When even superheroes go bad

Now, we all know politicians disguise their true feelings and their real beliefs, some even hide their sexuality. But imagine trying to hide the fact that you're a superhero? You would think that would be a vote getter.

Well, that's exactly what takes place on the wildly popular NBC sci-fi series, Heroes, which recently began its second season.

For those who haven't seen it, let me summarize: Heroes is the story of a quirky mix of characters who have been born or somehow developed superpowers. These folks can fly, spontaneously regenerate, read minds, erase memories, blow themselves up and travel through time, among other unearthly abilities.

In Heroes, a very ambitious New York politician named Nathan Petrelli discovers that he can fly. Not fly like Peter Pan, prancing through the air. He flies super fast like a rocket and can somehow turn on a dime, like a UFO gone wild.

Now, this is a very formidable ability for any human. But the Petrelli character doesn't want to alienate his voters so he hides it. In fact, most of the characters in Heroes are clearly embarrassed by their extraordinary powers.

Like another TV superhero, Buffy the vampire slayer, they just want to be normal.

The cult of ambivalence

Ambivalence is not a character trait we normally associate with politicians or TV characters.

But TV and popular culture have changed. As Steven Johnson tells us in his engaging little book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, TV storytelling has not only become smarter but more complicated.

Previously (as they say before each new episode) a TV drama told one story. Now it often tells several at the same time. Sometimes you even need a scorecard to keep up with what's happening.

This is especially true when the writing is of a high calibre, as in HBO's Sopranos but even when it's banal, as it is often in NBC's Heroes.

Banal doesn't mean it isn't watchable — at least for a while. I saw the first season of Heroes on DVD, blurry-eyed, over several evenings. For your everyday ideas guy or gal, the show can be a bulletin board for emerging themes in the culture. It can also get you pretty hyped up.

Fear and yearning in TV-land

It's always crisis time in Heroes: it's post-9/11 America after all. A heroin addict who can predict the future at one point sees New York City destroyed by a nuclear blast (we see his vision foreshadowed).

Other heroes try to stop this disaster, they want to save the world. Meanwhile, a secret organization is kidnapping people who show their superpowers. Fear and paranoia are everywhere in the TV atmosphere.

We have seen shadowy quasi-official agencies who want to hijack the future before — in X-Files, for instance. Evil is being hatched by secret cabals, even though they're already in power.

But in Heroes, much more confusion reigns. This cast of superheroes lives in a permanent identity crisis: they often don't know the roles they are supposed to play.

They are also feverishly anxious. Some of them are good, a few are evil and most a mix of fear, ambition and yearning, like soap opera characters who are constantly bounced from one emotional crisis to the next.

Paranoia has long been a pop culture staple. (Remember The Parallax View in the early 1970s with Warren Beatty, who is chased by evil government assassins across the Western U.S.). What's different about Heroes is that all this paranoia is served up in a 21st-century, New Age stew.

Human butterflies

At the heart of Heroes is the idea of humanity at an evolutionary crossroad. The superheroes in this show are the world's new avatars, men and women with god-like abilities who, with the right guidance, can save humankind from its destructive nature.

These New Age themes took their nourishment from visionary hopes about the future from writers such as the Jesuit thinker and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who wrote of a collective soul emerging down the road. Evolution would no longer be a brutish survival of the fittest but a goal that mystic forces in the universe were leading us towards.

In the visionary sci-fi novels of Arthur C. Clarke, like Childhood's End, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even in earnest, sentimental books like The Celestine Prophecy, human beings are on the threshold of evolving into a new, higher order.

In this view, human history is seen as our collective childhood. People worldwide are in the midst of developing special telepathic powers: they are like human butterflies who will eventually shed their ancient larval skins and emerge into a glorious future.

But in Heroes, the worm has crawled into the New Age apple. Some of the heroes are killers or have been corrupted, misled or driven insane. Even the plot to wipe out New York City rests on a misguided, cruel conspiracy.

New York is to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb so that people will turn in panic to a strongman president (who tries to hide his super, flying abilities). The sour, neo-con heroes behind this conspiracy think people are weak and need firm leadership.

Unfortunately, watching Heroes gets to be a grim chore. Everyone is dead serious, which is a sad reflection on a series supposedly based on comic books.

Superheroes in the comics (in print and on film) often have a light touch: Batman, Superman and Hellboy can't stop with the jokes. Nobody's laughing in Heroes. Everyone is too earnest for the good of the viewing audience.

Forty years ago, the critic Susan Sontag wrote a prescient essay about the science fiction movies of the fifties and sixties. It was called "The Imagination of Disaster." Sci-fi movies, she said, were a way of working out themes of catastrophe in popular culture.

But they also served a more dire purpose: they made the impossible seem plausible. Like New York being demolished by a nuclear explosion on prime time TV, between the ads.

I don't know if I'll continuing watching the second season of Heroes. I love the theme of spiritual evolution but I need a break from the hysterics of disaster.

At least Buffy the vampire slayer gave us some hope for the future and an inkling of maturity. She was once an ordinary valley-girl cheerleader. At first she balked at becoming a hero. But she had a job to do slaying vampires. And a girl has to do what her destiny says she should.