On Becoming a Super - Part 1
February 29, 2020

     My son is obsessed with Spiderman.  His third birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and he's been reminding us daily for several weeks now that (1) he is Spiderman, (2) he wants a Spiderman cake, and (3) he wants some tools so he can help Daddy with projects around the farm.  Okay, so the third one is not really related to Spiderman, as far as I can tell, but you can see how the kid's mind works.  At this point, he's started running both my husband and me (and sometimes my mom or dad, and anyone else who will listen) through a shorthand drill about what he expects for his upcoming big day: he faces us squarely, cocks his head to one side, points his finger and says, "Spiderman, tools" – as if he's reminding a miniature, imaginary spouse of the two things he needs from the grocery store.  This will be a fun birthday for him.

     Before he landed on Spiderman, Koen was telling us for weeks that he was "a Thuper" – meaning he was a Super, a la The Incredibles.  Now he can actually say the "hero" part too (though still with some difficulty), but before he just left it at "Thuper," raising one fist straight up in the air to make sure we got the point.  And he found a ready audience for his regular self-pronouncements.  I happily assured him, both before and after he became Spiderman, "Yes, Bubba, you are a Super!"

     It's pretty easy for a boy in our culture to find himself in a swirl of superhero air, so I think Koen has picked some of this up from beyond our home.   But my oldest daughter, Emma, has been watching a lot of superhero movies lately – more than her usual fare – so Koen has gotten some reinforcement from that, I'm sure.  In fact, I can trace the switch from generic "Thuper" to "Spiderman" to my husband's recording of the latest Spiderman movie for Emma earlier this month.  And while we limit Emma's TV time, she's still probably watched the movie three times in the last few weeks, and the younger kids naturally watch it with her (though they usually don't sit through the whole thing, thank goodness).  She's used up most of her TV credits on that and a spate of other movies in the superhero genre, including a few featuring girls and women as the superheroes.  

      So I've indulged her in this, yes, but it's also given me occasion to think about superhero stories in a new light – new to me, anyway (they're actually ancient, archetypal).  Now that I've considered them, I see that superhero stories are not just mindless cultural garbage, an excuse for Hollywood to get a lot of BANG! and BOOM! on the screen and at the box office.  Okay, maybe some of them are mostly just about BANG! and BOOM! and ticket sales.  But some of them – especially the ones that weren't giant box office hits – are really well done, depicting unlikely heroes stumbling upon and then growing into their superpowers and developing them to fight the villains and evildoers.

    I like the way the main character in Monsters Versus Aliens – a young woman whose entire existence, at the beginning of the story, revolves around her arrogant and self-centered fianceˊ – grows, very literally, into a larger-than-life figure who takes on the alien (and his clones) threatening to take over Earth.  She defeats the evil alien with help from her small army of misfit "monsters" and then turns around and dumps that arrogant, self-centered fianceˊ.  I also like the way the little cyborg girl with a human brain in Alita Battle Angel develops her physical powers in order to recover her forgotten past and prepare herself to take on the cruel overlord of her society.  It didn't hurt that when I asked Emma why she liked this movie so much, she answered, "It shows how girls can become strong and beat the bad guys," and then proceeded to practice some martial arts moves. 

     Yes, Baby.  They can.  They can, indeed.