LOOK A HERO IN THE EYE: At first, I didn’t quite know what to make of Motime Like the Present’s call for an “eye-level aesthetic.” And you know, I’m still not sure I grasp what he’s saying. It seems like he’s contrasting the “eye-level” view to both a “reverent” view of e.g. superheroic characters, and a “cynical” view. Let me riff just a little on these categories, and try to clarify what I would mean if I said what Motime says. Since our basic philosophies are really different, this may not be what he’s trying to say at all!

EDITED TO ADD: Be forewarned, this post is quite rambly and moves freely between real life, excellent art, and pop culture ice cream. Since it’s about the images that shape our worldviews and actions, though, that seems okay to me, since we draw these images from all three of those sources.

1) “Cynical”: I really can’t stand art/pop works that get their kicks from looking down on people. Easy target: Is it just me, or is the punchline to 90% of Ted Rall’s cartoons, “Americans are really stupid”?

One of the reasons I like the Silver Age Marvel stuff I’ve read is that although it’s quite obviously unserious, quite obviously aware of its own absurdity, it doesn’t try to make you feel like an idiot for reading it, and its attempts to make you feel like you’re “in the know” and supercool are lighthearted, ironic, and not meant to make you feel like you’re better than everyone around you.

A lot of cynical art participates in the sentimentality of machismo–it’s “soft,” womanish, to admit that some people really do great things, that some actions are genuinely heroic and worthy of our admiration. More on this in the Watchmen post coming soon.

And speaking of Watchmen–often a piece of art and/or pop culture will be derided as cynical when it’s really not. I don’t think the “point” of Watchmen is that heroism doesn’t exist. You can deflate old cliches, force a degree of insistent and even scathing humility, without retreating into boring old photo-negative cynicism, a worldview that’s still controlled by the old cliches simply because it tries to always do the reverse of whatever they did.

2) “Reverent”: Well, obviously, I think there are some things or Persons to whom we do owe reverence! There are also ways of showing love of, for example, beauty, simply by making beautiful images. (Not to open the “Alex Rossenstahl” can of worms again, but I loved the flames-in-darkness of his Human Torch in Marvels, which I thought was not reverent toward the character so much as toward the rawer beauty of fire and night. But also–didn’t I just say I didn’t want to talk about this?–I think Marvels, the only Ross thing I’ve read, makes the reg’lar-guys characters more glamorous than the superheroes. End of diversion.)

But it’s really easy to slip into idolatry or back-patting when portraying heroic figures. (The back-patting comes in when you feel good about yourself because you recognize the goodness of this heroic figure and identify with him.) This is one reason that the idea of a reverent picture of Superman makes me feel vaguely sick to the stomach.

Power is sometimes sublime; the sublime evokes awe; awe is a kind of fear; but our response to power should not be an overly-quick slide from blank fear to awe. (This is one reason I think God’s words to Job are not about raw assertion of power, but about what it means to be a creature–what our options are, really.)

So if something akin to this rambly free-association is what Motime’s trying to get at, I’m with him.

3) “Eye-level”: I think this phrase is–or could be!–meant to convey a perspective on, at least, other people (not sure about non-human stuff like beauty, let alone God), that is neither idolatrous nor prideful. (Ha, I’d bet money that that isn’t how Motime would put it!) Not groveling; not delegating the responsibilities for right action to other people, the mythic “heroes”; but also not humorless, unable to see the ironies and the gaps between oneself and one’s self-perception.

Thinking about this stuff made me think about Wei Jingsheng. Wei is a genuine hero. He defied the Chinese Communist government and spent almost 18 years in the laogai or Chinese gulag. If you read his letters from prison, one thing that strikes you immediately is the humor (this really comes out in his letters to Deng Xiaoping). Wei is an immensely ironic guy. He’s also convinced that he has not done enough for China; anytime an interviewer tries to praise him, he quickly says that the ordinary, unknown people of China are the true heroes.

This, to me, exemplifies what an eye-level view of the world looks like–neither precluding heroism nor turning it into just another excuse for self-love.

If that is totally not what Motime meant, I’m all ears–this post is intended as much to poke and prod him to write more about his views as to express my own.