I have been listening for days to CNN commercials applauding
their “superhero” program. I have only recently
begun to watch TV with some interest, a consequence of the 2016 Presidential
campaign, so what I know about the superhero project has been shoehorned into
those CNN advertisements with Anderson Cooper and Kelly Ripa.
The advertisements are almost convincing, effacing the
hypocrisy, contradictions, and social programming underwriting the Cinderella metanarrative:
the socially recognized heroes discovering the everyday heroes who unless
discovered by the anointed like Cooper and Ripa would go otherwise unannounced. This
storyline is that the Coopers and Ripas of this world are not the real heroes
(although, really, we know, they are); the everyday people, synecdochically represented
by the “superheroes,” are.
This superhero narrative is a head-fake strategy familiar to
social stratification and mobility theorists, particularly those critical of the
capitalist enterprise. Uncovering its function doesn’t call for a deep interpretation:
a small percentage of a particular culture has, as if it were a tribe, retained
for itself and its descendants a radically disproportionate percentage of social,
cultural, educational, symbolic, and economic capital.
To maintain (and increase) these inequalities in a putative
democratic, capitalist culture, we need these head-fakes, pretenses of a
meritocracy, games within which participants are sucked into the illusory
approximation of a zero-starting line.
My interpretation of head-fakes is not news. It is the foundation
of Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatus (ISAs). I could have
collapsed the previous seven paragraphs into one claim about the CNN Superhero
program as only one more in the long list of ISAs that work to naturalize
inequality.
I can’t fully explain my visceral response to the CNN
Superhero project. I am probably offending readers because on the surface, this
program seems laudable, spearheaded by the likeable, self-effacing Cooper. One
might claim he is a star/hero because of his heritage, being the son of Gloria
Vanderbilt. He has, one might also say, made it on his own. He is clearly one
of the more competent of the current swath of news broadcasters imagining their
functions as filtering for the masses some semblance of social and political
reality.
Cooper and Ripa have, I think, unselfconsciously embraced
the project identifying the “superheroes,” the extraordinary ordinaries, those
who give their lives to others with little or no attempt at gaining
hero-status. I have my own “superheroes” whom I emulate, people whose names no
one would recognize. There’s an odd tension here: almost as if you lose your
hero identity the moment someone spots you (think Dylan).
I would like to end here, paying tribute as if through a
broken mirror to whomever CNN will identify as hero of the year—and to whom it
will award $50,000 to be used to continue his or her good work.
But let me mention how the program would have perhaps
rescued some of its authenticity by refraining from its too-frequent
advertisements foregrounding this project and CNN’s generosity.
And let me suggest that this hero/superhero narrative
contributes to the mis-election of people like Trump as our leaders. Augusto
Boal explained the function of hero-worship within his critique of traditional
theatre, the actors absorbing the gazes of the audience as a magnifying lens
concentrating the parallel rays of the sun into a burning focal point on the
stage, the actors gathering the collective egos of the audience into themselves
to become larger than life, the audience in turn living vicariously through the
staged life of the hero rather than through themselves.
