Fantômas: An Insolent and Surrealistic Source of the Superhero

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 19^th 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 21^st century.

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 19^th 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.

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 20^th 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 20^th 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”

"Fantomas" became a comic-strip serialized the weekly Gavroche during World War II

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