What happened to secret identities?
_____Once upon a time, they were a mandatory part of the package. All but a handful of super-heroes had them, and they guarded them zealously. Then, as time progressed, more and more heroes began to make their identities known. In the fifties and sixties, it was a "gimmick" to not have a secret identity, as the Elongated Man or Metamorpho did. By the sixties and seventies, a handful of major heroes (most notably the Fantastic Four) abandoned the secret identity. The eighties saw a large scale turnabout on this issue, with numerous major characters (including Wonder Woman and the Flash) discarding them. By the late nineties a secret identity was the exception, not the rule.
_____So, what happened?
_____It's arguable that secret identities were a neat one-off idea that became a cornerstone of the genre completely unintentionally. Or you could reason that they were an idea that, like talking monkeys, no longer had a place in a comics world that was increasingly trying to lose its sillier side. You could even say that the secret identity was a device with a limited number of permutations, and that it has been worn thin over the decades.
_____But I think it also says something about our changing idea of what is an admirable man, and what our idea of wish fulfilment is.
_____At the core of the secret identity is the idea of HIDDEN depth. Whether it's a nerd like Peter Parker or a playboy like Bruce Wayne, the surface is unappealing. It's only underneath that the greatness lies.
_____In decades gone by, this was the vision of a hero. A quiet and normal man who rose to overcome whatever circumstances he found himself in. Jimmy Stewart conjures the sort of image I mean. Also, people weren't supposed to accept glory or rewards; the ultimate American ideal was for its heroes to want nothing more than a simple life in the end.
_____Initially, the second World War may have fed into this, with ordinary men becoming valiant soldiers, and then fading back into civilian life. The super-hero was similar in many respects to this ideal vision.
_____What of Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, or the other rich cads? They may have been part of the idea that every American holds greatness within. Perhaps they are part of the vision that beneath their facade the rich really do want to help the common man, an inverted Robin Hood idea for a capitalist society. I'm only guessing here.
_____That's fine from the outside, but how did the secret identity work for identification purposes? That's an easy question to answer. Most comic readers must have been themselves unpopular and overlooked to some degree or another. Through comics, one could imagine that we had an escape route, through which we could defeat evil and get the girl, only to return to normalcy again at story's end. It was partly a lead-in to the fantasy and out again, allowing an intermediate step through which readers could slip into the role of the hero vicariously. But there was also the secret gloating aspect, the notion that the joke is on them, and if only they knew what they had been missing by not paying attention they'd be sorry. What outcast child wouldn't like that?
_____So, what's changed?
_____First, the ideal of the hero has metamorphed. Gone is Jimmy Stewart, and in is Arnold Schwartzenneger. Today's ideal is not a quiet man, it's a loud one, quick on the trigger. We're in a competitive world, and the winners are those who take no prisoners. Too, the American dream is no longer a nice house in the suburbs; it has become a multi-million dollar stock portfolio. The game has prizes. In this world, depth cannot be hidden.
_____Similarly, we have become impatient with our fantasies. We don't want to vicariously experience life as a nerd; we want our action now! Life is tough enough without it being bad in our fantasies. As to laughing silently at the fools who cannot see our greatness... we'd rather blow them away.
_____Of the few heroes left with a secret identity at all, Superman's Clark Kent, once a total geek, has become what DC calls an "average guy"... an award winning journalist and popular novelist. In today's world, anything less would be considered a loser, and that is no longer tolerable from our heroes.
_____More common are those like Marvel's X-Men, who never take off the spandex or sheathe the claws at all. No one wants to see Wolverine pretending to be meek when he could be slashing bad guys. The people who overlook us readers... they'll be the bad guys. Slash slash.
_____It's a much less gentle world that doesn't have time for secret identities.
_____What do you think?