Superheroes have become mass entertainment again. This isn't really news: anyone who has gone to the movies at anytime in the past 10 years has surely noticed the proliferation of masked crusaders on the big screen, making the leap from ink to actor.
Why have superheroes suddenly regained the popularity they once had? The answer seems to lie in the stresses and strains of history.
As the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." Carlyle claimed that the ideal of a hero was something no one in the general populace could aspire towards and that the best we could do was to follow those elected for mighty tasks.
This idea seems to have fallen out of use by historians in the present day. The prevailing modern viewpoint is better expressed by Tolstoy's postscript to War and Peace, in which he argues that history is driven by powerful forces of circumstance -- where the moment controls the man rather than the man controlling the moment.
Today, it seems that we live in a world driven by shadowy and sinister forces of circumstance that are largely beyond our ken. We are constantly (yet quietly) menaced by the threat of violent extremism, economic collapse and ecological terror. We also have to deal with vast and impersonal bureaucracies on a daily basis.
No wonder, then, that superheroes have seen such a resurgence, providing a counterpoint to the threatening historical forces swirling around us, which seem to drive time and tide before them mercilessly.
When comic books were at their height in the 1950s, the situation was much the same: the Cold War was coming into bloom and the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed a tangible possibility. Men who could master chaotic situations were a valuable yet scarce commodity.
One of my friends -- a comic book aficionado -- remarked that "superhero movies are popular because they teach us about the hero within, which is why the classic moment is nebbish Clark Kent ripping open his suit to reveal the Superman shield."
People watch superhero movies to find reflections of the unmade heroes within themselves. Thus, Peter Parker, a remarkable man beset with trivial everyday problems of love and work (as well as grappling with a cosmic order of debacles as Spiderman) appeals to our sense of ourselves trapped in a drab and mundane world where we are wholly unable to reveal our miraculous secret identities.
Peter Parker is not so much a representation of what we wish we were, but a reflection of what we believe ourselves to be. The same goes for heroes like Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, et al.
While Carlyle thought that all we could do was follow heroes, his colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had a rather different notion. He thought that the potential for the heroic existed in absolutely everyone, and that the goal of life should not be to surrender to the leadership of great men, but to develop one's own potential for heroism, whether that be in the arts, philosophy, politics or science.
This idea seems to lie at the core of Americans' own assumptions about themselves -- the idea that one's individuality must be fully expressed, and that this, without consideration for money or material gain, is the path towards one's mental and spiritual salvation.
How cheerless and disheartening it is then (at least in the short term) to be born into a world so dominated by the essential entropy and chaos which we label "circumstance," that we must search for heroes not within the conduct of our lives but on a screen!
But perhaps the prevalence of superheroes in popular culture does indicate a new development in our consciousness, and the hero within will be made manifest once more.
