Tag Archives: Twilight

Tween Horror

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I had an article on the Atlantic a couple of days ago in which I talked about the Hunger Games and Twilight, comparing Bella and Katniss. I argue that Bella is in many ways stereotypically feminine (passive, focused on romance and motherhood) while Katniss is in many ways stereotypically masculine (competent, deadly, not focused on romance).

People have not been pleased with me. Specifically, Alyssa Rosenberg and Amber Taylor take me to task. Alyssa started out by calling me condescending and went on to say:

First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.

As is usually the case, Caroline Small is more eloquent than I am, so I’ll let her respond. This is a comment she left on the Atlantic site before Alyssa’s post went up, but I think it resonates.

The comments to this article are really pretty interesting. But pretty disheartening, really, too. A lot of popular feminism, which seems to be where some of the commenters are coming from, isn’t very attentive to the history of cultural gendering, where certain traits were indeed gendered “female” and certain “male”, and where the male traits were generally considered better and more worthwhile. Those preferences haven’t really gone away — the sets of traits and behaviors are still valued differently. They’re just more available to individual people of both genders now.

I’ve been seeing these “I’m glad I grew up with Buffy and not Bella” things too, so it’s not just Katniss. I sympathize; Bella doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. But it doesn’t take much insight to recognize that she aligns more closely with “traditional femininity” than Buffy and Katniss do.

Fortunately, there are lots of women today whose self-perception aligns with the masculine values, to the point that those women would never describe those traits as “masculine”. I think these comments reflect that. But being able to see them as non-gendered, or differently gendered, is something we have the luxury of doing because we were fortunate enough to have come up after feminism fought those hard battles, in an era where other people and society overall enforce those gendered norms on our individual bodies much, much less.

A lot of people seem to think that the point of feminism is making “masculine” behavior acceptable for women — or making no behavior unacceptable for women, that is, separating the behavior from the bodies of the people who perform the behavior and not judging women who prefer those historically masculine traits. And I agree that is one goal of feminism.

But feminism used to also be about recognizing the value and beauty of the way women historically did things, of women’s ways of knowing, of women’s unique experiences — of “femininity” as a counterweight to the excesses of “masculine” strength and authority and aggression. It used to be about valuing “femininity” as a place from which we could criticize and challenge the bad things in our world. A lot of the distaste for Bella is genuine distaste for the historically “feminine” categories and behaviors and values and aesthetics, but it’s generally expressed without even the slightest recognition of how problematic and limiting — and historically patriarchal — that attitude is.

So I’m hesitant that it’s a good thing to derogate traditional femininity, either in favor of traditional masculinity or even in favor of an individual woman’s right to behave however she pleases. A feminism that rejects the very notion that culture is gendered (in ways that have nothing to do with biology) is a feminism that’s amputated its best critique of power. It’s essentially co-opted by historically masculine cultural biases and preferences — including the ones for violence and strength. That’s tragic, if that’s where we are.

Part of the appeal of characters like Katniss is that they challenge conventional gender without completely eradicating it. Part of the appeal of characters like Bella is that they subvert conventional gender without really challenging it at all. I don’t much like either of them at a personal “do I want to hang out with these people” level — I’m with the person who prefers Hermione, although HP is almost as badly written as Twilight. But it strikes me that not being able — or willing — to think the difference is a problem.

Girl power is great — except when it moves beyond allowing people with female bodies to behave any way they like and becomes a new set of restrictive, normative, angry, prejudiced norms that bully people with female bodies into behaving a certain way. The widespread and almost-always knee-jerk “feminist” contempt for Bella, both in itself and in comparison with “tough” female characters like Katniss and Buffy, is a tremendous intellectual and social failure in that respect.

So I think it’s worth asking the defenders of Katniss — is there actually a feminist critique of the power structure that gets Katniss into the book’s defining life or death challenge, the kind of systematic feminist critique you get from, say, Joanna Russ or Erica Jong? I can be talked out of this position, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is. The same question could be asked of Buffy, and of any other girl power heroine. Twilight may actually have the edge on that one — there is a definite critique of the Volturi from Bella’s perspective that aligns nicely, yes, with Christian ideals, but also with traditionally feminine ones. (Although Bella is certainly no Alyx.)

Ignoring the seductiveness of those “masculine” characteristics, pretending their relationship to authority and strength and power and violence is transformed just because a woman engages in them — — that’s not feminist at all. And neither is perpetuating biases and prejudices against the historically gendered-feminine traits. A feminism that can’t make room for Bella is a feminism that’s going to have a lot of trouble getting purchase with women who like Bella, and that seems like a tremendous mistake to me.

To me it seems like Caroline has Alyssa pretty much dead to rights. Alyssa is basically insisting that the feminine be defined as, “anything that women do.” And that has been one goal of feminism. But another goal has been to champion those things traditionally associated with women. And you can’t champion those things if you feel it’s condescending to even suggest that they exist.

The difficulty with championing them if you refuse to admit they exist is perhaps best epitomized by another commenter on the Atlantic. This is Genevieve du Lac. Her comment has garnered 16 likes, so I don’t think she’s just speaking for herself here.

I’m really disgusted with these definitions of femininity and feminism. Why can’t a woman be competent and feminine at the same time? Femininity is not weak. And Bella is just retarded. The two neurons she’s got floating around in her cerebellum are drunk off too much estrogen… like most 16 year olds. So she’s got some feminine qualities – like following her feelings, etc. That does not make her the epitome of femininity.

I’d like to think a woman can be feminine and still be competent. I can wear my makeup and heels and take care of my hair just as well as I sky dive, shoot an arrow, shoot a pistol, finish my MBA, and have a career. Sheesh.

Like Alyssa, Genevieve wants the feminine to mean everything women do. But to get there, she has to call Bella “retarded” and sneer at her “estrogen.” Which, to me, seems like a problem.

Alyssa doesn’t lambast Bella in such offensive terms, of course, which I appreciate. But she is coming from at least a vaguely similar line of country.

And while those values are worth examining further, Twilight‘s also eminently critiqueable on narrative grounds, something Noah gives very little credence. Complexity is the stuff of genuinely compelling decision-making, as well as compelling storytelling. What’s troubling about Twilight is less the idea that Bella picks Edward and more the inevitability of their eventual union. Once Edward walks into Bella’s science class, she never really considers anything else, never gets presented with any other truly compelling options, she treats the humans in her life who are graduating and going off to their own adventures with dismissiveness and disinterest. Tough choices are fascinating. Defending the world’s kindest fate is rather dull.

And just as I’m bored by Bella’s certainty and dismissive attitudes towards people who set other priorities and take other paths, I don’t appreciate the idea that I don’t live up to Noah Berlatsky’s very particular standards of femininity, I’m doing it wrong. There may be effective arguments for a Christian focus on love rather than strength. But a strident and myopic lecture to women with a variety of priorities isn’t likely to be one of them.

Alyssa is arguing for narrative complexity — complexity involving action, politics, and suspense. She goes on to argue that the Hunger Games is interesting in part because it’s about how politics destroys families; how the public trumps the private and why that’s evil.

But…that’s not unique to the Hunger Games. It’s just how adventure stories work. You’re fighting for home and family; that’s the motivation, but it’s not the story. That’s why Amber Taylor is misleading when she says that Katniss’ actions are all about her family. Diagetically they are…but that isn’t what the books focus on. We hardly know Katniss’ sister, or her relationship to her; Pru really just exists as a kind of pure idol of goodness and innocence, a reason to keep fighting, like any number of pure-women-left-at-home in any number of adventure books. What Alyssa wants, and what adventure narratives want, isn’t the exploration of love and relationships…so they push those over to the side. And instead, you get violence and things blowing up.

I don’t have any problem with things blowing up in my entertainment. I don’t know that I seek that kind of thing out quite as much as my wife does, but I’m perfectly happy to go along for the ride. Enjoyable as those things-blowing-up are, though, I like other kinds of stories too. Such as, occasionally, romance. Which is what Twilight is.

As in most romances, narrative complexity, in terms of events and suspense, is not the point. You know Bella is going to get her guy, just like you know that Jane Austen’s heroines are going to end up happily married. That’s how romance works. People — often people known as “women” — read those books not because they’re idiots who don’t like complexity, but because they are interested in a different kind of complexity. Specifically, they’re interested in the ins and outs of love; not just whether people love each other, but how they do so; not who will live and who will die, but what will they say and how will they say it and how will their relationship develop?

For instance, there’s that scene in the Twilight series where Edward’s family is voting on whether to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward’s father votes yes, and his reason is that Edward has vowed to kill himself when Bella dies. For Edward’s father, his love for his son therefore means that Bella has to also live forever.

As a father, as a husband, as someone who has been thinking a lot recently about in-laws and what they mean for marriage and for love — I found, and find that scene really moving. And that’s where the suspense and surprise in Twilight comes from; from the explanation and exploration of love and intimacy, not just between Bella and Edward, but between Bella and Jacob, and Jacob and Edward, and Edward’s family — the entire cast of characters, in other words. It’s different than watching the nifty new way Katniss kills somebody, I’ll grant you. But it’s not worse. For me, anyway, I find it more compelling. Or, as Laura Blackwood says in a lovely recent essay, “The Twilight series challenges what I would call the “Buffy Summers Maxim”: that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity.”

None of which means that Katniss, or Alyssa, is “doing it wrong.” Even if the Hunger Games is (like Twilight) dreadfully written, I still like Katniss. I like watching her figure out how to kill people; I like her tomboyish competence; I like her butchness, I like her delight in dressing up, even if the series won’t really allow her to own it. I like the way she finds true love and family at the end. She’s not my favorite heroine in the world, and her whining (like Bella’s) gets pretty tedious, but overall, I enjoyed spending time with her. That’s why I went out of my way to say at the end of my essay at the Atlantic that Katniss and Bella aren’t opposed. As another writer notes here, it’s not an either/or choice. Lots of girls admire both characters. I think it’s possible to imagine that Twilight’s heroine and the Hunger Games’ heroine would find something in each other to love and admire as well.

Amber Taylor disagrees with me there, though:

The idea that there would be a fight is absurd, but the reason for peace is not that Bella and Katniss “might understand each other’s desires and each other’s strength” and walk away in mutual respect. Katniss wouldn’t fight Bella because Bella is not an autocratic totalitarian dictator. Bella threatens exactly nothing that Katniss values, and thus Katniss, a user of violence who is not inherently violent, would probably shrug. Katniss’s political consciousness and promotion of self-rule does not threaten Bella’s tiny microverse of loved ones and would likewise be a non-issue to Bella.

For Taylor, Katniss wouldn’t respect Bella. She’d just ignore her, because Bella is no threat. But I have to ask…if Bella “threatens exactly nothing” that Katniss or Taylor or Alyssa values, why then are so many writers so eager to attack her? If she’s not a danger, why call her a “retard” or deride her as dull or passive or sneer at her “tiny microverse of loved ones” — that thing that some of us of insufficient political consciousness refer to as our “family”? What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her? And could it, maybe, have something to do with our culture’s ambivalence about femininity?

I’ll let Sarah Blackwood have the last word.

Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.

The Twilight of Intercourse

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Romance was her suicidal substitute for action, fantasy her suicidal substitute for a real world, a wide world. And intercourse was her suicidal substitute for freedom.
— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1987

In the quote above, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is speaking about Madame Bovary. But she could just as easily be referring to Bella Swan, the heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s preposterously successful tween vampire book and movie series Twilight. In Twilight, Bella does substitute romance for action, abandoning her future plans, her academic interests, her family, her personality,and her life for her vampire lover Edward Cullen. She substitutes fantasy for reality in a manner which is literally suicidal, choosing to die and enter the twilit unageing faery world of the undead rather than grow into the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood. And she substitutes intercourse for freedom, believing that being “bitten” will grant her self-determination and happiness, when, in fact, it will simply kill her.

In short, the millions of tweens trooping in lockstep to the Cineplex to see the latest Twilight Saga installment might as well be trekking over Dworkin’s corpse. It’s a wonder she doesn’t just rise right out of the ground, fangs bared, spitting blood, and personally castrate both Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner with a rusty cleaver out of pure spite.

I don’t really have much doubt that Dworkin would really and truly have hated Twilight. She hated most things; it was part of her mean-spirited second-wave charm. At the same time…there are aspects of Twilight that resonate in odd harmony with Dworkin’s particular feminist convictions.

The most obvious of these is virginity. Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon, and her novels are obsessed with self-control in general and chastity in particular. The chastity is both literal and metaphorical; Edward won’t sleep with Bela before marriage both because he doesn’t want to damage her immortal soul and because he’s afraid of hurting her physically— he won’t bite her and turn her into a vampire for analogous reasons.

On the one hand, this virginity seems to be more about Edward’s struggle; a typical conservative vision in which female safety is placed in the hands of male renunciation and chivalry. But there’s also a sense in which virginity is not about Edward at all, but is instead Bella’s gift. Edward has a special vampire superpower, and can read minds — but for some reason he can’t read Bella’s. Over the course of the series, Bella proves immune to the mind manipulation powers of various other vampires; she is “safe in her own mind” as the books put it.

This brings to mind Dworkin’s discussion of Joan of Arc:

there was no carnal desire felt [by men] in the presence of [Joan’s] beauty [although that beauty was] female by definition…. This brings with it the sense that it was physically impossible to do it; her body was impregnable…. Joan accomplished an escape from the female condition more miraculous than any military victory: she had complete physical freedom, especially freedom of movement — on the earth, outside a domicile, among men. She had that freedom because men felt no desire for her or believed that “it was not possible to try it.”

The analogy isn’t perfect; Edward wants Bella sexually, and as a vampire he finds her blood especially attractive (“You are exactly my brand of heroin” he says.) Joan mystically shuts down male desire, thus becoming herself masculine; Bella on the other hand inflames desire, becoming all the more stereotypically female. But if Dworkin would no doubt see Twilight as a self-defeating fantasy of objectification, the fact remains that neither Edward nor anyone else can get inside Bella — and this fact eventually allows her, at the climax of the final book in the series, to save her family and change the geopolitical balance of the vampire kingdom. For both Dworkin’s Joan and Meyer’s Bella, virginity is power.

So if Dworkin and Meyer are chattering on about the wonders of virginity, that must mean they hate sex, right? This is certainly the mainstream vision of Dworkin,— her critics often claim that she believed that all heterosexual sex was rape. Though she explicitly denied that, her take on sex is hardly a cheery, rah-rah, Susie Bright one. As she says in Intercourse

With intercourse, the use is already imbued with the excitement, the derangement, of the abuse….Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society — when pushed to admit it — recognizes as dominance…..There are efforts to reform the circumstances that surround intercourse….These reforms do not in any way address the question of whether intercourse itself can be an expression of sexual equality.

So intercourse isn’t quite rape…but it is dominance, is inherently unequal, and it is not subject to reform. Intercourse oppresses women.

Again, you can see why people think that Dworkin has a problem with, as she often calls it, fucking. And yet, the truth is almost the opposite. Dworkin isn’t down on sex because she hates it. On the contrary, she hates sex as it is practiced not only because it defiles women, but because it defiles sex itself. When sex is rooted in self-knowledge and love it becomes, she says,

a complex and compassionate passion…. Fucking as communion is larger than an individual personality; it is a radical experience of seeing and knowing, experiencing possibilities within one that has been hidden.

Behind and in between Dworkin’s condemnation of fucking there is this other vision of sex as a sacrament; the idea that intercourse is an expression of the bonds between loved ones and is therefore holy. The introduction of dominance, hatred, hierarchy, and cruelty into sex is for Dworkin a kind of blasphemy; an original sin, if you will. Intercourse for Dworkin is always already corrupted, evil because, in some unknown place and in some unknown way, it was first good.

women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too….These visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them. They are not searching analyses into the nature of intercourse; instead they are deep humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter of reality. They are an underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that sustain life and further endurance.

They also do not amount to much in real life with real men.

Dworkin won’t embrace the vision…but she still sees it. Which makes me wonder, if after all, she might not have found something to respond to in Twilight. In the last book of the series, Breaking Dawn, Bella is finally transformed into a newborn vampire, with physical strength that is (for a time) even greater than Edward’s. Suddenly it’s she who has to be careful not to hurt him when they embrace. Before the transformation, she was afraid that the elimination of the differences between her and Edward would spell an end to their passion; he would no longer find her soft or warm, no longer feel the pull of her blood calling him. In other words, she worries that becoming strong will make her unfeminine. But that’s not what happens at all.

He was all new, a different person as our bodies tangled gracefully into one on the sand-pale floor. No caution, no restraint. No fear — especially not that. We could love together — both active participants now. Finally equals.

In her essay in the Atlantic about the Twilight series, Alyssa Rosenberg argues that the vampirized Bella “cuts even the romance buffs out of the equation” as Meyer rambles on and on about how Bella can now see Edward like never before and appreciate him in ways beyond the merely human. “Meyer is telling [her audience] that they are literally incapable of seeing through Bella’s eyes,” Rosenberg notes, as if this were a bug. But, as Dworkin could tell her, it’s a feature. Intercourse with men in this world is inherently unequal, and therefore inherently flawed. There is a dream, though, that things can be different. Or, as another imaginer of other worlds and other loves once put it, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The transformation Bella experiences is not just personal; it’s social. On the surface, Meyer’s fantasy is of a traditional patriarchy. The Cullens are an extended family living under one roof led by a benevolent father. In addition, the book resolutely champions the iconic conservative social issue when Bella refuses an abortion despite the fact that her pregnancy endangers her own life. Though this kind of conservatism is usually seen as denigrating women, Andrea Dworkin had another take. In her 1983 book Right Wing Women, she argued that conservative social arrangements actually offered women some modicum of protection and dignity.

Right-wing women consistently denounce abortion because they see it as inextricably linked to the sexual degradation of women. The sixties did not simply pass them by. They learned from what they saw. They saw the cynical male use of abortion to make women easy fucks…. Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion makes easier, the generalizing of force.

Thus, for Meyer, the ultimate expression of Bella’s virginal inviolability is her decision to have her child — a decision whereby she refuses to allow sex to become inconsequential.

But while Meyer is in some sense a proponent of traditional (and Mormon) values, in another sense turning into a vampire involves a rearrangement of familial relationships which can only be described as perverse. The Cullen vampire household is composed of a bunch of married couples who all also see themselves as the children of Carlisle Cullen — so in becoming Edward’s wife, Bella also becomes virtually his sister. Bella’s child, in perfect horror movie tradition, grows at a superfast rate — and is barely out of the womb before she “imprints” on Bella’s best friend and former suitor Jacob. Meyer swears up and down and all around that there’s nothing sexual about this Oedipal imprinting…but even Bella herself finds that hard to believe.

In fact, if the land of vampires is an Eden, then it makes sense that (except for that one about biting the red apple) taboos no longer apply. And this too resonates with Dworkin — particularly with the writing of one of her chief inspirations, the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that:

without the incest taboo, adults might return within a few generations to a more natural “polymorphously perverse” sexuality, the concentration on genital sex and orgasmic pleasure giving way to total physical/emotional relationships that included that. Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of…. Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendships…. All close relationships would include the physical, our concept of exclusive physical partnerships (monogamy) disappearing from our psychic structure as well as the construct of a Partner Ideal.

Meyer’s vampiric family is, then, in its own way, a kind of prelapsarian feminist utopia, pointing on the one hand to a stable, benevolent society in which all can live safe from the threat of sexual violence, and on the other to a world of libidinal overflow in which staid restrictive rules are smashed in an onrush of egalitarian ecstasy. Vampires, significantly, experience unchanging, never-ending passion — Bella and Edward can fuck monogamously forever without ever tiring or growing bored. And so they will every night for the rest of their eternal lives…though every morning they pause to go to hang out with their family in sort-of-bourgeois domestic bliss.

In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin actually has some things to say directly about vampires. Talking about Dracula, she writes:

vampirism is — to be pedestrian in the extreme — a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and being used; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of the female to the great hunter…. While alive the women are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck…after death, they are carnal, being truly sexed…. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth-century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, no matter with how many, no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freeom)…we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched unless blood has been spilled…this elegant bloodletting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair.

For Dworkin, then, Dracula is the ultimate profanation of both virginity and sex; a reimagining, in fact, of one as the other, and both as death. Instead of virginity leading to autonomy, it becomes just another fetish, to be consumed like all others. Instead of sex being a sacrament of love and connection, it becomes a form of “freedom” from connection, an alienated desire which feeds on itself. Vampirism is a way to make intercourse penetrate virginity, corrupting freedom without allowing for love, leaving only a life in death. It’s sex as consumption.

Stephenie Meyer’s vampires, though, don’t swallow Bella’s virginity. On the contrary, the point about the vampires seems to be that they can have sex and still remain virgins, inviolate and unchanging. After Bella has sex, both really and through the metaphor of being turned into a vampire, her power to stay safe in her own mind expands, until she can shield others from psychic invasion the way she shields herself. And at the very end of the book she gets the best power of all; the ability to let Edward read her thoughts when she wishes. Eternally loving, equally superhuman vampires joined in a monogamous relationship consummated by a perfect meeting of the minds. That’s a kind of intercourse maybe even Andrea Dworkin would have approved of.

Twilight: the Battle for Legitimate Art

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A lot of critical analyses of Twilight, the award-winning series by Stephenie Meyer, focus on legitimacy.  Is Twilight literature?  Is it good literature?  Is it worthy of critique?  These questions reveal the fundamental fallacy rooted deep within our culture: the idea that art should be questioned at all.  Art is art.  It needs no explanation, no analysis, no excuse.  Art is the expression of our inmost psyche, our deeply-rooted desires, our secret yearnings which would otherwise be impossible to express.  Twilight is all of this and more.

Instead of interrogating this text from this perspective, I would like to pay homage to this great work by exploring the characters and plot with the same simple lucidity and attention to detail Meyer paid them.  I want to get inside this work, to live in it, and experience it again.  I want to feel what people feel when they immerse themselves in art such as this; I want to touch nerves in the same plain yet oh-so-effective way.  I want people to be moved, and I want them to be entertained.  Let us cease to critically analyze; let us not merely destroy.  Let us create.

Let us use our hearts, not our minds.

Let’s do art.

 

TWILIGHT

Art is Beauty

Bite Marx

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Since Melinda Beasi wrote about Twilight here earlier this week, I thought I’d follow up with this essay, which ran in an edited form at the Chicago Reader.
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Twilight fans always make a fuss about Team Edward versus Team Jacob, but they might as well be plumping for Team Effete Aristocrat versus Team Colorful Earthy Ethnic Stereotype.

As with all things Twilight, the tropes work not because of their subtlety, but because of the absolute ham-fisted earnestness with which they are deployed. Eclipse is the book where the Edward/Bella/Jacob triangle attains an apotheosis of melodramatic angst-ridden preposterousness. As such, it’s also arguably the book where the bone-headed stereotyping is most thoroughly exploited. What sets the tween heart racing is not that Bella has two boyfriends, but that she has two romance narratives to choose from — narratives of differing but equally venerable pedigree.

In this corner, there’s Edward Cullen. Edward is extravagantly cultured, and ridiculously wealthy. He composes classical ballads, writes in an immaculate hand, and buys his sister a Porche as an offhand gift. Like a real product of the upper crust, he lives with his brothers and sisters, who are all also paired up as husbands and wives. His family is, moreover, obsessed with blood, and has amorphous connections to Italy. He’s foreign, exciting, steeped in ancient traditions, and deeply, ludicrously white. He’s the noble prince come to whisk Bella out of her life and into a deliciously decadent life of luxury and romance. Meyer name-drops Darcy and Heathcliff and Romeo, but Edward has at least as much in common with Prince Charming.

And in this corner, there’s Jacob Black. Jacob is the opposite of upper-class. An Indian living on reservation land, he transforms simultaneously into a werewolf and a laundry list of invidious racial stereotypes. He’s literally hot-blooded — werewolves have higher than normal temperatures, just as vampires have lower than normal ones. Jacob also has massive self-control issues; whenever he gets angry or upset, he starts to shake violently and then turns into a giant deadly wolf. He’s also hairy, frequently bare-chested, and…good with tools! He also eats a prodigious amount — as opposed to the uber-cultured Edward, who doesn’t eat at all.

If Edward is the aristocrat who treats Bella like a delicate queen, Jake is the swarthy, sweaty working-class hero who won’t take no for an answer. Edward will barely allow himself to kiss Bella; Jake, on the other hand, literally overpowers her when he wants a smooch and she’s reluctant. With Edward, Bella always has to be careful; with Jake she gets to be a little bit wild — riding motorcycles, cliff diving, and generally getting in touch with her inner wolf/teen delinquent. If Edward’s the prince whisking away the scullery maid a la Cinderella, Jake is the virile commoner dragging the frigid aristocrat down into the sensual muck a la Titanic.

Romance as a genre has always been just about as obsessed with class as it has been with gender. Differences in social standing are both great drivers of plot (“I’ll never allow you to marry that piece of trash!”) and sexy in their own right. The boy next door (played in Twilight by Bella’s poor, ordinary, never-had-a-chance classmate Mike Newton) is dull — there’s nothing romantic about winding up with the person everybody expects you to wind up with. But a prince to pull you up to the castle or a gardener to drag you down in the muck — that’s an exotic tale to set the heart racing and the bodices ripping.

Meyer’s genius (if you want to call it that) is to have figured out a way to repurpose the same old clichés for an era in which not even tweens want to admit to fetishizing either those on the top of the social scale or those on the bottom. Edward is enchantingly attractive not because he has gobs of money and cultural capital, but rather because he’s an immortal mysterious vampire whose body goes all sparkly in the sun. Jacob is excitingly exotic not because Indians make better lovers, but because he’s an impulsive superstrong werewolf. And the two don’ t want to kill each other because of class or racial animosities (which would obviously be really distasteful), but because vampires don’t like werewolves. When Jacob calls Edward “bloodsucker,” it’s a literal description, not a Marxist critique. When Edward calls Jacob “dog,” it’s because he grows fur and runs around on all fours not — despite all appearances — because it’s a racial slur.

Ultimately, of course, the dog lies down with the bloodsucker; the alabaster prince and the dusky gardener both love Bella so much that they set aside their differences to defend her. Social harmony descends on a world which never had any class antagonisms to begin with. A triumph of tolerance and goodwill? Well, maybe not. Certainly, to see the same old idiocies revived and venerated under a thin PC patina is irritating. How many generations are girls going to be waiting for their prince, anyway? And when exactly are we going to stop shamelessly exploiting the minorities just so that we can tell ourselves how sexy they look down there on the dung heap where we have so summarily deposited them?

But, on the other paw…there is something to be said for that thin patina. If there are stupid fantasies to be disseminated, maybe it’s better to have them be clearly labeled as fantasies. Edward’s not a prince; he’s a vampire. Jacob’s not out of control because he’s an Indian, but because he’s a werewolf. That’s no doubt splitting hairs (as it were) — but those are hairs that I’d as soon see split as not. If there’s one thing that romance consistently tells us, after all, it’s that differences matter.

Twilight & the Plight of the Female Fan

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When Noah first asked me if I’d like to write a guest post for The Hooded Utilitarian, he mentioned that he’d be especially interested in something about Twilight. I admit I originally balked at the idea. Though I’ve vocally defended the series’ fans, I haven’t read the novels, and my only significant reaction to the first volume of Yen Press’ graphic novel adaptation was that it was more readable than I expected.

That last statement should not be taken as a condemnation of Twilight by any means. The truth is, I’m simply not its audience. I like a good romance as much as the next middle-aged married lady, but even those who dismiss the genre would be foolish to assume that all romances are created equal. Simply put, I’m too old for Twilight. While my teenaged self might not have fully comprehended Stephanie Meyer’s bloodlust = regular ol’ lust metaphor (not that it’s especially subtle), she would have felt it in a profound way. It would have resonated with her on a deeply personal level. I was pretty innocent as a teen, and the concept of even kissing a boy was both enticing and mind-blowingly terrifying, much like Bella’s first kiss with her sparkly, bloodthirsty suitor, deep in the secluded woods.

Now in my forties, I know all too well that sex is the least terrifying element of romance. Love’s true horrors prey on the heart and mind, and there’s nothing you can buy at Walgreens to help protect them. Looking in at Twilight from the reality of weary adulthood, it’s difficult to muster patience for Edward’s martyred bad-boy act (just as it’s difficult to stomach Bella’s fascination with it) but I can recognize it as something that, if it was written for me at all, was written for the me of a very different time and place.

A second read-through of the graphic novel has only cemented my original opinion of it, but even so, I feel a kind of kinship to the series’ young fans. Having spent my entire life obsessed with some kind of fiction or another–books, television, musicals, manga–I can appreciate their need to experience the series over and over again, to talk about it with friends, and to proselytize everyone they meet. Sure, it’s obnoxious, but how many long-time genre fans can honestly claim that’s never been them? I know I can’t.

Earlier this year, just before the first volume of the Twilight graphic novel was released, I made a post in my blog about the manga and anime fandom’s treatment of Twilight fans. In that post, I cited a few overtly misogynistic comments made by male fans, and proposed a theory that the real “problem” with Twilight fans in the eyes of fandom is that they are overwhelmingly girls. That’s a pretty easy accusation to make against nearly any genre fandom. We’ve all heard stories of women who’ve been ogled, condescended to, or otherwise mistreated in comic book shops, at conventions, in online forums and so on, and most of us have experienced this at some point or another ourselves.

What I think I missed back when I wrote that post, however, is something far sadder than a bunch of paranoid fanboys making an angry fuss on the internet. What’s more disturbing to me now–something I began to see bubbling up in comments and responses to that post–is a trend of women in manga and comics fandoms deliberately distancing themselves from other women (or from works created by/for women in the medium, teen romances or otherwise) as an apparent matter of pride. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that women have an obligation to like works created by other women, or even the women themselves. We like what we like, and there’s not a lot more to be said about that.

The thing is, we are saying more. We’re ranting and denying and over-explaining ourselves, all in an attempt to ensure that we can’t be associated with anything “girly.” Take, for instance, this recent post from Molly McIsaac at iFanboy.com, “Turning Japanese: A Starter Guide to (Shoujo) Manga” (and let me apologize to her now for choosing her as my example). In this post, Ms. McIsaac strives to cut through all the girly stuff and point readers to some shoujo manga with “good, solid stories and strong characters.”

We’ll gloss over the fact that she likens shoujo manga to Craig Thompson’s Blankets (which, as a story of one man’s coming to terms with his spirituality, most closely resembles a particular brand of seinen, if anything at all), and that none of her shoujo “staples” goes back any further than 1996. All any of this indicates is that she’s fairly new to the medium and has yet to really experience its breadth (and hell, some of that older shoujo is pretty hard to find in print). None of this has anything to do with my problem.

What I’m getting around to here is the fact that Ms. McIsaac seems to feel that she has to offer up disclaimers for reading shoujo manga at all. I’m also bothered by the strong implication that manga for girls is antithetic to solid stories and strong characters. “However, do not allow shoujo manga to intimidate you,” she says. “Although it is aimed primarily at young women, there are plenty of good, solid stories that are considered shoujo that I believe most people can enjoy.” If even women feel they need to make these kinds of excuses while recommending manga written for (and primarily by) women and girls, how can we expect any of that work or the fans who read it to be respected by the larger fandom?

Again, I’d like to apologize to Molly McIsaac. This attitude about girls’ comics has most likely been passed down to her by scores of female fans who came before, shuttling around borrowed volumes of Boys Over Flowers to each other with quiet embarrassment, wishing they looked just a little less sweet and sparkly.

Honestly, I’ve done this myself. How many times have I complained about the hot pink Shojo Beat branding on the outside of Viz’s editions of NANA, claiming that it trivializes the series and makes it embarrassing to read on the plane? (The answer is, “Many, many times.”) Yet I can think of several pink, sparkly, decidedly “girly” manga (at least one of which is written for little girls) that are more well-constructed, deftly plotted, and philosophically-minded than many of the comics I’ve seen published for, say, boys or adult males. Though these manga are certainly girly, they’re hardly lightweight. Even so, just two years ago, I sat in on a convention panel at a nearby women’s college, where one of the pro panelists (a female sci-fi writer) told the entire room full of young women that all shoujo manga was plotless high school romance and that whenever she saw girls looking in the manga section at her local comic shop, she’d direct them towards “more interesting things like Bone.”

What does any of this have to do with Twilight? Well, nothing and everything, I suppose. If female manga and comics fans have any hope of adjusting men’s attitudes about our presence in “their” fandom, we really need to start by adjusting our own. I’m probably never going to really like Twilight (in graphic novel form or otherwise)… or Black Bird, or Make Love and Peace, or any number of particular girls’ and women’s comics I’ve picked up and discarded for various reasons.

I’m also never going to like Mao Chan, KimiKiss, Toriko, the Color trilogy, or any number of other comics I’ve rejected that were written for boys or men. Yet the existence of these boys’ and men’s series I don’t like has never made me feel like I have to apologize for or explain why I still read things like Fullmetal Alchemist, Children of the Sea, or Black Jack. “Well, it’s written for guys, but it’s still good, I swear!” That’s a sentiment I have yet to see expressed by comics fans on the internet, female or otherwise.

So what is it about “girly” comics that puts us so on the defensive? Are we seeking approval from male fans? Do we believe we have to publicly reject all things stereotypically feminine in order to obtain (or maintain) credibility in fandom? If so, I submit that we’re actually playing right into the attitudes that kept us alienated in the first place. And if we’re doing it to establish credibility amongst ourselves, we’ve lost to them completely.

– Read Melinda’s reviews and discussion of manga, manhwa, and other East Asian-influenced comics at her blog, Manga Bookshelf.

TwiHard the Hunter

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I’ve gotten into a bit of a back and forth about the Twilight series with pop-culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg. It started with Alyssa’s article on the Atlantic website in which she argued that the Twilight is a poor excuse for a fantasy series because Bella is overly passive:

I don’t imagine that I was alone when I was young in wishing there was something magical about me – or in reading Talking to Dragons until it became dog-eared or keeping The Mists of Avalon perpetually on renewal at the library. What girl doesn’t wish she could discover some special attribute about herself that would smooth her way through the demons of junior high school and beyond—particularly if that something would get her noticed for the first time by a boy or girl with special attributes of their own? But earlier this week, when I stumbled over the Twilight finish line, reaching the final page of Breaking Dawn, the series’ last book, it seemed clear to me that even in my younger days, Bella Swann would never have captured my imagination in the same way Cimorene, or Juniper, or Wise Child, or Morgaine had, and still do. Those heroines understand the joy of being loved by someone else. But their stories make the case that being a witch, or a warrior, or a queen—even without a king—might be better than an eternity as a metaphorical princess in a metaphorical tower, no matter how much the vampire company sparkles.

I responded in an article on Splice Today:

The real issue is, as Rosenberg says, that Bella’s actions are all inspired by her love for family and friends, rather than by a desire to save entire kingdoms and uphold “justice and freedom.” Of course, by this standard, Elizabeth Bennett isn’t much of a role model either—why, she never saves anyone! And what about Jane Eyre, refusing to sacrifice herself by going off to do mission work among the poor and heathen and benighted. What kind of model for young girls is that?

Rosenberg might as well just come out and say, “You know what? I don’t really like romance—and, on top of that, I’m kind of a liberal do-gooder who thinks that abstract notions like justice and power are more important than love and family.” Rosenberg accuses Meyer of turning Bella into a “metaphorical princess in a metaphorical tower.” But she’s not a princess in a tower; she’s a wife in a family, and one who at the end is not only equal to her husband in strength and magical powers, but actually superior to him. That hardly seems rabidly anti-feminist to me-but I like Pride and Prejudice too, so what do I know.

Rosenberg came back on her own blog to tell me that I’m still wrong, most pointedly because she does in fact like romance novels. Assuming makes an ass out of me as they say…though, as I’ll argue here, for somebody who likes romance novels, Alyssa is awfully uncomfortable with some of the central points of the genre.

So first, on a couple of interpretive points. Alyssa takes me to task for overestimating Bella’s achievements and power. In my Splice Today essay, I argue that Bella has to practice to master her magical vampiric abilities in the last volume, and that she ends up being stronger than Edward. Alyssa responds:

I think Noah’s actually mistaken: when Bella finally uses her powers, she exerts them much farther than she’s ever been able to in her practice sessions, which kind of defeats the point if you’re trying to make an argument about “determination and commitment.” (Also, to the point Noah makes in a paragraph I pull out below about Bella being more powerful than Edward, Meyer seems to establish pretty clearly that that’s just because she’s a new vampire, not that it’ll be permanent.)

Bella does become much more powerful at the end of the book all of a sudden; the rationale is that her loved ones are threatened, and that gives her the inspiration to exert an extra oomph. But it’s not clear to me that therefore all the training and work was worthless. Surely the point could just as easily be, you put all the effort in, you exert yourself to the limit, and maybe that will be enough to get that miracle you need. It’s a little overly pat, sure; but I think it’s a stretch to argue that it’s not about Bella working to achieve success.

As for the strength thing — Bella’s natural vampiric strength will fade after she’s a newborn, sure. But her power seems to only be getting stronger — and it’s her power (the ability to negate other vampires’ powers) which really makes her more special, and more powerful, than Edward. (It’s also worth noting that Bella is unusuall self-controlled for a new vampire, which is a big part of the reason she’s even able to use her physical strength in a way that’s at all useful to her or anyone else.)

To move onto more substantial disagreements: Alyssa responded to my comparison of Bella with Elizabeth Bennett and Jane Eyre by saying this:

I think Noah forgets that I’m writting a critique of Twilight within the realm of fairy tale, and about why it’s a step backwards within the innovations of that genre. But I absolutely agree that I would be completely and utterly freaked out if teenage girls wanted to emulate Jane Eyre. Less so if they wanted to be little Lizzy Bennets, since she’s an intellectual and stands up to class prejudice (to the extent capable within her constraints of course). But I do think those books are regularly read with the acknowledgment that a) they’re about an era when women’s choices were substantially limited, b) frequently read in a context like a classroom where those roles can be discussed, and c) presented social criticisms in the times they were written. Twilight is neither set in another era (although it’s curiously removed from the technology of today) nor is it mostly read in a critical context like a classroom. And while I recognize that many, many Twilight readers can distinguish fact from fiction, I do think that some of the book’s themes demand a critical context, particularly the obsessiveness of the love affairs. Perhaps it’s just me, but I think it’s important, especially with young girls, to have a conversation about the fact that sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, if he leaves you, he is never coming back. I don’t think this is a trifling point: Bella never experiences permanent romantic loss, something a lot of contemporary fairy tales have managed to incorporate into the genre, and that’s a genuinely valuable lesson in a society where most people date before they marry.

So there’s a bunch there…but let’s start at the top.

First, I wasn’t saying that Jane Eyre was a bad model. On the contrary, I was saying that, at least in the incident I referenced, she’s a fine model. At the end of the book, the aptly named St. John tells Jane that she should marry him and come with him to be a missionary in some far away, benighted land. Despite great pressure, from St. John and her own conscience, Jane eventually refuses to go, putting her love and family above the call to change the world for the better. That’s a choice Bella would agree with. Would Alyssa?

Alyssa is more willing to accept Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice as a role model…but even here, she’s leery. Elizabeth, after all, isn’t really sufficiently independent; she doesn’t save the world, she marries to devote herself to the estate and her husband — not quite independent enough, for all her spunkiness. So, to make Pride and Prejudice safe, we need to read it in a classroom context, where girls can be taught what to think and what not to think about their chosen romance.

As someone who spent 14 years developing curriculum for high school students, I can say with some certainty that this is utter nonsense. The only thing students get from studying a book in school is bored. If Pride and Prejudice ever had any relevance, the fastest way to denude it of same is to relegate it to the classroom. And Alyssa’s comments on Twilight in this connection are almost Kantian; the problem with the books is that they’re not read in a classroom context, and as a result, girls actually enjoy them! The fall of society and/or feminism is certainly at hand.

I also find this point kind of bizarre:

“Bella never experiences permanent romantic loss”

It’s true; Bella gets everything she wants. At the end. Along the way, though, she experiences intense, brutal despair, not once, but multiple times. Edward rejects here and she really thinks he doesn’t love her, causing her to be almost nonfunctional for months.Then Jacob rejects her, making her miserable for an extended period. And it’s those experiences, as much as (or more than) the eventual triumph, that are really the heart of the series. To suggest that Bella needs to be *more* depressed really seems kind of ridiculous. I do get the point that most girls are going to not get the first guy they love, and that it’s useful to point that out . But at the same time, Twilight is not shy about acknowledging, and even reveling in, romantic disappointment.

The real heart of our disagreement is here, though:

As for the assertion that “I’m kind of a liberal do-gooder who thinks that abstract notions like justice and power are more important than love and family.” First, it’s a mistake again to conflate the abstract concepts of justice and equality as they exist in fairy tales with contemporary politics. And one of the things I find fascinating about contemporary fairy tales of all stripes is the ways they’ve managed to make the condition of societies and of individual marriages co-equal. In a lot of contemporary fairy tales, the main characters have to establish peace or societal equilibrium in order to craft a space where a marriage can thrive….I actually think it exalts love to tie it to larger societal concerns, rather than to isolate it entirely from society, and it makes for wider-ranging and more interesting stories, too.

Abstract justice in fairy tales doesn’t map exactly onto contemporary politics, of course…but it isn’t divorced from them either. And, indeed, in the rest of her argument here Alyssa goes on to make parallels between how life and politics work in a fairy tale and how they work in the real world. She likes certain fairy tales, she says, because they present an image in which men and women fall in love and work together to save the world (or work together to save the world and fall in love.) The dream Alyssa wants is one in which social and political engagement maps onto romance, and the two enrich each other. That’s why she doesn’t like the message in Jane Eyre, where political and social engagement is shown as existing in contrast to love; it’s why she’s uncomfortable with the message in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet never really thinks all that much about social or political engagement (Alyssa says at the end of her essay that Elizabeth engages in rebellion…but really, calling a little satirical wit rebellion seems fairly desperate wishful thinking.) And her enthusiasm for great social change and rebellion is also why Alyssa absolutely hates Forks, the little town where Bella spends her life.

There is no larger world beyond family and Forks in the Twilight books, and if I were immortal, I think I might get kind of bored with that after a while. But then, I was never the kind of girl who could stare at a guy’s face for that long.

Okay, sure, I get that the treacly romance eternal love thing is irritating. But what is wrong with Forks? And why, as Alyssa repeatedly insists, is it lame, or passive, to save your loved ones and your entire family? Why exactly is Bella a failure? Because she doesn’t want to rule a kingdom? Because she doesn’t want to save the world? Because she’s chosen to care for those she loves and not impose her passing messianic dreams on the rest of the populace? Because her story — which is much more romance than fairy tale — ends in private happiness rather than public triumph?

Alyssa reminds me that she works as a political reporter, and is therefore not a liberal do-gooder at all, but instead is non-partisan. All right. Then she should be fine with the following argument, hopefully. Most people — girls, boys, what have you — they’re not going to save the world. Most of them don’t even want to save the world, you know? Is that because they’re victims of false consciousness and read too many Twilight books? Or is it because wanting to save the world is a kind of megalomaniacal sickness that most people just aren’t especially afflicted with? Or is it because there are different strokes for different folks? In any case, the fact remains; Bella, like most people, cares about the people she cares about. On their behalf, she’s able to do great things — risk her life, battle against evil, even perform miracles. But she doesn’t get off — and most of her readers don’t get off — on writing the wrongs of the world. Does that make her, and them, less virtuous or wrong? Are all those people in the Forkses of the world just not ambitious enough? I’m a liberal do-gooder myself, but still, that seems like a pretty presumptuous conclusion to me.

Update: It sounds like Alyssa is probably not going to respond further, so I should probably add that she’s been incredibly gracious and pleasant throughout the whole back and forth. So thanks, Alyssa. It’s been fun.

Ain’t Dead Yet

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Steven Grant (who guest blogged here last week) declares the super-hero dead dead dead:

it’s patently clear to anyone studying market history that the fans are disinterested too. They don’t buy new superheroes. They don’t want them. Maybe it’s economics, maybe they’ve been burned too many times to come back for what might be more, maybe they’re waiting for Something Truly Different and don’t feel like spending more on what are basically variations on themes they already buy, but reasons don’t much matter. They do not buy them, and haven’t for a long, long time.

So even logical ways of introducing new superheroes are right out the window. Theoretically (and ignoring all issues of creator rights for the moment) the best way to intro a character would be in an existing top character’s book. Let the readers get to know the new superhero that way, then spin him into his own book. That should work. It doesn’t, even with characters readers respond well to, like The Silver Surfer….

The superhero genre may not be the Titanic, no icebergs in sight, but everyone’s still just rearranging deck chairs now. That’s how the companies want it, because they’re no longer marketing creations. They’re peddling brands. Branding is everything now, and it’s almost always more profitable to cash in on a long-established brand than to create, develop and market a new one. The superhero as brand name might be with us until the end of time, now, but the superhero as expression of genuine creativity is pretty much dead.

Steven’s argument is fun both because it’s so devastatingly true…and because it’s completely wrong. Yes, yes, Marvel and D.C. and the handful of smaller comics companies peddling traditional super-heroes are so creatively bankrupt that you wonder how it’s possible that the “creatively” doesn’t just disappear from that formulation. Neither of them has had any success introducing new characters in forever, and it’s equally clear that the don’t have any idea what to do with the ones they’ve got other than continue an unending soap-opera playing to fewer and fewer true-believers. That’s absolutely right.

But the reason it’s right isn’t because nobody likes super-heroes. People love super-heroes. Here, for example, is a partial list of some of the most successful super-heroes introduced in the past twenty odd years.

Ben 10

Sailor Moon

Captain Underpants

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Edward (from Twilight)

Neo (from the Matrix)

all those folks on Heroes

You get the idea. The concept of a character with some combination of unusual powers and abilities and/or a secret identity and/or a costume, maybe, is hardly dead. On the contrary, it’s been essential to some of the most successful media properties of the last couple of decades

So the question then becomes, not why are super-heroes unpopular, but why are the super-heroes parlayed by Marvel and DC so darn unpopular? Why can everybody and their idiot cousin create successful super-heroes except for the companies that spend all their time, 24-7, writing about super-heroes?

Well, when you look at the successful super-heroes above, you notice a couple of things:

1. Almost all of them are genre blends. That is, they’re super-heroes and something else — fantasy in Sailor Moon, sci-fi in Ben 10, satire in Captain Underpants, goth horror in Buffy and Twilight. That doesn’t make them less about super-heroes — pulp genres cross-hybridize all the time (detective and romance, for example, mix so often it’s become positively indecent.) But what it does do is make them more creative. Steven says:

Don’t forget, the original context of the superhero was a poverty-stricken America heading into World War II. Superheroes were basically a big pep talk, later a big jingoistic pep talk as the country went to war. The earliest superheroes, cats like Superman and Batman, were hardly law-abiding citizens, but the ’30s weren’t a great time for staunch belief in the law. The notion that anyone could stand against presumed widespread corruption, could stand for a higher, nobler morality, that was heady stuff, especially at a time when whole nations seemed to be going nuts. Didn’t last long; before long, and once war was declared, superheroes were mostly chatting up the policeman as Our Friend and how all good Americans should follow the rules, take their vitamins, say their prayers, collect tin and aluminum and buy war bonds and that was a message the time was ready for, but it was no coincidence that the end of the war was almost an end of the superhero. It was the end of any semblance of relevance for the superhero.

And yes, sure, there’s something to that: superheroes started in a certain time and place, and they had to change to continue to be relevant. But…that’s how genres work. Tolkien started modern epic fantasy as a response to WW II. When WWII was over, fantasy was less relevant…so folks like Ursula K. Le Guin came along and did something else with it that made it speak to changing gender roles and race and other stuff that made sense to the people of the time. That’s how genres work; they’re not carved in stone. You pick them up and do something new with them that’s grounded in tradition but makes sense for a different time and place.

And that’s what folks do with super-heroes too. Buffy shows how to use super-hero stories to talk about contemporary high-school and girls coming of age. Captain Underpants shows how to use super-hero stories to talk (or at least snicker) about contemporary elementary schools. The Matrix uses super-heroes to talk (dumbly but popularly) about modern paranoia around technology, among other issues.

The only ones who can’t figure out how to gracefully use super-heroes to talk about anything that matters is the big two. And maybe, you know, that does in fact have something to do with the fact that they’re using the same damn heroes from 40 to 70 years ago. Though, on the other hand, Smallville manages to update Superman effectively, and the Batman cartoons are fine…. I don’t know. Maybe, on second thought, DC and Marvel are just catastrophically stupid.

2. The other thing about all of the most popular super-heroes is that they come complete with their own worlds. That is, the super-heroes aren’t just random folks who happened to gain super-powers and then go off to fight random evil stuff. Rather, the super-hero’s powers, their missions, and their enemies are all part of a single story and a single world. One of the most satisfying parts of Twilight is the geekily thorough way in which Stephanie Meyer apportions powers and weaknesses to her vampires and werewolves and such, and then has those powers drive the plot in particular ways (there are always incredibly intricate plans to stop the mind-reading Edward from picking up thoughts he shouldn’t hear, for example.) I don’t know much about Ben 10, but I do know that his powers and the DNAliens he fights are all tied together in a single backstory.

All of which suggests that people do like reading super-hero stories…but they most of all like reading stories. Folks are willing to suspend their disbelief if you give them a reason to — but DC and Marvel don’t even bother. Their titles just assume, pretty much, that all these various randomly powered, disconnected super-folk are running around, fighting similarly disconnected super-villains. In some ways, the lust for crossover that we’ve seen in recent years is an effort to get around this — to provide the narrative and the rationale that most people reading a story naturally want. But it’s too much of a mess, and mired in too much backstory, to actually be all that interesting to anyone beyond the small core of true believers.

________________________

On the one hand, you might argue I guess that Steven’s tendency not to see the super-heroes all around him is of a piece with the status quo among the big two; that is, if they could only start to think about super-hero stories in different ways, maybe they wouldn’t be so perpetually shitty. Perhaps they could finally start telling stories somebody cared about, and maybe even come up with some new heroes that were different from the old heroes in ways which would allow them to appeal to a broader audience.

But really, I think that’s too harsh on Steven and not sufficiently harsh on DC and Marvel. The truth is, DC and Marvel seem pretty thoroughly irredeemable. Steven was right; they’re creatively D.O.A. They’re going nowhere and changing nothing, and the chances of either of them ever coming up with an exciting, marketable new concepts is roughly the same as the chances of a monkey crawling out of my butt and handing me a power ring. So, yeah, I think it’s important to recognize that super-heroes are still popular, but not because doing so will help DC and Marvel. On the contrary, I think it’s important because, until you realize that super-heroes are doing just fine, you can’t really understand how truly lame Marvel and DC are.