Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound … I smell a superhero!
With the new vigilante movie “Watchmen” being released in just four days, I started thinking about superheroes. I read an article about the new movie in Entertainment Weekly a few days ago that had snippets from an interview with director Zach Snyder. He recalled, “Someone asked me if I thought that because Barack Obama had been elected president, the movie was no longer relevant.” His response (I just love this): “Wow, that’s a very optimistic view of the future!” In truth, no one person can ever achieve world peace and prosperity. It’s never going to happen simply because one person takes office.
This story got me wondering, though, “What if superheroes were real. Do we need them? Must our society have people with superpowers or fantastic gadgets to save us?”
I don’t know if their existence would make a difference. In the graphic novel from which the movie comes, the Watchmen, as the superheroes are called, are outlawed in 1977 after years of fighting crime. The world does not seem very different for it. There were dark times even when superheroes reigned and continued to be after they were no longer. There will always be villains and criminals rising up to take the place of defeated ones. Sometimes villains come from very unexpected places, like we will see in “Watchmen.”
What if we had someone to save crashing planes and people trapped in burning buildings? Would it change the way we live? Would we be more reckless and take bigger risks? Or would we be progressing toward a utopian society?
Since we have no caped crusaders, it is hard to answer these questions accurately. However, I don’t think a few masked men or women would truly be able to help us progress. Rather, I think people would be more precarious and thoughtless of others. If superheroes were around to save the day, people wouldn’t be concerned about the way the planet’s resources are being used up, how people in other countries are starving or how diseases and wars are spreading.
I think this novel, and its accompanying movie, is a call to action. In the same Entertainment article, Snyder says the story is “an allegory for what [is] happening right now.” Perhaps what Snyder is suggesting is that now is the time for us to rise up and work together. There is so much violence and hate in the world right now, so much pain and suffering.
Despite some people’s veneration of Obama, no one person can fix all of those problems. If our society chooses to make these things important, however, I believe we can do a lot of good. It’s because we don’t have super people that we are more aware of our surroundings. We see that there is no one stronger, faster or better than us to fix things. If we want problems solved we are going to have to be the ones to do it, not Batman, not Superman and certainly not Rorschach.
It also means we don’t have super villains, which in most stories are as equally present as the heroes. The avoidance of that kind of malevolent power sounds good to me! We have enough ordinary criminals to deal with as it is.
If we work together to root out evil, men in spandex will never be required.
Hannah Kaase is a sophomore majoring in animal and dairy science. She can be contacted at [email protected].