Superheroes got me thinking about this one. I gave up on DC superhero shows and am beginning to feel the same way about Marvel films because of what Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) calls “The Guy in the Chair”. In other words, the person who helps the superhero by watching a computer and talking to them through an ear pierce. These sidekick characters are ruining things for me. And not just them.
The best season of Daredevil, the best episodes of Arrow (very few at the beginning, you probably don’t remember) were the ones before the hero had anyone helping him. The best superhero film before all the super teams came along was M. Night Shymalan’s Unbreakable (2000). Not the sequels, the first one. When Bruce Willis was all on his own.
I understand that TV shows in particular are made up on people talking to each other. Producers try to create opportunities for as much of this as possible. But I hate it. The hero who is on his own, that’s a true superhero story. I am not saying they don’t have people in their lives. They do. But when the proverbial poop hits the fan, they are on their own. Daredevil in a hallway taking on twenty guys. The Punisher escaping from prison and taking on twenty guys. These were the two best scenes in all of the Marvel TV shows. Just one guy.
And I think H. G. Wells got this. (Remember him. This was supposed to be about Wells, right?) In all of his best SF works the protagonist is on his own.
In The Time Machine (1895), the time traveler (as it will be convenient to call him) does like to talk to others. The whole first section of the tale is him talking and talking to his “friends” about time travel. But when he gets into the seat of the machine, he is on his own. Yes, he will find the Eloi and Weena, but still, he is a man apart, alone. When he escapes the Morlocks he goes alone to the future. Truly by himself, he sees the world of the red sun and the giant crabs.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Pendrick is the man alone. Yes, Montgomery and Moreau are there but they are not exactly friendly. Pendrick shows up alone from a crew that has abandoned ship. He suffers the beast men alone, being saved a few times by Moreau and the dogman but ultimately leaves by himself. In one of the film versions, he leaves with a woman (made from cats!) but that is Hollywood tacking on a stupid ending.
In The Invisible Man (1897), the doctor who becomes invisible, Griffin, is truly a man alone. No one else is invisible. This fact adds to his insanity as he plans to take over the world using his ability. At first we can feel sorry for him, but as his actions prove he is not a good person, we stop. It is not by mistake that a group of men kill him with shovels in the new-fallen snow. Wells may have been burying a Socialist message there but it is also a commentary on Individualism versus Collectivism.
In Wells’s masterpiece, The War of the Worlds (1898) the narrator is a man alone as he wanders the destroyed countryside on his way to London. He meets others who add commentary such as the Artilleryman and the Curate but he never teams up with anyone to try and stop the Martians. He watches ranks of soldiers use “bows and arrows against the lightning” and knows better. This trope of a singular person wandering across a ruined landscape will filter down to Wells’s admirers like John Wyndham, who will not embrace the alone-ness quite as much, usually having a couple do it.
The most recent version of The War of the Worlds (2019) with Gabriel Byrne and Elizabeth McGovern eschewed the idea of a singular, central character and took a page from the zombie movie playbook, using a group of characters in different locations coming together. I enjoyed the series, which had many diversions including the killer robot dogs instead of tripods, but it’s not the same. The bottleneck is there but I missed that single man or woman who faces off against the odds.
H. G. Wells did use one central figure in many of his best short stories, which admittedly is easier. (Wells’s novels are short by comparison with earlier Victorian books. This is partly because they are about ideas and partly because he doesn’t have a host of characters.) “In the Avu Observatory” has a man alone attacked by a giant bat. “Aepyronis Island” has a man trapped on an island with a prehistoric killer bird. “The Plattner Story” has a man travel to another dimension looking in on ours. “The Country of the Blind” is probably his most “alone” story with a man who can see in a valley where all are blind. It doesn’t prove to make the “one-eyed man king” but a terrible defect.
So what about all the other works that aren’t about one person? The First Men in the Moon (1901) and Food of the Gods (1903) are two, along with classic stories like “The Valley of the Spiders”, “In the Abyss” and “Empire of the Ants”. Though these have at least two characters, allowing more subtle dialogue than that lecture at the beginning of The Time Time Machine, I don’t gravitate to them like I do the singletons. Cavor and Bedford don’t hold me like the lone newspaper man walking deserted London streets looking at ailing tripods.
As for the walking lectures that are When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and Men Like Gods (1923) and the other later novels, forget it. Wells gave up “romance” for solving the world’s problems and became a less interesting writer. It doesn’t matter if the lecture is given by one man or many.
So, to go back to the superheroes, why do I need these heroes, like Wells’s singular narrators, to be alone? Is this just me being a curmudgeonly old complainer? I think not. Let’s not forget Beowulf, one of the original superhero tales of English culture. Beowulf fought Grendel and then Grendel’s mom all by himself. He didn’t have the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a “Guy in the Chair”. Later, when he fights the dragon he kinda does with Wiglaf but he is mostly there to clean up the pieces afterward. There is something basic and valid about the tale of individual heroism that I obviously like and comic book and television people don’t.
And as I said earlier, I get it. Look at the unsuccessful Dresden Files show from 2007. Dresden is a loner who solves supernatural cases (largely because this type of occult detective is descended from the private eye, a true loner). To give him somebody to talk to he has a ghost pal, “Bob”. Is it better than Paul Blackthorne walking around, talking to no one? Probably, but the magic wasn’t there and the show flopped. The alternative is a monologue where the detective talks to the audience. This has been done successfully and also very, very badly. If your narration comes off like a cheezy Bogart imitation “she was a tall drink of water”, etc. then forget it.
H. G. Wells did it by talking to the audience. That man alone is not alone, because you are there, listening to their struggle. You aren’t in a chair with three computer screens making it all too easy and boring. Your job is to listen, maybe learn something. And to feel just a little less afraid. You can do it. Yes, you, the man (person) alone. All by yourself.
The War in The Air also featured a solitary protagonist