False Grit

So let me start out by saying that I found this stupid video on YouTube the other day (no, it's not Rebecca Black) and for some reason I think it’s the funniest thing ever. I legit can’t stop laughing at it, except when it gets really fucking loud for the last three seconds. What the hell is wrong with me?

And with that out of the way, let's talk about the Sandman.
No, not the really cool one who prowled the streets of Great Depression-era Manhattan in a sweet gas mask/trench coat/fedora get-up. No, not the other really cool one that helped secure comics' reputation as a legitimate literary and artistic medium, the one that continues to make generations of lit major goth chicks go Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (cue awkward story about accidentally going to Katz's Deli with her son. How were we supposed to know that scene was filmed there?!).

No, I'm talking about this sad sack:

Let's not beat around the bush here, sand powers are lame. I mean, come on, in Flint Marko's big debut Spidey sucks him up with a vacuum cleaner. Seriously, that's how Spider-Man beats him. He sucks the Sandman into a vacuum cleaner bag. I suppose it also doesn't help that the Sandman's powers make NO FUCKING SENSE, even by the standards of comic book logic. Remember, he's not transmuting flesh and blood into sand when he uses his powers, because he has no flesh and blood. He's literally a pile of inexplicably living sand. His eyes? Those aren't eyes, they're clumps of silica made to look like eyes. His clothes? Not clothes at all, but part of his actual sand body. Lungs? He has no lungs; he doesn't have any internal organs, it's all dirt. He's made of tiny grains of inorganic matter pulled together into a single mass, why would he need to breathe? It's. All. Fucking. Sand. That...uhhh...can somehow change colors to recreate his appearance. And *pulls collar* can see and hear and speak and stuff. Or something. I think.

Maybe it's just me, but I just can't suspend my disbelief for what's going on with the Sandman like I can with radioactive spiders and lizard serums in the "naturalistic" framework of the Spider-Man comics. I mean how the hell is this thing alive? Does it even meet the qualifications for biological life or, like a virus, does it straddle the line between living and something other?

Kinda creepy. There's definitely a lot of mileage to be had in exploring this line of thinking, of Sandman as horror monster. But my interest with Flint Marko lies in another direction, one truer to the established conventions of the character. Now usually I HATE when writers take up the page count with technobabble, but I think a detailed comic book science explanation is necessary to come to grips with Flint's true potential. Because if you actually break down Sandman's powers and try to make sense of it, they - and he - become so much more compelling. Enough, even, to sit alongside the cool Sandmen.

So Flint Marko, reluctantly forced into a life of crime, seeks shelter at a nuclear testing site while on the lam. The guy never got his high school diploma, he's drawn by Steve Ditko with a literal blockhead, so you can't exactly fault him for not thinking that one through. Anyway, poor Flint gets caught in the middle of a weird atomic experiment and is fused to the irradiated silica grains beneath his feet, finding himself transformed into sand...LIVING sand!!! Let's work this out.

How does the Sandman work, from a purely physical perspective? To find out, we have to get this idea of Flint Marko as a human individual, as that schmuck with the green striped shirt out of our heads. Instead, we should look at him as the shapeless pile of dirt that travels in the wind or slips through the sidewalk cracks. Put him under a microscope to see, in final boss terms, his true form. For him to make any sense, the Sandman would have to be a hive mind, his consciousness dispersed through each of the millions of silica granules that make up his "body". Every individual grain of sand has to be part of a collective conscious that operates together as a single cohesive unit, like an intelligent superorganism. That's the only way it can possibly work; how else could he dissipate into a dust storm and still maintain self-awareness, let alone be able to re-form?

Let's say that in the freak accident, the electrical signals going off in Flint's brain - which combine into an electromagnetic field that some believe is the source of conscious experience - inducted or were somehow transferred to sand particles (sand is composed of silicon dioxide, or quartz, which can store electric charge). Freed from biological constraints, his consciousness becomes a will-powered, self-sustaining electromagnetic field that can course through silica particles, a massive brain that can change size and shape through the attractive/repulsive force of its parts. The Sandman can charge other sand particles with his essence via contact, assimilating them into his sentient hive-mass. He can even alter the properties of the silicon dioxide he's composed of, as evidenced by all the times he's transmuted his body parts into glass - since quartz comes in every color that makes up the Sandman's palette, this neatly explains away how he can colorize himself to not look like a lump of sand. There's no reason why he wouldn't be able to change his appearance with different colors, from bright citrine to amethyst, either.

Of course none of this reveals how Flint can talk or experience senses, but I'm not particularly concerned with all that. Maybe he's got his own version of spider-sense, à la Doctor Manhattan's quantum perception (it's practically the same origin story, after all), which allows him to interact with the world like we do. Whatever, that part isn't important. The hive-mind-sand-grain-thing was what you were supposed to get out of all this.

So the question you're asking yourself now must be why the fuck does anything I've written so far matter? Why is it important that the Sandman is a de-individualized collective united under a single will? Consider the way the Sandman always tries to swarm Peter, to completely envelop and overwhelm Spidey within his collective essence. Better yet, consider Spider-Man's greatest enemy. It's not the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus or Venom. It's not even himself, because self-doubt is externally conditioned. It's not any individual.

It's the general public. Christ, it took me long to get here. Damn technobabble...

Yes, the Sandman represents the public at large, the capricious, alienating force that "mock[s] Peter Parker, the timid teen-ager" and condemns Spider-Man as a freak; the ultimate source of all our protagonist's unending insecurities, paranoia and self-esteem problems. So it makes sense that Flint Marko is, at heart, a good man who vacillates between the straight-and-narrow, super-villainy, and at times proactive heroism (he was even a reserve member of the Avengers once upon a time), because the public opinion of Spidey changes between unanimous enthusiastic adoration and unanimous impassioned loathing at the drop of a dime. Which, when you think about it, must be so much worse, so much more nerve-wracking than if the people just always hated the wall-crawler. I mean I can't even imagine what kind of toll it takes on his sanity - to be loved, supported, validated by millions one moment and despised by them the very next. It'd be like dating an abusive partner with bipolar disorder.

It's also in no way an exaggeration of real life: public consensus has always been fickle and flip-floppy to the point of schizophrenia, that's one reason why our representatives on Capitol Hill can't get anything done. And try as he might to straddle the line between good and evil, we all know what side of the law Flint will inevitably end up on. Just as we know which side the public opinion of web-head will fall when all is said and done...as long as Jameson's still writing the headlines, at least.

But all this talk about alienation brings up an important point. I feel like in my previous articles - the Mysterio two-parter and the egomaniac Electro - I may have overstated the extent Peter's neuroses defines his character, or at least the extent it should be portrayed in the comics. Yes, it should be played up for great tragic/dramatic moments, but we're not talking about the Punisher here, these comics are supposed to be funny and FUN. There's something of a Woody Allen quality to Peter's problems. The best comedians may all be clinically depressed, but they're also awesome and funny as hell. And The Amazing Spider-Man was the first teen dramedy, after all.

So the Sandman is a very interesting foe because he establishes Spidey's angst not as an ingratiating carryover of whiny teenage hormones, but as a completely logical reaction to his situation. Pete's the straight man here: it's everyone else, it's society that's schizo-manic-depressive-crazy. And it's not paranoia if everyone actually is out to get you.

During "The Gauntlet" event, the Sandman gained the new (well not really, but, y'know, whatever man) ability to create duplicates of himself. It's a brilliant development. The story explored what would happen if Flint lost control of the duplicates, but that's not a tale I'm particularly interested in nor one I find plausible, given what I've rambled about Flint's hive consciousness and the ease with which he already controls his complex swarm powers. A Sandman in complete control of this new ability has so much more potential: now not only can he represent the collective public, he can actually be that collective public. A shape-shifter who can not only alter his appearance but also branch off copies of himself? He can't impersonate individuals, that intimate violation of identity is the Chameleon's niche, but he can be any - and, crucially, all - of the anonymous faces in the crowds.

I want to open up a Sandman story and see a microscopic close-up of thousands of flowing sand granules in one panel juxtaposed with an aerial shot of thousands of people walking down W 28th St in the panel below, their faces obscured into a horde of flesh-colored ovals. Symbolism, people! The Sandman can be a 20,000-strong protest group in Times Square demanding this Spider-Man menace be brought to justice. He can be a mob that confronts the web-slinger, right after saving the day in a public display of selfless heroism, to tell him he's not welcome, that they don't want him to be their protector and will do everything they can to make his life hell. These antics would make Peter a nervous wreck: what if these faceless nobodies, these anonymous people that surround me every day, what if they're all the Sandman?!

Which brings me to my next point. The general public itself, with its bemused ennui towards costumed antics, represents a larger concept in these stories: deindividuation. It's the social phenomenon where an individual's sense of responsibility - and any sense of self-awareness, for that matter - diffuses until ceasing to exist as a result of immersion into a group. If you took any psychology classes (I only remember this shit because my textbook had an article on Heath Ledger's Joker) you probably know all about the term, and all about its frightening as fuck ramifications in the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. Deindividuation fosters blind deference to authority figures as well as an overwhelming apathy, and has been directly linked to the greatest horrors of the twentieth century, from the Holocaust to Kitty Genovese to Abu Ghraib.

As I've stated before - and justified by saying "go with it until I finish my big post on it" (which is almost done, definitely will be up right after the next Spidey villain article) - indifference is the greatest enemy of the Marvel Universe, the one thing every Marvel hero, all social activists in one way or another, is united against. Good vs. Evil is much more the DC Universe's deal, which is why characters like Mephisto feel so out of place at Marvel and are reduced to breaking up marriages on behalf of editorial mandate. In regards solely to the Spider-Man mythos, indifference is what let the burglar live a free man long enough to kill Uncle Ben, which set Peter on the path to heroism. The added angles of diffused responsibility and loss of individuality to anonymity make deindividuation a complete antithesis to everything Spider-Man, paragon of both proactive social responsibility and the self-actualizing individual, fundamentally represents.

And boy, is it prevalent here in New York City. People here have trained themselves to be apathetic towards everyone else around them, it's a simple fact of life. Don't stop for the homeless guy who just needs 50 more cents to buy a damn sandwich, walk past the brilliant music prodigy playing in the subway to make rent, ignore the guy next to you who could obviously use a hand right now. What's the rationale? Plenty of other people will do it, it's not my responsibility, I need to get where I am going to fulfill my role in society, etc. Deindividuation in action, right there.

I remember my first day arriving at NYU, how we were instructed specifically to ignore all the people surrounding us as we walked down the streets. It's necessary, because if you didn't A) you would never get to where you're trying to go and B) you would quite possibly get mugged or kidnapped or something my mother would be worried about, but Christ in a hand-basket what does that say about us if the norm is indifference? If one deviates from the norm, asserts individuality and separates from the group by being selfless, it makes that person a right bloody weirdo. Or someone with an ulterior motive, as the cynics would assume. And it makes them a pariah, a leper - they're cursing themselves with bad luck, because bad things happen to good people, the nice guy finishes last and so on. Their goals will be unfulfilled, their hearts will be broken.

But thank God for these people - the optimists and the good guys, the ones who persevere through wave after wave of taunting misfortune and never let it get to them. They know things will get better. They're the ones who carry the torch. Their outlooks keep hope alive for everyone else; without them we'd all be swept away in a sea of cynicism. Thank God for the people who see a cafeteria lady struggling with a bunch of big cardboard boxes and fucking help her out.

Thank God for the Peter Parkers of the world.

Just as Spidey embodies all the best qualities of New York City - "the capacity," as Michael Cunningham puts it in this awesome article, "to rise and rise again out of the rubble of whatever it used to be" - the Sandman embodies this city at its absolute worst, at its most callously uncaring. It's telling that he's literally composed of the grime and grit of the city, of the unwelcome dirt swept underneath. Similarly, the city itself - this so-called concrete jungle - seems to be one massive cluster of silicon dioxide, all glass and cement towers. It's Flint's playground: he can play Big Brother and literally be everywhere. I'm getting this image of thousands of formless faces emerging from glass skyscrapers, concrete walls and cement sidewalks, like the wailing portraits Nina psychotically hallucinates in Black Swan, following Peter as he runs home from work panicked. Yeah, Sandman as horror monster works real well.

The Sandman's established character is pretty much right on the money for this interpretation. The reluctant villain shtick can get real tiresome sometimes *coughcoughSpider-Man 3cough* but it's a great literalization of all these concepts he represents. The Sandman really wants to be a good person, but life just keeps giving him lemons day after day. Like a less-educated Underground Man, Flint totters conflictingly between potential actions, wracking his brain until he finally makes a decision: to take the easy way out and go down the path of crime. He gives up to the cynicism, compromises his values and shows how little grit he has in the face of adversity. The irony.

What makes the Sandman such a great character is that he's a distillation of all these high concepts - alienation, deindividuation, apathy/indifference, dangers of the collective, diffusion of responsibility, weak will in the face of hardship - into a single individual, a tangible (sort of) object that our hero can punch in the face, suck into a vacuum cleaner bag and defeat. I mean, that's sort of the entire idea behind superheroes and villains, isn't it?

Huh, I guess the Sandman is pretty cool after all.