Today marks a pretty significant day in the Real Life Superhero movement’s history. Not because lives were saved or a superhero was born, but because today is the day that many might point to and say, “That’s the day Real Life Superheroes went mainstream.”
I say this, obviously, because today is the release day for the RLSH-inspired movie Kick-Ass.
A little ultra-violence...
Now, we’ve already wrote about how we feel about the movie , but we recognize that with the release of Kick-Ass, many more people are going to stumble upon our movement and so it becomes extra important to get the message straight.
Being a Real Life Superhero doesn’t mean kicking ass. Superheroic action must be judged in the context of the world in which it takes place. Comic books create different worlds overflowing with endless varieties of villains – from the whimsically silly supervillains of Superman to the decidedly psychotic underworld gangsters of The Punisher and, now, Kick-Ass – but the villains of the comic book are not the villains of the real world. Kick-Ass is dangerous only because it begins with a world highly modeled after our own, and indeed the setting of New York and the pop culture references throughout the comic book further ground it in our world, but make no mistake – this is a classic comic book world by any definition. From the first scene in which Kick-Ass is saved by Hit-Girl from gangsters, all grounding in reality gets thrown out the window.
It could even be argued that Hit-Girl has superpowers – or at least her ability to not be fazed by extreme gore, impossible danger and her uncanny ability to dodge bullets or avoid bodily injury throughout qualifies her for superpowers of some sort.
Regardless, Kick-Ass does not exist in the real world. But as a result of its intense efforts to represent its world as our own, there will be people who read the comic or see the movie and wonder what it takes to actually be a Real Life Superhero.
I would simply like to say this – we live in a world with infinitely more complex moral dilemmas, on meta and macro levels, than those that exist in comic books. In comic books, they have to create the concept of supervillains simply because the regular notion of a “villain” itself is too ambiguous. One may look at gangsters and drug peddlers and have a feeling of revulsion, and of wanting to do something about it, but what are the underlying causes that contributed to these problems?
Or rather, let’s get a little controversial and look at this another way – when you imagine drug dealers, or when they are often portrayed in pop culture, what is your image of these drug dealers? Young, male, and most often, black. Now, if you were to take up fighting drug dealers in any major city, you would most likely be committing yourself to fighting young, male, black kids. Are you comfortable with that? I’m certainly not. Because while I believe in personal responsibility, I also believe in societal responsibility – such as recognizing that only 50 years have passed since segregation was abolished, blacks Americans were supposedly given “equal rights,” and the freedom they deserve. However, we know from history that 50 years means almost nothing compared to the 300+ years that blacks spent in slavery or segregation. And, in many ways, this country continues to be a highly segregated place. This is either due to economic segregation, social segregation or historic segregation (since many early black communities remain black-only communities), amongst others reasons. Similarly, employers discriminate much more heavily against black workers both in hiring and in pay. And finally, due to this country’s ridiculous prison-industrial complex, 1 out of 10 blacks in this country are locked up in prison. And due to a lack of societal reintegration services upon being released, many have little incentive not to resume their old ways.
All of this unfortunately contribute to the rise of the drug trade and unfair policing tactics and drug policies put these youth in much more of a high-risk situation. Not to mention the fact that our schools have been failing these communities for years.
Now, by busting that drug dealer on the corner, do you really believe you’re making the world safer?
No, you’re not. I’m not trying to argue away personal responsibility, and certainly if you see a violent crime and it’s within your means to react you should do so, but violence is not usually the best way for a Real Life Superhero to make a difference. There are genuinely positive activities one could engage in, such as street outreach, neighborhood watch patrols, education and even fundraising and protest that a superhero could be involved with and make a much more positive impact.
So if you came for Kick-Ass, I hope you’ll leave with something more. You don’t need to kick ass to be a Real Life Superhero.
