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...

Computer animated films near 'Uncanny Valley'

Sometimes the characters I see in computer animated movies creep me out.

I understand they are not real and there's nothing dangerous about them. Something about the way they look just makes me uncomfortable.

They're beginning to look too real.

I'm not alone in my way of thinking. For more than a century, psychologists and social theorists have pondered the point where artificial life will become too life-like for human society.

Today, theorists refer to this point as the "Uncanny Valley." But, that concept is couched in the psychological principles of what humans conceptualize as familiar and unfamiliar.

Many link the first psychological conceptualization of the uncanny to German psychologist Ernst Jentsch. In his 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny," Jentsch explored the psychological boundaries that separate the familiar from the unfamiliar.

Jentsch felt the boundary was often violated when we are forced to question if an object is really alive or not. While Jentsch if often credited with coining the term "The Uncanny," it was actually brought to prominence by Sigmund Freud.

In his 1919 essay, "The Uncanny," Freud expanded the concept to examine the way things we encounter in daily life can be familiar yet strange at the same time. For Freud, these situations created conflicts of feelings and thoughts, described as cognitive dissonance.

Both Jentsch and Freud based their conceptualizations in the literature of E.T.A. Hoffman, a German fiction writer known for creating characters that exhibited uncanny characteristics.

While the term and concept of "The Uncanny" was discussed, science was not ready to bring the concept to the public, the implications of "The Uncanny" were not realized, and its discussion was regulated to literature.

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori reintroduced the concept into popular culture in 1970.

In his article, "The Uncanny Valley," Mori asserted that as robotics become more advanced and their appearance more life-like, the small imperfections in appearance will cause them to appear eerie - thus causing cognitive dissonance as Freud asserted years earlier.

Mori's theory interest in robotics will proceed until we reach the point when they become too lifelike. When that saturation point is reached, interest in robotics will fall, and people will react adversely to them - thus we fall into the "Uncanny Valley."

Mori's solution to the problem of the Uncanny Valley was that we simply shouldn't make robots that look so much like people - for the most part, we haven't.

Despite recent advances in robotics and automation technology, robots are still slow and awkward-looking.

In recent years though, computer generated animation has become immensely popular and may hold the key to a modern concept of the "Uncanny Valley."

Companies, such as Disney-owned Pixar Animation Studios, have produced several high-quality computer films that have won several major awards and rake in millions of dollars.

But not all computer animated films have been as fortunate.

Other films, like Columbia Pictures' "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," have been panned by both critics and the public, leading to poor sales.

While both movies were seen as technically impressive and visually appealing, the difference may lie in their approach to the human form.

Pixar's films, and other successful computer-generated films, have often taken a semi-realistic approach to animation. Less successful films, such as "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and "The Polar Express" have attempted a more realistic view of computer animation.

Their failure to achieve substantial success in the market may the first sign of a tangible manifestation to the "Uncanny Valley."

There is one caveat to the idea of "The Uncanny," though. Some believe that exposure to the uncanny reduces the cognitive dissonance it causes and that we can get used to seeing the unfamiliar - thus the "uncanny valley" may never be realized.

That idea doesn't comfort me much though - I'll stick with cartoons for now.


Originally published in The Daily Reveille...