The Return of the Pulp

Pulp has become a core topic in my world. It's almost as if Pulp exists in a world seperated from us by just a thin layer of shadow. I keep waiting for the public imagination to be enthralled once more by the fabulous impossibility of Pulp.

Pulp's strong points are almost a dichotomy: the Pulp story has the most incredible elements, the most fantastic incidence, the most crude exploitation of human emotions. Meanwhile, the Pulp relies heavily on formuliac influence--the agreement between reader and writer of the inevitability of justice, in one form or another.

My first exposure, and understanding, of Pulp emerged from a movie I've spoken of recently, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Indiana Jones, particularly within the first twenty minutes of the movie, is graven in stone as a Pulp Hero. He's mysterious, brazen, fearless, adaptive, and determined. Until he sees his first snake, striking deep into a repulsion the entire movie-going world instantly understands, Jones is derived from a long line of Pulp Heroes. Yet with the deft personality touches, Jones goes from Pulp Archtype to Pop Culture Icon within seconds after this discovery of his primary phobia. He both subverts and celebrates the Pulp Archetype.

I've argued before that the Pulp Archetype, the Pulp Hero, had his heyday in the 1930s/1940s due to a certain cultural acceptance. First, public belief in the flashing sword of Zorro. Then rabid popularity for the gutteral cry of Tarzan. Then the shuddering pleasure in the creeping laugh of The Shadow, which coincided with that apex of Pulp magazines and the dominance of radio broadcasting, which existed in every American home. The rise of the Pulp Hero from literature to Pulp and back again has been a theme dominating the characters. The Batman, one of the world's most popular characters since the 1940s, is obviously The Shadow stripped of pyschological darkness but given, in its stead, a mask. The mask, the part of the cowl of Batman that hides most of his face, remained the darkest part of his costume during most of his publishing history. The costume's primary colors, blue and gray, were deftly spotted with the darker face of the mask and the Bat-symbol directly in the center of the yellow oval, where his heart is. This is interesting to note that, along with Batman's inhuman white "eyes", lenses one supposes, criminals cannot see him as a man, like them, but as a mysterious creature of darkness.

This eye-showing issue is one of the missteps of the movie versions, for me...Batman's eyes are revealed on film, which convinces you (as it's supposed to) that there is a famous actor behind the mask and, thus, empathetic. The problem is, once you realize it's a man in a rubber mask, it is a man in a rubber mask. You're not allowed to suspend that belief. Batman is left little mystery on film. The Batman on the 1960s television show however, for all the comedic/satiric elements and Adam West's smooth-operator eyes revealed, is a much more successful transition. The darker mask is retained by the show's producers, a subconscious concession to Batman's grim crusade literally on his face. At no time did anyone of that era care if Bruce Wayne became Batman because his parents were slain in front of him by a criminal when he was a child. And yet the element of symbolic darkness is still present in the television show's costume design. No matter what anyone thinks about the loyalty to the comics felt by the show's producers, they respected the character enough to get details correct that slavish fan-pros in Hollywood cannot.

At any rate, the point is that I feel the Pulp character has been making a steady return in recent times. Not the flawed superhero of Marvel and DC Comics, nor the unassailable indestructible Pulp Hero of the 1930s. But a mysterious element has begun to creep back into the new icons, a detachment between what the readers know about the character and what the character's actions are. I believe the new Pulp Hero must be prepared to do anything, in order to return his world to the status quo. The Spider, a 1930s vigilante character cut in the Shadow mode but 120 thousand percent more violent and unpredictable, reflects what I'm thinking in theory. The only thing you could be assured about with the Spider is that he would kill and destroy anything and everything in the pursuit of justice. He was an agent of chaos strictly imposing his world view on the criminals/citizens of Earth. Unlike the Randian philiosophy of the Individual choosing to be either good or evil and judged according to that choice, the Spider clearly chose for you both Fate and Punishment. I guess the Spider is the most gloriously pure example of what might be politically referred to as Facism, or outright psychotic in head shrink terms.

There's something to be said for the purity of the mystery of the Pulp. The fact that so many Pulp characters such as The Avenger and The Phantom exist only in the pursuit of an ideal Justice, a specific concordance with the Laws of Man they themselves are not bound to, makes the Pulp Hero somewhat more edgy and new in these times. The Pulp is not an "anti-hero", which represents a pretentious style of hard-edged character, but the Pulp is neither restricted by nor loosed upon moral standards. The Pulp seems motivated by a methodology we, the reader, can only begin to guess at. I think some of the most vivid Pulps seem undefined by what they are after, and wholly defined by the process of avenging.

In every way, the Pulp's journey to avenge injustice is truly why they exist. "Justice" is merely an excuse to return, again and again, to the unleashing of fear, pain, and blood. Whether it be their own, or yours, under the strangling vines of Pulp's lacquered darkness.