Superheroes and the Villainous Real

by Christopher Barr

"Look at us!  Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense – Mr. Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA”
-Grant Morrison, Doom Patrol, Vol.2: The Painting That Ate Paris

Would the superhero movies of today survive in 1970’s cinema?  Superman: The Movie (1978) made it through the tail end of that decade.  Could Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne work together as Woodward and Bernstein did, to uncover the details of the Watergate scandal that would lead to President Richard Nixon resigning his office?  Could Peter Parker have the courage to walk into that small Italian restaurant bathroom, get the hidden gun above the old toilet, walk back out to the eating area and shoot both Virgil Sollozzo and Captain McClusky in cold blood to protect his family?  Of course not, these were different times and contexts, the point being that movies from the 70’s were quite grounded in reality, in spite of their fiction.  Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Chinatown, The Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and the above referenced, The Godfather and All the President’s Men, to name a few.   The whole decade screamed Howard Beale’s rant from Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

As in all decades of cinema, 70’s cinema was a product of its time and at that time, people wanted answers.  It was a time when people asked questions.  They wanted to know why their government was constantly misleading them and the films they watched echoed that sentiment.  That’s not to say people didn’t want to be transported to a galaxy far, far away but for the most part it was serious cinema.

Fast forward to today, three decades and change later, we ‘first-worlders’ live in a technopolized advanced iSociety, where this Internet is a virtual transportation window that can feed you information beyond anything that anyone in the 70’s could have dreamed.  Assuming as mankind advances technologically we intellectually stay in tandem with this form of progress of the human race.  So why are we stuck in this superhero littered playground, where Earth’s Mightiest heroes are saving the world from cookie-cutter, trite, evil villains, during a politically, ecologically and spiritually dark time in our civilization?  When did we decide to stick our ‘well groomed’ heads in the sand while issues of the world are no longer just third or second world issues but are pushing at our door steps.  I see people aimlessly gazing around and wanting to be ‘told about the rabbits’ instead of global warming and global resource robbery.  It would seem that, we like our movies like Iron Man and Spider-man big and loud and our real world issues, small and absent.

We are in a time in our history, where being distracted from actual real life offerings is not only popular but socially necessary to reject the Delphic oracle’s mandate that one ought to ‘Know Thyself’.  That life mantra that encourages self-interrogation of beliefs and ideals and suggests us explore our possibilities in this life, both with originality and creativity with a splash a spiritual enlightenment.

With the bombastic stream of TV channels and endless commercials, inert Facebook status updates and continuous text messages with faces down and thumbs mowing through techno-connecting, with actual people waiting to pick up where their conversation was rudely cut off.

Superheroes in cinema, as fun as they can be to watch, are guardians of capitalism.  Protectors, not from global annihilation, but consumerism and globalization.  They take advantage of our innocent youth and draw us in to their product placements and movie tie-ins, giving us a false sense of hope of who we should aspire to be.  Or maybe these little episodes of fantasy do actually give us a break from existential angst, Wolverine style and the banality of everyday living, Kick-Ass style.