But who's my favourite superhero? Who do you think I rate most highly from the Marvel/DC world? And who's your favourite superhero? The Human Torch? Mr Fantastic? Sparky The Battery Boy? Mr Boombastic? Ok, I made two of those up...
I'll tell you mine in a minute.
But first, I recently walked out of a superhero film at the cinema. It was Captain America: Civil War, it was an hour in, and there'd been some extended conflict between Captain A, the Black Panther, the Winter Soldier and some other dudes I wasn't caring very much about.
Part of the reason for leaving was that the film didn't bother with the courtesy of "Previously on Avengers" or somesuch. Casual viewers like me were just baffled. Don't tell me that a film weighing in at about two-and-a-half hours can't muster two minutes to bring us up to speed on things. Friends managed it. Doctor Who manages it. Even Coupling managed it. But Captain America? No such luck.
Except I did.
So I was baffled by events. But more than that, let's look at its superheroes.
Captain America. He's a buffed-up fellow, to say the least.
Iron Man. He's a millionaire geezer who's basically joined the powerful by being rich, who has more money than sense and if he gets a bit trashed he just digs not very deeply in his pockets and rebuilds his super suit. Heavens, sometimes he sends his suits in as automatic drones, I think. He doesn't even bother showing up!
Iron Man. No sympathy.
The Black Panther. He's pretty quickly unmasked as… the crown prince of an African nation.
And these are the people I'm meant to sympathise with or cheer on? Rich, royal and ripped. Frankly, that appeals about as much as this football sport where people fork out big money to watch 22 overpaid millionaires run around a field.
It doesn't end with the Black Panther.
There's Batman. A rich man with a big shed and a butler.
All the bravery money can buy.
There's Superman. Pretty well invincible, only ever interesting in the presence of kryptonite.
Superman. Get a neck!
Problems of the royal, ripped and rich. Spare me. I don't watch the Kardashians either.
And the big reason, then, is that they simply don't connect.
Whereas my favourite superhero is…
…
(drum roll)
…
It's Spiderman.
Web-slinging, wise-cracking Spiderman, yesterday.
Sure he has some powers (bitten by a radioactive spider, so it's fortunate they weren't experimenting with radioactive worms or cockroaches that day), but otherwise he has no huge inheritance. He earns his cash as a photographer with a grouchy boss. He has women trouble. He has an elderly relative to look after. He's human. He's us.
In my youth I recall reading the story of the origins of Spiderman as an idea for a character, and how Stan Lee was almost persuaded not to publish him after someone asked, "Who wants to read about a superhero with problems?"
But the answer is, we do.
Proper problems of laundry and love, rather than the massive existential problems that Superman and Batman have. Wangst, I believe they're called, making much out of some massive ideology that the rest of us have no time for because we have to earn our living and put the recycling bins out without the help of Alfred.
Spiderman is actually in Captain America: Civil war, albeit briefly and some time after I left the auditorium. Ah well. maybe he swung in to tell them to lighten up and to stop whining about their first world problems, and that anyone else would kill to be ripped, royal or rich. Oi! Avengers! Shut it!
Go Spiderman, especially in his underrated incarnation played by Andrew Garfield. "Don't come in!" he shouts at his Aunt May as he tries to hide his costume in his room in the two-bed condo he shares with her, "I'm all kinds of naked!" Now there's a problem. And when he gets home, it's more often his costume is ripped than he is, and he gets to sew it up by lamplight, much like Father Mackenzie, darning his socks.
A real person recovering from fighting for others. BUPA health plan not included.
Where was I? Of course, Spiderman has that in common with Jesus: neither is rich or ripped, and Jesus puts aside the royal side of things in order to be born in hay, raised with splinters, live with idiots and die in agony. No Alfred, no Batplane, none of that blarney about Jor-El. He could call on battalions of angels… but he doesn't because that would be cheating. That wouldn't be incarnation. That wouldn't be identifying with us. Jesus chooses to live like common people, chooses to do whatever common people do. And while it's true that if he called his dad he could end it all, Jesus doesn't. He's no tourist. He's here and he means it, and he lives like us and suffers like us, so that finally we have a hero we can identify with.
Batman wanders round muttering gnomically and darkly to himself. Largely incomprehensibly, too. Superman speeds in, speeds out.
Batman vs. Superman. Be honest, who gives a monkey's who wins?
Spiderman, however, he stops to banter. And tellingly, he's your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman, two adjectives that would have Batman turning in his grave and Superman raising an eyebrow. How vulgar, belonging to people. How vulgar, belonging with people.
But it's what Spiderman does, and it's what Jesus does. And I'll take that common vulgarity of mucking in and staying like us anyday. Jesus loves us, never lords it over us. Long live heroes who share our problems and are heroic nonetheless. It shows it can be done, and I may even stay til the end of the film…
Jesus: strawberry and halo never in evidence during earthly time. Or at all, probably. Human face, always.
No comments:
Post a Comment