Great Gatsby! Green Lantern!
By Henry Richards | January 7, 2011
In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”
Oath for charging a ring on the Power Lantern
There must be something in the ether. Dan Liechty started this blog off with a riff on a Star Trek Next Generation episode. I am introducing myself in these pages by glossing on a comic book super-hero, Green Lantern, who will debut on the big screen this summer.
“Blak Lantern,” my username for blogging here is a kind of meme negative image of “Green Lantern”. By the time this post is finished, the graphic sic-if action hero rap, which may appear frivolous, will change into something of a brief cultural critique.
Here’s the quick scoop on Green Lantern. Some of you will recall that Green Lantern lives in the DC Comics world, which is an earth parallel to both the Marvel Comics world, and our own lacklustre world, where super-heroes with infinite power are somewhat rare. The Guardians of the Universe decide to appoint a new Green Lantern to the sector in which Earth is located. The Green Lantern Corps is sort of intergalactic Canadian Mounties, but green not red, and no horses. Allan Scott, a young railroad engineer (circa 1940), who has the distinction of being fearless is offered this cosmic appointment after he performs a heroic life-saving deed. He accepts and becomes one of the thousands of the Green Lantern Corps, who protect the populated sectors of the universe, each one a fearless exemplar of their species. That’s what typifies the Green Lanterns: fearlessness, iron will, and active imagination. Allen wears the infinitely capable Power Ring that emits a transmogrifying green laser-like light that is responsive in shape and intensity to the bearer’s will and imagination. It is refuelled by a Power Lantern that emits a green glow. Unfortunately, the power ring has a yellow shadow: it can’t affect anything that is that yellow, unless the bearer can totally master his fear.
As the comic series progressed over the years, the Guardians choose more humans to become the Green Lantern of this sector of the universe. (Probably a galactic affirmative action program. There are other intelligent species in the sector, after all). In the early 1970s, John Stewart, an unemployed African American architect, became the Green Lantern, making this series one of the first racially integrated ongoing super-hero series.
As the saga progresses, the Green Lantern Corps does battle with the Black Lanterns Corps. The latter are deceased super-individuals (some heroes, some not, more essentially amoral than evil). They are reanimated by their resentment of the living and they are bent on ending all life on earth– but first they must muffle all emotions except fear and hatred.
The Green Lantern hero-system is pretty straightforward and meaningful to the average early teenage male, who probably appreciates the transparency of simple allegory, with its one to one symbolism. Bravery, power, and goodness make us heroes and are green. Green is also the symbolic garb for the Green Arrow, Green Hornet, and J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, a green super-detective from Mars. My teenage friends and I were sure he was African American and he was being “passed” because the times were more ready for a green hero than a black hero. There was one Superboy edition in which this Martian morphed into an African American and worked on the Kent farm, and was comforted by the young Clark Kent after he was attacked by a racist mob.
Green is historically connected to the green light that flutters in the distance at the end of the dock in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and is one of that novel’s recurrent symbolic motifs:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning –
Like the Green Lantern, Gatsby’s greatness lay in his ability to use imagination and will to make his dreams become realities. Gatsby craved an orgiastic future of unending material wealth that he believed would secure his self-esteem and immortality. Teenage boys are content with just the virtues of goodness, power, fearlessness (and the Nike gear that goes with it), which will undoubted secure their reputation with other guys and win the admiration of foxy chicks. Gatsby’s green light has a darker side. The novel piles up rancid dreams, adulterated with deception and exploitation, and ends in Gatsby’s accidently killing his lover, Molly, by automobile in the “ash heap of the present.” This is followed by the murder-suicide of Gatsby by Molly’s betrayed husband, who was Gatsby’s friend. The future is unbearable “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Fitzgerald is saying the wages of the American dream is this kind of death of meaning in which one despises the present and is inexorably drawn into the fog of the past. The moral universe of the comics is almost as complex although drawn more allegorically than symbolically. The Black Lantern Corps embody death and its reaching out to us in a literal Halloween way, in a universe where the dead aren’t quite dead. The original green “go light” that appeared to permit Gatsby to zoom past his personal history has changed its meaning over the passing decades. Now Green also means sustainable environment, eco-empathy, but like Gatsby and the Green Lanterns, this new Green also will have its alter-ego and shadow. One wonders if we have hero-exemplars ready for the boys and–perhaps more importantly-the girls who will be forging the new green future.
So that gives you a flavor of what I would like to do in these pages. Play around with symbols, look at the darker and the humorous or lighter side of things, as “one likes to recall that the difference between comic side of things and their cosmic side, depends on one sibilant.” –Nabokov. To further play on Blak, I may have the occasion to comment on issues (and select them) from an African American perspective (my A.A. perspective, anyway). This post only slanted things this way by noting how long it took to get an African American Green Lantern or other black super hero, for that matter. You are wondering, why spell it Blak and not Black? No, it’s not a form of Ebonics. The name “Black Lantern” was already taken in this blog world, so I had to innovate. Even here, going for the odd spelling, I ran into claim stakes. Coke put out a French high-octane beverage “Coca Cola Black” a few years ago complete with an accent.
Are we reaching some kind of cultural singularity where everything imagined has already been done?