Alessandra Stanley from the New York Times has a piece on the return of Heroes for its third season. It’s an odd review, mostly because it’s not a review—instead, it’s an occasion to muse on the meanings of and the motivations behind the show. The gist? Heroes is the consummate expression of “Generation Y,” a generation that has inherited a financial meltdown, the HIV virus and a quagmire in Iraq. Stanley proposes re-titling the third season “Victims” rather than “Villains,” and offers—seriously?—an extended comparison of the show to advertisements from Freecreditreport.com aimed at young people in debt. But lest you think this is an expression of sympathy, the review is quick to add that this is “the most coddled, indulged and overprotected generation ever,” whose only superpowers are the ability to text rapidly with two thumbs on a Blackberry and assemble better playlists on their iPods. The show’s final message: “don’t trust anyone over 50.” Alessanda Stanley graduated from college in 1977—that makes her about 53 today. I’m just sayin’.

Like most “generational” critiques, this one makes about as much sense as astrology (most astrological signs are predicated on the same technique—a bit of flattery, a bit of critique, and several contradictory personality traits). To begin with, wasn’t generation Y some time ago? Slacker (1991) and Reality Bites (1994), the quintessential “Gen X” movies, came out when I was starting graduate school. “Gen X” became a buzzword, produced books, grabbed headlines, and coughed up several movies. Since then, there have been halfhearted attempts to cash in on the generational idea again, all of which have failed, and commentators on the Zeitgeist quickly ran through the remaining two letters of the alphabet, and several other possible names as well.  In any case, I’m highly dubious that the current and recent crop of college graduates can be boiled down to a simple set of contradictory stereotypes. One could, however, say at least two things about them with certainty, however, which would be of obvious importance to Heroes. First, they watched 9/11 happen as they were growing up. Second, they like comic books a lot more than my generation did.

But is Heroes even aimed at this group (or does it just take its formal aesthetic, its look, from it)? Actually, the ensemble cast ranges from grade school children to middle age parents (quite a few of the characters already have children: D.L., Noah, Niki, Matt—sort of—, Nathan), and while some of these characters are more central than others, the show doesn’t offer a single, readily identifiable central character with whom the entire audience is supposed to identify. Just as audience identification is dispersed across the whole cast, so is heroic action.  Heroes actually breaks with superhero convention (and note that the title is Heroes, not Superheroes) in a major, nearly unprecedented, way: the “heroes” must work together to stop the villain, precisely because their super-abilities are unusual, but hardly world-historical. In short, what made Heroes so smart in its first season was its explicit refusal of the “superman” ideology, with its racial and religious subtexts: a lone hero, perfect in every way, who would sacrifice himself to redeem us. Instead we saw ordinary people—a cheerleader, a cop, a Las Vegas stripper trying to be a good mom, a male nurse, and so on—who could work together in extraordinary times and circumstances. The show’s strong suggestion was that such collective action could have prevented 9/11 and the ensuing millennial “clash of civilizations.”

Who is at fault in this world? The chief villain is Sylar, of course—not exactly “over 50.” I’m not sure exactly how old his character is supposed to be, but Zachary Quinto, the actor who plays Sylar, just turned 30 last year. Heroes itself invokes the rhetoric of generations—the parents of Nathan and Peter Petrelli, for example, clearly formed their own little band of superheroes back in the day. And they got some things wrong, but the show always suggested that the current generation was simply the latest in a series of repetitions, themes and variations. The current generation is not special or different—they just happen to be “now.” In fact, most of the older characters are the same mixture of admirable and fallible that characterize Nathan or Peter or Matt: Hiro’s father, Kaito, Mohinder’s father, Chandra, and Noah Bennet are sources of wisdom and frustration in equal parts for their children—they are unquestionably good people. Alessandra Stanley refers to “Oedipal issues” in her review, but as Inigo Montoya once said: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” If the show has a failing, it is not in depicting those over 50 as untrustworthy—it is that it does not trust mothers. From Sandra Bennet, Claire’s neurotic and dog-obsessed adoptive mother, to Niki, the schizophrenic mom who works as a stripper (one personality all maternal care, the other all sex), the show does not deal well with adult women. Really? Comic book geeks suffering from an anxiety about women and adult female sexuality? Who would’ve thought? This anxiety comes through most apparently, of course, in the über-Oedipal Angela Petrelli—she is based on, and even takes her name from, Angela Lansbury’s incestuously-inclined mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (a classic cinematic example of a woman who puts the s in “mother”). 

As always, people find the violence and conflict in Freud easy to remember and accept. Oedipus is about the hatred for the father, generational conflict. What is invariably forgotten or discarded in Freud is the sexual content—Oedipus is about incestuous desire. Heroes is smart enough to “go there,” as they say, and smart enough to leave its anxieties about adult female sexuality unresolved. Heroes certainly imbibes from the well of paranoia so popular over the last eight years, in which every situation and character turns and turns and turns again (think 24), but it has no special distrust of those over 50. It doesn’t trust politicians and it doesn’t trust corporations—no surprises here—but its innocent female characters are exclusively those who are young: Molly, Claire, Monica.

UPDATE

You should all check out Mishka’s link which was in the comments (now deleted due to general stupidity of how iWeb interacts with Apple’s MobileMe)—it’s spot on, and I couldn’t agree more with Prof. Vaidhyanathan (with a name as awesome as Siva Vaidhyanathan, perhaps to appear as a character in the upcoming season of Heroes) about the diversity of opinions, affects and abilities within the so-called “digital generation.” (Is it a sign of the times that Prof. Vaidhyanathan formally shut down his blog today, however?) One can’t help but notice in the list of generations that they overlap and contradict each other—some are as brief as 3 years in length, others as long as 20. As a party game, there doesn’t seem to be any harm in trying to catch a Zeitgeist, but as a serious critique, it leaves something lacking. Like seriousness. And critique.

UPDATE #2

Any doubts about the intensely Oedipal character of Heroes are hereby formally removed by Angela’s panting, moaning and caressing (spoiler!) her son Sylar while saying “I know what every boy wants from his mommy” in the first episode of the season.