Superheroes continued to soar at box offices this summer with Iron Man 3 and Superman the Umpteenth leading the way. Detractors scorn them as mindless, and while some of the pyrotechnics amount to a brain-dead pleasure, superhero movies exert a pull on the imagination that has less to do with CGI than with archetypal representations of good and evil, responsibility and excess—and sometimes the difficulty in drawing those distinctions.
That ambiguity has grown in the superhero universe at the expense of the simplistic clarity of old-fashioned comic books is a theme running several entries in the essay collection Our Superheroes, Ourselves (Oxford University Press). Edited by psychologist Robin S. Rosenberg, Our Superheroes, Ourselves draws from her psychology colleagues for many of the articles. Hence, titles such as “Are Superheroes Just SuperGifted?” and a raft of case studies attempting to show the positives of intense identification with Spider-Man and Wolverine. The worst passages display the queasy stir-fry of gee-whiz and jargon common to academic cultural studies, yet there is thoughtful material scattered throughout.
As Lawrence C. Rubin emphasizes in “Are Superhero Stories Good for Us,” these tales are modern manifestations of recurring mythological patterns and, as such, “dramatize personal and cultural narratives, recapitulate history, are prescriptions for action, and reduce incalculable centuries of human experience to understandable metaphor.”
In the provocatively titled “Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography,” David A. Pizzaro and Roy Baumeister explore a shocking idea; “Bad is stronger than good.” According to current psychological theory, bad experiences and emotions usually have greater impact than good ones. And thus, the dangerous allure of supervillains and their necessary counterparts, the superheroes. “Comic books provide a satisfying escape—by giving us a universe in which good is stronger than bad.” And unlike the chorus of tenured fans populating much of the book, they identify a downside: “the instant moral satisfaction these stories provide is not likely to be any real help in real-world moral evaluation.”
It’s a conclusion at odds with the drift toward greater moral complexity in the Dark Knight trilogy and other recent tales from the comic book universe.
