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Secret Identity

“Every super­hero has a secret identity…who wants the pressure of being super all the time?” –Mr. Incredible

Super­heroes may be fun, but I would rather watch a real hero in action — someone who doesn’t hide his identity, and faces the challenges that arise as a conse­quence. Consider Batman, for instance. The whole point of putting on a mask was to hide the truth (that he was Bruce Wayne) from everyone else. But to me, that appears to be the easy way out. Would it not have been more heroic to conquer the bad guys as Bruce Wayne rather than Batman? Wouldn’t that have set an example that could be followed?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 20:32 and is filed under Daily Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Secret Identity”

  1. Varun Says:
    January 19th, 2008 at 14:30

    Batman is a vigilante — all of his heroic actions are unlawful. Even though the police implic­itly supports him if caught he can be prose­cuted. Ditto for spiderman and most of the other “masked” superheroes.

  2. Ramnath R Iyer Says:
    January 19th, 2008 at 14:40

    That’s true of course. But it is somewhat dissat­is­fying that these heroes often try to convey a ‘moral’ through their actions — good versus evil etc. — which doesn’t apply to the real world, because people can’t (and shouldn’t) turn into caped crusaders.

  3. Varun Says:
    January 19th, 2008 at 15:44

    Agreed. But then all of it is metaphor­ical, right? I think I need the super­hero to be better and more myste­rious than me. If I could do every­thing he does then he will not be a super­hero to me any more, just a role model.

    As a kid I always used to wonder about how and why the super­heroes were never recog­nized when in disguise… after all it is not as if they totally change. Anyways…

  4. Ramnath R Iyer Says:
    January 19th, 2008 at 16:50

    Some of those disguises were foolproof. Look at Clark Kent’s for instance…glasses…ingenious.… :-P

  5. Ramnath R Iyer Says:
    January 19th, 2008 at 16:56

    I would like to add -

    I’ve noticed that some of these movies actually try to let the good guy fight the bad guy ‘as himself’ rather than as the superhero.

    Remember ‘Mr. India’ in which Anil Kapoor declines to become invis­ible for the last fight? And in Spiderman, Peter Parker’s mark always seems to come off in the end, which appears to be a symbolic way of saying the same thing.

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