“I’m only good because I want to be.”

Peter and Illyana Rasputin discussing whether heroism is a matter of being, or of choice. Rick Leonardi and Chris Claremont from Uncanny X-Men #231

Those were the words spoken by the half-demon little sister of the X-men’s Colossus, Illyana Rasputin, as she lamented the fact that her diabolic nature urged her to evil. Her brother only laughed and replied that that just made her exactly like everyone else.

This weekend marked the release of the third film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Its arrival was heralded by a brutal mass murder. Outside Denver a young man armed to the teeth opened fire in a crowded theater, killing a dozen people outright and wounding dozens more. He was quickly apprehended, and early interrogations and examinations of his booby trapped apartment indicate that he may have been trying to emulate Batman’s fictional nemesis, the “Clown Prince of Crime,” the Joker.

Tammi Stevens is overcome with emotion as she picks up her son outside Gateway High School in Aurora, Colo., on Friday. Jacob was a witness to the shooting inside the Aurora movie theater where 12 people were killed. Photo by R.J. Sangosti, The Denver Post. via PBS

Any tragedy like this is easily explained by the fact that there are too many video games, not enough video games, too much rock and roll music, not enough Church, too many guns, not enough guns, etc., etc., etc. While, like everyone else, I have my opinions on the etiology to tragic events like this, I’ll spare you – there are no doubt plenty of people on the internet waxing eloquent about the need to give a machine gun to every elementary school child or to encourage them to play zombie hunting computer games for at least sixteen hours a day. But I am going to engage in some pop psychology . . . if some evil bastard murdering people because he wants to be a comic book villain isn’t an invitation to ask what the hell is wrong with our collective psyche, I don’t know what is.

Some guy doing a really convincing impersonation of something evil. http://instagram.com/p/NCqbH0hIO5/

That being said, let me get out of the way at the outset my conviction that this guy is seriously wrong in the head. Maybe he wasn’t hugged enough as a child, or maybe he inherited a faulty neocortical sodium channel gene or two . . . but you don’t start shooting strangers because you watched too much TV . . . at least not JUST because you watched too much TV. I don’t think that idolizing Captain America will make sociopaths love kittens, nor will wearing a Doctor Doom mask for three hours a day make a sane person decide to blow up a school. Thus, my cultural commentary is just that – it isn’t meant as an explanation for why this guy went so far off the rails, and I suspect that the Joker connection is overblown; it is, however, meant to speak to my disquiet at the appeal of the villainous within popular culture and an argument for embracing the heroic in our daily lives and self-conceptions.

Just prior to the shooting the internet was abuzz with the fantastic costume of some guy at the massive San Diego Comic Con who had absolutely nailed the appearance of the Joker. It was a great costume; but, as anyone who attended any Halloween parties four years ago can attest, one in three dudes has dressed up like Heath Ledger’s rendition of the character. He was an exceptional actor and the character – both his rendition and the comic book mythos – of the Joker is intensely interesting. He is a figure that it is hard to look away from – he’s a clown, he’s brilliant, he’s insane, he’s funny, he’s charismatic, he’s ruthless, etc.

Harley Quinn – a tragic figure so broken that she doesn’t realize all she’ll ever get from her “Mr. J” is pain. http://www.flickr.com/photos/eberini/3646475225/

However, he is also evil. Not bad. Not devoid of social skills. Not monomaniacal. Evil. The Joker is pretty much the Devil. He hurts and kills not because he has a master plan – he hurts and kills because he enjoys hurting and killing. He doesn’t care about anything or anyone.  One of the few successful recent comic book character creations is Harley Quinn – the Joker’s girlfriend. She is also insane and violent and hateful . . . but at the end of the day she is an approachable human being because she is primarily motivated by her love for her “Mr. J.” This is not a love which is reciprocated. The Joker uses and abuses her – and the sense is that he does so primarily because it gives him the opportunity to hurt her worse than he hurts anyone else. The diabolic resume goes on and on. While there have been instances where the Joker has acted with honor or as if he had some sort of moral compass, the general character sketch is one of a being who is not just amoral, but well and truly evil.

The Death Eaters from the Harry Potter universe radiate cool. They’re dangerous. Sexy. Arrogant. But they also get their kicks torturing people and advancing an unsubtle Naziesque agenda.

The Joker, however, is just one of a slew of popular culture characters who happily step across the line from anti-hero to villain. I was approached about being a model in a Voldemort/Death Eaters photo shoot a few years ago – which completely blew my mind.  Yes, Bellatrix is sexy in a damaged goth girl sort of way – but these are evil people. Unlike the Joker they at least have motivations beyond inflicting misery – but they still murder and torture people for fun. Let me repeat – they murder and torture people for fun.  It’s all fiction and fantasy . . . but these are figures who should turn our stomach. No amount of eyeliner and sexy crazy obscures the fact that every fiber of our being ought to twist and recoil to remove itself from their presence.  These are villains. These are not creatures that even in play we should want to pretend to be – there is too much danger that some of their taint might rub off onto our souls.

“There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something . . . Don’t be sorry. You’ve paid for it. You’ve paid the price. You just don’t know it yet.” – Lev Grossman, fr0m The Magician King

Another image from Uncanny #231. We all get to be heroes – but we have to choose to be.

The list goes on – Eric and Pam from True Blood, Loki, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, etc. – they are all psychologically fascinating characters who often upstage their associated heroes. But it doesn’t change the fact that they have no qualms about killing people and inflicting pain – even if some of them do it according to a particular brutal code. I know that it makes me a lame goody two shoes, but I’m not all right with the fact that as a society we are okay with these figures as anything other than objects of derision.

I understand that this might come as a surprise. I wear a lot of black. I was unpopular in high school. I’m happy to eschew many social conventions. I don’t adhere to any particularly robust religious-based ethical code. I’m more than a little neurotic. I drink Yoo-hoo. In short, I’m someone who ought to have signed up for the super-villains club – ought to have decided that other people suck and that I deserve to take whatever I want from them to make myself happy. People like that exist. They don’t wear capes or shoot laser beams from their eyes, but they exist. Sadly, many of them end up in government or other positions of power – precisely because they are happy to step on other people to get there. I, however, am not one of them.

A Dr. Strange flashback from before he found his higher purpose – published in the year in which doctors enjoyed their highest approval rating from the American populace. We’re still trying to escape the image that we do it for the money instead of to satisfy our dreams of heroism.

Don’t get me wrong. It has crossed my mind.  Back in March I hit an intense emotional nadir when someone I cared about described someone else as a “hero” while having privately described me as anything but. It was devastating as more than beautiful, or brilliant, even, sadly, more than loving or sexy, I wanted her to see the sacrifices I had made in order to be able to help people (and massage my own ego) as evidence of my heroism. If this person who should have known me better than any other didn’t see that then maybe, I thought, I’d had this wrong from the beginning. While driving home one evening in the late winter dark I even composed a status update in my head that suggested since I clearly wasn’t cut out for heroism, and had never been very good at martyrdom, it was time to embrace villainy. But, even in jest, and even in pain, I couldn’t post it. I knew that it wasn’t true and it seemed disrespectful to even consider it – like saying, even for laughs, that you wish your old grandfather would die so you could get his money. Still, the fact that I had thought about being the kind of person who would hurt others rather than face my own demons forced me to examine the road I was on. It was then that I deleted Parliament & Wake and cut away a few other albatrosses of a narrative that seemed to lead down a road at the end of which sat a place dominated by cruel self-serving reason and bereft of heart.

“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.” – Joseph Campbell

Which brings me back to the choice – of “being good because I want to be.” While ‘success is its own reward,’ you don’t get success just by wanting that reward. You have to have a narrative, a story of Self that makes failure impossible – because it’s always easier to fail. It is a cliché that doctors all have a “God Complex,” but there is a reason. We all give up our twenties, sometimes a big chunk of our thirties too, in order to be able to look into the eyes of a frightened young woman with breast cancer and tell her that we can save her life. We all get puked on, and bled on, and we stare at the ceiling holding back tears thinking about the patients who died – and we do it while we watch our college friends buying boats by screwing people over as investment bankers. It might not be psychologically healthy at all – but we all make ourselves into the heroes of our own stories. Chances are most of us had some delusions of heroism before we even started, but we certainly wouldn’t make it through thirty-plus hour shifts if we didn’t see ourselves as metaphorical Avengers fighting off alien invasions with IVs and CT scans. I don’t know about other professions – but I imagine that they do the same thing. The men and women who know every speeding ticket they give could be met with a bullet have to see themselves as more than mobile bureaucrats. The teachers who get paid nothing to do the most important job in our civilization must tell themselves a pretty convincing story to endure politicians talking in the same breath about cost cutting and new standardized tests. And even the people who don’t have “jobs” per se must often get through on the strength of their self-conceptualization. How else does the stay at home parent deal with the isolation and the screaming infant? How else does the patient in chronic pain get through her physical therapy?

The Coxcomb in another time. via www.lexmachinaphoto.com

Plenty of people who start out wanting to be heroes get lost. They end up deciding that it’s too hard, that they’d rather bury their pain in alcohol, or that they’d rather have money than satisfaction. Plenty of others (including me, at times) realize that the narrative they’ve embraced to get them through the job is toxic to real world interactions where people would rather be with Clark Kent than Superman. What matters though, is the choice. On the face of it I’m way more Lex Luthor than Superman, but I reject that narrative. I spent the darkest years of my residency writing story after story about my heroic alter ego in Parliament & Wake fighting a good, if losing, battle for truth, justice, socioeconomic equality, and self-determination; but they were just a fraction of the stories that I wrote in my head to get me to work every morning.  There’s a lot of terrible stuff in the world and a lot of people are hurting and scared and they take that out on each other. When faced with that we have a choice: we can give up in despair, we can turn that pain back at others, we can hate the people and the world around us – or we can be heroes. That doesn’t have to mean saving lives. It can mean calling a friend you know is hurting. It can mean working at a food bank. It can be as simple as finding the strength not to give up on your own dreams.

For all my dubious fashion choices, in some respects I am intensely old-fashioned, and I think the most noble thing any of us can do is try our hardest to set good examples. Be heroic. Make someone want to be like you and not be like the Joker. Remember that being the good guy is cool. Maybe we can prevent more tragedies like that in Colorado with more (or less) gun control and more (or fewer) hours spent listening to death metal . . . I don’t really know. I also don’t know if we can do anything about the truly crazy sociopaths, the real Jokers – if they are going to go on murderous rampages no matter what. But I do believe that we could make the world as a whole better if we spent more time idolizing heroes (be they in capes or wheelchairs) rather than villains (be they in clown makeup or on the stock market).

In a crossover between DC properties, Dream of the Endless reminds a child captured by a dream-eating alien that the power of heroes comes not from a yellow sun, but from the hearts of those who believe in them. There isn’t any reason we can’t all carry an “S” on our chests.