Our elders used to hand down the collective wisdom of our cultures; have superhero movies taken their place?

Prior to modern usage robbing the word of its original meaning, “myth” and its derivatives stood for something else entirely.

“Myth” didn’t mean something patently untrue, but the Truth as seen through the eyes of a specific culture. It was the framework by which people viewed the world and their place in it. The stories in a body of myths expounded the virtues and warned about the vices that defined that particular culture. They were lessons that taught us about ourselves.

They were the collective wisdom of elders, handed down the generations through stories that told you who you are and where you were going.

Cultures evolve, and so do their mythologies. In today’s global village, where mass media and pop culture sweep across the world at a speed and with an intensity of influence never seen before, it would seem that our methods of disseminating myths have also evolved.

Beware when you fight monsters lest you become one yourself ... the Batman movies, like the comic books (below, left: Arkham Asylum), have examined this issue in great length.

Television and movies have taken over the oral traditions of yesteryear. They’re creating their own universal myths that almost everybody who is plugged in to the globalised village can relate to.

Some of these new mythologies are inspired from older sources – for instance, the farmboy who goes on a series of tests and quests to become something more, as we saw with Luke Skywalker, has occasionally been compared with the hero’s journey that mythology professor and writer Joseph Campbell wrote about.

But when it comes to using metaphors and symbols to tell the stories that help us define ourselves, there is one particular popular medium that has been doing it for decades without any recognition or accolade: Comics!

Crazy? Look at Superman. He’s the ultimate personification of all those noble virtues that we’d like to aspire to. He does good, and strives to do good, without taking the pragmatic or easy way out. He’s Parsifal, a Paladin, the last Boy Scout.

And because our mythic heroes merely reflect the society they exist in, look at the beating he’s taken in recent years at the hands of darker heroes like the Batman.

The mutants of the X-Men can be seen as representative of the alienated phase almost every adolescent goes through, and the hope that they’re misunderstood because of a certain degree of envy from the people who just don’t get them.

Yep, comics are not just teenaged boy power fantasies (though some of them are). They’re telling us new stories that define us.

In the 1980s, a group of writers began to see that, which explains the series of titles that redefined the comic-book landscape – Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Rick Veitch’s The One, just about everything that Alan Moore churned out.

Indeed, Moore’s Miracleman took it to the extreme in its dénouement – if there were a group of super-powered beings, how would mere mortals regard them, and how would they go about saving us from ourselves?

Forget The Watchmen and V for Vendetta; to my mind, it’s Moore’s best work.

All this came to mind as I watched Iron Man recently. Here we have a story of the healing power of repentance and ultimately, redemption. And of course, it has fantastic hardware, mind-blowing special effects and engaging dialogue between Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts.

And Ang Lee’s Hulk, just as it was with the comic, was about the tension between the Freudian id within all of us, and the ego and superego. And how dangerous it is to unfetter and unleash that primal force.

The Batman movies (the first two Tim Burton ones and the recent Batman Begins, not those awful ones whose names I don’t even want to remember) were about how one man can make a difference, but does so on the edge.

A Nietzschean warning there – beware when you fight monsters lest you become one yourself.

Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s 1989 “graphic novel” (comic-book to the rest of us) Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth took that examination to its extreme: What’s the difference between the Batman and all those psychotic criminals he’d sent to that mental institution for the criminally-insane?

Or, how sane is a man so obsessed with fighting crime, and does so dressed up as a bat?

Hellboy asked an important question in the 2004 cinematic version: What makes a man a man? ... Is it his origins?

The Spider-Manmovies are a perfect example of Hollywood tampering with the ‘soundness’ of decades-old mythologies contained in the comic books.

Then answered it: It’s the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

If comics have been the standard-bearer for the creation of new myths over the last few decades, movies about comic-book heroes have slowly been invading this space.

Movies have certain advantages – it’s more socially-acceptable to watch a movie about Superman than it is to read a comic about him. Everyone watches movies, but only geeks and nerds read comics.

Also, the combination of literature and sequential art in comics may be too daunting for many who prefer to be spoonfed their entertainment.

And of course, all the special effects help too.

But the problem is, as Hollywood brings more comic-book heroes to the silver screen, they’re tampering with the “soundness” of decades-old mythologies.

The Spider-Man movies are a perfect example. Peter Parker and his alter ego had a certain resonance with a lot of readers – the socially-inept geek (like many of us) who can transform into a chick-attracting hero. Which boy never had such a fantasy?

But in Hollywood’s hands, and for good reason too, some things were changed. Movie-only fans will never know the tragedy of Gwen Stacy, Peter’s childhood sweetheart who was thrown off a bridge by the Green Goblin.

Spider-Man failed to save her. And had to live with his failure gnawing at him.

Suddenly, some of the universal truths of these new bodies of myth have been slashed in two. As the silver screen popularises these modern myths for mass consumption, we’re increasingly seeing a division, a difference between what defines one set of consumers from the other.

Or perhaps, universal truths can evolve, too. Hopefully, this would lead to diversity and not divisiveness.

And yes, I can’t wait for The Incredible Hulk either! Will it divide anew, or will it create a deeper understanding of that particular mythic lesson?

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