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| Book cover painting by Mikael Eriksson |
By Dan Hagen
If you’re tracking the origin of
the American superhero genre, you’ll find one path winds inevitably back to
Paris.
Much of American popular culture
seems to have been anticipated in France decades before, and that includes the costumed
supermen who engage in titanic struggles of good versus evil and always
narrowly escape the endless fiendish traps that are set for them.
The superhero emerged in the U.S.
in the 1930s’ pulp magazines and comic books, a fantasy antidote to the
powerlessness and despair experienced by millions during the Great Depression.
But such characters had already
captivated the attention of the French public at the turn of the century,
although they were often presented not as heroes but as ruthless criminals. The
assumption seemed to be that a person who had abilities far above those of the
common herd of humanity would use those abilities to exploit that herd.
Probably a safe assumption, at that.
It’s useful to remember how very weird the end of the 19th
century must have seemed to the people who experienced it, the press of
technological change on society even exceeding what we undergo at the
beginning of the 21st century.
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| The most famous image of Fantomas |
Look at Paris in La Belle Époque,
particularly from the 1890s on — the newly electrified City of Lights a beacon
to the world; the new telephone breaking the old rules of time and space as
effectively as telepathy; a new subway system and the new automobiles
permitting fluid movement, shifting identities and new opportunities for
criminality. Even flying machines were visible on the horizon.
This juxtaposition of the
commonplace and the seemingly fantastic would inform the 1920s artistic
movement known as surrealism, the aim of which was to “resolve the previously
contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” And it’s in that hypnagogic
space where we will find the secret lair of the superhero.
“At the founding of their
movement, the surrealists drew inspiration from currents of psychological
anxiety and social rebellion that ran through certain expressions of mass
culture, such as fantastic popular fiction and sensationalist journalism,”
wrote Robin Walz in “Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early
Twentieth Century Paris.”
Before World War I, a ruthless,
faceless superman called Fantômas schemed, feinted and glided through
adventures in 32 serialized novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain and in
five Gaumont silent films by the brilliant director Louis Feuillade.
Fantômas particularly caught the
fancy of the surrealists, cutting-edge artists like Belgian painter Rene
Magritte who created a 1943 homage called “The Backfire” or “Le Retour de
Flamme.”
This translates as “The Flame
Returns,” essayist David Kalat noted. “Some destructive, primal force has
returned. It threatens our end.”
“The picture depicts a masked
villain bestride a helpless city: a rather on-the-nose metaphor for the dark
times of the day, and the globe-spanning influence of supercriminals like
Adolph Hitler.” Magritte knew his fascism-besieged audience would instantly
recognize the reference to Fantômas.
Fantômas had predecessors, notably
Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail’s 19th century criminal
adventurer-turned-hero Rocambole, who appeared in novels from 1857 to 1869. Another
inspiration was Léon Sazie’s Zigomar, a murderous master criminal who bowed
Dec. 7, 1909, in a feuilleton or serial in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin.
His symbol of a flaming red “Z” may have inspired Johnston McCulley’s Zorro a
decade later.
Fantômas also had arguably even
weirder contemporaries like the Nyctalope, a superhero with an artificial heart
who could see in the dark. He appeared in novels by Jean de La Hire published
between 1911 and 1944 (meaning that the Nyctalope holds the dubious distinction
of being the only superhero to finish up collaborating with the Nazis in
occupied France).
But it was Fantômas who captured
the attention of the public and the avant garde, a shadowy figure who somehow
anticipated the sinister, exciting zeitgeist of the new century.
“The narrative trappings of Fantômas
were arcane, melodramatic, Belle Epoque schlock — the ‘family circle’ of
principal players, the Manichean opposition of good versus evil, the sublimity
of overstated rhetoric and the spectator’s total pleasure in riding along for
the performance,” Walz wrote.
The pleasures of the novels were
not literary. Like the science fiction novels of A.E. Van Vogt and the Arabian
Nights tales, the books offered hypnagogic escapism, a sense of wandering
through the infra-logical, identity-fluid, symbolic demimonde that we touch
between wakefulness and sleep.
Fantômas was a figure set against,
not a literary landscape, but a literary dreamscape, or perhaps nightmarescape.
He left an enemy suspended in giant bells, raining blood and gems. He killed
another by having her long hair caught in that fiendish new contraption, a
washing machine. He left the fingerprints of others by using gloves of human
skin. He secreted razor blades inside the shoes for sale in a department store,
and replaced the bottles of perfume with bottles of acid. He destroyed everyone
on board an ocean liner by releasing plague-infested rats onto the ship. He
placed enemies face up on a guillotine, so they could see what was coming.
And yet the dreams and nightmares
were somehow those of an era, an age.
“Fantômas exceeded the boundaries
of its melodramatic trappings,” Walz said. “Moral restitution was fundamentally
denied through the motif of the escape of Fantômas at the end of each episode.
All the reader was left with was an endless, yet predictable string of murders,
thefts, disguises, pursuits, traps, confrontations, arrests and escape — and
not a bit of it plausible.”
My favorite example of that comes
from the first of the groundbreaking Fantômas films, in which the supercriminal
escapes by leaving his captors holding not the bag but his arms, which turn out
to be fake and detachable. Boy, that’s planning ahead.
Yet as laughable as the adventures
are at times, they are almost equally unsettling because of the casual way they
are peppered with vicious mass murders.
“While the classic British
whodunit affirms rational order through the intervention of saintly detectives
like Inspector French and Miss Marple, Fantômas tends to undermine any notion of
stability or ultimate purpose,” observed Geoffrey O'Brien in the Village Voice.
“To sustain the series' open-ended structure, crime must always triumph, and Fantômas
is no Robin Hood.
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| Ernest Moerman's 1937 "Monsieur Fantomas," an homage to the 1913 serial |
“With his blend of technical
elegance and cruelty … he infects a whole ocean liner with plague — he foreshadows
a peculiarly modern type of gratuitous killer. The novels that chart his mythos
are themselves amoral: there is no pretense of edification, but rather a
frankly perverse fascination with terror and death-dealing. Any possible
ethical concerns are further distorted by ambiguity. Both Fantômas and his
nemesis, Inspector Juve, spend most of their time in disguise, so that it’s
hard to tell who anyone is. The only certainty is that fairly soon another body
will fall.”
Walz wrote, “As the series continues,
Fantômas’s number of aliases diminishes and increasingly he assumes his role en
cagoule, in black tights, cape and cowl.” An evil Batman, in other words.
“Think Batman, and then think what
would happen if Batman had no Bruce Wayne,” Kalat wrote. “Fantômas is a fictional
identity, a mask, a brand name for crime. But Allain and Souvestre never allow Fantômas
to remove that mask, to reveal the man beneath. We get snippets of his back
story: we meet his lover, his daughter and his son, we visit his hometown, and
we even learn his real name, but none of these fragments adds up to anything
substantial.”
All this anticipates the American
super hero sagas of much later in the 20th century — the breathless
melodrama, the astounding abilities, the never-ending seesawing battle of
criminal and crimefighter, the elaborate death traps, the bizarre gadgets and,
especially, the fluidity of the secret identity.
I’ve explored this particular curious
convention before, in the essay “The Mystery of the Menacing Mirror Men” and in
“The Secret Identity of Don Draper.” I don’t fully know what it means. It’s as
mysterious as Fantômas himself. I just know that it means something, it’s uncannily
dreamlike and it’s unmistakably there.
Both Fantômas and his archenemy
easily assume the identities of others, while the secret of Fantômas’ own
“real” identity, if any, is never pierced.
“The characters in Fantômas are
not merely ‘disguised’ as someone else,” Walz observed. “For the practical
purposes of the novel, they actually have to
be someone else.”
Right and wrong, good and evil,
order and chaos, forever changing position in an endless, dizzying waltz.
Underlining the symbolism, Fantômas and Juve also disguise themselves
flawlessly as each other.
That has to raise a psychological
and aesthetic question — are we really dealing with two people in opposition
here, or with the opposing elements within one person?
“In Jungian psychology, the shadow
or ‘shadow aspect’ may refer to (1) the entirety of the unconscious, i.e.,
everything of which a person is not fully conscious, or (2) an unconscious
aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not recognize in itself,”
Wikipedia notes. “Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least
desirable aspects of one’s personality, the shadow is largely negative. There
are, however, positive aspects which may also remain hidden in one’s shadow
(especially in people with low self-esteem).
“Contrary to a Freudian
conceptualization of shadow, therefore, the Jungian shadow often refers to all
that lies outside the light of consciousness, and may be positive or negative.
‘Everyone carries a shadow,’ Jung wrote, ‘and the less it is embodied in the
individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.’ It may be (in part)
one's link to more primitive animal instincts, which are superseded during
early childhood by the conscious mind.’”
This Shadow archetype, Jung
thought, is the source of the mechanism of psychological projection — of seeing
one’s own unperceived faults in others as a way of escaping full realization of
them and confrontation with them.
“These projections insulate and
cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego
and the real world,” Wikipedia said.
“Jung also believed that ‘in spite of its function as a reservoir for
human darkness — or perhaps because of this — the shadow is the seat of creativity’
so that for some, it may be, ‘the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow ...
represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar.’”
Are these mirroring masks the
popular culture shadow of Jung’s Shadow, lengthening itself across cultures,
nations and centuries — evidence, therefore, that within human nature of all of
us, of each us, lurk secret identities, doubles, dark and light?
I don’t know. But I do know this,
that the creators of the contemporary iterations of superheroes, in a quest to make
the material seemingly more “adult,” increasingly give up the concept of the
“secret identity,” and do so at their peril. They may be cutting off one of the
deepest wellsprings of dreamlike psychological power that is available to them.
Superheroes, after all, do not
derive their vast power from the real, but from the surreal.
Sources: "Crime After
Crime", by Geoffrey O'Brien. From the Village Voice, August 18,
1986: review of Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, New York:
William Morrow, 1986
“Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early 20th
Century Paris” by Robin Walz
“Shadowmen: Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction” by Jean-Marc
and Randy Lofficier
“The Long Arm of Fantômas” by David Kalat, an essay in “Third Person:
Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives”
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| "Fantomas" became a comic-strip serialized the weekly Gavroche during World War II |
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| Whether super hero or a super criminal, it's important that you know how to make a properly bombastic entrance |
