He Asked, No, Demanded I Punch Him

I feel relatively safe in Chicago. I bike under the assumption that no driver wants to

• dig me out of their grill
• wrench my bike out of their axle
• go to jail

... but I still wear my helmet.

I also don't worry too much about the occasional gangland executions in earshot of my apartment. While I know these events make everyone less safe, not being in a gang myself, I'm less likely to get shot in a gang war.

Even so, I don't leave the house at these times (well, mostly. I did step out with my roommate the first time, but that's because I wanted to make sure she would be ok).

I'm worldly enough to know, and this is partly from watching No Country for Old Men a few too many times, that violence is partly random.

And looking sad at it won't make it stop

So I work out, study the martial arts and have developed a disdain for those who would hurt me or others. I wouldn't say this disdain has reached a crazy level, but one that I think has balance the fear I naturally have of being hurt with the anger that someone would try. Which, again, I don't think makes me crazy.

Being Rorschach makes me crazy.

So, like in Watchmen, I had an experience which amounted to, "he tried to [rob me]. I mean, can you believe it?" Ironically enough, it fell squarely into my passive, non-target defense style.

My wife and I were getting onto the train (Blue Line, if you're curious) and I had my yoga mat sticking out of the top of my backpack. I wasn't too worried about it, since it was fairly secured and I figured the kind of person who boosts your stuff on the train don't do yoga.

He's stressed out 'cuz he hasn't done no Savasana.

As I was getting onto the train, I felt my mat getting pulled up. I turned, my first thought being to apologize for bumping someone. My gaze was met with an angry look and that's when I pieced together what happened. I returned the look.

I guess the guy expected me to back down or something, which is why he got up in my... grill? Is that what the kids call it these days? Yes? Well, that's what he got up in and started asking me if I thought he was "rolling" one me, if I was (*ahem*) [screwing] with him and the like.

I assured him I wasn't screwing with him, but that's when he said something I didn't expect. He told me to "start swinging. Swing [insert nasty word here]! Swing!" I didn't, but I also didn't back down. At his behest, I let him on the train and assured a concern-expressing fellow passenger that I still had my wallet.

That fellow later congratulated me for handling the situation as well as I did.

The next day, my father (who was a police officer and works in a prison) explained the behavior as one of being tough and expecting me to apologize for the whole thing--I had no intention of being a bitch. This plays into Allie's surprise that he was, you know, asking a superhero to punch him.

Lucky for him my parents are alive.

Even if he had known all that, would he still have been all... fronting on me? Probably. It's like the King and Duke in Huckleberry Finn, or the guy in Sandman: Season of Mists, the one who says Hell is only possible to bear because someone else is punishing him: we can't forgive ourselves, and we meet that inability with anger.

I did that very thing this morning: I got angry because I felt like I ruined plans Allie and I had made. I didn't, but I got angry at myself, and by extension her, which exacerbated things. When I calmed down, I realized that this was the same thing that thug on the subway tried on me, and, like Roy Batty, maybe that's the reason I didn't hit him. Maybe I saw that, deep down, that thief and I are more similar than either of us would like to admit.

Though being like me would be trading up.

(PS: BATMAN, BLADE RUNNER and NO COUNTRY all in one post! Woo-hoo!)

Let's Look at This One More Time...

Postmodernist revisionism has us by the nuts. Or, in English, we all have hard-ons for perverting what we traditionally think to be innocent. Maybe "perverting" isn't the right word. A better word might be, rationalizing. Nowadays, people want an escapism that isn't escape at all. They want to see their world, exciting. We love/hate our world, plus; our world plus superheroes, our world plus video game characters, the list goes on and on. With the release of the long-awaited Watchmen and the less long-awaited second episode of There Will Be Brawl, I've been thinking about how we rethink our heroes.
For those of you not in the know (both of you), Watchmen is, ultimately, a collection of stories about superheroes and their irrevocably messed up lives. The book is pretty old now, and was always a fiercely postmodern work, but the movie takes a couple steps forward in this area, so I'll focus on it. Watchmen denies a lot of what we assume about superheroes. You can attribute various proxies to its characters; I like to describe the sundry costumed adventurers as "______ if he/she didn't give a damn about anything." The Comedian is, in my mind, who Captain America would have been under Nixon. Dr. Manhattan is even more powerful than Superman, but has no real attachment to his home, unlike the Man of Steel focusing so much on his adopted status. I know this is a cursory way of explaining the characters, but it serves to get my friends into the book.
And when they do, they see what I mean. These characters would have nothing to do with the tried and true, primary-colored champions of American Exceptionalism we know and love. Comedian would probably consider Captain America (at least Steve Rodgers) as something of a faggot, not wanted to mow down dissenters and protesters. Manhattan would summarily dismiss the Man of Tomorrow's desire to save life. To Ostermann, it would simply be superfluous effort. In the movie, Nite Owl is much more brutal, and Silk Spectre II is a killer. While these may be extreme examples, but they shed some light on how we are beginning to look at superhero--for lack of a better term, as "comic book" would include A History of Violence and Road to Perdition--escapism. Considering the trend, superheroes are getting more realistic. Spider-Man existed in a more believable world, and now Batman and Iron Man look at real world problems, being solved and exacerbated by the presence of masks. These new superheroes are darker, meaner and more relevant. This is no longer Tim Burton's Batman. That was a world from which the viewers could safely distance themselves. It was a bleak, sprawling and, most importantly, idealized landscape. Now, if you watch a superhero movie, you will most likely recognize the world as your own. Gotham looks an awful lot like Chicago. The Middle East looks like the Middle East. It can be terrifying to think of the insanity of society or war encroaching in our lives, which is why the heroes win. And they should. We need Batman and Iron Man to triumph over evil because, for decades, that is what they do: they save us.
This is where Watchmen questions our desire to be safe. It presents a world that looks and sounds similar to our own, but is subtly different. If Bill Finger and Tim Burton crafted a dystopian 40's/80's American city, Moore and Snyder showcase a recent past/near future in which you wouldn't want to live. Watchmen postulates if superheroes would be so great after all, and offers mixed evidence. I still feel it, both as a book and a film, has mismatched priorities in some of its storytelling, but it is, at best, skeptical of cowled do-gooders. Which is why it's a classic: we want to know what would happen if our heroes failed, not so much in their exploits, but in their persons.
There Will Be Brawl thinks about this same thing, and decides that the characters are correct, Mario is still Mario, Princess Peach is Princess Peach, but the world around them is suspect. Mushrooms are drugs. The Koopa Coins littering the Mushroom Kingdom are avarice given shape. Even when it seems the characters are the ones who have changed, its a matter of interpretation. Boiled down, Kirby is a monster, a cannibal. The Mario Bros. are brutal mushroom heads (not literally, like Toad). Peach is not a cocktease, as you'd think from the games, but rather a slut in a little crown. Unlike Watchmen, There Will Be Brawl shows us a world we only know from its approximation in our own. Watching it, one could wonder if something was lost in translation, and this was a more accurate way of looking at the Nintendo universe. What is scary is, the series candidly represents what the Nintendo world would be like if it was our world. Watch the first episode here.
These are the games many children of my generation grew up playing, and now we can see them more as we see ourselves.
In the end, this is what all the pomo, all the revisionism is. It is a means of rending imaginary worlds into our own. Superheroes like Batman and Iron, Man along with Rorschach and V, ask hard questions about our world while making what was once a safe way of asking, movies and comics, dicey territory. The Nintendo denizens throw in our faces what we loved as children, only to find it has become mired in the filth in which we live. This is not something we should find disappointing or disenchanting. It is something to consider. We no longer read old Batman comics for a reason: they're outdated. Superman Returns was largely panned because it was found to be preachy. People want heroes with whom they can identify in worlds they can recognize. This newfound importance in the postmodern "hero" is a shepherd. We do not have to root for A because he is good and B is evil. We can ask questions about our own lives, what our heroes really say about us, and grow as people. Our new superheroes demand of you, would you implement a Big Brother network to catch a madman, beating cops in the process? Would you use the tools of war to do good? Would you, well, I'm not going to ask you what Watchmen asks. Go see/read it yourself. It may be a hard question, but our new heroes lead us not by telling us where to go, but forcing us to find the answer within ourselves.