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Evoking the Pinocchio Theme

For many superheroes of a certain model - the artificial man attempting to contend with a world that defines machines and men as separate and non-overlapping categories, and, in the process, acquire, earn, or discover the humanity which stereotyping might routinely deny them - the fundamental problem of their existence plays out what we might call the Pinocchio Theme.

Human beings, after all, seek validity through external recognition of their worth, probably since the social nature of our species inclines us to measure ourselves against the approval provided to us as others. We attempt to prove ourselves through a variety of methods, including too many kinds of shallow one-upmanship to count, through the acquisition of friends, through the acquisition of property, through campaigns of reinvention that may involve actual surgery to make superficial - and often meaningless - modifications to our outward appearance. Perhaps we find the greatest potential for misery in attempts to justify ourselves through the selection of a mate (for to remain mateless, to many, suggests an almost-irrefutable argument for lack of worth).

Some might argue that arrogant people have overcome this need, but to my eye arrogance serves as another strategy in self-validation, a kind of self-deception which begs the question of worth and, therefore, saves the insecure the effort required in the various campaigns human beings engage in to demonstrate their value to themselves and others.

However, one can reach to the core of this yearning for worth through a common concept in literature and in comics through the form of the character who looks for - or looks to earn - his humanity. Decades of comics have featured characters who vicariously follow our own explorations in search of self-worth through robotic proxies who try to prove that they belong in the world of sentient creatures rather than in the category of mechanical constructs such as cars, conveyor belts, or household appliances.

This quest for self fits under the banner of the Pinocchio Theme.

The Original

When we speak of Pinocchio, we think of the animated puppet in a mid-twentieth-century Disney feature film, clad in red lederhosen and suffering the indignity of a nose that expanded, priapistically, every time he told a lie. While this describes the Pinocchio that left the persistent imprint on popular cultural memory, a previous version, from an Italian prose work, holds the honor of the role of the original.

A scholar would wave away the cartoon version and point to the very original of Pinocchio, the serialized tale from the 1880s featuring an out-of-control marionette who smashed his Talking Cricket with a hammer. Carlo Lorenzini, writing under the pseudonym Carlo Collodi, wrote tales of a talking piece of wood fashioned into the likeness of a boy and struggling to learn to behave amid a world of rascals and ruffians. To read this piece, one might see in it the central themes common to works like Lord of the Flies, in that it explored the consequences of life and behavior detached from successful moral education. This original, and therefore authentic, interpretation, however, remains less known than the popular interpretation created by the Disney studios in the 1940s.

When Disney got hold of the property, he stripped much of its moral (and moralistic) message away, removed the part about Pinocchio smashing the cricket with a hammer (even turning said cricket into the trademarked "Jiminy" and recasting him as a foil), and defined Pinocchio's central crisis as the desire to become a real, living, flesh-and-blood boy. This theme resonated with viewers of the Disney movie, and continues to resonate in other venues, including the medium of superhero comics.

For, though Disney productions of the twentieth century frequently provide targets for a criticism based on the notion that their formulas frequently bowdlerize and sanitize content until no substance remains, in the film feature "Pinocchio" the entertainment concern hit on a theme that could evoke sentiment and inspire the imagination. For, by centering on the notion of Pinocchio's desire to become a "real" boy, Disney (et al) prodded a concept that would have meaning through subsequent generations: the seeker who, through whatever process, attempts to find his own humanity.

This notion would appear again (and again; and again) in superhero comics, through a number of robotic and android characters and their imitations. As characteristic examples of various approaches, the well-known figures the Vision, Red Tornado, Machine Man, and Hourman would play the central themes of note.

Camouflage through Commonness

Some cliches occur so often it becomes difficult to recognize them in the sense that one does not notice what one sees all the time; a blue sky does not, after all, attract our attention the way a red one might, since we have come to expect one color to show up during daylight hours.

The cliche of the angst-ridden synthetic man desperately seeking for the validation that would come through his identification as more man than machine has become, sometimes, so commonplace that readers might wonder at its absence. Indeed, sometimes writers can create a strong effect by bypassing this notion altogether, as we might observe in the case of the dehumanized construct Robotman in Robinson's work Golden Age. In that case, indeed, we have an instance of someone who began as human and progressively lost his humanity.

Some cliches do have an origin one can trace, if not as the ultimate progenitor of a concept at least as the most likely vector from which an idea might have spread. The film "Wizard of Oz," from a book by Frank Baum, had, earlier, explored the notion of various characters seeking to complete their supposedly-imperfect personalities through the intervention of the Wizard in the City of Oz, had the Tin Woodsman seeking something like humanity through the infusion of a heart; and the cultural penetration of that movie may have reached further than the Disney film from the same era about an aspiring marionette.

In comics, this theme seems to have begin from a point suitably late that we could (maybe) just as well proclaim it the Tin Man Theme, but the image of Pinocchio persists more eloquently and therefore gives its name more mnemonically to the fundamental theme. And, to my eye, the Pinocchio Theme expressed itself most eloquently in an early form through the recreation of a Golden Age hero in a Silver Age form in the person of Roy Thomas' version of the Vision.

The Vision

Though Roy Thomas' reworking of a Golden Age concept as a synthetic humanoid did not represent the first artificial life-form in comics, it did provide the template for the fundamental existential quandary that would beset such characters in the future, even unto a degree of cliche that frequently passes the merely tiresome and advances through the terrain of cliches to the truly regrettable.

Nonetheless, as the prototype of the created being seeking validation through humanity (real, simulated, or achieved), he stands as a father and font to a number of conceptually similar and sometimes overtly derivative characters who dance the dance he invented in the late sixties.

Red Tornado

In many ways the weakest of the synthetic men reaching for realness, Red Tornado began as a retcon character grafted onto the Justice Society (re-using the name of a comic relief character who wore red longjohns and a pot over her head, thus, perhaps, inspiring Forbush Man in the Marvel Silver Age). He had a synthetic nature, and, as tales ultimately revealed, a soul grafted onto a robotic body from a villainous entity called "The Tornado Tyrant" (or something very similar).

As a Silver Age creation made to appear, at first, as a forgotten Golden Age character (retroactively) who demanded the respect due him by a Justice Society that had treated him with disdain due to his artificial nature, he would suffer a number of problems of conception including the usual baggage of a robot living among men, of a reformed villain (through his possession of the soul of the Tornado Tyrant), and as a rehash of a similar concept (Marvel Comics' the Vision).

Early attempts to manage the character - meaning pre-Crisis treatments - generally failed to impart much pathos or interest to him. Adopting the uncompelling human moniker of "John Smith" for his human identity, in which he had no particularly interesting feature beyond a total absence of hair, he dabbled in romance and adoptive parenting, but slipshod conceptualization limited the character to third or fourth-rate status until the events of the Crisis would redefine him as some kind of elemental being (the Swamp Thing and Firestorm may have similarly benefited from a redefinition as some kind of elemental force).

From that point forward, DC seems to have sidestepped the question of the desire for a difficult or impossible humanity, until recent usage of the character in a mentor's role in Young Justice. As of one of the JLA 80-Page Giant books of the late nineties, he had given in to the temptation to express some kind of human emotion again, as if no one had really caught on that the character needed development along less cliched and more interesting lines.

Machine Man

An interesting slant appeared (and still, sometimes, appears) in treatments of the character Machine Man in that, to some degree, human beings can withhold his humanity by withholding his face. The creation of a face for him back in his earliest, Kirby-penned stories in 2001 held a symbolic meaning of humanity imparted through recognition; and, at the end of the 1990s, in Earth X, we would again encounter a situation in which some external agency - this time the sad wreck of Uatu the Watcher - would withhold his humanness via a mechanism that stripped him of his synthetic human visage.

This theme, naturally enough, dates back to Machine Man's earliest appearances as "Mister Machine" in the pages of the often fascinating title 2001 and represents another way in which Kirby could take an apparently simple comics concept and imbue it with a new level of pathos.

In Earth X, although the character played something like a narrator's role (with dialogues between him and Uatu the Watcher serving to generate long sequences of exposition), the question of his humanity as revocable became an important aspect of the character. In the beginning of the work, he lived as much like men do as he could approximate, having a mostly-humanoid shell to his robotic workings, an identity as Aaron Stack, and a house (presumably in the suburbs) to live in, until summoned to the moon by Uatu, who rendered his human trappings transparent so that his mechanical innards might remind him of his origins.

This both showed the increasing cruelty (or crassness) of the blinded Watcher and pointed out some of the inherent risks of the artificial construct who attempts to live among men as a men; for simple exposure left Machine Man stripped naked in a way much more unkind than humans might suffer. At least, in our own nakedness, our humanity does not vanish or recede; while some uses of nudity can dehumanize, they do this by pointing out certain animal aspects of our natures, aspects which nonetheless contribute to our humanity.

Hourman

By the time we reach the late 1990s and the coming (and going) of Hourman, comics had really beaten the stuffing out of the notion of a synthetic man searching tragically for his humanity. However, well aware of the cliched aspect of this quest to find a human self, Hourman infused elements more typical of works such as Hesse's Siddhartha in that the quest itself created Ty's humanness. It suffices for the reader to understand that this new Hourman had achieved what he continued to seek and that this failure to recognize his humanity achieved helped keep looking, in vain, for something he couldn't find because he had already found it.

Nonetheless, from beginnings as a kind of spooky figure in the DC One Million books, Hourman proceeded on a kind of Zen exercise of self-improvement through attempting to understand humanity, both that of others and that of his template Rex Tyler, source of the dubiously-defined "geneware" that somehow connected the Hourman of the 853rd century to the Hourman of the 20th.

Hourman, in general, seems to have taken a somewhat different approach in exploring his own humanity. While often unaware that he had indeed achieved what he sought, he nonetheless could take for granted things like a descent (of a technological kind) from Rex Tyler, the original, flesh-and-blood, Hourman. His strategies did not follow the normal pattern.

For example, he resorted to impersonation only late in his experimentation, and only after some unsolicited upgrades in the 853rd century gave him the ability to take the form of a long-haired adolescent. He did not resort to this approach particularly often. Instead, he lived among people he believed could provide him with the kind of experience that might hone his humanity, such as the slacker incarnation of Snapper Carr and Snapper's peers. He interacted with objects and places connected to his prototype and ancestor, Rex Tyler. He interacted with other synthetics who existed on the frontier between humanity and created being. He even dabbled in odd jags with caffeine and Miraclo. And, in the end, he attempted an ill-fated road trip as a means of saying goodbye to his friends in the 20th/21st century.

While often confused or unhappy - both very human traits, by the way - he seldom indulged in identity politics of victimization; he dealt in interactions with individuals, the fundamental units of humanity, rather than reciting slogans about dehumanized forces on a cultural scale. And, to the credit of Tom Peyer, who breathed the life into the character, he did not scowl in a mansion while sign-wielding protestors called him names and said to stay away from their women, something that did occur with the Vision.

The Ever-Receding Horizon

Such characters as appear described in the previous paragraphs often continue their pursuit indefinitely. Some suffer recurring setbacks. For example, at one point various intelligence agencies, after an unfortunate episode of attempted world conquest, dismantled the Vision into a pile of wiring, synthetic muscle tissue, and miscellaneous lumpy things that must serve as comic-book semiconductors. When Henry Pym rebuilt him from the available pieces, the resulting Vision had lost much of the humanity acquired in the first 16 years or so of the character's history. Similar setbacks tend to afflict similarly-themed creations throughout their own histories.

However, although the fundamental problem seldom resolves completely, and, furthermore, though overuse and/or misuse can often make the Pinocchio Theme become tiresome, the nature of the discovery of one's humanity makes it something of an open-ended task with no particular milestone to mark its completion. This shows a consistency with the fundamental human problem behind such questing; we can never completely demonstrate our own worth, said worth existing among a family of intangible and abstract virtues. While we can improve ourselves, we generally fail to perfect ourselves.

This leaves the robotic characters generally pursuing the horizon, a place that recedes precisely as fast as someone approaches it. The axiomatically-incomplete nature of their pursuit could, unanalyzed, incline the questor to despair; but a deeper understanding suggests that the benefits come not from the achievement of the often-impossible goal but from the process of pursuit.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 270. Completed 03-SEP-2001.