Madman in a Box
Previously, in Infante's Inferno: When this all started, I was addressing Charlie Anders' concerns about the proposed new Buffy movie and her lament of the lack of heroes in today's popular culture, and I don't disagree with her, but I thought it perhaps useful to begin picking apart some of the components of how a story, particular the story of a hero (as opposed to a mere protagonist. Shhh. We'll get there.) travels through a culture, particularly in today's media-rich environment, including, among other odds and ends, glances at Hamlet, whose story has traveled for centuries more or less consistently; and Sherlock Holmes, whose story gets retold and rewritten often, sometimes with reckless abandon.
If there is anything which has kept these characters intact, it's been a reverence for the original writing of William Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and while there are popular versions of the characters' stories that don't entirely line up with the controlling narrative of these stories, one never feels that anything is lost when a divergent version appears. The original texts, after all, are right there on most of our bookcases or Kindles.
Most contemporary heroes, even the compelling ones, don't have this sort of luxury. Their stories are more fluid, being reset and updated with some degree of regularity: Batman and Superman have been around for 70-some years, after all, their continuities restarting with regularity -- often by way of a universe altering crisis -- in order to keep them young and fresh, while Spider-Man and other Marvel Comics characters simply rely on an ever-contracting time line, where despite being introduced in the '60s, their debut in the comics is consistently somewhere "around 15 years ago." Even Star Trek, ostensibly the story of Capt. James T. Kirk, abandoned the original cast for the adventures of other crews over time, occasionally revisiting the originals in movies, until finally giving up and rebooting the whole franchise with a new cast. It's hard to keep a story going that long, without having to make a few explanations. We want new Spider-Man stories, but we don't want him to be web-slinging in his 60s. We would find that odd. (And what that says about us, and ageism, is probably another blog post all together, save to say, heroes tend to resonate best when young people can see themselves in them.)
And then, there's The Doctor, from the British TV show Doctor Who, one of very few characters whose exploits have been able to be told in a straight line for decades, by the conceit that he's an alien (and thus extremely long-lived); a time traveler (and thus gaps between stories can be easily explained); and, most brilliant of all, that he regenerates into a new body when he dies (thus, allowing different actors to portray him.) It may have happened as an accident, an on-the-fly producer fix to deal with a lead actor leaving, but it's allowed Doctor Who to remain one of the most enduring shows in television history, with an internal logic that allows the audience to buy into the fact that there's a different guy playing the role every few years, and yet allows the narrative to continue in a straight line. The wizened William Hartnell of 1963 is the same Doctor that Matt Smith is portraying today, despite nearly fifty years passing. (Indeed, some estimates guess that, for the character, somewhere around 200 years of passed since The Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan, inadvertently kidnapped human teachers Ian and Barbara and dragged them on a whirlwind tour of time and space.)
But Doctor Who has been clever in other ways, too. The show has a number of internal controls that allow it to update and revise itself with minimum fuss: The first is that, while some events in time are often "fixed" and immutable, others maybe subject to history being altered. Thus, the villainous Daleks can have two or three origins, or there first encounter can be written off as being from near the end of their history, because the characters are traveling in time, and time, occasionally can change. Moreover, the simplest continuity control of them all has proved to be among the most useful: The Doctor lies, sometimes for no particular reason (although he probably has his reasons, we just don't really know them. His thinking is sometimes -- often -- alien.) The end result could be a muddle, but the series' legal owners, the BBC, have tended their garden well. There are inconsistencies over the course of five decades, but they're nothing to be fussed about. It's still, in its way, one giant story.
There are, of course, ephemera: Comic books, radio plays, novelizations, video games, odd appearances with symphony orchestras in London, all "authorized" but still out of continuity. And there are ostensibly in-continuity spin-offs, such as Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, which have deepened the central story but not overtly challenged it. On the whole, while there have been echoes, it's been abundantly clear which version is the real version at any one time. Which is funny, as there have been two real narratives for Doctor Who. The first: an alien adventurer casts off his stuffy people and comes to Earth (among other places) in search of adventure, and the second: The Last Time Lord travels time and space after his race is destroyed (mostly) in a war. But they're really two chapters in one story, and presumably, the story could go on for centuries, so long as the BBC is interested. It's a story that doesn't need an ending.
The immortal hero isn't entirely a new idea, of course. One could harken all the way back to mythology if one wanted to (although I always find it fascinating that the Norse myths have a an end story, whereas most myths don't, and more contemporary religious narratives mostly do, centering on the idea that this world is temporary or an illusion, and the real world is what comes after. You know. Like The Matrix. All theology aside -- please -- there's something about a looming end times which gives a narrative power, isn't there. A sense of urgency.) In a more literary context, one could look to Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion as a similar concept -- one hero, reborn an infinite amount of times and having vastly different adventures on different worlds, or to Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, which tells the story of Dream of the Endless, the immortal personification of dreams themselves. But although Dream does eventually die, and is reborn in a new incarnation, as are others of the Endless, Sandman fundamentally tells one incarnation of Dream's story, and while the newer incarnation popped up here and there, his story's not really being told in any substantial way. Other characters are ostensibly immortal, such as the fairy tale characters in Bill Willingham's Fables, but that immortality is a meta-commentary on how those stories have endured, not part of the original stories.
No, The Doctor stands more-or-less alone as having one straight narrative, with clear ownership of who has the right to tell that story, and which commands a place in popular culture. And in a lot of ways, he's an odd duck to have that sort of presence. Unlike a lot of action heroes, he's not prone to violence, mostly relying on his intelligence to solve a crisis, and for the most part, compassionate, not lightly taking the life of an enemy, even one as monstrous as his fellow Time Lord and arch-nemesis, The Master. It happens -- The Doctor is, after all, responsible for the apparent genocide that wiped out both his own people and the Daleks -- but it's not a preference, and indeed, he mostly manages to avoid violence with regularity. Perhaps its no surprise that he largely disappeared (excepting radio plays and novelizations) in the era when excessively violent "heroes" such as Rambo and the Punisher were ascendant.
What then do we make of the character's endurance? Surely, there's something appealing about a madman in a box who appears from nowhere, reaches out his hand and invites some random person on a sightseeing tour of time and space. Who doesn't fantasize about that sort of thing? But it's more than that, isn't it? There's something inherently noble in The Doctor's constant search for a third way through a crisis that doesn't involve merely eradicating his enemies. Vengeance, destruction ... they all seem a bit too simplistic for the modern audience. Even Batman isn't motivated by vengeance. He's motivated, as one of the more compelling writers to write the character in recent years, Grant Morrison, once wrote, "to heal his city and hang up his cowl forever in the Batcave when the job is done. This is not a dream, but a plan." That Morrison probably will never get to write the plan -- as it would end the story -- is irrelevant. It sheds light on how the writer who is writing what must be considered the controlling version of the character (even more so than filmmaker Christopher Nolan) sees the story he's working on. Batman: a great detective, like Sherlock Holmes, who uses violence but is far more interested in healing (like a Doctor.) It takes very little brushwork to see that three great iconic figures currently at play in our popular culture -- a detective who's endured since the Victorian era, a crime-fighter born in the Great Depression, and an alien come to us from post-war England -- are really not so dissimilar after all. Highly intelligent, capable of violence but not interested in it for its own sake, engaging as characters but probably off-putting and unfathomable if we ever met them in real life, and capable of nobility, if not always prone to it as an end in and of itself.
In a lot of ways, all of them -- even Batman -- is a far cry away from what we might consider a hero, but their darkness, intelligence and the push and pull between their humanity and their fundamental otherness -- how they are both of us and separate from us at the same time -- seems to be striking chords. Is this, then, what the culture wants and needs in a hero at this particular moment in time? Perhaps. Cultural consciousnesses are hugely complex things, but it seems some symbols are pushing forward in a rather forceful way.
If there is anything which has kept these characters intact, it's been a reverence for the original writing of William Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and while there are popular versions of the characters' stories that don't entirely line up with the controlling narrative of these stories, one never feels that anything is lost when a divergent version appears. The original texts, after all, are right there on most of our bookcases or Kindles.
Most contemporary heroes, even the compelling ones, don't have this sort of luxury. Their stories are more fluid, being reset and updated with some degree of regularity: Batman and Superman have been around for 70-some years, after all, their continuities restarting with regularity -- often by way of a universe altering crisis -- in order to keep them young and fresh, while Spider-Man and other Marvel Comics characters simply rely on an ever-contracting time line, where despite being introduced in the '60s, their debut in the comics is consistently somewhere "around 15 years ago." Even Star Trek, ostensibly the story of Capt. James T. Kirk, abandoned the original cast for the adventures of other crews over time, occasionally revisiting the originals in movies, until finally giving up and rebooting the whole franchise with a new cast. It's hard to keep a story going that long, without having to make a few explanations. We want new Spider-Man stories, but we don't want him to be web-slinging in his 60s. We would find that odd. (And what that says about us, and ageism, is probably another blog post all together, save to say, heroes tend to resonate best when young people can see themselves in them.)
And then, there's The Doctor, from the British TV show Doctor Who, one of very few characters whose exploits have been able to be told in a straight line for decades, by the conceit that he's an alien (and thus extremely long-lived); a time traveler (and thus gaps between stories can be easily explained); and, most brilliant of all, that he regenerates into a new body when he dies (thus, allowing different actors to portray him.) It may have happened as an accident, an on-the-fly producer fix to deal with a lead actor leaving, but it's allowed Doctor Who to remain one of the most enduring shows in television history, with an internal logic that allows the audience to buy into the fact that there's a different guy playing the role every few years, and yet allows the narrative to continue in a straight line. The wizened William Hartnell of 1963 is the same Doctor that Matt Smith is portraying today, despite nearly fifty years passing. (Indeed, some estimates guess that, for the character, somewhere around 200 years of passed since The Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan, inadvertently kidnapped human teachers Ian and Barbara and dragged them on a whirlwind tour of time and space.)
But Doctor Who has been clever in other ways, too. The show has a number of internal controls that allow it to update and revise itself with minimum fuss: The first is that, while some events in time are often "fixed" and immutable, others maybe subject to history being altered. Thus, the villainous Daleks can have two or three origins, or there first encounter can be written off as being from near the end of their history, because the characters are traveling in time, and time, occasionally can change. Moreover, the simplest continuity control of them all has proved to be among the most useful: The Doctor lies, sometimes for no particular reason (although he probably has his reasons, we just don't really know them. His thinking is sometimes -- often -- alien.) The end result could be a muddle, but the series' legal owners, the BBC, have tended their garden well. There are inconsistencies over the course of five decades, but they're nothing to be fussed about. It's still, in its way, one giant story.
There are, of course, ephemera: Comic books, radio plays, novelizations, video games, odd appearances with symphony orchestras in London, all "authorized" but still out of continuity. And there are ostensibly in-continuity spin-offs, such as Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, which have deepened the central story but not overtly challenged it. On the whole, while there have been echoes, it's been abundantly clear which version is the real version at any one time. Which is funny, as there have been two real narratives for Doctor Who. The first: an alien adventurer casts off his stuffy people and comes to Earth (among other places) in search of adventure, and the second: The Last Time Lord travels time and space after his race is destroyed (mostly) in a war. But they're really two chapters in one story, and presumably, the story could go on for centuries, so long as the BBC is interested. It's a story that doesn't need an ending.
The immortal hero isn't entirely a new idea, of course. One could harken all the way back to mythology if one wanted to (although I always find it fascinating that the Norse myths have a an end story, whereas most myths don't, and more contemporary religious narratives mostly do, centering on the idea that this world is temporary or an illusion, and the real world is what comes after. You know. Like The Matrix. All theology aside -- please -- there's something about a looming end times which gives a narrative power, isn't there. A sense of urgency.) In a more literary context, one could look to Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion as a similar concept -- one hero, reborn an infinite amount of times and having vastly different adventures on different worlds, or to Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, which tells the story of Dream of the Endless, the immortal personification of dreams themselves. But although Dream does eventually die, and is reborn in a new incarnation, as are others of the Endless, Sandman fundamentally tells one incarnation of Dream's story, and while the newer incarnation popped up here and there, his story's not really being told in any substantial way. Other characters are ostensibly immortal, such as the fairy tale characters in Bill Willingham's Fables, but that immortality is a meta-commentary on how those stories have endured, not part of the original stories.
No, The Doctor stands more-or-less alone as having one straight narrative, with clear ownership of who has the right to tell that story, and which commands a place in popular culture. And in a lot of ways, he's an odd duck to have that sort of presence. Unlike a lot of action heroes, he's not prone to violence, mostly relying on his intelligence to solve a crisis, and for the most part, compassionate, not lightly taking the life of an enemy, even one as monstrous as his fellow Time Lord and arch-nemesis, The Master. It happens -- The Doctor is, after all, responsible for the apparent genocide that wiped out both his own people and the Daleks -- but it's not a preference, and indeed, he mostly manages to avoid violence with regularity. Perhaps its no surprise that he largely disappeared (excepting radio plays and novelizations) in the era when excessively violent "heroes" such as Rambo and the Punisher were ascendant.
What then do we make of the character's endurance? Surely, there's something appealing about a madman in a box who appears from nowhere, reaches out his hand and invites some random person on a sightseeing tour of time and space. Who doesn't fantasize about that sort of thing? But it's more than that, isn't it? There's something inherently noble in The Doctor's constant search for a third way through a crisis that doesn't involve merely eradicating his enemies. Vengeance, destruction ... they all seem a bit too simplistic for the modern audience. Even Batman isn't motivated by vengeance. He's motivated, as one of the more compelling writers to write the character in recent years, Grant Morrison, once wrote, "to heal his city and hang up his cowl forever in the Batcave when the job is done. This is not a dream, but a plan." That Morrison probably will never get to write the plan -- as it would end the story -- is irrelevant. It sheds light on how the writer who is writing what must be considered the controlling version of the character (even more so than filmmaker Christopher Nolan) sees the story he's working on. Batman: a great detective, like Sherlock Holmes, who uses violence but is far more interested in healing (like a Doctor.) It takes very little brushwork to see that three great iconic figures currently at play in our popular culture -- a detective who's endured since the Victorian era, a crime-fighter born in the Great Depression, and an alien come to us from post-war England -- are really not so dissimilar after all. Highly intelligent, capable of violence but not interested in it for its own sake, engaging as characters but probably off-putting and unfathomable if we ever met them in real life, and capable of nobility, if not always prone to it as an end in and of itself.
In a lot of ways, all of them -- even Batman -- is a far cry away from what we might consider a hero, but their darkness, intelligence and the push and pull between their humanity and their fundamental otherness -- how they are both of us and separate from us at the same time -- seems to be striking chords. Is this, then, what the culture wants and needs in a hero at this particular moment in time? Perhaps. Cultural consciousnesses are hugely complex things, but it seems some symbols are pushing forward in a rather forceful way.
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