Comic book movies bring complex heroes to our youth

When gazing over the crowd at any comic-book movie, one sees a wide range of characters both on- and off-screen.

While their groups vary in demographics, their mission is the same - they want to see that awesome new movie where one person takes the weight of the world on his or her shoulders and proves there is something good deep inside all of us - except things are a little different these days.

The days of patently good and evil characters are long gone. Many of our modern heroes are awash in a sea of grey intentions and complex goals - yet their audience remains unchanged. Like the current generation of adults, today's teens are growing up with comic books. But do gray heroes create a gray populace?

The business of comic books had been in trouble for a long time. The sales of actual comic books have been sliding for many years and Marvel Comics even declared bankruptcy in the '90s.

For both Marvel Comics and its chief rival DC Comics, movies have been the saving grace, making them millions of dollars. Just this past weekend Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" set box-office records.

With their popularity, comic-book movies are set to supercede their paperback forefathers as the creators of cultural mythos.

In the past, comic books have served as the dyed-in-the-wool representations of right and wrong - Captain America defeated the Nazis, Batman fought the Joker and so on. Each representation of evil was clean-cut and clear.

This was done partially because comics were marketed toward a young market. However, the content of comic books has always reflected the society that produced them.

The world itself was not so cut and dry, but the image presented was that simple. Our enemies were evil, and the U.S. a force of pure good. The true complexities of the characters involved and the collateral damage of war were left hidden and unreported.

The messages given to both adults and children were similar and, in truth, those comic books were not far from the propaganda the U.S. government used to rally the nation to support its cause.

Times changed though. The fall of communism and a more intrepid media led the world to a new era of knowledge. Adults were now steeped in the truth that there is no dichotomous good and evil.

Comic books didn't really change all that much, though. Sure there were some more complex stories, but the market and the message remained the same. There are those who are good and those who are evil.

Here we see a slight break in the portrayal of the world. Our children are still sheltered from the world, but we are not.

The late '90s and early 2000s, Sept. 11 specifically, changed damned near everything.

The complex arguments and discussions that were hidden in the past are now out in the open. TV news is business and our society is more complex and faster.

Children are no longer protected from the complexity of the world. It is now beamed into their homes through the Internet and television. Rising to the occasion, comic books found a new medium and a new hope: movies.

Interestingly, some of the earlier comic-book movies that adhered to the old style of good and evil fail at the box office. Joel Schumacher's "Batman Forever" and "Batman and Robin," with their campy portrayal of violence and lack of complexity, bombed at the box office.

Comic-book movies hit it big in the 2000s with the popular movie versions of The X-Men, Spider-Man and Frank Miller's gritty Sin City.

The old medium is gone. Kids aren't reading comics nearly as much as they have in the past - they now come to their heroes through the big screen portrayals of these characters, who themselves are more complex than ever.

"The Dark Knight" portrays Batman as a vigilante, both loved and hated by the populace he protects. Mobsters and convicted criminals are now victims and the hero has some rather severe psychological problems.

These movies will not create a gray populace - they feed one that already exists.

Today's kids don't need the heroes of years past because the world they live in is faster and harder than ever. They can no longer relate to pristine imagines of valor.

In the end, it will not be the heroes themselves that matter, but young people's critical reasoning and ability to understand complexity.

We don't seem to understand that yet, though, and still cling to old standards.

Maybe we really do need Batman.



Originally published in The Daily Reveille...

McDonald's boycott has social movement potential

People are finally starting to boycott McDonald's - but not for a good reason.

The newly-established McDonald's boycott isn't because it treats its employees poorly or because it serves food that rots you from the inside. No, those things actually make sense and would be great reasons to boycott McDonald's. We're dealing with a different type of boycott here. A select group of folks based in our neighboring state of Mississippi have chosen to boycott McDonald's because the chain "supports the gay agenda."

I know it's easy to just brush this off as another example of the religious right freaking out about something, but this little social movement is actually pretty interesting and may function as a litmus test for future American social movements.

This whole issue started in early 2008 when Richard Ellis, vice president of communications for McDonald's USA, took a seat on the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

The NGLCC is a non-profit organization that encourages and helps develop businesses owned by members of the LGBT community. While it is not an official government agency, though its name implies such, it does act as a middle man between gay and lesbian business owners and their local chamber of commerce.

It's pretty easy to see where this is going.

The American Family Association, a religious group based in Mississippi, took issue with this business deal because its members believe the McDonald's corporation is supporting the gay agenda.

The AFA, also a non-profit organization, is concerned with the preservation of the American family, so the rusty and broken-down chain of logic is obvious - homosexuals are bad people; McDonald's has someone on the board of an organization that helps homosexuals; thus McDonald's is also populated with bad people. Not because it makes bad food, but because it supports gay people.

The AFA has called for a national boycott of all McDonald's restaurants because, as posted in an article on its internally run Onenewsnow.com site, "The AFA took issue with McDonald's refusal to remain neutral in the culture war."

Currently the AFA is telling its members to boycott eating at McDonald's restaurants and to call their local franchises to inform the management staff of McDonald's secret plot to help out the gay community.

This isn't the first time the AFA has called for a boycott of a national corporation that supposedly supported the gay agenda. In 2006 the group called for a similar boycott of Wal-Mart that was scheduled to take place over the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend.

When threatened with the loss of sales on Black Friday, Wal-Mart backed down and issued a statement confirming its neutrality on gay marriage. The AFA subsequently canceled the boycott.

They haven't canceled this one yet.

Through a letter sent to the AFA, McDonald's confirmed its commitment to diversity and has refused to back down.

It's crunch time for the AFA. Can they make the mighty McDonald's bow down?

Sure there are some faulty causal mechanisms at work here, and I'm honestly not sure who is putting together this so-called gay agenda, but this group has serious potential as a mechanism for social change.

In a column this past spring I wrote about the potential power of conservative Christians as a voting block. While my focus was on the political power of conservative Protestants, it's not the only possible outcome - this boycott could serve as a field test for the modern social power of religion.

Here in the U.S., that translates into the social power of conservative Christians.

By their sheer numbers conservative Christians represent a large portion of the U.S. population. According to the 2007 Pew National Trusts Survey on Religious Life, more than one quarter of U.S. citizens self-identify as evangelical Protestant - the group of denominations most commonly associated with conservative Christianity.

Conservative Christians are more than just evangelical Protestants and may self-identify with any denomination. However, they do frequently share beliefs on hot-button issues.

A unified belief on an issue can certainly serve as the glue for a social movement. In this circumstance the culture war against the gay agenda serves as a very strong bonding element. When combined with a large potential audience, you have the makings of an old-school social movement.

Their opponent, however, is a grease-spewing juggernaut that will be fairly difficult to topple.

That doesn't mean they can't have an effect though. After only a few weeks of threats the AFA got Wal-Mart, also a large and powerful corporation, to back down and claim neutrality - so there is precedent and potential.

Whether that potential will open us up to a new era of activism or condemn us to an oppressive theocracy is still up in the air.

Digital distribution has potential advantages for students

One day in the future, nearly everything you need will come to you digitally - without boxes, cases or instruction manuals.

That's right - books, video games, music, nearly anything you can think of that doesn't rot - will be beamed directly into your home through that magic system of tubes: the Internet.

While it's true digital distribution may be the wave of the future, we're not there yet. The infrastructure that currently exists is not set up to deliver a full digital package and some of the hitches are surprisingly low tech.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, digital distribution is a method of product delivery that shoves aside the packaging of a product in favor of shipping it to the consumer via the Internet.

Most students at the University are already too familiar with the concept, however not in the legal way. I imagine most University students are familiar with it's free-spirited cousin - peer to peer networking.

Peer to peer (P2P) networking involves the sharing of media

between individual users - usually distributing pirated software, music and games.

While P2P networking does distribute things digitally, its not what I'm talking about here.

The type of digital distribution I'm referring to is next step in a process the general population is already familiar with - it's like shopping, except you don't go anywhere and never get to actually hold anything.

The legal version of digital distribution involves manufacturers selling it to consumers directly and then allowing them to download the product at their leisure.

It's already pretty popular.

iTunes and Rhapsody.com already make millions of dollars from digitally distributed content, and sites such as Netflix.com have recently opened up on-demand downloadable movies.

Even video games are transitioning to digital distribution with Nintendo's WiiWare and Microsoft's X-Box Live Arcade.

Digital distribution may be in its infancy now, but the road to complete digital distribution will lead University students to some big payoffs.

For the general population, digital distribution may actually be more expensive than traditional methods of shipping.

Blogger Nick Beaudrot, of the site Cogitamusblog.com, calculates that it's still cheaper to ship products the old fashioned way. Production of the items that are easily digitally distributed is still remarkably cheap. The CDs and DVDs that contain our music, movies and video games are pressed out rapidly, and the packaging is usually pretty meager outside of special editions.

The cost of production and light weight of transport make them relatively cheap to ship compared to the cost of bandwidth. As one anonymous comment on Beaudrot's post said, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

In truth, Beaudrot's idea is sound, and the increasing cost of gas and increasing availability of broadband Internet will eventually make digital distribution paramount.

What Beaudrot doesn't take into account is the other forms of digital distribution - namely books, magazines and academic journals.

These are the media that most directly apply to University students.

University students already have access to many periodicals and e-journals through Middleton Library.

But that's not where the real gain for students is.

For University students, the real gain will be from e-books, podcasts and digitally distributed lecture videos that are already here in some cases and on the way for others.

Other universities are already on top of this. Universities such as Purdue, Washington State and U.C. Berkeley, among others, offer podcasts and in some cases videos of lectures that students can download.

The University has taken the first steps toward getting it all lined up, but the future holds tons of promise.

Unlike DVDs and movies, the benefit of digitally distributed books is easy to see. Books are costlier to produce than disc-based media and it would be much cheaper to distribute them electronically.

Podcasts and videos of lectures may get bogged down in image rights, but by far the biggest hurdle here is an administrative one.

If podcasts and videos of lectures are online, why would students take notes? Would attendance matter anymore? These are anything but trivial issues, and they cannot be resolved easily.

The age of digital distribution is coming, but it's not here yet.

In the case of popular media, it's close and coming fast. For the academic community, it's merely a tiny shadow on the horizon of an academic revolution.

It'll be here eventually, but in the meantime we should all invest in bigger hard drives.


Originally published in The Daily Reveille...