A woman asked me once exactly why it seems I have always attracted/been attracted to damsels in distress. My answer was glib: "We don't grow up on
Batman comics without it having an effect." I thought maybe this needed going into in more detail.
I have always loved stories of heroes. When I was a little kid, there was Bugs Bunny, who may seem an unlikely hero, but think about it: faced with bigger, meaner or better armed antagonists, he kept his cool, fought back with his wits, and made fools of anyone who messed with him. He didn't mind being a stinker at times, and was quite unrepentant. He was a smart-alec. I did not grow up in a home nor in circles in which wit was encouraged or even viewed as a virtue.
I don't even remember when I started being into Batman. I'm sure it was probably seeing a snippet of the Adam West Batman from the 60s on a TV in Zellers, Radio Shack or some other store that sold TVs. When I was five, my dad, mortified at how risqué the jokes on M*A*S*H* were getting, and how it depicted promiscuity, adultery and alcoholism, got rid of our TV, and there was no more Bugs Bunny in our house. But somehow, I still began to idolize Batman.
Batman is not usually a smart-alec, but he isn't above the occasional wry comment. He was grim, unstoppable and determined, in most depictions of him. The world was messed up and corrupt, and he made a difference. He couldn't fix it, but he could chip away at it, and that made him feel his life was worthwhile. He had all manner of gimmicks designed for no purpose other than making that difference. He had an awesome big black car. He wasn't a goody two-shoes. He was actually scary for criminals. Pretty badass, not pretty boyscout or pretty Peter Pan, which I always found Superman to be a little bit too. (And Robin. They wrote Robin into Batman comics in an attempt to lighten them up, and to give kids someone to identify with. Waste of time. I liked dark stuff, and was already identifying with Batman just fine).
When I discovered
Zorro (in friends' comic books, and in
a cartoon version glimpsed briefly on TV), I immediately liked him for all of the reasons I liked Batman. I wasn't surprised years later to find that Batman was heavily based upon Zorro. Like Batman, only with a black horse instead of a black car, and with constant jokes and smart-aleckry. Same with Robin Hood, who I also loved. Why smart-alecs? Because I grew up in a world of male people saying "I can impose my will upon you and embarrass you publicly because my fist is stronger and faster than yours is" and me responding "No, I can hold my own against you because my wit is stronger and faster than yours is."
When I was six or seven, the Ottawa Journal newspaper that we got each day started carrying daily comic strips of Spider-man. He was strong, he rescued people, and he climbed buildings and swung around the city even better than Batman. Unlike Batman, who was a rich adult businessman by day (how unheroic!), Spider-man was a nerdy teenager during the day (equally unheroic, but something I could relate to), having to worry about school and peers and his boss at work. The idea that someone could have a life quite a bit like the one I knew I would have in my teens, but secretly "get his own back" from the bullies, the bosses and the criminals during the night was enticing. There was also the 60s cartoon of Spider-man still being repeated on Saturdays, and I stole a couple glimpses of that too, growing up.
Somewhere around that time, at Kevin Durkee's house, I saw a couple of episodes of Filmation's
Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle. (it was one in which Tarzan
gets abducted by some jungle-visiting aliens, and the one where
he has to fight a robot Tarzan) This was around the same time as the
Ottawa Citizen started carrying daily comics of
Conan the Barbarian. Conan was pretty much Tarzan with a sword and some other accessories. These men were strong, dangerous, adept at killing people, but there was a nobility to them. They often rescued people. They were berserkers when they were angry, and they were quite different (especially Tarzan) in daily conversation. They had adventures, because they were explorers. Where Batman and Spider-man had fairly generic cities with alleys and waterfronts to police, Conan and Tarzan would find hidden cities of gold with leopard people and giant spiders or the like. Exploring ancient, murky underground places filled with danger and mystery was pretty intoxicating. When the
Indiana Jones movies came out, I read the novelizations of them eagerly.
A kid left the book
Star Trek: Log Seven (novelising
Star Trek: The Animated Series) in the change room at the school at which my dad was basketball coach and gym teacher. I was hooked immediately. Exploring. Strange new worlds. Gimmicks. Smart people solving problems and beating stronger, meaner, better armed folk. Smart-aleckry. Very American. Typically, they hired Canadians to play the American captain and the Scottish engineer.
Star Wars (read in novelization form) provided the idea of another berserker hero with a fast ride (Han Solo), and to a lesser degree, Luke Skywalker was also cool, in terms of learning that he could grow up to possess secret wisdom and skills, mostly to deal with his scary, overbearing, emotionally-detached father. Very American again. Overtly following Joseph Cambell's hero cycle theory, which was either an observation that most hero tales follow the same structure, or an attempt to formalize millennia of stories of heroism.
Doctor Who was something I read in novelization form also. The BBC may have had pretty much zero budgets for their plywood and styrofoam sets and props, but in the books of course, everything was real.
Tom Baker's idiosyncratic performances were so off-the-wall that they came through 100% in the books, even without seeing or hearing him.
Doctor Who was very British. What a counterpoint to the American stuff! Where in
Star Trek two spaceships would (both carefully right-side-up) encounter each other and reenact a submarine movie, or people would go down to a planet and bring guns and (like a more laid-back
Star Wars) posture and make threats and shoot at each other and blow things up and punch and wrestle, the Doctor pretty much won by condescending to everyone. He didn't have weapons. He was an incurable smart-alec and he won because he was smart and knew everything. Very like Bugs Bunny, if you think about it. And The Doctor was Jesus. He often found ways to heal planets and people, he came "from beyond with infinite insider's knowledge" about the Universe and how it was put together, and he wasn't merely human, though you couldn't tell by looking. What he'd do, when pushed to it, was sacrifice his life and his body to save everyone, and then, getting all glowy and radiant, he'd actually resurrect and live on to save a whole lot more people.
When I was first reading books, I read the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. These were kids who had adventures and explored mysterious places and had gimmicks and cool boats, cars, planes, motorcycles and stuff. They had fun adventures, but they were far too boyscout. This meant they didn't last. Also, the books were written according to a formula calculated to sell, and farmed out to ghost writers. In the case of the first several Hardy Boys books, they hired a Canadian (from Carleton Place, Ontario, actually, where Roy Brown, who likely shot down the Red Baron also hailed from) named Leslie McFarlane to write them. The formula worked at first, but after reading about twenty of the books, it got repetitive. This would later happen with Star Trek and Star Wars. Far too many hours of adventures that were far too clearly formulaic. Not Doctor Who, though.
When I was a kid, I did have a fondness for the Incredible Hulk also. He wasn't smart (though David Banner was, and he was a very interesting character) but he was a berserker and he was misunderstood and ostracised, which we can all relate to. Also, like Spider-man, he was a nerd part of the time, and an stoppable, take-no-crap hero the rest of the time.
In my teens, I latched onto any TV heroes who were smart-alecs, who had cool cars and who rescued women and solved mysteries. So, Shaggy from
Scooby Doo (Freddie was too boyscout and gay), Rick Simon from
Simon and Simon, McCall from
The Equalizer, Michael Knight from
Knight Rider, Murdoch from
The A-Team, Luke Duke from
The Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum from
Magnum P.I. and many others, including Canadian, budget-cut, injured, desk-bound superspy V.H. Adderly from the show
Adderly. I'd been reading Robert B. Parker's
Spenser books, about the beer-loving, smart-alec Bostonian private investigator, and so the few episodes of
Spenser: For Hire that I saw on TV at a friend's house delighted me.
Still reading many, many books of heroism, I loved the Sherlock Holmes books, and Lord of the Rings. I think something I have always valued in heroes is intelligence and composure. Keeping their cool, as it were. Characters like The Doctor from Doctor Who, Bugs Bunny, Spock from Star Trek and many others were brave in the sense of not showing fear. Magnum and Han Solo/Indiana Jones were humourous exceptions to that rule, being known for kind of funny running away, or wincing after they'd hit someone, or the like, but in the end, it kind of came off as Bugs Bunny, and it worked. Tarzan, the Hulk, Conan and others only lost their temper for the best possible reasons and with the best possible results.
In my late teens (not having previously been allowed to own comic books) I got into the X-Men, mostly because of Canadian macho berserker Wolverine. I got especially into the character when he got his own book, and it became about keeping his temper. He would lose his temper when he should (to fight or whatever) but there was the new idea that losing his temper socially would keep him from getting the girl, from getting the support of his team or whatever.
Looking back, I find a couple of things interesting:
I liked nobility and heroism, but only down-to-earth nobility by characters who had normal lives also, if that makes any sense. I liked the everyday heroic quality to Spider-man and the rest. Characters like Thor or the Silver Surfer didn't do it for me, because they didn't really have normal life components to their day. They talked a bit like the bible I was expected to read daily, but the writers weren't actually all that good at that. Even in the "Amok Time" episode of Star Trek, they'd gone all "thee" without knowing how to go "thou" or "thy" properly in an attempt to make Spock's planet Vulcan seem more spiritual and ancient. I liked the idea that these characters were heroes, and that they were real people with normal lives who could also be heroes. Spock's job was to be a scientist and researcher, not to sacrifice his life for people. Spider-man was just supposed to be taking pictures, not actually rescuing people from burning buildings or cackling madmen. Tarzan was trying to live in peace in the jungle away from people, but then he'd help out people anyway, though they gave him little reason to. Han Solo's better judgement told him to take the money and run, and Shaggy just wanted to get high and eat giant sandwiches. Characters like Frodo and Aragorn didn't want to be heroes and were actually sacrificing their comfortable, everyday lives to be heroic for the greater good. Characters like Wolverine really made you believe that, unless they chose to do heroic acts of sacrifice on an hour-by-hour basis, they'd have lives to live that would keep them busy enough. Not so much Thor or the Silver Surfer. I like those characters (as in the recent Thor movie) when their "normal lives" are explored, so that there is a backstory and a context for their heroism on Earth.
I liked smart-alecs, but not if they were mean. I always reacted badly to David Spade characters, and even to characters from Seinfeld eventually (after too many shows and too much obvious formula repetition) if they were just nasty, and displayed no capacity for empathy or generosity.
In the modern world, I have loved stories which deal in light/dark and good/evil concerns, especially ones which present a world-view I recognize: not one in which unless we're careful and do not say Beetlejuice three times, play with Ouiji boards or feed the mogwai after midnight, evil will suddenly take over with teeth and stuff. No, ones in which evil, as a more corrupting, all-pervasive, bureaucratic rot has already taken over and is running everything. Even in Star Trek, with the all-powerful Federation ruling everything, the impracticality and inflexibility of bureaucracy and disputes over rules are important. In Star Wars, the government has been taken over by bureaucracy-exploiting thugs. On Twin Peaks, goodhearted people prove ill-equipped to deal with the slow, insidious rot that evil has already brought about. In The X-Files, your government routinely keeps secrets from and lies to you, and will sell you out for money or more power, and two people with a lot of questions will go around shining flashlights into ancient, murky underground places filled with danger and mystery despite being told not to question the status quo. In Babylon 5, there are mysterious, dark (and light) forces at work behind the scenes, to which we are pawns, and our government is siding with the dark. In Battlestar Galactica, things are complicated, and there are wheels within wheels again, and we're always two steps behind knowing what's really going on, yet we have to make important life-changing choices now.
In Vertigo comics, the dreams of everyone in existence are shaped by the Sandman's inability to forgive, to find love, to hope, to change, to find freedom, to find the joy in life. Hellblazer's John Constantine finds that, once people have stuck their hand in evil's maw, and tasted evil and used it, they're kinda doomed and all he can do is damage control. Preacher's Jesse Custer feels like the God he was raised to believe in has abandoned the world and buggered off. So he's going to find Him and demand answers, navigating a dangerous world of powerful men with deep perversions. Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem isn't a virtuous man, but one thing he can't let go of is a mania for telling the truth, for letting people know, for not believing the lies.
House is Sherlock Holmes. The Matrix presented evil as wearing suits and ties and demanding conformity. (No one wearing a tie has ever said anything to me that I ever wanted to hear.) Dexter reminds me of Wolverine and the Hulk, and presents the idea that the bosses know more than they're telling, but also don't have a clue what's really going on, so are bureaucratically in the way all the time. Sometimes he needs to go into the night and take care of business his own way. Because once people have drank the koolaid and become part of the system, they've often lost important bits of both their empathy and their realism along the way (like Odin giving up an eye for wisdom), become somehow neither naive enough nor cynical enough to be fully human in any way that's going to help, yet kind of too naive and too cynical in ways that won't. The Walking Dead presents a world already lost, yet in which all of the little human concerns remain as important as ever. Fringe is new X-Files episodes, with the Star Wars element that, even if the fate of galaxies lie in the balance, it all really revolves around whether a father and son can get along.
And back to "why are you attracted to normally strong women who suddenly seem to need to be rescued?" I could add to that "Why do you routinely not believe that anyone in any position of authority over you is ever very good and competent and informed?" and "Why are you such a smart-alec when just shutting your mouth would probably cause less friction?" and "Why do you lose your temper how and when you do?" And "Why did you buy a big, cool, black Dodge Charger, which is the same make and model of car as the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazzard, but now looks more like the Batmobile?" And "Why did you just buy a big, black, Peter Parker SLR camera?" Also "Why do you buy so many gadgets?"
Some sad lessons:
-you can't actually rescue anyone. The best you can do is be a comfort or a help in a time of need, and then not be needed after that, unless you're dealing with a parasite. So:
-you don't really get to be a hero. Even if you're a smart-alec with cool gadgets and a fast car. And your life will just have to be good enough to suit you anyway. Cartoons make girls want to be princesses. They make us need to rescue people.
-it is almost never safe to lose your temper. Anger can work as fuel only if kept to a low simmer, and it's only good for being destructive. If you have a tree to chop down, a bulletin board to tear all the stuff from, or a person who is crossing all kinds of boundaries and really needs to be sat down hard, then it's useful. Usually? Not.
-smart, witty people can be bullies every bit as much as strong, nasty thugs can. So can pretty, popular or rich people.
-we do not fight to keep evil from happening. It's here, it has occurred, and worst of all, it's us.
-as the damage done by western culture and the religion it created having their huge prolonged falling-out continues, widespread failure to appreciate and understand the colour, flavour and nature of "religious" virtues such as empathy, self-sacrifice, heroism, nobility, grace, forgiveness, redemption, patience, charity and the like will continue to result in simple-minded story telling with heroism that rings false in our hearts. The more "virtuous" means prissy, tight-assed, selfish, judgemental, closed-hearted, martyr, self-pitying, superstitious, ritualistic, self-mythologizing crap, the more we decide that, in order for an angel to make a kickass hero, he really needs to half demon to get rid of the stench of church. The more batarangs Van Helsing needs. The more giant robots and explosions, the more noise and fury to try to cover up the signifying of nothing.
-We need to explore. Places, people, things. Or we'll simply die of stagnation.
-If you make only sensible choices, you aren't likely to have any adventures.
-without the possibility of failure, success doesn't mean anything and is, therefore, meaningless and impossible.
