The Culture Beat

A few posts ago I wrote about how one of Lost‘s current season episodes introduced a new character, Charlotte Staples Lewis, a scientist from the mysterious freighter who literally drops into the island. My post referenced the brilliant analysis by Entertainment Weekly‘s Jeff Jensen, who expertly recaps each episode and finds a wealth of allusions, literary, cinematic and others, many of which might acutally be intentional and could tell us something about the significance of a name or character. Charlotte’s initials, being clear signposts to C. S. (Clives Staples) Lewis, came along about the same time her fellow freighter colleague, physicist Daniel Faraday begins experiments that indicate the island is moving through time at a slower rate than the surrounding world. Indeed, in recent weeks the island survivors found the freighter’s murdered doctor washed ashore and when they radio the news to the ship, the doctor himself is still alive there. In fact, the island time seems in flux, sometimes faster, sometimes slower than that of the outside world.

Last week’s episode, “There’s No Place Like Home, part. 1,” itself a reference to The Wizard of Oz, ended with some of our survivors trekking through the forest to rescue friends when they again encounter “the Others,” the strange group of humans who have apparently been on the island far longer than they have. For a long time they were seen as the enemy, but with a group of mercenaries on a mission to “torch the island,” perhaps these forest dwellers might not be the real villains. And that’s where the Narnia connection seems to arise.

With the Disney/Walden adaptation of the second Chronicles of Narnia book, Prince Caspian premiering last weekend, I started persusing the book to reacquaint myself with movie’s source. Set many hundreds of years after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children find that the land they once ruled was long before invaded by the Telmarines. They discover that time moves much more quickly in Narnia than in their own world. They rescue a dwarf from the Telmarines who tells them of the dire state of the enchanted land now ruled by those who have suppressed the truth about Narnia’s glorious past and it’s wonderful creatures.

When, in the fifth chapter, Prince Caspian learns that his Uncle Miraz seeks his death in order to allow his own newborn son to become the next heir to the throne of Narnia, he flees into the woods and is warily taken in by a talking badger and two dwarves, Trumpkin and Nikabrik. Caspian learns that they are part of “Old Narnia,” the talking animals and mythical creatures who were driven away by the invading Telmarines who conquered Narnia ages earlier. Now considered merely the stuff of legend, Caspian discovers the tales are true. The chapter ends with this paragraph:

There was a great deal more talk, but it all ended with the agreement that Caspian should stay and even the promise that, as soon as he was able to go out, he should be taken to see what Trumpin called “the Others”; for apparently in these wild parts all sorts of creatures the the Old Days of Narnia still lived on in hiding.

Coincidence? With the earlier allusions, it’s now hard to deny that Lost‘s masterminds are either doing some bigtime cultural poaching in the woods of Narnia or trying to weave a brilliant web that captures our imaginations in new and intriguing ways.

Those of you who grew up reading DC comics and who still harbor a love for the superhero genre in your adult years may have heard of or read Darwyn Cooke’s neo-classic graphic novel, DC: The New Frontier, first published in 2004. Cooke’s genius concept was to re-imagine the transition from the era of the first superheroes, the 1940s’ “Golden Age” to the latter 1950s’ “Silver Age” of jet-era characters. The dark undertones of the story arise from a political angle as the first superheroes face governmental efforts to either shut down the masked vigilantes in favor of merely human law enforcement or, in Superman and Wonder Woman’s case, their co-optation as government-sanctioned agents. It’s the era of Cold War paranoia and anyone who won’t unmask or retire operate underground (like Batman).

This resonates historically with the congressional hearings in real life when, featuring psychiatrist Frederick Wertham author of the accusatory book, Seduction of the Innocent, which charged comic books with promoting unhealthy attitudes and behavior in impressionable youth. Comics publishers agreed to police the content of their magazines and give them the Comics Code stamp of approval. The Silver Age began in 1956, with the appearance of the Flash, a sleeker re-invention of the Golden Age character. Like his mythological inspiration Mercury, herald of the gods, he announced the return to exciting adventure tales for a new generation.

Cooke’s epic covers pretty near every DC character of the era, many of which I only vaguely knew of as a small boy glancing over comics in Barnes’ Drug store around 1960. His retro art style wonderfully captures the commercial art of the era and everything about the book is well-thought out. He captures a Cold War America entering the Space Age with its bright hope of reaching for the moon that will inspire in the country at large and in the minds of comics’ readers. The title itself refers to John F. Kennedy’s promise of a new generation facing the geopolitical and scientific challenges of tomorrow with courage and grace. Cooke even includes salutory elements of Philip Kaufman’s space epic The Right Stuff to fuse comic book sensibilities with the world of the brave and bold test pilots. The book’s central character is Hal Jordan, test pilot for Ferris Aircraft and soon to become the Silver Age Green Lantern. We learn why he is choosen as the most fearless candidate for the power ring that obeys his will.

The book starts slowly and those of a conservative bent might be, as I was, put off by the ideological elements of the first chapters. But as I followed the story’s many characters and plotlines I realized it was taking me to heights I’d never experienced in a comic narrative. I’d rarely if ever been deeply moved by superhero stories, I read them for the pure fun of fantastic adventures. DC: The New Frontier combines comic and real life history in an unforgettable saga that ends with a staggering action climax that resolves the many conflicts and creates the world many kids have always loved about DC’s universe of heroes.

Three weeks ago, Warner Bros. releaseed a direct-to-video adaptation titled JLA: The New Frontier. The title change indicates the necessary reduction of scope to fit a 78 minute animated movie–there are fewer non-Justice League of America characters and plotlines but the shape of the original remains potently intact. Cooke, who had worked with Bruce Timm (Batman: The Animated Series) on the JLA animated stories, knows how to make characters work onscreen and this is the best looking of anything produced by Timm and associates, and captures Cooke’s style perfectly. Some might complain that newbies coming to the story would be baffled by the wide array of characters, but that’s pretty much how I felt about the book–the more you know about the Silver Age DC universe, the more you will enjoy it but you don’t have to know a whole lot to get that the characters you grew up with, (especially if you were in the Boomer cohort), have grown profoundly richer in both versions of the story.