COMMENTARY
KONG RITHDEE
The world needs superheroes, and every year during the blockbuster season we get a coterie of caped, armoured or Spandexed men who save the world and the economy by disparate measures. So far we've had Ironman, a cocky playboy with a titanium crotch who rescues Afghan children from deranged mujahideens somewhere near Waziristan. We've had Hulk, the juvenile monster, green with rage, nostrils flared, just like the prime minister on Sunday morning. We've had the alcoholic Hancock, the post-modern anti-superhero, played by a big Obama groupie Will Smith. On HBO we've seen Spiderman battling love and other demons in the city that's supposed to be post-9/11 New York.
And this week it's Batman's turn. The Dark Knight, the movie is called, and the Gotham vigilante, with his kinky costume and tank-like Batmobile, is perhaps the most Republican of all superheroes. Obscenely rich, doted on by a loyal servant, traumatic yet narcissistic, he kills to cure his depression. Batman is aloof, self-absorbed and deep - so at times I'm tempted to side with Joker, a psychopath and anarchist with the gift of the gab, like the PAD leaders. He seems more fun to hang out with.
Superheroism is a Western concept dating back to Aristotle, Alexander, Caesar, Bonaparte. As fantasised by DC Comics and Hollywood, it is associated with the belief in a special man (for there are hardly any superheroines, even if John McCain picks Condoleezza Rice to run with him) equipped with a moral conviction, strong motivations and, most importantly, the superhuman power to change the course of things, from building empires to authorising free bus rides and free electricity under 80 units.
In other words, a superhero is a man who is the law unto himself. A man who quells chaos by chaos. Apparently this is an intriguing and dangerous concept. In every superhero story we perceive not only the grandiose ambition of a human being to stretch his physical and mental limits - the strive to become better - but also the deep-seated insecurity of his own imperfection. Every superhero, I might venture to say, is to a varying degree a fascist, even a dictator.
In this sense, the first superhero movie is Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a Nazi propaganda film from 1935 featuring Adolf Hitler as the centrepiece of the Nuremberg rally. In it Hitler is revered by the robotic mass like a superman who has arrived to alter the fate of Germany, or the entire world. Watching it in the contemporary context, the film still has a disquieting power, like a defused bomb or a sleeping crocodile, but unintentionally it is also a film of gallows humour, a black comedy about the paranoid little man.
It is possible that since the US never had a major war caused by outside invaders upon its land, the country is preoccupied with creating fictional heroes, and entertains itself with the conceit of sending them out to save the world (on and off the screen). The fear of Apocalypse, thus the superheroes as a precautionary means to avert or correct it, is born both from the Biblical prophecy and from the paranoia of a civilisation nearing its climax. The Bat-bloke and Spider-lad quell chaos through chaos, and war is fought to prevent war. What a neurotic mess.
But then another major culture for superheroes is Japan, which rose from the ashes of World War Two with a catalogue of superheroic insects, mostly ants, in the form of mask-wearing Kamen Riders, idolised by children across Southeast Asia. Mostly apolitical, the Japanese super-ants also chant the mantra of saving the world, but in their cases it's cathartic rather than neurotic: they're generally less depressed than their American counterparts.
Even though Thailand has had a shot at supermodels, superprojects, supermarkets, superstupidity, we have hardly attempted to construct our own superheroes. Having fought no tragic war or been colonised, we need no saviour. We chill. And anyway, our experiment with superpolitician Thaksin, the man who believed he could forever change the destiny of this land, ended with a debacle whose dust still refuses to settle. Thaksin is not a superhero because his life is perfect. He enjoys his existence, and that's the biggest bore. To become a real knight who saves the day, the guy still has a lot to learn, best from Batman.
Kong Rithdee writes about movies and popular culture in the Bangkok Post real.time section.
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