On the character
whose ambiguous heroism illustrates a fundamental American duality.
Each of the
comic book heroes I’ve written about this week is complex in one way or
another, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that they’re all, at the end of
the day, heroes (outside of those individual storylines where Superman
goes bad or the like, which only reinforce the character’s general goodness
in contrast). But the same cannot necessarily be said of Marvel’s The Punisher (Frank
Castle); since his 1974 debut in The Amazing Spider-Man, as a man out
to kill Spider-Man both because he believes him to be a criminal and because he
seemingly enjoys killing, The Punisher has blurred the lines between hero and
villain as much as any comic book character. On the one hand, Castle first
became The Punisher after his wife and children were massacred and the killers
escaped justice (until
he delivered it to them); on the other hand, he has continued to kill ever
since, a vigilante often skirting and breaking the law while at the same time
claiming to honor and uphold it.
There are
salient late 20th century contexts for that kind of ambiguity,
perhaps especially in the rise of vigilante characters such as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry
and Charles Bronson’s Paul
Kersey, men who take the law into their own hands in understandable yet
brutal and extreme ways. Pushing that particular envelope even further are
characters such as Robert
De Niro’s Travis Bickle (spoiler alert for that clip) or Michael Douglas’s Bill Foster,
men whose motivations are even more murky and disturbed, although the objects
of their violence seem often to deserve their fates just as much as did Clint’s
and Bronson’s. It’s no doubt in part because of that sense of rightness in
their actions, despite the obvious wrongness in much of their characters, that
all four men became pop culture heroes in various ways; but such vigilante heroism
is also an enduring American ideal. Even many of the Revolution’s heroes, from
the Boston Tea Partiers to Paul Revere to Nathan
Hale, operated outside of and in opposition to the law; and they’re far
from alone in our popular iconography.
Perhaps the most
famous pop cultural embrace of vigilante-ism, however, is also a far more
explicitly controversial one, and a reminder of the other side to these American
histories. In the final sequence in D.W. Griffith’s technically pioneering and
thematically disgusting The Birth of a Nation
(1915), the Ku Klux Klan rides triumphantly to the rescue of the film’s
protagonists, defying any and all official institutions (who are all in the
film’s mythos in league with the villains) in the process; the scene’s
celebration of the KKK’s lawlessness would be echoed two decades later by
a distinctly similar scene in Gone with
the Wind (both the novel and the film). These cultural
texts remind us that the vigilante activities of the KKK, like those of lynch
mobs, were for many decades in our national narratives treated just like
those of The Punisher et al—as a disturbing and perhaps tragic but also
understandable and even necessary response to societal ills. Makes Frank Castle
that much more ambiguous, doesn’t it?
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So what do
you think? Responses to any of the week’s heroes? Other comic characters you’d
highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment