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.

 

THE SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES

There was a time when the majority of liberal thinkers distanced their political and philosophical statements from anything falling under the rubric of "myth." For much of the twentieth century, myth meant "untruth," and neither Lefties nor Righties wanted their thoughts to be associated with the fantasies of archaic tribesmen. Marxist Roland Barthes was particularly insistent about distinguishing his ideology from the "mythology" that he claimed pervaded his society, as I showed in this 2010 essay.

But the lure of money titillates a lot of authors, even ideologues. Even anti-Jungian Richard Noll, toward the end of THE JUNG CULT, admitted that Jungianism had gained ground over other psychological systems thanks to the "New Age" subculture. Jung was gone by that era, but Joseph Campbell rose to prominence in the sixties, and many of his books have remained in print for the past sixty years. I think it's likely that Campbell's success in the marketplace led to many liberal thinkers putting aside any qualms about myth and trying to draft the allure of mythic discourse to validate political ideologies. I've shown this by demonstrating the anti-mythic agendas both in 1998's DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME, which I view as a "proto-woke work," and in 2011's THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, wherein the author tried to prove that fairy tales were all about Marxist dialectic.

Maria Tatar's 2021 HEROINE WITH 1001 FACES is at least partly honest, since her agenda is to break down the masculinist emphasis she claims to find in all of Joseph Campbell's works. (Strangely, toward the end of her book she cites a quote from a 2013 collection of Campbell essays, GODDESSES, but Tatar does not in any way engage with anything Campbell said in that book.) Her main target, as her book's title indicates, is Campbell's 1949 HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, in which the author promoted a "monomyth" that unified all the major motifs relating to male heroism, which left female heroes without any say in the matter.

Having a say is extremely important to Tatar, so much so that her volume might have been better titled "1001 VOICES." Tatar never critiques Campbell in depth, either fairly or unfairly. She only attacks those aspects of Campbell that she views as attempts to stymie or silence the voices of women, and she pursues the same strategy with respect to archaic myth and folklore. If the story's about men winning glory in battle, it's bad. If the story's about women exposing male perfidy through speaking out, it's good. It's no coincidence that an early chapter of HEROINE is subtitled "From Myth to #MeToo." At all times, Tatar remains lockstep within the boundaries of that ultra-feminist ideology. Thus, even though she sometimes evinces impressive erudition, everything she writes about is distorted by that determination to make her own monomyth that excludes the supposedly male province of glory and violence.

One amusing thing about HEROINE is that Tatar duplicates one of Campbell's minor vices: that of assuming a commonality of meaning between archaic fables and modern literature. I call it a minor vice because Campbell was a good enough writer that his comparisons were usually interesting if not always logically supportable. But when Tatar windmills from talking about the English folktale "Mister Fox" to modern works by such authors as Philip Pullman and Toni Morrison, she fails to build even a loose chain of associations.

If Tatar had merely claimed that there had been plenty of writings about male heroes and that she was simply going to focus on what she deemed examples of female heroism, she would have been on surer ground. But the #Me Too ideology requires the demon of toxic masculinity. Thus Tatar sprinkles her text with glib indictments of masculine myths. In her first chapter she inextricably associated archaic myths of male heroism which "we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity" (p. 20). No hero in Tatar's ideology ever protects a woman from rape; men are just in it to force women into servile bondage, keeping them barefoot and pregnant.

I will give Tatar this much: though many of her potential readers will assume that she's going to address the presence of martial heroines in antiquity and in present-day pop culture, Tatar gives this "face of femininity" short shrift. On page 258. she tosses out a short list of "pumped-up, tough-talking women," including Diana Rigg, The Catwoman, Wonder Woman,Lara Croft and the Bionic Woman,"  but then chimerically changes the subject to first GAME OF THRONES and then to Disney heroines. Why? Well, on page 26 she also listed martial heroines of antiquity, but opined that it was a "perversion of the feminine" to show female characters "usurping the power of the heroic." So at least she's consistent in her antipathy to a power she wants to view as strictly male and therefore toxic.

That's not to say she's consistent about anything else. Wonder Woman is the only martial heroine to whom Tatar devotes any extensive attention, but her analysis is wonky, even leaving out the outright error on page 152, when the Amazon is said to be "the first female action figure in the Marvel Universe," but that she owes her live-action cinematic debut to "DC Films." At the start of Chapter 4 she excoriates Frederic Wertham for his hostility toward Wonder Woman because Wertham believed that the Amazon might keep young girls from becoming homemakers. But how is that any different from complaining that such heroines are a "perversion of the feminine?" On page 232 Tatar claims that "the love of justice-- avenging injustices and righting wrongs-- is what makes Wonder Woman so powerful a force in the pantheon of superheroes." Wait-- so aside from Wonder Woman, no other superheroes, even other female heroes, had any interest in avenging injustice or righting wrongs? I should note in passing that Wertham's ideology also could not see fictional violence as being anything but anti-social in its effects.

Her nastiest inconsistency, though, is that after having burned up a lot of hyperbole inveighing against male violence, she unleashes snark against the late Campbell in her first chapter, implying that he promoted his 1949 adulation of heroism as some sort of compensation for his having "sat out the war" (that is, World War II). This armchair psychology takes up about a page and a half, and amounts to nothing more than character assassination. (At least Richard Noll provided a detailed critique against Jung.) But this side-swipe shows Tatar's basic hypocrisy. Is it good to refuse the allure of toxic male violence, or is it not? 

Tatar doesn't care; any dirty trick will serve her ideological agenda, making her a kindred spirit with the #MeToo movement, whose leaders ranted about believing all women but decided to ignore a woman who leveled charges of sexual harassment against Presidential candidate Joe Biden. If one goes into HEROINE knowing that it's a snake pit, one may learn some interesting facts about serpent behavior, but not much more.

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.

THE READING RHEUM: KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885)

 

In my essay WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED SUPERHERO OUGHT TO WEAR I wrote:

In the pop-culture world as we know it today, there are a lot of characters who have superhero-like powers, weapons or adventures, and who wear commonplace attire. James Bond may be the foremost example of this type, and there's no doubt that the prose novels qualify as adult-oriented pulp. However, Bond's enormous popularity across many cultures stems principally from the movie adaptations, which may have caught fire from being culturally "in the right place at the right time." Before Bond, popular fiction-- prose fiction, movies, comic strips-- played host to innumerable characters who wore ordinary clothes but enjoyed extraordinary adventures, whether they chased down weird masterminds (Doc Savage), mystic menaces (Jules De Grandin, Mandrake the Magician), or just freaky-looking criminals (Dick Tracy).

 By my lights, the character in serial pop-fiction who represents the earliest flowering of the superhero idiom is Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain. I've not investigated every 19th-century claimant to the status of "first superheroic type," but my general feeling is that most of them tend to be "one-off" concepts, like THE BLACK MONK from 1844. Not only was KING SOLOMON'S MINES wildly successful as a stand-alone book, its repute lasted long enough that Haggard continued to add adventures to his protagonist's history, though most were prequels, since the author killed off the character in the second book, ALLAN QUATERMAIN. Quatermain himself possesses no special powers or weapons, but he does encounter a smattering of weird opponents. The antagonists of the second Quatermain novel, for instance, come from the city of the Zu-Vendis, a white-skinned people whose ancestors colonized a part of Africa in archaic times and continued their customs uninterrupted into modern times. Thus Haggard invented "the lost race novel," which Edgar Rice Burroughs and others further promulgated.

KING SOLOMON'S MINES does not precisely concern a "lost race," though it does conform to the uncanny version of the trope I call "exotic lands and customs." Purportedly Haggard wrote MINES as a response to the popularity of Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND. But whereas everyone in the Stevenson book is anxious to claim the titular treasure for pure gain, only one Haggard character goes to Africa to make his fortune by finding the fabled mines of King Solomon-- and when he goes missing, white hunter Quatermain is hired to search for the missing man by Sir Henry Curtis, brother of the treasure-seeker. During their trek across a hostile desert, Quatermain and Curtis are accompanied by two other major characters: Captain Good, who serves more or less as comedy relief, and a mysterious Black African named Ignosi. When the four men succeed in crossing the desert, they find themselves in the isolated domain of the Kukuanas, a Zulu-like people. Because these Africans have been cut off from modern developments, they have a superstitious feeling toward the three white men, though the Kukuana's tyrannical leader Twala is quite willing to chance killing these interlopers. The white men find themselves drawn into a dynastic struggle when they learn that Ignosi's true name is Umbopa, and that despite an exile from this land since childhood, he, not Twala, is the rightful ruler of the land.

What makes the Kukuanas uncannily exotic is not their isolation, though, but their custom of witch-finding. Chief Twala has no problem with sacrificing dozens of tribespeople to the gods when his henchwoman Gagool fingers her victims as witches. Gagool, an incredibly ancient woman, claims to have lived for centuries (making her a figurative predecessor to Haggard's creation She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed) and claims that she can only be killed by accident, though both of these claims are left ambivalent. Even after the white adventurers help Umbopa's loyalists overthrow the reign of Twala, they almost meet their doom when they force Gagool to lead them to the mines of Solomon, marked by statuary from Biblical times. Though Gagool meets her end here, she's weird enough that I deem her as much an ancestor of the "supervillain" as Quartermain is to the "superhero."

Naturally, there are aspects of MINES that could never pass the political correctness test today. Yet it is not a racist novel, or even what some pundits would call a "white savior novel." (The white guys score some points against Twala's forces, but in the end the victory is that of the loyalists allied to Umbopa.) Umbopa is also a heroic personage, probably the first black hero of English-speaking literature (if one uses "hero" according to the combative mode I've outlined here). In the second Quatermain novel, Haggard introduces Umslopagaas, a Zulu hero who's a support-character in that novel but later gets his own solo story, NADA THE LILY, which I've not yet read. 

Not all novels called "classics" deserve that title. But like SHE, KING SOLOMON'S MINES richly deserves the accolade.

THE MOST FAMOUS SUBCOMBATIVE ADVENTURE

In ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT.2, I detailed some of the problems with which I’d grappled in terms of assigning ROBINSON CRUSOE its place within my literary system. I didn't have any problems in stating that CRUSOE qualifies as “the first major work of popular fiction.” The book’s mode of communication is markedly different from the mode of earlier elite-culture works that happened to become popular with the masses, ranging from Shakespeare’s PERICLES to Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE. I also view CRUSOE, as well as its first sequel, as touchstones for the modern development of the adventure-mythos. However, this distinction must be qualified. Readers during the Enlightenment may have believed that chivalric romances belonged to an outmoded genre, but both “high” and “low” readers remained aware of how that type of fiction worked, how knightly heroes disported themselves. As I remarked earlier, Crusoe is anything but knightly in his bourgeois orientation, and though I do consider Defoe’s two Crusoe-novels to fall into the mythos of adventure, Crusoe himself is at best a demihero, and not a very impressive one. Even Friday, describing how he took the life of a wild bear just for kicks, comes closer to the model of the combative knight than does Robinson Crusoe.

Now, as my essay-title portends, Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND (published as a book in 1883 but serialized in a kids’ magazine two years previous) is also subcombative in terms of the dynamicity of its protagonist Jim Hawkins. However, while not all readers may think of ROBINSON CRUSOE as a pure adventure-novel, TREASURE ISLAND is practically a watchword for the mythos. To be sure, it’s preceded by many other classics in the same mythos, particularly the Big Three Perennials: Scott’s IVANHOE, Dumas’s THREE MUSKETEERS, and Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Yet though there had been numerous adventure-tales—now mostly unread—that featured juveniles as protagonists, ISLAND seems a breakthrough in terms of creating a true hero who simply happens to be a juvenile. By “true hero” I mean the type of character who fits the persona of “the hero,” more devoted to glory than immediate survival.


Hawkins is not utterly without economic motive. As much as his “good mentors” Livesy and Trelawney, and his ‘bad mentor” Long John Silver, Hawkins wants to profit by uncovering the lost treasure of pirate captain Flint. But there’s a sense in which the treasure gives Jim an excuse to get away from the mundane life of running an inn with his widowed mother. To be sure, he doesn’t expect to meet danger during the voyage to the isle of treasure (called “Skeleton Island”). Peril only looms its head when Hawkins learns that Silver has brought hardened pirates into the crew, who are willing to murder or maroon all of the ship's honest citizens, once the pirates have acquired Flint’s treasure. Nevertheless, twice in the story Hawkins boldly strikes off on his own, first to explore the island, and then to recapture the ship when it’s set adrift. Hawkins can’t fight or shoot, and he’s saved from being killed in his only battle-scene by losing his footing and falling down a hill. Nevertheless, Hawkins displays both the honor and courage of a hero. The sense of honor extends even to the duplicitous Silver, for Hawkins refuses to break his word to the pirate even to save Hawkins’ own life, and his courage is all the more remarkable because of the very real fears he experiences. Cinematic adaptations sometimes are accurate in conjuring with the terror-aspects of the boy’s early encounter with the fearsome Blind Pew, or Hawkins’ life-or-death struggle against the murderous Israel Hands. But the island itself is rarely shown as Stevenson shows it, as a place of potential malarial sickness, inhabited by “huge slimy monsters” (sea lions, unfamiliar to the young Englishman). And I’ve never seen a film that ended as the novel ends; with Jim Hawkins, years later, still haunted by nightmares of piratical iniquity, summed up by the memory of Long John’s parrot, mindlessly screaming “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Like many of Stevenson’s works, TREASURE ISLAND was originally directed at young readers, for its original title was THE SEA COOK: A STORY FOR BOYS. I for one did not read the novel in my youth. My first memory was that of seeing a thirty-minute cartoon adaptation as an episode of THE FAMOUS ADVENTURES OF MISTER MAGOO, in which a version of Magoo, an actor rather than a blind old coot, essayed the role of Long John. The cartoon, like many live-action adaptations, played up Silver’s charm and wit, and downplayed the consequences of his intentions toward the honest treasure-seekers. I didn’t read the book until I was in my fifties or thereabout, when I sought to sort out the book’s relationship to the literary form of “the romance.” Indeed, Stevenson’s epigraph alludes to “the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way,” which I take to be a reference to the chivalric romances, whose spirit Scott had revived in IVANHOE. To be sure, I doubt if any medieval romance ever had a villain as ambiguous as Long John Silver, who is the dark side of Hawkins as much as Hyde, five years later, would become the alter ego to Jekyll. Ironically, while Jekyll and Hyde perish together, Stevenson allows Silver to escape the fate he’s earned and to steal a sack of coins for his trouble, while Hawkins on the contrary is too haunted by his experience of “man’s inhumanity to man” to enjoy his share of the pirate treasure.

Despite the many horrific images in the novel, TREASURE ISLAND is entirely naturalistic, just like the Big Three Perennials. However, the book is indirectly responsible for spawning the cornerstone of the nineteenth century’s formulation of the superhero idiom. After reading ISLAND, H. Rider Haggard bet a friend that he Haggard could write a novel as good as Stevenson’s work. While there had been pirate adventures before ISLAND, KING SOLOMON’S MINES instituted the subgenre known as the “lost race novel.” Perhaps more importantly, MINES introduced one of the nineteenth century’s first serial characters whose adventures were both (1) predominantly metaphenomal in nature, and (2) predominantly based around the agon of combat. Allen Quatermain, star of MINES and the eight books that followed, does end up chasing a legendary treasure as does Hawkins. But Quatermain is a seasoned campaigner rather than a beardless boy, and though Haggard killed off his character in the second book, the series was popular enough for the author to bring Quatermain back in six “prequels.” To my knowledge Stevenson never wrote anything that belongs to the superhero idiom, but TREASURE ISLAND remains an important link in the chain of events that led to that idiom, ranging from Nick Carter to Tarzan and John Carter and on through the costumed offspring of four-color comics.

MYTHCOMICS: THE DARK KNIGHT, MASTER RACE (2015)

They'll kill us if they can, Bruce. Every year they grow smaller. Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the earth.-- Superman, Book 3, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

When Frank Miller wrote those words circa 1986 for THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- his "brass band funeral" for superheroes-- he gave no indication that there was any real way to reconcile the domain of  the colossal super-crusaders and the domain of the Lilliputians whom the heroes are destined to save from peril.

(Sidebar: In THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche often railed against mediocre people, for whom one of his many epithets was "the small men.")

Over rhirty years later, Miller and Brian Azzarello raise these same issues once more in THE DARK KNIGHT MASTER RACE. (To be sure, the progress from TDKR to TDKMR was interrupted in 2001 by a weird, carbuncle-like growth called TDKSA, but so far as I can see, this interruption plays no role in the progression between the 1986 work and the 2015 work.) Seven pages into Book One of MASTER RACE, Wonder Woman-- who has moved with her Amazon sisters to the Amazonian rainforest in South America-- saves a tribe of Indians from a rampaging minotaur. And as she vanquishes the monster, she thinks:

When they are threatened, we are there, and they name us saviors-- until they call us threats.

However, in contrast to Superman's frustrations in TDKR, the Amazon Princess seems to accept the absurdity of the sacrifice with samurai-like stolidity:

The same, a hundred times. A hundred hundred times. We know that, and we are still there for them. You taught us to be that way.

The "you" of which the Amazon thinks is Superman himself, the father of Diana's two children, an infant son named Jonathan and a teenaged daughter named Lara. Later the reader will learn that the Man of Steel has become a man of ice, retreating from his heroic duties into a frozen stasis due to his disappointment with the people he's served so long. The reader sees his self-exile through the eyes of his half-Kryptonian, half-Amazon daughter, who gets no answer when she asks her entombed father, "Why did you let the ants knock you from the sky?"

To be sure, Batman, the ostensible star of the show, has been gone for a while too, though a caped crusader makes the scene in Gotham City. However, it's not the aging and ailing Bruce Wayne, but his protege Carrie Kelley, formerly the first female Robin and now masquerading as her mentor for reasons that are never entirely clear. Really Old Batman doesn't make an on-panel appearance until Book 3, but he seems to have lost most of his zeal for crimefighting.

Though other superheroes are still around, DC's "Big Three" are largely removed from the current scene. Superman's hibernation in particular gives rise to his opposite number: a cult devoted not to the service and protection of humankind but to mastering all life. And his own daughter is the vehicle of the cult's rise, for while visiting her comatose father in his Fortress, she discovers the Bottle City of Kandor, and decides its inhabitants ought to "get big." And to accomplish this, she seeks DC's smallest hero, the Atom, who as it happens is just as given as Diana to waxing philosophical, though he's more scientist than samurai:

Everything-- for Stephen Hawking's brain to a molten flash of goo bubbling at the earth's core-- shared an undeniable commonality--

This belief in commonality, profound though it is, leads him to assist Lara and her Kandorian friend Baal (note the Old Testament cognomen) in enlarging a coterie of Kandorians to human-size. The Atom assumes he's going to get good men and true. What he gets a cult of Kandorians, led by a Manson-like old fellow named Quar, who believe that the ants ought to be worshiping them.

It's not clear how aware Lara is of the cult's purpose when she abets their ascension. However, she's a hot-headed teenager, who resents her father's absence and her mother's attempts to control/discipline her, and she doesn't exactly rush to combat Quar's cult. (It's strongly suggested that she's hormonally motivated, since she's a teenager who perhaps wants a boyfriend able to survive mating with her, though she ends up falling out with false-god Baal.)

 At any rate, the cult runs roughshod over humanity and neutralize most of the heroes, starting with Atom and moving on to Flash and Green Lantern, though Aquaman and the two offspring of Hawkman and Hawkgirl remain on the periphery. (This is perhaps the closest we'll ever get to seeing Frank Miller write a Justice League story.) Though the Kandorians can't rid themselves of Superman quite so easily, their real foe is Batman and his protege, who are able to combat the cult more with strategy than with brute force. Miller and Azzarello certainly make much more judicious use of DC continuity than Miller did in TDKSA, though only hardcore insiders will get the references to the Lazarus Pit, and even I, hardcore though I am, have no idea why Green Lantern conjures up the image of Bat-Mite in one panel. Yet, for all of the juicy superhero action and continuity, MASTER RACE's greatest accomplishment may be that of giving the lie to all the penny-ante intellectuals who dismissed THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS as "fascist."

In my 1987 review of TDKR, I challenged this canard, though I qualified that view by suggesting that Miller might have "left himself open to such criticisms." But over the past thirty years, I've witnessed the irrational attachment that most psuedo-intellectual critics have to the "superheroes=fascism" meme, and now I believe that nothing Miller could have written then would have deflected that knee-jerk reaction.

Miller, as I said elsewhere, deals in visceral scenarios, not abstract propositions, so his answer to the fascist accusation appears in the form of the heroes having internal dialogues about heroism. The Atom's early musings about commonality prove central to Miller's response, and though the hero's meditations are qualified by some of his own experiences, he's certainly validated in that he ends up saving the day when the bigger heroes (yes, even Batman) fail. In Princess Diana's internal monologue provide a counter to Quar's ascension to godhood via the rays of a yellow sun, she argues that "specialness" must be cultivated as "something we can grow into, through curiosity, exercise, and discipline." And Superman, whose voice dominates the final coda, reverses his earlier animus to the incredibly shrinking mediocrity of humankind:

Ultimately, we understand how small our role really is-- that the lives we affect are potentially even greater than our own.

Superman also refutes the tendency of human beings to think of superheroes as gods, stating that "that's not even what we aspire to be." Miller and Azzarello are clearly not speaking only of four-color mystery-men, but of all human impulses toward heroism, however one may choose to define them. In a balanced viewpoint one could never be conflated with the ambitions of either historical fascists or super-villains like Quar, who sacrifices one of his own daughters as a "super-suicide bomber" whose exploding body annihilates Moscow-- though I feel relatively sure that some reviewer somewhere has complained about Miller and Azzarello having used Islamic motifs for his villains. (Quar has three Kandorian wives who wear veils. Oooooohhhh--)

In this post I've left out a lot of good stuff about TDKMR and some not so good stuff. Regardless, it's a given that, even if MASTER RACE's philosophy is more articulate this time round, this graphic novel can never surpass the place TDKR occupies in comics-history. But given that dopes like Frederic Wertham attacked superheroes by conflating Nietzsche and Nazism, it's fascinating to see these creators echo certain Nietzschean conceits that I identified in this meditation on the INCREDIBLES movie:

Nietzsche's ideal of his Ubermensch is not covalent with any version of the superhero, with one exception. the motivation of magnanimity. The Nietzschean "superman" is magnanimous because he has so much more "spirit" than common people. Superheroes generally don't show as much contempt for the rabble as Nietzsche did, but there's still a sense that superheroes are frequently magnanimous for similar reasons. But even here, there's a crucial difference. Mister Incredible enjoys getting praise and plaudits for his super-deeds, but his deeds primarily spring from empathy: from the realization that ordinary people need his help. 

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES PT. 4

In previous installments I've attempted to examine various subcombative works in terms of their relation to the overall concept of heroism. In brief, my previous estimations have been as follows:

(1) JUDEX the film is not only subcombative, but its titular character also bears little relation to the model of heroism I have constructed in essays such as 2013's RETURN OF THE MASTERY MASTER PT. 3. 

(2) MOANA is subcombative but the characters show heroism despite their inability to meet their foe in equal combat.

(3) Mark Twain's PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC, though a subcombative drama focused on the purgative sacrifice of the main character, shows a fascination with her ability to inspire men to "exalting activities," which Twain describes with a passion for their invigorating qualities ("the soul is overflowing with life and energy," et al).

(4) Parenthetically, I mentioned that even though Shakespere's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA centered on struggles of physical combat, just like Twain's JOAN, there's no sense in TROILUS that warfare brings forth any invigorating qualities. I did not say so previously, but I tend to view the two main characters of TROILUS to be demiheroes for the same reason that Judex is: their acts reflect no more than the "existential will" of persistence, rather than the "idealizing will" of glory.

The film I'll now discuss, 1955's THE COURT JESTER, is closest in structure to MOANA. The VHS cover seen above, whether it's original or derived from earlier art, capsulizes the inner conflict of the title character. Hubert Hawkins desires to be a hero, and for that reason, he joins a revolutionary movement led by an older crusader, "the Black Fox," who seeks to unseat the current usurper of the English throne. The rebels' ace in the hole is that they have custody of an infant whose proper legitimacy is a birthmark: a purple pimpernel on the baby's tush. The movie's opening number shows Hubert staging a complicated dance-scenario in which he appears to be the masked, Robin Hood-like leader of the rebels.

However, the viewer is quickly disabused of this illusion when the real Black Fox shows up. It's established that Hubert is not a fighter, only a performer, and that his main duty is that of caring for the infant heir to the throne. Not only is Hubert not the equal of the Fox, even the rebels' sole female member, Maid Jean, is given more trust than Hubert as a respected soldier in the cause.

Hubert's one compensation is that this female crusader (played by Glynis Johns) is not the inamorata of the Fox, the way that Maid Marian was to Robin Hood, and it turns out that she rather likes Hubert in spite of his lack of demonstrable manliness. For reasons too complicated to explain, the two of them end up forced to take the infant heir into the castle of the usurper-king, while Hubert poses as the king's new court jester. Thus, the protagonist who wants to be a hero ends up "playing the fool" for his enemies.

Hubert does get a shot at megadynamic heroism. The king's daughter takes a fancy to Hubert, and demands of her witchy servant to give Hubert protection. The witch uses hypnotism to convince Hubert that he's a great swordsman. Thus the witch, though she knows nothing of Hubert's desire for heroism, gives him the very persona he desires, even though, as I've observed elsewhere, Hubert remains subcombative because he never gains "mastery" of his other self, and only wins against his enemies by dumb luck and trickery.

However, jumping ahead to the film's end, it's interesting that when Hubert does save the day-- averting combat between the Fox and loyal supporters of the usurper-- it's through a manipulation of psychological factors. In short, Hubert figures out that the supporters will turn on the usurper if it can be proven that the rightful heir still exists-- and Hubert wins them over by showing them the "purple pimpernel" on the baby's butt.

Clearly, though the filmmakers could have allowed Hubert the opportunity to become conscious of his buried sword-skill, they probably felt that giving Hubert real fighting-skill obviated the comic persona of star Danny Kaye, the good-hearted bumbler, one who is almost likable here for his "feminine" qualities. However, even though Hubert is a bumbler for much of the film, he's still a protagonist struggling for a higher ideal, and so he, like the starring characters of Moana, qualifies for the status of the subcombative hero.

PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory, even if I renounced his confusion between dynamis and dynamicity in the essay DYNAMIS AND DYNAMICITY. Frye showed a slight tendency to equate social station with "power of action," probably because he was following Aristotle in his groundbreaking formulations in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

To quickly summarize between the personas of the "hero" and the "demihero," one incarnates the value I've called "positive glory" while the other incarnates that of "positive persistence." I won't repeat the distinctions I've made in earlier essays' I merely revisit this topic to correct my possible tendency to assign the persona of the demihero to the "ordinary man" rather than figures of high social station. (Not that this is a dominant tendency, as seen in some of the characters cited in DEMIHERO RALLIES.) 

Since positive persistence is not really correlated with social station, it's entirely feasible for demiheroes to be not only aristocrats, but rulers of whole domains, who may command considerable forces. However, not all kings and princes function to display "glory," and many function simply to keep their positions stable, a practice which allies with the value of persistence, as much as any of the "ordinary man" protagonists I've touched on.

Within the medium of comic books, one example of a powerful ruler is DC Comics' Morpheus, a.k.a. The Sandman. I've reviewed only two works in Neil Gaiman's corpus of Sand-stories, here and here, and in both of these storylines Morpheus is largely concerned with simply keeping his dream-empire stable for however long the universe lasts. He does undertake a personal duel of sorts in "A Hope in Hell," so he's certainly not without courage. However, for the most part Morpheus does not engage in any form of combat, nor is he concerned with the hero's goals of casting out evil in order to promote good. Thus the Lord of the Dream-World aligns with similar demiheroes who only perform positive actions when pressed to do so, like the LOST IN SPACE characters, to whom I've perhaps devoted the most analysis, starting here.

An example of heroic rulership appears in Nozomu Tamaki's DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND. The "bund" of the title is the domain ruled by Mina Tepes, queen of the world's vampires. Mina, like Morpheus, spends a fair amount of time protecting her empire from incursions, and though she and her retinue are much more violent than Lord Moepheus, the difference between them is more one of their personas than of physical dynamicity.  In the arc titled THE SCARLET ORDER, the origin of the vampire race is revealed, and Tamaki makes this narrative reflect elements of heroic glory:

Vampires are in essence spawned by a mystic force known only as "the Darkness," and its goal is much the same as that of the three vampire-lords from the first arc: to successfully begat a child to perpetuate its heritage. Tamaki's description of the Darkness' methods reminded me somewhat of the Hindu myth of Prajapati, who creates a woman to be his mate. Like Prajapati, the Darkness must then seek to overcome the woman's resistance to spawn the offspring he desires. But the unnamed "Woman" does resist the dark god's purpose, just as Mina resisted the corrupt desires of the three lords, and from the fact of the Woman's defiance springs the history of the vampire race.

By comparison, Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

Interestingly, very few American-made superheroes have any propensity to be rulers, whether due to aristocratic birth or simply taking power by force of will. Thus they must be seen as "ordinary men" who make the transition to heroic status, which only shows that even characters who start out as demiheroes can feel the demands of "noblesse oblige."

THE TOILS OF TROILUS

In MYTHOS AND MODE PT. 3, I spoke of three principal ways in which a given work failed to achieve the combative mode despite having some of the requisite elements, and I used one Shakespeare play as an example of each of the three. One way was exemplified by TITUS ANDRONICUS, which had both the necessary narrative and significant elements but simply chose not to resolve the conflict in a combative manner: I might call this the "diffuse type." Another path was exemplified by HAMLET, which had the narrative elements but not the significant ones relating to character-dynamicity, while the last was exemplified by CORIOLANUS, which had the significant elements but not the narrative ones. The third choice is one in which the main character and his enemy possess great dynamicity and seem to be building to a major combative resolution, but chose to frustrate that potential.

I recently reread TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, a play written about three to five years before CORIOLANUS. I remembered nothing about the play from whenever I last read it. Yet I decided, given my earlier statements on Shakespeare's proclivities for fictive violence, that I should re-read it, at least partly because the play's actions takes place during the action of the Trojan War. According to one source, the classic work most associated with that conflict, Homer's ILIAD, had not been fully translated into English when the Bard wrote his play. Thus it's hard to know if he knew more than generalities about parts of Homer's plot-action. Further, neither of the characters in the title-- two young Trojans in love (hmm, that sounds strange)-- appears in Homer. Both were born from medieval accretions to the main tale, accretions continued by authors ranging from Boccaccio to Chaucer, and since the story had proved popular in Shakespeare's time the Bard apparently chose to try his hand at the legend.

(Note: although Cressida does not appear in Homer, she's probably derived from the character Chryses, a prophet's daughter claimed by Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces battling Troy. When circumstances make it necessary for Agamemnon to return Chryses to her father, he then swipes another "spoils of war" female from his subordinate warrior Achilles, and this leads to Achilles' famous reluctance to continue pressing the fight against the warriors of Troy.)

TROILUS has two plot-threads. One, dealing with the Trojan lovers, demonstrates no more narrative potential for the combative mode than does ROMEO AND JULIET. The other is nothing less than the quintessential combative moment of THE ILIAD: the duel between Achilles and Hector that, in Homer, marks the beginning of the end for Troy.  Toward the end of the play, main character Troilus does take the field and fights a warrior or two,  but he really has nothing to do with Shakespeare's (probable) attempt to one-up Homer by destroying the integrity of the Achilles-Hector battle. Here's a prose translation of the relevant scene from Homer:

Now, the fine bronze armour he stripped from mighty Patroclus when he killed him covered all Hector’s flesh except for one opening at the throat, where the collarbones knit neck and shoulders, and violent death may come most swiftly. There, as Hector charged at him, noble Achilles aimed his ash spear, and drove its heavy bronze blade clean through the tender neck, though without cutting the windpipe or robbing Hector of the power of speech. Hector fell in the dust and Achilles shouted out in triumph: ‘While you were despoiling Patroclus, no doubt, in your folly, you thought yourself quite safe, Hector, and forgot all about me in my absence. Far from him, by the hollow ships, was a mightier man, who should have been his helper but stayed behind, and that was I, who now have brought you low. The dogs and carrion birds will tear apart your flesh, but him the Achaeans will bury.’

And now here's Shakespeare's reworking:

ACT V SCENE VIII	Another part of the plains.
[Enter HECTOR]
HECTOR	Most putrefied core, so fair without,
	Thy goodly armour thus hath cost thy life.
	Now is my day's work done; I'll take good breath:
	Rest, sword; thou hast thy fill of blood and death.
[ Puts off his helmet and hangs his shield behind him ]
[Enter ACHILLES and Myrmidons]
ACHILLES	Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set;	5
	How ugly night comes breathing at his heels:
	Even with the vail and darking of the sun,
	To close the day up, Hector's life is done.
HECTOR	I am unarm'd; forego this vantage, Greek.
ACHILLES	Strike, fellows, strike; this is the man I seek.	10
[HECTOR falls]
	So, Ilion, fall thou next! now, Troy, sink down!
	Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone.
	On, Myrmidons, and cry you all amain,
	'Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain.'

So, in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who orders his personal guards, the Myrmidons, to chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor.

There's a lot of other support for the notion that Shakespeare meant to vilify the very idea of Classical Greece's idea of heroes and their heroic deeds, but I don't mean to explore that here. My main concern is to locate this Shakespeare play within the sphere of the playwright's handling of violent conflicts, and thus I find that TROILUS AND CRESSIDA follows the same pattern as CORIOLANUS, of which I wrote:

CORIOLANUS was my choice for a play that had the potential for the significant combative value, in that its opposed characters Coriolanus and Aufidius were both portrayed as exceptional warriors seen lusting to kill each other at the play's outset.  However, because the play's plot does not end with a combat between these two well-matched characters, CORIOLANUS is not combative in the narrative sense.

I'll forego further comment on the play, except to say that it strikes me as a play in which the writer's desire to satirize something he didn't like-- in this case, the general macho swaggering of the Greeks, and even Troilus's male chauvinism-- but without managing to bring any of his satirical characters to the semblance of life. By comparison, CORIOLANUS is much more successful on a roughly similar theme. The Roman general of the play's title is also something of an egotistical butthead, but he's a much more nuanced character than any of those in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.

PROPPIAN PONDERINGS PT. 3

I'm returning to the topic of this brief "series," last seen in 2014, because one of the films I've just reviewed speaks so well to the "two forms of will" elaborated there:

I should have said earlier that these two forms of will, these "two souls" that seem to dwell in every human's breast, only appear in fictional characters to the extent that their creators choose to emphasize one or both.  It is possible to have characters who are purely devoted to glorious ideals, or purely devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence.  It is also possible to have combinations of the two, but one form of will must dominate over the other...

In my review of the 1971 Hammer film TWINS OF EVIL, I remarked that although it was part of a trilogy of vampire films based on Sheridan LeFanu's novel CARMILLA, TWINS did not center on the menace of the vampires, in contrast to most films containing vampires. Rather, the "star" of the story, played by the top-billed Peter Cushing, is a (17th-century?) witch-hunter named Gustav Weil.

(I should note that top billing in itself doesn't equate with the star of the story. The most extreme example of this is that Bela Lugosi gets star-billing in the serial THE WHISPERING SHADOW, but he plays neither villain nor hero, but simply a red herring-type.)

Weil is apposite to the matter of fictional characters whose creators have given them combinations of both the idealizing will, with its "glorious ideals," and the existential will, "devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence." As the film begins, the viewer sees Weil and his cohorts burning a young woman to death on the suspicion that she's a witch. This act makes it impossible for most viewers to assign him the status of the hero, so by my system he could still be one of three other personas: villain, monster, or demihero. Villains are suggest a devotion to the pure ideal of contravening good, but it's soon apparent that Weil thinks that his witch-hunting serves the purpose of his version of Christianity and of his community. It would be possible for a witch-hunter to be a monster who, in the name of pure survival, has become estranged from his community due to his obsessions: this formula appears in another Peter Cushing role, his "Baron Frankenstein" as portrayed in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN.   Yet Weil seems to blend in with his community, even though not all the locals approve of his witch-finding activities. Thus at first, Weil seems closest in tone to the negative form of the demihero: the type who I observed in this essay to be "a loathsome viewpoint character who deserves to be destroyed."

Yet, as the movie's plot unfolds, Weil's dedication to his cause is shown to be sincere even if he makes poor choices regarding the objects of his persecution. Further, vampires in Weil's world are real, and thus he's not totally unjustified in crusading against evil. But the new information still doesn't elevate Weil to the level of a heroic figure like the Van Helsing of Hammer's DRACULA series. It's not just that he's fallible, but he's fallible in a way that shows the negative consequences of the existential will. Thus, at the climax Anton, the "hero" (but not "star") of the story finally makes Weil aware of his failures, Weil still does not take on the stature of the hero, even when he leads his followers in an assault upon the castle of the vampire. Weil has some idealizing will in him, but it's been trumped by the existential will, the part of him that has been content to attack impotent victims rather than assail the true source of evil. I observed a similar admixture of "the two souls" in Cushing's Baron Frankenstein as well, as I chronicled here, but in the Baron's case he is estranged enough from the community to be deemed a "monster."

On a side-note, TWINS seems to be a rare example of a horror-film oriented on the demihero rather than the monster; to date I've analyzed only one other such film here. But in that film, the monster dies and the demihero survives, while in TWINS OF EVIL, it's the demihero and the monster who are the real "twins," in being diametrically opposed evils that are both destroyed by film's end.