Batman Could Only Have Developed in America

      Not many characters from speculative fiction are uniquely associated with the United States.  Superman, despite "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," is from a distant planet.  Monsters are almost always foreigners: the Mummy from Egypt, Wolfman from the Celtic Lands, Frankenstein from Germany and Switzerland, Dracula from Transylvania, the Gillman from the Amazon Basin, Godzilla from Japan, Mothra from the South Pacific, etc., etc.  Wonder Woman hails from Atlantis and Green Lantern got his powers from somewhere out in the universe.  Silver Surfer caught a space wave from out beyond, as well.  

     But Batman is firmly rooted in the good old US of A more than any other, because his very name would not make sense elsewhere on Earth.  Consider that in Berlin he would translate as Flying Mouse Man, in Paris as Bald Mouse Man, and in Naples as Peep-Peep Star Man.  Further back, in the ancient Roman Empire, he would have been Little Evening Thing Man.  Even among the Brits, with whom we occasionally share a common language, his name could not have caught on, for it would suggest a flunkie serving a military officer.  And so it goes.  Not nametags that exactly would make a criminal tremble.  

     So we must be grateful for our homegrown hero, even if he dresses less patriotically than Captain America.  He is so much one of us, both in his strengths and his weaknesses.  Empowered with his belt full of technological wonders and beset with periods of emotional anxieties, Batman looms over Gotham like the ghost of our national imagination.  Whether the rest of the world will ever truly understand him, we know not.  Yet our own visceral bonds to him will never fail.  Hail to this Dark Knight in a land that dubs no knights of its own.  May he always lurk in the alleys where our fears wait to assail us, offering the salvation he could never give his own privileged family.  Batman is America.

Will Old Malls Become New Mini-cities?

     Here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, archaeologists of the future may one day uncover a variety of urban footprints to rival the multiple levels of the ancient city of Troy.  There is an Old Town that is mainly mid-20th century, but with some buildings sprinkled in that date from the American Revolution and the Civil War.  Outside that time capsule, the later 20th century produced layers of subsequent urban models, including both an enclosed mall and a couple of immense big box commercial areas.  Both the mall and the big boxes are no longer what they were originally planned to be.  If the 80s-era boxes are beginning to show vacancy gaps, the mall is barely recognizable.  Its on-site duplex cinema is barely a memory, its anchor department stores have fallen away, and generation after generation of retail shops replaced each other to reflect lower and lower buying power.  Its main commercial hopes for the future are largely pinned to an immense Costco planted in one unused corner of its colossal parking periphery.  

     These developments appear to reflect a widespread tendency across the USA, if I am to believe some recent Facebook posts that confirmed my own more limited observations.  One in particular grabbed my attention, as it spoke of a more recent movement to build residential apartments directly into the physical body of malls in order to create an in-house clientele made up largely of millenials and post-millenials who might eschew the car culture and patronize walkable businesses adjacent to their abodes without braving the vicissitudes of traffic, road rage, and higher gas prices.  Indeed, our local mall is doing exactly this, as blocks of apartments rise from the ruins of a moribund Sears store.  Some see this new type of insularity as offering a type of freedom to the hipster generations.  But will "freedom" come only at the price of the access to movement?

     This set me to thinking of a favorite novel, Jose Saramago's The Cave.  Portugal's Nobel-Prize winning master of prose is not always considered as a writer of speculative fiction, but that is perhaps an oversight.  After all, one of his first best sellers, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, already revolved around a ghost (no less than that of its great modernist poet Fernando Pessoa).  Others concern events in Lisbon's gargantuan graveyard (All the Names), a mysterious malady that causes his countrymen simultaneously to lose their eyesight (Blindness), or a geological oddity that snaps all of the Iberian Peninsula off from Europe and sets it floating across the Atlantic toward the New World (The Stone Raft), to name but a few.

       The beginning of The Cave gives no hint of such speculation, or even of much magical realism, as it traces the banal life of a humble ceramist whose livelihood is threatened by the onset of capitalistic globalism.  He is later drawn into events on a different scale as family members are invited to move from their traditional village to a giant complex called The Center.  This place combines vast housing facilities with mass commercial interests that the potter had formerly dealt with.  It is a softer and quintessentially Portuguese version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  Old Cipriano's unemployed rambles (he is now supported by his son-in-law Marcal, who works as a security guard) bring him finally to discover a darker side of reality, and his own destiny, concealed deep beneath The Center.

       Will tomorrow's hipster mall-dwellers collide with sinister consequences of a new urbanism as Cipriano does?  If so, will they follow him and his little family towards a new (or perhaps old) frontier experience?  Given that today's apartment complexes are hastily-constructed, minimally committed types of architecture, I have my doubts if they will be able to found a durable model for new urbanism, or even to adapt to the high-frequency technological and social changes that are under way.  Saramago seems an unlikely type for a prophet, particularly since he was remarkably heterodox in his spiritual ideas and actively opposed by at least one Pope.  Yet, we may do well to lend some thought to his works as late stage capitalism offers us a new spectacle (in the sense of the late Situationist Internationale) of mall settlements sprouting mushroom-like across the landscape.  It will be well worth watching.