"HELL BOY": NOT FROM THE SUBURBS

“Hell Boy” is not a movie I would normally watch.  Somehow by accident I saw a trailer and it stuck in my head so -- since it streams on Netflix, at least the first of the two movies does, I watched it last night.  No doubt many people watch it for the special effects which are extraordinary.  They are not as scary as “Pan’s Labyrinth” though many of the elements are similar: Nazi’s, monsters, darkness, hidden underground structures.  In “Hell Boy” they are slightly more conventional.  It’s GREAT tentacle horror with a lot of "Alien" references and a definite sexual vibe.  And it’s funny.

In much of my deep mind -- since my first years were WWII -- the nightmare imagery is Nazi and combat shooting.  As kids we worked off a lot of it crawling around in the neighborhood shrubbery pretending to kill each other, but we never imagined the ingenious and overwhelming machinery of modern technology.  Don’t look at this linked clip of a Banksy graffiti with sound unless you’re pretty tough.  It combines the crude assault of horse cavalry with the sound of technological, rule-governed, irresistible air assault.  http://www.banksy.co.uk/2013/10/09/lower-east-side  That's the now.

Because of activists and the Internet, we are now aware that this happens daily in parts of the world that we dominate.  We do it.   In my childhood I thought children were only killed by mistake.  Even then, I thought I might be killed.  Part of getting past that as I grew up was accepting that everyone will die.  It was harder to get past the idea that I was different from everyone else, which is partly what Hellboy is about, though the plot is meant to convince us that his difference is only rubbersuit deep.  I AM different from everyone else.  Aren't you?  And aren't we different from our enemies?

I was grateful for Abe Sapien, the underwater man who echoes Mister Spock.  Arguably, the most terrifying thing about the Nazis was their relentless rationality and their belief that this was the core of their superiority.  Their moral emptiness was justified by claiming compassion to be subjective, merely emotional, which meant they didn’t have to think about why a depraved little man with a funny mustache and a bad attitude would think he was superior.  And we do not miss the fact that our own leaders are no better: war-mongers, puppets of money, inhuman.  Abe Sapien has wisdom.  And he knows his limits.

The girl, if you could see her back, would have a dragon tattoo on it.  She is a Scandinavian berzerker, the warrior who bursts into flame and is therefore irresistible in violence.  Fine if they don’t try it at home.  All these supernatural characters are accompanied by two humans who try to be truly human:  the scientist/father who is not afraid to befriend hell, and the youngster who is ambivalently recruited to grow into his shoes.

Beyond the genre of superhero comics, which also had roots in WWII, this line of plotting goes back to mythic times when extraordinary people, heroes, were needed.  But it is also uniquely modern in that we have been taught that exceptional people are either better or worse then everyone else, not equal.  They either have high obligations -- cure cancer, go to the moon, write the all-time greatest American novel -- or they are so dangerous that they must be destroyed lest they attack all the rest of us.  People who can’t answer their own narcissistic expectations of themselves will find this role and become shooters.  If you can’t be the president, you can be the president’s assassin.  If that’s too hard, shoot primary school kids.

Hellboy is not much like Superman who is a cleancut kinda guy.  Hellboy and his cigar are more like some tough cop, the kind of man that our culture (including the military) used to depend upon -- General Patton, for instance.  In lieu of growing stubble, he shaves his horn stubs, both proof of maleness.  He’s not really like the classical Lucifer, who is lascivious and defiant, sly and psychological.  He’s just red and has a tail.  The Christian references that creep in are mostly old-fashioned archeological machinery: strange doors and inscriptions.  It’s the same rather old-fashioned Berkeley suburban stuff.  Hellboy is a marshmallow inside, looking for a girl to toast him.  (But his lips won’t pucker for a kiss.)

Sci-fi has always explored the social consequences for people who are different from the society in which they dwell.  One of the more subtle versions decades ago was a series of short stories about alien children surviving a spaceship crash.  They were exactly like humans except for being able to levitate and read minds.  The humans who rescued them were good conscientious people who tried to take care of them, but learned to hide them because ordinary humans became alarmed by their gifts and punished them.  The exception was a school teacher who finally figured it out and supported the children as they grew.  The dynamics of this story are enacted in schoolrooms all over the planet every day.

The point of storytelling is in part to illustrate patterns that are so common we can’t see them.  Can a fish think about water?   Probably not until the fish is thrown out of the water and gasping.  Can Abe Sapiens think about water?  All the time.  That’s what makes him wise.  We can follow his example.  In fact, this is the work of religion on its best days (not necessarily Sunday), art, and humanities education of every kind.  

So can suburban boys who grew up vanilla-and-entitled ever envision something like a Hellboy movie without the help of someone who has seen the horror?  I would argue that Spielberg and Lucas are forever crippled by their suburban origins.  It is Guillermo del Toro who has the vision and Dreamworks that is thrillingly curious about how it all works. 

Consider these quotes from del Toro:

Del Toro’s father, automotive entrepreneur Federico del Toro, was kidnapped . . . Although Federico was eventually released safely, there was intense economic pressure from his captors. . .  The event prompted del Toro, his parents and his siblings to move abroad. . . He said this about the kidnapping of his father: "Every day, every week, something happens that reminds me that I am in involuntary exile [from my country]."

"Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don't wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment."  

"I hate structure. I'm completely anti-structural in terms of believing in institutions. I hate them. I hate any institutionalized social, religious, or economic holding."

But Dreamworks IS an institution;  Hollywood IS an institution.  It is money that holds them together as institutions so that del Toro movies are possible.  This essential contradiction -- the gears of the locks on the bank vaults -- is what we recognize with horror.  We try to take the hand of Abe Sapiens, but there is glass in between.  Destroying that glass would mean making either his or our life impossible.

THE STENCH OF STIGMA

Yesterday “Here and Now” on the radio  had a story about the girl who was so bullied and stigmatized that she committed suicide.  She struck back after her death by leaving video tapes of what happened.  The persecuting girls, who made their attacks on the Internet, inadvertently provided more evidence and have been formally convicted in court.  http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/05/06/bullying-massachusetts-court

I often send comments to this radio program, partly because Robin Young is an intelligent and responsive person who weighs ideas carefully and partly because they often choose issues I relate to.  In this case it is bullying and stigma more than the issue of suicide, though suicide is HIGHLY and SPECIFICALLY stigmatized as a sin by the Catholic church and punished by exclusion from the church’s ceremonies after death.  Presumably also punished by condemnation to hell.  That is, suicide is more punished by the Catholic hierarchy than sexual abuse by priests who infect their victims with HIV because the church forbids condoms. 

Leaving that aside, the management of stigma seems a crucial issue in a time when many people are in mixtures of society without much confidence about who is in and who is out.  The sociologists and psychologists and biologists are hurrying to explain how deeply embedded in evolution this is.  One of the early experiments consisted of painting a crow white, whereupon the other crows ostracized and attacked it.  This was part of the effort to remove stigma from dark people.  But it ended up stigmatizing racists, at least for many of us.  It’s just harder to identify racists who’s not wearing a sheet.  Until they open their mouths.

Stigma is attached to a person who seems to embody something that the group finds non-conforming, whether or not it’s really “bad” or “wrong.”  It is often mindless, so now good priests are having to bear the stigma of bad priests.  Our advertising society tries to stigmatize things in order to sell us the “cures.”  Stinking, being fat, being old, being clumsy, being inarticulate, being “foreign,” being stupid, being sexually non-conforming to the rigidly prescribed formula of the media (sometimes stigmatizing even celibacy or faithfulness to committed marriage), and a host of other real and invented conditions from lack of fashion sense to conviction of murder --  all can cause stigma to be attached to someone.

The point of stigma is that then it is legitimate for others to persecute them without rebuke.  We find it funny to ridicule stigmatized people.  Snatching a cigarette out of someone’s mouth, yelling at young women entering an abortion clinic, throwing paint on a fur coat, and accusing the president of being a foreigner are all seemingly justified to some people.  The stigmatized might be labeled diseased or filthy.  Stigmatizing is a way of controlling people you don’t like, excluding them from power or significance.  Even exterminating them.   It is also a way of inflating the “stigmatator,” getting them the attention and -- from some people -- approval they need.

I find myself judging people in categories.  Sometimes I see a story about bad behavior, look at the name of the person, and think-before-I-think,  “Oh, no wonder.  No surprise.”  In the Thirties two families were given false names:  “the Jukes and the Kalikaks.”   Social-worker-type literature described them as everything stigmatized:  no education, always unemployed, tumble-down houses, dirty kids in rags, alcoholism, abuse, crime.  No one wanted to be the Jukes or the Kalikaks.  It was a way of enforcing assimilation in a time of immigration and limited resources.  In Valier it often drives things like the appearance of the town or the keeping chickens or horses.  Criticism is framed as the stigmatized person failing to attract business.

I find myself sitting with the Jukes and the Kallikaks on a voluntary basis.   When I went to kindergarten, I was enrolled late in the fall and a little bit young (October birthday).  I had no social skills because our neighborhood had no other kids at the time.  (I had two younger brothers.)  The class had formed into its patterns and didn’t want to make room or figure out how to fit me in.  In the next few grades I was sometimes the target of bullying because I was such a klutz on the playground.  I was near-sighted but no one had figured it out.  Reading was my preoccupation so instead of learning the class rules of how-to-be, I was busy conforming to “Anne of Green Gables.”  Yup.  Red hair.  Stigma.  High school came to the rescue when I discovered dramatics and never looked back after that.  I used my imagination to sympathize with the stigmatized.

But it could have gone the other way.  I could have become one of those nervous people who is always trying to fit in, please others, earn a place in society.  I did buy into one strategy:  hitching onto an outstanding person.  Mixed success.  Part of the mixture is the pleasing sensation of helping someone you love, which can wander over into a slightly more dubious category:  “do-gooder.”  This can earn you either prestige credits or -- in the eyes of those who are having “good” done to them -- stigma stinker status.  A reputation for self-righteousness.

I suppose that’s part of the reason people will not step in with schoolyard bullies.  They feel it will stigmatize them -- they might be attacked next.  So I welcome the idea that one way to address bullying is to energize and honor interventions.  Often it only takes one person to turn the tide.  Not that there isn’t a price.

I rode the bus to work in Portland, usually crowded.  I had a bad back at the time and really suffered if I had to stand.  On this morning there was one seat empty though many were standing.  Occupying the seat next to the window was a down-and-outer nodding and ragged.  I assumed, “Oh, people think they’re too good to sit by him.”  So I sat by him.  Standing people raised their eyebrows.  The ride was only ten minutes, which was lucky.  This guy had (ahem) “filled his pants.”  I spent the whole ten minutes debating how stubborn to be, while the people around me watched with amusement to see which way I would go.  Actually I got off a couple of stops early, hoping the walk would blow off the stench.  But I can’t really quite blow off the guy.  I still wonder what I could have done, but he wasn’t even conscious.  Help would have had to be involuntary on his part -- maybe involving police.