The Myth of the American Superhero

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In photographs taken the previous day, two spandex-clad superheroes — Spider-Man and Captain America — stood on a stage to flex their muscles alongside the similarly- posed Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. The oc- casion for this unlikely union was a press conference announcing a deal struck between Marvel Comics Inc.

Marvel would contribute its cast of colorful characters to a popular entertainment-oriented campaign designed to boost morale amongst American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and would also dispatch one million free comic books directly to the troops themselves. In the press coverage of the event, however, Rumsfeld's ap- pearance with two costumed crusaders drowned out reports of such business arrangements. What sort of popular cultural receptors were stimulated by the image of those three men flexing their muscles?

What popular cultural associations did Rumsfeld silently invoke when he stepped up onstage with "Spidey" and "Cap," and what associations were onlookers likely to read into his being there?

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Together, the two books update and extend the argument Jewett and Lawrence first advanced in The American Monomyth in There, they built on Joseph Campbell's analyses of cultural mythology to define a cultural myth as a narrative "uncritically ac- cepted" within a given culture, which thereby "pro- vides a model [for that culture] to interpret current experience"; then, they drew a distinction between Campbell's "classical monomyth" and their concep- tion of "the American monomyth" Whereas the classical monomyth rests upon "an archetypal plot pattern [ Suggesting that the American Modern Language Studies In , with American forces already in Afghanistan and with rising popular and political enthusiasm for military action in Iraq, ewett and Lawrence saw an opportunity to test the validity of their original thesis against observable socio-politi- cal and socio-cultural phenomena.

They wondered whether and how the American monomyth, as manifest in popular culture, might have construed and advanced a set of cultural assumptions about what would constitute a legitimate national response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, — assumptions later appealed to and invoked by the Bush Administration in an effort to legitimize its own responses to those events: When we look at the [popular narratives] that receive the steady attention of most American minds, we must also recognize that they are thereby forming a cultural matrix for action.

The superhero tales amount to a kind of mythic induction into the cultural values of America. Identifying the logic underpinning this rhetoric as the logic also under- pinning the representations of conflict resolution in The Lone Ranger, the typical John Wayne film, Rambo, Star Trek, Superman, The Matrix, and other popular narratives, Jewett and Lawrence suggested that the popularity of such narratives throughout the twentieth century engendered a cultural susceptibil- ity to political appeals to governmental superhero- ism after September 11, Together, the two books paint a picture of a culture as convinced as Spider-Man and Captain America that those who wield power thereby pos- sess a moral obligation to defend an individual life even if, in doing so, they risk destabilising the entire culture's way of life.

In defending an individual life, in short, those who wield power can and must use whatever means necessary to overawe any threat against that life, even if overawing those dangers entails a suspension and violation of the most fun- damental social, ethical, and legal standards of the culture itself.

That said, the two books are in many ways inseparable, as they are structurally complementary.

Bringing the emotional rather than rational justifications of such practices under the banner of "pop fascism" Captain America, 42 , the two books trace the steady "popularization of a crusading zeal" Captain America, whose advocates celebrate democratization as a rhetorical construct even as they undermine the operations of established democracy with what amounts to authoritarianism. Moreover, both books have been expressly written to serve their own countervailing political purpose.

By disclosing the emerging confluence between comic- book fantasy and political reality and the blurring of cinematic excess into military prowess, Jewett and Lawrence hope to defuse and thus articulate an opposition to the cultural logic they analyze, thereby edging their readers towards an outlook on current events less informed by cultural myth and more informed by realpolitik. The American Monomyth in a New Century. The Birth of a National Monomyth. Buffalo Bill Staging World Redemption. Heidi Visits a Little House on the Prairie.

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