The Green Lantern: Romantic Icon?

I’ve never been much of a DC comics fan. I use to collect Marvel Comics, but I do not think that I have purchased a DC comic in my life. That is not to say that I do not like the characters. I have seen a good chunk of the animation and live-action creations and yes, I even have my favourite characters. High on the list is The Green Lantern.

The origin story is pretty simple. An alien crash lands on Earth mortally wounded. Before he dies he sends off his power ring to choose a new Green Lantern and it chooses test pilot Hal Jordan. The power ring is a tool used by an army of over 3,000 intergalactic cops called The Green Lantern Corps with each Green Lantern patrolling an assigned sector. The source of the ring’s power is a battery shaped like an old lantern which is linked to the main battery, on the corps’ headquarters planet of Oa, containing an energy source called the green element. With the ring, the wearer can create solid light-based constructs. Here is the important part. The strength and force of the constructs depends on the will of the user, and the variety and complexity of constructs is limited only by the user’s imagination.

There is another factor. Every superhero needed his weakness, his Kryptonite. For Green Lantern, the ring would not work against anything that was the colour yellow. Yep, pretty stupid. Fortunately, the writers finally got around to explaining the weakness and came up with something brilliant.

There was a yellow energy impurity in the main battery. Just as the green energy responded to will, the yellow energy responded to fear. Eventually all the colours of the light spectrum where shown to have a corresponding emotion: Red is anger, Blue is hope, Orange is avarice, Violet is love, Indigo is compassion. The main point here is the battle between Green and Yellow – Will vs. Fear.

The philosophy of the Romantic can be reduced to a single word – I. Romanticism is all about the individual. I think, I feel, and I act. I am a human being. This opens up quite a few questions. Am I my heart? My mind? Who am I? And what does it mean to be human?

Aristotle taught that we are what we repeatedly do. We live in a world of action and reaction, of cause and effect. The Hindu word for this is karma. This is the world of karma and all that is in existence made by humans is the result of action and consequence. Who are you? Your thoughts and feelings drive and direct your actions, but ultimately you can choose to exert your will to either act or not act. With each action or inaction there are consequences that shape your world and effect the worlds of others.

As for what makes us human, there are two schools of thought. One is that it is emotions that make humans unique among all the species on the planet. Another is that it is our ability to reason. Is Man primarily an animal that feels or an animal that reasons? Adam Smith proposed that what makes humans unique is our ability to reconstruct reality in our minds as concepts that can be both manipulated or used to trigger emotional responses. What makes us human is our imaginations. Without which there would be no emotion or reason.

So what defines Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern is what defines us all.  The will that makes us who we are and the imagination that makes us human.  The strength and the quality of our life constructs depends on the these two character qualities.  The only thing holding us back is fear.

I subscribe to the theory that there are four root emotions from which all the variety of feelings emerge as variations on these four themes. All living organisms have the same basic concern. Can I eat it or will it eat me? Gaining a value is good and losing a value is bad. When we gain a value we feel happiness and when we lose a value we feel sorrow. Imagination provides the next two root emotions. To imagine gaining a value evokes desire, but the imagined loss of a value evokes fear.

Part of the human experience is regularly coming to terms with our desire and our fear. Desire drives action but this is tempered by fear. I desire the hot girl, but I fear approaching the person because I might lose the value of my self-esteem if I am rejected. I desire a new job, but I fear losing the job I have.

Some superheroes are born with power, like Superman. Some develop powers naturally, like all the mutants whose powers emerge as teenagers. Some work hard to achieve their powers, like Batman. Some create their powers, like Iron Man. And some have their powers thrust upon them, like Spider-man.

In the case of the Green Lantern, sure, he is given the ring, but the ability to use it powerfully is derived from the innate character of the person wielding it. I think that this makes Green Lantern unique. In the recent film adaptation Hal Jordan fails as a Green Lantern when he tries to be fearless and only succeeds when he stops trying and just trusts his innate ability to face and work through his fears. He is not afraid of fear, rather he is more focused on his desire – what he chooses to accomplish through his will.

Frank Hurbert writes in the book Dune that “Fear is the mind killer”. When a person is afraid they become like a startled deer trapped in the headlights. The mind shuts off.  The will that defines us as individuals and the imagination that makes us fully human simply evaporates.

This is why we need heroes like the Green Lantern.  Sure, he is not a moral iconic like Superman, or a feminist icon like Wonder Woman, or a brooding badass like The Batman.  Not only is he not one of those “Big Three” in the DC Universe,  Hal Jordan is not even the only Green Lantern from Earth, the others are John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner and that’s not even counting the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott.  If Batman had a power ring he would be, well, over-powered because he has the required character qualities in abundance.

In a sense Hal Jordan is special because being the primary titular Green Lantern we are more involved with him as a person and he is often touted as the greatest of the Green Lanterns.  From another angle seeing Hal Jordan as just one of many Green Lanterns reminds us that he is symbolic of everyman.  We all have will and imagination, but the measure of a person is how they use it.

We are all engaged every day of our lives in the battle against fear.  Those who seek to live life consciously rather than on autopilot must exercise their will and imaginations if they want to prosper.  Yes, it is easy just to sit back and let the river of life just carry you along, turn-off your will and your imagination and follow the herd.  But this has never been the path of the Romantic.  Those who choose this road less travelled must be creatures capable of harnessing the power of their will and imagination and employ this against their  fears and in the construction of their realities.  It is this power that makes the Romantics the larger than life characters they are in both fiction and reality, or as I like to say quoting Rob Zombie, “More human than human”.