Are Our Hero Mythologies Growing More Complex?

Ask any intelligent and discerning moviegoer what they think of films today, and the answer is a variation on a theme: Movies are getting dumber. I can’t argue that point. I concede it completely.

Yet I also see a curious dichotomy going on in 21st century cinema. As movies get bigger and broader (and often sillier), they’re often loaded down with complicated and convoluted mythology. In fact, Hollywood even seems to take a perverse delight in optioning stories that are larger than life, if not downright unfilmable. How is this a world where The Hangover: Part II aims low, and yet adaptations of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower or Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game are real possibilities?

I don’t know, but I find it to be astonishing and confusing. One minute, I’m arguing that audiences crave richer, smarter cinema and the next I find myself insisting that there’s no way audiences can accept a hero like the Green Lantern because his world is too cryptic.  Critics and audiences complain that superhero and comic book movies are feeding and encouraging arrested audience development (“These stories are for kids and teenagers!”), yet if you glance through the backstories of Green Lantern or Namor the Sub-Mariner, you will find a mythology dense enough to be eye-glazing.

Now, this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Ancient mythology is certainly dense and confusing. Our ancestors often reworked or reinterpreted them as they saw fit. Regions that liked a particular hero myth might form a cult around it, and turn it into something radically different than the version their neighbors might know. But even in all its shifting forms, heroic myth is a pretty basic and symbolic thing that works on a primal level. (Insert all Jung and Campbell musings here, as well as all references to phallic symbolism.)

For the most part, we kept to that mold with much of our fiction and folklore, whether it existed in comics or action flicks.  Glance through the early history of Superman, and you’ll see a character of marvelous simplicity. John Wayne and Charles Bronson characters give a line or two about wives they’ve had and battles they’ve fought in, and one has all they need to know. Arnold Schwarzenegger characters are simply products of their service. The Man With No Name is iconic because we know (and want to know) absolutely nothing about him, an angle Wolverine and Boba Fett happily ripped off and worked for decades.

Today, it seems unthinkable to have a character that lacks a name. Now, they come to our screen loaded with an appendix of backstory that has to be referred to … or else. It’s not even confined purely to superhero stories or J.R.R. Tolkien, though they’re the biggest culprits. Now it extends even to Transformers, Star Trek, and Sucker Punch. Remember when people snickered about the glossary that accompanied David Lynch’s Dune? HBO’s Game of Thrones put up an online version of the same thing, and no one laughed. Instead, viewers anxiously flocked to it before returning to the series. They do the same with Wikipedia, and then exhale a sigh of relief that they “now get it” and “can see it again, and enjoy it without trying to piece it together.” Viewers who complain about plot holes are often viciously rounded on. Didn’t you watch the short film that preceded the feature release? Come on, it was on YouTube?  Didn’t you read the tie-in graphic novel or one-shot comic book?  The villain’s backstory was explained there. Character motivation isn’t a flaw of not enough backstory – it’s a result of having so much that it can’t be crammed into one film and one performance. It spills out into other mediums with varying degrees of success and satisfaction. Even now, Universal is seriously considering the possibility of plotting The Dark Tower over a  series of movies and television shows just to try and fill in a portion of that world.

I love rich and complicated stories. My shelves creak with epics both ancient and modern. I eat it up, I analyze it. I know I’m not alone or special for doing so. This is the kind of mentality that has kept genre fiction and film going for decades. We love the sheer expanse, weirdness, and confusion of it all. But maybe stories are just becoming too big to be really compelling onscreen. When our ancestors flocked to cult cities to commune with heroes real and imagined, they didn’t have to do research first.  Should audiences have to “read up” before they can enjoy a film or television series? And what happens if they miss an installment?  Should they be penalized by being lost, confused, and left behind as the plot and characters march grimly onward?

Again, I don’t want stupid movies and dumbed-down heroes (once again, let’s marvel that this stuff exists in a world alongside cardboard rom-com characters), and I love the potential that multiple media platforms offer. In an ever-shrinking world, it’s fascinating that we can have a global cult of Ned Stark or Roland Deschain as everyone eagerly devours the bits and pieces of scattered story. Yet I can’t help but wonder if a good story – the best kind of story – is one that’s self-contained and dependent only on the imagery within its frames or pages. The Man With No Name told me all I needed to know with one flip of his serape. Is it a strength or a weakness that so many of today’s heroes can’t do the same?