Heroes and Anti-heroes: Spider-Man vs. Bill Clinton

Steve Ditko, the original artist and co-creator of the Spider-Mancomic, which is now a record-breaking hit movie, is the Greta Garbo of comic books.

Refusing to give interviews for 20 years, he recently refused interviews for major articles about him by the Los Angeles Times and one of Canada's leading newspapers, the National Post.

Ditko, however, explained his philosophy of art in a narrative on a 1987 video titled "The Masters of Comic Book Art," hosted by author Harlan Ellison. In his introduction, Ellison dismissed Ditko's plea that heroes in art and literature be measured by the moral courage shown in objective good vs. evil choices.

The artist now seems prophetic for saying in the show that if we glorify the anti-hero in art, then anti-life and violence will come into our culture. The anti-heroes of the Columbine-like killings in public schools and the Sept. 11 terrorists seem to justify his claim.

What our American and global culture needs are heroes as models. In the program, the artist and co-creator of Spider-Man says, "Aristotle said that art is more important than history. History tells how man did act. Art shows how man should and could act. It creates a model.

"The self-flawed and anti-hero provide the heroic label without the need to act better. A crooked cop, a flawed cop, is not a valid model of a good law enforcer," Ditko said in the program. "An anti-cop corrupts the legal good, and an anti-hero corrupts the moral good."

The power of Ditko's art has in fact influenced youth toward good. In the fall 2001 issue of the Jesuit, a teenager named Pedro tells how he was inspired to go to college by Spider-Man's message.

"Spider-Man got his power when he was a teenager and wasn't sure how to use it," Pedro explains. "So his grandfather [actually uncle] told him, 'With greater power comes greater responsibility.' That's the way it is at Cristo Rey. We're learning to make the world a better place.

We're going to go to college and give a whole lot back from what we've been given."

Some are saying that Spider-Man is even a type of Christ. In his essay for the video, Ditko seems at times to be describing Spider-Man as well as Christ. He said, "Early comic book heroes were not about life as it is, but creation of how a man with a clear understanding of right and wrong and the moral courage to choose acts even if branded an outlaw."

On the Internet, I found the testimony of a man who used Ditko's art to turn to God. Mark Dukes, now a deacon of the African Orthodox Church, said:

"My father wasn't around. My mother was a single parent. It was a vacuum in my life. Who am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to be?

"For me, Spider-Man really resonated. Spider-Man's alter ego was Peter Parker, who was a nerd. And I didn't feel like I was a cool guy either. Spider-Man was disliked and feared. Everyone thought he was a crook, but he was a good guy. No one gave him any respect but he continued to do good even in the face of all that.

"He would sacrifice himself, get beat up and then people would say 'Ahhh. Spider-Man! Run. He's going to do something to us!' And really he had just now saved the world. That is very saintly.

"For me, Spider-Man was a type of Christ. He went through suffering just to do good. And he continued to do it even in the face of everyone misunderstanding him and hating him."

Dukes is an artist of Orthodox icons for churches, which is art that doesn't have the same perspective or photo-realistic graphics like Ditko's early drawings of Spider-Man.

"Visually, Ditko had what most people would consider a cartoony style, but his work was far more real than the "photo-realist" comic artists that would appear on the scene in the following 20 years.

"His was more real because the visual laws defined in his universe were so real, so consistent, that one suspends disbelief to its maximum."

Icon historian Andrei Navrozov, in the June issue of Chronicles, agrees with Bell that art can either be about "gaining a deeper understanding" of reality by symbols or can "mimic" reality.

Perspective was first invented in 470 B.C. by Agatharchus as a means of "geometric illusionism" to mimic reality in stage sets for theater, according to the icon historian.

Navrozov said the "theater set is conceived as a fiction, whereas a [icon] painting is born as an attempt at truth of life, an attempt that in no sense compromises the integrity of the original [reality]. ... They are symbols of real life, not lifelike imitations of reality.

"There is no deeper conflict in history than that between these opposing views of art. 'Is art to serve reality and the individual under God or is it to serve [materialistic] realism and the masses under communism?"

Navrozov shows us that the modern battleground against God and reality is imagery and the imagination. Michael O' Brien in "A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind" said that the imagination is the way that mankind comprehends "God's territory" and his created "invisible realities."

The modern imagination, according to O'Brien, has lost "God's territory" by returning to its "pre-pagan split in consciousness," which is the Gnostic rejection of the "sacramental" unity of spirit and matter, the addiction to occult tales of will to power like Harry Potter, and the relativistic denial of good and evil with ends-justify-the means storylines.

J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" is for O'Brien a prime example of a return to the Western Christian epic tradition of the moral imagination, which comprehends "God's territory" and his created "invisible realities."

O'Brien said, "The discernment of the right paths that must be taken, if good is to triumph, is dramatized in the myriad geographical, emotional, spiritual, and symbolic choices faced by the questers. In each of these, Tolkein's world is faithful to the moral order of the universe, to the absolute necessity of freedom. Middle-earth is a "sacramental" world, an "incarnational" world. ... Spirit [invisible realities] and matter are never portrayed as adversaries."

The Western Christian culture was rooted in this service to reality and God. Reality was the belief in the objectivity of things that are both material and spiritual. During the last two to five centuries, materialistic modernity has been the adversary of this spiritual and matter "incarnational" worldview.

This "incarnational" reality was rooted out and refilled with the lone materialistic science and "realism" in art worldview – in which reality was contained only within material objects that could be tested or seen.

Spiritual (invisible) realities like God, love, beauty, responsibility and free will were neither seeable, material nor testable, so they were not within modernity's realism.

Modernity attacked the primacy of realistic philosophies such as Thomism and realistic symbolic literature like Dante's spiritual epics and Shakespeare's dramas contrasting persons who were symbols of the conflicting real worldviews of modernity and the older realistic philosophy.

Hamlet's "To be or not to be?" illustrates what the two cultures were in conflict about. In our time, Clinton ("What is the definition of is?") is the symbol of modernity's denial of "to be" or objective truth or falsehood.

Modernity, in its desire to stamp out the Christian culture, dislodged Thomism realistic philosophy and realistic symbolic literatures with Pavlovian behaviorism as well as the materialistic reductive studies and application of art, which represented only material acts. Such as Freud's deterministic reduction of all symbols of the mind to represent only the physical acts of sex and Picasso's sexual anti-art.

This cramped reality of only the materially seeable or testable led to rootlessness and alienation, which was so unbearable to modern man that there was a reaction. According to philosopher Allan Bloom, Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of disbelief in all reality, seeable or unseeable ( material or spiritual) became the language of the American reaction.

Friedrich Nietzsche's values philosophy led to the subjectivity of all concepts of objective truth, which included good and evil.

Many will remember when President Reagan called the USSR "the evil empire"; he was roundly criticized for violating the new language of "beyond good and evil." This language of value relativism allows for neither the words nor the symbols of evil and good.

Nietzsche's anti-reality philosophy of "God is dead" led to the anti-heroes of politics and art.

In society this led to the denial of the concepts of absolute truth and the law of identity in reality by modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso and by politicians such as Clinton. This rejection of good and evil in turn led to the degrading of women and sexuality.

"His break with the traditions was an index of his hatred not only toward the spiritual values of the West but toward the human body and spirit that the West prized as good. In the end, the only thing that Picasso portrayed realistically was the woman's crotch. Modern art had returned to its roots, and the gaping crotch was the only thing now that could keep the aging Picasso in touch with the real world."

On the other hand, the hit Spider-Man movie may be a sign that our society wants to go back to the culture that Nietzsche, Picasso and Clinton rejected -- a culture that was able to see the objective reality of God, love, beauty, responsibility, free will and the honorable hero.

In the climax of the movie, at the top of a bridge, the Green Goblin's hand holds up the woman that Spider-Man loves and in the other hand he holds a cable with a tram full of children dangling at the other end.

Then the villain lets them fall to their deaths. As he does this, he gives Spider-Man a choice by saying, "You can save either the girl or the children."

Spider-Man, almost miraculously, saves both. For some, this is symbolic of the need in our society to return to the Christian tradition of men retaking the heroic responsibility of showing love by committing both to his woman and the fruit of their love through "better or worse" for life.

As our hero slowly lowers, by the cable, his love and the children to safety, he is repeatedly knocked around by the Green Goblin.

The Goblin taunts him to let go and save himself, which would mean the deaths of those he is lowering. But as the villain zeros in for the kill, Spider-Man is ready to give his life for others, as another hero did 2,000 years ago.

With the help of New Yorkers, Spider-Man saves his love and the children and defeats the Goblin, who finally begs for mercy. As our hero is about to give him his hand, the villain sends his high-tech vehicle to kill Spider-Man from behind. Spidey avoids the vehicle and it ends up killing the Goblin.

God will forgive anyone no matter what the offense, with only one exception. The only offense God can't forgive without destroying our free will is one's choice to reject mercy. By the Judas choice, one freely sends oneself to where God is not, which is the definition of hell.

The Democrats and their public relations agency, the media, are at the other end of the symbolic spectrum, as real-life anti-heroes who use the seduction marketing trick of association to sell lies.

Years ago, in Catholic books, association meant personal relationships with good or bad companions - friendships that led to depravity or honorable lives.

Association now means creating the false impression that a product, place, thing or politician is like the symbol he figuratively stands next to. Nike shoes are "good" because stars like Michael Jordan wear them, or toothpaste will make you popular because that's what happens in the commercial.

It's a con job to sell products and politicians. Sadly, the shadier part of our economic culture is based on this tactic. This shallow magician's trick, as with all lies, leads to meaninglessness and despair.

The selling of pornography to the masses by associating it with constitutional freedoms would make our founding fathers turn over in their graves.

Porn is not only bad, it is also an empty evil that can only mimic reality. It's men having imaginary relationships with glossed-over images of what was once a picture of a real woman, betraying her most intimate self and future relationships. The emptiness keeps multiplying.

As Navrozov said, "There is no deeper conflict in history than that between these opposing views of art. 'Is art to serve reality and the individual under God or is it to serve [materialistic] realism and the masses."

The marketing and selling of porn brings us to Bill Clinton, who, despite promises to the contrary, disrupted the "obscenity prosecution" of Ronald Reagan's task force, which had the porn industry in "serious trouble in the late '80s and early '90s."

Culture War editor E. Michael Jones said, " This [Reagan] task force caused a major rollback of the porn industry during the late '80s and early '90s. ... Florida, according to Sears, was on its way to becoming a porn-free state - except for one county, whose District Attorney inexplicably refused to prosecute cases. That county was Dade county and the name of the DA was Janet Reno and she became the Attorney General when William Jefferson Clinton took office in 1992.

That event signaled the end of the federal task force to prosecute pornography."

Clinton lived the message. He was the presidential X-rated soap opera star for the $10 billion annual pornography industry.

Our society was willing to accept Clinton as an anti-hero. And as Ditko said, "[A]n anti-hero corrupts the moral good."

His presidential movie star appeal and the porn industry's money helped his party by association to sell porn, homosexuality, abortion and masturbation all the way down to the elementary schools.

A few years ago, I spoke with a Texan director of a crisis pregnancy center who has saved thousands of unborn babies. We spoke of a pro-life group whose top priority-- to put it mildly -- was not saving as many babies as possible. He said to stay away from them because they are "spiritual masturbators."

I love new word combinations, so I researched it to see where it would take me. I found masturbation to be a good metaphor for the spiritual direction our society is taking.

"The ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity," Norman Mailer said. If one has, for example, the image of a beautiful sexy babe in masturbation, one still doesn't know whether one can make love to her in the flesh. All you know is that you can violate her in the brain. ... But, if one has fought the good or evil fight and ended with the beautiful sexy dame ... one has something real to build on."

Masturbation -- as the pornography industry knows -- is a profitable lie. For example, if someone says he had sex with a porn star and he didn't, it is a lie. If one imagines having sex with a porn star, it is still an untruth. The imagination is used to reach unreality.

In contrast to this abuse, the imagination can be used to reach into deep reality. As philosopher Edith Stein showed, truth can be found using the phenomenon of the imagination. As Thomas Aquinas also demonstrated, the mind can grasp the realities of love, truth and God using the phenomena of the imagination and reason. One only need read Shakespeare or G.K. Chesterton to see the imagination grasping deep truths.

Chesterton, in a book on Thomas Aquinas' philosophy, shows how the reason and imagination can work together to reveal the philosophical reality of being:

"A brilliant Victorian scientist delighted in declaring that the child does not see any grass at all; but only a sort of green mist reflected in a tiny mirror of the human eye.

"This piece of rationalism has always struck me as almost insanely irrational. If he is not sure of the existence of the grass, which he sees through the glass of a window, how on earth can he be sure of the existence of the retina, which he sees through the glass of a microscope. ... [T]he child is aware of Ens [being]. Long before he knows that grass is grass, or self is self, he knows that something is something. Perhaps it would be best to say very emphatically [with a blow on the table], There is an Is ... a thing cannot be and not be.

The masturbator who imagines he is with the porn star is not in is -- or, in common language, he is in falsehood. His body and imagination are moving -- as moderns would say, progressing -- but the direction of his mind is toward unreality. The porn addict and people like Clinton must always ask for the definition of 'is' because they are living in a lie.

Once one denies absolute truth and the law of identity, he will live in a lie. Ditko said, "Aristotle formulated the law of identity. A is A. A thing is what it is. It has a specific nature and identity.

It can either go the Clintonian direction toward the unreality of the pornography industry, which does not want an is because then it would have to be morally responsible.

Or it can go in the direction of the reality that Ditko points to, where there is an is, as well as the reality of God, love, beauty, free will, responsibility and the honorable hero.

The true reality is where there is an "is", as well as the reality of God, Love, Beauty, Free Will, aresponsibility and the honorable hero.

I almost passed this one by.

Maybe this explains why Spiderman was such a big boxoffice hit.

Great article. Great dissertation.

But I still like Mark Bagley's treatment of Spidey better than Ditko's.

Oh, well. Nobody's perfect...

The Western Christian culture was rooted in this service to reality and God. Reality was the belief in the objectivity of things that are both material and spiritual.

Put another way:...."the Laws of Nature and of Natures God....." (Declaration of Independence)

Great post Doc!

"...that if we glorify the anti-hero in art, then anti-life and violence will come into our culture. The anti-heroes of the Columbine-like killings in public schools.."

"Basketball Diaries", with Leo DeCaprio comes immediately to mind. I get beat up on this board when I claim that this movie had a direct cause and effect on Columbine. I stand by this opinion. I don't think anyone under 18 should be allowed to see this movie. 1st. amendment be hanged. As a protected class, children do not have 1st. amendment rights.

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