FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (4)
By:
April 3, 2024
Some years ago, HILOBROW friend Greg Rowland pointed out that the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves ought to be regarded as a sentimental remake of the 1970 revisionist Western Little Big Man. The series FIRST TIME AS COMEDY will offer additional examples of this recursive (and often, though not always middlebrow) syndrome.
FIRST TIME AS COMEDY: SUPERDUPERMAN vs. WATCHMEN | WILD IN THE STREETS vs. PREZ | EMIL AND THE DETECTIVES vs. M | THE SAVAGE GENTLEMAN vs. DOC SAVAGE | GULLIVAR JONES vs. JOHN CARTER | THE PHONOGRAPHIC APARTMENT vs. HAL | HIGH RISE vs. OATH OF FEALTY | JOHNNY FEDORA vs. JAMES BOND | MA PARKER vs. MA BARKER | DARK STAR vs. ALIEN | SHOCK TREATMENT vs. THE TRUMAN SHOW | LITTLE BIG MAN vs. DANCES WITH WOLVES | THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS vs. THE MATRIX | & more to come.
“Doc” Savage is a pulp-magazine adventure character created by publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L. Nanovic in 1933 (i.e., at the tail end of the sf genre’s emergent Radium Age). A nearly superhuman surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, and researcher — as well as an expert at disguise, not to mention hand-to-hand combat — Savage’s only goal in life is to right wrongs and punish evildoers.
How did Savage become so… savage? A team of scientists assembled by his father trained Clark’s mind and body to near-superhuman abilities from a young age — giving him great strength and endurance, a photographic memory, a mastery of the martial arts, and vast knowledge of the sciences. From his first outing, he was known as the Man of Bronze.
Doc Savage Magazine was published from 1933 — 1949; the character was re-popularized in 1964 when Bantam Books began reprinting the magazine novels — over 180 of them in total. There have also been several Doc Savage comic books, from the 1940s through the 2010s; a movie; and there’s supposedly a TV show in the works.
Stan Lee would credit Doc Savage as being a forerunner to comic-book superheroes — along with other pulp magazine characters such as Zorro and the Shadow, of course.
Despite the 1972 movie, which is unintentionally amusing (even campy), Doc Savage was never a figure of fun. He’s a deadly earnest he-man heroic type.
A year before Savage’s first appearance, Philip Wylie’s novel The Savage Gentleman gave us Henry Stone. Raised on an island by his father and his father’s servants, Stone returns to a 1930s New York an incredible physical specimen with a fortune waiting for him. (His hair, by the way, is described as “bronze.”) It’s a Tarzan-in-reverse story. Stone’s “savage” upbringing has made him a kind of superman.
There’s a sardonic twist to Wylie’s story, however. Henry’s father has raised the boy to fear, hate, and above all never to trust, any woman.
See Wylie’s 1943 nonfiction book Generation of Vipers, a blistering critique of organized religion, big business, Congress, and “Momism,” the sentimental cult of American womanhood. “The idea women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift — an idea promulgated by every medium and many an advertisement — has defeated half the husbands in America,” he raged; this was not intended to be anti-woman, but anti-“Karen,” as we’d now put it.
Mom [read: Karen] is organization-minded. Organizations, she has happily discovered, are intimidating to all men, not just to mere men. They frighten politicians to sniveling servility and they terrify pastors; they bother bank presidents and they pulverize school boards. Mom [Karen] has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires.
Henry’s embittered father isn’t wrong about Karens, we’re led to understand. His error is in teaching his son that all women are Karens.
Henry has returned to civilization to discover that his father’s newspaper has, under the guidance of corrupt newsman Voorhies, been commandeered by the forces of crime and corruption. (Isn’t this exactly the plot of Batman Begins?) Of course Henry isn’t going to lawyer up. He goes after the crooks with fists flying.
As one might expect, Wylie’s yarn about how a Tarzan-like “savage” adjusts to the contemporary world is complicated by his encounter with Marian Whitney, a witty, honest, and vivacious woman… the kind of woman of which “Momism” would lament the lack.
A strange book! Satirical — and yet we’re also supposed to admire this conflicted superman. The creators of Doc Savage would make things easier for their readers, stripping away all the anti-Karen business, the anti-religion and -business business. Thus giving us a middlebrow superman… an anodyne defender of the dominant discourse.
MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY JOSH GLENN: SCHEMATIZING | IN CAHOOTS | JOSH’S MIDJOURNEY | POPSZTÁR SAMIZDAT | VIRUS VIGILANTE | TAKING THE MICKEY | WE ARE IRON MAN | AND WE LIVED BENEATH THE WAVES | IS IT A CHAMBER POT? | I’D LIKE TO FORCE THE WORLD TO SING | THE ARGONAUT FOLLY | THE PERFECT FLANEUR | THE TWENTIETH DAY OF JANUARY | THE REAL THING | THE YHWH VIRUS | THE SWEETEST HANGOVER | THE ORIGINAL STOOGE | BACK TO UTOPIA | FAKE AUTHENTICITY | CAMP, KITSCH & CHEESE | THE UNCLE HYPOTHESIS | MEET THE SEMIONAUTS | THE ABDUCTIVE METHOD | ORIGIN OF THE POGO | THE BLACK IRON PRISON | BLUE KRISHMA | BIG MAL LIVES | SCHMOOZITSU | YOU DOWN WITH VCP? | CALVIN PEEING MEME | DANIEL CLOWES: AGAINST GROOVY | DEBATING IN A VACUUM | PLUPERFECT PDA | SHOCKING BLOCKING.