Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 24–On superheroes and archetypes
I wrote this one after watching a bunch of the special features on Spider-man 2. Now, I like Spider-man, and I liked Spider-man 2, but I can only handle so much torture of the word “archetype.” I don’t know if I’m alone on this, but I’m extremely fucking tired of people trying to explain everything in fiction based on “archetypes.” You know, I’ve read Hero With A Thousand Faces, too, and I didn’t see anything in there about high school science geeks or hairy dudes with claws or all-powerful flying guys in tights. I also didn’t see any real advice on how to write a story. What I saw was not a prescriptive guide to how things should be written, but rather a descriptive guide to certain similarities in existing myths. While I will admit that some great works have been made that slavishly follow “archetypal”, many more shitty works have been made that follow it just as slavishly. If the theory is true then any story you cook up should have elements of the monomyth, so whether a work has lasting impact or not must be determined by some other factor. And when, as in the case of superhero comics, the stories seem to very definitively not appeal to everyone, the argument that they appeal to something primal in all humans is just ludicrous. I work in a comic book store, so I know that the characterization of superhero comics fans in this comic is an exaggeration. But it’s not a big exaggeration. We sell comics to all kinds of people. But we sell the vast majority of superhero comics to a very narrowly defined group of people.
I think this is part of my general distaste for any theory of art or literature that leaves out pure aesthetics as a consideration. The monomanaical focus on archetypes seems like just another way of making art seem valuable in some phony way. Archibald MacLeish wrote “A poem should not mean but be,” and it’s just a true for other kinds of literature as well. Superhero stories, when they are good, don’t appeal to us because they appeal to some primoridal unconscious. They appeal to us because they’re good, whether that means an entertaining story, a well crafted page of comics, a beautiful frame of film, etc.
Anyway, here’s a comic about it.
Save on del.icio.us
Save on Stumbleupon
