The secret identity of the superhero depends on the mask he wears. In Moore’s Watchmen, superheroes are generically referred to as “masks.” The mask is a perfect synecdoche for the superhero, the mysterious totem that makes everything possible. Masks have their place in the history of modernity, as they do in so many other histories. Bakhtin has labeled it the most complex theme of folk culture, but it accrued still more meanings in Western cultures during the Enlightenment and still more within mass culture in the twentieth century. Terry Castle has observed the “ambiguous philosophical and ethical meanings” so prevalent in narrative appearances of masks in the eighteenth century, but these ambiguities may not be as thoroughly forgotten as she might think.50 The mask had found its place within the elegant, decadent recreation of the masquerade, a carefully delineated realm of comparative abandon. In the novels of, say, Fielding, things happen under cover of the masquerade: intrigues, scandals, and a refusal of prevailing social mores are all played through. Castle notes a conflation of mask functions in these tales. Bakhtin and Caillois wrote of an “old mask” of “shamanistic ritual and medieval carnival, [that] embodied ‘the joy of change and reincarnation’—the spiritual and organic union of opposites,” and of the “mask of modern times,” which was “no more than a screen, a disguise or ‘false front,’ evoking new and sinister realms of alienation.” Castle continues: “Instead of working marvelous transformations, the mask now ‘hides something, keeps a secret, deceives.’”51
In English novels of the eighteenth century, these two ideations of the mask intertwine without resolution. The masquerade permits an uncanny return to an earlier animism. Identity is hidden, but upon this act of disguise something of the earlier talismanic power of the mask can again emerge. In Fielding, “the masquerade is that charged topos around which forgotten or subversive possibilities cluster.”52 The mask of the modern superhero is also both a “new” mask of disguise and an older mask of “marvelous transformation.”
For Bakhtin, the mask could never be “another object among objects”—it was simply too charged with meanings and functions, whether erotic, magical, or fashionable. In earlier or non-European cultures, masks marked social identity, while the modern use of the mask in the West is intended to conceal difference, protect identity. Castle points out that only after the emergence of a particular notion of the self as unique, individual, and distinct does the concealment of identity take on social significance. To protect the self in modern times, then, modern man had to don the mask, join the crowd. “Whereas the primitive mask expressed an identity to the outside, in fact constructed that identity, the modern mask is a form of protection, a canceling of differences on the outside precisely to make identity possible, an identity that is now individual.”53 Thus, the mask is invisible: for it to function, one cannot be seen to be masked.
I dwell on these ideas of masking and modernity because it seems to me that superheroes partake of some of the ambiguity that Castle ascribes to eighteenth-century English narrative as well as twentieth-century urban concerns with anonymity and the mask that cannot be seen. In their secret identities, superheroes all hide in plain sight. Superman sets the stage but also remains somewhat unique. As Jules Feiffer was among the first to observe, while all the other heroes adopted their colorful alter egos, Superman grew up hiding his true abilities.54 Superman is disguised as Clark Kent, while Bruce Wayne disguises himself as Batman. Clark Kent, mild-mannered, blue-suited, earnest, hardworking, dolefully dweeblike for most of his history, is a perfect embodiment of the masked figure of modern man. One can read so much into this particular masquerade: Superman’s adolescent creators, recognizing the repression endemic to the world of adulthood; Jewish youngsters fantasizing of being both uniquely superhuman and invisibly assimilated; American Everyman as Superman. Meanwhile, Superman is the hero without a mask, his “true” face revealed to the world, at once monumental and generic. Superman becomes us, goes among us, and we might be him. But Clark is about more than assimilation and even about more than geek dreams of godhood. This Everyman in a dependable suit depends on invisibility, the anonymity permitted by a great metropolis. He cannot be visible, and he has a secret. And so Superman and Clark subvert one another: the man who sees everything meets the man who is not seen.
But most of the others hide their faces: they can’t wait to pull on the tights, don the masks, and streak out into the bright life of the city. Here masks once again mark a social identity—the costume of the burglar becomes, following Zorro and the Lone Ranger, a sign of the vigilante hero. In their first adventures, Superman and Batman battle ordinary, uncostumed foes. Batman’s rogue’s gallery moves decidedly toward the grotesque with such villains as the Joker and Two-Face, figures who are never permitted the luxury of hiding what they are (although Two-Face, acid scarred on one side, normal on the other, carries a LOT of symbolic weight). Soon, however, with the advent of costumed and masked villains, the mask becomes less a sign of ethical status than a morally indeterminate “superness.”
Both masked heroes and villains tapped back into the history of the mask in “shamanistic ritual and medieval carnival”: in comic books, the mask once more embodied something of “the joy of change and reincarnation.” Many of these characters are literally or figuratively reborn into their new identities. Jim Corrigan is a cop murdered in the line of duty, but he returns as the domino-cloaked Spectre, a figure of unyielding vengeance. The animistic underside of the rational space of the city is exposed in bold, bright colors.
The Vigilante and the Dandy
The city is a permanent costume party, Koolhaas and Johnathan Raban remind us, and superheroes have the brightest costumes. Their outfits are streamlined amalgams of the machinic, the historical, and the organic, but they always emphasize the (increasingly exaggerated) human musculature beneath. An Alan Moore character of recent vintage actually wears no costume; she simply adjusts her pigments to superheroic patterns. When people find out she’s “really” naked, they no longer know quite where to look, but Moore’s little joke reminds us that superhero bodies have always been naked bodies exhibited to a very public gaze.
Superheroes are acrobats: their colorful tights are the garb of circus performers. Dick Grayson was a circus performer, one of the Flying Graysons, but he was orphaned when gangsters doctored the trapeze ropes (that damn acid again!). After a little training by Batman (another orphan—these cities attract them) he takes on a new role as “that astonishing phenomenon, that young Robin Hood of today—Robin the Boy Wonder!” Deadman is a reincarnated circus acrobat out to find out who had him assassinated in mid-performance, but really they’re all circus performers. There are strong men (Superman, The Thing), aerialists (Batman, Daredevil), clowns (the Joker), acrobats (Nightcrawler), ringmasters (Lex Luthor, The Ringmaster), hypnotists (Mysterio), wild beasts (Catwoman, Wolverine, Hawkman et al.), contortionists (The Elongated Man, Mr. Fantastic), fire acts (The Human Torch), escape artists (Batman, Mr. Miracle), sideshow freaks (Bizarro, The Geek, the X-Men), magicians (Mandrake, Dr. Strange), sharpshooters (Green Arrow), half-men/half-beasts (The Hulk, Swamp Thing), and a big finish (The Human Bomb).
In Sex and Suits, Anne Hollander describes several shifts in the history of “civilized” attire. At some point dress began to mark differences of gender, and not simply of class, and the neoclassical moment “put a final seal of disapproval on gaudy clothes for serious men.”55 While the man’s suit was a dynamic yet subtle manifestation of bodily power—flexible and flowing, closely shaped to torso and mobile limbs—men’s clothing also moved away from flamboyant color and excess. The superhero costume marks a return to earlier modes of male self-presentation by combining Rococo ornamentation (with its flashing colors, flowing capes, epaulets, and talismans) with a classical ideal in which “the hero wore nothing but his perfect nudity, perhaps enhanced by a short cape falling behind him. The nude costume was the one most suggestive of perfect male strength, perfect virtue, and perfect honesty, with overt
ones of independence and rationality. The hero’s harmonious nude beauty was the visible expression of his uncorrupted moral and mental qualities” (87). Purity and performative flamboyance were thus uniquely combined in the superhero’s costume. And, if Batman eschewed color to embody instead his heart of darkness, Robin the Boy Wonder was right by his side, accoutered in red tunic, yellow cape, and green booties.
The appeal of classical purity speaks for itself, but flamboyance is the real issue here. Alongside the image of an idealized, classical self, superheroes further embody a male fantasy of flamboyant, performative intemperance, something blocked by the pragmatic, self-controlled economy of a historically constructed masculine cultural identity signified by the visual drabness of his closet. But many of those closets have secret doors opening onto a broader sense of what is appropriate for the boy or man. Our costumed vigilante is perhaps something more a dandy, a flamboyant, flamboyantly powered, urban male, who, if not for his never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way, would probably be ordered to “just move it along.” What battles against “crime” and “corruption” really do, it seems, is license the donning of the superhero garb, legitimate the movement out of the home, through the window, and into the secret magic of the urban night. The fantasy, then, is one of dressing up—superheroes don’t wear costumes in order to fight crime, they fight crime in order to wear the costumes.56
Here it seems that I’m edging up on a homoerotic reading of buff closet queens escaping the mundane world to mingle in secret places with their even more flamboyantly subversive enemies/allies/doppelgangers. But that’s been done. Instead, I’d like to soften the reading and spin it somewhat differently by suggesting that the superhero raids several closets before swinging out on the town, indulging in the flamboyance of urban fashion, desiring to perform anonymously but in full view, fantasizing of a presentness usually assigned to ethnic others. The superhero heads for marginalized sites, sites of nonproduction or spectacular destruction, not to impose order but to participate in, belong to, the chaos.
Perhaps the concern with “law and order” should be reconstrued to remove it from a narrow, legalistic definition. After all, the “laws” of physics and biology are more inverted than affirmed by these free-flying figures, and what role can “order” serve with regard to the flamboyant contents of the superhero’s closet? Baudelaire referred to dandyism as “an institution beyond the laws,” and despite its association with effeminacy Sartre found it more exhibitionist than homosexual at its core. Dandies operate on “their own authority” and, with “the help of wit, which is an acid, and of grace, which is a dissolvent … manage to ensure the acceptance of their changeable rules, though these are in fact nothing but the outcome of their own audacious personalities.” While superheroes, especially those who wisecrack while in the very midst of battle, seem more witless than witty, their universe is a kind of self-referential and solipsistic realm centered on an audacious performance by a flamboyant figure who is permitted to slip the bonds of conventional behavior and being. In Superman, the transcendent imperatives of the übermensch are tempered by the dandy’s unseriousness: Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird?
Baudelaire connected the dandy to the modern urban landscape, although his analysis of a more self-alienated observer, the flaneur, has received more attention of late than the seemingly blasé but relentlessly committee performance of the dandy. Barbey noted Brummell’s “air of elegant indifference which he wore like armore, and which made him invulnerable” or, Barbey quickly adds, “which made him appear invulnerable.” (If not for my childhood reading of Superman, would I even know the word invulnerable?) The costume is the sign and source of power, the mark of grace.
Norman Mailer’s “white Negro” tries to co-opt some of the dandy’s projected grace. In Mailer’s mythos the white Negro, or hipster, is a kind of racial cross-dresser, performing the perceived existential freedom of the urban black male. Rendered powerless in American society, the black man “lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory powers of the body.” The hipster partakes of this acceptance of death and danger, living as he is in the shadow of the Bomb and the Holocaust. His isolation is willed; Mailer calls it “the isolated courage of isolated people,” a fine superhero credo.
Superheroes could be some inchoate version of the same thing. Their sagas are passing narratives—Superman’s Midwestern Jewish cocreators cloaking themselves not only in the power of Superman but in the metropolitan anonymity of Everyman Clark Kent. And in his multicolored, flamboyant absurdity the superhero is also a kind of hipster, seeking to swoop down and possess the life of the street. The costume still serves as a mark of difference, but now the superhero signals an abdication of responsibility rather than becoming its exemplary figure.
So this is a fantasy of blacking up—putting on the mask permits an extroversion only in the guise of the other, which is exactly Mailer’s critique of the hipster. And, as Garelick argues, “All dandyism hints at a wish for male authochthony”—the woman disturbs the dandy’s (and the superhero’s?) perfect aesthetic self-containment. The self in motion is also a “reified, immobilized Self.”57
The foregoing analysis is valid and important, but it is also surely too damning. The dandy, according to Barbey, combines “frivolity, on the one hand, acting upon a people rigid and coarsely utilitarian, on the other, Imagination, claiming its rights in the face of a moral law too severe to be genuine, [producing] a kind of translation, a science of manners and attitudes, impossible elsewhere.” Fantasy is, after all, the place for the abdication of responsibility, a place of temporary grace.
One hesitates to play the Nietzsche card, as his name has dominated too many attempts to take superheroes seriously. Superman just doesn’t cut the mustard as an übermensch. He is to the manner born, so to speak; he doesn’t need to become a superman. Despite his power, he continues to identify with, and fight for, the values of ordinary men (hence Clark Kent), and thus he is a superman who preserves rather than sabotages the status quo. Superman is the overman domesticated, muzzled, and neutered. There have recently appeared several serious and sustained works that grapple with the Nietzchean connotations of the genre by exploring the darker relations between superhuman morality and social responsibility.58
But another aspect of Nietzsche’s thought might be more pertinent to our friendly neighborhood superheroes. Central to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science is the concept of play. Independence, the position of the overman, can only be attained through new modes of thought and thus through new languages that implicitly deconstruct the assumptions of the old. A gay science “is meant to be anti-German, anti-professorial, anti-academic. … It is also meant to suggest ‘light feet,’ ‘dancing,’ ‘laughter’—and ridicule of ‘the spirit of gravity.’”59 Poetry and play, “light-hearted defiance(s) of convention,” are the means to a new spirit of investigation: a gay science.
I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall.
Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!
I have since learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run. I have learned to fly: ever since, I do not want to be pushed before moving along.
Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.60
Thus, the plumage of the dandy is quite in keeping with the playful aspects of Nietzsche’s thought and language, although not, one must note, with the philosopher’s asceticism, which the dandy would fine tedious. The superhero does have affinities with the overman but not in the Nietzsche Lite version of transcendence that gives the hero powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, nor in the movement of the hero beyond good and evil, but rather through a basically light, playful, and performative d
ance. The superhero is our ally against the spirit of gravity: in rising brightly over our heads, he compels us to look, and look again, and then to exclaim: Look! Up in the sky.61
“Wish I Could Fly Like Superman”
The challenge in writing about comic books lies in both the dearth of scholarship and the inaccessibility of the actual objects. In many ways, the most valuable historians of the medium have been the creators themselves, in particular those writers, editors, and artists who have continuously revitalized the genre over the last twenty years, who have pushed and prodded the idea of the superhero in all directions.62 Because of course superheroes are real: they have history and have exerted a material impact on culture for sixty years. Most of us have grown up in a world of superheroes, a world in which the original Superman, jumping his one-eighth mile and chucking cars about, seems, let’s fact it, like a bit of a wuss. Anything less than planet-shattering power isn’t worth the computer-colored paper it’s printed on. But some recent comics have begun to settle back to Earth, fueled by the recognition that the real power of the superhero is primarily iconic.
Hence the spate of stories about being, or wanting to be, a superhero. Watchmen and Astro City are filled with citizens dreaming of superheroes or superheroics, and James Robinson’s updating of Starman centers on the aging hero’s son, who reluctantly takes up the heroic mantle and gravity rod but won’t wear the tights. In 2000, DC Comics published its Realworld series, in which “fictional superheroes influences all-too-human people to attempt superhuman things.”63 Realworlds: Batman gave us a youth who thinks he’s Batman. He poses in his homemade costume on the cover, beneath the Bat logo from the 1960s television program, surrounded by Bat paraphernalia of every kind, including a poster of New York he has relabeled “Gotham.”64
The Superhero Reader Page 29
