The Superhero Reader

The Epic Hero and Pop Culture

84 The Epic Hero and Pop Culture roger b. rollIn Sections I–III and V of Rollin’s essay are reprinted by permission of the National Council of Teachers of English from College English, Vol. 31, no. 5 (February 1970), 431–449. The student’s unmediated responses are to his comic books and television programs, while his response to Macbeth has every conceivable kind of inhibition attached to it. NorthroP Frye many a teaCher of english vieWs With trepidation the prospeCt of introducing members of the present student generation to the study of Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, or Paradise Lost. The poems themselves have always posed enough scholarly and critical problems to make teaching them a problem, but nowadays the students themselves seem to make that pedagogy still more difficult. Many of them, more than is sometimes realized, are deeply concerned about the race problem in america or are involved in it, have fought in Vietnam or fought going there, have demonstrated against the brutality of police or of college administrators, have been actively engaged in politics or social work, have complained about their education’s lack of relevance, or have tried to do something about it. For such students the great old poems of the anglo-saxon scop, of Spenser, and of Milton may well seem not merely remote , but irrelevant. Even the best among them, those who despite their other real concerns can still be responsive to esthetic or scholarly appeals, may feel that reading the great English epics is reading only for art’s or history’s sake. Encountering Spenser’s proud claim in his letter to Raleigh that “The generall end thereof of [The Faerie Queene] is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline . . . ,” they may at worst scorn or at best savor what seems to be the poet’s quaintly Elizabethan squareness. Yet these same serious students, when they temporarily put aside their socio -political and academic cares, will watch television programs like Mission Impossible or Star Trek, will follow installments of Steve Canyon or Batman The epIC hero and pop CulTure 85 in the comics, or will read Ian Fleming or attend “James Bond” films, all of which have a “generall end” similar to Spenser’s: “to fashion a gentleman or noble person” for the age. The students themselves, however (and not a few of their teachers), think of such extra-curricular, extra-political activities as “escape.” But what is “escape”? If it means a temporary psychological and intellectual disengagement from the tensions and problems of “real” life, the type of entertainment referred to above will not serve. For “pop romance” (a term that will be used throughout this paper to designate television programs, films, and comic strips in the adventure category) is typically replete with tensions and problems, and those not usually very far removed from present reality. a few years ago it might have been argued that the frequent threats and acts of violence to be found in pop romance made the genre escapist by virtue of sheer hyperbole, but our growing awareness of how violent our reality actually is weakens that case. It might better be argued that the “escapism” of pop romance resides paradoxically in the security it generates: we know, deep down in our hearts, that Batman will not be turned into a human shish kabob by “The Joker,” that Steve Canyon will in the end foil the attempt of the Chinese Reds to defoliate Central Park. If this argument has some validity, it follows that the “escapism” provided by pop romance involves not only emotional catharsis, the purgation of pity and fear, but also what might be called “value satisfaction,” that confirmation or reaffirmation of our value system which results from our seeing this value system threatened, but ultimately triumphant. For at least one of the things that happens when a hero like Batman or Steve Canyon wins out in the end—and not the least important thing—is that we experience at some level the defeat of Evil (as we imagine it) by the Good (as we have learned it). Even though we consciously are aware that such victories do not always occur in reality, there is a part of us which very much wants them to occur. We are of course unwilling to have such victories take place too easily, as the epic poets well realized, for an easy victory not only lacks dramatic force but paradoxically cheapens the value system...