Hercules: Meta-myth and Mockery

I took yesterday evening to watch Hercules, the latest installment in this decade's Greek mythology blockbuster rampage. And it was alright, as a film. It was corny as hell, packed with oiled musculature, two-dimensional characters, and over-the-top, predominantly bloodless violence. It was pretty, that's for sure. It was also an immense disappointment. I watched this film to experience a legend that has existed in the Western consciousness for thousands of years, a core part of the mythology of the ancient Greeks. Even as a modern, Canadian kid the story of Hercules and his twelve labours was one of the first I knew. The Nemean Lion, the Hydra, this son of the gods and the monsters he defeated by his supernatural strength. I could go on, but you know the stories, right? They're with you, too. Those are the stories I expected to see on screen, as I suspect you will as well. The trouble is, those stories aren't there.

What the film offers us is a flimsy frame-narrative-esque structure, introduced and concluded by the voice of a storyteller (Amphiaraus) who is also a character in the main story (a seer laden with stoner references), but including a second storyteller character (Iolaus) whose role is essentially to propagate exaggerated stories about the feats of Hercules. He's the hapless spin doctor for this party of adventurers, all of whom are well aware that they're riding on the legendary reputation of...a man, and nothing more. The movie runs through the Twelve Labours of Hercules in its first five minutes, short, epic bursts of battles with The Nemean Lion, The Lernaean Hydra, The Erymanthian Boar, before cutting to Iolaus who is clearly telling these stories with the intent of putting the fear of the gods into the crew of pirates who have him prepped for a gravity-assisted castration. As the film progresses it becomes apparent that not one of those deeds was what the stories made it out to be. Iolaus only role here as a character, despite his place in Grek mythology as a great hero, is to provide comic relief while making a mockery of the cultural role of Storyteller. That reverential position, this movie says, was actually occupied by hacks and opportunistic frauds. It even mocks the viewer, offering glimpses of real wonder before revealing them for optical illusions or plain old craziness. How silly you were to believe in that! The lion and the boar were nothing but monstrous wild animals. The visions of Cerberus that haunt Hercules are, in the end, flashbacks to a drug-induced hallucination during an attack by three wolves. A scene which has Hercules returning to court bearing the heads of the Hydra in a sack takes a turn for the mundane when he pulls King Eurystheus aside and reveals the severed heads of men wearing snake masks. No wonder, he says, the people thought it was a many-headed monster terrorizing the villages. By the time the film is finished with the Labours of Hercules, the story resembles nothing so much as an episode of Scooby Doo.

It's a wonder that the lion skin doesn't have a zipper on it

The result of all this is that the story isn't offering us true mythology, but rather "meta mythology". This term may already exist in academic discourse, but I can't seem to find a concrete definition of it so I'll adopt it for this article. Rather than tell us the stories that the Greeks were telling the filmmakers have opted to tell us their "what actually happened" version, a behind-the-scenes to Greek mythology. What actually happened, they would have us believe, is that a couple of storytellers pulled the wool over the eyes of a whole culture of suckers, and that the stories those poor saps believed went on to become the most enduring narrative tradition in the Western world. This does the storytellers of old a great disservice; it takes Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Hesiod and the rest for utter fools. It waters down their tales into propagandist drivel while preaching a modern, individualist message of "the strength within" that has no bearing on the stories it claims to adapt. The film closes with Amphiaraus narrating; he asks rhetorically, "Was Hercules the son of Zeus? I don't think it really matters."

Doesn't it, though?

In the latter half of the 1930s, Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel were working their arses off in Cleveland to work the kinks out of a character they were calling "Superman". The premise of the character was that he was part adventure hero, part science fiction wonder, part biblical figure, part sideshow strongman. He was Charles Atlas, Doc Savage, Moses, and Flash Gordon rolled into one. Nobody has ever come along and proposed that these two Jewish kids were delusional and actually believed in the character they were writing, nor that the millions of fans who have grown to love the stories of Superman over the years are all hapless saps who are falling for some elaborate farce. It is well recognized and widely accepted that Superman is two things. First, he is fictional. Second, he embodies the cultural values of his creators and reflects the context within which he was made. Why we can so easily accept this about superheroes and be utterly clueless about ancient myth is beyond me.

Now, imagine a Superman movie that takes the Hercules route. Imagine DC making a movie that starts out as Superman, but slowly reveals that he's not bulletproof, he just wears Kevlar all the time. He's performed some crazy staged stunts in Metropolis to win the favour of the people, making sure nobody gets hurt. As a newspaper reporter he's spinning his own image, expanding his own feats in print to cultivate a legendary persona. He's even hired stunt doubles so he can be reported "saving" people at impossibly separate location around the city. "Was Superman actually Kryptonian? I don't think it really matters." Remember, viewer! Because he believes he's a hero, he really is. Oh, and DC announces at Comicon that this version of the character is now official canon.

People would hate that movie.

At this point, go read this article about the nature of mythology by Joshua Unruh. It's great, which is why I'm going to quote him heavily. Josh focuses on the point that this movie deliberately circumvented, that the power of mythology comes from the values that the stories communicate through their figures.

Mythology’s primary purpose was never to explain how but instead to explain why. To give a meaning to the world outside the window that had absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of how things worked. 

As I’ve said too many times, mythology is the stories a culture tells about itself. Nobody who does any scholarship about myths sees them as serious attempts to explain the natural world except in the broadest, most philosophical sense. They are educational tools meant to tell someone within the culture how to behave within the culture, how to excel in the culture, and what to beware about the culture...  

To assume that these stories so full of profound cultural relevance and revelation (and constantly refilled and re-revealed for each new culture that discovers them) are just what the poor simpleton ancient people used as “science” is to miss utterly the point of them. It also makes you a bigot against everybody who lived on this world before you.

There is no self-reflexivity in Greek myth. Homer didn't write The Odyssey with quantifying statements of, "or so it is said". It is simply written as though it happened, and when the audience willingly suspends their disbelief the stories become a window onto the world. So, what drives a writer to want to suck the power out of a cultural narrative? Maybe pride, the "Anachronistic Elitism" Unruh proposes (We modern folk can have our heroes, but damned if we'll let you primitive savages keep yours!). Or maybe it's some postmodern need to refresh a story by deconstructing it.  I don't know for sure, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

In the end the film loses any power it could have had by slipping into ambiguity. By this point we all know the monsters were fake, the stories were lies, there are no gods, and Hercules is just a man...but damn is he strong. Like, mythically strong, to the point where he topples a monumental statue of Hera and brings down the temple, just by putting his back into it (remember, he was able to do this because he believed in himself). This is the one moment in the film when you feel like you might actually be witnessing a mythic feat, even if collapsing the temple on top of your wrongdoers with strength granted by the gods feels more like Samson than Hercules. At the same time, it's mundane. The wrath of the patron goddess upon her city is reduced to the sheer ballistic energy of her massive marble head as it careens down the temple stairs and obliterates the corrupt king. The movie ends up being about a war, a people who believe in a bunch of crazy fairy tales, and one really buff guy with a great motivation speaker. The result is nothing short of insulting to one of the richest narrative traditions in human history.

Zack Snyder's Wonder Woman - The Measured Response

Jaime Alexander as Lady Sif
Thor: The Dark Side of the World

This morning, before Zack Snyder tweeted the Wonder Woman photo, Rose Moore wrote an indignant Movie Pilot article about the heroine's costume titled WHAT? Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is Wearing a SKIRT in Dawn of Justice!?. She is reacting to a "scoop" released earlier this week by JoBlo.com which offers details on Wonder Woman's appearance in the new film: a blue leather skirt, silver bracers, a tiara, and multiple weapons. Moore gets hung up on the idea of the skirt right from the get-go, quoting Michael Wilkinson on character history and design intention and responding with, "What we have instead seems to me a poor excuse to make a female character's costume 'feminine', and to try and emulate the looks of other popular 'warrior women' in film and tv". This is followed by photos of Xena and Sif, and then, "We get it, we get it. Putting a woman in a leather skirt and gauntlets and giving her some weapons means that she is a 'strong woman'. God forbid you dig a little deeper."

Lucy Lawless as Xena
Xena: Warrior Princess

God forbid, I'm going to dig a little deeper.

I've read a lot of material in the past months about the much-lauded Strong Female Character. From the now classic Sophia McDougall article, "I Hate Strong Female Characters", to Tasha Robinson's "Trinity Syndrome" a couple weeks back, many good points have been made about plot relevance, screen time, emotional complexity, and clothing choices. My friend Andrew Dyce wrote a great piece for Screen Rant a few weeks back looking specifically at women in superhero blockbusters, wondering when the makers of these movies are going to stop giving the gals defensive, support-oriented powers that stem from some esoteric energy source, mental instability, or nature, and lamenting the bent in screen adaptation to portray female heroes as burdened and/or corrupted by their power. Jean Grey loses control, becomes the villain. Rogue can no longer have personal contact with loved ones. Mystique suffers from something of an identity crisis. And there's Sif, who may be the only on-screen heroine in this 21st century string of superhero films allowed to revel in her power, even if that power comes de facto with being born Asgardian, but in Moore's books she's just another "popular 'warrior woman'", and cannot be upheld as a point of reference. Neither can Xena, whose television reign was more than a little revolutionary in the area of female characters who could hold their own, alongside shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These characters are improper role models because of their...skirts? Is that all it takes?

Do we consider a female character to be a poor example when they exhibit femininity by design?

The history of Wonder Woman has been beaten to death in the course of Strong Female Character debate. She was written by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s. Marston was a psychologist, the inventor of the polygraph test. He was also fond of bondage, and shared a female lover with his wife. All of this made its way into the character we know as Wonder Woman, an icon of feminine strength and liberty who will tie you to a chair and make you tell the truth. Remove femininity from that equation and you gut the character.

A long list of Strong Female Characters was shared with me a little while ago, and it prompted a lot of sound discussion. A friend of mine chimed in with a thought about much she appreciates the character of Isabelle from the Mortal Instruments books, a character who is deadly when she needs to be, girlish when she wants to be, and loves it all equally. It got me thinking about Buffy, slaying demons in and around her love life, always well-dressed and quippy, and about how often resistance of that girlish nature is used in action cinema as a critical plot point. Hanna tries so hard to relax and be a girl (Hanna), but her training ends up being stronger than that desire. Merida's entire shtick is how much she disdains her role as princess (Brave), similar to our introduction to Arya Stark (Game of Thrones). Hit Girl (Kick Ass) and Buffy may be closest to Isabelle, both very much girlish though maybe not finding their strength in that. Now we have potentially the greatest heroine to grace the silver screen, a woman who stands as an equal among the greatest male figures in her stories, whose power is rooted in her femininity. I refuse to believe that whether she wears a skirt is going to make or break that power.

The other question to emerge from that discussion was the matter of violence. Do Strong Female Characters have to be violent, physically capable women? When Man of Steel came out there was a tendency in online response to cite General Zod's ruthless and beautiful right hand, Faora, as a breath of fresh air for female characters, due to the sheer number of times she was able to punch Superman. Kudos. If combat and aggression have become prerequisites for character strength, then it's worth asking: are we defining strong women by traditional forms of masculine expression? It comes full circle, in a way. When femininity by design is frowned upon, perhaps as sexualized but possibly also as simply "weak", then we turn in the other direction and masculinize our female characters. Add to that the fact that most weaponry through history can be interpreted as phallic: swords, spears, guns, and Buffy's stake "Mr. Pointy", which Joss was sure to get full comedic mileage out of. With all of this comes language of rigidity, pointing, penetration, and the rest. It's a mess of double-entendre which some characters have been able to escape. Xena's signature weapon is a circle; Wonder Woman uses, well, rope and the truth. One way this new Wonder Woman may be able to move us towards a true modern superheroine is by presenting a woman who sees the damage humanity does through violence, and exhibits strength and power along an alternative, constructive path.

I should, I suppose, touch on one last thing, a design element I neglected in my previous piece: the heels. Where, many people are asking, is the pragmatism in wearing high heels with armour? You can't fight in that. To which I feel compelled to respond: she's a demigod who deflects bullets, wielding a sword Hephaestus forged as a gift for her...

...who the f**k are you to tell her she can't wear heels?

Man of Steel was an Inherently Antisemitic Film...Yeah, You Heard Me

Have I got your attention? Excellent :)

Alright. I just finished the first chapter of Harry Brod's book Superman Is Jewish?, and it hit me like a punch. Most people who know anything about the history of comics know that the founders of superherodom, The Greats, were Jews. Lieber (Lee). Kurtzberg (Kirby). Schuster. Siegel. Liebowitz. Eisner...and the list goes on. For a long ways. These guys were geniuses of narrative, every one, and they were all pulling from the stories they'd grown up with. Brod focuses on that influence, particularly in the case of Superman (created by Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel). He wants to come to an understanding of which elements of Jewish culture made their way onto the pages of comics in the late '30s and onward.

The answer is, "Quite a lot of them".

The biggest blow in the first chapter, though, is the recognition of antisemitism in the comics industry. Let's get this straight: when I wrote "antisemitism", you thought "Nazi". Yup. The antisemitism we're addressing here is significantly milder, though no less a cultural crime. It's more akin to an iconoclasm than a holocaust. It's a whitewashing of Judaism and its influences to make this particular brand of media more palatable to North America at large, and it has changed our beloved characters over the decades to a point where are are almost unrecognizable as the heroes they once were coughnewfiftytwocough...sorry, where was I? Ah, right. I'm not complaining, I swear. I like these heroes. After all, their altered selves are the only ones I've ever known. I'm okay with the changes, but we need to recognize that those changes happened. These aren't my thoughts; I'm getting pretty much all of this from Brod, and passing it on to you, paraphrased. However, Zach Snyder hadn't just made a Superman blockbuster when Brod was writing, so...

Why was he created? Well, he was written by two slightly-built nerdy Jewish guys in New York in the 1930s. That should tell you everything right there. Two young men who are cultural outcasts by birth, who parents set out to escape persecution and find a promised land of sorts, who wound up working the runt-end of the New York publication industry. Awesome. These guys create a story about the man that every boy wishes he was: a moral straight-edge, powerful, handsome...and then they write a flipside for him. They stick themselves in there as an "alter ego", Clark Kent, the little guy. There's a lot to unpack there...but that's not what were here for.

The basics of the Superman story are this: the planet Krypton is about to be destroyed. An alien couple sends their only child off in a small vessel to save his life, and he grows up among a people not his own. He eventually becomes a champion of those people, but disguises himself as one of them so as to live in secret. That's it, in a nutshell. So...antisemitic? Yup. Let's take a quick look at the Bible, or Bibles: the Jewish and the Christian scriptures. Christian students are used to reading Bible stories about heroic figures, like David facing down Goliath, but Jewish students know better. Take the Book of Genesis, where it all starts. It's the multi-generational saga of a dysfunctional family struggling with rape, murder, incest, lies, and theft. And then there's the stuff they do to others. The Jews have no illusions about the flawed nature of their biblical forefathers. But centuries of Christian tradition have sanctified and sanitized those stories, and the characters are looked upon as saints and moral exemplars. Superman didn't start off as a goody two-shoes. He had a little bit of bad boy in him in the '30, threatening to drop people off buildings if they didn't answer his questions, flaunting his powers and operating entirely on his own authority. Nowadays he comes gift-wrapped in an American flag. When Siegel and Schuster were in charge it was clear that the real man in the story was Superman, and Clark Kent was a puny personification of the way he saw us. But now, well, watch the movies. Where does Superman get his moral code from? Martha and Jonathan Kent, his earth-parents. DC even created a heroic past for the family, an ancestry that had the Kents sheltering Harriet Tubman once upon a time. Clark was in good hands,good, all-American hands. I'll quote Brod on this next bit:

"With each wrapping of the flag, the Superman/Clark Kent character moved up a level in what medieval Christian thinkers called the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchical order of the cosmos. Over the years, as Superman's powers increased so that he came to achieve near divinity, Clark became more humanized, even allowed to be heroic in his own right, gaining greater humanity. Over the long term a Pinocchio-like transformation turned Clark from a wooden figure of ridicule into a "real boy"."(pg.15)

And so we ended up with shows like Smallville, made possible because Clark was now a real person. Crazy. But it doesn't end there. I'm going back to Brod for this next bit; I don't trust my paraphrasing.

"By the time we reached the 2006 Superman Returns film that brought Superman back to the big screen after a long hiatus, Superman's de-Jewification had proceeded so far that he was not only the ultimate all-American, he was even being claimed as a Christ figure. Another nice Jewish boy was being resurrected as a Christian god. The Warner Brothers/DC Comics publicity machine launched a two-pronged campaign before the film's release, one aimed at the usual action-adventure crowd, the other aimed at conservative Evangelical Christians and flying under the general cultural radar, specifically positioning Superman Returns as the next Christian blockbuster, hoping to cash in on the trend following The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia." (Pg.17)

So, that got crazy. I didn't know about that ad campaign until I read this two days ago, and I can't help but think that Schuster and Siegel must have rolled in their graves. You've probably all seen that 2006 Superman film. It has this "father becomes the son and son becomes father" motif running through it, and then Supes gets stabbed in a very iconic location...not coincidence. Also note, Superman's trip from Krytpon to Earth was originally a story about an infant being saved fro his dying world. It has become, in both the 2006 movie and now in 2013's Man of Steel, a tale of a father sending his son to save us. We have a messiah, the writers tell us, and his name is Superman. And now, in conclusion, let's return to that opening statement.

I say again: Man of Steel was an inherently antisemitic film. You've read the history, brief and drastically abridged but accurate, of the character's development. Snyder made a movie tailored to a modern audience, building on the character as we now know it and therefore the character as it has been Americanized. Half the movie was conversation between Jonathan and Clark about how to live a moral life with great power under your belt, with Kevin Costner playing a flawless all-American dad. I loved that movie. It felt like someone had finally got Superman right, and I watched it twice in theatres. But let us face the truth here. Man of Steel was the single thickest coat of whitewash yet applied to the Jewish immigrant's fantasy that was Superman. We have all but lost sight of the original character under layers of antisemitic sanitization that we didn't even know were there. So, there. That's my spiel. Superman was never meant to be Jesus.

He was meant to be Moses.