I saw two movies this week, Nochnoi Dozor, in English �Night Watch,� and of course, V for Vendetta.
You can look at the official American Night Watch site , or even watch a super-condensed version of the entire movie, if you�d like. I think of it as a combination of Harry Potter on heroine, Underworld with the suck turned way down, and a sequel to an alternate version of The Lord of the Rings set a thousand years later, but in which the War of the Ring had ended in a stalemate. Pretty compelling, no?
As a guy who�s bloody obsessed with adaptation, between media, between cultures and languages, whatever, this film is fascinating. It�s the first of three movies based on a wildly popular trilogy of horror/fantasy novels in Russia. I�ve now seen two versions of the movie, one somewhat cheap exported version, acquired via das infobahn and possibly a fan sub, and the official American version, released under the auspices of Fox Searchlight. The American version is a much better translation, both in terms of the subtitles themselves, and in terms of adapting this very Russian movie for English speakers.
Subtitles, much as I�m quite comfortable with them, are always a little awkward. They force your eyes up and down across the screen, they keep you from seeing key visual elements, and you don�t get the same sense of tone from the actors. I realise it�s cinematic heresy to say so, but I�ll take a good dub over subtitles any day. The reality is that that I get very little sense of the actor�s inflections from a language like Russian, or for that matter Japanese or Cantonese, all of which are very far removed from the rhythms of English. Even in a French or Italian movie, I lose a lot. The trouble is that there are very few good dubs out there to choose from, and a lot of good subtitled films, so the choice is usually for the higher quality option, rather than the preferred medium.
Night Watch solves that problem by integrating the subtitles into the film, making them part of the visual experience, rather than simply layering them on top of that experience. I�d post caps from the film here, but I don�t want to be sued by Fox and I don�t have the right version to cap from. Also, I�m not sure how. But as an example, in several scenes, characters speak through rasping throats as a result of injury or fatigue or emotional strain. Their subtitles flicker and pulse, giving an impression that they�re not quite strong enough to stay on screen. The special psychic lure of the vampires in the film show up in blood-red letters that then wisp away like blood in water. The technique is very much like a comicbook in which the visual and the textual start to blend into each other, creating a combined effect based on tension as much as co-operation. Has no one ever thought of doing this in a movie before?
The second film was V for Vendetta, Alan Moore�s series that, thematically, was all about the Thatcher government�s persecution of foreigners, people of colour, and specifically homosexuals in the UK in the 80s. There�s an odd history, here. Moore himself just recently severed all ties to the films that have been based on his work, stating in several places (including to his agents) that in the event that film rights have already passed from his hands, he wants his name taken off of the films and his share of the profits divided amongst the other artists. That�s why the film�s credits say it�s based on �the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd.� The writer�s name is curious by its absence, which might be the Wachowskis� way of acknowledging Moore without naming him. Just a guess.
At first blush, Moore�s decision might seem petulant or just plain dumb, considering the money involved, but it�s important to remember two things. First, the two films we�ve seen based on his books so far, From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have been shit. I know, as a good critic, I�m not supposed to make that claim, but just this once I�m going to speak as a fan and say they were cinematic abortions sent naked and undeveloped into the world with very little desire to actually use what made the originals work. Moore has every reason to believe that his books are just unfilmable, and he apparently said as much to Terry Gilliam who, for a short time, was involved with creating a Watchmen film. (Gilliam, by the way, is just as happy to have washed his hands of the project since he didn�t think it was filmable either and maybe, here�s a radical thought, should just be left in its original medium.)
Second, Moore doesn�t actually retain the rights to the work that�s been made into films. Both V and Watchmen (the latter of which is a perpetually �forthcoming release�) are owned by DC Comics. I�m not certain about From Hell, since it�s published by Eddie Campbell�s label, but bounced around between publishers during its original tenure. The point, though, is that he no longer has any control over who makes a lot of his books into movies because he doesn�t retain the rights, so the money, while nice, isn�t exactly the �buy your dad a house� sums that it�s assumed to be. Moore is probably the most prolific and skilled comics writer we�ve ever seen, but he�s not sitting pretty on a money bin full of cash (and he�s not living with a bisexual witch coven, either. That myth is based on his three-way �marriage� with his ex-wife and their mutual girlfriend). So when you break it down, Moore�s decision to turn his back on cinema entirely isn�t as unreasonable as it initially sounds.
However, I have always hoped, in the back of my mind, that when a good movie is made from one of his books, it might convince him to embrace film as a medium in which he, of all people, could have a really good time. I do agree that most of his comics are unfilmable. Watchmen, as Gilliam suggests, might work as a big-budget mini-series for television; twelve one-hour episodes could conceivably contain the labyrinthine plot of the books. Something like Promethea just wouldn�t work in any other medium; the tarot card issue could only be rendered in comics. My hope, though, is that Moore might, at some point, consider writing film scripts, so that the message is appropriate to the medium.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that the artistic success of V for Vendetta, the film, should be at least less of a kick in the nads for Moore than his other two films. It�s a genuinely good movie, and a very timely one, at that. It�s far enough removed from current events in the US and the UK that it can�t be read as straight allegory, but the underlying themes are applicable and powerful. Moore himself, in a recent interview with the BBC, said that he doesn�t object to the idea of adaptation. He just wishes they�d actually adapt the books, bring something new to them, but also make them, you know, good. Though the film version of V isn�t perfect, by any means, it�s a good, solid film. Moore, and for that matter Warren Ellis who recently bashed the film in Bad Signal, should both at least see it before criticising it.
In the last ten years, two sets of films have been the subject of fan re-edits, Lucasfilm's much anticipated Star Wars prequels, specifically The Phantom Menace, and the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix. In both cases, the films were not parodied or satirised, but improved by fans who, presumably, thought the originals weren't good enough but felt strongly enough about them to go to the effort of re-editing them at all.
The Matrix has been subject to two different fan edits, The Matrix: Reloaded, The Recut and The Matrix: Dezionised (the latter of which I have not seen yet). The former attempt to improve the much-maligned sequel to the first Matrix film involved adding cut scenes from the video game Enter the Matrix), removing scenes that didn't push the plot, and radically re-editing the rave/sex montage from the original, turning it into a separate (and much shorter) dance scene, followed by a quieter and more intimate sex scene.
This last example is interesting in that the separation almost totally reverses the feel of the original scene. By intercutting the rave, a public, group-oriented but still blatantly sexual event, complete with sweaty, nearly-naked bodies, and 'tribal' rhythms, with Neo and Trinity's love-making, the montage effect connected the signifiers of the two different settings: the almost primal nature of music and dance and the inherent messiness of human sexuality (which is visually juxtaposed with Neo and Trinity's data ports, remnants of their lives as slaves to the machines).
The scene loudly proclaims (almost literally given the content of Morpheus' preceding speech, "we are here, and we are unafraid") that this is humanity, low-tech, sexual, almost animalistic, dancing in a cave, as opposed to machine life, which is cold, hard, metal. The casting of a predominantly African-American and Latino-American population for Zion emphasises the point, making the rave feel universally human, not to mention rendering the scene in 'Earth'-toned skin, browns and beiges.
The recut version splits the two contexts and drastically reduces the rave scene, thus severing the connection between sex and dance, slightly retints the Neo/Trinity sex scene, making their skin seem pale, and shifts to a quieter, more 'soft rock' sound track, making the sex itself less animal-like, and more leisurely. All of this would seem to be an attempt to (1) cut out the rave scene entirely, which most fans hated, and/or (2) emphasise the plot point that, even in the midst of having sex, Neo cannot keep his prophetic vision of Trinity's death out of his mind (in fact, his mental flash to that vision either coincides with, or interrupts, his orgasm).
I can't comment much on The Matrix: Dezionised because I haven't seen it, but this fan edit results from combining the two Matrix sequels into one film, and cutting out all but Neo's story, which means primarily cutting out scenes in Zion, the last human city. Like The Matrix: Reloaded, The Recut, a plot-driven film, Dezionised seems to proceed from a desire to make the theatrical releases better, as opposed to abandoning them entirely as films that simply weren't good enough.
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was first recut in two versions that circulated by hand, The Phantom Edit: New York and The Phantom Edit: Chicago. I have, sadly, not seen the original edits, but there are now several versions of The Phantom Edit and Attack of the Clones circulating around the internet. Some are simple recuts, involving merely removing scenes or characters (I.e., Jarjar) or adding deleted scenes available on DVDs. Some are more elaborate, going so far as to change major plot elements by, for example, scrambling the dialogue of all aliens and robots and rewriting it in subtitles. One version even recuts the Obi Wan/Maul light sabre duel such that Obi Wan never loses his weapon. This recutter, whomever it might be, had to digitally change the colour of Obi Wan's light sabre to achieve the effect, an extremely difficult, and just a few years ago impossible thing to achieve with a home computer.
The reason I go into all of this detail of how the cuts work, how they change the films, and just how difficult they are to create is to demonstrate the sheer effort put into by fan recutters who remain totally anonymous, aside from pseudonyms like "Magnoliafan" (some on-line chatter has it that "Magnoliafan" is Kevin Smith, a known fan of Star Wars, and a known detractor of both the Special Edition films and the sequels, who is also somewhat infamous for attacking the P.T. Anderson film Magnolia on his own website). By virtue of being anonymous, the recutters are also not profit motivated. The question remains, then, why do it at all?
The answer to that lies in the love/hate relationship fans have with failed versions of their favourite films. Both Star Wars and The Matrix set the bar high with, in the former case, the first three films, and in the latter case, the first of three films. In both cases, the 'originals' (a problematic concept in this context) were loved by fans, and made a lot of money. In both cases, the sequels that followed were critically disliked and box-office flops.
Serious fans of these sequels felt, on some level, betrayed, claiming, for example, that George Lucas had "taken away their childhoods,� or that the Wachowskis has somehow misrepresented their talent in their first film (rumours of plagiarism floated around for a few years after the first sequel was released). Instead of abandoning the failed attempts at sequels, however, fans took it upon themselves to 'save' and 'improve' them. The fan edits of Star Wars and The Matrix claim a new kind of community ownership over the originals. They, as symbolic acts, say 'When you (George Lucas, Andy and Larry Wachowski) released these movies into the world, you gave them to us. You created a world that we took on as part of our culture. Therefore, when you ruined the sequels, you took something from us, and now we will take it back.'
And now, the point: fan edits are very clear examples of mass audiences reinterpreting mass culture and making it their own. Any argument about mass-produced art's monolithic uniformity, or the passivity of a pop culture audience, is obliterated by the very act of recutting a Hollywood film.
Sela.
Davis, Walter. �Theater, Ideology and the Censorship of �My Name is Rachel Corrie�: The Play�s the Thing.� Counterpunch. 6 March �06.
Yesterday, Walter Davis posted this article about the cancellation, he claims censoring, of a controversial play about a woman killed in Palestine by an Israeli bulldozer. The article is not about Israel/Palestine but about what he argues is the �purpose of serious theater� which apparently can be �stated simply�to challenge the audience to examine everything that they don�t want to face about themselves and their world� (Davis 1).
Theatre, in his argument, is the art of political subversion, of enacting change, �not in order to relieve or �cathart� our dilemmas� (1).
�Other public institutions, (Churches, Political forums, the Media) are dedicated primarily to something else: the celebration and perpetuation of ideology, the programming of a mass audience with the beliefs, ideas, and feelings they need to internalize so that ideology will secure its grand function� (1).
Davis argues polemically (sometimes incoherently) that good theatre can seek to challenge exactly those notions that its audiences deem to be sacred, specifically including religion, but also the political and social ideologies that dominate a great deal of our thinking. In this, I absolutely, whole-heartedly agree with him. I have no idea of the circumstances of the cancellation of this particular play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, so I won�t comment on that, but his explanation of what good theatre can do is quite convincing. Anything that inspires people to question their own beliefs such that they can decide if they ought to believe them, is great! The unexamined life, and all that. However, the implications of his definition are also criminally rigid and not-just-a-little insulting to potential audience members.
I�m honestly baffled by his assertion that theatre and �the Media� are somehow separate, by definition, or mutually exclusive. I can only assume that by �the Media� he means television and film, and perhaps journalism, but probably not the print kind. Here we find a very similar self-fulfilling definitional prophecy as we did with Howe�s paper, in which �mass culture� is simply that art that is bad. In Davis� construction, �the Media� is an extremely fuzzy word that connotes generic entertainment, aimed at the fabled �lowest common denominator� (a truly odd mathematical metaphor in the midst of discussions of art and culture). My point, put simply, is that �theatre� is a form of �media,� and Davis either misses that fact, or deliberately uses the word�s colloquial meaning to deflect away from it.
Also like Howe�s conception, Davis� model of good theatre is unidirectional. It talks of putting the audience �in the proper theatrical condition� in which �all of their ways of thinking and responding are turned back against them� (6). Again, I have to stress that I don�t disagree that good theatre can do this, nor do I claim that it�s inherently evil to do so, but I also cannot read that line without thinking that it�s incredibly manipulative, and relies on an assumption of a combative metaphor for art in which the art assaults viewers, lobs idea grenades at them, until they are defeated and have to admit that they�re pre-conceived notions are inappropriate. Which is to say that Davis� model assumes that the art knows better than the audience, in fact that its �purpose� (from his opening statement) is to know better than the audience. The corollary and unintended implication is that �the Media� (from his second sentence) must not know better, must be unsophisticated, must merely reflect the preconceived ideas of the audience. Again, I don�t think smart art is bad, and I am forced to agree that a lot of mainstream entertainment does merely preach to the choir, but Davis� categorical definition of the two, theatre and media, is logically nonsensical.
The central irony of this article, though, is that it starts with Davis� objection to the cancellation of a play, but ends with him offering the reader the outline for another play as if to counter-balance all the �bad� media. He builds a model of media, throughout the essay, and then trumps it using an example of theatre. There�s a word for that in logical philosophy. It�s called a strawman. His objection is not to the presence of bad art, which his proposed play might cure, but to the absence of the good kind. It would seem far more conceptually consistent, therefore, to give us a detailed description of the play that New Yorkers can now not see, the one that was cancelled, My Name is Rachel Corrie, which seems to have been lost in the shuffle.
Howe, Irving. “Notes On Mass Culture.” Arguing Comics. Heer, Jeet and Kent Worcester, Eds. University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, Mississippi. 2004.
Howe’s paper is a textbook (almost literally) example of how the high/low culture split is theorised. He even references Adorno’s work on popular music, equates it to film and, by association, comic strips. In the very first sentence, he refers to “the pseudo-cultural amusements that occupy the American people’s leisure time” (43), and consistently defines ‘mass culture’ as that which is merely a distraction from the unpleasantness of being a member of the labour class, as merely a vessel of conformist messages that pacify that class, and as the opposite of ‘art,’ which stimulates the mind and inspires questioning instead of conformity.
The lure of this kind of model is that it has clear ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys.’ The bourgeoisie capitalists are the producers of unidirectional propaganda, and the labour class is the victim of that propaganda. It’s simplistic, but it can get one all fired up about how, to be fair, demonstrably manipulative and witless most mainstream entertainment actually is. There are, of course, serious problems with this approach, so I thought I’d take a minute to point them out as I see them.
At base, Howe’s definitions for ‘mass culture’ and ‘art’ are meaningless because they’re essentially just short-hand for ‘good art’ and ‘bad art,’ which is really just a falsely objective version of what they really mean, ‘art he likes’ and ‘art he doesn’t like.’ There are no surprises in his construction, though I’m sure there are many people, then and now, who would find it so self-evident that it needs no arguing. It pretty much requires that we assume artistic quality can be objectively demonstrated, if not measured. Given the power of trends and personal tastes and the vast variety of cultural and historical taste, that claim isn’t worth more than a paragraph.
The more insidious element, which runs counter to what I think we can assume is Howe’s goal, is that the unidirectional and manipulative model of ‘mass culture’ he offers implicitly assumes that ‘the mass’ that consumes it is stupid, monolithic, and incapable of subversive reinterpretation. Now, I do believe that limiting education is a great way to maintain class division, not only because it creates greater and greater cultural differences between the educated and the uneducated, but also because it funnels the upper class into executive, managerial, and generally high-status professions, and vice-versa for ‘the mass.’ Continuously flooding popular entertainment with witless crap does play into that divide by artificially exacerbating the high/low split in art that occurs part-and-parcel with the basic class split.
However, we simply don’t have to assume that popular consumers are unaware of that manipulation, or that they don’t manipulate the consumer entertainment they’re given to serve their own cultural ends. Long before mainstream culture started to “eat its young” in order to stake a claim to fringe culture, as Warren Ellis puts it, labour and ‘mass’ culture has been collaging high-culture for its own purposes.
Examples of this abound in the 20th century, but the most recent and most compelling is ‘sampling’ in hip-hop, a musical technique that violates some of the most basic assumptions about art: that it proceeds from inspiration, possibly from God, and through the vessel of the singular genius, the artist; that it is based on originality and personal vision, rather than collective view of a social context; or, on what I’d argue is an even more fundamental level, that ideas can be owned and parcelled out, like land or cattle.
In a similar vein, the original hacker mantra, “Information wants to be free,” assumed a world in which I am ethically allowed to copy into my computer anything that I can copy into my computer, that that act of copying constitutes a good act, a further dissemination of knowledge, and not in any way a ‘theft’; and that it’s logically impossible, to begin with, to steal an idea. Clearly, mass culture is perfectly capable of interpreting mainstream ‘signal’ in such a way as to, if not remove the conformist ‘noise,’ at least only listen to that part of the signal that can be put to their own purposes.
The other lure of Howe’s construction, though, is that he defines ‘mass culture’ in terms that we’d mostly agree are bad: it’s superficial, it encourages passivity, it discourages the questioning of authority, it neatly answers questions rather than posing them and leaving the audience to sort them out. But he never demonstrates that mass culture does suffer from these defects, nor does he really define how he determines what ‘mass culture’ was to begin with, before he defined it as ‘that which is bad.’ So though I agree that art that’s conformist and merely preaches to the choir isn’t very good for society in general, I’m totally unconvinced that all ‘mass culture’ is conformist, or that all ‘art’ is radical. Howe's dividing line between the two seems to consist of a convenient bit of circular reasoning.
Howe’s discussion isn’t of much use, considering it’s meaningless definition and tendency to lapse into Freud-inspired descriptions of the theatre space as a giant vagina, but it’s interesting in so far as it reminds me how easy it would be to cheer against mainstream entertainment, ostensibly in the interests of ‘the mass,’ but by doing so, would insult the intelligence of that same ‘mass’ of people.
Really, this is yet another version of the same old lesson, that instead of making grand proclamations about how ‘all’ art functions within some kind of false universal social context, we have to simply get on with the job of investigating individual examples, one at a time, and collating our data after the fact. Starting with generalisation is just waste of paper.
Eco, Umberto. "The Myth of Superman." Diacritics. Vol. 2, No. 1. (Spring, 1972), 14-22.
Eco's analysis of Superman doesn't bring anything exactly new to the table, though I think we can forgive it for that, since it was written in 1972. The article puts a few specific, if somewhat obvious, features of the Superman cycle in extremely logically-deduced terms, and draws some conclusions that feed directly into central questions within Cultural Studies.
The article covers two basic features of Superman's stories. First, Superman is both mythic and novelistic, and here is where Eco brings up something that is not entirely unoriginal. In his split personality, Superman/Clark Kent embodies, in the first place, the iconic and mythic presence that we can partly define as that which is out of the range of human experience. It may, in kind, resemble human experiences of love and struggle, but it cannot in scale, or else it would lose its mythic quality.
The love affair between Superman and Lois must be nearly cosmic, as we see in Grant Morrison's DC 1,000,000, set several thousand years in the future, and in which Superman lives in the centre of the Sun, is made of living gold, and manages to revive a living, solid-silver Lois to be his eternal lover. The battle against monolithic evil must be logically unwinnable in order to be never-ending, so he can never fully defeat Luthor or Darkseid or Metallo. Superman's edict against murder is helpful, here, because he's powerful enough to not only not have to kill, but to save the lives of defeated villains.
Clark Kent's stories, however, must necessarily be small in scale in order to carry the wish fulfilment of the reader. His experiences must be those that we all are familiar with, so he is (pre-Crisis) consistently turned down by Lois and stymied by his mundane job. The very fact that he wears glasses, a prosthetic compensation for bad eyesight, is a visual signifier of his humanity.
The second, and far complex, feature of the Superman cycle is related to his narrative immortality. Superman does not "consume himself," (153) which means that his actions do not consume time, he "accomplishes a given job [... and] at this point the story ends. [...] If [the story] took Superman up again at the point where he left off, he would have taken a step toward death" (153). His immortality, in the comics, comes with an inability to actually progress as a character.
He cannot be allowed to, for example, clearly enunciate and recall all of his adventures because doing so would imply that he'd had specific experiences that could be documented and numbered; experiences that have a finite number at all would ruin the illusion. Within this timelessness and deathlessness, Eco locates what I've taken to calling the "neverwhen" of American superhero stories, and he describes as "the illusion of a continuous present" (156).
That concept, by whatever name, is very closely related to what Eco takes great pains to explain in complex detail, and which Roy Thomas popularized a term for in 1983: "retroactive continuity" or "retcon." Eco marvels at retcon, at the writer's ability to revisit a previous event and add more and more details to it so as to tell a new story about it. "The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said" (153).
He gives the example of the original (pre-Crisis) Supergirl who arrived on Earth as a teenaged girl, but had been secretly helping Superman in his adventures the whole time even though no one knew of her existence. This arrangement meant that the writers could go "back in time to tell in how many and in which cases she, of whom nothing was [originally] said, participated during those many adventures where we saw Superman alone involved" (154).
Eco's tone implies that this device isn't used anywhere else, but he doesn't outright say that. In truth, something like retcon happens every time a myth or legend is retold by a new voice, the dozens of versions, for example, of the Arthurian Cycle. Obviously, this example isn't the same because there's no official affiliation between the storytellers, as there is in comics, but there's a conceptual commonality that we'd be remiss to fail to mention. This timelessness, this neverwhen, means that superhero stories are endlessly repetitive iterations of themselves. Perhaps each pass at the same story gets a few more details, is a little richer for it, but it really just invokes a simple pleasure response for being told something you already know.
Experience tells us, by the way, that each pass is just as likely to make a dog's breakfast of the whole glorious tapestry as it is to add subtle detail and narrative richness. Retcon easily creates just as many continuity problems as it solves, as we can see from the several times that DC and Marvel comics, the two companies with the longest, continuous narrative threads, have had to "reboot" certain characters (Spider-man, the X-Men, the Legion of Superheroes), or even the entire universe, in the case of DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, which they've now followed-up on twice, with Zero Hour and, just this year, Infinite Crisis. They even tried to entirely avoid the problem of continuity (I.e., time flow and causality) through another mini-series called The Kingdom, in which they introduced an extremely post-modern narrative principle called "hypertime," which would have done away with strict continuity entirely. Because fans didn't like the concept--they read it as a lazy writer's trick--it didn't stick.
Eco initially characterises these endless iterations as wholly negative, which is where a Cultural Studies point of view steps in: "In growing accustomed to the idea of events happening in an ever-continuing present, the reader loses track of the fact that they should develop according to the dictates of time. Losing consciousness of it, he forgets the problems which are at its base, that is, the existence of freedom, the possibility of planning, the necessity of carrying plans out, the sorrow that such planning entails, the responsibility that it implies, and, finally, the existence of an entire human community whose progressiveness is based on making plans" (156)
Obviously, there's something very wrong, here, with the presupposition that stories that move through time the way we do are necessarily superior to the stories that don't, with the assumption that "common" readers and writers are ignorant of the manner in which their narratives function, and with the unargued declaration that this state of affairs is logically anathema to free will. Eco doesn't argue these points very well, and they are very easy to counter, if not fully defeat.
But the subsequent section of the paper makes clear that he's playing Devil's advocate in his condemnation, which, he makes clear, is really a way to point out that it presupposes several things to be "good," such as so-called high-class literature, the "cultured" reader or writer, and the ideology of individualism from which a defence of free will might spring. This is not to argue that these things are necessarily bad either, merely to point out that their goodness has not been defined. The real question we ought to ask is "What is Good?" (163) What do superhero stories classify as "the Good?" From what endlessly repeated moral message do their readers get a habitual pleasure response?
The answer is, again, nothing new to us, but meticulously argued through all of this reasoning. Essentially, Eco points out that most superheroes defend private property as opposed to larger issues of social or political fairness, and that Superman, in particular, could solve most of the world's problems through far less effort than it takes to defeat a few street criminals. Superman addresses the most superficial symptoms while remaining blissfully unaware of the root causes, and therefore is totally unable to affect real change.
What Eco misses is the possibility of symbolic action. Previous to pointing out how the superhero mission statement is something akin to Captain Metropolis' claim that "Somebody has to save the world!" in Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen), he admits that "the pedagogic message of these stories would be [...] highly acceptable, and the same episodes of violence which the various stories are interspersed would appear directed toward this final indictment of evil and the triumph of honest people" (163) if the content of the stories themselves were morally acceptable.
Eco merely attacks the political and moral features of the genre, not the fact of repetition, so if those features can be shown to be morally acceptable, then so is that genre. It is not my job, of course, to either defend or attack superheroes unless the evidence tells me to, and even then, my job is merely descriptive. So what I'm about to suggest is merely for the sake of argument, a new thought that occurred to me as I read Eco's paper, and which occurred to me, ironically, because of his example.
"It is strange that Superman, devoting himself to good deeds, spends enormous amounts of energy organizing benefit performances in order to collect money for orphans and indigents. The paradoxical waste of means (the same energy could be employed to produce directly riches or to modify radically larger situations) never ceases to astound the reader [I.e., Eco himself] who sees Superman forever employed in parochial performances" (164).
"Performance" is absolutely the right word to use, here. We can't ever forget that narratives are a set of events on display. They function to be witnessed. Superman is undoubtedly a cosmic-level character, one who can practically juggle planets and ignite suns at a glance, but his roots are street-level, and the whole genre, created by two Jewish guys living in the poor part of Chicago in the early 30s, retains some of the street. Superheroes don't just act, they perform. Certainly, many of them have the power to do far more than they do, to act for the good in ways beyond beating up street criminals. But the reader does not.
The reader, who gains a pleasure response from watching Superman, among other things, raise money for an orphanage, witnesses his adventures as strings of symbolic acts; they do nothing in themselves (they never even happened!), but through the sheer pleasure of repetition, they might inspire a reader to act similarly. A large portion of the symbolic action of superhero stories instils a pleasure response from violence, and anyone who has watched an action movie, or watched an audience watch an action movie, can attest to the reality of that very physical response. I do not deny this. However, condemning these characters for performing small acts of charity and community support seems rather petty.