The Four Bodily Humors – Awesome Heroes for this Advanced/Backward Age
By Simon Black (with thanks to Terence Edwards)
It’s very exciting how the advanced technology of Hollywood has mixed with the most primitive nonsense mankind has ever dreamed up, isn’t it? I sit eating my popcorn agog at the special effects created by these scientists, programmers and robotics experts and I feel that I am straddling both the cutting edge of the future and the stupidest ancient past, as I am presented with a bunch of extremely unscientific mumbo jumbo and primitive animism, something the first idiots out of the caves would have been very comfortable with. Isn’t this paradoxical? What a strange cocktail. Somehow the Comic Book Movie is perfectly appropriate for what I call our Advanced Backward Age. We have iPhones, yes. But we have a society that is so hideously violent, unjust, pathetic, cruel and hypocritically stupid that one day they will look back on us and call us beasts. They will look at our most popular entertainment, the Comic Book Movie, and they will say of course this is what these beasts liked, because they were extremely Advanced and extremely Backward at the same time, just like these big budget extravaganzas.
For instance, check out the latest comic book movie coming down the pike. With The Heroes of Humorism Marvel comics went back to Hippocrates and his ancient system of the four bodily humors. There is a hero for each of these bodily fluids, Blood, Yellow Bile, Black Bile, and Phlegm. Blood, or Sanguine as he is sometimes called, is all red and looks like an open blood vessel. He exhibits an outgoing and sometimes impetuous ego as the leader of the group. He will be played by Lee Majors, in a long awaited return to the big screen. Sanguine can spit blood at the villains, which they often find disgusting, but it does not hurt them. It does distract them, however, in time for his fellow Humorists to come join the attack. Yellow Bile, or Choleric Man, played by Jackie Chan, is also a leader and very extroverted. But he is also an expert in the martial arts. If the martial arts don’t work, though, he can blow yellow bile out of his nose, which flies through the air and can cause blindness, irritation and sometimes drowsiness in the bad guys. Black Bile, played by Samuel Jackson, is melancholic and usually very depressed. But he is super powerful and smart. He can shoot Black Bile out of his right eye, which is very sticky and makes people feel sick. Finally, the fourth bodily humor, Phlegm, will be played by the phlegmatic Flemish actor, Jean Claude Van Damme. He is super relaxed all the time and funny, but also good at coughing up balls of poisonous phlegm at villains. Well, it’s not poisonous, but it is gross and sticky and the villains are usually pretty disgusted.
The plot of the first bodily humor super hero movie, which is bound to have many sequels as Marvel’s latest franchise, involves the four bodily humors being thrown out of balance on earth by an alien pre-invasion force. In order to make the human species easier to conquer, the alien Xath (Liam Neeson) has sent down the femme fatale alien named Astrological Disturbance (Lady Gaga). She dresses very sexy and Goth, but she has the ability to completely confuse people. Her job is to seduce Sanguine and suck out all his blood so that when the imbalance in the humors on earth occurs, Sanguine won’t be able to heal it.
The problem she runs into though is Sanguine’s girlfriend, Miasma, played by the waifish Emma Watson, who has the ability to transform herself into a poisonous vapor if she is near enough to a swamp. Miasma keeps making Astrological Disturbance feel sick so she cannot seduce Sanguine. But Xath has another plan. He sends his minion, the demonic Abiogenesis (played by Zack Galifianakis), who has the ability to create life out of inanimate objects, for example evil mice, which Abiogensis can cause to arise from grain. He can also create maggots from decaying meat because he knows that the non living material contain pneuma or vital force. With these monstrous life forms, he is able to subdue Miasma, and overtake Sanguine. But never mind, Yellow Bile blows a bunch of snot at him and he dies.
Next Black Bile shoots some black bile out of his eye at Xath. Xath seems to have died, but he jumps up and is about to kill Black Bile when Phlegm comes to the rescue and hocks a loogie at him.
The Heroes of Humorism. The budget is four hundred million dollars and the science is entirely medieval, classical or pre-classical. And daft.
Coming late summer 2018.
