Blogocentric Formulations

Separating Fact From Fiction

I'm reading a fascinating book right now called Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human: ($14.75 from Amazon.Com) by Grant Morrison. In case the extensive title isn't enough, the book is about the history of comics and the influence they've had on people since their inception. Grant Morrison is an accomplished comic book writer and playwright who wrote this analysis of the comic medium in 2011.

In the book, it talks about Dr. Frederic Wertham, a German-American psychiatrist who was an outspoken opponent of violence and perversity in mass media. His criticisms of comic books resulted in a Congressional inquiry, which resulted in the Comics Code of 1954 which was a particularly restrictive set of creative limitations on comics to protect the innocence of readers in the same way that the Hays Code "protected" movie audiences in the 1930s-1960s. Among many of Wertham's accusations were that Batman and Robin (and Alfred) condoned and celebrated a homosexual lifestyle, and that Wonder Woman's island paradise home of Themyscira perpetuated a BDSM lifestyle, especially since a strong, independent female character clearly promoted lesbianism.

Ultimately, Wertham's argument (however ridiculous his individual accusations) is the same argument that many people still make against video games and other forms of media today... that violent or "perverse" imagery is harmful to children because they don't have the capacity to fully determine right from wrong, or fact from fiction. When there's a school shooting or a suicide, it's the music, or the video games, or the movies, or some other kind of form of media that's scrutinized for contributing factors to the tragedy.

In Supergods, though, Morrison offers a counterpoint to that argument:

"I tend to believe the reverse is true: that it's adults who have the most trouble separating fact from fiction. A child knows that real crabs on the beach do not sing or talk like the cartoon crabs in The Little Mermaid. A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen.

Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real."

I have to agree with Morrison. When I was a kid, there was a very clear distinction between fact and fiction. When I saw Aladdin in the theater, I didn't go home and start rubbing all the lamps and teapots in our house trying to conjure a genie. When I played the Goldeneye video game (and watched the movie), I didn't think I was a secret agent that could go around shooting people and participating in car chases. The things I watched and the games I played were entertainment... and when they were over, I went on about my business. Maybe I imagined what it would be like to fight alongside the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the closest I ever got was taking martial arts classes in the safety of a dojo under the supervision of an instructor. I honestly didn't expect anything to jump out of a sewer grate outside and attack us.

Now that I'm an adult and work in the entertainment industry, I do think about things like realism and logic. I read a story and ask myself, "But how did the protagonist learn to be a black ops soldier?" Or, "How can they expect us to believe that an encounter with radioactive toxic waste could give someone superpowers instead of killing them by means of horribly unpleasant radiation poisoning?" Or, "How many times can this same serial killer/arch-villain escape from prison before people lock him up and throw away the key?" Somewhere along the way, I lost that part of myself that I had as a kid, where I didn't need any explanation or a direct link to the real world in order to accept that incredible things were possible. As adults, we can still suspend our disbelief... but it'll never be as easy as it was as a kid to just say, "Hey, I accept that ludicrous premise or explanation because it's supposed to be fiction."

Obviously, there's an exception for those mentally ill, damaged, or imbalanced people who legitimately can't distinguish fact from fiction or reality from imagination, but if we're talking about the same average audience that Wertham is so concerned with protecting, I have to agree with Morrison that kids aren't the ones who have difficultly distinguishing fact from fiction... adults are.