In his latest movie, Glass, Indian-origin Hollywood filmmaker M Night Shyamalan, who specialises in exploring ‘supernatural’ themes, develops the concept of the necessary symbiosis between superheroes and supervillains.
Drawing on the Action Comics tradition of invincible superheroes and their counterparts, equally formidable supervillains, Shyamalan advances his central thesis that if supervillains exist, countervailing superheroes must also exist, and the two are inescapably destined to come into super-conflict, in a never-ending loop of Kurukshetra replayed.
So, do superheroes represent ultimate good and supervillains, ultimate evil? Are good and evil two distinct essences, two opposing forces, each begetting the other, like the Newtonion axiom that every action causes an equal and opposite reaction?
A third-century Persian sage called Mani propounded a philosophical and spiritual doctrine in which light and darkness waged a constant war against each other to dominate the world of matter. His teachings, which came to be known as Manichaeism, became a major religion, spreading as far eastwards as China.
Manichaeism was gradually eclipsed by the rise of Christianity and, much later, of Islam.
In Christian theology, Manichaeism was declared a heresy in that it posited evil as being separate from the good, thereby denying the omnipresence of God.
Christian doctrine explained evil – be it in the form of Satan, or the anti-Christ – not as a separate existence in itself but as a retraction, or withdrawal, from an otherwise all-pervasive good.
In Indic cosmology, the notion of good and evil is largely replaced by the concept of dharmic and adharmic, which is often misconstrued as a transliteration of the good-evil dichotomy.
Dharma is best translated not as piety or moral righteousness but as that which, through thought or deed, preserves the harmony of the cosmic order, while adharma is that which seeks to undermine this harmony and allows chaos to unbalance the universal equilibrium.
Shyamalan’s sensibility seems to favour this elucidation of the good-evil duality. His portrayal of the superhero and the supervillain can be described using the analogy of a cantilever bridge, in which two opposing dynamics combine to keep the entire structure intact and prevent it from collapsing in an engineering embodiment of the far eastern principle of yin and yang, which fuse together to create a gestalt in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Shyamalan appears to hint that his good guy and his bad guy – without who the good guy couldn’t be the good guy, and vice versa – can be internalised.
Within all of us there is a potential superhero, and a corresponding supervillain, the personifications of dharma and adharma respectively.
Thanks to the free will that we all have, we can choose, from moment to moment in our day-to-day lives, to follow the path of dharmic compassion or adharmic hatred, of forgiveness or revenge, of generosity or selfish greed.
The battlefield of light and dark, dharma and adharma, is not out there.
Nor is it just within us; it is us. We are the interchanging superheroes and supervillains of our own selves.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed in the Article above are Author’s personal views and kashmiribhatta.in is not responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article
Courtesy:Times of India,S.T,Feb 19,2019
In his latest movie, Glass, Indian-origin Hollywood filmmaker M Night Shyamalan, who specialises in exploring ‘supernatural’ themes, develops the concept of the necessary symbiosis between superheroes and supervillains.
Drawing on the Action Comics tradition of invincible superheroes and their counterparts, equally formidable supervillains, Shyamalan advances his central thesis that if supervillains exist, countervailing superheroes must also exist, and the two are inescapably destined to come into super-conflict, in a never-ending loop of Kurukshetra replayed.
So, do superheroes represent ultimate good and supervillains, ultimate evil? Are good and evil two distinct essences, two opposing forces, each begetting the other, like the Newtonion axiom that every action causes an equal and opposite reaction?
A third-century Persian sage called Mani propounded a philosophical and spiritual doctrine in which light and darkness waged a constant war against each other to dominate the world of matter. His teachings, which came to be known as Manichaeism, became a major religion, spreading as far eastwards as China.
Manichaeism was gradually eclipsed by the rise of Christianity and, much later, of Islam.
In Christian theology, Manichaeism was declared a heresy in that it posited evil as being separate from the good, thereby denying the omnipresence of God.
Christian doctrine explained evil – be it in the form of Satan, or the anti-Christ – not as a separate existence in itself but as a retraction, or withdrawal, from an otherwise all-pervasive good.
In Indic cosmology, the notion of good and evil is largely replaced by the concept of dharmic and adharmic, which is often misconstrued as a transliteration of the good-evil dichotomy.
Dharma is best translated not as piety or moral righteousness but as that which, through thought or deed, preserves the harmony of the cosmic order, while adharma is that which seeks to undermine this harmony and allows chaos to unbalance the universal equilibrium.
Shyamalan’s sensibility seems to favour this elucidation of the good-evil duality. His portrayal of the superhero and the supervillain can be described using the analogy of a cantilever bridge, in which two opposing dynamics combine to keep the entire structure intact and prevent it from collapsing in an engineering embodiment of the far eastern principle of yin and yang, which fuse together to create a gestalt in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Shyamalan appears to hint that his good guy and his bad guy – without who the good guy couldn’t be the good guy, and vice versa – can be internalised.
Within all of us there is a potential superhero, and a corresponding supervillain, the personifications of dharma and adharma respectively.
Thanks to the free will that we all have, we can choose, from moment to moment in our day-to-day lives, to follow the path of dharmic compassion or adharmic hatred, of forgiveness or revenge, of generosity or selfish greed.
The battlefield of light and dark, dharma and adharma, is not out there.
Nor is it just within us; it is us. We are the interchanging superheroes and supervillains of our own selves.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed in the Article above are Author’s personal views and kashmiribhatta.in is not responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article
Courtesy:Times of India,S.T,Feb 19,2019