In-Class Brainstorming: Everyday Heroes

What separates an everyday hero? 

In class, we attempt to wade through the multiplicity of definitions.  Suggested:

• no alter-ego
• characterized by struggle
• start in poverty

Has anyone ever saved anybody's life? 

Couple examples:

• pulled friend out of traffic, saved from reckless oncoming car
  
• saved young boy from sliding down pyramids
• interfered in domestic violence
• removed drunk girl from clutches of bad people, put her in cab

Kathleen's story:

• jumped in moving Volvo, applied brakes to stop it sliding downhill
  

Objections are raised, what about a quieter definition of everyday hero: teachers who change their students' lives, etc.  We discuss the meaning of "everyday hero" with "accidental hero".

Accidental Hero

• element of chance
  
• lack of preparation
• lack of reward? (common theme in all heroism, rewards may be offered and may be accepted, but aren't the point of the act).

Kitty Genovese story brought up - why didn't a hero step forward to stop her murder?

Groupthink and sheep - does heroism require acting before thinking?  We also discussed Rosa Parks, who was the one person in the crowd not willing to go along.  Where was Kitty's Rosa Parks?

Talked a lot about Wesley Autry.

Laundry as Destiny:

• Boy dressed as Spider-Man saves baby from blaze (Brazil)
  

Vince Carter as superhero?  Shot of him in Olympics looking an awful lot like Spider-Man....

How about the man who organized MLK's civil rights on Washington?  You never hear his name (and, in fact, I've already forgotten it and it was just mentioned thirty seconds ago in class).

What about the Guardian Angels?  At what point does a power trip become the "reward" that a hero is supposed to eschew?

And what do you do with someone who doesn't want to be saved?  The beginning of The Incredibles was mentioned by Kathleen - the guy who wants to kill himself, doesn't want to be saved, and sues the hero who saves his life.

Real life plays against archetypes.  There's no template for dealing with the gray areas that life presents.  Brightly-costumed archetypes slugging it out in a mountaintop retreat or hovering over the city is one thing, but life rarely presents in black and white.  Human life operates almost exclusively in the grays.

Sometimes standing up to authority is an act of heroism:

This was a watershed moment in media - comedy becomes the new political voice.  A third opinion is added, breaking the artificial duopoly of opinion.   No longer the same network views, but Stewart is the coming of the Internet, the New Media, the moderates and the hard-to-contains.

"If you're going to tell the truth, you'd better make people laugh.  Or they'll kill you."  They thought he was going to be a goofball - they needed him to be a goofball - but he spoke instead the truth.  

Words from the jester.

In-Class Writing Exercise, 11/20, part 2

Re: flying as the primal super-hero power:

The television series Heroes opens with a character dreaming of leaving his (forgive me) pedestrian world behind and being a person with great power, and what's the power he dreams of?

Flight.

Who can't see themselves in that?

This is why Heroes sucks - it started out so well, tapping this universal vein.  And now it keeps tromping over the same ground again and again.  Except for anything approaching a sense of wonder or magic.

Response to in-Class Proposal, continued

Piercings and Tattoos - Nicole

• religious piercings
  
• "supposed to make your life better"?  Sounds like the piercings in our culture.
• I'm really interested in the culture clash between the Japanese, who had a long history of tattooing, and the Chinese, who did not.  How was this expressed?  Fought?  Resolved (or not)?
• Romans?  Really?  Cool.  I didn't know that.
• Your proposal is a great idea - don't know if practicioners are really aware of the history behind it.  My suspicion is that tattooers do, if only because of the Japanese influence on so many artists (and, just while we're at it, is there a sort of reverse-Engrish going on there with all these white kids wearing katakana that they hope means what they think it means).  Piercers?  I don't really know.  Again, I'd suspect that they don't.
• For my own part, I knew a fair amount about the history of tattoo art (especially Japanese and Maori) before I got my first tattoos, although I wasn't terribly interested in them and none of my three tattoos come from those cultures.  I didn't know a thing about the history of piercings before I got my eyebrow done.

In-Class Writing Exercise, 11/20

"Teenagerdom was a secret identity in the first place"

- From Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.

There's something primal and true about this statement, which speaks to why the genre is so appealing to teens. 

We pull our hats down and collars up against the cold wind of the presence of our peers, and know that deep inside us, somewhere, is a being of great power and authority.  We have the glasses and the weak knees and the weaker chins and the bad teeth and the worse skin, but deep inside us, if we can just pull open our shirts and let it out, is a spit-curled demigod who can lift an oceanliner and always has a quip at the ready.

It's why, to bring this back to my midterm paper, kid sidekicks flat-out suck.  What teenager's fantasy of power involves being fourteen years old?  Nobody wants to be Robin - everybody wants to be Batman.

In-Class Writing Exercise, 11/13

Responding to this quote from Joss Whedon, which Kathleen put on the board:

"I created Buffy to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can't be loved.  Because it's about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult.  And it mythologizes it in such a romantic way - it basically says "Everybody who made it through adolescence is a hero."

I dunno.  Maybe it's my lack of real Buffy knowledge, but I just don't see it - there seems to be a little of this, Buffy's journey through this stranger-than-fiction-fictionalized town in which everyone is vaguely-but-not-really aware of the sinister underbelly, her trip through high school.

But Buffy's quest doesn't seem as universal as all that - she's the Slayer, she's a singular figure for this moment in history.  The universality of Whedon's quote doesn't seem pressing.

As for the nature of what he's saying, without applying it to Buffy, I think it's fascinating.  Vampires have traditionally been seen as sexual creatures, the conversion to vampirism as metaphor for losing virginity.  And then, of course, there's the blood and all.  

Powered characters themselves as a metaphor for adolescence goes way back - the X-Men were built on it, after all.  Mutations manifest at puberty and the characters go from little kids to teenage superheroes.  Heroes has a similar moment when powers erupt on to the scene, in a moment of stress or excitement or other adrenaline.  But Heroes sucks, so maybe that's not the best example.

Final thought - I think I need to watch more Buffy.

That New York Times parody newspaper

has a website.

When I first heard about it, the site was down.  I presumed heavy Times legal action, but for whatever reason it's back.

More on the paper here.

FInal Project - the Good Knight

I discussed my final project with Kathleen, and decided that I could probably stretch my midterm paper out to final paper-length in my sleep, so I thought I'd go in a completely different way.

So I'm creating a pitch for a new comic book hero, a sidekick all grown up into adult hero.

My hero grew up as as The Pageboy, sidekick to a hero named The Good Knight, prowling the dark alleyways of a Midwestern industrial city.  The kicker is that she's a she - Janet Fleischer by day - violating the general rule that the hero and sidekick game is exclusively for boys.  The further kicker is that, as the Pageboy, she crossed-dressed.  Either because her hero mentor thought it would protect her identity or ironically (in light of Wertham's views on Batman and Robin), because an adult male palling around with a young girl would be somehow unseemly.

Now her mentor is gone, and she's taking over the role.  But on her own terms (forgive me, Michael Dorsey), and as a woman.

So we have an Olde Englande themed hero, knight on horseback/motorcycle kind of thing.  But what really interests me is her conflict at heading back into the world.  Michael Corleone finally taking over the family business.

How does the public react to this new hero?  Does she out herself as the Pageboy or present as a brand new, unrelated adventurer?

How does the super-hero community react?  Did any of them know she was who she was?  The heros, the sidekicks?  Any sense of betrayal from them when they learn?

Is she ever tempted to "kill off" The Good Knight II, maybe return as a male Good Knight III?  A new incarnation, in the role she's more comfortable playing?

Short - I don't know.  But those are the questions I'm asking as I work on it.