What makes a man wear a mask and fight evil?
I'll ask that another way: Why do any of us do anything at all? Seriously, what could possibly be so important, so validating that it would warrant the effort of getting out of bed and making choices?
Like any journey or heroic voyage, getting out of bed is about one thing: clarity. We wake up, plunge headlong into a world of unforgiving trials and aggression to finally return to our safe and comfortable beds with a clearer and more confident notion of self; maybe somewhere along the line we defeated a cyclops or wrestled a wolf that was trying to eat the world, but these are really just details. We are all of us characters—or heroes if it’s a good day—asking the same question: “Who am I?” What makes each of us unique and interesting is the manner in which we ask that question, so I reiterate: What makes man wear a mask and fight evil?
Superheroes provide me with equal parts clarity and contradiction. Times when I feel stunted or confused by the milieu of adult life are when I need Batman the most, or maybe even Wolverine, or Hawkeye, or Dr. Strange—you get the point. However, my desperate binges inevitably end with the same feeling; once the grand emotion and swashbuckle has passed, I‘m left with self-defeating dictators who destroy and contradict the very communities they attempt to protect and safe-guard (I also tend to over-analyze at these moments). But I keep going back, time and time again. The clarity I derive isn’t the grand emotion or even the swashbuckle, it’s simpler and quieter than that; to explain this, I can think of no better example than Darkwing Duck. Just bear with me.
Darkwing Duck (a.k.a, Drake Mallard) was the ostentatious, self-aggrandizing, and hard boiled (ugh) hero who defended the city of St. Canard every Saturday morning. His modus operandi pulled from all the dark classics of crime fighters like The Shadow, Dick Tracy, of course the Batman, and a slightly less appreciated hero who I will come to in a moment. In his very first appearance, Darkwing is shown to be capable to a degree but aimless; he pursues popularity and fame with no real goal or focus for his abilities. His world is completely changed when he meets, and ultimately adopts, Gosalyn, a young girl orphaned by the villains of the first episode (you weren’t expecting this anthropomorphic duck cartoon to get dark?). Both Darkwing’s motivation as well as the persona of Drake Mallard are born when he sings Gosalyn to sleep, and in one tender moment the hero finds purpose as well as himself; purpose and self are one in the same.
Am I straining your attention? Okay, let’s get away from ducks for a moment. Zorro is cool, right? He's essentially equal parts Batman, Indiana Jones, and the Scarlet Pimpernel—how could you not think he’s cool? However, he is not one of the most vivid characters in all pop-culture—at least not until 1998. The Mask of Zorro is a fantastic film (don’t mention its sequel, my brain could potentially melt); it has an amazing cast, great writing, a director who specializes in home runs (cough::Goldeneye, Casino Royale::cough), and was widely popular. But why? Sure, Zorro was a common enough hero during the 50’s and 60’s, but how does that become an oscar nominated blockbuster at the end of the century? The same reason that for the last two decades the escapades of Darkwing Duck have held some level of gravity in my subconscious. Zorro is shown to be the father of young baby girl (a lullaby scene strangely reminiscent to that of Darkwing) and the film’s conflict begins when that child is taken from him: he loses purpose as well as his sense of identity as a result of his daughter’s abduction, and for the rest of the film he trains a successor to take on the mask.
Let’s return to the original question. What makes a man wear a mask and fight evil? At the outset, it’s a really silly idea—too far from anything at all familiar to those of us who struggle with getting out of bed. What intrigues me as a writer is the challenge inherent in concepts like this one: how do you find the humanity in the fantastic, because, like anything to spawn from our collective brain juice, the humanity is always there. A man wears a mask and fights crime because he’s a father, because he has something worth protecting, because there exists something so precious in his life that doing objectively stupid or morally contradicting swashbuckling nonsense is a matter of course. When characters are born in our minds they’re superheroes: larger than life, exciting, invincible, and vague. But rather than striving for some type of desperate complication that must be true simply because of its intricacy, I believe we should steer into the slide.
Find a simple truth for your hero, find the thing that pushes them into the world and puts a mask on their face—complexity and authenticity grow from simple seeds, things we all know and share as truth. The question may be different for each of us, but we are looking for the same answer.
For the forum, write a short scene that contains a simple but defining moment for you or your character. Real or fiction.
