Wanna make me disappear? Start preaching about superheroes or star wars.
Superheroes are a great symptom of the diseases caused by forces unimaginable to previous cultures. (At least previous western cultures. Don’t believe me? Spend some time reading epics—especially the epic similes where the writer tries to make his epic characters into something approaching a super-hero. Radiation, induction, etc. ain’t there).
The monsters, we all know, encapsulate the devastation that most of the major narratives won’t own up to. We could do worse than tattoing Adrienne Rich’s “Power” on one arm and a choice couplet or three from Bruce Cockburn’s “Call it Democracy” on the other, then look at them in decisive moments. Maybe then we could move away from South Detroit and stop believing the myth of the individual super-hero chosen from the “street-light people” . . . that sketchy successor to bs about some wealthy con-artist who ‘built’ something that easily required the labor of hundreds of craftspeople and burns through a staff to maintain. I don’t even have to look to find a blurb from “American historical houses” about some $65 million house {really, really not the correct word] that “has undergone a masterful and complete renovation by its most recent steward . . .” Oooh, the buzzwords of gratitude and manifesting—which work to launder into something aspirational the exploitation and grift it takes to get access to financing $65 million.
Then there’s the ethical quagmire hiding in the definitions of the word “worship.” During the Old English period, the term adds “the possession of high rank or position” to the originary descriptive meaning of “the condition of being held in or of deserving esteem, honour, or repute” (OED). Confusing individual or characteristing esteem with institutionally- or socially-transferred position will become the special conjuring trick of hagiography and biography performed in the Walter Isaacson school.
What should produce ‘worship’ has long been a vexed issue involving “Krafte”—”the mysterious, dynamic, purpose-seeking forces, the interplay of which constitutes all movement and growth,” as Isaiah Berlin tried to define what he thought it meant to Herder (one of the first to try to come to terms with the newly emerging gotterfunken). Related to nyamakala, the West African concept that links the forging of words to the forging of metals, the shaping of individuals and society to “the fire inside me,” as Onyesonwu puts it in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, Krafte got messed around, split up, and part of it locked up inside away from some of the other parts so that the connection between the meaning Prometheus—forethought and his action—fire-stealer—seems far-fetched in ways it wouldn’t to someone who “could have been the son of Ogun, the goddess of metal.” At the edges of the real and the realizable the spirits and the forces appear: the helpers or foes for whom we have imagined and communicated recognizable and memorable guises.
And that gets us close to what this post is kind of about: the countercultural potential of fairies. and the likelihood that Zeus, or God, for that matter, is just a fairy with a huge public relations retinue (and a large contingent of legal fixers on the back-end since almost all of their stories involve sexaul aggression of some sort). Why is it worth it to turn some random backwater divinity into a “supreme being," or King of Pop, or . . .? Because metastizing possible divinity into one deity limits the possibility of other people to imagine an alternative supernatural or future.
And done well and powerfully, you can inform people’s dreams and visions. For example, when Volkswagen wanted to sell people on remote keyless ignition in 2011 or so, their ad agency cooked up this:
Both super annoying and super revealing in how it leverages Star Wars (the force) to sell VW (as a 19th century person, I can’t help but see this as Vital Warmth and Force yet again, but oh well). Blithely assuming that our fantasies of power and evil matter more than emotional connection and food, this ad reveals that those fantasies of the force—at least the corporate ones—can only be fulfilled through fraud and cosplay.
[The responses to this ad would be amusing if they didn’t reveal an amazing lack of critical thinking and storyboarding skills even amongst so-called creatives. Like, everyone presumes the kid’s a boy. But look at the kid’s room. Suggesting the kid’s a girl, or girl-identifying is simultaneously the most interesting and horrifying thing about the ad because of how the ad rejects the maternal for the corporate patriarchalism that is Darthy Vader ahem: vater, father.]
Responding to Michael Jackson’s “you know the force has a lot of power” on “Don’t Stop til You Get Enough,” Joe Jackson snarls on “TV Age,” “You know the force has a lot of power, but what makes you think it gives a shit about you?” It’s a great question with an elaborate answer neatly tied to all of the energies spent to form consumer identities in the TV Age. Flipping aside that Adorno & Horkheimer disdain for the consumer could become a recognition of how much effort goes into manufacturing “ordinary people” who could believe that “everyone wants to be the villain,” as one dude insisted after a class discussion on the VW Force ad. Ain’t much of a stretch to get to our c ontemporary political circumstances.
It’s amazing how much energy and force has been spent on convincing us that our imaginations are useless because the real power flows through corpo-gadgets like remote keyless ignition or the supposedly full-self-driving mode of our mad max fantasy incel caminos. (Thus Robin Williams’s Peter Banning in Hook seems so quaint) But the whole thing is a con, since the more appropriate text would be Tonyi Onyebuchi’s Goliath since Elon and the boys see themselves off this hell-rock.
Imagining fairies, though, argues Sir Ronald Hutton, seems to have been a home-grown response to the imposition of orthodox control of the imagination. Against the routinization of imagination which says this is how it is, and thus shall it ever be, the fairie godmother provides another way to, as Daniel Dennett argues, exercise “the fundamental purpose of brains is to produce future” (qtd. in Fictional Minds 90). Alan Palmer then quotes Edward Reed: “Cognition is neither copying nor constructing the world. Cognition is, instead, the process that keeps us active, changing creatures in touch with an eventful, changing world” (qtd. in FM 90).
Maybe we could move beyond anthropomorphic fairies: Knowing that crows can count out load, Orcas can sink boats because they are bored, and trees communicate through their roots, maybe we can reinsert the pathetic fallacy into a transformed sort of personification. The result would be a narratively-experienced feeling for the other types of sentient beings that our narratives and practices subjugated in ways that tried to justify and assuage our guilt for a way of life erected on, as Tracy Chapmen sings, “The Rape of the World.” Bakhtin suggests, after all, that narrative need not be narrator-dominated: “when characters are not objects of authorial discourse but subjects of their own, they are not exhausted by the usual functions of characterization and plot development” (qtd. in FM 156).
The moral force of characterization and plot development has worked to normalize through indirect shaming, othering, and validation of a range of narrative identities and possibilities. The existence of a possibly gay or feminist character in Star Wars or a superhero film merely confirms the lack of artists and musicians. The plots that seem like a slightly disguised review of an AP or General Education history course strongly suggest the underlying colonialist template and values. Tell me more about the Ewoks . . . George Lucas set up a template for high-school identity in American Graffiti and does a similar lock-down in the Star Wars . . . canon. [For all of us who lived through the canon wars when the point was to destroy the canon, the vehemence with which people have extended it to, say Star v the Forces of Evil [I WANT a ponyhead t-shirt] is almost as disheartening as learning that Karl Rove became the best Foucauldian of them all.]
But, if the trope of the Fairy Queen, as Ronald Hutton thinks, comes from counter-cultural resistance, maybe we can use that practice. And perhaps examples aren’t that far away from us. Not of a fantasy-world whose actuality sucked. I’ve read, though it’s been awhile, almost every weekend lifestyle section that the Chicago Tribune published in the 1950s along with a whole lotta front pages. (Was looking for info about Mary Coyle Chase). Paranoia, misogyny, racism as basic editorial policy behind every, EVERY Saturday for three years there being a feature article about a young woman who’d given up a career to be a fulfilled (with Thalidomide?) housewife. I Love Lucy was protest. Doris and Rock (& Doris and John Raitt in Pajama Game) were social engineering.
Maybe go a little further back, or into different areas: say, Emily Dickinson’s garden or the roads William Stafford drove, or Adrienne Rich’s wreckage. “Publication” is still the “auction of the mind of man.” And the “truth” must still be communicated by “circuit lies.” And some people will need a “book and a box of tools.” And the circulation could be in the small dozens or hundreds . ..
Thanks for affirming my opinion of Star Wars. It always seemed like a load of patriarchal BS to me.