On a Superhero’s Ideals and Their Reluctance to Change

by Gabriel Alejandro 

“[But] Are you the Superman that the 21st century needs? Why not use your power to ‘fix’ the world?”

-From Superman Vs. The Elite, 2012

     Superheroes have represented humankind’s limitations ever since their creation. Whether it be the power to fly, x-ray vision, or just super intelligence, their traits often reflect the frustration of a group facing a seemingly impossible challenge. For example, both Superman and Batman were born out of the Great Depression. The economic difficulties and usual questioning of immigrants that comes as a consequence of difficult times were embodied in a alien who arrived on earth seeking refuge and a billionaire (perhaps millionaire, at the time) who used his wealth to help the less fortunate. But super powers did not give them the permission to abuse them. In fact, it just meant that a larger sense of responsibility had to be administered. This came from an ideal perspective of responsibility that echoed American exceptionalism. Later, when Marvel arrived unto the scene, their heroes offered a fresh and optimistic perspective that the Sixties so desperately needed. They applied the same sense of responsibility to a decade marked by Cold War propaganda, Civil Rights movement protests, and Vietnam-conflict bloodshed. By doing so, they cemented countless unwritten superhero rules such as “no killing,” which stemmed from a particular ideal of justice. Now, more than fifty years have passed. Our innocence has faded along with our ideals of responsibility and justice, but superheroes still go by the same standards that they did back when they first arrived. Should they be brought up to modern policies or should they be kept as historic records of past mentalities?

  Next I will analyze recent Superman, Batman, and Captain America events that put into question their role and that of their ideals in modern society. I chose these heroes because they are the earliest examples of the superhero archetype and carried an ideal. I know that I left out excellent ones like Wonder Woman (feminist icon) and obvious ones like Spider-Man (“With great power comes great responsibility”) out of the article, but I needed it to be short and concise. If anyone is willing to write one about any other superhero’s adaptability, they are more than welcome to submit it. 

Superman 

  Superman Vs. The Elite (2012, cover picture) is an adaptation of a Joe Kelly story (by Kelly himself) titled What’s Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?, published in Action Comics #775 (March 2001). The story pits Superman against a new group of superheroes called The Elite, led by Manchester Black (a bit stereotypical for an English superhero, no?). But why would Superman go against another superhero team if they are, in fact, superheroes? The answer lies in a matter of principle. Unlike Superman, Manchester Black’s team, The Elite, does not mind getting its hands dirty when it comes to crime fighting. In fact, in the Action Comics version of the story, this is how they introduce themselves to the public: by killing everyone involved in a conflict before Superman could even get to the scene. This strikes a chord with one of Superman’s strongest mandates: thou shall not kill. But much to Kal-El’s surprise, the act is well received among the public opinion who take advantage of the situation to express a growing dislike towards the status quo. This causes Superman to question his place in the modern world: are his ideals still relevant? Is HE still relevant?

The disapproval of the status quo can be taken up outside Superman’s world and into the comic book reader’s world. For years now, big-hero comic book sales have been declining due to readers turning their attention into other no-so-super, grittier titles. This is due, in part I believe, to lack of adaptability. Today’s world is much more in tune with the reality of war and, thanks to social media, can even witness it first-hand from the comfort of their home. The growing cynicism that has come as a result demands its heroes to be more “real” and in par with what audiences see on a daily basis.

But the audience’s growing rejection of the status quo is not limited to the fiction they consume. Recent tragedies such as Charlie Hebdo and the Boko Haram kidnappings have stirred debate on how global entities such as the United Nations should deal with extremist opponents. The people who question the old, diplomatic ways favor a more hands-on approach like The Elite. Their argument is that modern, religious-driven “terrorists” do not act on reason and therefore we should not waste time trying to reason with them. They feel that governments are upholding a  moral value system that is outdated and will not work against this new threat. In a sense, we see how Superman’s convictions mirror those of our world order (Kelly correlates truth and justice to the “American way” which also happens to be “Superman’s way,” however problematic you may find it) and just as our real world leaders struggle to maintain relevance in the world power stage, Superman struggles to maintain himself relevant in the comic book sphere. It is important to note that the book was published just months before the September 11 attacks, leaving us to question if it would have been any different had it been published after the event.

Batman

  Perhaps the one who has had a better time aging has been Batman. His menacing presence and psychological trauma has allowed for writers to come up with darker storylines that live up to some modern standards. They even stopped calling him superhero in favor of a more believable “detective.” That being said, Batman has got to be one of the stronger maintainers of the status quo. He keeps his rogues gallery not too far (locked in Arkham Asylum) where they  are just a sneeze away from breaking out, running amok, and returning after being beaten senselessly. Like Superman, he has been questioned on many occasions about his decision not to kill when it would save him a lot of trouble and his answer always evokes an inmutable concept of justice.

  A memorable moment was presented in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) when our caped crusader saw himself crossing over boundaries even he feared. Beginning with the extradition of a Chinese bank accountant who fled the U.S. avoiding trial and then using a highly problematic sonar tracker on the citizens of Gotham, Batman’s actions were just a metaphor of the United States’ internal and external policies after September 11. Many do not remember how, after the attacks, the U.S. struggled to assess its new enemy. On the exterior, they had to justify military intervention in order to “prevent” future attacks and, in the interior, they proposed the highly controversial Patriot Act which included wiretapping the whole nation “for their own safety.” We see again how the nation’s supposed interests match those of our superhero, but this time the hero does not go all in. Even though Batman also struggles with his new enemies, he is fully aware that the means blur moral and ethical lines. Everything sort of ends up in hypocrisy after Batman does agree to do both things “just this once,” giving in to the notion that rules are meant to be broken in the time of war. Still, his questioning of the whole event can give us an idea of what 1939’s Batman would think of 2008’s Batman, as well as what would 1939’s United States would think of post-September 11 United States. The only difference being that Batman went on the record as saying that it was wrong, while we are still waiting for the other to even address it.

Captain America

  Time for a Marvel character to join the list. In my opinion, Captain America is one of the most misunderstood superheroes and it is largely due because of the name he bears. Many believe that the ideal he represents is that of the current U.S.A., when in fact, Captain America’s semiotic object never left the year/moment he was created in, thus making him the perfect emblem of an ideology whose nation has changed, but the character’s did not.

  To begin with a comic book history perspective, Captain America was created to fill the need for a more “physical” superhero during World War II. Previous comic book characters such as Superman and Batman not only did not kill, but they also avoided detailed physical confrontations (it is believed to be because of the artist’s inability to draw “real” fights). That is why on the cover of Captain America’s first issue we saw him punching Hitler square on the face. This was meant to appease the then-modern audience’s thirst for action during the war. Their hatred towards Hitler and the amounting anti-Nazi propaganda the U.S. served had rallied the people into a patriotic frenzy that had to be released. Luckily, Jack Kirby’s experience in the Suffolk Street Gang (Grant Morrison, Supergods 38) that he had been a part of when young served as a creative model for his illustrations and they were a hit (no pun intended).

But it would be only a matter of time before Captain America joined the rest of the “aged” superhero crew. His identity became more problematic as the years passed and the world’s perception of the U.S. changed. The Cap’s name would be forever linked to the nation’s foreign debacles even though Steve Rogers opposed their actions and philosophy in the comics. His return during the Sixties had made him socially aware: he believed Vietnam should end in a peace agreement and later, during the 70s, fought against a government association that was headed by president Nixon himself (Dominic Tierney, Did Captain America Really Sleep Through Vietnam?). He finally ended up hanging the suit in 1974 because of his dislike for the U.S. nation’s actions and distanced himself by becoming Nomad. But, since nothing in the comic book world lasts forever, he was meant to grab the shield once again, but as Tierney states in his article: “When he finally grasps the shield again, Cap decides he will fight for American ideals, and not for the administration in Washington. ‘I'm loyal to nothing ... except the [American] Dream.’” The “Dream” mentioned not being the applied version, but the idealized version of it.

During the past decade the Captain has had to endure the same world changes as Superman and Batman. He did not go after Islamist extremists and chase them off the map because, as we have seen, that is not his way. He has rather stayed inside and favored local policies in a time when politics have become extremely polarized and a second wind of the civil rights movement has emerged. I have praised Rick Remender’s Captain America (2012-) a number of times and this is one of the main reasons for doing so. By removing Rogers, sending him to Dimension Z for a number of years and then bringing him back to earth, Remender replayed the Captain’s 1963 return, but for today's standards. Since Remender knew the Captain would not submit the U.S.’ current ideals, he brought the whole media and public opinion against him. Unlike Superman, Captain America did not question his relevancy in modern times, but he did question the United States government decision-making during modern times. 

Steve Roger’s last bout came at the hands of Zola who drained him of his serum and left him an aged soldier (perfect analogy for this article). And, in a move that seemed logical to some of us, Sam Wilson, The Falcon, was chosen to be the new Captain America. The implications of the move were big. The change came at a time when gay rights are being debated in the political sphere in a way that reminded many of the 1960s civil rights movement. In addition, African Americans across the U.S. were marching on the streets seeking justice for Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two victims of police shootings whose perpetrators were not indicted. The argument of a new America can be established here with Sam Wilson as the face. Steve Rogers could question authority all he wanted, but if there was one thing he could never reflect, it was the diversity of the American people. Nevertheless, a costume or physical change does not suppose a change in ideal. Sam Wilson upholds the same concept of justice as Rogers before him. And even though it is still too early to say in the series with Wilson at the helm, it would be interesting to see if this becomes a point of discussion. 

Closing

I do realize that, at this point, both DC and Marvel establish limits for their characters when a new writer is hired. This certainly does prevent the creative team from moving away of what has already been established. The audience is also a key factor in accepting or rejecting new material. Zack Snyder’s heavily-derided Superman film Man of Steel showed him killing General Zod and the audience did not approve. Many other stories where our characters have bent or simply broken their rules have been written, but they are always discarded as “Elseworlds” or “What If?” This article centers around a canon that includes comic book storyline and the public acknowledgment of said canon. 

Still, it is interesting to trace a character’s immutability for more than five decades. Even more when the nation their ideals were based on has changed so much. Superman will always be the boy scout of America, upholding the chain of command for as long as it exists even though he may know that it is not completely right. His devotion to preserving order and a form of central power belong in his ideal. It is why Frank Miller easily wrote him as a government puppet in The Dark Knight Returns (1986). Batman will be Superman’s opposite in style of achieving things, but they will still share the same principles. Finally, Captain America has been the one to question things from early on. This has produced many changes in esthetic, but nothing at the core. You can say that the Captain is a symbol whose referent is stuck in time. But for the three, the ideal stays the same even though the times keep moving forward and the standard of what a superhero is moves along with it.   

Bibliography

Morrison, Grant. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011. 

Tierney, Dominic. Did Captain America Really Sleep Through Vietnam?. The Atlantic, 26 July. 2011. Web. Feb. 2015. <http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/07/did-captain-america-really-sleep-through-vietnam/242573/>

Captain America: The Winter Soldier- Endorsing Good Wars

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Is World War II still the Good War? This was the title of an Adam Kirsch New York Times article exploring just that, the goodness of the Second World War. It came out in March 2011, when Iraq and Afghanistan had pushed Americans to question the extent of confidence a country could extended towards military might and strategy in the twenty first century. Militarism as a virtue, as a primary national value, seemed to be dwindling in representational prowess. The distance breached between morality on the home front and morality on the battlefield had broadened much to the disadvantage of war as an American ideal. Fighting in the Middle East made military conflict an impersonal experience, much detached from the cohesiveness of the American experience. More importantly, it became its own entity, with its own politics and its own history. In other words, it went opposite the Second World War’s route, that of war as the defining principle of American society. Kirsch will conclude that World War II will stay “good” so long as it stays living history. Living history, in turn, can instruct, it can still impart teachings of its own and tell people that there actually is a right way to conduct war. Of course, Kirsch explains that such histories need to take into account ambiguities and morally gray areas. But when memory is so highly elevated as to be considered near mythical, then, we have another thing entirely. War was “good” back then. Therefore, war can still be “good”. And Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) endorses just that idea.

      Captain America means many things, but most of them rely on his war to make sense. The Second World War lives through Steve Rogers the same way Steve Rogers lives through it. It might make the character unstuck in time and it might keep him from being a more universal metaphor for war in America, but it keeps the war’s memory fairly grounded in what Kirsch referred to as living history. The character’s many discourses have been touched upon before. He upholds conservative politics, endorses a continued state of war, exalts ultra-patriotism, and survives as a testament to the goodness of the Second World War. These things hold true in the movie. 

      Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, Captain America: The Winter Soldier keeps with Captain America’s longstanding character conventions and gives us a fairly safe war movie. Rogers is now a part of SHIELD, just in time to watch it fall into the hands of HYDRA. In true sequel fashion, old enemies continue to haunt Rogers. HYDRA remains the Nazi stand-in par excellence (if HYDRA is not an offshoot of Nazism then nothing is), and is the main villain of the story. Captain America favorites such as Arnim Zola and obscure villains such as The Leaper pop up to keep true followers anxious for more. But it is the Winter Soldier that makes the movie stand above standard superhero fare. The character contrasts so starkly with Rogers that the whole HYDRA plot could have been scrapped so as to focus entirely on the Winter Soldier. In fact, the Winter Soldier is more a secondary story arc playing to the overarching plot that deals with war on a more general level. 

       The inclusion of the Winter Soldier could have been an interesting counterweight to the discourses of old residing in Rogers. The Winter Soldier, created by Ed Brubaker (who makes a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the film) is revealed as Roger’s lost sidekick, Bucky. Brubaker broke one of the only rules Marvel comics resisted touching (only Bucky stays dead) to make Captain America face his war with an added sense of ambiguity that judges his sense of being as superficial and overtly simplistic. In the comics, when the long lost sidekick returns as a Soviet-trained super-soldier Rogers knows he not only faces Bucky but the war that turned him against America.

     Bucky’s Cold War turns history into a lesson that descends upon Rogers and lectures him on the darkness American history carried out of the Second World War. He distorts the idea of goodness in war by ridding himself of the conflict that grounded him in a bygone era that barely resonated later on. Captain America slept through the Cold War, conveniently frozen at the bottom of the ocean so as not to witness the United States fall into hysteria, anti-communist paranoia, and proxy wars that strayed farther still from the mythic principles of World War II. It was a time Rogers could very well find war to be at its most un-American. But the fact he slept through it meant his example, and that of the Second World War, did not shine bright enough to keep America from derailing into morally ambiguous territories. The Cold War could not be saved by the Good War because it was frozen in time, a memory that sought shelter rather than facing the realities of a world dictated by nuclear politics. So why not right that wrong with Captain America and a big silver screen production that pits him against a villain borne out of the Cold War?

     That Rogers faces the Winter Soldier can be seen as just that, an attempt to save the Cold War after the fact. Captain America, unfrozen, looks back into the history that pushes the Winter Soldier into the will of HYDRA and sees an opportunity to once again prove his war’s might can save all wars, turn them good. All throughout the movie the audience is subjected to scenes of Rogers visiting museum exhibits dedicated to himself, his old uniform in display. Once we see the old uniform standing above a display of the Howling Commandos, we know that, in the end, Captain America will revert to that uniform (not a suit) and go into battle as a World War II soldier first and a superhero second.

     It is never clear which war weighs more on the Winter Soldier throughout the movie. Arnim Zola is the Winter Soldier’s creator in the film, more a Nazi than a Soviet, but the movie does stress his secret Soviet assassin past. The fact Zola plays Winter Soldier’s Frankenstein keeps the character between wars. He is the darkness between. The thing war is capable of but should not be. Either way, it falls to Captain America to prove that his war, one no one questions as being his, can save both the day and the idea that war can still be a virtue if not a moral responsibility. And keeping to our expectations, the day and war is saved, and very convincingly. Captain America in his old uniform explodes on scene as a war god, the ultimate authority on militarism and how Americans should interact with its war powers. So, is World War II still the Good War? The answer is obvious if you are Captain America. Can War, in all its dimensions, be Good forevermore? Yes, but only if it follows in the footsteps of the Second World War.

The Twilight Zone and Kennedy-era Optimism: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sixties

by Gabriel Alejandro

"Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."
-John F. Kennedy inaugural address (January 20, 1961)

     The fifties’ last couple of years witnessed a shift in perspective that contrasted with the doom and gloom that had plagued the U.S. since the end of World War II and its subsequent lead-up to the Cold War. The transition peaked when a young Irish Catholic was nominated for the presidential ticket by the Democratic Party and later won the 1960 elections. A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy represented a “warmer” alternative to a nation whose domestic dispute resembled its foreign one; cold.

      One of the main objectives in Kennedy’s domestic agenda involved the reconciliation between the arts and politics, a relationship that the past decade had thoroughly tarnished. Hollywood Blacklisting and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt had pushed many entertainment workers into exile during the forties and early fifties, leaving those who stayed behind without stable employment and in fear of persecution. But now, gone were the days McCarthyism and the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and in their stead were Kennedy’s youthful and progressive prospects. This meant that every writer, actor, director, producer and composer could venture freely into their craft without worry of whiplash by the government which, in turn, had set a precedent for the American audience:

     He [Kennedy] was…the first presidential candidate to mount both a literary and a television 
     [emphasis added] campaign for the office, the only one comfortable in both media, and 
     the perfect man for a time when Americans were teetering on a balance point between image and
     word. (Thurston Clarke, Ask Not, 2010; P. 115)

Television, a medium that had been persecuted for its then-rapid widespread and informative capabilities, was becoming more and more common in every household. This, along with a young president’s embrace of the medium, catapulted the industry’s creativity into experimenting with never-seen-before themes and techniques.

      One program in particular that emerged during this era was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Originally presented as a fantasy/science fiction anthology series, The Twilight Zone constantly touched on subjects that reflected the worries and aspirations of the times. The show’s first episode aired on October 2, 1959, three months before Kennedy began campaigning for the primary elections (January 2, 1960) and was cancelled in late January 1964, less than three months after his assassination (November 22, 1963). But the program’s five-year-run would be enough for it to leave its mark in television history. By exploring different aspects of the human psyche such as that of a soldier’s during war, the possibility of life in other planets, and giving new angles to historical events, The Twilight Zone ventured into territory that would have been deemed unsuitable for television would it have aired some years earlier.
 

      In “Where Is Everybody?,” the first episode that formally aired under The Twilight Zone brand name, we meet an amnesiac Air Force pilot roaming in a deserted town. After much scavenging and self-questioning, the man finally collapses after running from a shop and into a street crossing pole. We then see that the man is not really in a desolated town but in a test chamber, and a group of military personnel observes the unfolding of his delusion. He is a test subject in a moon trip simulator, completely isolated in a town was just an illusion. After being carried out by medics, he gets a glimpse of the real moon and says, “Hey! Don’t go away up there! Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it’ll be for real. So don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.”

      Aside from the nuclear tension that characterized the Cold War, the space race against the Soviet Union comes in close second. This competition would not have only granted technological supremacy to its victor, but it would have also awarded ideological superiority to the winning nation. The U.S. audience had been fantasizing about space travel since the early years of film and television. But for a while any public “space talk” was avoided amid fears of Russian spies acquiring classified information. That lasted until May 25, 1961, when Kennedy, before a joint session of Congress, gave his "Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” speech in which he urged the Nation to set the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” A year later, on September 12, 1962, he gave another speech, later known as the “Moon Speech,” at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas. This time he expressed how the trip to the moon would spur an aftermath of technological innovations similar to previous achievements such as the printing press and the steam engine. Even though the goal was set to be long-term (before the end of the decade) and the Russians had the advantage, the Nation had been rallied up and felt that the task at hand was within grasp for the first time.

      Other well-known episodes from the first season such as “Time Enough at Last” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (both airing between November 1959 and March 1960) also carried the spirit of the epoch in more than one form. In the first one we meet Henry Bemis, an avid reader surrounded by uncultured people. He is an admirer of Robert Frost (who, coincidentally, recited a poem during Kennedy’s inaugural) and is mocked by both his boss and wife for his passion for literature. The subject of anti-intellectualism was well-known at the Kennedy camp. A lover of words and history, Kennedy believed past administrations had strayed from establishing an intellectual core and compensated by opening the doors to intellectuals in his administration. Furthermore, in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” the topic veers from current or future events into the near-past. Maple Street is your typical 1950s portrait of an American neighborhood until bizarre incidences take place after a shining object is seen in the sky. Since the residents do not know the cause of these occurrences, they begin to single out each other by creating conspiracies fueling the idea that a monster dwells among them. It is a clever reimagining of Communist paranoia and its blind fervor that stalked the government under Senator McCarthy. The episode ends with a conversation between the culprits, two extra-terrestrial beings who observe the events from afar, when one says: “… I take it this place –This ‘Maple Street,’ is not unique?” To which the other one responds: “By no means. The world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other...One to the other...One to the other...” (The “monsters” in the title referring to human beings instead of actual monsters or aliens).

      In conclusion, one could spend countless pages and ink counting the parallels between history
and fiction in every Twilight Zone episode. For many, Kennedy embodied the spirit of the people which sought to distance itself from the practices and ideologies of the past. This resulted in a large manifestation of arts and academic work in government affairs and vice versa. The constant mirroring and exposure of political subjects in television and movies resulted in the “de-stigmatization” of some elements but also in the further expansion of others. In one hand, the possibility of reaching the moon and its advances was tangible; but on the other, the bomb and other scare-tactic representatives were still ever-present in every household. Nonetheless, this did not halt the television and film industries from maintaining the flux of interesting proposals throughout the decade. And even though creativity persisted, the early sixties’ optimism, along with Kennedy, ceased on November 22, 1963.

Negotiating the Past: The Rise of History as a Pop Culture Phenomenon

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

            History has often been accused of being footnoted fiction. It has been the subject of cross-disciplinary name calling that ends in inconsequential academic ramblings that do not further serious debates on the nature, meaning, and consequence of studying the past. One is easily jaded by such accusations in that they keep with a narrow frame of thought that restrains knowledge from evolving into an agent of human understanding. Instead, they make the production of knowledge a process of exclusive infighting amongst professional thinkers (meaning men and women trained for the academic world) that deviate from the original purpose of knowledge creation, making sense out of humanity. And this brings up questions.

            If History is fiction, then why is it not consistently studied in Literature courses as legitimate works of fiction? Why reduce the impact of its findings by relegating such works to the space of interpretation (a dirty word in the world of classic academia)? When did cataloguing something as fiction demean the subject matter of any kind of study? It is here that the whole point of pedagogical research collapses. History is nothing more than one of many outlets that produce information, in league with Sociology, Anthropology, Biology, Physics, Psychology, and many other disciplines tasked with the same thing. History produces information on a debatable platform (and I mean this in the most pedagogically productive of ways), subject to any and all kinds of discussion so long as its purpose stays within the sphere of understanding what it means, and has meant, to be human. Now, if anything, if we are to consider History fiction, then it should be feared as an academic phenomenon, and here’s why: History can be the most dangerous kind of fiction in the written world.

            The year 2012 saw America threatened by two atomic bombings, a violent middle-class revolution, and a foreign invasion dooming the city of New York to a repeat of 9/11-like destruction. These threats have two very distinctive things in common. First, they are conceptually configured in a language very much rooted in historical discourse. Revolution screams 19^th century French history and Cold War fears of Soviet dominion on a global scale; foreign invasion jettisons the sounds of revolution with a clash of ideologies and ways of life again rooted in Cold War bursts of paranoia; and atom bombs cloud reason by ringing the bells of past fears not lost but rescued for further political terror. And secondly, they were all represented as legitimate 21^st century dangers through superhero films.

             
            In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman faces his toughest challenge yet: a popular uprising of Gotham City’s people against the city of Gotham itself. This, of course, set upon the imminent danger of atomic destruction through an unstable reactor politically infused with meaning by Bane, the 99% personified in a man with a scary mask. Revolution, here, is framed as stable as history permits it to be, which means it is pretty unstable. Its disorganized structure resonates with mid-20^th century stereotypes of revolution painted Soviet red. The Dark Knight Rises updates said stereotype with contemporary imagery, positing the now infamous Occupy movement as a ‘natural’ continuation of an historic tradition (see Soviet Communism) already vanquished in what is slowly being considered ‘a long ago’ (back when history ended in 1991, according to Francis Fukuyama. The Free World had won and, hence, history reached its apex). This gives ‘Recent History’ a whole new meaning. The contemporary merges with the past in an attempt to establish continuity in humanity’s political struggle.

            Marvel’s The Avengers, on the other hand, rescues recent despair in an attempt at redeeming the past through current American foreign policy. As a race of space aliens threaten New York with their own brand of 9/11, Captain America (a World War II vet) leads a unit of heavily militarized superheroes ever watchful for enemy infiltrations inherently bent on disrupting the American way of life first, and later the world by consequence of the first objective. The Avengers rescues the ‘sleeping giant’ metaphor made famous by the Pearl Harbor incident of 1941 and inserts it into the American military experience of the 21^st century (this metaphor supposes the argument that the United State fell asleep on the war intelligence job and that it could have intercepted the Japanese surprise attack). The Avengers fend of the alien invasion but with heavy casualties. New York City, the film’s set piece battleground, is forcefully thrust into the still fresh echo of 9/11 in spectacular glory. In a sudden twist of fate, America’s heroes avert the invasion by saving the city from a prematurely launched atomic missile diverted by Iron Man into the alien ship that coordinates the original invasion, avenging heavy loss and giving America military triumph. The atom bomb, a Cold War symbol of fear, is revived as a supporting character in a grander narrative looking to make war make sense in the 21^st century. It evidently needs the past for that.

            And so, we are subjected to a revival of History through an effort rooted in fiction. A negotiation of past meanings is taking place in that the present looks to acquire new meaning in old symbols of fear and action. Popular culture is rapidly becoming a primary supplier of informational authority in all things considered political and historical. As a result, the validation of information is exponentially relying on its exposure on silver screens, video games, and comic books. Alan Moore (the author of Watchmen, and V for Vendetta) once wrote:

            History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a fiction we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a strong language of our own. (After the Fire, 1996)

            In calling History the most dangerous kind of fiction, we must acknowledge that it is dangerous precisely because it wears the cowl of ‘truth’, one which historians insist on wearing forevermore. We must remember that what historians consider secondary sources can quickly become primary sources for the general public. This is why I comment on superhero narratives, because the history that travels through them can end up teaching audiences more about the past than history books in general. A serious attempt at lighting History under continued debate can help by lessening the weight authority bears upon the discipline. It may lead researchers and thinkers to the realization that classifications only dampen the labor of information production, to the point of keeping knowledge bound to the chains of exclusivity. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if History is fiction or not. Either way, History continues to walk down the path of a regulator, trying to keep facts in check, even if fiction ends being more convincing in doing so.