I don’t think I’ve ever read two paragraphs with more to say about superheroes, secret identities, and American comics than these, from Joan Didion’s brief essay about Howard Hughes, 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38. Paste “Tony Stark” or “Bruce Wayne” or whatever for Hughes in the following:
That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake … but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
Of course, we do not want to admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another. A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called “the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.” ”I mean only,” he wrote, “that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning, and international cooperation. … Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.” Officially we admire men who exemplify those ideas. We admire the Adlai Stevenson character, the rational man, the enlightened man, the man not dependent upon the potentially psychopathic mode of action. Among rich men, we officially admire Paul Mellon, a socially responsible inheritor in the European mold. There has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
It seems to me there’s a lot to unpack here. Secret identities tend to fit the “what we officially want” model—especially old-school ones like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne. Tony Stark is a funny corner case, since his ‘secret identity’ was not-so-secretly modeled on Hughes, and the character has become popular at a time when maybe we’re more likely to claim we want amoral power, and secretly want justice. (I’m reminded of the weird way many kind, good folks I know and love use creepy “when I rule the world, you’ll die first” type rhetoric.) Or maybe so many enterprises are built to cater to ‘our’ secret desires that these desires are barely secret any more, and even (as in the She-Hulk’s superhuman law arc, which I’ve been reading recently on Alyssa Rosenberg‘s recommendation) become the external identity… Not to mention the way superheroic romance seems to revolve back to that line between “the people we marry” and “the people we love” (which was at least part of Spider Man’s arc in the Sam Raimi movies).
While on some level this is just another way of saying that superheroes address repressed desire, Didion’s essay makes the point that the particular form this desire takes is uniquely US-American… which might explain why secret-identity superhero comics have remained a cornerstone of the US-American comics market, even in an age of competition from robust Japanese and European comics industries. Anyway. I’ll ponder this more; seems deserving of a seriously Long Read. Any thoughts?
I think my head just exploded. Thank you for pointing out these few paragraphs as I’m not sure I’d be able to read the whole thing.
What we want in our heroes is definitely different from what we want in our peers, though. In Donald Maass’s WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL, to bring it back to my own lens on the world–writing–he talks about the larger-than-life character. We want to read about someone who says inappropriate/bold things and goes places we would never go. Our own behavior and goals tend to be very different, except in rare cases. This piece sort of talks about hypocrisy, too, and I think that’s common to everyone along the philosophical spectrum. Hypocrisy is perhaps the only universal principle aside from love. We’re all hypocrites in different ways, but when it comes down to it, we all want different things than we profess to want. The big question is, what would we do if we had the power that could give us what we want? Would we refrain and stick to the professed goals and wants? Or would we indulge in what then becomes our darker nature? I love to read books that investigate these inclinations and questions.
It’s a great read, actually—I’m reading through Slouching Towards Bethlehem in my spare time, and having a lot of fun.
Re: larger-than-life characters, I think the Didion piece goes a step further by asking *what* kind of larger-than-life characters Americans like to follow, and why we follow them. What secret desires do they fulfill? If we think that public-private split is essential to human life (which I’m not so sure about—read an interesting essay a while ago about the way self-help books switched from “how to build character” to “how to win friends & influence people” in the early 20th century), then the question is, do different cultures see the split differently—which is sort of Vlad’s point below.
Great post, Max! I think you hit the nail right on the head – there is something uniquely US-American (or at least, something I have not encountered in other cultures) about the dichotomy between the social, moral, responsible character, and the asocial, amoral secret-hero. I will, as an aside, note the interesting similar dichotomy in Russian literature, where the needle of the author’s / reader’s preference moves wildly on the social asocial scale, often in the same work. E.g. Crime and Punishment, and especially Brothers K., vacillate between sociopathy and complete self-sacrifice for the greater good.
It is an interesting thought experiment to consider what an American Social Novel would be like. Something like the anti-Self-Reliance, but with a plot and characters and such
There are of course clan novels in US literature, e.g. Magnificent Ambersons, but not so much of the works of fiction where a hero who works for others is presented as a true hero, and the self-serving wanderer, as a destructive villain.
Hey, thanks! Glad my intuition (well, really, Didion’s) reads true to you. I think Dmitry in Bros K is an interesting example of the kind of inversion I’m talking about above, especially in the case of the rag-wrapped money that he ‘stole’ from Katarina—IIRC he’s at first willing to go to the gallows rather than explain where the money came from.
Some of the great American novels focus around themes of mutual aid and forgiveness, though I don’t know if I’ve ever read this theme discussed as such. Steinbeck, while he seems to be heroic in character, loves this theme—c.f. the (amazing) end of Grapes of Wrath, or East of Eden for that matter. Infinite Jest’s continued emphasis on the importance of groups and of the limits of the intellect also seems relevant. (Not that DFW is ant-intellectual! IJ just spends a lot of time talking about the ways intellectuals have a hard time with AA and addiction, and the importance of wisdom and sacrifice, though I remember him using those words.)
Clarification: by ‘seems to be heroic in character’ I mean: I think Steinbeck has a rep as a writer of strong self-reliant male hero characters, though in fact his characters play at the limits of strength and self-reliance.