The Renaissance of Superheroes

You have all been to see The Avengers and there is Dark Knight Rises to look forward to, the last installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

This reign of comic book superheroes in our mainstream pop culture is inescapable but why, in spite of all the movies, television shows and brilliant comic books produced all these years, is it during this day and age that they have attained such an elevated place in our collective cultural imagination?

What do they represent to us?

It goes beyond mere escapism. To call them the gods of our time, as Grant Morrison does in his book ‘The Supergods’, seems rather naïve.

As people, we hate to be told we can be better, we want to be told we are already good to begin with, the best even. The modern day retelling of these comic book superheroes show us this; flawed, shadowy, egoistical, insecure, out of place, lonely individuals struggling with their place in the world and in doing so take on forms and personas which elevate them almost to the level of demigods.

Some do so by training and acquisition of a particular skill set, some do so by genetic experimenting gone awry, some do it with a lot of money and technological expertise. What makes them all similar is their inane desire to immerse themselves into battling for a vision that is bigger than themselves, the greater good of mankind. In doing so, they find an escape from their self-doubts and issues.

This specific means of empowerment combined with escapism employed by the superheroes is very apparent, especially in their big screen reincarnations. It is almost as if this is the hook which draws us to the cinemas and renders these movies the blockbuster hits which they have become.

At best, we want to nurse the idea, however deeply buried, that no matter how flawed and irredeemable we may seem, we will step up to save the day when the occasion calls for it.

At worst, we hope that some day the collective vision of a better society will drive away the increasing disconnectivity we feel and imbue our lives with the much longed for sense of community, that sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.

A whole range of social institutions and constructs have been created over the course of history to proffer this feeling to us – religion, family, nation state etc.

Yet these very same things have also divided us time and again, so we look towards other sources to make us feel part of a united whole. Think about how effective the World Cup and the Olympics are in doing this – it definitely explains the continuation of these events till today.

These international sporting events, like the abovementioned movies, involve exalting mortals as heroes.

Perhaps it is not gods that we need after all, but merely heroes, people like you and me, willing to do what it takes to get up on the pedestal, for the good of an entity larger than themselves, be it a country or mankind itself.

If they chose this path because they witnessed their parents get mugged and murdered in a dark alley and vowed in the presence of their dead bodies to make the city crime-free like in the case of Batman, it is not for us to judge.

Ambition and drive are necessary inventions of our times – their underlying motivations, often cast in the murky recesses of our beings, tend to be forgiven (though not necessarily forgotten). We all have our inner demons after all.

That is the inherent understanding of the twenty first century individual: sometimes the man who is angry all the time i.e. The Hulk can save the world, sometimes the shadows can create light.

More crucially, movies such as The Avengers show us how this happens -when one drinks from the modern day elixir of empowerment and self-styled exceptionalism.

 

Reena Devi

 

 

 

 

Roar

Inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s Poem entitled Howl

There are no best minds of my generation.
We are merely abject failures perpetually poised on the cusp of greatness
Constantly apologetic for our pursuit of freedom and independence
Caught between the dichotomy of suburbanite expectations and an urban lifestyle.
These are the Confucian horrors of our times.
Lest you worry I am being racist, I will spare you the pedestrian angst – I do not blame our ancient fathers of varied colours, I only blame us.
We are living their legacy with only the fortitude of preservation. The wanton spirit of creation is lost in the rhetoric you spew about my colour versus yours, my country versus yours, my religion versus yours.
War on the streets has been helmed but the war of words has grown.
To what end, at what cost?

We are a land of myth and magic;
Recall the geographically impossible sighting of a lion by Sang Nila Utama,
The mythical Merlion that guards our shores,
We are the land of transformation, impressive and impossible in scope.
Ignore this at our own peril,
Becoming the land where only the reinforced myth of conservatism prevails.
If I tell you, you are better than everyone else, you will listen to me.
If I tell you, you can be better than yourself, you do not hear me.
If I tell you marriage, children, a HDB flat is not my choice of life, you stare befuddled and ask, ‘but doesn’t everyone want those things?’
People, who know us not, look at this mindlessness and think this must be the product of a long sustained suppression by an external form, a government.
But the repression is within.
An island tied to none, mistaken for bigger continents, we are entirely consumed as a negligible civilization with being the best of the best.
To what end, at what cost?

See the earth we dig deep, the rage that flows out of it, it is our rage.
We are angry,
We are alienated, locked away from our own psyches, oblivious to the varied lives, the diverse options, the endless possibilities.
We see only our fractured selves in each other and rage and rage and rage.
We fuss over identity like mannequins in a store window
Grappling for the insides with only frozen smiles on plastic faces.
We love,
Not as a voyage of discovery,
But as a necessary step in the narrow ladder of social acceptability.
Look upon this mirage of a classless society,
Witness social mobility becoming a foregone conclusion of another era.
To be asked to forecast the trends of the future
Then shut down by the soothsayers of the past,
It is cockblocking for the brightest minds;
This intelligentsia the world sees as powerful sharks,
But you, with your breakable ego,
Only willing to acknowledge mediocrity,
Irrationally look upon them as guppies in a small pond.

Surely this vicious cycle has only one doomsday conclusion
Yet we float, buoyed by the sheer tenacity of a structure laid in place by foresight
Foresight, my friends, is the ability to look out of the past into the future,
To view the immortal land of being with the steady gaze of a pragmatic.
Who can do this?
Now you see what I see
There is no greatness in my generation
We have swallowed the past or spat it out, whenever it suits us.
We live in the present, drunk on the power of potentia.
You have it all, you have what it takes, you are the leaders of tomorrow
And yet we are none of this.
In this age of diversity and discernment and power to the agile,
To lead is not to redeem or conserve, it is to break and build, time and again,
Till death and birth become one and the same,
The shadows of the unknown resurrecting the powerful and the wise.

Reena Devi

This poem is for the ones who love me best uncaged…