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ACF #13 Political Conflict in Marvel and DC
I’m back with the second part of my long conversation with my friend Pete Spiliakos. We talked about girls becoming women in despite of society in ’80s movies last time. In the most surprising way, Pete picked horror movies to show social and psychological realism. Well, he hit it out of the park there, but then our conversation veered to the aesthetic, dramatic art and the political implications of the new business model of sequels and franchises. Like it or not, in an age of sequels and franchises, it’s no longer feasible to ignore the problem of sucky sequels.
You get a bit of Hollywood history of the last two generations. You get Pete’s “margin of suckitude” theory. You get commentary that moves from plot to philosophy and backwards to show what’s going on in popular entertainment. You get Pete’s “first Avenger test” to assess the worth of superhero movies. And you get my ideas about how critics should help writers improve their work.
By the way: What movie sequels are superior to the originals? I know Wrath of Khan. What else?
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I was re-listening to this. I wanted to ask about whether the theme of institutional collapse in the Marvel movies is a reason for their popularity, as there is a strong feeling among many people that various political and social institutions are failing.
Yup. & they’re super-successful at selling a new identity to the young. The homelessness & orphan-status of their heroes emphasize that abandonment is where you live & you have to make it into a great thing. Loneliness is radicalized; the old American art of association, from the Constitution to the local ethnic dances–gone.
This plays into the fact that post-war Americans have chosen to segregate the age groups radically. Our previous podcast, on the horror in suburbia stuff, shows another view of things & is really a precursor to the age of the super-hero movie. Those girls, the protagonists of horror movies, were trying to attain adulthood without having any public importance. In private. Hence the importance of dreams & fantasies. In this other case, it’s boys, also in hiding in various ways. People underestimate the extent to which superhero movies borrow the logic of the horror… There are certain important similarities & above all a concern of making do in an America that is a wasteland–no society left.
Superheroes therefore become the vehicle to sell America a new identity–a corporate identity. Like Apple, there’s also Marvel…
Hard not to see that with so many movies playing the theme. Hunger Games, Divergent, The Purge, etc.
I think actually those are fake. That’s retailing political paranoia. It’s like saying institutional failure is the theme or the working out of anything in 3 days of the Condor or any crap like that… It seems to be there. But it’s just a prompt for hysteria. Adults are literally sacrificing children.
But the fact that it’s there is important, of course!
It’s just that it’s only worked out where it’s invisible. Like in the horrors I discussed…
Of course they are fake; they never explain how you get from A to B, how you end up in a society where people get to murder each other one day a year. Just rules, no context.
Take a gander at my podcast on Carlito’s way. There you see a somewhat fantastic view of a part of Queens in the Seventies. But it makes a lot of sense about America. The tension between The Way & The Dream.
It’s fiction, but it’s super-realistic. It tells you lots of stuff you need to know.
I find no problems with trying to show possible end-of-the-world in America scenarios. They’re mirror images of the Western. I think much better than The Walking Dead is possible; but that’s good, too. It’s just that associations, politics, human things have other rules than childish hysteria. Suggesting how America might get from here to hell is not a bad idea. You don’t have to do the play-by-play either. You just have to be realistic about America & have some talent for story-telling.