"These puppies are of the same parents, but by virtue of a different bringing up The One is pampered, and The Other A Good Hound."
Let so much suffice for habit and modes of life.
SCULLY :
You've always said that you
Want to Believe.
But Believe in WHAT, Mulder?
If this is The Truth that you've been looking for then what is left to Believe in?
MULDER:
I Want to Believe That The Dead Are Not Lost to Us.
That They Speak to Us as Part of Something Greater Than Us - Greater Than Any Alien Force.
And if You and I are powerless now,
I Want to Believe That if We LISTEN to What is SPEAKING --
It can Give Us The Power to Save Ourselves.
SCULLY :
Then We Believe in
The Same Thing.
She reaches down to the gifted Gold that hangs on a chain around her neck, the same Golden totem that has hung there in plain sight for 9 whole seasons of Network Television without attracting ANY real notice or curious interest — or not any from Mulder, at least — and she gently turns her Cross ever-so slightly, 45-degrees or so from the perpendicular —
It is an X. The Unknown and Unquantifiable, Endless-Nameless Mystery
18 INT. SEWER - DAY
Connor and Angel are walking through the sewers under Los Angeles.
CONNOR
She's been down here.
ANGEL
How old were you when you realised you could track like this?
CONNOR
I don't know. Five, six.
We didn't exactly celebrate birthdays in Quor-Toth.
Holtz made up a game
so I could practice.
ANGEL
What do you mean he'd
hide things for you to find?
CONNOR
Kind of.
He'd tie me to a tree
and then run away.
ANGEL
(shocked, stops walking)
What?
CONNOR
(shrugs)
You know, so I'd have to escape
and then find him.
One time it only took me five days.
ANGEL
Five days.
He abandoned you...
Connor, that's terrible.
That's—
CONNOR
(unfazed)
Why I'm so good at tracking.
Fred rested here for a while.
You do not Pass Judgment because you sympathize with Them --
A deprived childhood and a homicide really isn't necessarily a homicide, right?
The Only thing you can blame is circumstances : Rapists and murderers may be the victims according to you, but I, I call them DOGS and if they're lapping up Their Own Vomit, The Only Way to Stop Them is with The Lash.
But Dogs only obey
Their Own Nature.
So why shouldn't
we forgive them?
DOGS can be taught Many Useful Things, but not, NOT if we Forgive Them every time They Obey Their Own Nature.
So, I'm arrogant…
I'm arrogant because
I forgive people?
My God. Can't you see how condescending you are when you say that?
You have this preconceived notion that nobody, LISTEN, that NOBODY can POSSIBLY attain the same High Ethical Standards as YOU, so you exonerate them.
I can not THINK of ANYTHING more arrogant, than that.
You, My Child... My DEAR Child, you forgive Others with excuses that you would never in THE WORLD permit for yourself.
Whyshouldn'tI be merciful?
Why?
No, no, no You SHOULD, you SHOULD be merciful, when there is TIME to be merciful.
But you MUST maintain Your Own Standard, You OWE them that, You OWE them that.
The penalty you deserve for your transgressions, they deserve for their transgressions.
They are Human Beings.
No, no, no -- Does EVERY Human Being need to be accountable for their actions?
Of COURSE they do. But you don't even give them THAT chance!
And that is EXTREMELY arrogant -- I LOVE You, I LOVE You, I LOVE You to DEATH....
But you are The Most Arrogant Person I have ever met, and you call ME arrogant!
I Have No More
to Say.
Full shot.
Planetarium seen from The Parking Lot--a Great Dome crowns it -- The City lies Below.
Camera picks up JIM STARK'S car maneuvering through the crowded lot. In b.g. a few other late-comers are dashing up steps to Planetarium.
JIM drives into a small lot behind observator, parks, then runs to observatory entrance.
Full shot.
Lobby as JIM runs through, opens door of theater and passes inside.
Long shot.
Sky Full of Stars seen past JIM's Head. Darkness. This is not Our Sky.
It is a replica of it projected onto The Dome of The Planetarium.
The Stars slide their tentative ways in an ever-changing pattern.
One of them is much larger than The Rest and increases in size as we watch.
Music of The Spheres is heard -- a high threatening tremolo.
LECTURER (O.S.) For many days before The End of Our Earth, People will look into The Night Sky and notice a star, increasingly bright and increasingly near.
JIM looks around for a seat and passes down aisle.
Seen beyond him is the projector, moving slowly, its great dumb-bell head sparkling with pin-points of light.
JIM takes a seat in front row.
PLATO, in the row behind him, moves over a seat to be nearer. They exchange looks.
Full shot.
Normal students watching intently.
LECTURER (O.S.) As This Star approaches Us, The Weather will change.
The Great Polar fields of The North and South will rot and divide, and The Seas will turn warmer.
Low angle.
LECTURER.
A dry, Elderly Man in a stiff white collar.
He is seated at a desk, the light from the reading lamp spilling upward onto his face.
LECTURER The Last of Us search The Heavens and Stand Amazed. For The Stars will still be there, moving through their ancient rhythms.
Angle shot.
Students. Some watching, some taking notes. An OLD LADY TEACHER in f.g. taps the heads of two kids in the row before her.
They stop their whispering.
She smiles at them. LECTURER (O.S.) The familiar constellations that illuminate our night will seem as they have always seemed, eternal, unchanged and little moved by the shortness of time between Our Planet's Birth and its Demise.
Med. shot. PLATO staring upward.
LECTURER (O.S.) Orion, The Hunter.
PLATO looks off.
Med. shot. JIM (from PLATO's angle).
JIM is seated in the row ahead of PLATO.
His lips are parted as he looks up.
JIM Boy! PLATO (leaning forward) What? JIM (surprised) Once you been Up There,
you know you been
Some Place!
LECTURER (O.S.) Gemini, the Twins.
Two shot. JUDY and BUZZ.
BUZZ has his arm around her.
He is nuzzling her ear.
She is blandly watching The Dome.
LECTURER (O.S.) (continuing) Cancer, the Crab.
BUZZ pokes JUDY who looks at him.
He curves his wrist toward her, opening and closing his first two fingers like the pincers of a crab.
“Maybe There’s Hope.”, said Special Agent Fox "Spooky" Mulder,
Once-More Enunciating The Stated Truth.
"Maybe There's Hope."
And So There Was.
And It was Good.
Good it is,
and remains Good still.
[Fade to Black]
Dear Clarice,
I have followed with enthusiasm the course of your disgrace and public shaming.
My own never bothered me, except for the inconvenience of being incarcerated, but you may lack perspective.
In our discussions down in The Dungeon, it was apparent to me that Your Father, The Dead Night Watchman, figures largely in your value system.
I think your success in putting an end to Jame Gumb's career as a couturier pleased you most because you could imagine your father being pleased.
But now, alas, you're in bad odour with the FBI.
Do you imagine your daddy being shamed by your disgrace?
Do you see him in his plain pine box crushed by your failure?
The sorry, petty end of a promising career?
What is worst about this humiliation, Clarice?
Is it how your failure will reflect on your mommy and daddy?
Is your worst fear that people will now and forever believe they were, indeed, just good old trailer-camp, tornado-bait, white trash, and that perhaps you are, too?
Mmm?
By the way, I couldn't help noticing on the FBI's rather dull public website, that I have been hoisted from the Bureau's archives of the common criminal, and elevated to the more prestigious Ten Most Wanted list.
Is this coincidence, or are you back on the case?
If so, goody, goody, 'cause I need to come out of retirement and return to Public Life.
I imagine you sitting in a dark basement room, bent over papers and computer screens.
Is that accurate? Please tell me truly, Special Agent Starling.
Regards, your old pal,
Hannibal Lecter, M.D.
P.S., clearly this new assignment is not your choice.
Rather, I suppose it is part of the bargain, but you accepted it, Clarice.
Your job is to craft my doom, so I am not sure how well I should wish you, but I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun.
Ta-ta.
"H."
"To speak generally, what we are wont to say about the arts and sciences is also true of moral excellence, for to its perfect development three things must meet together, natural ability, theory, and practice.
By theory I mean training, and by practice working at one's craft.
Now the foundation must be laid in training, and practice gives facility, but perfection is attained only by the junction of all three. For if any one of these elements be wanting, excellence must be so far deficient.
For natural ability without training is blind: and training without natural ability is defective, and practice without both natural ability and training is imperfect.
For just as in farming the first requisite is good soil, next a good farmer, next good seed, so also here: the soil corresponds to natural ability, the training to the farmer, the seed to precepts and instruction.
I should therefore maintain stoutly that these three elements were found combined in the souls of such universally famous men as Pythagoras, and Socrates, and Plato, and of all who have won undying fame. Happy at any rate and dear to the gods is he to whom any deity has vouchsafed all these elements!
But if anyone thinks that those who have not good natural ability cannot to some extent make up for the deficiencies of Nature by Right Training and Practice, let such a one know that he is very wide of The Mark, if not out of it altogether.
For good natural parts are impaired by sloth; while inferior ability is mended by training: and while simple things escape the eyes of the careless, difficult things are reached by painstaking.
The wonderful efficacy and power of long and continuous labour you may see indeed every day in the world around you.
Thus water continually dropping wears away rocks: and iron and steel are moulded by the hands of the artificer: and chariot wheels bent by some strain can never recover their original symmetry: and the crooked staves of actors can never be made straight.
But by toil what is contrary to nature becomes stronger than even nature itself.
And are these the only things that teach The Power of Diligence?
Not so: ten thousand things teach the same Truth.
A soil naturally good becomes by neglect barren, and the better its original condition, the worse its ultimate state if uncared for.
On the other hand a soil exceedingly rough and sterile by being farmed well produces excellent crops.
And what trees do not by neglect become gnarled and unfruitful, whereas by pruning they become fruitful and productive?
And what constitution so good but it is marred and impaired by sloth, luxury, and too full habit?
And what weak constitution has not derived benefit from exercise and athletics?
And what horses broken in young are not docile to their riders? while if they are not broken in till late they become hard-mouthed and unmanageable.
And why should we be surprised at similar cases, seeing that we find many of the savagest animals docile and tameby training?
Rightly answered the Thessalian, who was asked who the mildest Thessalians were, "Those who have done with fighting."
But why pursue the line of argument further? For the Greek name for moral virtue is only habit : and if anyone defines moral virtues as habitual virtues, he will not be beside The Mark. But I will employ only one more illustration, and dwell no longer on this topic.
Lycurgus, the Lacedæmonian legislator, took Two Puppies of The Same Parents, and brought them up in an entirely different way : The One he pampered and cosseted up, while he taught The Other to Hunt and be A Retriever.
Then on one occasion, when the Lacedæmonians were convened in assembly, he said, "Mighty, O Lacedæmonians, is the influence on moral excellence of habit, and education, and training, and modes of life, as I will prove to you at once."
So saying he produced The Two Puppies, and set before them A Platter and A Hare : The One darted on The Hare, while The Other made for The Platter.
And when the Lacedæmonians could not guess what his meaning was, or with what intent he had produced the puppies, he said,
"These puppies are of the same parents, but by virtue of a different bringing up The One is pampered, and The Other A Good Hound."
Those who say “The more I see of men the better I like dogs” — those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship — will be well advised to examine their real reasons.
I hope I am not being misunderstood. If this chapter leads anyone to doubt that the lack of “natural affection” is an extreme depravity I shall have failed.
Nor do I question for a moment that Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives. I shall therefore have some sympathy with those whose comment on the last few pages takes the form,
“Of course. Of course. These things do happen.
Selfish or neurotic people can twist anything, even love, into some sort of misery or exploitation.
But why stress these marginal cases?
A little common sense, a little give and take, prevents their occurrence among decent people.”
But I think this comment itself needs a commentary.
Firstly, as to neurotic. I do not think we shall see things more clearly by classifying all these malefical states of Affection as pathological.
No doubt there are really pathological conditions which make the temptation to these states abnormally hard or even impossible to resist for particular people. Send those people to the doctors by all means.
But I believe that everyone who is honest with himself will admit that he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not a disease; or if it is, the name of that disease is Being a Fallen Man.
In ordinary people the yielding to them — and who does notsometimes yield? — is not disease, but Sin.
Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment.
Medicine labours to restore “natural” structure or “normal” function.
But Greed, Egoism, Self-Deception and Self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney.
For who, in Heaven’s name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent?
“Natural”, if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen.
We have seen onlyOne Such Man.
And He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen.
You can’t really be very well “adjusted” to Your World if it says you “have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.
But secondly, the comment in its own language admits the very thing I am trying to say.
Affection produces happiness if — and only if — there is common sense and give and take and “decency”.
In other words, only if something more, and other,than Affection is added. The mere feeling is not enough.
You need “common sense”, that is, Reason. You need “give and take”; that is, you need Justice, continually stimulating mere Affection when it fades and restraining it when it forgets or would defy The Art of Love.
You need “decency”. There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be.
That is The Whole Point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection will “go bad on us”.
How bad, I believe we seldom recognise.
Can Mrs. Fidget really have been quite unaware of the countless frustrations and miseries she inflicted on her family? It passes belief.
She knew — of course she knew — that it spoiled your whole evening to know that when you came home you would find her uselessly, accusingly, “sitting up for you”.
She continued all these practices because if she had dropped them she would have been faced with the fact she was determined Not to See; would have known that she was not necessary.
That is the first motive. Then too, the very laboriousness of her life silenced her secret doubts as to the Quality of Her Love.
The more her feet burned and her back ached, the better, for this pain whispered in her ear “How much I must love them if I do all this!”
That is the second motive. But I think there is a lower depth.
The unappreciativeness of the others, those terrible, wounding words — anything will “wound” a Mrs. Fidget — in which they begged her to send the washing out, enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment.
If anyone says he does not know those pleasures, He is a Liar; or, a Saint.
It is true that they are pleasures only to those who hate.
But then a love like Mrs. Fidget’s contains a good deal of hatred.
It was of erotic love that the Roman poet said, “I love and hate,” but other kinds of Love admit the same mixture.
They carry in them the seeds of Hatred. If Affection is made the absolute Sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate.
Q : Playing The Devil’s Advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around Identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of Others.
Some may ask why A White Man would seek to tell the story of a Woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to what he knows, Being a Man.
How authentically Real is that Character or Story, etc.?
GM: It’s important to air these feelings for debate.
I must admit, with all respect, that I COMPLETELY disagree with the idea that We cannot understand one another.
Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot •truly• know or have any meaningful opinion on what it feels like to be X, then we may as well STOP LISTENING to ANYTHING ANYONE Else has to say about their personal experience, on the basis that it can only be irrelevant to our specific lives!
If I can never •truly• understand you without walking in your shoes and vice versa, WHAT’S THE POINT OF LISTENING or talking to anyone about our experience?
WHAT’S THE POINT of writing stories, or protesting, or making art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and UNDERSTOOD by ANYONE who has NOT shared the experience of The Artist, or The Writer?
I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in The Real World. We don’t need to BE a thing to have some understanding of how it operates.
People can be great veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day inner lives of dogs and cats.
I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for the inmates of the Gulag without having to reprise their exact experience.
To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a Symptom of Narcissism Painted into its Inevitable Corner, its Private Echo Chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of late stage Osiris pathology
.
And you know, we actually DO understand one another in so many ways. We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of Other People’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience. As a Writer, I KNOW this to be True.
We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since The Dawn of Humanity. People AREN’T so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery.
All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another.
The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.
We figured one another out a LONG, long time ago.
And ultimately, I’ll say again, We are ALL the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them! To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of narcissistic inflation but it will be understood as a fact of nature in the end.
Maybe I’m Wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on Our Planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!
I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves.
We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared.
We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by The World at times.
And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent – to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.
And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.
These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view.
And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.
I hope so
GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist consumer culture has clearly reached its limits and we either advance to a more efficient, stable, less suicidal and aggressive engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.
The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.
It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.
GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. The echoes of the Inquisition, accusations of ‘wrongthink’, the return of Original Sin, the demonic glee taken in any stumble or falter from the approved path seems almost mediaeval. It’s terrifying. The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by rules that grow ever more authoritarian and specific every day. Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading power by the Osiris energy of the last 2000 years, now gone rotten and unsustainable but trying harder to keep everything and everybody under increasingly deranged levels of control in every area of our lives.
I relied on the Captain Marvel of Earth-5 to come through.
From a simpler, kinder universe than the Marvel Family I know back Home.
HOYNES
Leo, I have had it up to here, with you and your pal!
I've been shoved into a broom...
LEO
[gets riled]
Excuse me!
“Me” and “My Pal”..?
The Captain Marvel of Earth-5 is What Superman Would Be if Jimmy Olson were to have become Superman instead of Clark
Captain Marvel introduced audiences to Billy Batson, an orphaned 12-year-old cub-reporter who, by speaking the name of the ancient wizard Shazam, is struck by a magic lightning bolt and transformed into the adult superhero Captain Marvel.
Fawcett’s circulation director Roscoe Kent Fawcett recalled telling the staff,
“Give me a Superman, only have his other identity be a 10- or 12-year-old boy rather than a man”
“ “This imposes on me at the outset a very tiresome bit of demolition. It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.
The dangerous word really is here important. To say that every Friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false; the wiseacres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it is really — unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian sense — homosexual.
Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive Love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
NEVER.
The rest of us know that though we can have Erotic Love and Friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is LESS like a Friendship than a love-affair.
Lovers are always talking TO one another ABOUT Their Love; Friends talk hardly EVER about their Friendship.
Lovers are normally Face to Face, absorbed in each other; Friends, Side by Side, absorbed in some Common Activity”
C.S. Lewis,
The Four Loves
CAPTAIN MARVEL OF EARTH-5 :
From a simpler, kinder universe than the Marvel Family I know back Home.
“While National’s legal team would eventually contrive to prove otherwise, Captain Marvel wasn’t much like Superman at all. Superman celebrated the power of the individual in settings drawn to look as true to life as possible. Captain Marvel’s stories offered a world that slid and slipped and became unreal, a world where the word took center stage. He embraced the interior world of dream logic, fairy-tale time, and toys that come to life. If Superman was Science Fiction, and Batman was Crime, Captain Marvel planted his flag in the wider territory of pure Fantasy.
His origin story detailed an out-and-out shamanic experience of a kind familiar to any witch doctor, ritual magician, anthropologist, or alien abductee.
Young Billy Batson’s journey begins in a typically mundane setting. Here on a city street corner at night, the reader is introduced to an orphan boy, a victim of the Depression, selling newspapers outside the subway station where he sleeps rough. When Billy is approached by an odd character in a slouch hat and trench coat, he seems to take it all in stride. The stranger’s face is hidden in the shadows beneath his hat brim, and Billy shows a level of trust that would seem unfeasible in our pedophile-haunted twenty-first-century world when he agrees to follow the dodgy figure into the station.
A train arrives in the otherwise deserted station, and it can only be a train from another reality, with modernist motifs daubed across its side like graffiti painted by Joan Miró. Resembling the streamlined Platonic prototype for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express, the train carries Billy into a deep, dark tunnel that leads from this world to an elevated, magical plane where words are superspells that change the nature of reality.
Billy’s psychedelic tunnel voyage culminates in another empty train station. Entering, the boy finds himself in a threatening archway of flaring shadows. At the end of the corridor, Billy stands face-to-face with a long-bearded “wizard” who outlines the boy’s new and unexpected duties and abilities. All the while, a monstrous, trembling cube of granite hangs suspended by a splintering thread above the wise man’s venerable skull. Everything is heightened, torch lit, and feverishly real as higher powers explain to Billy their plan.
Billy Batson, Good and True, has been selected to take the place of the retiring wizard, who has used his powers to protect humankind for the last three thousand years and wants a break. The transfer of power is accomplished when Billy speaks the wizard’s name — “Shazam!”— triggering a thunderclap and flash of lightning. In the swirling smoke of the ultimate conjuring trick stands a tall man in a cape. He wears a red military style tunic with a chunky yellow lightning bolt on the chest. His cape is white with a high collar and braided yellow trim. He has a yellow sash around his waist, red tights, and yellow boots. (He wisely steers clear of the underpants-on-the-outside look.) With his slicked-back brilliantined hair, he looks like the boy Billy grown up, perfected. He looks, in actual fact, almost exactly like the actor Fred McMurray, upon whose features Charles Clarence Beck based those of his hero. His final task complete, the wizard slumps back in his throne, and the immense block of stone drops to smash his body flat. His spirit form haunts the panel like Obi-Wan Kenobi dispensing postmortem advice to the fledgling superhero.
It’s a heady brew and it extends the potential of the superhero in the way that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”pushed the prevailing idea of popular music into something unforeseen.
The Magic Word was a concept that connected the hero to the basis of human speech; language, storytelling. Captain Marvel’s power came not from years in the gym or from his alien biology or his royal blood. His power came from a spell.
He was a Magician.
I remember walking alone as a child, chanting every word in the dictionary in the hope of finding my own Shazam! Eventually, everybody searches for his or her own magic word: the diet, the relationship, the wisdom that might liberate us from the conventional into the extraordinary. That eternal human hope for transcendence gave the Captain Marvel strip rocket fuel.
Shazam! has entered the culture as an Abracadabra or Hey Presto! — an all-purpose magical incantation. It was a word of enlightenment and personal transformation that accomplished, in a white-hot instant, what decades of Buddhist meditation could only point toward. His powers were the siddhis claimed by ultimate yogins. In the language of ceremonial magic, Shazam! summoned the holy guardian angel—the exalted future self—to come to one’s aid. When Billy’s natural curiosity got him into trouble, the word could summon Captain Marvel to deal with any and all consequences.
In fact, Shazam was an acronym. Captain Marvel’s powers were derived from six gods and heroes of legend. He was endowed with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Mercury was all over the concept, from the bright yellow thunderbolt motif on the captain’s scarlet tunic, to the word games and the presence of the old wizard who gave Billy his word. Billy worked as a roving boy reporter for WHIZ radio, going one step beyond newspaperman Clark Kent in scoring such a prestigious adult job. The tower atop the WHIZ building crackled like the RKO Pictures logo with graphic zigzags. A boy radio announcer seems so perfect a job for a modern Hermes that it’s barely remarkable.
All of this made Marvel the first occult — or, perhaps more accurately, Hermetic — superhero; Marvel was the magus in tights, empowered by angels and the divine. Where Superman’s strength relied on pseudoscientific explanations, Marvel’s adventures opened doors to a world of magical self-belief and transformation. Where Superman tightened his jaw and tackled the ills of The Real World, Marvel smiled a lot and had room for whimsy, warmth, and a well-developed personality. Where Superman’s cape was plain, adorned with only his S brand, Marvel’s was flamboyantly decorated with gold trim and fleur-de-lys. He was wearing the military dress uniform of a regiment of future men and women.
Marvel heralded another innovation. Superheroes had so far been loners. In 1940 Batman had only just hooked up with Robin, and the era of boy sidekicks was yet to kick off in earnest, but Captain Marvel had Family.A superhero family! In 1942, he was joined by his cousin Mary Batson, who only had to speak the name of her hero, “Captain Marvel,” to transform from wise and good Mary Batson into the wise and good Mary Marvel, who could punch a building to dust. The third member of their team was the magnificent Captain Marvel Jr., from Whiz Comics no. 25, 1941.
In an era when so much of the artwork could at best be described as robust primitif, the work of Mac Raboy on these strips had an illustrative delicacy and a grasp of anatomy and movement that made it unique. His Captain Marvel Jr. was a lithe Ariel, effortlessly capturing the blue-sky freedom and potential of youth better than any other superhero. With such accomplished competition as Raboy in the studio, Beck’s polished professional line work also developed a new gloss that propelled Captain Marvel’s sales beyond those of even the mighty Superman. Backgrounds seemed more solid in Marvel Family stories, the shadows were blacker and more distinct, the focus and depth of field somehow sharper, and the comics developed a deluxe look that recalled Disney animation and the best of the newspaper strips.
In his turn, Captain Marvel spawned his own imitator, the British Marvelman — a character who provided my own first exposure to superheroes, when I was three years old and picking my way through a bizarre “Marvelman Meets Baron Munchausen” adventure. Marvelman was a child of necessity rather than inspiration. When DC successfully sued Fawcett Comics, Captain Marvel’s publisher, in 1952 and new Captain Marvel comics ceased to appear, a hasty substitute strip was assembled to fill the pages of his ongoing British reprint title. Editor Mick Anglo reconfigured the basic Marvel Family setup and remade the character as a blond hero in a streamlined jet-age blue costume with no cape and no exterior underpants. Billy and Mary were replaced by Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman. And yet, as if litigation was somehow built into the concept’s atomic structure, Marvelman himself became the subject of a bitter court wrangle that continued for decades and involved major comic-book industry players like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Todd McFarlane. Captain Marvel and his cloned offspring found themselves tangled in statutes as if the law had enacted its judgment on Prometheus. Exile would follow. DC would go on to completely destroy Fawcett in court, but the word Marvel would return to haunt DC Comics.
Despite the legal wrangling, the exile and disempowerment of the original Captain Marvel, he and his family had made their mark on the culture. Elvis Presley’s first single appeared three years after DC filed the lawsuit that brought down the entire Marvel Family universe, but the king of rock ’n’ roll identified so strongly with Mac Raboy’s lithe superboy that by the time his own physique was somewhat less than slender, he had his costumes designed to recall Captain Marvel Jr.’s boyish, cavalier spirit. Take a look at the short capes and high collars Presley wore in his later years and note how Captain Marvel Jr.’s tousled, jet-blue cut was re-created on Elvis’s troubled head. Even the lightning bolt TCB logo on the tail of his private jet derived from Captain Marvel’s chest emblem, marking the beginning of a continuing cross-pollination between comics and popular music, two equally despised and scapegoated midcentury art forms.
It is hardly any surprise that Captain Marvel was Ken Kesey’s favorite superhero as well. In 1959 Kesey had volunteered to take part in a series of clinical LSD trials, which inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey and some young followers painted a school bus with Day-Glo colors, wrote Furthur on the destination board, and set out to recruit an army of rebels—an alternative society of liberated superhuman beings.
The story of Kesey and his Pranksters with their superhero alter egos — Mountain Girl, Cool Breeze, Black Maria, Doris Delay — and dreams of a new society was transformed into myth by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which talks of Kesey’s trips into the mountains to summon down lightning from The Rock of Eternity and release a thunderbolt pure enough to blind the squares and deafen the bigots and change the world forever.
The Spirit of Marvel lived on.
The other night I was talking with My Friend, 5.
He was over at my place, and we were out in the greenhouse together.
And he was explaining to me how when a member of The Mende -- that's His People -- how when a member of The Mende encounters a situation where there appears no Hope at all —
He invokes His Ancestors.
It's a Tradition.
See, The Mende believe that if one can summon the spirits of one's ancestors, then they have never left—
and The Wisdom and Strength they fathered and inspired will come to his aid.
James Madison
Alexander Hamilton
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
George Washington
John Adams —
[John Quincy is now speaking directly to the marble bust of His Father, President John Adams, in the corner of the Supreme Court Chamber of The United States]
We've long resisted asking you for guidance —Perhaps we have feared in doing so we might acknowledge that our individuality, which we so, so revere is not •entirely• our own.
Perhaps we've feared an -- an appeal to you might be taken for Weakness.
But We've come to understand, finally, that this is not so.
We understand •now•.
We've been •made• to understand, and to embrace the understanding,
That Who We Are -- •is• Who We Were.
We desperately need your Strength and Wisdom to triumph over
