Cool concept - the Dark Knight is the perfect example of the vigilante personality type, but his version is motivated by good perhaps even more than revenge.
This documentary was originally aired on the History Channel, but I found it at Top Documentary Films.
Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are both excellent sources of entertainment, but they also offer a complex and interesting dissection of a man who learned to use his own fear against criminals.
Delve into the world of Batman and the vigilante justice that he brought to the city of Gotham. Batman is a man who, after experiencing great tragedy, devotes his life to an ideal – but what happens when one man takes on the evil underworld alone?
Examine why Batman is who he is – and explore how a boy scarred by tragedy becomes a symbol of hope to everyone else.
Not only does this documentary investigate the mental attitude of the mysterious caped crusader along with selective interviews from various expert, but also put some brilliant resemblances between the Batman and Theodore Roosevelt.
Additionally, the filmmakers shows how spiritual iconography greatly influenced the development of the Batman character.
Aside from that, it includes a short insight inside the motivating force that drives other infamous figures such as the Catwoman and the Joker. Explore why the history of the Cape Crusader and discover how a kid scarred by traumatic event turns into a symbol of hope for City of Gotham.
Ryan has put up an interesting article at his Examiner blog on Metaphysical Spirituality. He writes this time about the need for Superheroes - a topic I have mentioned here in the past. I have argued that "super human" beings - mostly men, with a few exceptions - offer terribly unreal expectations for masculinity.
Ryan argues the other side - that superheroes, Superman in particular, offer us an ideal to strive toward, a mortal 'God' with human feelings.
Seriously, though, we need to get rid of that wearing his underwear on the outside of his tights thing - that just ain't manly.
Here is a taste.
Superman has remained the brightest star in comics for over 70 years not only because he was the first and greatest superhero, but because he represents the highest human potential. Over the last 70 years institutions have changed, politics have changed, governments have changed, cultures have changed, but Superman has remained constant. He remains the idealized human being absent of any moral or spiritual flaws. Superman is human perfection incarnate and represents the evolutionary impulse in human beings to become better, more complex, more ethical, more spiritual, more loving, more compassionate, and more whole. He invites us to evolve. He invites us to become like him—to become a superhero.
Of course, we can’t match the Man of Steel’s physical superpowers (although in the future who knows?), but we can aspire to match his spiritual superpowers. To live up to our fullest human expression would indeed be superheroic. To treat one’s life with the serious care and concern necessary to develop one’s self along many of the major lines of development from moral, spiritual, emotional, cognitive, even kinesthetic, is an engagement with the world on such an intimate level that one not only transforms one’s self, but changes the world as well. What Superman suggests is fully alive human beings engaged in the world at a high level of consciousness. The world needs us to be evolutionaries.
Eivind Skjellum, the man behind Masculinity Movies, offers an in-depth and thoughtful review of the major ideas in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991), starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges in a very different kind of "buddy film."
This is one of my favorite films - even though the final shot just before the credits roles is terribly annoying and not fitting the film that preceded it. Bridges and Williams are perfect for these roles and have great chemistry.
Self-obsessed New York shock jock Jack Lucas is about to hit it big as a TV celebrity when disaster strikes and one of his radio listeners goes on a killing spree. He is plunged into a dark night of the soul from which he can recover only through a process of redemption. His chance for healing comes along when Perry, a deranged man who lost his wife to mentioned radio listener, sets his eyes on him and identifies him as "the one", the man chosen to reclaim the Holy Grail. The ensuing journey weaves Jack and Perry's worlds together and promises psychological healing for the both of them. But before they can be released from their respective private hells, they must join forces to vanquish the demonic Red Knight who keeps them there.
Skjellum uses the archetypal approach of Jungian analyst Robert Johnson (who wrote a short book on the Fisher King myth) as the foundation for his explication - but even if you are not familiar with Jungian approaches to masculinity, this article provides background to the Percival myth for those not familiar with the story of the Fisher King and the Holy Grail.
Right out of Arthurian lore comes the famous Fisher King myth, a story about a wounded masculine feeling function and the subsequent healing of it by a fool. It comes in many forms, but the version told by Perry in this movie starts with a prince who has to sleep alone in a forest to prove he can be King.
Alone by himself at night, he is visited by a sacred vision of a fire with a holy Grail in it. A voice tells him that he shall be the keeper of the Grail that he may heal the hearts of men.
The young prince is overcome by feelings of grandiosity and reaches in to grab it. The Grail disappears and the boy’s hand is left terribly wounded. Another version of the same myth leaves him with an arrow through his testicles.
In all versions of the story, the wound grows deeper as the years pass, and the boy – now King – knows by consequence no joy or love in his life. He is always miserable. He begins to die.
The Fisher King Wound in Modern Man
I want to examine the wound itself before digging into the movie’s plot. In his short book on the Fisher King myth, Robert A Johnson talks about this wound as “probably the most common and painful wound which occurs in our Western world”. Robert A Johnson explains to us that it is a wound “in the male, generative, creative part of his being” and that it “affects every sense of value in his psychological structure”.
So how does the wound appear? The playful, active boy who is told to sit down and be quiet receives a shock (wound) to a nervous system that only seconds ago was so alive. The mother who shames her son’s sexuality “shoots an arrow through his testicles” and wounds his sexual feeling function. A son who requests his father’s blessing and receives only his aloofness and temper ends up distrusting men and his own masculinity and a deep wound cuts through his psyche (Robert Bly refers to this as the father’s axe blow).
If the wound were only an issue of family systems gone wrong, maybe we wouldn’t be so ill off. Alas, the weapons by which the wounds are inflicted are woven into the very fabric of our society, leaving us scarred all over by the time we turn twenty. Maybe we divulge an authentic spiritual experience to our local religious leader and find ourselves targeted and programmed, like sheep, with the officially sanctioned version of religious “truth”. Or maybe we go to school to learn the soul-devouring “truth” that the only valid way of perceiving the world is through our rational faculties. Whatever the cause, the wound grows ever deeper.
So in my opinion, the pertinent question isn’t whether we have a wound. Rather, it is – how can we heal it?
This is an interesting, though brief, book review from Western Folklore, by Goodwin, Joseph P.
From the publisher's promotion:
Take this test. You think today's sensitive, caring man is: (a) a myth, (b) an oxymoron, or (c) a moron. No matter whether you laugh at this bit of folk humor, its wide circulation bespeaks a modern predicament for American men.
Men's "manly" traditions have been shaken in an age of "sensitivity." Some observers have even referred to a crisis of masculinity for a new generation of boys. In Manly Traditions, established scholars in the fields of folklore, men's studies, and gender studies identify the folkloric roots of what it means to be a man in America. In a lively volume they examine the traditions men inherit and adapt for their own purposes in contemporary life.
That first part is interesting for what it does say about our culture concerning men - not much has changed since the 2005 publication of the book. We are still often stereotyped into these limited categories.
This was the first book to look at male folklore, so in that sense it is very important in the slow but continuous effort to build a tradition of masculinity studies.
Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities. Edited by Simon J. Bronner. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. xxv 383, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliographies, afterword by Alan Dundes, index. $24.95 paper)
Traditionally, folklore studies treated men's culture as unmarked, while women's culture was subsumed under men's. In the 1970s, however, feminist folklorists began studying women's folklore on its own terms (Mills 1993). In 1983 Ronald Baker chaired an American Folklore Society panel called "Men and Manliness," and later called for studies of men's folklore on its own terms. The present collection of essays, Manly Traditions, has now been assembled by Simon Bronner in honor of Baker's many years as a folklore scholar. (Disclosure: I was to have been a contributor to this volume, but for personal reasons withdrew from the project.) In keeping with Baker's call, Bronner and his contributors examine men's folklore on its own terms rather than as generic and unmarked. The first part of the book focuses on typically public "enactments of manliness," while the second half features "more private rhetoric of folkloric communication" (xix) . This approach could make Manly Traditions useful as a text in (for example) courses on masculinity, courses on men's folklore, or courses that compare men's and women's folk traditions.
The editor's introduction situates the book within folklore scholarship, and his essay "Menfolk" examines "what . . . constitutes a masculine text and setting" (26), tying the discussion into points made by other contributors to the anthology. In both of these essays Bronner suggests that folklore plays a significant role in the construction of masculinity. Gary Alan Fine asks whether men's or women's folklore changes when women join traditionally male workplaces. Tom Mould explores how the differences between men's and women's "'stepping' staged performances of dance and march routines" - are used to distinguish masculine from feminine presentations of self (xix) . Norma E. Canni examines the role of folklore in masculine identity formation along the Texas-Mexico border. Taiko, a style of energetic performance on gigantic drums, is designed to counter stereotypes of Japanese American men as effeminate, according to Hideyo Konagaya. Anthony P. Avery presents androgyny at raves as masculine, but different from traditional notions of masculinity, while Mickey Weems writes about the circuit, in which DJs drive dancers to ecstatic performance. Both of these "alternative masculinities" explicitly reject violence, and it is interesting to contrast the de-emphasis of the body at raves with the hypermasculine physicality of the circuit. Jay Mechling uses feminist theory to explore the anxieties, misogyny, and other themes common in men's culture and to explain why so much of men's humor is focused on the penis. Greg Kelley also discusses anxieties in his study of men's stories of squandered wishes.
W. F. H. Nicolaisen examines positive and negative depictions of men in texts from Jan Harold Brunvand's legend collections. The late W. K. McNeil shows ways in which mountain men play with others' stereotypes of them. Bronner argues that traditional toys that men carve with enormous penises "confront the impotence and infirmity of their aging set against the public association of manliness with youthful sexual prowess" (xxii) . The final essay, jointly written by Bronner and Baker, considers relationships among three recitations and their role in proving the reciter's masculinity to other males. The volume concludes with an afterword by the late Alan Dundes, calling for studies of masculinities in other cultures and presenting a bibliographic review to guide future scholars. Dundes also offers an analysis of cockfighting leading up to the question of the value of studying the folklore of masculinity. The conclusion is classic Dundes.
The jargon in a couple of the essays could prove difficult for undergraduate students (and possibly lay readers as well). A few other quibbles: Bronner suggests that social fraternities developed in the early twentieth century (9) , when they actually date back to 1825. He writes of the concept of the "metrosexual" as developed in the 1990s, one attribute of which he says is the wearing of earrings by men who previously would not have done so for fear of appearing gay (37-38). Yet fraternity men in the Midwest were already wearing earrings in the early 1980s. A couple of passages in the essays by Canto and Nicolaisen seem to be jumbled or to have lost parts of their text (128, first full paragraph; 257, last full paragraph, last sentence). Minor points - but factual inaccuracies and uneven copyediting can threaten the credibility of an essay, as when Mechling writes, "the king's castration might be considered disastrous only from a heterocentric perspective, for the joke incorporates presumably the deepest fantasy of male homosexuality - father-son incest" (235-36). Many male homosexuals would contest this "deepest fantasy" and would ask who may be presuming it. Mechling may have made this claim in reference to Freud, but if so, he (or the editor) ought to have framed it as such. Given the significance of this collection of essays, though, such complaints are trivial. As the first book on the folklore of masculinity, Manly Traditions has already assumed an important place.
WORK CITED
Mills, Margaret. 1993. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore: A Twenty-Year Trajectory toward Theory. Western Folklore 52:173-92.
Joseph P. Goodwin, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
Copyright California Folklore Society Winter 2009
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.
If you are a guy, you no doubt have memories of having to go to the blackboard or stand up in class at the most inopportune time. Most of us weren't shamed by our peers -- our supposed friends -- the way Simon was in this clip. But there still was some sense of shame involved, especially for those of us who lacked good fathers who normalized such events as part of growing up.
As adults we now know that it was all about hormones, and that it didn't take a blond knockout flirting with us to create an erection -- our own natural levels of testosterone took care of things without any effort on our part.
It's easy to laugh at the events in the clip. Boys will be boys. And surely, many people believe that living through such teasing builds the thick skin needed to survive in the adult world. I'm sure that is partially true. And I am also sure that such shaming is damaging to a boy's self esteem. Let me explain, by taking a detour into myth.
Joseph Campbell described the hero's journey as the monomyth. It is the essential initiation from boy psychology to mature masculinity.
Campbell held that numerous myths, from disparate times and regions seem to share a fundamental structure. This fundamental structure contains a number of stages, which include:
A call to adventure, which the hero has to accept or decline
A road of trials, which the hero must fail or overcome
Achieving the goal or "boon", which often results in important self-knowledge
A return to the ordinary world, again which the hero can succeed or fail in achieving
Applying the boon, in which what the hero has gained can be used to improve the world
In a well-known quote from the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell wrote:[4]
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
The classic examples of the monomyth relied upon by Campbell and other scholars include the Buddha, Moses, and Christ stories, although Campbell cites many other classic myths from many cultures which rely upon this basic structure.
One of the classic examples of the monomyth is Parcival. Following his father's death, the boy is raised by his mother. So already we have the hint of his quest, a search for the masculine within his psyche that the absent father was not there to mentor in him. Many of us have grown up with absent fathers, either literally (mine died) or figuratively in that they worked so much they were seldom present.
As he becomes an adult, Parcival kills the Red Knight and takes the knight's woman as his own. But adventure calls and he leaves her to chase down the Holy Grail. This is a form of immature masculinity. It is not until much later, in King Arthur's Court that he receives the mentoring he needs to enter into mature masculinity.
In an older version of the myth, Parcival is unable to heal the wound of The Fisher King because he was still under the influence of his mother, and he lacked the power of his own masculine assertiveness.
Many teen boys are struggling with similar issues at an unconscious level. They are at a pivotal point in their development. They need to break free from the realm of the mother so that they can enter into their own manhood, but many lack the father figure to help them make that transition. Without that mentoring, there is shame about those things we don't understand, fear about who we are, and doubts about our own powers as men.
This lack of guidance has immediate and long-term impacts on young men.
Angry Young Men
What we are seeing a lot more of these days is what Time Magazine calls Angry Young Men.
[Psychologist] Michael Currie has worked with adolescent boys and their families for 20 years. Much of his attention has centered on the anger that can consume boys during their high school years. Manifesting in the home as sullenness, disobedience and fierce assertions of independence, teen rage confuses and distresses parents, who often make matters worse with their clumsy, if well-meaning, attempts to address it.
Currie explains a little about how he defines adolescent anger.
Anger is made of two components: one is an idea that there's something wrong, two is that someone else is to blame. The difference in adolescence is the struggle behind the anger. The teenager is trying to grasp the responsibilities and freedoms that come with entering the second epoch of life — that between childhood and adulthood. His identity is fragile, and it can be inevitable that anger comes with that.
Without the crucial and difficult container that a strong masculine father can create, boys end up feeling lost and that sense of fear becomes anger. I don't blame men for being bad fathers. Most men with kids these days lacked adequate fathering themselves, so they did not have the needed model to learn from.
If we can view the teen years in boys as a kind of heroic quest (for mature masculinity), it becomes a little easier to see how we need to assist them in this quest. They need mentoring; they need permission to make mistakes; and they need boundaries that cannot be violated. While it may be difficult to watch a son pull away and become more independent, the important thing to realize is that when his quest is completed he will return, as a man.
If our boys lack the father-figure they need, there will be shame that damages self-esteem and there will be anger that covers over their sense of being lost and afraid. I went through a lot of this in my own life, and I acted out in every way imaginable.
I think I may have rambled here a bit, but I hope I made a little bit of sense.
Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are both excellent sources of entertainment, but they also offer a complex and interesting dissection of a man who learned to use his own fear against criminals.
