INVESTMENT VS. FASCINATION PT. 2

At the end of PART 1,  I asserted that the dominion of the process of fascination over that of investment came about when "the other" received more narrative charisma than "the familiar." The former category doesn't have to be evil as such-- the Japanese "Mothra" films are a case in point-- but in some way the incarnation of the other cannot be subsumed within the audience's concept of what is familiar.

Today I finished a review of the 2005 film DOOM, in which I compared the movie to its video game iterations and to its supposed filmic influence, the 1986 ALIENS. DOOM, unlike ALIENS, presents a rather complicated dynamic of centric will, so I'll begin my analysis with the simpler dynamic of ALIENS. As I stated in the review, I view all works in the ALIEN franchise to be "exothelic," in that they depend more on fascinating the audience with the bizarre nature of the killer aliens than on building up the audience's investment in the human heroes, primarily Ellen Ripley. That's not to say that such investment does not exist. Obviously, no other hero to be found in the subgenre of "killer alien movies" has been more important to audiences than Ripley. But the ALIEN films emphasize the fascinations of the exothelic over the familiarity of the endothelic.

Now, rather than addressing DOOM as yet, I'll segue to a film-franchise that resembles the ALIEN franchise in having a simple dynamic: the live-action STARSHIP TROOPERS serial, whose films I reviewed here and here. The first film is, like the source novel, centered upon the activities of the various Earth-soldiers who go to war against a race of alien "Bugs," and the next two films in the series more or less follow the same formula. I confess that in the original review I regarded STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 to be something in the nature of an ALIEN-clone, which meant that within my system the centric will would be represented by the Bugs. Further, this determination caused me to determine that the film fell within the mythos of the drama rather than the irony seen in the other two films. However, upon re-viewing TROOPERS 2, I've decided that the Bugs still weren't emphasized as much as the humans. Indeed, Captain Dax, the soldier who perceives the insanity of the Earth's military fascism, is the most important character in that film, just as John Rico is for the first film and Lola Beck in the third one. Further, the fact that Dax perishes and fails to change the destructive course of his people makes the film cohere with the mythos of irony (I've added a correction to the original review).

Now I mentioned that the process of investment did not necessarily mean that the audience endorsed everything that a centric character said or did; it only means that the audience feels able to understand where that character comes from. Thus, even if a character like John Rico has been effectively brainwashed by his culture, the audience still feels in him a familiarity about the nature of his fictional will; how he lives and what he desires. So, now that I've revised my view to state that Rico, Dax and Beck are all investment-type centric characters, I can state my determination that the franchise as a whole (including the somewhat marginal animated video) is endothelic.

So, with these examples in mind, is DOOM endothelic (investment-centered) or exothelic (fascination-centered)? I stated that I felt that none of the starring human characters incarnated the narrative charisma, even though the character of Reaper is the nominal "hero," even as Ripley is the nominal "hero" of the first four ALIEN films. More precisely, I said:

Whereas ALIENS is a film in which the titular extraterrestrials are on center stage, dwarfing the importance of the space-marines fighting them, determining the "main characters" of DOOM becomes a little more dicey, given that the actual Martians are all dead. However, their genetic legacy-- that of passing on the mutagen  that can enhance either "good" or "evil"-- has more central importance to the narrative than any of the three human characters. A quick check of Wikis about the video game suggests that there's no generic name for the "Doom Monsters," probably because they are largely supposed to be either Hell-demons or humans possessed by demons. So for my own satisfaction, I'll state that the stars of DOOM are indeed the Doom Monsters-- and, since both Sarge and Reaper become affected by the mutagen, they become reflections of the mutagen's potential to create both monsters and monster-fighting heroes.

So in DOOM, neither Sarge nor Reaper is really "the hero," but both together can be subsumed by the ensemble-concept of "the Doom Monsters," since both are infected by the mutagen, which makes it possible for them to re-play the catastrophe that destroyed the Martians. The mutagen furnishes the connective tissue between the "good guy" and the "bad guy" so that they're both part of the same ensemble. I observed the same dynamic prevailing with the two opposed monsters of THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS and the two opposed psychics of John Farris' THE FURY. Of course the ensemble "Doom Monsters" also includes the long-vanished Martians and the humans who become mutated menaces-- though not any of the "victim" characters who don't become transformed.

SUBCOMBATIVE TROOPERS

"Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition.  Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics-- is nonsense.  Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is-- not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be."-- Robert Heinlein, STARSHIP TROOPERS.

Reading this quote in isolation, one might think that Heinlein was seeking to make some point comparable about will and "the will to power" akin to the philosophical insights of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  Heinlein, however, is pursuing more limited goals.  STARSHIP TROOPERS might be termed a "bildungsprop."  That is, on a superficial structural level it resembles the literary genre called the "bildungsroman," the novel which primarily describes a young man's maturation.  However, though a young man of a far-future era is indeed the viewpoint character of TROOPERS, and he does undergo a maturational process, that process is not oriented on showing his personal progression, but the positive effects of the era's meritocratic military upon his unsentimental education.  Hence, the intent is closer to being a propaganda-speech on the virtues of the military, which Heinlein constructs with enough sophistry to elide any possible flaws-- and with enough panache that the novel won science fiction's Hugo Award in 1960.  In addition to the novel's controversial merits in terms of its philosophical viewpoint, TROOPERS is also known as the first SF-novel to extrapolate the concept of "powered armor suits" to be worn in battle, as opposed to a warrior simply clad in some form of armor, with or without additional gimmicks.  Heinlein's term "mobile suits" became so well circulated that it entered the name of the later Japanese manga franchise MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM.

My reason for recently rereading TROOPERS, though, was to determine whether or not it fit the combative mode, as did the 1997 film adaptation of the novel.  I suspected that it did not, but I certainly hadn't even begun to think in terms of the combative mode when I first read it, much less formulating that it required both a *narrative* and a *significant* value. 

To cite the short verdict, TROOPERS possesses the *significant* value, in that there are at least two exceptional forces pitted against one another: the highly skilled soldiers of Earth, sometimes though not always garbed in mobile suits, and the alien "Bugs" who represent the "competition" of which Heinlein speaks in the above quote. Yet the narrative value isn't there, for the book is really not constructed around the conflict.  The novel opens with Earth taking military action against an unrelated group of alien combatants, during which POV-character Rico makes considerable use of his mobile suit.  After that, the novel moves back in time, describing in great detail the events that led to Rico's military service.  Eventually the novel shuttles back to real time, and the so-called "Bug War" begins, in which the aliens assail Earth by blowing up Buenos Aires, which coincidentally happens to be Rico's home city.  Eventually Rico takes part in a raid on one of the bugs' world, as he and his men attempt to take prisoner one of the "brain bugs" in the aliens' hierarchy. In the film STARSHIP TROOPERS, this battle is the culmination of the Earthpeople's endeavors.  However, because in the novel Heinlein is seeking to illustrate the chaotic quality of military action-- the better to underscore the true heroism of the ordinary soldier-- the battle is rendered fragmentary by Rico's limited POV.  Rico's part in the action ends when a roof literally falls in on him, and though the mission is judged a success, the battle itself is secondary to Heinlein's focus on the military outlook.  This strategy of eliding the potential for a combative climax compares somewhat to the ending of CORIOLANUS, a work I described in MYTHOS AND MODE 2 as also possessing the significant value but not a narrative one.

Once I finished reading, though, I also assessed the novel in terms of the Rico persona, and decided that he was more dominated by the quality of persistence rather than glory, despite Heinlein's many assertions of the military's glorious record.  This would make him a "demihero" rather than a "hero."  Further, this returns me to a line of thought I formulated in April of this year:

On a tangential note, I think that in general most works that focus on the military-- be they naturalistic or otherwise-- tend to emphasize the "emotional tenor" of "persistence" rather than "glory," as those terms were defined here. The military is more often defined by the quality of winning conflicts through group effort rather than individual excellence, and that may be one reason I couldn't view the heroes of STARGATE as fully in the genre of adventure, despite some superficial likenesses.

I did not claim that military characters could not possess the persona of the hero.  However, such characters' adventures must, in keeping with my alignment of "glory" with the concept of "megalothymia," must show a much more personal stake in a given conflict than one sees in STARSHIP TROOPERS.

For example, I cited one "heroic military" example, that of Marvel Comics' Sergeant Fury. From SGT. FURY #5, here's Fury's very personal reaction to his being challenged by the evil Nazi officer Baron Strucker.

It strikes me that this aspect of "personal glory" is exactly why, in KNOWING THE DYNAMIS FROM THE DYNAMIC, I didn't want to regard the protagonists of STARGATE as "heroes."  At the time I tried to rationalize that the Stargate heroes seemed unheroic because they belonged to the "dramatic" mythos.  In contrast, I had no difficulty in regarding drama-centric Harry Potter as a "hero," even though I had not at that time fully evolved my concept of the four personas.

Now I'm not saying that the various STARGATE heroes-- none of whose names I can remember-- never get mad or offended as Sgt. Fury does above.  But the narrative focus of the teleseries is upon "group effort," and hence victory through persistence, rather than personal glory.  There's no doubt from the first pages of the Fury-Strucker story that there's going to be some monumental combat between Fury and Strucker.  Occasional STARGATE stories may set up such a conflict.  But the narrative emphasis in the teleseries, as in Heinlein's TROOPERS novel, is upon subsuming one's personal goals into the traditions of the military.  Thus all or most of the STARGATE characters qualify as combative demiheroes.


The Johnny Rico case is more complicated.  The original template for Rico is that of a subcombative demihero, but the character-- as well as those featured in the film adaptations-- are combative demiheroes, who deviate from Heinlein's original template.  Thus far, I've seen TROOPERS movies fall into three of the four mythoi-- excluding only "comedy"-- and in all of them, the main characters are extremely combative.  But their mental orientations emphasize the concept of "isothymia," of "emptying out elements of will that seem excessive to one's society or environment."