Clarence Smith, Jr.'s Profile

People with fragile high self-esteem compensate for their self-doubts by engaging in exaggerated tendencies to defend, protect and enhance their feelings of self-worth.

Also, individuals with high self-esteem sometimes become very unlikable when others or events threaten their egos.

The concept of someone who just wants to have fun, and be like everybody else, but at the same time is compelled to do the right thing — I think that’s a lesson that kids can’t see too often, and there isn’t enough of it anywhere else. Our culture is filled with celebrated figures who do morally reprehensible things, and kids are getting mixed messages about that all the time. So to have these models is very useful, I think.

Batman’s great struggle is between revenge and justice — he’s really the go-to guy for that issue. And, of course, that’s something we’re struggling with as a country right now.

Movies, of course, are just movies. These projects have been in the works for years — chugging along Hollywood’s trillion-dollar poop-chute, now stalled or un-financed, now flush and moving again. Nobody associated with their production planned to make any great statement. And cinematic trends are not clinical symptoms. But the Zeitgeist works by coincidence, and the fact is that all of them, all these noisy dramas of superheroic identity crisis, have popped out now — at a moment of intense national self-interrogation. Are we liberators or torturers? Decent men or sadists? Are we chained to our fears or ready to embrace “change”?