Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

The Nature of a Hero in the Incredible Hulk

Continuing my short posts on the previous Avengers films as I build up to this weekend’s opening, tonight’s topic is the Incredible Hulk.

I remember being very glad that a new big-screen attempt was being made for the Green Goliath when this was announced several years ago, as the previous Hulk film had been…well, let’s just say that we all prefer to forget it. This newest incarnation is a good film, though, if a bit underwhelming compared to the rest of the Avengers films.

Chronologically, the events in the Incredible Hulk occur simultaneously with the events in Iron Man 2 (how do we know this, you ask? Check out a cool rundown of hidden nuggets of visual niceties in all the movies here). Bruce Banner has been on the run for some time, though, as the film opens stylistically recalling (though Banner’s eyes) the accident that transformed Banner into the Hulk. We learn later that these experiments were veiled attempts to further weaponize the World War II “super-soldier” serum that created Captain America, and that Banner is ultimately an unintended consequence of these experiments.

Banner, and the so-called monster into which he transforms, are fascinating because they are reluctant heroes. Banner is on the run, desperate to cure himself of the transformations that afflict him, because he recognizes that the power of the Hulk is too dangerous to be weaponized (this smacks a bit of Tony Stark’s fear of his Iron Man technology falling into the wrong hands, as I’ll talk about in my next post). Banner just wants to return to his life before it went wrong, and to live it with his true love, Betty Ross. While in hiding, he reluctantly stands up for what he knows to be right when he defends a lady’s honor against the predatory men who corner her. Even when confronted by the wrong-doers later, and while pursued by those who would capture him and attempt to extract the Hulk from him to harness his power for destructive purposes, Banner still pleads for a solution that prevents him from becoming angry enough to trigger his transformation into the Hulk.

Initially, the Hulk acts on instinct, retaliating against those who hurt him. Of course, he continually astounds his military pursuers with his sheer power, because the angrier the Hulk becomes, the more powerful he becomes. However, we see the character that was originally created by Stan Lee as a hybrid between the Frankenstein monster and Mr. Hyde recognize the woman he loves, and act to defend her, even against the consequences of her revenge-driven and power-hungry father. In the end, the Hulk defends her father, as well.

When one of Banner’s rogue pursuers transforms himself into the Abomination and begins wreaking havoc among innocents, Banner has potentially been cured of the Hulk transformations. At the risk of dying himself, he leaps from the aircraft at the climax of the film in hopes of triggering the transformation. He hates and fears the Hulk, but recognizes that only the Hulk can defeat the threat that is currently taking the lives of innocents. He suspects that he cannot control the Hulk, but agrees to “aim it,” in hopes that, whatever happens to himself, the monster within him will accomplish the good that no one else can. In the end, after the Hulk’s victory, he flees his pursuers once again, and ends up alone…but gaining the ability to control the Hulk.

Bruce Banner shows the nature of a hero because, while he doesn’t choose the life of the hero, he agrees to accept it because of the unique power that he now holds. He agrees to use this power to save others, others who are helpless to save themselves, despite the risk that he may not survive the attempt himself, or may lose himself inside the monster. The fact that Banner is such a reluctant hero makes him one of the most fascinating.

Next post: Iron Man 2.

Photo Attribution: stan

The Nature of a Hero in Iron Man

In preparation for the opening of the Avengers film in the upcoming weekend, and in true geek fashion, I’ve been embarking on a week-long series of watching the rest of the Avengers cinematic canon in order, from Iron Man through Captain America. So far, I’m two films in since Thursday. My ingenious plan to take over the blogosphere that is resulting from this is to do a short post for each of the previous films, and how they relate to my thoughts on the nature of a hero. Then I’ll post a review of the Avengers film when I’ve seen it (disclaimer: I’ve been known to skip opening weekend in order to enjoy a film with the absence of opening night insanity. Time will tell if I do this for the Avengers…my excitement may just win out, in this case).

I began my retrospective, then, with Iron Man. Tony Stark is the first Avenger we see in the film histories, and he is at his narcissistic best when we meet him. Thriving on a business of arms production that he inherited from his father, reaping the enormous financial benefits of a corporation that makes weaponry for war zones and sleeping at night in a sort of willful ignorance about the sticky ramifications of where his weapons may be ending up for less than honorable purposes. Not until Stark is captured by terrorists who intend to force him to build his weapons for them does he see his technology in the use of the other side, deployed for the slaughter of innocents and perpetuation of nefarious regimes. We know, of course, that it is in this captivity that he builds the prototype armor that will evolve into the Iron Man identity, and he does so with the assistance of a fellow captor. During his escape, his fellow captor (who claims to have met Stark years ago at a formal function, but who Stark cannot, of course, remember), sacrifices himself in order to assure Stark’s success. With his dying breaths, he tells an already guilt-ridden Stark that he has been given his life back, and that he should not waste it.

This is beginning of the end for Tony Stark’s intentional naiveté, and he begins to ask questions of what his company is doing. Suddenly, he is able to see that his technology can be found in various war zones being used by evildoers, and he vows that his company will stop making weapons. When the company continues its weapons business in spite of him, he assumes the Iron Man identity to use his own technology to defeat what he has already built, taking on a singular focus of ridding the world of an evil that he created (he tells Pepper Potts later in the movie that this is “all there is”).

Tony becomes a hero when he chooses to live out the forgiveness that he has received, to act out redemption on whatever parts of the world that he can impact. Of course, he does not experience a complete change: we still see an arrogant and self-absorbed Stark in the second movie. Tony Stark, however, assumes the mantle of a hero because he has been forgiven much, and chooses to not waste the redemption that he has been offered.

Going in order, my next post will on the Incredible Hulk.

Photo Attribution: mikequozl

Lockout

I’m re-visiting a topic that I wrote about recently because…well, because I think that it’s a topic that deserves discussion, and also because it re-surfaced for me this week when I read this memo from the faculty advisory council of Harvard detailing how the subscription prices that the school pays for academic journals have reached a level that is unsustainable.

Now, this is a bit of a sticky subject, partly because I’m a writer, and because I have several friends and a spouse employed in academia. Let me say up front that I recognize that getting an author’s writing into the hands of readers in published form is not an inexpensive process. I also recognize that professors and researchers perform a critical public service and should be paid well, and, as with nearly any profession that provides critical public services in the U.S., they are grossly underpaid now. I recognize that publishers must earn enough money to cover the costs of distribution and to pay their marketers and editors and designers, etc.

All that said, though, I have a problem when businesses opportunistically seek to earn a profit from critical public services, and an increasingly large profit, at that. University professors are conducting their research to contribute to the development of their disciplines. This is how knowledge grows. All of these disciplines, whether they are arts, humanities, or sciences, are components of our society at large. Thus, while the professors’ teaching is reserved largely for those paying for a seat in their classroom, their research is conducted for the public good, and, in the case of public schools, are funded at least in part by public money.

We consider access to our culture’s literature to be a right, not a privilege. That is why publicly funded libraries exist (although some areas have tragically chosen to curtail that funding). I would argue that access to research conducted for the public’s best interest is also a right. To take research that is conducted, written, and reviewed for accuracy by peers, all for the public good, and trap it behind a paywall that, by definition, limits the number of people who can access it, is an approach that I find to be misguided at best, and reprehensible at worst. Yet, just as publishers have moved to rob the public of its right to read literature by limiting ebook access to libraries for fear of losing profit, so do some academic publishers appear to be limiting scholarly pursuits by placing exorbitant prices on their subscriptions.

For a school of the economic stature of Harvard to declare the subscription prices of academic publishers unsustainable is indicative of a very, very serious problem. Yet, acceptance of publishers supporting these business models seems to be so widespread as to even have Congressional support. Is the goal to preserve an academic, ivory tower elite by also preserving a public that remains largely illiterate of new research in various disciplines by virtue of the fact that it has no access to that research? Doing so smacks of pre-Reformation church practices of perpetuating Scriptural illiteracy and subsequently selling indulgences.

As I know many professors, I can tell you that this is not the goal of the researchers. They, like artists, are interested in their work being available for the public to engage, and for the public to walk away from this engagement growing as human beings. As with artists, though, researchers are subject to the fact that distributing their work places them at the whim of publishers who sometimes place needless limitations on who can read their work.

I’m happy to see that Harvard is encouraging its faculty to seek publication in open access journals, because they have the academic and cultural prestige necessary to help force this into common practice. I believe that open access should be the future of academic publishing. What this looks like for professors and researchers, I don’t know.

What I do know is this: as new ways of instant distribution and communication have become ubiquitous, both traditional and academic publishers must stop dragging their feet in embracing and adapting to new models simply because they fear some of their precious money slipping through their fingers. Doing so will result in more authors and researchers choosing to simply bypass them altogether to place their work into the public sphere. Adapting to concepts like open access is in everyone’s best interest.

And by “everyone,” I mean all of us.

Photo Attribution: G&A Sattler

The Fallacy of Formulae

Not far into the rhythm of my week, I was startled to see the news that no Pulitzer prize is being awarded for fiction this year. Apparently, for the first time since 1977, the jury concluded that none of the finalists were worthy of the award.

Wow.

I think “wow” because I also read this very thought-provoking post hypothesizing how the Great Gatsby, a novel that few would dispute as an American classic, would have an enormously difficult time being accepted for publication today by any mainstream publishing house because it was not formulaic. That is, it didn’t contain the elements needed to ensure sales.

It’s that last part that concerns me: the literature that passes successfully through the gatekeepers of mainstream publishing and into the hands of a nation of readers (although that part of our population is tragically shrinking) is passed, in (large) part, on the ability of the novel to sell. That’s because publishers seem to be far more interested in making money than in circulating quality literature, just as are record labels or movie production studios guilty of this in their own realms. This is, I’m convinced, the phenomenon that drives Hollywood to produce such vast amounts of garbage, while depth thrives at indie film festivals.

Now, I don’t intend this post to be a debate between the merits of traditional publishing and the merits of self-publishing. I’m just expressing concern that a jury of reviewers, in looking over our nation’s literature for a year, cannot find anything worthy of the honor of this prize. Nothing. As a nation, from a literary standpoint, we didn’t cut it. Yet, sales of books thrive, partly because sex sells, as do other formulaic components, and partly because genre fiction far eclipses literary fiction on the shelves of most bookstores (I think of the three consecutive shelves of YA at my local Barnes & Noble, for example). And that’s the problem, isn’t it, with genre fiction? Formulaic components.

Please don’t hear this as being a slam on genre fiction, either. I write genre fiction. I grew up on genre fiction, and I love it (science-fiction, specifically). I just recognize that, while certain formulaic elements make up certain genres (the predictability of James Bond-style espionage books, for example, or murder mysteries), the risk of using these formulae for the profit of publishers is a “dumbing down” effect of the literary landscape at large.

Good writers should be paid well for their craft, as should any good artist. However, when profit is the driving motive for writing (or recording, or painting, fill in other mediums of expression here), the culture is in trouble. So many authors whose works we consider “classics” today didn’t write for the money, and often didn’t receive much, either. Their stories, though, helped shape a national psyche, and continue to contribute to our journey through the human experience. Were this the driving motive in Hollywood, I imagine we would see significantly fewer big-action, huge-explosion movies with cheesy lines. Were it the driving motive in literature, I’m confident that we would see a great deal less vampire fiction.

Not everything can be reduced to a formula. I think that formulaic elements can be used successfully in storytelling, but, like the spices you use when cooking dinner, using them sparingly is best. Otherwise, the taste becomes overwhelming.

Photo Attribution: balise42

Rewinding to the Little Things

Any poet, I think, would tell you that the little things are of utmost importance. It’s occurred to me lately that it’s the little things that we had once known, but have since forgotten, that are of enormous importance. Or, at least, the things of which we need to be reminded.

I was taking a walk over the weekend to enjoy the sudden appearance of beautiful weather in the Southeast, when, as I passed through the parking lot between our apartment and some of the adjacent apartments in our complex, I saw a plastic soda bottle stuffed full of leaves. It was lying in the midst of some branches with a sort of pool of leaves around it, and you could almost imagine the young child collecting leaves for his elementary school science project or something of the sort. In fact, as there are a lot of young professionals with families in our apartments, there were several children running around nearby on that sunny evening, and I imagine that it was likely one of them. I wish that I had taken a picture, because the entire event just seemed so carefree.

Similarly, I was walking around the apartment entertaining our daughter (read: having her on my shoulder because she didn’t cry there) and looked out of the sunroom window to see a little girl across the parking lot ordering some papers that she had been drawing on, or some similar activity, when her (I presume) mother and brother caught her attention, and she ran to greet them…totally forgetting about the papers, which proceeded to travel away on the wind.

This sort of makes me think of the time my parents gave me a balloon when I was very young. I took it outside and into the backyard of our rural home to play with it, and promptly let the string slip through my fingers. Away went the balloon. Much sadness and an improbable theory that perhaps a passing airplane would assist me by catching my balloon ensued as my parents gently tried to explain to me that the balloon was lost, but that there would be others.

I have a thousand other memories of childhood, and have occasionally written about them here, that obviously made a lasting impression on my life. Yet, I tend to forget them…that is, they aren’t in the forefront of my memory unless something specific triggers them. When they are triggered, I find myself blooming in the innocence with which life was enveloped then…a poetic sort of event. Since we had our daughter, I’ve been much more likely to recollect these sorts of things, because watching her innocently explore her new world leads me to relive what it was like to explore mine.

There’s something disproportionately large about the experiential gap between what we know and what we know with certain life events. When Karen and I were married, I was told by many wise people that marriage was a “lot of work.” I went into the marriage with my eyes wide open, knowing that it would be a “lot of work,” and prepared to dive headfirst into whatever that work might look like. About a year in, there were times when I thought, “wow…this is a lot of work!” What I had known only as a cognitive theory previously, I now knew experientially, and it was an entirely different level of knowledge.

I remember others telling me that being a parent is difficult, that it is wonderful, and those sorts of things. I knew they were meaning well and speaking the truth as they knew it, but I honestly always thought that they were being a bit melodramatic. Now, only six months in, I recognize that this is difficult! And also wonderful beyond anything that I could have imagined.

I’m glad that this incredibly difficult, incredibly wonderful way in which my life shifted sideways leads me to recall those more innocent moments, because I want our daughter to have just as many amazing memories from her childhood. Those are the memories that I have a role in making now.

There’s something wonderfully poetic about that.