George Reeves

George Reeves died, and the details of his death were immediately fashioned into legend. The newspaper headline read "Superman Kills Self," conflating the man with one of his roles. It was, of course, the role that defined his career, but he didn't necessarily want it to define his life. Nonetheless, to this day The Adventures of Superman has a devoted following, and the death of its star is still cause for speculation.



Part of the reason people still talk about it is the so-called "Superman Curse." Supposedly, if you're involved in the production of Superman television or movies, you're doomed. The Unexplained Mysteries (dot com) has a page devoted to the curse. The Superman Homepage offers a page of "common superman misconceptions" related to Superman, which includes sections on Reeves' death and on the curse. Lou Anders writes an article about it in The Man from Krypton: A Closer Look at Superman. The article is titled "A Word of Warning for Brandon Routh," and was written prior to Superman Returns. It's a curiously nonsensical article, which focuses far more on Keanu Reeves than one would think an essay on Superman should focus on a person who has never played Superman (his role in The Matrix notwithstanding). It does, however, have this little bit:



"...it can't be glossed over that it was this injury (to Christopher Reeve) which began the idle speculation that something supernatural existed called the Superman curse. Perhaps man isn't meant to reach too high, the thinking goes, and daring to take on the role of such a super man tempts the gods too much."



I'm tempted not to note here that Hugo Danner, protagonist of Gladiator and often-cited inspiration for Superman, died while tempting the "gods" by cursing them. He's struck by lightning.



Anyway, Greg Hatcher writes about George Reeves' death on Comic Book Resources.

Here's a page about George Reeves' ghost haunting the house where he died, which I don't think I'd encountered before.

The Straight Dope tackles the subject here.

There's a lot more to this. A book was written about it: Hollywood Kryptonite: The Lady, the Bulldog, and the Death of Superman. This book seems to have been the primary inspiration for Hollywoodland, a film that creates a fictional detective to investigate the case. The book pretty much goes for a murder verdict, the film concludes suicide. The book also goes over a lot of the rumors about Reeves.

There's so much more to this. The rumors persist. In her recent Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine, Valerie D'Orazio writes about her contemplation of suicide: "Oh, how was I going to do it? Window. Sixth floor. I think George Reeves died like that, no? Took LSD, thought he was really Superman? or was that an urban legend?"

I could link to websites all day, but this seems to cover the important facets.

September 11

There's a book called The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi. It's a book about what the American responses to 9/11 revealed about us as a nation. It's also largely about the myths we tell to get us through crisis. These myths aren't always healthy, as Faludi demonstrates with overwhelming evidence. It's fascinating.

A while back I posted some fan art of Superman grimmacing in pain because of his impotence in the face of the attacks on the world trade center. Here's some more.

It's called 'And Where the Hell Was Superman?' by Hardy Ecke. It seems to be on display in DC somewhere, but my information may be out of date.

Ecke explains the picture on his website: What causes me to fix the catastrophe in a painting is not that an attack on the civilized world is surrounded by unanswered questions, but insted that the saviour of the world became too tired to protect America from evil anymore....A Rambo and a McClane with all the other Hollywood comics cannot rescue the world because if they cannot reach victory with the brain they cannot succeed with the sword.

It's an interesting image, though I don't think it conveys the ideas (at least to me) that he wanted it to convey. I see in this painting an image of a symbol of heroism that is dated and tire, one that can no longer save us, which is evidently what he wanted to paint. But maybe my concept of Superman is different from his. Superman is different that Rambo and John McClane--both reference in his explanation. These guys are all muscle and tactics. Superman is violent, to be sure, but he stands for something more.

This is from Gregoy McNeill, writing on the Superman Homepage: Since then [9/11], our concept of what a hero is has changed. Living with the fear of future terrorist attacks and uncertainity has made us ask "Where's Superman?" The truth is he does exist. It's not the powers nor costume that defines Superman, it's the morals. Superman has evolved from the embodiment of America to what we as human beings can strive to become if we can constructively use our talents and potential in a positve light....All of us are superheroes when we take a stand against injustice. All it requires us to have is courage and faith. Superman is within us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we want to use it.

I think Superman as a moral exemplar is a more common conception than Superman as a brute. There's a therapeutic technique named for him, "What Would Superman Do?"; an English professor counsels the same thought exercise, There's Valerie D'Orazio's blog, Occasional Superheroine, where she titles a post, "Why Superman not Telling a Lie Had Such an Impact on My Life." She ends the post with the question, what would Superman do? (it's at the bottom of the page here). A Google search of "What would superman do" reveals over 5000 hits, though not all of those are immediately relevant, they're interesting.

And I return, as so often, to All Star Superman. A running theme is Brain Vs. Brawn, Luthor vs. Superman. In Issue 12, Morrison reverses it, when a weakened and dying Superman outsmarts Luthor and says, "Brain beats brawn every time," a line Luthor uttered several issues earlier (Issue 1, maybe). Of course, Superman is punching Luthor when he says it.

but back to Terror Dream...Faludi titles a chapter "The Return of Superman." This book would have been published about a year after the film Superman Returns. There's a lot to the book, about how 9/11 affected women in particular. The chapter relevant here is about how we had to search for heroes after the attacks. When none presented themselves in an obvious manner, we (meaning, largely, the media and government) had to invent them. We invented them in a mold that we had long held to be valuable and glorious, a mold cast on cowboys and superheroes. Into that mold stepped Bush and his cabinet, Giuliani, and others.

Also cast in that mold were the men on United 93. We sought evidence that the mold fit, and we found it in statements such as this one, spoken of Lou Nacke on Dateline: "When he was a little boy, he love Superman. And he'd actually had a cape on and went through a glass window pretending to be Superman." He also had a tattoo on his shoulder. So he must have been a hero.

I do not question Nacke's heroism. Nobody really knows what happened on that plane. When Congress tried to award medals to four of the men, whom the media had decided were the heroes who overthrew the highjackers, others protested. Eventually, all the passengers on the flight were given posthumous medals. Lots of other people, too.

Faluid writes that this search for heroes and the apotheosization of them reveals "a deep cultural unease beneath the hero worship." We were constantly looking for new heroes after attacks that "left us with little in the way of ongoing chronicle or ennobling narrative. So a narrative was created and populated with pasteboard protagonists whose exploits would exist almost entirely within the realm of American archetype and American fantasy. There was a danger to being honored with such manufactured laurels, particularly for the tragedy's survivors; for the fantasy to hold, citizens would have to stay in character, never mind that their roles were constrained and deforming, never mind that the command performance prevented them from expressing what they really had witnessed and suffered that day."

There's a danger in casting real people as imaginary characters. They can never deliver fully on the promise of the role. None of these people is Superman (neither, seven years later, was Obama), who would have saved the day. That's why the moral example is so much more important than the warrior. Faluid calls superhero stories the fantasies of adolescent boys, but that only refers to the power the character possesses. If the Superman who returned after 9/11 had been the embodiment of morality instead of the misguided muscle of the governmental reaction, things would have been different indeed.

Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine

Valerie D'Orazio began this book as a series of entries on a blog, called "Goodbye to Comics." She expanded and revised these to the book Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine, which is also the title of a blog she writes. The book is a memoir, so it's about her life, but it's also about superheroes, the comics industry, and sex--not just the kind of sex you have, but the kind that's part of your biology. The part that informs but doesn't define your gender, if that makes sense.




You might not get that from the cover, which features a perky young woman with bright red hair and a cape. It looks innocent. The story inside is anything but. This is about D'Orazio's life in all its difficulties. This makes it a hard book to review, since I'm the last person to know anything about the issues with which the author has had to contend throughout her life. It begins with a childhood of abuse by her bodybuilder father and moves through a series of rejections, sexual harassments, drug difficulties.






Scholars don't like to deal directly with such things. They're difficult topics, so most of us abstract the material to make it more comfortable. It would be easy to just write about the parts where D'Orazio discusses Superman and other superheroes and be done with it. But that would do the book a disservice. It's a good book, and deserves to be addressed on its own terms.






There may be more thorough accounts of the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of sexual harassment that occur in the work place, but I haven't read them. In this book, D'Orazio writes about what it was like to deal with harassment in all of its forms at DC Comics in New York, and it's horrific. I can't imagine it. I'm a man, and men's bodies don't display their sexuality in the way that women's bodies do--whether they want to or not. They have to try to hide it. I sympathize when D'Orazio writes about this, though I cannot empathize. I don't have the experience or the mindset. Men do these sorts of things to women every day--the staring, the offhand comments, the innuendo, the "innocent" requests for dinner, the denial of impropriety, and whatnot. The stress is immeasurable, since the harassment saturates every aspect of the woman's life and work. Is she really being passed up for a promotion because she's not good at her job, or is it because she won't agree to have dinner with the supervisor? No one should have to ask themselves that question. D'Orazio refers to it as unprofessional, when it's actually criminal.





There's a whole lot more to this story. That level of interaction with men follows her throughout her life. She doesn't flinch from describing it, nor from describing herself in less than flattering terms. She does things that, well, aren't so smart. She's the first to admit it, and she often uses a line from a Wonder Woman comic to drive home the point. She has a "fuckitup" button.





And this is where the story gets interesting for me as a scholar who's writing about the uses to which people put the stories that are important to them. She tells her tale, the story of her life, in terms of superheroes. Not merely comic books, either. She refers to Wonder Woman a lot, and Catwoman. D'Orazio has internalized these characters, as well as others such as Superman and Batman. There's a story of Phoenix, from Uncanny X-Men 207, that's also very important to her. Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine is the story of a woman's life as read through superheroes. In this, it is extremely valuable for me.

I wonder...how much of this--of the reading of her life in terms of comic book charactes--actually occurred at the time and how much of it is part of the process of writing the Memoirs?

If anyone wants to really demonstrate the power of literature in a person's life, all they need to do is point to this book. If one were cynical, one might also use it to demonstrate the negative impact of comics, but to do so would require a gross misreading of the book and the people who populate it--not to mention comics themselves. Comics aren't the problem, instead they provide D'Orazio with a way to understand herself and her troubles. And wow, she's got some troubles. Or had. There's a happy ending.




I've been following her blog, so that wasn't a surprise to me. What was a surprise is the "Second Self" that D'Orazio develops first as a defense mechanism against abuse but that later becomes her conscience, her shadow self, her failures, and ultimately, it seems, her salvation. She rejects the second self (she never refers to it as her secret identity or alter-ego, as one might have expected, and I think it's a wise choice; to do so would be to force us to read it as acomic book trope, which would reduce it in ways that I don't think are appropriate, especially considering how the book ends) at first, which seems to be a bad idea. But this is not a book about love, or self-love, or anything like that. It's more about acceptance: of her problems as things she can't ignore, of herself as a person who has troubles but can overcome them, of the imperfection of the world and the ability to change parts of it--including herself.






It's also about telling her story. She's told not to so often, and listens, that the few times she does tell it early on (about the abuse and harassment), it's basically too late. She needs to tell her whole story in order for it to be an effective strategy in her life, and that's what this book is (well, as much of the whole as anyone can ever tell).










Her blog has changed recently, reflecting that the phase of her life chronicled here is well past. It's more about archetypes, symbolism, and specific superheroes now than anything else. Still interesting, though, just like the book. But the picture from the cover of the book that used to be the masthead of the blog, that's gone.