The Cat Remembers

METALEPTIC NOSTALGIA IN WHISPER OF THE HEART, THE CAT RETURNS AND IBLARD JIKAN

To explain the subtitle right off the bat, ‘metalepsis’ refers to the crossing of conceptual boundaries in works of art – the most obvious example is when a character looks out and talks to the audience and thereby acknowledges that a wider real world exists beyond its own fictional one. It can also be applied when we have a fiction-within-a-fiction: in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose Of Cairo, a character steps off of a cinema screen to spend time with a young woman that repeatedly comes to see the film. The other characters stand around within the world of the film, unable to continue until he returns. Here, metalepsis is about traversing through different fictional ‘levels’.

Nostalgia is probably an easier concept – though I will be talking about two different kinds. The first is a collective nostalgia, a commonly held idea about the ‘way things were’ at a particular time. Our ideas about the 60s, 70s or 80s are shaped by a shared belief in what it was like, rather than the reality of each decade. The second is personal nostalgia, which we can think of as a particular rose-tinted memory of something that happened to us, often triggered by some stimuli in the present (a smell that reminds us of a great-grandparent’s kitchen, an episode of a television show that we haven’t thought about since early childhood, etc.). What both forms of nostalgia have in common is a kind of mental editing; nostalgia is a positive perception, one that results from remembering the good aspects of a period or event and forgetting the negative.

In the Isao Takahata film Only Yesterday, the film shifts the original source material from one type of nostalgia to another. The original Manga on which the film is based is an episodic story of the experiences of a young child Taeko in the 1960s. The setting conjures up a collective nostalgia of the era, but when adapting the story Takahata added a framing device set in the 1980s, where Taeko is a young woman travelling to the countryside and remembering her youth. The framing device shifts the nostalgia from a shared idea of the 60s into the specific personal memories of an individual. Thus there are two kinds of nostalgia functioning simultaneously – the collective nostalgia felt by the audience and the personal nostalgia of the character.

Whisper Of The Heart, written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Yoshifumi Kondo, evokes nostalgia in a slightly different fashion. On one hand, the film will create a sense a collective nostalgia from audiences today as it captures the feel of the mid-1990s, but at the time of production it was a contemporaneous story. The opening creates another kind of nostalgia, the use of the song Take Me Home, Country Roads not only conjures a nostalgia for the time that the song was originally written and released (the 1970s), but also the song’s subject matter is one of a nostalgic longing for a long passed childhood home. (And, in fact, for me, the song evokes a personal nostalgia for old school music lessons from when I was 9 or 10)

But there is also a strange kind of near-nostalgia shown in the film, a kind of ‘nostalgia for the present’. Whisper Of The Heart is a slice-of-life narrative about a young girl named Shizuku who, in-between preparing for the new school term, follows a cat that she sees sitting on a train. The cat leads her through small alleys and up to a tucked-away neighbourhood where she discovers an antiques shop (that she was unaware even existed) which contains a beguiling cat doll. She also discovers love for the first time in the form of Seiji, a young boy who has already decided that his life’s goal is to make violins. Inspired and a little frightened by the clarity of his ambition, Shizuku resolves to write a short story. 

In the brief glimpses that we get of her story-in-progress, in the form of raw imaginative daydreams, we see a strangely vague but familiar world identified elsewhere as 'Iblard'. When Shizuku conjures up these images, she is viewing her surroundings in a positive light, emphasizing the good and ignoring the bad, applying the same kind of ‘mental editing’ that nostalgia does to the past.

Iblard is the creation of artist Naohisa Inoue, who has created several hundred paintings of this nostalgic landscape. These paintings were eventually partially animated by Studio Ghibli to create Iblard Jikan, a half-hour direct-to-dvd piece that evokes a strong sense of familiarity rather than otherness in its strange multicoloured landscapes. Iblard is less of a clearly defined fantasy world and more of a frame of mind, a way of looking at our own world. Indeed Ghibli co-founder Miyazaki talks about the ability to see the world ‘through Iblard eyes’, a means of rediscovering the mundane everyday world as something new and magical.

The world that she conjures up in her mind reflects the surroundings that she is used to; we often see the landscape from high up, looking down at a cityscape that merges with trees and vegetation. 

Thus, Shizuku’s flights of fancy in Whisper Of The Heart are not a young girl’s escapism, but rather a way for her to find something new and exciting in a world that she had previously only ever thought of as containing school exams, annoying elder sisters and friends with romantic problems. Falling in love and discovering a passion for writing allows her to see the world through Iblard eyes, to be nostalgic about the here-and-now.

The finished story that she herself writes is never depicted or described in detail on screen. We know that it involves the figurine of an anthropomorphic cat as its main protagonist, Baron, and that it strangely parallels events from the youth of Seiji’s grandfather (who later recounts this story to Shiziku). But the story did find its way to being told many years later, in the form of the Studio Ghibli film The Cat Returns, directed by Hiroyuki Morita.

The Cat Returns is the story of young Haru, who does not consider herself particularly good at anything, and has recently discovered that her highschool crush has a girlfriend. While walking home she saves a cat from getting run over. But the cat is no ordinary feline; it is in fact the prince of the Cat Kingdom – and now his father the King has decided that Haru must come to their realm and marry the prince. Desperate to find a way out of this situation, she is directed to the Cat Business Office (or Cat Bureau depending on the translation). She discovers a large white cat waiting for her, which leads her through various backstreets and upwards until they finally reach a small, magical courtyard, where Baron waits for potential clients in his small antiques shop.

The Cat Returns is sometimes criticised for being more ‘lightweight’ than other Ghibli films but this can be explained when we view it not as a film, but rather as a film-within-a-film, the story that Shizuku will eventually write after the events of Whisper Of The Heart. We can see the aesthetic shift in Shizuku's imagination – from the baroque and fantastic Iblard to the simpler, streamlined look of 'The Cat Returns' – as resulting from the process of Shizuku polishing and refining her story. Her raw imagination is vibrant and excessive, the finished story is clear and concise.

Both Whisper Of The Heart and The Cat Returns feature sequences where young girls follow white cats upwards through unknown backstreets, eventually leading to a circular plateau that contains a quaint antique shop with Baron the Cat waiting inside. Arguably, Shizuku is 'present' in both moments. In Whisper Of The Heart, the event is happening to Shizuku, while in The Cat Returns it is happening as Shizuku remembers the original event.

Taken on its own, The Cat Returns is not a nostalgic story. But when we watch it in the context of Whisper Of The Heart (and Iblard Jikan) it is possible to see that Haru’s adventure is itself a nostalgic memory of what was arguably the most significant day in Shizuku’s life. And here is where the nostalgia becomes metaleptic. For an audience, watching this sequence in The Cat Returns evokes a collective nostalgia for the film Whisper Of The Heart, reminding us of the original sequence. But because we are aware that Shizuku is somehow 'there', behind the scenes, writing the event that we see, it also functions as a communication of the character's personal nostalgia. Like the character stepping off the screen in The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Shizuku's nostalgia moves from one narrative layer to another, linking the past events of Whisper Of The Heart, our memories of watching the film, Shizuku's memories of that period of her life and the present story of The Cat Returns into a single nostalgic experience.

                                                                                                             - P. S.

Undercover Authorship

The above image by Tim Burton expresses the young animator's frustration at the Disney Studio's insistence on conformity and determination to force individual talent into pre-set expectations. If you wanted to work at Disney in the 1980s, then you had to obey the strict rules of what constituted the 'Disney Brand'. Burton's unique style did not suit the studio much at all (though, given that fact, he did do rather well out of them - being able to make the decidedly un-Disney shorts Vincent, Frankenweenie and Hansel And Gretel) and he eventually left to pursue his own artistic agenda. This panned out quite well for Burton himself, but also rather well for Disney in the long-run, who have made a fortune out of Nightmare Before Christmas and have repeatedly tried to entice Burton back to put his own stamp on their established properties (successfully with Alice In Wonderland, unsuccessfully with Maleficent). Another frustrated animator with artistic dreams that ran against the grain of 80's Disney was John Lasseter, who likewise left Disney to follow his own star, only to find that that star brought him right back to making money for Disney again.

In both cases, individuals with a clear artistic stamp were forced out of the studio for not conforming to the status quo and were only incorporated back into the fold once their idiosyncrasies had proven themselves out in the real world. But what about those that were left behind? The other Disney animation directors of the 1980s that managed to toe the line and produced material that the studio executives were happy with? Were they in some way less artistically-minded? Did they simply keep their heads down and get on with what they were told?

I shan't try and offer up an overview of the people at work in Disney during the decade, but what I will do is look at the films of John Musker and Ron Clements in the context of 'authorship'. When we look at their filmography, we're struck with how mainstream it appears to be - you can't find another pair of directors from this period with as successful a track record as these two. The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet, and The Princess And The Frog - each would seem to be 'Disney movies' first and foremost, providing us with all of the things that we would expect from the studio rather than any individual person (or persons). But when we look closer we can see a pattern of elements in their films that link them into a unified whole. It's not that these elements are missing from other Disney films, but no-one else combines all of these particular elements together in the way that Musker & Clements do.

While the previous post on Burton explored the concept of authorship largely in relation to aesthetics - the look of the films - with Musker & Clements we need to focus on the narrative structure and themes to see an authorial pattern. First off, the cast of characters; Musker & Clements movies will nearly always feature a hero/heroine, a love-interest, two comical sidekicks and a villain. At first glance, this might appear to describe any Disney cast, but bear with me. The hero/heroine and love-interest are of least interest here, not only do we find them in the majority of Disney films, we also find them in 95% of all Hollywood films. The other two categories are slightly different, though. All Disney movies have comic relief characters, but Musker & Clements have a particular affinity for the 'removable double-act' - two characters whose role is mainly to communicate with one another, rather than to contribute much to the plot. We can easily take Sebastian and Flounder out of The Little Mermaid and it will have little bearing on the way the narrative pans out. The same goes for Abu and the Carpet in Aladdin, Pain and Panic in Hercules, or Louis and Ray in The Princess And The Frog. Now, of course, it's not that these characters contribute nothing to proceedings, but that their roles (if any) are largely functional and could be performed by any random character. The botched murder of baby Hercules could have been given to undifferentiated goons, Aladdin's escape from the Cave of Wonders requires a flying carpet - but there's no reason for that carpet to be a character.

Two obvious counter-examples here might be Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King and Lumiere and Cogsworth from Beauty And The Beast, neither of which are directed by Musker & Clements. But although they are both comical double-acts, they differ from the above examples. In the first, Timon and Pumbaa are integral to the narrative; it is their philosophy to life that changes Simba in the second half of the film (it's not about their function in the story, but their personalities). In the other, the two belong to a wider cast of enchanted-object characters, Mrs. Potts most prominent among them. The dynamic is in fact a three-way one, with the more down-to-earth Potts acting as a buffer between the two in their constant bickering. Other examples of the character type - Mushu and Cri-Kee from Mulan and Meeko and Flit from Pocahontas - do serve the same function as in Musker & Clements films, but the films lack the other recurring elements (that I will discuss below).

The other character type is the villain. Now, Disney has a long tradition of famous villains - they've even become their own meta-franchise recently - but these villains are of a very particular type. Modeled mainly on James Bond bad guys, Musker & Clements villains are intelligent, sarcastic, have very specific multi-staged schemes, are obsessed with taking over whatever portion of the world they happen to inhabit (all of 'mousedom', the seas, Agrabah, the cosmos, New Orleans), and very often have some powered-up final form, like a video game boss (Ratigan and Ursula grow in size, Jafar becomes a giant snake, Hades calls upon the hired muscle of the Titans). While Gaston from Beauty And The Beast is clearly the antagonist of the film, he doesn't possess any of the above attributes. Neither does Ratcliffe from Pocahontas, Shan Yu in Mulan, Frollo in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, or Clayton from Tarzan. Once again, The Lion King seems to give us the exception - Scar fits the bill perfectly, and we have to reiterate the fact that it is not that each of these individual elements are unique to Musker & Clements, but that only they use this exact combination of elements.

But most striking device in the Musker & Clements tool-kit of animation filmmaking is not character types but a particular narrative approach; the two-goal structure. In most Hollywood films, the story is motored by the central character's desire to achieve their goal - to get the girl, to save the world, to find the treasure, to pilot the giant robot. This goal is established early in the film, and then circumstances and antagonistic characters thwart the hero/heroine's attempt to achieve this dream. But in Musker & Clements, the story is propelled by a character attempting to achieve a goal, which they do achieve at around the mid-point of the film, only to find that that goal has been transformed or replaced into a second goal, which now takes over as the focus of the story. Ariel is initially motivated to be a part of the surface world, and she achieves this goal only to have it be replaced by the more pressing goal of getting Eric to fall in love with her. Aladdin's goal in life is to become more than a thief and be a success - which the Genie makes a reality, only for the schemes of Jafar and the heart of Jasmine to take centre-stage. After finding out his true heritage, Hercules is motivated by one thing only: to become a hero. This he does by the film's second act, only for the sultry Meg to change the direction of his attentions. As is probably apparent from these descriptions, the second goal is always that of finding romance.

The Princess And The Frog is probably most overt in this respect, highlighting as its central theme the difference between what you want and what you need. The first goal is always what the character wants, a somewhat short-sighted or superficial desire. Once this has been obtained, its shortcomings become apparent (to the audience if not always the character) and so the second goal of settling down in a heterosexual relationship takes its place as the new, more worthy goal. You might want fame or money or legs, but what you need is the love of a good woman or man. As always, we could argue that The Lion King fits the Musker & Clements bill despite not being a Musker & Clements film. It has a comical double-act, a sarcastic and scheming villain and is very definitely a film of two distinct halves. But Simba has no immediate first goal. Although he certainly wants to be king (he just can't wait for it), he does not need to do anything to achieve this. It is not a goal but an eventuality. Only in the second half of the film does he develop a clear idea about what he needs to do and finds the resolve to do it.

The films of Musker & Clements allows us to see that an authorial stamp does not have to be as obvious as a particular aesthetic or overt thematic concerns, it can take the form of completely mainstream, commonly found elements (which at first appear to be no different to any other film) combined in a particular way to highlight a storytelling preference. John Musker and Ron Clements make their own films featuring comic relief characters that have little bearing on the narrative flow, witty and Machiavellian villains that tend to up the stakes at the finale, and heroes and heroines that pursue slightly selfish ends only to discover the joys of the opposite sex. But they also quite definitely make Disney films

                                                                                                                             - P. S.

Team Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas

To celebrate All Hallow's Eve, this month's post will look at the concept of authorship in relation to a Halloween favourite of many, the misleadingly titled Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm intending to start a series of posts exploring the complexities of film authorship next month, and so it seemed appropriate to use Tim Burton, the most dubious of film auteurs, as a prologue to this.

In some ways, Burton is a prime example of the initial iteration of the 'auteur', the term Francois Truffaut used to describe a film director whose personal stamp could be seen in the finished film thanks to a recurring set of stylistic and aesthetic motifs. And it's certainly true that one can often identify a Tim Burton film just by looking at it (or even just the poster, in fact). There are certain characteristics that we expect in a Burton film, an almost unconscious checklist that audiences carry in the backs of their brains when going to see one of his films.

Another reason I evoke Truffaut rather than just the general concept of 'authorship' is because, for him, one of the defining features of the Auteur is that they express their personal vision while working within the confines of the Hollywood system. Anyone can make a personal film if they're being funded by an arts council or creating a personal avant-garde piece in their home, but to achieve it while working with a team of hundreds, with studio executives and producers looking over your shoulder, insisting that you make the film as appealing to as wide an audience as possible in order to increase box office revenue - well, that takes a very clear and uncompromising vision, says Truffaut.

Because Burton is very much a Hollywood director with a clear and distinct visual stamp on his films, there would appear to be no reason to describe his authorship as 'dubious'. But this is where Nightmare Before Christmas comes in. Before writing this post, I did a quick search through some message boards and found that to this day - 21 years after the film was released - there are still people who believe that Tim Burton directed Nightmare. The mistake is easy to understand - his name's above the title, after all - but I'm always a little depressed by how little attention people pay to the credits. Do people's brains really just switch off the second the story ends? After Jack and Sally embrace and the camera pulls back, the screen goes black and there - in large white letters - is the phrase 'Directed by Henry Selick'. I'm genuinely baffled by how people can watch the film year after year, and claim to be huge fans of it, and yet not pick up on this.

But the purpose of this post is not to rant about Burton 'stealing credit' from Selick, or how the film is good only because it was directed by Selick instead of Burton (there are plenty of other people doing that on the internet), rather it is to demonstrate that the idea of authorship in film, of identifying a 'personal stamp' in a film, can be far more complicated that we might first think.

It's certainly true that Nightmare is Burton's baby; an idea for a 20 minute television special that he concocted while at Disney, alongside the original Frankenweenie, the utterly bizarre Hansel And Gretel and a host of unrealised projects (two of the most interesting of which would be Trick Or Treat and True Love). The original story and character designs were by Burton and it's here where we can most obviously identify his fingerprints - a tall willowy figure wanting to break away from the confines that society has placed on him, an inherent trait that prevents them from being able to achieve their immediate desire, a host of bizarrely proportioned creatures, architecture with funny angles and a recurring use of black and white stripes and checkerboard patterns.

But the finished film is just over 70 minutes, not 20, and Burton neither expanded the story, wrote the screenplay or directed the action himself. Although we can say that the central theme of the film and the overall aesthetic are his, the idea that any other aspect of the film belongs to Tim Burton the individual becomes a little stretched. First, the original story was adapted by Michael McDowell, whose main output has been writing episodes of horror anthology shows such as Tales From The Darkside, Monsters and Alfred Hitchcock Presents... as well as co-creating and co-writing the screenplay for Burton's Beetlejuice. The shifting of the story into a longer format was the result of McDowell, including the addition of the love story with Sally and the villain Oogie-Boogie. The screenplay itself was written by Caroline Thompson, best known for two other Burton scripts Edward Scissorhands and The Corpse Bride as well as several adaptations of children's literature.

Burton was still involved in the development of his story into full screenplay, but he had now become the 'producer leaning over the shoulder' who Truffaut considered an obstacle that had to be overcome. And we must also take into account Selick's claim that the film was largely improvised during the animation process, using Thompson's script only as a loose guideline. The story is already three-steps removed from Burton and yet, because of the core theme and aesthetics, we can still identify the piece as a Burton work.

But surely it's more accurate to just describe Burton as the 'original author' of the work - in much the same way that Dr. Seuss is the original author of The Lorax but had little to do with the expansion of the story into a feature film (for obvious reasons). Why do we credit Burton for the finished film and not just the initial source material? Part of the reason is because both McDowell and Thompson have worked with Burton before (and after). As writers they have a fairly good understanding of what boxes to tick in order to give something a 'Burton' feel. This, of course, is not authorship but rather a kind of work ethic, a shared idea originated by an individual but executed by many. What we think of as the work of Tim Burton is really the work of the Tim Burton Team, several talented people consciously evoking the expected style.

Another important point worth noting about the expansion of the story: 30 minutes of the film's runtime is taken up with songs (and that's not including reprises). Arguably the film's most important storyteller is Danny Elfman. While in a standard Disney musical, the 70 minutes would contain maybe five or six songs, Nightmare has ten. And while ordinarily the purpose of a musical number is to condense story time - the use of music in 'Part Of Your World' expresses Ariel's emotional state far more succinctly than dialogue alone could - Elfman's songs are largely about expansion. Scenes such as the town meeting or Jack's Christmas experiments could have been half the length if their subject matter were just stated through characters. This is not a criticism (it's not that the songs are 'padding'), it's to emphasise how the story is told more through music and movement than through words.

Elfman is of course a hugely significant factor in the 'Burton feel' of many films, from Beetlejuice to Batman, from Pee-wee's Big Adventure to Big Fish, and the amount of work put into the film by him seals the deal for many that Nightmare must be a Burton film. So, not only is the story the result of four other people in addition to Burton, but the atmosphere created through the soundtrack is also the result of our associating Elfman with the director rather than anything that Burton himself has done. On top of this, there is the 'look' of the film to consider. We have already discussed how the aesthetic elements of the film are recognisably that of Burton - we could take a still from any moment of the film and be able to identify it as coming from his mind. But a film is more than still images, it is about how those images flow together to create movement - the 'look' of Nightmare is just as much about cinematography (the way in which the camera interacts with what's in front of it) as it is about character design.

Selick's personal stamp is most easily seen in the cinematography of the film; the way in which the camera navigates the spaces of the scenes are what most obviously draw comparison with James And The Giant Peach and Coraline. Take the opening sequence, 'This Is Halloween', for example. A casual viewer might only see the 'Burton-ness' of the scene, seeing the curved walls and wonky corners of the streets and buildings, the colourful creatures of Halloween Town, and the atmosphere created by Elfman's song, and make connections with other early films such as Pee-wee and Beetlejuice. But a more canny spectator will look at how the camera moves through the scene, how it skirts passed the scarecrow just as the wind spins it around, how it drifts through the street as each character sings their piece, and most strikingly how it circles around the effigy that reveals itself to be Jack Skellington in his big entrance, and see the hand of Selick at work. One aspect of stop-motion animation that often gets completely taken for granted is that camera movement has to be animated as well. The camera doesn't just float through a scene as animators busily attend to the character models. The movements just described above would have had to have been created frame-by-frame in conjunction with the character animation. This is a level of elaborateness that we often find in Selick but rarely find in Burton.

As this post has already run far longer than I intended it to, I shall quickly reiterate my main point about film authorship: when we think about the look or feel of a particular director's body of work, what we are really thinking of is not a personal vision or expression by some genius individual. Rather it is a collaborative work resulting from several parties all working towards a common artistic goal, a goal that it often shaped by the individual whose name appears above the title, but which is realised by the talents of many artists. When we think about the distinctive 'Guillermo Del Toro look' what we really mean the work of Del Toro's recurring team of designers (Mike Mignola, Wayne Barlowe, etc.) and production crew (such as cinematographer Guillermo Navarro) rather than just the director himself. But much as a band will be overshadowed by their front-man/woman, a film's production crew will often be overshadowed by the single person that we associate with that particular style - even when the person had precious little to do with the actual production of the film.

Happy Halloween!

                                                                                                                             - P. S.

Real-Life Superheroes

SOME THOUGHTS ON REINVENTING YOURSELF AS A MARKETABLE ICON

The phenomenon of ‘real life superheroes’ is interesting on several levels for several reasons. We could talk about the psychology of such people and why they would want to put themselves in such high risk situations? Is it the thrill of danger? A death wish? A genuine inability to see the real world as more dangerous than the fictional worlds of comics and movies? Or we could talk about the sociological conditions that have led to these groups of people springing up now. Is it some increased juvenilesation of culture that leads to grown adults playing children’s games out in the streets of major cities? Why now and not in the middle of the seventies? What differentiates these ‘real life superheroes’ from standard vigilantes or neighbourhood watch groups? They don’t actually, after all, really have superpowers.

But rather than pursuing these kinds of cultural questions I want to look at the element of this phenomenon that most strongly resonates with my personal interests, and also speaks to something quite fundamental to the phenomenon: the decision of ordinary people to do good deeds as someone else. The fascination for me is how these people – who I actually have the utmost respect for in terms of their altruistic intentions – feel compelled to reinvent themselves as marketable icons, as distinct entities that can be differentiated from other ‘products on the shelf’ thanks to a specific look, gimmick and name.

A 'marketable icon' is a pretty vague category. I don’t mean it to be taken literally, as something designed to be tied to particular advertising strategies, but rather that it is some kind of individuated entity, distinct from all others through a particular set of visual, and sometimes conceptual, codings which are – it must be said – usually enforced by copyright laws. Mickey Mouse is clearly a marketable icon. But so too are the Universal Studio Monsters, though as characters Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster are in the public domain and exist in numerous instances, it is their 1930s and 40s incarnations that remain the marketable icon. Would Kenneth Branagh’s take on the monster really have made a particularly good action figure?

This question is actually quite important, because the benefit of a marketable icon is that it can exist in a variety of media; movies, toys, posters, t-shirts, video games, collectible cards, etc. We can probably all recognise Robert DeNiro as a distinct individual, but he’s not a marketable icon in that he cannot be successfully translated into other media in the way that Frankenstein’s monster can. The simpler the figure, the more easily translatable to different contexts it is. Cartoon characters, monsters and superheroes are the most common kind of marketable icons that we come across in our day to day lives, not least of all because the genres that these types turn up in naturally lend themselves to extending into franchises of various kinds. Few superheroes only exist in one single issue of a comic.

Ownership of a marketable icon is also important. Icons are designed to be easily read as belonging to a particular company or group. Mickey Mouse does not endorse Warner Brothers products; Spider-Man is not going to convince you to eat Kellogg’s Frosties. DC and Marvel are the two biggest owners of marketable iconic superheroes, indeed, they each make sure to spread their characters across as many mediums as possible at any given time. Whatever variations Spider-Man might take across films, cartoons, video games or action figures, he is still recognisably the same icon that appears in the original comic.

The common academic cliché surrounding superheroes is that they are the myths of today, the equivalent of Hercules’ adventures or the saga of Odysseus. This is perfectly acceptable as an explanation, that superheroes feed a basic need that we have and have had since our earliest ancestors started telling each other stories. We like to invent people who are more than human so that we can aspire to be them. But Hercules wasn’t owned by a corporation. If an ancient Greek pre-school put on a play of The Odyssey, they weren’t going to get sued by the estate of Homer. The ownership issue surrounding superheroes is precisely what defines them from previous generations of heroes. We like to think that superheroes belong to us all, but they don’t, they belong to Time-Warner and Disney.

In the HBO documentary Superheroes (sometimes known as Real-Life Superheroes), we are shown the lives of a selection of would-be heroes who don costumes each night and set out into the city streets to fight evil doers. Of course, the majority of these are slightly overweight well meaning middle-aged men who are just comic book geeks living out their dreams. The documentary draws attention to the fandom of these men (and women occasionally) in a few ways. Self-proclaimed superhero Mr. Xtreme spends his days watching episodes of Power Rangers on TV. We are given the opinions of comics legend Stan Lee on the phenomenon of real-life superheroes (he’s a little concerned, obviously). During the interviews with Lee, Mr. Xtreme and another hero, Master Legend, the camera pans across posters and action figures of various Marvel superheroes. All of these associations seem perfectly harmless, even commonsensical, until one realises that HBO is owned by Time-Warner, who also own DC comics. The references to DC heroes are surprisingly sparse. Practically non-existent, in fact. The documentary functions as reverse-propaganda; Time-Warner tells us that the phenomenon is the responsibility of Marvel – DC comics don’t inspire such nutty behaviour, blame Disney (who also owned Power Rangers when the documentary was filmed).

This continues through what is not said by the documentary. Several of the heroes during the documentary cite the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese as a prime reason for their actions; the kind of apathy that led to her death, when there were dozens of people who could have helped her, is exactly what they’re fighting against. It seems highly unlikely that any of these people knew about this 1964 event through any means other than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. In that work, the somewhat imbalanced but highly morally indignant vigilante Rorschach is inspired to become an ultra-violent crime-fighter because of the Genovese murder. Though the heroes of the documentary claim to be inspired by the real life event, they are actually replicating Rorschach’s actions, recasting themselves as the character. Their inspiration for becoming real life vigilantes is not a 1964 stabbing, but a seminal comic published by DC and owned by Time-Warner.

So why reinvent yourself as Rorschach? Why decide to put on a mask, kit yourself out with a variety of home-made gadgets, call yourself an odd name and fight the good fight? Why not simply do good as yourself? It seems to me that there are two answers. Firstly, there’s the desire to transcend the boundaries of your own identity and become the heroic figures of myth, to stop being Joe Nobody and become Hercules. These actions of vigilantism and charity are not about ego (well… mostly), or about making sure that your neighbours know all about the good deeds that you do. They are about the actions themselves, doing good for good’s sake and separating it from an individual person. But there’s also a more culturally specific reasoning behind it. As has already been said, nearly all of the known superheroes are owned by major corporations. The people don’t really own these heroes, the money-men do. But by becoming the next generation of heroes, equally distinct, equally iconic, equally ‘marketable’ (not literally, but I’d be happy to own a Black Monday Society action figure set), but not owned by any of the major corporate power brokers that dictate the majority of our day to day lives. Becoming your own marketable icon allows you to distinguish yourself from the rest of society, to be an individual in the crowd, to become that transcendent icon that Spider-Man is without having to put money into Sony Pictures’ pocket.

There is a third reason, of course, one voiced by another of the documentary’s subjects: “It’s hella cool!”

                                                                     - P.S.