Goodbye, Fortress of Solitude

When I was growing up, one of my secret favorite books was Children of the Atom, a 1953 think-piece of a novel about a group of children born exceptionally intelligent after their parents are involved in a nuclear plant accident. The children must pass for normal as best they can until a caring psychiatrist intervenes and establishes a special, separate school where these boys and girls can be just as mad-brilliant as they want to be. As you might guess, it ends in tears, and though I don't remember the details, I'm pretty sure an angry torch-wielding mob is involved.

Looking back on it, my childish identifactory love of this book--"But that's me! I'm misunderstood and do better on tests than my peers too!"-- now prompts two uneasy realizations. One, I was vain as all hell as a preteen; participation in my elementary school Junior Great Books Club does not a mutant genius make. Two, I don't think I can love superheroes any more.

Of the many reasons that Alias crapped out in its final season, Sydney Bristow's pregnancy probably isn't the worst of it, nor can we really blame Angel's fall on the appearance of Connor, as much as we might like to. But there's no getting around the fact that, for the CIA super-spy and soulful vampire alike, progeny is a problem. If both shows depend on the conceit that the protagonist is singled out from millions by destiny, the Powers that Be, or Project Christmas, the question of how to handle the abilities of their genetic offspring starts to get creepy. Case in point: The Incredibles. Sure, it's Pixar and it's quippy, but it's also a logical first step on the path to eugenics and fascism. The "If everyone is special, then no one is" catchphrase, not to mention the entire plot of the movie, seems like Brad Bird's lengthy attack on the culture of child-affirmation via Barney singalong. And that's fine, I guess, if you enjoy pointing out to children how they're not really as great as they think they are, but where does that leave us?

If you're me, at a 8:30 Saturday showing of X-Men: The Last Stand (thanks, Peter!). X-3 concerns the transformation of various characters from one state to another--mutant to human, child to woman, regular psychic to psycho psychic--and in so doing tries to say things about the ways that people choose to conceal or reveal their true natures (or what they understand to be their true natures.) Thus, even more overtly than many other superhero narratives, X-Men works the race-passing metaphor until poor old Nella Larsen is limp as a noodle. Some of the mutants, by virtue of being blue or winged, can be visually identified as Other, while others just periodically pop in black contacts and move things with their minds but otherwise look "normal." (As an aside, I couldn't shake the feeling, perhaps enhanced by the San Francisco setting, that at least half of the "evil" mutants appeared to be former Berkeley grad students). In mentoring the flock of confused mutants that gravitate to either the ivied halls of Xavier's School for the Gifted or the redwood forest of Magneto's Tent City of the Pierced, the two surrogate fathers take different positions on how their "children" should integrate themselves into the world at large. But they both agree, and the movie does too, that their charges are superiorly special. That may be true--who wouldn't prefer self-healing skin--but the thing is, the real-world conditions that mutancy is a metaphor for are neither superior, nor special, nor necessarily genetically coded. Describing social difference in the science lab, as Children of the Atom also tried to do, tends to make a dangerous leap from constructivism to essentialism.

The movie's central conceit is the invention of a "cure" that polarizes the mutant community/race/species/what-have-you, with some characters defiantly reveling in their difference and others desperately eager to erase that genetic distinction. So the well-known philosopher Brett Ratner's question is: Is the ability to conjure mist at will, say, a way of expressing who you really are? Does your biology, or the way your biology is perceived, determine what you are for yourself inside of your own head? Or is there some essential part of your identity that transcends both societal category and DNA coding (as Something New would have it)?

But actually, my abandonment of superheroes has less to do with any possible answers to these questions than it does with the questions themselves. The notion that there is this kind of hidden best self, ready to be revealed only when greatly needed (unless you're Faith or something) isn't the way I want my children to understand identity. Do I want to tell them that any difference, real or imagined, between themselves and their peers is something to be gnawed over in private, pent up in a closet until they start classes at Metropolis University? Or do I want to make them start kindergarten with their capes and tights on?

This where I realize that being a parent changes things, lots of things, in ways I never would have understood before. Sure, my kids have the right to fantasize that they are disgruntled children of the atom, and probably will. But I don't get to think that way any more. I'm trying my damndest to raise citizens of the world, and step one of that endeavour as I understand it is to rewrite the narrative of exceptionalism that governs superhero fantasies and Bush foreign policy alike. That's why the argument that "parents are the real superheroes" is as flawed as "we don't condone torture, because we're Americans." The condition of being a parent, or of being an American, is terrifyingly important, powerful, weighty and more. And in that, it is utterly ordinary, because that is also the conditions of being human in general.

I'm really going to miss you, Buffy.