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Superheroes are sometimes regarded as modern day myths; archetypes harking back to ancient heroes like Gilgamesh who famously wore his underwear on the outside and engaged in curiously vigorous male-bonding activities with his youthful ward Enkidu.
Gilgamesh aside, though, the whole ancient myth thing is maybe obscuring the fact that superheroes have much closer cousins than Hercules. Cousins like, for example, Sherlock Holmes. Absurdly dedicated, supremely skilled guardians of right who bring evil-doers to justice — switch the moustache for the helmet, or even just paint the first on the second, and how much difference is there really between Iron Man and Hercule Poirot?
Which brings us to the mystery/procedural television drama
Bones. The series stars Emily Deschenel as Temperance "Bones" Brennan, a brilliant forensic anthropologist who also happens to possess wicked martial arts skills, a passion for truth and justice, and (like all the best superheroes) a heaping helping of daddy issues. Over the course of the series she tracks down murderers and foils a whole series of serial killers with her trusty sidekick Enkidu — er, I mean, with her partner and romantic interest special FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz).
Bones doesn't dwell on the parallels with superheroes all that much …except in one or two instances. In the Halloween episode "The Mummy in the Maze" from season three, Brennan dresses up as Wonder Woman, and — inevitably — ends up fighting crime in costume (though she explains at some length that her bracelets aren't really made of Amazonium, and so won't be especially effective at stopping bullets.)
The other super-hero themed episode is "The Superhero in the Alley" from season 1. In this case the dynamic duo discover the body of comic-book geek Warren Granger. Granger was terminally ill, and so, knowing he didn't have long to live, he dressed up as "Citizen 14" and went out to confront a wife-beater — getting himself murdered for his trouble. The episode trades cheerfully in negative fanboy stereotypes: comic fans, in this world, are pallid adolescent doofuses whose only saving grace is the unlikelihood that their seed will ever contaminate the gene pool. In an especially idiotic sequence, Warren's self-made comic book is interpreted as allegorical anthropology. An entirely by-the-numbers story about saving some ethereal female from an evil guy is supposed to symbolize the real-life relationship of Warren, the damsel he wants to save, and the husband who beats her. Thus fantastic superhero narrative is reinterpreted as real life murder story.
Of course, there is no "real life" murder; just a fictional plot mirroring the fictional story-within-a-story of the comic book. The ridiculous superhero story does mean exactly what the idiotic anthropologists say it does. Which is to say, the meaning of the comic is the meaning of the television show: murder, justice, good, evil, all wrapped up in 32 pages or 43 minutes, whatever comes first.
Bones makes fun of the comic-book geeks for not being sufficiently attached to reality…but, of course, the television narrative itself isn't "real" either. Least of all when it reads the comic as mimicking (TV) reality.
It's not like the episode is unaware of the irony. Over the course of the show, Booth and Brennan engage in a running argument about which of them is more like that lame-ass, the deceased "super-hero" Warren Granger. Both at first deny the connection, but eventually they have to admit that his motivations — fighting for the right, defending the defenseless, putting one's life on the line for justice — align fairly closely with theirs. Or, as the script puts it:
Brennan: You said before that Warren reminded you of me. You think I'm just like him, that he hid from life by immersing himself in a fantasy world where he fought crime, and I do the same thing. Only I don't have super powers, I have science.
Booth: C'mon Bones, you do fight crime. It's not a fantasy. As far as any normal person is concerned, you do have super powers.
Booth is referring to Brennan's forensic skills — which are indeed, and literally, miraculous. As with most police procedurals, the police procedure in question is a lot more effective in fiction than it could ever be in practice. Brennan's team is always pulling DNA out of the most unlikely places, using particulate matter to identify not just regions or cities but individual houses, or doing 3-D reconstructions of facial features from a hunk of bone. The last utilizes technology that doesn't actually exist ("patent pending" according to the pilot), but the whole show takes place squarely in the land of make believe. If forensics could do this sort of thing on a regular basis, no one would ever be convicted falsely and reasonable doubt would be a quaint relic of the past. The science Brennan's team uses is more realistic than doomed-child-rocketed-from-Krypton, but more realistic doesn't necessarily mean more real.
Contra Booth,
Bones is a fantasy. And a familiar one to any comic-book reader: good guy uses superior abilities to defeat the bad guys. Everybody loves empowerment narratives; it's what makes the pop culture go round.
In
Bones, that narrative is quite blatant — not only is Brennan a genius anthropologist with Hollywood good looks and a martial arts expert, but she's also — a best-selling author! But while the Mary Sueness is piled on with a trowel, the romance is dumped on even thicker. The center of the series isn't so much Brennan's greatness as it is her sort-of-not-quite romance with Booth — the flirtatious bickering and the buried declarations of affection strung out episode after episode, season after season, with the resolution forever and carefully delayed. On this basis, you could argue that
Bones exercises an adult self-control in comparison to the adolescent instant gratification of comics — though, of course, the Superman/Lois Lane relationship took way more than five seasons to achieve any kind of consummation.
The point is that the the difference between
Bones and Superman isn't so much the elements as how they're mixed. Play up the fighting evil and you have more guys in the audience; play up the romcom and you've got more girls. There are different features there, sure, but, at least to the non-expert, they certainly look like they've been stretched over the same skull.
Noah Berlatsky writes regularly for The Comics Journal, The Chicago Reader, and his own blog, The Hooded Utilitarian. He's also an artist of sorts.
A Pundit in Every Panopticon is ©2010 Noah Berlatsky
