THE DIVIDING LINE

In this post Sean Collins critiqued Curt Purcell's use of the term "superhero decadence thusly:

'One thing I think's a little odd about Curt's superhero blogging so far is that he primarily cites The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen in terms of their use of bloody/realistic violence and its influence on later comics. But neither of those comics is particularly gruesome in that regard (indeed one of the big complaints about Zack Snyder's Watchmen was that it was bloody all the way up to the end, at which point it became bloodless, as opposed to the comic which more or less worked the other way around). I actually think the increased use of graphic violence in superhero comics is the least direct of their legacies. I also think he's slightly misreading Dirk Deppey's "superhero decadence" concept by using it synonymously with "stuff that would get these comics an R-rating," when I think the more crucial element is the debauched nature of contemporary superhero comics as art primarily concerned with itself, its own continuity and conventions--an increasingly artificial edifice built on shaky foundations and displayed for an audience with no interest in ever looking at anything else.'

Dirk Deppey approved of Collins' re-definition of his "s.d.," but over in the comments section of Curt's response here I said that I felt Deppey's original use of the term "decadence" wasn't so purely focused on the superhero genre being "an increasingly artificial edifice." I objected that while Collins' re-definition could be applied as easily to "clean" superhero comics like Roy Thomas' various continuity-fests (or, as some would call them, fanwanks), that wasn't true of what Deppey originally wrote, since he was specifically taking issue not with involuted continuity but with the fact that the superhero genre, one "created for children,"was being infused with adult tropes, so that the resultant stories seemed like faux-SOPRANOS.

The item most common to both the Deppey and Collins definitions is the Good Ol' Pedagogical Paradigm: Deppey critiques the decadence-fans' inability to "move on," while Collins says the "decadence-edifice" is "displayed for an audience with no interest in ever looking at anything else."

Plainly it's impossible for Collins or anyone else to know how wide-ranging the tastes of superhero-fans may be, which is why the "movin' on" paradigm remains empty rhetoric. By the same token, no one's fannish interest in any genre, medium or author proves anything about how widely-read they may be. If one is a Hemingway fan, that doesn't demonstrate that one has wide-ranging tastes that include everything from Conrad to Calvino.

Further, while Hemingway may be a stabler "edifice" than JUSTICE LEAGUE, there's not a damned thing in Hemingway that automatically leads one to explore Fitzgerald. Just as JUSTICE LEAGUE is focused about getting readers to read more JUSTICE LEAGUE, every Hemingway work is purely an attempt to get readers to read more Hemingway. A JUSTICE LEAGUE fan may feel moved to read GREEN LANTERN because he wants to know more about how their paths cross (particularly in the context of a mega-crossover), or a Hemingway fan may want to know more about Fitzgerald when he learns the two authors crossed their "continuities" in such and such a way. I am emphatically NOT saying that there are no important differences between JUSTICE LEAGUE and Hemingway: I am saying that every fiction is primarily about creating its own "symbolic universe," to reiterate a useful term from Cassirer.

Now, when Mario Praz analyzes the art and literature of the Decadent Era in THE ROMANTIC AGONY, he does describe the work of a Decadent like Gustave Moreau as being more involuted, more self-involved, than that of a fierce extrovert like the Romantic Delacroix. But he emphasizes that Moreau's work is involuted precisely because it's turned inward to focus purely upon the theme of "erotic sensibility," which is no less present in Delacroix than in Moreau. Thus, though I disagree with Dirk Deppey's partisan use of the literary term "decadence," I agree with his original post more than with Collins' newer one, in that I consider transgressive eroticism to be the dominant connotation of the word "decadence." On a related note, that's why I have no hesitation in judging relatively-extreme portraits of sex and violence in kiddie-comics (say, Golden Age CAPTAIN AMERICA) to be "juvenile decadence," as against the sort of "decadence" directed at adult audiences.

And this question of "adult vs. juvenile" gets me back to the question of the dividing line between the two. Clearly there must be one, even if the category of adolescent entertainments sometimes forms a bridge between the two.

As memory serves, Gary Groth's dividing line privileged the notion of adults being capable of greater sophistication than juveniles, which was in essence just another statement of the Pedagogical Paradigm. This notion fails to take into account the fact that functioning adults dominantly read a lot of unsophisticated fictions. Thus a love for sophisticated canonical literature, a la Hemingway, certainly cannot be the dividing line between adult and juvenile. And yet it does seem that there is some qualitative difference between (to borrow from Blake) the "innocence" of juveniles vs. the "experience" of adults. It also can't simply be "stuff that would [earn] an R-rating," for I've argued elsewhere that while a "dirty" work like DC's OMEGA MEN lacks the so-far-undefined qualities that would make it adult, a "clean" work like Owen Wister's VIRGINIAN *is* of adult concern, is "adult pulp," even though it's certainly not "decadent."

In the second of my Superhero Decadence posts, I asserted that STAR WARS was another example of "adult pulp" in that it was an entertainment that appealed to adults as much as to juveniles, even if adult desire went thr0ugh certain modifications not present in the juvenile:

"the continued appeal of the original STAR WARS trilogy for drivers'-license-carrying *adults* is obvious proof that the human desire for wonder, childlike or otherwise, does not die out with puberty, however much maturation modifies the desire."

Now, I specified the trilogy above, but since the 1977 STAR WARS had generated its appeal for adults long before any of them had seen its darker aspects, the first film has to be seen as having some innate qualities on its own that (however unintentionally) brought about the mainstream-ization of SF-FX films for an adult audience, as earlier standout films like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and PLANET OF THE APES had not managed.

I considered the possibility that Lucas' breakthrough special effects had been solely responsible for the mainstreaming process. producing a sort of "genre-gentrification." But if spectacular effects were all that were needed, then the films of Ray Harryhausen would've made the breakthrough that Lucasfilms made.

I believe that, inasmuch as STAR WARS is a "clean" work not unlike Wister's VIRGINIAN, the dividing line is to be found in understanding what adult concerns each one addresses, irrespective of how much spectacle the two do or do not feature. So in DIVIDING LINE Part 2, I'll be exploring parallels between the most famous works of Wister and Lucas.