A DEMIHERO DISTINCTION

This post follows up on one made about a year and a half ago, wherein I made a point with which I no longer agree.

 Shortly after I re-defined "focal presences" as "icons" in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, I stated that in PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS that I didn't think "charisma-crossovers" occurred at all when, in a given open-ended series, subordinate icons belonging to one persona-type encountered subordinate icons belonging to another persona-type. Here was one of my examples:

...within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

One flaw in this statement, though, is that as an often-seen support character, Commissioner Gordon is as familiar a sight in the BATMAN comics as an object like the Batmobile. He belongs to what I've called "the subordinate ensemble," so naturally he does not "cross over" with subordinate icons who are only seen in a more irregular fashion. Gordon, like Alfred the Butler, might be seen as moons circling a planet called Batman-- or sometimes "Batman-and-Robin." Non-regular subordinates are more like celestial bodies that might not be big enough to be planets, but they too respond to the gravitic influence of the Bat-planet. But even if the Joker and the Penguin are seen as separate celestial bodies, when they come near one another they also issue a gravitic influence on one another-- and that intermingling of energies does qualify as a charisma-crossover.

Side-note: arguably some of these celestial bodies may increase their mass, enough to become "planets" in their own right, then they may start generating their own gravity-power on the Bat-planet as well as upon lesser celestial bodies. Catwoman, for instance, remained a "Charisma Dominant Sub" for the first fifty years of her existence, and her very rare forays into stature-territory did not change her, any more than the JOKER series made the Clown Prince into a "Stature Dominant Prime." But in 1993 Princess of Plunder acquired strong stature from a series that lasted roughly eight years, and continued to headline various projects over the past twenty-plus years. All that stature bulked her up into a "planet" with "Stature Dominant" mass, and she would be stature-dominant even when appearing as a guest-star in some other feature. End side-note.

Another inaccurate statement I made in CALLINGS was the following:

When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona.

In saying this, I was trying to suss out why demiheroes in a given series did not have "crossovers" with one another, just because, say, Flash Thompson crossed paths with J. Jonah Jameson (which I believe was a minor event that only happened one time in the Lee-Ditko years). But there was no necessity for this statement, since characters like Thompson and Jameson were already part of Spider-Man's subordinate ensemble.

Further, if it ever made sense to me to say that "monsters" and "villains" could not cross over their charisma-filled gravity-wells, that now seems entirely unnecessary. Monsters and villains are indeed very different personas, but as long as they are subordinate icons who are NOT part of the subordinate ensemble, then there's no reason that, say, if Batman crosses paths with both The Mad Hatter and Solomon Grundy, that's not a charisma-crossover. The reader recognizes both icons as "adversaries of Batman" and so their gravity-waves play off one another. Equally, in one Superman tale he encountered a "villain" of his own rogues' gallery, the Atomic Skull, and teamed up with a "monster" from the Dark Knight's domain, The Man-Bat. I would deem both Skull and Man-Bat Charisma Dominant Subs, since Man-Bat never enjoyed more than fleeting stature-roles. So the two charisma-icons definitely cross over, just as if they'd both been Superman-foes-- or even two foes belonging to some third hero's cosmos.

Now, is it possible for a "non-regular" demihero "foe" of a hero to cross over with a monster or villain? Possibly. A character from the Frank Miller series BATMAN YEAR ONE, Commissioner Loeb, only made rare appearances in the comics. But he did make recurring appearances in the first two seasons of GOTHAM. There Loeb was a menace to James Gordon but not one regular enough to belong to that show's subordinate ensemble. He would have to have had some "dynamic" relationship to a monster or villain for that to sustain any crossover-vibe, not to simply be in the same room with Riddler or that sort of thing. A brief scene from THE LONG HALLOWEEN, in which Harvey "Not Yet Two Face" Dent crosses paths with Solomon Grundy for a chapter or so could have been reworked as a stand-alone arc with such a crossover-vibe with a demihero-type. I already alluded to a "monster-demihero" crossover in CALLINGS, where Brother Power crossed paths with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters.

And that's probably enough noodling on that for now.

 

PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS

 In ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA), published on 7-27-22 I made the following inexact statement: 

Lee had Foswell return to crime as an ally to the newly minted Kingpin-- only to be killed by the Kingpin's thugs for trying to protect Jameson. This might be deemed a demi-crossover of the charismatic kind, since Foswell had some escalation-charisma even as a support-figure, and the Kingpin had none until he appeared often enough to become a familiar figure.

I added a note to the blogpost to the effect that I would trash this opinion in another essay, and this is it.

The problem with my previous formulation is related to my ongoing theory of personas, given its final form in 2012's DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 1. I feel as if I've implied, though never stated outright, this necessary rule:

"When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona."

An example: within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

 

To return to the Spider-Man cosmos once more, Fred Foswell may have started out as a super-villain, but he spends the majority of his career as a demihero in the Lee-Ditko stories, wherein he's reformed and become a crusading reporter, generally being of aid to Spider-Man or the police but only with the limited actions of a demihero. Lee and Romita change him back to a villain who conspires with the Kingpin, probably because neither creator cared anything about Foswell and simply wanted to be rid of him. Nevertheless, Foswell's gratitude toward J. Jonah Jameson causes him to betray the Kingpin to save Jameson, which means that his brief conversion back to villainy was less than consequential in summing up his character arc. So Foswell dies, according to my system, a demihero.

So by my newly stated rule, Foswell might in theory interact with another demihero in the SPIDER-MAN cosmos, and that might be a charisma-crossover. Nevertheless, such a crossover would have to have something unusual about it, rather than just Fred Foswell bumping into Betty Brant or Jonah Jameson in the news room. For that matter, Foswell bumping into any of Peter Parker's college-chums-- which I don't believe ever happened-- would also prove inadequate to sustain any charisma. Now, if Stan Lee had written a bizarre story in which Fred Foswell was revealed to be the real father of Flash Thompson, then THAT might be a charisma-crossover, but even then it would be largely because the two characters had spent a long time in the Spider-cosmos acting independently of one another. 

In some of my earliest writings on crossovers, I distinguished between "static crossovers" and "dynamic crossovers." I won't repeat those particular observations, but the salient aspect of that theory was that the static crossovers were those that were fairly regularized, like Donald Duck appearing in Uncle Scrooge's feature, while dynamic crossovers were those that spotlighted a more unusual meeting, say, of Spider-Man and Daredevil. I would now tend to state that, in contrast to the crossovers of the other three persona-types-- of heroes, villains, or monsters-- demiheroes only sustain crossovers of a dynamic kind, because most of them function as support-characters. Returning to the Batman cosmos, a story in which Alfred simply met police detective Harvey Bullock would not be a dynamic crossover. But if the two of them joined forces to accomplish some mission, as the characters did in an episode of "Gotham," I would consider that a charisma-crossover. This principle builds on what I said here about viewing the meeting of two URUSEI YATSURA support-types as a charisma-crossover, because they immediately challenge one another.

Now crossovers of demiheroes from different universes are a different matter, since those are dynamic by definition. On my blog OUROBOROS DREAMS I devoted a post to a multi-demihero crossover, a TV-cartoon entitled POPEYE MEETS THE MAN WHO HATED LAUGHTER. Although the humorous hero Popeye is the star of the show, he's conned into bringing together a few dozen characters from funny comic strips, all under the aegis of King Features Syndicate, and including both famous types like Blondie and Dagwood and near-forgotten types like Snuffy Smith. Some "serious" heroes are mixed in as well, but almost all of the crossover-characters are of the demiheroic persona.

Similarly, there's no problem crossing over demiheroes with other persona who originate in separate conceptual universes. When DC Comics finally brought back their late sixties character Brother Power, who belongs to the "monster" persona, they did so in 1989's SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5. But the Brother didn't cross paths with the monster-protagonist of the feature, but with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters, Abby Arcane and Chester Williams. A crossover with Swamp Thing would have been a stature-crossover, but Brother Power meeting Swamp Thing's friends only works on the level of cosmic charisma.

 

CROSSOVERS VS. MASHUPS

 In this essay I wrote:

MONSTERS VS. ALIENS does not qualify as any kind of crossover, though it is a "mashup," in which diverse characters with some similar aspects but also with different backgrounds are jammed together in one narrative. It might be fairly argued that all crossovers may be called mashups, but that all mashups are not crossovers.

I'm not going to advance a "theory of mashups" to go with the crossover-theory advanced in the CONVOCATION series. But for the purpose of this essay, I'll formulate a rough definition: that, unlike crossovers, mashups don't always have to feature at least one character with some established story-history. For instance, the cited example, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, is a monster-mashup even though all four of the starring monsters appear for the first time in the movie. But it's not a monster-crossover because none of the featured characters had any established history in a previous narrative.

I reviewed the two WAXWORK films back in December 2014, but that was long before I was thinking much about crossover-theory. Whereas the heroes of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS only indirectly reference the movie-characters on which they're based, both WAXWORK films provide various incarnations of "famous monsters of filmland." What's interesting is that some of the incarnations are very generic, and would hardly count in a mashup except for the sheer diversity of their types, while a comparative few are specific enough in their references that they could be considered at least high-charisma crossovers.

In the first WAXWORK, the protagonists are menaced by assorted doppelgangers of evil entities. Two segments are devoted to generic versions of a werewolf and a mummy, and there's a climactic fight-scene in which the good guys contend with a small army of freaks, also mostly generic like zombies and vampires, though there are some very loose visual references to figures like The Invisible Man and Audrey II of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Yet there are two extended sequences devoted to the protagonists contending with both the canonical Dracula and a very fictionalized version of the Marquis de Sade-- both of whom count as "monsters" in my system. So by the terms I've used earlier, WAXWORK qualifies as a "high-charisma" crossover, even though none of the evil entities are "real."

The second WAXWORK, which includes a markedly different origin for the doppelgangers, also includes lots of generic types: more zombies (with an obvious hat-tip to DAWN OF THE DEAD), a disembodied hand, various aliens (including The Aliens), and a "ghost girl" possibly patterned on the spirit from THE HAUNTING. However, this time the "high-charisma" entities include versions of Doctor Frankenstein and his Monster, Mister Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Godzilla, Nosferatu, and a sorcerer based on the villain from Roger Corman's 1965 film THE RAVEN. To be sure, the sorcerer fits the persona of a "villain" rather than a "monster," but the others all register as monstrous presences, even though all of them, except for Frankenstein and his creation, only appear for a minute or so. 

Still, it's not hard to imagine the WAXWORK concept being done with no strong references to any established characters. Had this been done, the movies would not be crossovers, only mashups, like the one seen in the Mexican kiddie-film TOM THUMB AND LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD-- though that film is a "hero-crossover" because of the teamup of the titular fairy-tale protagonists.

PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2

I may be dovetailing two subjects with only a loose relationship, since my acceptance of the Whitehead term "prehension" (as explained here) came into being about the same time that I started meditating on the hypothetical evolution of what I've labeled as the four literary personas. Nevertheless, I'm going with the conceit.

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

In contrast, though, I can imagine-- just as part of a large thought-experiment-- ways in which the four personas might develop diachronically. 

From 2015's COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, here's my last summary definition of how the four personas play off one another in terms of the abstractions they represent, the positive and negative forms of "glory" and "persistence":

The model I've established is one in which heroes and villains alike align themselves with *glory* by championing either the positive or the negative forms of the "idealizing will," while monsters and demiheroes align themselves with *persistence* by pursuing the negative or positive forms of the "existential will."

Prehension may be relevant here as the process by which the two forms of will distinguish themselves, in terms of how such forms of will manifest themselves, first as real human activity and secondarily as the "gestural" literary abstraction of human activity.

Assuming the usual schema for the development of early protohumans-- living in small hunter-gatherer tribes once they've come down from the trees-- then the persona of the *demihero* would have "pride of place." The demihero embodies "positive persistence" insofar as he/she is in essence the persona most concerned with immediate survival. The same need for persistence also determines that the demihero is the figure that is, or at least appears to be, the most thoroughly socialized, because in prehistoric times the tribe is the means by which the individual survives.

The next in line of development then would be "the monster," whatever figure becomes outcast from society. There's no knowing what form of rebellion would give rise to the monster, but it could be anything from an individual rebelling against codes of exogamic marriage to a victim selected as a sacrificial *pharmakon.* The monster is defined by his exclusion from society, and in most if not all his/her forms, he's always "out of place" or "out of step" in some manner.

It's not impossible that other tribes might also contribute to the idea of the monster-persona, but given that a particular tribe cannot really designate a separate tribe as being "outcasts," it's more likely that rival tribes would be the source of the "villain-persona." A given tribe may have to trade with other tribes, particularly in terms of gaining exogamous marital partners, but as long as other tribes can be perceived as a threat, they-- or more probably, their overlords-- would be the ancestors of the villain. 

When a given society faces entities too powerful to be simply cast out after the fashion of the rejected monster, the notion of the hero, the individual able to conquer the most powerful representative of the enemy tribe, is born. The hero may also take partial shape from human being's battles against non-human animals, but in a social sense, the hero is most reified by his rivalry with the villain, where both represent the tribe's greater self-expression to goals of "glory" rather than mere "persistence."

 

 

OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD PT. 3

 

Most of my considerations on “persona-types” follow the broad patterns laid down in archaic societies, where a character is “good” if his actions enhance society and “bad” if they do not. Fiction, not being more than an analogue to real life, had no problem in promulgating heroes who are all good, and villains who are all bad.

At the same time, if one surveys the various personae of art, one sees some interesting admixtures of good and bad not only in the personas of “hero” and “villain,” but also those complementary types I call “the monster” and “the demihero.” In a purely statistical sense, most heroes and demiheroes are aligned with “goodness,’ and most villains and monsters are aligned with “badness.” In the following sections, I’ll outline various exceptions to these rules. I have categories for various types of exceptions, though these are only meant to be broad trope-types rather than critical formulations as such.

BAD HEROES include…

OUT FOR BLOOD—these are the heroes who serve the public good but are really in it more for personal gratification of bloodlust than for moral reasons. Examples include the Punisher and Marv of SIN CITY.

OBSESSED BY IDEALS—this type is the opposite of the previous category, in that the hero does good despite the fact that he’s overly rigorous in his pursuit of justice. These include Itto Ogami of LONE WOLF AND CUB with his devotion to being a pitiless assassin, Hugo Drummond of BLACK DOSSIER. A somewhat offbeat idealist is the half-insane Badger, as seen in the story “SnakeBile Cognac.”

HEROISM CORRUPTED—the will to do good has been soured by bad experiences, so that the hero no longer has a strong moral compass, as seen in Rorschach and the Comedian in WATCHMEN.

GOOD VILLAINS include…

GENTEEL THIEVES—professional burglars like Catwoman and Lupin III never really cause society any harm with their ripoffs, and thus give readers all sorts of fun diversions from the moral order.

THEY MIGHT GOT A POINT—these are villains who embody ideals that society might use a little more of. The prisoners of DEADMAN WONDERLAND are villains until they’re given heroic inspiration by lead character Ganta, while in TALES OFHOFMANN Mister Nobody and his Brotherhood of Dada embody capricious chaos as an anodyne to normalcy.

THEY DIDN’T MEAN TO DO GOOD—but authors work in mysterious ways, as seen with the plutocrat General Bullmoose in LI'L ABNER and with Judge Dredd’s reluctant ally Spikes HarveyRotten.

CONVERTS TO GOODNESS—Sometimes villains turn to the non-dark side just because they’re attracted to the good guys, though this may be more understandable with Kree-Nal being swayed by the Jaguar, and less so with “the StarCreatures” getting starry-eyed over two Earth-schmucks. Sesshomaru of INU-YASHA, however, loses his villainy due to adopting a cute little girl. The Providers of THE GAMESTERS OF TRISKELION are reluctant converts in that they become benevolent overlords due to losing a bet.

GOOD MONSTERS include…

VENGEANCE-SAVIORS—the monsters are out to avenge themselves and end up helping good people, as happens with Black Jubal in THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT DIE. Janus, the son ofMarvel’s Dracula,  appears to get empowered by angelic forces to slay his unregenerate father, though Janus never seems all that “angelic.”

MONSTERS WANT LOVE TOO—sometimes these are just domesticized monsters like Dick Briefer’s comedy version of FRANKENSTEIN, or the grotesque romance seen in “LowerBerth.” Brother Power believes in peace and love like his hippie brethren though he tends to hit as hard as his nastier opponents.

ACCIDENTAL TERRORS—ah, the Tribbles are so cute, and the Shmoos so useful, until they get in the way of normal operations.

IRREGULAR HEROES—Both of the best-known swamp creatures, Man-Thing and Swamp Thing, possess a “thing” for fighting evil, but not on a regular basis. Monsters who commit to full-time heroism, like the Thing and Vlad from HACK/SLASH, are just plain heroes.

BAD DEMIHEROES include…

IDEALISTS UNLEASH EVIL—Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll are the best known examples, but types like Gustav Weil and Joy Eden are cut from the same cloth.

RACING LIKE THE RATS—these are conniving types who often seem to meld with the regular ranks of society but are always on the lookout to swindle or steal. Some of them have irregular moments of heroism, like Cerebus the Aardvark, but they usually revert to type in the end. Simon Stagg of METAMORPHO sometimes helps the Element Man, but is just as likely to undercut the hero. Dynamo City presents a whole society devoted to ruthless acquisition.

THE EVIL OF BANALITY—Wally Wood’s New York in “My Word” might be better named “No Fun City.” THE CABBIE has Christian visions but money’s his real god, though unlike the rat-racers he’s not honest about it. In “A Taste ofArmageddon,” all the inhabitants of Eminiar-7 line up to surrender their lives to automated extinction.

PUFFED UP WITH NO PLACE TO GO—the category of the braggarts. A few, like J. Jonah Jameson, are dimly aware of their own failings and so have their enormous egos threatened by persons of superior attainments. Most are like Rudy Crane of EYE EYESIR and Doctor Pritchard of HANDS OF THE RIPPER, seeking to demonstrate their braggadocio and ending up deflated.

RALLY ROUND THE ROGUES' GALLERY PT. 2

One reason that I've devoted a fair deal of space to the topic of *centricity,* or any of the other synonyms I've used for it over the years, is that only by knowing the center of the story does one understand the story as a whole. That said, it can be more than a little challenging to determine when a given narrative is dominated by one character, more than one, or even a setting. My 2012 essay ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE is devoted to some of the cases in which more than one entity is "the star of the show"-- which is admittedly a lot less complicated than figuring out which characters are the "focal presences" of multi-story narratives like anthology presentations.

In 2008 I devoted some space here to some of the earliest examples of "monster rallies" and "villain rallies" in popular fiction. The earliest dated use of the term "monster rally" that I've found appears in a 1950 Charles Addams cartoon, but I suspect Addams didn't conceive the term. It sounds like something that would have been cooked up in the 1940s in response to Universal Pictures' release of "monster crossovers," possibly starting with 1943's FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN. If "monster rally" does indeed date back to the 1943 film, it indicates that "rally" did not connote unity for the person who coined the phrase, even though the word traces from a French word meaning "to unite." As all horror-fans should know, the film centers upon the two monsters not just meeting, but eventually coming into conflict. The next three Universal crossovers also did not depict the monsters as part of any united front: in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and HOUSE OF DRACULA, they cross paths to some extent but largely don't affect one another's arcs, In ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, the Monster is more or less the thrall of Dracula, and the Wolf Man opposes the vampire's plans, though the lines of battle are not as strongly drawn as they were in the 1943 film.

In my essay THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS I stated that I thought much of the appeal was about the audience taking pleasure in the differences between the respective mythologies of two or more focal presences:

Some Marxist critics will view such character-crossovers as one of many strategies by which the evil Masters of Mass Culture manipulate their audiences. While such explanations may seem to answer all questions as to the motives of the stories' producers, they don't say anything substantive about why the audiences choose to patronize not just works of mass culture in general, but works in which characters or concepts from different storylines happen to intersect. The usual Marxist explanation is that these audiences want nothing more than mindless divertissement. However, the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes.  For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict.  

In a larger sense, though, it's not just the "ground rules" that are in conflict, but the stories of characters with radically different backgrounds, be it She and Allan, or Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. One might say that what is being "rallied" in such crossover-tales is not any sort of "alliance" between the focal characters, but of the "spirit of monstrosity," just as other ensemble-cast films usually rally spirits of romance, heavy drama, slapstick comedy and so on.

Now, as I pointed out earlier, "hero rallies" and what I have termed "demihero rallies" are fairly common. Since both personas are dominantly positive in tone, it's become common to feature crossovers between such characters. The personas of "monsters" and "villains," however, are meant to be negative in tone: both personas primarily exist to be defeated by the forces of life and/or justice.
That said, it's more typical to see "monsters" as central to particular narratives than it is to see "villains" in the same position. The monster is the dark side of the demihero, even as the villain is the dark side of the hero. The genre of horror is largely about exploring the nature of the monster, while any demiheroes tend to play secondary roles. In contrast, in adventure-fiction and its congeners, the villain exists to define the hero. Monsters are thus often centric, while villains are non-centric.

Often, when monsters or villains are made the stars of continuing features, they are made to battle "the menace of the month," just as heroes do. For instance, the cover of the first issue of DC's 1975 feature THE JOKER shows him visually dominating other Bat-villains, though in the story proper he's only engaged with fighting Two-Face over some slight.

Similarly, in the 1940s FRANKENSTEIN series by Dick Briefer, the Monster's first adversary is his creator Frankenstein, whom I view as more "demihero" than "hero." Doctor Frankenstein does not last long as the Monster's main opponent, but before the scientist vanishes from the series, he creates one or two "monsters of the month" to battle his greatest creation.

Now, the presence of two monsters in the Frankenstein story doesn't really constitute a "monster rally" like that of the 1943 Universal film. In that film, both the Monster and the Wolf Man comprise an ensemble, for they are of equal interest to the ideal viewer of the story. Not so the croc-monster in the FRANKENSTEIN comic; he's simply an opponent for the main character. "Villain rallies" in which both villains have been the stars of their own serials-- even if they did not start out that way-- are much rarer, but Two-Face is not the equal of the Joker in the Joker's book. The earliest example of a "villain rally" wherein both evildoers have been featured characters in their own narratives is this 1964 crossover of Walt Disney properties: the comic villains the Phantom Blot and the Beagle Boys, both of whom had enjoyed their own comic books by the time this issue appeared.

Thus, in the third and last part of this essay-series, I've compiled for my own amusement the main ways in which "monster rallies" usually take place. "Villain rallies," which are less common, are pretty much subsumed by the same narrative rules, and so I won't make separate reference to them.

DEMIHERO RALLIES

I've been giving a little thought recently to the concepts of "monster rallies" and "villain rallies," and how often these have been featured in various media, as opposed to the more frequent "hero rallies," better known simply as "team-ups."

However, since I'm the only one that uses the neologism "demihero," denoting thereby a fourth essential literary persona there are of course no "demihero rallies" as such. They do exist, but audiences merely think of them as plain old "character crossovers."

From the 61 entries I completed on my possibly abortive 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME, here are the ones featuring demiheroes. I'll add a comment only when the demihero persona is mixed with of the other three personae.

DYNASTY AND THE COLBYS

STEVEN UNIVERSE (hero) AND UNCLE GRANDPA (demihero)

THE MAN WHO HATED LAUGHTER (mostly demiheroes, though some of King Features' heroes, like Mandrake and the Phantom, make brief appearances)

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (Non-toon Eddie Valliant is a hero, all the rest, from Roger to all the cartoon revivals, are demiheroes)

FONZIE AND MORK

SIMPSONS AND FUTURAMA

DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH (mingles demiheroic protagonists and monstrous entities and settings)

ARCHIE BUNKER AND MAUDE

More on this subject later, possibly.

COMBAT PLAY PT. 4

As the Nietzsche citation in Part 3 should make clear, the philosopher believed in the principle of mastery, or "overcoming" (German *uberwindung*) as a necessary aspect of the human spirit. At the same time, he believed more profoundly that the possessor of a "master morality" should also practice *selbstuberwindung,* usually translated as "self-overcoming." As I observed here, Nietzsche expressed a marginal preference for the corrupt, real-life Cesare Borgia over the simon-pure fictional character Parsifal, essentially because Parsifal had no real "self" to be overcome. For similar reasons, Nietzsche expressed disgust at those whom he deemed adherents of "slave morality" because he felt that they weren't really any more free from the impulse of aggression than the representatives of "master morality." Rather, adherents of "slave morality" merely projected the illusion of self-mastery. Only those who consciously admitted the allure of mastery, of wielding power over others, had any true capacity for self-overcoming.

In other segments of COMBAT PLAY I've sought to provide somewhat more personal motives for advocating the importance of combat-fantasies, and for arguing that they can represent "positive compensation" when dealing with the travails of ordinary life. I would add-- without bringing in all the Hegelian arguments about the nature of freedom-- that it's psychically necessary for any individual human to feel as if he or she can, as the occasion demands, fight back against oppression of any kind. At the same time, the notion of "fair play" becomes important within the sphere of fiction and fantasy, possibly more important than it can ever be in the real world of political negotiation and compulsion. In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming." Clearly the importance of this concept has led me to author essays like this one, where my main concern is to account for certain pop-culture figures, such as the Golden Age Spectre, who seem to know little if any "self-limitation." In the original series, whose tone was set by scripter Jerry Siegel, there's no question that the Spectre is positioned as a hero-- and yet only occasionally does this hero encounter opponents able to wield forces equal to his own.

In the aforesaid essay DECIDEDLY SEEKING SYMMETRY, I argued that occasional heroes who worked without the limitations of the "fair play" were a "natural, and probably inevitable, counterpoint" to the statistically dominant type of hero who tends to meet his foes on a level playing-field. I say that it's inevitable because it's the nature of affective freedom that individual authors can diverge from any statistically dominant model of a given concept, be it "the hero" or anything else. The model I've established is one in which heroes and villains alike align themselves with *glory* by championing either the positive or the negative forms of the "idealizing will," while monsters and demiheroes align themselves with *persistence* by pursuing the negative or positive forms of the "existential will."  But the existence of this model, while statistically dominant, does not prevent individual creators from diverging from it. For whatever reasons, Jerry Siegel conceptualized the Spectre as having such near-omnipotence that he could "overcome" most of his villains without the limitations of fair play. I wasn't entirely serious in SYMMETRY when I labeled such heroes as "sadists," for a true sadist would not possess the Spectre's empathy toward ordinary humans oppressed by mortal evildoers. That empathy, as well as the determination to better the world through the positive form of the idealizing will, still qualifies the Spectre as a hero. Later versions of the Spectre conformed to the dominant model, giving the Ghostly Guardian more high-energy foes to combat. But had the character never appeared anywhere but in his Golden Age adventures, I might have to view him as a "subcombative superhero," in that only rarely did the original Spectre combat megadynamic entities like himself.

By the same parallel, the nature of affective freedom also makes it possible for individual authors to diverge from the statistically dominant model of "the monster." In contrast to the hero, the monster often appears as the sole megadynamic entity in his universe, and his opponents, usually demiheroes, are not usually able to stand against him. In SYMMETRY I mentioned Freddy Krueger as an exception to this rule, in that the majority of his films end when another megadynamic entity-- usually the so-called "final girl"-- manages to defeat the dastardly dream-creature with her own display of dynamicity.

However, a better-known example would probably the combative relationship between the starring monsters of the original ALIENS film-franchise and their most "persistent" demihero-enemy, Ellen Ripley. Ripley starts out as a typical demihero, and in her first appearance she only manages to stave off the assault of one monstrous extraterrestrial by getting him in the right place for his elimination, rather than beating him one-and-one.

In the second film, however, Ripley resorts to mechanical aid to fight a Queen Alien on its own terms, and even though Ripley loses that battle and must once more trick the creature into defeat, the narrative places far more emphasis on Ripley as a megadynamic figure.

Though the character also does not directly defeat any Aliens in the last two films in the original franchise either, Ripley continues to display a megadynamic formidability, so that she is, unlike most monster-victims, a combative demihero. The fact that the Aliens' most prominent human foe can fight them back doesn't alter their persona as monsters, but their divergence sets them slightly to one side of the dominant model for monsters, just as Original Spectre's divergence sets him slightly to one side of the dominant hero-model.

DECIDEDLY SEEKING SYMMETRY

While some critics are fine with preserving a simplistic, dualistic symmetry-- as in "art is art and trash is trash and never the twain shall meet"-- in my long-running narratological project I find myself looking for symmetries that extend at least into quixotic quaternities.

For instance, I've repeatedly defended heroic fiction against the notion that its primary function is to appeal to its audience's tendencies toward sadism, fascism, or both. Probably my most representative argument against the "sadism" accusation, principally voiced by Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, is 2008's POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, while  this year I re-examined the fascism argument in WORKING VACATIONS.  

The Legman-Wertham arguments are poorly reasoned, forcing the material under consideration upon a Procrustean bed of theory. However, because the "sadism argument" addresses, even in the form of a dumb dualism, the dynamics of power between protagonist and antagonist, it's a little more difficult to dismiss across the board. In POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY I presented my reasoning as to why the combat between hero and villain typical of the adventure-genre is a near-complete reversal of the paradigm of the sadistic victimizer:

...it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre.

Yet, though I continue to endorse this argument, I've always admitted that there are a few adventure-heroes-- specifically those of the 'super" variety--  who depart somewhat from the dominant narrative action of the adventure-genre. In this respect I'm thinking principally of the Golden Age stories of two DC characters-- Superman and the Spectre-- who are only occasionally pitted against enemies who can ably defend themselves against the hero's godlike powers. This narrative departure did not continue to dominate either character's exploits in the Silver Age or in any ages thereafter. But if the majority of Golden Age superheroes gave their villains as little opportunity to fight back as Superman and Spectre did during that period, then *maybe* the fulminations of Legman and Wertham would have been justified.

I could just say, "Yeah, some authors enjoyed the spectacle of omnipotent heroes beating the tar out of whining, helpless villains," and let it go at that. But because I value symmetry in my narratological system-- particularly in the quixotic quaternity I term "the four persona-types"-- it occurs to me that the "sadistic hero" provides a natural, and probably inevitable, counterpoint to the more frequent "courageous hero." Further, this narrative propensity mirrors in reverse the evolution of the hero's inverse persona, the demihero-- for it's far more rare to see a demihero face down the monster who persecutes him, than to see him either fall victim to said monster or to escape the monster by sheer dumb luck.

As it happens, I touched on the dynamics of "hero and villain" and "demihero and monster" once more in the recent essay GOALS, OR ROLES?:

Perhaps a useful distinction also arises from the concept of "paired opposites' I've formulated: to wit, "hero is to villain as monster is to victim (or, more formally, 'demihero.')"  The monster is designed to prey on a victim who is usually weaker than he, although in many cases the demihero may "step up" and conquer the monster through strength, guile, or a combination thereof. The villain may be just as obsessed as the monster, but characters like the Joker and Lex Luthor-- who make rather good comic-book parallels to Freddy and Pinhead-- are always oriented on challenging heroes, often despite having been beaten by said heroes on many, many occasions. That kind of glory may have only negative consequences, but it's still the same glory we descry in Milton's fallen Lucifer.

Anyone who's familiar with popular fiction could hardly deny that it's far more typical to behold exemplars of the "monster persona" enacting scenarios of sadism upon helpless demihero victims than to see exemplars of the "hero persona" doing the same to their villainous opponents. Naturally, ideologues have also railed against the horror genre-- the predominant dwelling-place of monster-types-- and for Wertham if not Legman, the sadism of the monster was apparently indistinguishable from the supposedly equal sadism of the hero. Public critics of the horror-genre, though, are usually not so undiscriminating. Roger Ebert attacked slasher films relentlessly throughout the 1980s, explicitly taking issue with the subgenre's power to make viewers Do Bad Things. In contrast, this collection of short superhero-flick reviews by Ebert shows no tendency to condemn heroes in general as budding sadists. I'm not saying that Ebert rendered any substantive judgments of the superhero genre, for he was as superficial about them as he was about monsters. I merely use him as an example of a popular film-critic who had a more normative reaction to hero-fiction than one sees in the pop psychobabble of Legman and Wertham.

Summing up, the heroes who *may* incarnate a sadistic dynamic-- one for which the Spectre has become far better known than Superman--

--are a distinct minority, just as it's rare to see monsters inspire their demihero victims to fight the monsters on their own terms.

___________________


On an unrelated matter, another assertion of symmetry occurs to me with regard to my formulation of the dynamics of the combative mode. In PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX, I explored some of the ways in which works might depart from or adhere to the mode in terms of their narrative strategies. For instance, the best-known paradigm of the combative mode presents the audience with a scene in which the central hero meets his villainous opponent in equal combat.

However, I considered the problem of whether the mode was fulfilled if someone other than the hero defeated the villain:

Another variation is seen in my review of the 2012 DARK SHADOWS, wherein vampire protagonist Barnabas Collins has a violent conflict with the villain but is taken out of the fight, after which the villain is destroyed by the main character's allies. But as long as there has been some narrative plot-thread to leads inevitably to some sort of spectacular combat, it doesn't matter if the combat follows the dominant pattern of the main hero overcoming the villain.

Now, though I did not say so at the time, it occurs to me that having the villain defeated by an ally of the main hero is not markedly different from the scenario in which the main hero fights, not the main villain, but some ally or henchman  of the main villain. As example, here's a still from the 1966 film TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD:

I don't think anyone watching the film felt Tarzan's heroism invalidated because the ape-man fought the main villain's enforcer, rather than the villain himself. By the same token, even though the Barnabas of the 2012 film doesn't succeed in defeating his foe, the fact that she is defeated by a being more or less allied to Barnabas' cause provides the same experience of combative satisfaction.

GOALS, OR ROLES?

In 2012's THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PT. 2  I ended the essay thusly:

As a closing clarification, I am not saying that concrete goal-affects do not appear in hero-villain narratives.  Maybe the Joker sends Batman a mocking note so that Batman will come chase him, but clearly the Penguin would rather get away with the loot rather than tilt with the Caped Crusader again.  But the act of reading about Batman's struggles with both types of villains is in itself an example of an "abstract goal-affect," since the pleasures we derive from reading fiction cannot be said to promote either gain or safety in a direct relationship.

I have the general habit of recalling fragments of stuff I've written and wondering whether or not it fits into the overall schema-- which, I have no doubt, is the same way synoptic critics like Frye and Fiedler also work, since no system springs out of anyone's head a la Athena. I became concerned as to whether this statement had overemphasized the role of "goals" within the diegesis of a given story-- say, a Batman vs. Penguin story-- and had thus come into conflict with the principles stated in HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN W/O IDENTITY:

 Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

By that principle, the Penguin too is a fictional construct, and though he's been constructed so that he does possess what I called "concrete goal-affects" within his own diegesis, he's defined more by his "role" as a fictional construct than by his "goal" as an actual willing subject, since he isn't one. Unless one of the raconteurs working on him re-defines his roal, the Penguin is defined by the abstract affects of villainous glory than by getting gold, jewels, etc.

Parenthetically, something like this did happen at one point with the Riddler. In some Bat-universe stories-- I can only attest to a story-arc in GOTHAM CITY SIRENS-- the Riddler reforms and becomes a private detective. For all I know the character may have turned back to crime by now, but during that arc he ceased to be a villain as such, though it's debatable as to whether he then assumed the role of "hero" or "demihero."

Fortunately, a quick survey of some of my writings on "persona-types" and the forms of will they incarnate don't seem to place undue emphasis upon the diegetic motives of characters, and I see that in ESTRANGED SPORTS STORIES I did stress "role" over "goal:"

 ...it's the intent behind the narrative, not the conscious intent of the protagonist, that denotes the nature of his persona.

This observation helps me out with a related problem I've been considerering recently. I've defined the monster-persona against the hero-persona as one relating to whether or not their primary role emphasized the "idealizing will" or "the existential will"-- two terms I devised after I wrote this passage in MONSTERS, DEMIHEROES AND OTHER WILLING BEASTS, and which I've interpolated in place of the original, now outdated terms:

King Kong, Gamera and Godzilla may follow the plots of heroes in these assorted works, but I assert that in terms of fundamental character they still represent "existential will," while the not much more intelligent Hulk represents "idealizing will."

But the concept of "existential will" is harder to sell when the monsters are clearly intelligent human beings, like my sometime examples of Doctor Moreau and Victor Frankenstein. Still, I've argued that their obsessions, even if they are motivated by a desire for glory, are subsumed by the "intent behind the narrative." Unlike a genuine glory-oriented villain like Fu Manchu, the two monstrous mad scientists embody the quality of "negative persistence" as much as do big hulking monsters like Kong and Godzilla.

Similarly, because of my tendency to identity Sadean activity as examples of Bataillean expenditure rather than acquisition-- probably best summarized here-- I find myself thinking twice regarding two monsters who are very popular for their overt Sadean qualities.

The first is Freddy Kreuger of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST series. He's become popular, I'm convinced, not because he's a nasty child molester (if indeed that was the intention in the original series) but because he stalks and slays his victims with an imaginative panache atypical of the average slasher-monster.

The second is Pinhead of the HELLRAISER film-series. He doesn't warp his infernal domain quite as flamboyantly as Freddy does with his dream-worlds. But he incarnates the idea of suffering as Sadean glory, and so he does have a highly imaginative "ideal" behind his depradations that is foreign to most monsters.

But in both cases, the narrative's intent supersedes Freddy's snarky cleverness and Pinhead's cerebral viciousness. Their obsessions imprison them far more than do those of the great villains like the aforementioned Fu Manchu, and so I can still align them more with the quality of persistence than with glory.

Perhaps a useful distinction also arises from the concept of "paired opposites' I've formulated: to wit, "hero is to villain as monster is to victim (or, more formally, 'demihero.'"  The monster is designed to prey on a victim who is usually weaker than he, although in many cases the demihero may "step up" and conquer the monster through strength, guile, or a combination thereof. The villain may be just as obsessed as the monster, but characters like the Joker and Lex Luthor-- who make rather good comic-book parallels to Freddy and Pinhead-- are always oriented on challenging heroes, often despite having been beaten by said heroes on many, many occasions. That kind of glory may have only negative consequences, but it's still the same glory we descry in Milton's fallen Lucifer.

On a closing note, I've read that Pinhead has recently been executed by his creator Clive Barker in the world of prose. Pinhead did not appear in the last HELLRAISER film, which I have not seen, and it seems unlikely that Doug Bradley will essay the role again, any more than Robert Englund will again play Freddy, after publicly claiming that he would not do so. I personally won't mind if the characters never appear in film again--

But the crossover-loving part of me wishes that someone could engineer a comic-book meeting between Freddy and Pinhead, one worthy of their respective forms of sadistic nastiness. True, one such comic-book crossover I reviewed here  turned out awful. But the idea of a good writer managing to do justice to both Freddy's American wisecracks and Pinhead's dry Brit humor is a tempting one indeed-- though admittedly, not tempting enough to make any Faustian bargains.

SON OF THE BRIDE OF THE NON-MONSTROUS DEMIHERO

My most recent review on NATURALISTIC (ETC), was for the 1944 film THE CLIMAX. In the course of the review, I noted that it was structurally the opposite of the film that inspired it: the 1943 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. The earlier film followed the dominant pattern of the American horror film, focusing on "the twisted nature of the monster, mad scientist, etc," as he menaced various victims, who are usually demiheroes as I defined the category here.

Demiheroes, even on the occasions where they triumph against their opponents, don't really choose to stand or fall, because they are governed, just like their monstrous counterparts, by a different form of will than one sees in the heroes and their villainous counterparts.

I later refined the name for this "form of will" as the "existential will." It is that force that urges demiheroes to exert themselves in the name of pure survival, in a manner parallel to their negative counterparts-in-existential-will, "the monsters." This is in contrast to the ways in which "heroes" and "villains" work, given that their function is to exert themselves in the name of the "idealizing will," be it for good or evil.

In horror-films that are centered-- as most are-- upon the figure of the monster, the monster's victims-- almost always demiheroes-- are usually not given much depth. But THE CLIMAX is interesting for inverting the pattern, though there isn't much of an increase in character-depth. That is, the real star is not top-billed Boris Karloff as the malefic Doctor Hohner, but singer Susanna Foster's character Angela, of whom I wrote:

the "climax" of the movie is that [Angela] triumphs over [Hohner's] attempted repression even without ever knowing what he did to her.

Now, as I said in the review, THE CLIMAX could do this easily because it wasn't really a horror film like PHANTOM, but an "uncanny murder-mystery."  And yet, this may have been a little glib. Certainly there are other mystery-films in which demiheroes become the stars of the show, as one can also see in Hithcock's THE LODGER, But though there are probably more demihero-centered mystery films than there are demihero-centered horror films, the majority of mysteries at any given time are more likely to center upon either serial heroes (Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan) or upon the source of the mystery, who like the star of the horror-film is often a monster (not sufficient to stand) or a villain (choosing to fall, as it were). As it happens, in this review of two unrelated films, I touched upon two such films, with 1993's SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER supplying an adequate example of "the murderer as a monster" and MURDER BY DEATH forming an excellent illustration of "the murderer as villain"-- a villain so formidable, by the way, that he confounds several hero-detectives, all of whom are spoofs of famous figures like Holmes and Chan.

It would be more accurate to say, not that works in the mystery-genre are characteristically dominated by demihero-personas, but that they're simply much more open to all four persona-types. The purpose of the horror genre is to fill the audience with what I have called "antipathetic affects," and for that purpose, the "monster" is better than any other persona, though I've noted in various essays that the dominantly positive personas of the hero and the demihero have their negative manifestations. Though Angela of THE CLIMAX reaches heroic heights in overcoming Hohner's influence-- though not in the service of a greater ideal, as would be the case with a genuine hero-- some demiheroes exist to be defeated. In the 1964 suspense-film DEAD RINGER Bette Davis' character registers as a demihero because she propounds the existential will in a negative fashion but lacks the more profound traits of "monstrosity" found even in the crappier monsters, like the featured "axe murderer" of the Mike Myers film mentioned above.

One of the few subtypes of horror film that allows for greater latitude in the use of personas is the comedy-horror film. Though in PUMPING THE PRIMACY I was addressing a different subject-- that of the NUM theory rather than the subject of personas-- I mentioned that it was possible for the demihero star of a comedy-horror film to be the main focus of the narrative, rather than whatever spooky phenomena he encountered. I cited Bob Hope's 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY. However, this pattern was not meant to be determinative either, for in the same essay I also mentioned another comedy-horror film-- 1941's THE SMILING GHOST-- in which the plot followed the same pattern as the "serious" horror flick, making the titular monster the narrative focus.

Of parallel interest is the way in which the narrative focus changes in Universal's "monster-mash" films of the 1940s. There's not much question in my mind that in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN,  HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and HOUSE OF DRACULA, the monsters are the stars of each film. Yet, when Universal chose to put paid to the continuing sagas of their "starring monsters," the story chosen put the emphasis upon the comedians. Arguably this was because Abbott and Costello carried more clout for the audiences. Similarly, Bob Hope is arguably the star of the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY, even if the monster known as "the Cat" may be the main focus of the original 1927 silent film, of which the 1939 flick is a remake.

PUMPING THE PRIMACY

(While in other essays I've used the terms "wonder" and "terror" to label experiences of sublimity in keeping with the marvelous phenomenality, for this essay only I'm going to use these two terms to replace, respectively, "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects.")

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”-- H.P. Lovecraft, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE.

Over the years I've specified several times-- most recently here-- that just because one phenomenon *may* have come first, it should never be assigned primacy, simply because of primogeniture. Burke, Otto, and Lewis all seem to give some primacy to the affects of "terror" over those of "wonder." Perhaps, like Lovecraft in the quote above, see the "brute man" of humankind's origins as being more moved by the emotions relative to physical survival than to the latter, since the latter affects depend on one's having some degree of perceived safety.

Having written so much about the affects recently, I wondered to what extent they appeared in the films of the uncanny that I've reviewed on NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS. I felt certain that I could find a good distribution of both "wonder" and "terror" in films of the marvelous. But many of my ten tropes were formulated in reaction to narratives dominantly concerned with "terror." Many of the tropes as I christened them even reference ideas of repulsion more than attraction, as with "freakish flesh" and "weird families and societies."

So I scanned over the lists of the reviewed films that had been filed under each trope, trying to determine whether indeed most of them were more dominated by "terror" than by "wonder." And sure enough, as if moviemakers had been in tune with Rudolf Otto himself, most of the uncanny films were based in terror-- UNLESS those tropes occurred in a film focused upon a wondrous hero, whose main purpose was to banish terrors with his life-affirming attitude.


For instance, though most of my films in the "phantasmal figuration" category centered upon kenotic figures of terror, like THE SMILING GHOST, some heroes, like THE PHANTOM, used "phony supernaturalism" to serve the cause of justice. Usually, though, in heroic narratives it's the antagonist, not the hero, who incarnates aspects of terror-- the "bizarre crimes" of Goldfinger, the "freakish flesh" of Dick Tracy's villains, the "exotic lands" faced by Tarzan, Bomba, and other jungle heroes. So obviously the only one of my ten categories to be dominated by the affect of wonder is "outre outfits, skills, and devices," even though all of the elements that fall under this rubric can and have been used by antagonistic figures as well.

Villains, as much as monsters, are also dominantly kenotic figures of terror, even though villains incarnate "idealizing will" rather than "existential will."  However, even today it's rare for villains, unlike monsters, to become the focal presences through which the audience receives its dominant affect.

Demiheroes in uncanny films present a complication. Often they don't inspire a lot of wonder, even when they are unquestionably the stars of the show, as is the Bob Hope character in 1939's THE CAT AND THE CANARY.  But when they are stars rather than simple viewpoint-characters, their triumph, however comic or ironic, still suggests life-affirming forces.  The most fruitful category with respect to life-affirming demiheroes was that of "delirious dreams and fallacious fragments."  Often, even though character would have to awaken from their dreams or their fictional imaginings at story's end, their encounter with the world of dream could be generally wondrous-- as in THE DAYDREAMER--  as easily as they could be filled with terror and confusion, as in both DREAMCHILD and HEAD.

Whether these observations lead me down any deeper pathways remains to be seen.

SUPERHERO IDIOM VS. COMBATIVE MODE, PT. 2

Rereading my first post about the superheroic idiom in 2008, I see that I didn't clarify one of its aspects sufficiently, though the relevant point arose in later essays like this one.  That fundamental aspect is that the superheroic idiom is a subset of what would be best called "the heroic idiom."  Superheroes, even if their only "super" nature is that of wearing a strange costume, belong to the same idiom that gives us "unsuper" crusaders like Dirty Harry Callahan, John Rambo, et al. 

What is a hero? As should be obvious to anyone who clicks on the term "hero-concept," I'm clearly not using it to be one with the idea of "hero as protagonist."  Narratologically, a hero is a definite persona, though also one most often tied to the idea of a countervailing persona-- the "villain"-- as if they were locked together into "concept-pairs," my parallel to Buber's idea of "word pairs." In practice the individual concepts are separable and can be used apart from one another, but in essence they remain locked together, much as when I originally suggested a similar interrelationship between the personas of the monster and the victim.  Significantly, one of my main comments in this essay was to note that a villain's dominant status in a narrative-- as with Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series-- does not keep that narrative from having the same *invigorative* effects as one centered upon a more standard hero.

As a result of my investigations of the mythographer Theodor Gaster and the philospher Schopenhauer, I advanced a theory of the hero and villain as dominantly positive or negative incarnations of a type of will, "the idealizing will," that aspires to go beyond the bare functions of the maintenance of life. In the above essay I linked the hero and villain in terms of being either positive or negative expressions of this will.

*Megalothymia* depends on filling oneself with elements of will excessive to normal functioning. The hero is filled with a positive, altruistic will to protect society, one that often goes beyond the dictates of society's normal functions. Like the monster the villain is filled with a negative will toward society or the environment, but he is the mirror-image of the hero in that he glories in his independence from society, rather than yearning after a lost "normalcy" as the monster does.

Because of that "concept-linkage," then at base the "hero-concept" and the "villain-concept" are intertwined so that one implies the other.  Thus the "heroic idiom" includes all those narratives that center upon either a plerotic hero or a plerotic villain as the narrative's focal presence, and the same symmetry applies to "the superhero idiom."  My aforementioned list of a "top 20 live-action superhero movies" included one such villain-centered narrative, the 1932 MASK OF FU MANCHU.

Had I been seeking to list twenty live-action films with a hero or villain with no "super" elements, then I might have listed heroic Harry Callahan alongside the equally obsessed-- but negative-toned-- Jack Carter from 1971's GET CARTER.

Thus the one commonality of all narratives within the superhero idiom is that its focal presence must be either a "superhero-like" figure or a "supervillain-like" figure.  This figure may belong to the "demotic group" commonly linked to the "superhero genre," which obviously includes figures like Batman and the Joker.  But it could also include types from other genres and other mythoi cognate with the superhero idiom.  Heroes like Harry Potter (drama mythos), Marshal Law (irony mythos), and Ranma Saotime (comedy mythos) would thus rub shoulders with Felonious Gru (comedy mythos) and that threesome I like to call "the Bitchy Trio" (irony mythos).

In contrast, however, narratives featuring focal presences who conform to either the "monster" or 'demihero" personas do not belong within the superhero idiom.  This is fairly obvious with assorted monsters who have sometimes enacted deeds associated with superheroes-- King Kong, Godzilla, Gamera-- but who remain apart by virtue of their monstrous nature in a way that types like the Hulk and the Thing do not.  It may not be so obvious-- though it is no less true-- of the demihero, since many of them are often seen as indistinguishable from the hero-concept.  I won't repeat my arguments for this category here, but will only note that most of Philip K. Dick's protagonists are unabashed demiheroes.  Interestingly, many of them retain this character when translated to combative films, as occured with both Rick Deckard in BLADE RUNNER and "Michael Jennings" in PAYCHECK.  However, as if to prove that it's not impossible to make a heroic purse out of a demihero's ear, one may regard the cinematic transformation of Dick's "Douglas Quail" into "Douglas Quaid."