many fondly. I’ve met some really cool people and made friends through blogs, back when blogs were at their prime. Most of these, however, have been dormant for some time. The feeds that update on a weekly basis belong to certain prolific and popular bloggers, or larger publications. Those like this one? People who were passionately contributing their thoughts to the public sphere? I suspect that only a few of us remain.

As a rule, I’m not a trendy person. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given that I use an RSS reader to collect my feeds, as I’m guessing there are some out there who are even questioning what that is. As social media was introduced and eventually evolved to do irreparable harm to our social fabric, most readers outsourced their reading preferences to the Algorithm and stopped (perceiving themselves as) having the time to look for good writing. If something isn’t being thrust in front of our faces, we forget that it exists. My friend, that’s not a byproduct of the technological evolution. It’s by design.

So, I suppose that writers such as myself are, if not a casualty of the Internet’s impossibly fast and unhealthy evolution, then certainly relegated to a niche. In the before times, I posted two or three times weekly, and now struggle to post monthly, so this is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy. I miss those days, though, don’t you? Back before the web was weaponized?

I think that part of the phenomenon, though (and I’m being intentional to not call it a “problem”) is less engagement. I actually have little insight into who reads this as I don’t invade your privacy with analytics, so there could be hundreds of readers on each post who simply don’t comment. That would actually make sense, because I think that commenting died before engagement did in the blogosphere (and yes, I’m aware at how much I just dated myself by using that term).

I suspect that things may change though, and that this will be reflective of a cultural change. I say that because I hear…feel?…rumblings of discontent at being a culture comprised of those who consume rather than those who engage.

The first time I heard the phrase “consume media,” I had a visceral reaction. This should not be the case and has become a sad state of affairs. To consume is passive, to sit back and allow one’s brain to be flooded with entertainment without that entertainment having any substantive impact on them…the equivalent of elevator music. And, while there is a conversation to be had about minimizing the vision of the artist by refusing to look longer than 10 (metaphorical) seconds at their work, the point I’m making here is that engaging media, and, by extension, art, is an entirely different experience than simply consuming. Engagement involves thinking, unpacking, permitting oneself to be impacted by the story.

When I was in theatre, the experience of seeing a play was twofold. There was the experience of going to the show, of course, which is magic in itself. Beyond that, however, was the experience of going for coffee with your friends after and discussing what you had just watched. What did you see in the show? What did it make you think? How did it make you feel? Layers of substance are revealed in these conversations that begin to get us closer to what the playwright was trying to convey.

To some degree, that happens today in discussion forums, but not in the same way. After all, it would be impossible to meaningfully watch or listen to the amount of media that various platforms prefer us to consume in an endless stream, which maximizes the profits of them and their advertisers. One would think that, with all of this volume, smaller and more independent voices would be able to have a better chance of getting their work to you, but you see, their work doesn’t rank in the Algorithm, and we long ago ceded those RSS feeds because we didn’t want to think for ourselves.

Were blogs a solution to this? Hardly. In the days when we aggregated our own reading, though…when we went looking for things that interested us…new work had a better chance of making its way to the top.

So, I think the winds are changing, because readers and viewers and listeners are willing to pay for what they like, and are pushing back on the so-called attention economy. As they do so, and culture hopefully begins to go back to a better way of doing things, I think that blogs will regain some popularity. I’m hopeful, not because its better for the bloggers, but because its better for everyone.

Please engage. Don’t consume.

Relatively Speaking

Rewind the clock with me about 19 years. I was just married. I had been writing here for a while, as well as other places, and I was a full-time grad student. I wrote a lot of critiques…that’s the nature of being a grad student, after all…and I enjoyed doing so. To this day, if I’m thinking through a concept or a problem, the process doesn’t feel finished until I’ve written it out. That’s something about being a student that never goes away, I guess.

I wrote…and still write…reviews of movies and books here and other places. I’ve noticed a shift in my tendencies, though. When I critiqued things back then, I was…well, critical. Sometimes overly so. In reading some of the things that I wrote from that time, I sometimes feel that the me from that time didn’t feel as though he was thinking about something if it wasn’t completely torn down, many faults exposed. That’s changed, I think. Don’t get me wrong, I can still be quite critical, but I’ve noticed that if I re-read or re-watch something now that I read or watched then, I tend to receive it with a more positive attitude overall. There was at least one case in which I finished a series that I had abandoned then because I thought so critically of its writing, and was happy I did so, because it turned out to be quite worthwhile.

I heard a stunning statement recently on the Theology in the Raw podcast. The guest on the episode in question, a Dr. Miller, stated that we as a society have reached the end of postmodernism. For someone who did their graduate work in religion, like me, that’s a breath-taking statement. The theological and philosophical implications are huge, and the way that those implications inform the rest of our lives possibly even more profound. Miller states that he had come to this conclusion because he (rightly) identified deconstructionism as a hallmark of postmodernism, and felt that he had observed a loss of interest culturally in deconstructionist thought in recent years. He particularly tied this to our political moment, but I want to think more broadly than that here, because this statement, if true, leaves me with so many questions.

I recently was in a conversation with some friends around the falsehood of the idea that “the ends justify the means.” As part of that discussion, we agreed with the rejection of the concept that the means are also completely inclusive of meaning…in other words, “it’s all about the journey” rings equally hollow. There was easy agreement there, and I think now about how much of a shift that is from early 19th century thought, such as the lingering echoes of Hegel’s dialectic and how the process was most important, because truth is not static. When I think of those foundational thinkers, I think of the birth of postmodernism in the sense that postmodernism’s primary characteristic in my studies, beyond deconstructive pessimism, is moral and theological relativism. The influence of postmodernism today is felt in the pervasive…and empty…idea that there is not an absolute truth. Think of statements that encompass this:

“You do you.”

“That’s what’s right for me, it may not be what’s right for you.”

“Find your own meaning.”

“Jesus is my way.”

And, the interjection that I find so repulsive, “…for me…”.

If postmodernism is fizzling…and the longer I think about the argument, the more I am open to the idea that it’s true…the societal shift, marked by a necessary exhaustion with these sorts of rudderless drifting, are huge. An openness to a defined reality…that there has to be a truth, that it is a knowable truth, and that it would give us a common starting point for discussion…would be a positive shift, perhaps just the shift that we need culturally. If Generations X and Z, and Millenials, have been defined by postmodern relativism and cynicism, what would this mean for an up and coming Generation Alpha? What would it mean for the scientific enterprise? For education? For politics?

I’m slightly concerned that Dr. Miller’s hypothesis presented on the podcast episode may be correct…that we’re a culture that is so exhausted with denying everything that we arbitrarily choose something to be true. There could be a rebound period here in which that happens, but, if postmodernism truly is passing away, I’m excited overall to see what replaces it. Like my old critiques, I think a bit less cynicism and a bit more definition would do all of us good.