It’s getting to be summer movie time, and I’ve noticed something about this year’s movies. Several of them are films based on comic book superheroes. Examples include “X-men: First Class” and “Green Lantern.” Of course, we’ve had movies based on comic book superheroes for a long time now. Batman, Superman, and Spiderman have become movie franchises, spawning numerous iterations of their heroic tales. At the level of story these movies rarely if ever rise above the level of the comic books on which they are based. Their characters are one dimensional and their plots simplistic and unbelievable. Yet the genre never dies. It seems we can’t get enough of superhuman heroes battling it out with and defeating really villainous villains who threaten the peace and good order of our cities. As I have watched the trailers for this summer’s batch of superhero movies on television something has occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before. I want here to explore the notion that superhero stories are our secular culture’s version of apocalyptic literature.
Apocalyptic literature is a recognized genre in theological and biblical studies. “Apocalyptic” comes from a Greek word that simply means revelation, but literature designated as apocalyptic has some specific defining characteristics. In apocalyptic literature God breaks into human history, violently, to destroy evil and those who perpetrate it and reward the faithful with justice and peace. There are several examples of apocalyptic literature in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the Hebrew Bible the book of Daniel is an example of apocalyptic literature. It condemns the empires of the world as thoroughly corrupt and evil, then envisions “one as a Son of Man” coming from on high to destroy the evil empires of the world and make matters right. The best example of apocalyptic literature in the New Testament is of course the book of Revelation. In that book, by far the most violent book in the entire Bible, God sends plague after calamitous plague on the earth to destroy evil, specifically, to destroy the Roman Empire (which Revelation calls Babylon). Then, after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have done their brutal work, God sends down from heaven a new Jerusalem, a city of peace in which there are no tears and no death and in which God resides in the midst of the people. In all of this apocalyptic literature divine intervention is required to set matters right on earth. Mere humanity is not up to the task. In all of this apocalyptic literature the divine intervention is violent. Violent divinity destroys violent humanity.
Apocalyptic literature tends to arise under specific historical circumstances. It arises in times of persecution and great deprivation. It arises when people lose hope. The book of Daniel arose in a time of persecution of the Jewish faith by Greek rulers. The book of Revelation arose in a time of persecution of nascent Christianity by Rome. Apocalyptic literature appears when people feel overwhelmed by oppressive forces that they believe they are powerless to control or to defeat.
In superhero comics and the movies made from them superhuman heroes appear to defeat superhuman villains. The setting of these stories is always a world in which the ordinary forces of human good are inadequate to defeat superhuman evil. The Batman stories are a particularly good example. Villains appear with superhuman powers, often as the result of some kind of mutation or mutilation by powers that not even they can control. The Joker, Catwoman, and the Penguin are only partly human. They have outsized evil ambitions and powers, or at least abilities, that create the possibility that they may indeed fulfill those ambitions. Police Commissioner Gordon is at a loss. He represents the normal human forces for good, for the rule of law and safety for the citizens of Gotham City. All he can do it appeal to a superhero, Batman, to come to the rescue. He shines the Bat Signal into the sky, that is, toward heaven, and the superhero appears. Batman, who is human and yet somehow more than human, does what the ordinary humans in the story cannot. He defeats the evil schemes of the super villain. He restores order, then turns the city back over to the mere humans.
Note the similarities to apocalyptic literature.. In both types of literature the forces of evil and oppression are too strong for ordinary humans to overcome. In both types of literature the humans turn to a superhuman force for help, in apocalyptic literature to God and in superhero literature to the superhero. The power to whom the people have appealed intervenes, and intervenes violently. In both types of literature evil is defeated through a liberal application of violence. In neither type of literature does the transcendent power that intervenes, whether divine or mostly human, have any compunctions at all about using violence. Through violence order, peace, and justice are restored.
The first superhero in American culture was Superman, who was created in the 1930s. He gained wide recognition in American culture through a television series in the 1950s. The Superman movie franchise began in the late 1970s. Thus Superman appeared at a time when the world was indeed threatened by great evil. The 1930s saw the rise of Nazi Germany and the growing strength of the Communist Soviet Union. The world of the 1930s was a very scary place, and Superman appeared. Most superheroes battle super villains. Superman, somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t. That characteristic of superhero literature would appear later. Superman’s targets are merely human, but Superman clearly demonstrates another characteristic that superhero literature has in common with apocalyptic. Not only does he have superhuman powers, he comes from beyond the earth. He comes from the sky, the mythic location of heaven. He isn’t divine exactly. He is mortal, but he is no mere human mortal. He has superhuman strength, x-ray vision, and he can fly. He is a being from above who comes to smite those who plot evil, much like God in apocalyptic literature.
After World War II and the advent of atomic weapons the villains that superheroes battled came to have super powers themselves, and they were often the products of failed science experiments that at least sometimes involved radiation, so closely identified of course with nuclear weapons. In the atomic age the threat to our wellbeing seemed to be more than human. Nuclear weapons seemed to be a force unto themselves, dictating the policies of the superpowers in a seemingly endless arms race that threatened to annihilate life on earth. The villains of the superhero comics can be seen, I think, as mythic representations of the power of death and destruction that seemed to be running unchecked through the world. The superhuman superheroes of these stories were mythic representations of the human yearning for safety and for a way to control and defeat the powers of evil over which we seemed to have no control.
And that, after all, is what apocalyptic literature is all about. The Book of Revelation isn’t a prediction of, much less a blueprint for, a coming end of the world. It is a mythic expression of a yearning for peace and justice in the world that seemed beyond the power of mere humanity to effectuate. Because the powers that were inflicting injury and perpetuating injustice used violence as their means of maintaining order and bringing about a kind of peace, and because the violence of the Roman Empire seemed so unstoppable, the mythic imagination of the author of the book was stuck in the paradigm of violence. He imagined God as being as violent as Caesar, or more so. He imagined God using divine violence to overcome imperial violence. The violence he attributes to God is not a revelation from God, it is a projection of a limited human imagination onto God.
Today we are projecting the violence of the forces of evil onto our superheroes. They use violence to defeat violence, just as in apocalyptic literature God uses violence to defeat violence. The continued and even increased popularity of the superhero genre in our time is a symptom of our fear and our hopelessness in the face of systemic evil, the evil of empire, the evil of violence and injustice that the world never seems to overcome. Their popularity tells us that people have lost hope in the ability of mere humanity ever to overcome evil and establish a world of peace and justice. They are a mythic expression of our hope for a better world, but they are a mythic expression that, like apocalyptic, doesn’t rise above the violence that we see in those forces of evil at work in the world.
Christianity offers a different vision. Although for reasons that pass understanding Revelation is in the Christian Bible, it is profoundly un-Christian in its depiction of God and Jesus Christ as violent. It is profoundly un-Christian in its depiction of divine violence as the solution to earthly violence. Jesus Christ gives us a different vision. In him we have from God a vision of divine nonviolence as the solution to earthly violence. We have a vision of divine justice as the antidote to earthly injustice. Jesus makes a very bad superhero. He doesn’t kill anyone. He doesn’t even try to kill anyone. Instead he condemns violence even in the face of his own violent death and calls us to lives of creative, active nonviolent resistance to evil. The way of Jesus doesn’t work in a comic book. It doesn’t work in a summer blockbuster movie. Jesus doesn’t blow anything up. He doesn’t zap anyone with a death ray. He just shows us God’s way. He shows us that our way must be nonviolent because God is nonviolent. He’s no superhero of the Apocalypse. He is Immanuel, God with us. In him we find the wisdom and the strength to oppose the forces of evil with love, of violence with nonviolence, of oppression with justice. It’s not the way of the superhero. It is the way of God.
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