Dispassionate Analysis of Heroes and Celebrities (Crowley
Heroes and Celebrities: Moral Guidance versus Entertainment
HUMN240, E1WW – Fall
2014
Professor Harlan
Schottenstein
John J. “Jack”
Crowley
When I was younger, my father used to let me read comic books. As long
as I was reading, he’d say, that’s all that was important. Obviously, he didn’t
want me reading smut, but heroes in Batman, Superman or X-Men comics taught me
about heroes. The old man was sly, because the older-style comics from DC or
Marvel also reinforced hard work, cleverness, physical strength and
right-headedness. Culturally, we crave them all.
Celebrities do disservice to the genre of Batman, for instance. Michael
Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney and Christian Bale don’t really get it all
“right.” Gotham , even the new, dark TV series by the
same name, is never as fully served as Batman’s true potential. And celebrities
are not as durable: Keaton’s 62 in his new send-up of playing a superhero, Birdman. Kilmer’s gotten fat, Clooney’s
gotten married, and Christian Bale is too brooding. America ’s
love of “crime comics” reaches back to their heyday in the late 1940s and early
1950s. It also was a time when the still-90-percent-male readers were confused
after World War II and the start of the nuclear-age Cold War – and still today.
Jeffrey A. Brown’s article in our Popular Culture textbook captures the
mindset, and publishers’ tricks. Brown decries the “have” and “have-not” social
classes within comic bookdom. (Brown pp 306-323). To him, it’s not so much
about heroes, celebrities and plots as it is about marketing, “hot” editions
and “complex intensification of more general aspects of popular culture.” (Brown,
322) It’s fans augmenting their morals and status.
Hero-based plots in animated texts are redeeming tools in a
wrongly-perceived social status of deprivation. Celebrity comic movies and
books supplement religious/moral values. Fans read comic books, which are “intellectually
debased” by upper-crust intelligentsia. (Brown, 323) They are revered as
heroes in their “subliterate” culture
based on the discerning collection of V
for Vendetta or Death of Superman
“hot” comics.
References:
“Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital” (Brown, J.A.)
Profiles of Popular Culture, A Reader,
(Browne, R.B.), Popular Literature Chapter,
pp 307-323
“Cult of Celebrity,” May
25,2011 (Champion, S. blog; Yoffie, E.H., r abbi;
and The Atlantic magazine), The Huffington
Post
Retrieved from:
and
“The Way We Are” (Pollack, S.)
Common Culture: Reading
and Writing about American Popular Culture
(Petracca, M.,
Sorapure, M.) 2012 University of California Santa Barbara
Seventh
Edition, Pearson, pp 453-463
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