The Myth of the American Superhero

William G. Doty
— author of Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals
"A major interpretive resource for several disciplines, including American studies, religious studies, literature, popular culture, and film studies, The Myth of the American Superhero covers an astonishing array of expressions of the heroic in American culture. I have used the authors' approach to popular mythology for many years and appreciate this rich, up-to-date (right up to the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, and the films The Matrix and Fight Club) work. Monomythic expressions now include highly violent video games and worldwide terrorism. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett provide a framework for critiquing a wide range of movies and literature, including the Disneyfication of the nation and the lethal patriotism of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski. The dangers of fascist elements in Star Wars are confronted as well as the dangerous apocalypticism of the Left Behind books and films. Ultimately, the authors are sincerely worried about the shape of Western democracy as it is threatened by cheap resolutions of complex political and theological issues. This book will be a major component in my honors course on the heroic model in life, literature, and film. As a tool for understanding the dangers of the traditional hero model, The Myth of the American Superhero has no competition. It is the sort of book that educates one for a lifetime."

Jutta Weldes
"The Myth of the American Superhero is a very timely and provocative analysis of what John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett call the 'American monomyth.' In this myth an Edenic community is threatened by implacable evil from outside. Mundane democratic institutions, impotent or corrupt, can't cope. With a convulsion of redemptive vigilante violence, the selfless, singleminded, sexually repressed, and misogynistic superhero restores the community to its pristine state and fades into obscurity. The authors trace this generic story (and its variants) through many guises: it appears, among others, in Buffalo Bill's traveling Wild West show, in The Virginian and The Lone Ranger, in a wide range of twentiethcentury films from John Wayne through Rambo, in disaster movies and in The Matrix, in the television phenomenon Star Trek, in the wonderful world of Disney, in video games, and in 'credotainment.' In this scathing critique the authors demonstrate the relentless reproduction of a fundamentally antidemocratic and viciously misogynistic myth that, with fascist rigor, extols the purifying powers of extralegal violence. Lawrence and Jewett trace the frightening imitative Werther effect' of this myth of vigilante redemption in the antisocial violence unleashed by Bernard Goetz, the Unabomber, and Timothy McVeigh, among others. The power of this myth to radically undermine the prized American institution of democracy is ably illustrated in their retelling of the Ramboesque antics of Oliver North and of even more appalling North's striking popularity. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the unilateral extralegal violence promised by the Bush administration to destroy evil on a worldwide scale, exposing and challenging this American monomyth is of the utmost importance. Lawrence and Jewett's fascinating and accessible volume does just that."