Everyday people

I'm writing a paper concerning the epic as it regards a certain Early Fritz Lang film called Siegfried. Siegfried is among the legendary heroes of the Germanic peoples, and examining what it is that makes the epic mode what it is, I've stumbled upon something I think rather important.

Most fiction created in contemporary Western culture that serves the purposes that the epic once did are crap. Deeply unsatisfying. In some significant way, the superhero comic stands for the epic mode. Like so many American modes of cultural production, the superhero comic has seen radical changes and inversions in the past few decades. Just as in the pictures, one can't go from a genre featuring heroes to one featuring antiheroes and back without suffering somehow.

Despite the current relative vogue for Superhero film adaptations, there is something unsettling, weird, wrong, about the Spiderman and X-Men movies, and their inferior cohort. What is most troublesome is that the rise of the antihero type and the attendant changes in US society have introduced a Realism into a genre concerned with myth and metaphor. While the two can occasionally coexist (I'm thinking at the moment of The Seventh Seal), there is something about the difference between Tobey Maguire as Spiderman and Christopher Reeve as Superman (and i don't think this is just the difference between the myths of each*) that makes Spiderman small and useless. His world and its stakes are too familiar and quotidian. Take out the superweapons and supervillians, and this is not the majority of the film, and you have a blend of adolescent confusion and realistic angst about intimacy and responsibility.

The Incredibles deals with these issues in an exceptional, perhaps even brilliant manner. But it does so in a way that invites imitation. Just as Scream presented itself as the answer to the stuck, tired horror genre, only to be sequeled and imitated until the product, the self-aware teen horror movie, becomes both ubiquitous and significantly less charming than a fourth-hand Z-grade ripoff of Halloween, so there's a danger of a crop of self-aware superhero flicks that gracelessly recycle and misinterpret this film.

The Incredibles seems to be very much about what it is to be exceptional and how the contemporary world has little use for this. What keeps the film from being stuck in a hellish continuous lecture about responsibility and the ugly consequences of being superhumanly strong in a world where builing collapses flatten children and old ladies is what pulls Mr. Incredible out of retirement- a crisis which turns the ordinary world of 9 to 5 and babysitters and laundry into a world where the stakes are exceptional and all the ugly consequences are thereby mitigated.

it is only by resorting to unreality, or at least a reality so far removed from our own as to be genuinely alien, that myth can really fit into it. It is only through some significant measure of fantasy that a fiction can talk about its culture on this kind of scale. And I can easily imagine Peter Parker with a fever blister or a hangover.

*Superman is unlike either Batman or Spiderman (probably the most beloved superheroes) in that Clark Kent is Superman's costume and not vice versa. Superman's authentic self is a superheroic alien, not a vengeful billionaire or a freakish youngster.