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You are here: Home / TV & Movies / Movies / Super Heroes

Super Heroes

by John Cole|  August 13, 20115:51 pm| 57 Comments

This post is in: Movies

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I saw this really weird documentary on HBO called Superheroes today while I was cooking and cleaning. On many levels, it was the most depressing thing I have seen in a long, long time. And not because many of the profiled “superheroes” seem to have psychological/personality issues that need to be addressed, but because many of them were attempting to address, in their own oddball ways, real societal problems that really shouldn’t be happening in the “richest country in the world.”

BTW- when I was in basic training, my drill sergeant called anyone who was a chump a “superhero,” so now whenever I here the term superhero, I think of a loser. I can still see him rolling his eyes saying “Ok, superhero. Get to it.”

Also, I caught it before I posted it, but I had a typo in the title of this post. This post was almost called “Super Herpes.”

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57Comments

  1. 1.

    Comrade Mary

    August 13, 2011 at 5:56 pm

    I didn’t see the show, but there was a great post about many of the same people here, including some references to the Real Life Superhero Project and Jon Ronson’s wonderful article about several of these guys.

  2. 2.

    PeakVT

    August 13, 2011 at 5:57 pm

    Would my neighbors, whose washing machine or something just leaked into my basement, qualify as “superheros”? Or should I stick to calling them fucktards?

  3. 3.

    Cat Lady

    August 13, 2011 at 5:58 pm

    psychological/personality issues that need to be addressed

    I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the regular commenters here pops up to say “hey, that’s me!” You know who you are.

  4. 4.

    Will Reks

    August 13, 2011 at 6:02 pm

    DS, John. I wasn’t hardcore enough for the Marines.

  5. 5.

    Ozymandias, King of Ants

    August 13, 2011 at 6:07 pm

    What’s happening to you? First, it was “expressing anal glands” and now it’s “superherpes.”

  6. 6.

    John Cole

    August 13, 2011 at 6:13 pm

    @Will Reks: Thanks. I’m losing it.

  7. 7.

    gene108

    August 13, 2011 at 6:20 pm

    I’m treating this as an open thread.

    With Texas A&M going to the SEC and last years realignment, I’m really getting freaked out as we approach college football season.

    I swear the SEC is turning into a professional sports league.

    It’s really getting on my nerves.

  8. 8.

    4tehlulz

    August 13, 2011 at 6:26 pm

    @gene108: “turning”? That implies it wasn’t.

  9. 9.

    Moonbatman

    August 13, 2011 at 6:27 pm

    I’M MOONBATMAN!!!!!!!1!!

    I call on the power of the MoonBat. All College Professors, Art Directors, Newspaper Editors, Overpaid TV Reporters, Anyone else with a IQ of 80 or Below. Heed the call of MoonBatman.

  10. 10.

    Southern Beale

    August 13, 2011 at 6:27 pm

    We saw the new Planet Of The Apes movie this afternoon and I’m really glad we did. It was great!

    I have a new superhero and he’s a chimp named Caesar with a huge chip on his shoulder.

  11. 11.

    South of I-10

    August 13, 2011 at 6:28 pm

    My husband and I watched this ealier this week. I felt sorry for the people in it. Also, who designs those costumes?

  12. 12.

    Cat Lady

    August 13, 2011 at 6:29 pm

    @John Cole:

    The whole world is undergoing some kind of psychic/psychological transformation. I have my theory, but if I shared my thoughts as much as you do the words would look crazy to me too. It takes a lot of stable psychological architecture to keep pushing against the crazy day after day like you do. You’re not losing it. You’re fine.

  13. 13.

    Comrade Luke

    August 13, 2011 at 6:29 pm

    @gene108:

    I bet some of the players that don’t make the NFL are paid better now than they will be after they graduate.

  14. 14.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 13, 2011 at 6:30 pm

    @gene108: Big-time college football should just be like the English “club team” concept, a purely commercial enterprise that indulges local boosterism and has nothing to do with higher education.

  15. 15.

    gene108

    August 13, 2011 at 6:39 pm

    @4tehlulz:

    The SEC occasionally had some great teams, but they weren’t that much more dominant than the top teams from the Big Ten, PAC 10 and Big 12.

    The current level of domination of college football, by one conference, is unprecedented from anything I’ve seen before.

    Therefore the SEC has become or is becoming more of a pro-league than the other major conferences.

    I’m not sure what the SEC did to separate itself from the rest of college football.

  16. 16.

    mem from somerville

    August 13, 2011 at 6:42 pm

    Did you see the images that were workin’ ’round the twitter this week?

    If Male Superheroes Posed Like Wonder Woman

    http://jezebel.com/5829204/if-male-superheroes-posed-like-wonder-woman

    Cracked me up.

  17. 17.

    Poopyman

    August 13, 2011 at 6:42 pm

    @Moonbatman: Yeah, well don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

  18. 18.

    hildebrand

    August 13, 2011 at 6:44 pm

    @FlipYrWhig: Then they could do the whole relegation bit – with the best of the college teams making the leap up to the NFL, and the bottom-dwellers getting kicked to the college ranks.

    The whole relegation business would work well in MLB – with Triple, Double, and Single A ball already in place.

  19. 19.

    Poopyman

    August 13, 2011 at 6:45 pm

    OTOH, the Red Cross refers to their blood donors as “superheroes”, so chalk one up in the other column.

    Oh, and thanks for the oversharing on your Freudian in the title.

  20. 20.

    hildebrand

    August 13, 2011 at 6:47 pm

    @gene108: Its the south (sorry, folks) – that thar book learnin’ makes people take on airs. Best to focus on the true Southern religion of Amurican football.

  21. 21.

    MazeDancer

    August 13, 2011 at 6:49 pm

    Ames Straw Poll Results. No Superheroes.

    Bachmann wins with 4823
    2. Paul 4671
    3. Pawlenty 2293
    4. Santorum 1657
    5. Cain 1456

    Over 16,000 votes, 3K more than last time.

  22. 22.

    Dee Loralei

    August 13, 2011 at 6:49 pm

    Bachman wins Iowa straw poll. Color me surprised. I’m curious how Perry, Parry, and the Mittster did though. I bet Paul was 2nd.

  23. 23.

    cyntax

    August 13, 2011 at 6:50 pm

    @John Cole:

    Wow, did you just get corrected by your former drill sergeant in the comments section? That’s pretty hardcore.

  24. 24.

    Rob Wolfe

    August 13, 2011 at 6:51 pm

    I caught this show the other night and was most struck by the folks that were handing out the baggies full of necessities. They may be wearing costumes and strike us as weird but some of those folks are doing some very good work

  25. 25.

    Southern Beale

    August 13, 2011 at 6:52 pm

    So according to the news, Michele Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll. Ron Paul was second, & Tim Pawlenty third.

  26. 26.

    Violet

    August 13, 2011 at 6:56 pm

    @cyntax:
    I was thinking the same thing. Your former DS reads your blog?
    @MazeDancer:
    Interesting. No real surprise there. The Paultards are probably both happy and pissed off about the results. Bachmann and Paul are really close in votes — 152 votes different. That’s hardly anything.

  27. 27.

    Scott

    August 13, 2011 at 6:58 pm

    I’m a huge comic book fan, and am even writing a series of stories about superheroes — but I’ve never really liked the “Real-Life Superhero” thing. It strikes me as a sign of serious mental health issues when someone dresses up in spandex/cape/mask or trenchcoat/fedora/mask, outside of Halloween and comic conventions. It seems especially sad that they need to dress up to do good deeds in their communities.

    I wouldn’t want to stop them from doing it — mainly because why stop people from doing good. But I’d rather they got some kind of treatment.

  28. 28.

    The Sheriff's A Ni-

    August 13, 2011 at 6:58 pm

    As a regular player of City of Heroes, I should be offended. But, yeah, its information and consumerism overload colliding with people who need help. Its not going to be very pretty.

    And Bachmann nudges over Paul in the Straw Poll. Hmmhmm.

  29. 29.

    marginalized for stating documented facts

    August 13, 2011 at 6:59 pm

    I assume this is the kind of goofy crap you’re talking about.

    Just another symptom of America’s delusional drift into collective la-la land.

    Ronald Reagan was a great war hero because he played a PT boat commander in the movie Hellcats of the Navy — but never actually volunteered to serve in the real army.

    General Petraeus is America’s pre-eminent military commander…because he bribed the Taliban to leave our convoys alone in Afghanistan and bribed the Shiite and Wahabi insurgent factions to stop killing one another in Iraq. Meanwhile, Petraeus has never won a single actual battle in a real war.

    The spate of bizarrely unrealistic superhero movies that dominate America’s box office shows us that Americans have lost their taste for reality and can no longer distinguish twixt fantasy and the real world.

    I predict a bright political future for Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.

  30. 30.

    FlipYrWhig

    August 13, 2011 at 7:00 pm

    @hildebrand:

    Then they could do the whole relegation bit – with the best of the college teams making the leap up to the NFL, and the bottom-dwellers getting kicked to the college ranks.

    I think that would be excellent. They’ve got the stadiums, they’ve got the millionaire coaches, everything’s in place already. If you’re the Auburn Tigers Gridiron Club, you can decide whether to keep your team intact and push for first-division NFL status, or reap the lucrative transfer fee for Cam Newton and/or Dad Newton. And Cam Newton doesn’t have to spend any more time in a classroom learning about geology than he feels like spending.

    The passion people have for college football in some quarters is just incomprehensible to me — but I’ve never been affiliated with a big-time sports school. But the “school” part is ancillary. People don’t just love Florida because they took art history there; there are all kinds of people all excited about the team who never set foot on campus. So why confuse it all with this whole “educational” charade?

    It would totally work.

  31. 31.

    gbear

    August 13, 2011 at 7:00 pm

    OT but Oh Joy. Bachmann and Paul just about tied as winners of the Iowa straw poll. Pawlenty came in third but with less than half the votes Bachmann got. Teabaggers are the republican superheroes.

    Edit: But I see I got here late. I’m not a commenting superhero.

  32. 32.

    cyntax

    August 13, 2011 at 7:02 pm

    @Violet 26
    Which is very cool, but ya better keep things squared away.

  33. 33.

    marginalized for stating documented facts

    August 13, 2011 at 7:04 pm

    @Scott:

    I wouldn’t want to stop them from doing it—mainly because why stop people from doing good.

    Another sign of America’s divorce from reality. We need to stop people from doing this kind of stupid stuff and we need to stop it pronto.

    Any competent cop or army NCO will tell you that clowns who try to be heroes interfere with the people who are actually doing their f*cking jobs.

    People who try to be heroes get real cops and real soldiers killed. The last thing any competent professional wants is some bozo in spandex running around in the field and, for example, getting in between the police and a bank robber in some hostage situation, or sticking his damn nose into some domestic dispute that just turned ugly and now has some drunken a-hole holding a knife to his girlfriend’s throat with a bunch of police yelling at him to relax and calm down.

    In the real world, one of the biggest dangers to professionals trying to do their jobs is a jerk who thinks he can be a hero. Real police and real soldiers and real firefighters have no interest in being goddamn heroes, they just want to come back from their shifts alive and with the perps in the back of the squad car, or with the domestic violence call resolved without anyone getting hurt or killed.

  34. 34.

    Scott

    August 13, 2011 at 7:30 pm

    Any competent cop or army NCO will tell you that clowns who try to be heroes interfere with the people who are actually doing their f*cking jobs.

    Sure, for the guys who are trying to go out and stop crime. But from my understanding, the vast majority of the “Real Life Superheroes” dress up in the costumes, then do stuff for charity or do regular good deeds around their communities — stuff that doesn’t endanger anyone — cop, civilian, or themselves…

  35. 35.

    Joseph Nobles

    August 13, 2011 at 7:41 pm

    A Theory of Everything (Sort Of)

    That’s the title of the new article. I’m not linking. It just went live. You should already know who wrote it.

  36. 36.

    Derf

    August 13, 2011 at 7:41 pm

    Ahhh so you were in the military. That explains a LOT.

    I have never met a military guy who was able to truly think for themselves outside the box. If it wasn’t written down for them somewhere how to deal with situation A by taking action B they were completely lost. They need some sergeant telling them how to make their bed, how to take a dump, how to clean their toenails.

    I guess that explains why you need someone like Greenwald to tell you how to think politically and you tend to buy into the main stream bullshit the media tells you about the ecomomy or politics or whatever.

  37. 37.

    befuggled

    August 13, 2011 at 7:46 pm

    The biggest part of the reason why the SEC has been dominant is simply that all of the teams are in the south, where the population is high and high school football is healthy. Florida, for instance, is in great shape because Florida produces a lot of college football talent and they can bring in the best of it.

    Another thing that some of the SEC schools are doing is oversigning Basically, what some teams have been doing is signing more players than they have scholarships for, and “encouraging” some of the less talented kids to leave. For instance, 21 players have left the Alabama football team over the last two years, but Alabama is exactly at the maximum roster size. LSU had a kid by the name of Elliot Porter who moved into his dorm room last year only to discover that he didn’t have a scholarship.

    Not all SEC teams are doing this (for instance, I don’t think Georgia or Florida are), but for the ones that do it can be a competitive advantage. It certainly helped Nick Saban to turn around Alabama in a relatively short time.

  38. 38.

    Tony J

    August 13, 2011 at 7:54 pm

    As has been said, these are people who probably need some kind of help with their mental health issues, but what they’re doing isn’t wrong. They’re taking the fictional idea of a costumed superhero and doing something good with it. They’re not trying to be ‘Kick-Ass’, they’re trying to help out where they can and if they get laughed at, so be it. They’re not trying to impress, they’re trying to inspire.

    YMMV.

  39. 39.

    gnomedad

    August 13, 2011 at 8:00 pm

    Derf deserves banning for that. That was vile.

  40. 40.

    Villago Delenda Est

    August 13, 2011 at 8:13 pm

    @Derf:

    It’s pretty obvious that you have no fucking clue about how the military actually functions. You’re a lot like Dick Cheney and most of the neocons…never served, and have no fucking clue.

  41. 41.

    fuzz

    August 13, 2011 at 8:15 pm

    @befuggled:

    You beat me to it with the oversigning issue. In fairness though, some schools do it for a reason, there was a book that followed the Ole Miss coaching staff while they recruited. Drawing heavily from MS, AL, AR, they had problems with kids qualifying, in any given class almost a third to half of the kids you offer a scholarship to won’t make it because of their high school grades/test scores. So you offer a lot of them to a lot of kids, it’s really tough though for the ones that get left out.

  42. 42.

    celticdragonchick

    August 13, 2011 at 8:21 pm

    @Derf:

    I have never met a military guy who was able to truly think for themselves outside the box. If it wasn’t written down for them somewhere how to deal with situation A by taking action B they were completely lost. They need some sergeant telling them how to make their bed, how to take a dump, how to clean their toenails.
    I guess that explains why you need someone like Greenwald to tell you how to think politically and you tend to buy into the main stream bullshit the media tells you about the ecomomy or politics or whatever.

    Obvious troll is obvious.

    Also, go fuck yourself with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat.

  43. 43.

    celticdragonchick

    August 13, 2011 at 8:25 pm

    @marginalized for stating documented facts:

    Another sign of America’s divorce from reality. We need to stop people from doing this kind of stupid stuff and we need to stop it pronto.
    Any competent cop or army NCO will tell you that clowns who try to be heroes interfere with the people who are actually doing their f*cking jobs.

    That was the kind of thinking that lead to this…

    BTW, you are talkng about police “professionals” who routinely shoot people’s dogs and conduct no-knock raids on the wrong address. I don’t have a problem with “amateurs” trying to do their bit when the paid pros are dropping the ball. We used to call that ‘civic responsibility’.

  44. 44.

    Omnes Omnibus

    August 13, 2011 at 8:48 pm

    @celticdragonchick: Don’t take the bait. The troll’s view of the military is actually a fairly common misconception; the thing is that the troll is just here to troll.

  45. 45.

    Derf

    August 13, 2011 at 8:53 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est: Please explain it to me.

  46. 46.

    Derf

    August 13, 2011 at 8:54 pm

    @celticdragonchick: That was so sweet celt. You’re a wonderful little groupie aren’t you. Hugs and kisses.

  47. 47.

    Nikita

    August 13, 2011 at 8:55 pm

    Delurking for a second…

    @John up top:

    Not to be an old fuddy duddy but since you mentioned typos in the original post, I figured you wouldn’t mind my pointing out another one.

    It’s “whenever I hear the term superhero”.

    Okay, going back to lurking.

  48. 48.

    Chris

    August 13, 2011 at 9:06 pm

    @marginalized for stating documented facts:

    People who try to be heroes get real cops and real soldiers killed. The last thing any competent professional wants is some bozo in spandex running around in the field and, for example, getting in between the police and a bank robber in some hostage situation, or sticking his damn nose into some domestic dispute that just turned ugly and now has some drunken a-hole holding a knife to his girlfriend’s throat with a bunch of police yelling at him to relax and calm down.

    “Do you know what the definition of a hero is? It’s someone who gets other people killed. You can look it up later.”
    – Serenity

  49. 49.

    Yutsano

    August 13, 2011 at 9:10 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: One would think that his own home country would have no military or military history. One would be quite wrong.

  50. 50.

    Omnes Omnibus

    August 13, 2011 at 9:12 pm

    @Yutsano: Derf is Canadian? That is hilarious. A one man mission to demolish the image of Canadians as polite.

  51. 51.

    Roger Moore

    August 13, 2011 at 9:35 pm

    @Derf:
    Shorter Derf: I’m trolling a blog I haven’t even bothered to read.

  52. 52.

    befuggled

    August 13, 2011 at 9:45 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’m an American living in Toronto, and believe me: I have met plenty of impolite Canadians. I think anonymity on the Internet tends to bring it out.

  53. 53.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    August 13, 2011 at 10:15 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    A one man mission to demolish the image of Canadians as polite.

    You would think that Claude Lemieux would have taken care of that already.

  54. 54.

    celticdragonchick

    August 13, 2011 at 10:18 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Maybe so. I get a bit agitated when people who don’t know a fucking thing about the military presume to ignorantly opine about those of us who have, in fact, served.

  55. 55.

    Yutsano

    August 13, 2011 at 10:22 pm

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):

    You would think that Claude Lemieux would have taken care of that already.

    Or Stephen Harper. Lawd I can’t stand that man.

  56. 56.

    sneezy

    August 14, 2011 at 12:10 am

    @gnomedad:

    Derf deserves banning for that. That was vile.

    Seconded.

  57. 57.

    Life

    August 15, 2011 at 10:06 am

    I’m in this movie. You can find me at http://www.facebook.com/superherolife and learn more

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