Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Ideology

As a child, while staring at the screen, you don´t really wonder why the hell someone came up with the idea of having four turtles that look like humans and fight ninja style. They become an acceptable fiction when the word "mutant" is added to the equation. It makes sense inside of its universe. But why was this universe created? We might think someone was just pretty damn high or excessively creative, yet there is a rather curious theory on the reason they exist at all.

Let´s get the obvious out of the way: Ninjas use to fight without any code of honor like the Samurai did; these both "styles" come from Japan. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles come from an American comic book artist and writer: Kevin Eastman. The other obvious fact about them is that they are a compound of notions packed into one: nuclear mutations, sewers, rats, heroes, journalism, the Renaissance, art, etc.

It is complicated to roll it all up into one sentence better than the title: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Let´s attempt to imagine any of those combinations in reality: a Teenager Ninja; a Ninja Turtle; a Teenager Turtle; a Mutant Turtle; a Mutant Ninja; a Mutant Teenager; and so on. If we were to dissect all of the elements that make up this comic universe we would find a response to a few fantasies that otherwise would take a different path in the mind of a child: what is a Ninja? In more than one way, the existance of the comic book clouds the real deal about Ninjas and leaves the question not only unanswered but deviated, displaced. What is a Mutant? The same occurs here, instead of immediately thinking Science: a Mutant is a living organism whose DNA has been altered by nuclear radiation(a Scientist would be a lot more rigorous at that), we think: Magneto, Wolverine, Xavier. The whole fictional universe of comic books act like a censorship for children. In a way, it is like the problem they all have trying to answer the question: Where do babies come from? And then all of a sudden you have a fleet of white storks getting them from a baby industrial fabric. It all adds up to the ideology of capitalism: babies come from industrial processes, the life that is coming will not know anything about its past, genetic mutations are not a problem but an incredible gift which in turn can make you a hero, a rat that can carry diseases has the ability to train turtles, and the first source is a friend of those who fight crime: cops. Even the whole notion of Justice is twisted: Mutant Turtles decide who is evil and who is good. They, of course, are good, and ordering pizza should be something that puts a smile on your face. 

Lets get it all very clear, it seems like fantasy and fictional characters can show a lot more of ourselves than we can even know, and even though our childhood might seemed ruined for understanding more about ourselves in a real way in order to try and cope and deal with reality: no!: It is somewhere else where you see the phrase: "childhood ruined"; in the new movie of them coming out the 8th of August 2014 by producer Michael Bay, there have been complaints by fans who are saying their childhood has been ruined already because they did not like the design of the turtles faces. My god! In what kind of a world are we living? Shouldn´t we hear something in the lines of "My childhood was ruined by the whole ideology of allowing me to desire the continuous flow of images that cloud history and reality to deform my perception and train of thought."? History is a very complicated subject, usually written by one person, the winner of a war, that´s why it is called His Story(History). Rather than having a society of human beings who share a common culture, common goals and ideologies, what we are bombared with as children is a complete chaos of disorganized and mixed up fiction that leaves us without any real ground to build other than more mixed stuff. No wonder there is even a documentary called Everything is a Remix. But it is not: history is not a remix. The documentary itself defines a Remix as the combination or edition of existing material to produce something new. Isn´t this what has happened with all the elements that encompass Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And why are we striving for the ideology of always having something new? Again, it is only through the creation of something new that a new desire is created and then someone gets hooked into that desire in order to sell the product which satisfyies that desire. So... capitalism is the ideology. We salute the flag of the eternal new, our flag is no longer the static image of a few colors that represent something in particular. Our flag is now hanged on a wall, we look at it for hours and hours every day and it is called a screen. But in order to work as our flag it has to be turned on. When it is off we might find it as an antique, no matter how new the design. 

Let´s attempt to go a bit back in history and remember World War II. Weren´t the Japanese the smartest people on the planet in terms of strategical warfare? This is a subject of discussion, but we cannot discuss that they were better than the Americans at this. It was something else that made the Americans win the war and destroy the Japanese culture and deform it into what it has become: technology. They in fact became the Country which represents technology advancements and innovation: they turned themselves into what destroyed them. So could Capitalism stand for something different than consumption? What I´m trying to say now is, maybe because the usage of a technology only understood by a hand-full of people by a bunch of power lurking jerks gave rise to this notion that the new is better, that the new can protect us, that the new will always win. That was the case during World War II; but let´s look at our World now: is it the case? Are people really smarter now than what they were before? Contradicting the just released Apple´s video named: "You´re more powerful than you think." I claim that it is because of these technologies that we actually are weaker than we know. The word "think" on the Ad cannot be an accident. We can think whatever we want, but to "know"... that´s different. Are we really powerful when we´re saluting a flag that is eternally mixing colors and brightness scales that we now even carry on our pocket with 326 pixels per inch? If we´re not powerful thinking on our feet, like actual Ninjas did, we´re then inside an idea that is not Ninja-like, that relates more to a code of honor like Bushido, for instance. And we respect then not who has the more practice or talent in dealing with a sword, but the ones with more money in the bank. The respect that was before given to a Samurai walking around town is almost the same as to those who are wearing the most expensive brands and drive the newest cars. We have to remember something very peculiar about these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: their enemy was a brain. Ok, so bare with me here: A brain that was giving instructions to a body and that was something like a parasite inside the belly of a giant is the enemy of these turtles. Isn´t it mind boggling to think that these Remixes are now defining us into accepting the fight against logic and reason? Turtles are supposed to be slow. In this comic they are super fast, they are four and they work in team, they use weapons that cannot defeat an American soldier: Bo(Donatello); Katana(Leonardo); Nunchaku(Michelangelo); Sai(Raphael). It becomes increasingly obvious that it is these characters and remixes that define our visual reality like the painters whose names are used to name the Mutant Turtles. During the Renaissance, it was patience and technique and practice and time which gave those real masters the respect they won; but not now: a Teenager can get it. It is that instant victory for youth that makes them feel powerful and smart, the fact that they are portrayed on a screen(the flag) like smart, mutant and carriers of an ancient fighting technique that is all in the darkness(sewers): it´s obvious because there is nothing in the darkness but an empty space, the empty space that´s in the minds of those who feel empowered by watching those cartoons and wasting away life saying yes to the remixes that are now very effectively redifining our ideologies. So what are we to do? Ignore them? It is not possible to do so now, but what we can do is see these remixes like walls that we must jump because they are blocking our way towards what we really wanted in the first place. And to remember the words about critique of ideology by Zizek: "Freedom Hurts". Hopefully the title says something different now: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. TMNT.