On Superheroes Part 1

*all knowledge of mentioned super heroes comes from the movies. I do not have the collector's edition comic books and all that stuff . On an unrelated note, I have gone several dates.

Maybe I am just becoming aware of it now, but the super hero content of the media is getting a little ridiculous. This weekend I saw Hitchcock, Will Smith's new movie. It was decent, entertaining and was surprisingly edgy for a Will Smith movie [Like his Clean Rap] considering he dropped an F-bomb and consumed alcohol and only made this face once:


But Hancock [I keep slipping and calling it Hitchcock for obvious reasons] was really only a speck in the big picture of America's obsession with super heroes. Since most of us live mundane lives with little to make us unique, super heroes allow us to escape from this by living the dream of someone who escaped from it by fluke chance or destiny or by being from a different planet or evolution. This is also why we are obsessed with the lottery, American Idol, and any other way that people can be very ordinary but become extraordinary by some immediate and easy event.

It started with Superman, who is from another planet and helps people here. That is cool.

And there is Batman who is both rich and a crime fighter. He of course inherited his money from his truly extraordinary father and after "backpacking around Asia" to self actualize and find himself by joining a messed up cult in the Himalayas. All this to come back and use his money to get nifty gadgets invented by Morgan Freeman that happen to be used to stop bad guys and woo Katie Holmes/ Maggie gyllenhall.

The show Heroes is perhaps the greatest example of this phenomenon. There is one ounce of creativity in that show: explaining super powers by way of evolution. Woot. The rest of the show is just a soap opera mixed with X-men. Alarmingly normal people have these powers because of the chaos and random draw of evolution and that is it. Some people are for the powers, some people are against them, some people try to control the people with powers, someone's Dad dies, etc. I was blown away that the show was on prime time television in America. But that is just my point: super heroes are prime time and mainstream. No longer are they children's fantasies and marginal, nerdy hobbies, but America's culture has gotten to the point where we all want to escape to where we can fly and have a purpose and can rely on super powers to get the girl.

->"I shock people to make them like me."






Let me expound on that by outlining the qualities of super heroes. Super heroes have everything people want: They are unique with their powers. They have a clear purpose: to fight crime by punching it in the face and saving people by keeping trains on the tracks. They are well endowed, so to speak, and can easily get the girl they want because of their strength and ability to use their powers for creative date ideas. They are in control of their situation and can fly away or do what ever they want. No super hero is confined to his desk job.



-> "yataaa! I can teleport out of my cubicle. Finally I have purpose."




My point is not that Americans suck or that watching these things is evil. You may notice that I have watched all of these things so I would have no room to talk and hell, it is just really entertaining. My point is that we seem to be finding more and more of our required dose of super hero qualities only in the movies and T.V. shows rather than getting up off of our couches and living them ourselves. Think enough to have a purpose, be intentional enough to pick a job that serves that purpose. Be unique by being you-do what you like to do, have hobbies, do what you always wanted to try, dare I say take a risk. Go and get the girl. Sure you can't fly around to impress her, but being rejected is never as bad as living alone with the question of what would have happened if you had talked her. Being super is not as not a fatalistic thing. We don't need to wait for the lottery or a bug bite, we just need to get off the couch.