In the previous article, I mentioned that there are issues surrounding the understanding of popular and pop culture, and then I addressed the role of men. Here, too, we continue to discuss the role of masculinity in the formation of popular culture, and then in another article we will discuss the differences between pop popular culture.
As we have seen, hipsters became a subculture, and with this example I wanted to emphasize the influence that subcultures play on the formation of mainstream culture. In fact, the mainstream has turned its attention to icons, superstars, and especially subcultures, in order to acquire their appropriate styles.
But is it the mainstream that makes up popular culture or subcultures? What role did men play in shaping the culture? Is this another sign of male domination of the world? In the following, we will further examine the role of heroes and criminals in popular culture.
The status of the superhero in modernist and contemporary culture is significant and evolving at a strikingly rapid rate, so much so that it cannot go without comment. But what differentiates the figure of the superhero from the rest of those discussed here is that he is located in a different imaginary space.
While men dressing in the vein of a cowboy may have no inkling of ranch-handling, and while a muscle man may actually be a coward, the only time one appears in public as a superhero is as dress-up, and the actual powers are, safe to say, limited.
This may all be obvious enough but there is a nuance to all of this, which is different from saying that cowboys exist but superheroes do not, because they do, but in a more remote frontier of the imagination. They are, in many ways, the modern transposition of medieval chivalry, and even the transposition of the ancient pagan gods.
But they are also the embodiment of the symptom of penis envy, for in Lacanian terms, the superhero has the phallus in the way that ordinary mortals do not. It is this explanation that also helps to account for female superheroes, who are more often than not, phallic women, that is, women in possession of typically male powers.
There are no female superheroes that excel in activities more germane to women, but rather are also combative and fearsome. It is also for this reason that a discussion of superheroes can concentrate on men, a bias that exposes the very lack (the phallus) for which they are the compensatory party.
In tracing the nature and appearance of the superhero as he emerged in the early twentieth century, it is also curious to see a new kind of superhero. The new millennium has witnessed an exponential upsurge of superheroes in popular culture that in turn has expanded the range of characters.
There has been good deal of scholarly work done on action heroes and their relationship to classical mythology, the social subconscious, psychology, politics, and religion. Overall they stand for beliefs and aspirations, while also expressing personal fears in a highly encoded form.
Batman, for instance, is the subject of considerable psychological inquiry. The victim of childhood trauma at witnessing the violent murder of his parents as a child, his mission for justice is tempered by anger, which leads to moral hesitation, reflecting a split in his consciousness.
For by becoming Batman he has withdrawn from his human identity and, in a sense, renounced the human element in whose name he was created. As a modern mythology, and one that is still vigorously being rewritten, superheroes are among the most telling models for interpreting how men see themselves and how they wish to be seen.
Superheroes are one of the most helpful sources in helping to mount the argument of masculinity as masquerade. As Friedrich Weltzein argues, there are examples since antiquity of men asserting their manhood through adopting particular guises in order to perform their desired function.
This can range from Odysseus returning home in the guise of a beggar to the definition of a berserker as ‘the one in the bear skin’. Thus ‘heroic or ideal masculinity appears not as a superior virility but as a superior ability in masking’. The superhero, whose identity is based on an alternate, civilian identity is central to this concept, as he has become the modern exemplar of the ancient warrior.
The construction of the ‘true’ male self comes as a result of the constant oscillation: It is a steady doing and undoing of two separate identities, which restlessly constructs masculinity through the act of changing costume’. In many ways the dimension of fantasy that the superhero embraces exists to mask the embarrassing, unsettling, or baffling truth about male identity itself.