Up Up And Away...

“I'm gonna knock down every wall (I find)
gonna spit out bullets
gonna be a hero (the super kind)
can you dig it?
Cause someone needs to clean things up
before things get much worse…” – Superman by Down By Law.

I went to see Superman Returns on Thursday night. It was exactly what the doctor ordered. I had been feeling a little run down, and seeing the man of steel back in action really recharged my batteries.

I thought it was really well done. It had great effects, and decent casting, with the notable exception of the “Lois” character, which fell kinda flat. Kevin Spacey on the other hand, makes a great “Lex Luther.” You could almost call him Saintly evil. (If evil had it’s own set of “Saints” I guess…)

Singer did a great job with the story too. There was less of the hokey “Golly Gee Whiz” stuff and more grit, but it never had to sacrifice any of the humour in the process.

Since I was a kid, I have believed that comics are a near perfect blend of morality tales and mythology. I think we can learn a lot from them. Few things in popular culture hold as steadfast when it comes to stories of definitively right vs. definitively wrong. In comics, it gets laid out for the reader in black and white. Rarely can you mistake it’s message. Marshall McLuhan might be inclined to argue they are the perfect medium. (Because he asserts that the message is the media…)

But perhaps in a way, that’s also where they fall down. There is no subtext to chew over. With so little for the left-brain to process, they become too preachy and stale. (Well for some anyway… it is just a theory after all…) One could argue that they tend to hit you over the head with the message.

It is however difficult not to see them as a mythology. The varied pantheons of Gods and Goddesses from the ancient word are really no different than these modern characters. Hercules and Superman have a lot in common, and not just on the surface. Both are flawed in some fashion, both come from Gods in their own right, and more specifically both were created by humans to teach us something about ourselves.

In the movie, Lois Lane gets a Pulitzer Prize for writing an article titled “Does the world really need Superman?” It’s not too difficult to imagine a point when Greek society asked the same question about their own Gods.

I realize that I’m talking about a fictitious character(s), but I pretty sure I’m not the only one who has ever wished there was a Superman, and more importantly wondered what life would be like if we had such a fantastic protector.

If nothing else, I would argue that this world could really use a Superman. He would be useful to us even If his only purpose were to remind us of one fairly heady and important notion.

“Only when we are no longer afraid, do we begin to live!”

Somewhere along the way our society forgot that. It wasn’t terrorism that made us forget. Nor was it tragedy or religious differences either. Those were just symptoms of the problem. We were told to be afraid and we bought it.

Mind you it was an easy sell. Being bombarded with negative messages that fester in the conscience made us a brilliant tool to be manipulated.

Superman also teaches us another important lesson. Humanity has great potential, but they way we are now demonstrates very little of that.

To bad eh? Maybe if we can asuage our fears, we might see that potential one day.