No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an Australian to play him), but I wonder about this superhero business. They’ve been cleaning up at the multiplex ever since the dawn of the millennium: Spider-Man. X-Men. Batman. Iron Man. The mid-20th-century long-underwear guys are bigger than ever in the 21st. Truly this is the Age of the Superhero. And it’s beginning to bother me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love comic books. Meeting Stan Lee was one of the great moments of my life. Read a zillion of his masterpieces as a kid—although my grasp of the details decades later is generally frozen circa issue No. 22: Jean Grey will always be Marvel Girl to me. Please, no need to write to point out that she subsequently became Phoenix, and then Dark Phoenix, and then died, and then turned up in a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, which was given to Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, and then she died again but implanted her psyche in the body of the comatose Emma Frost . . . I’m just skimming the CliffsNotes here, so, alternatively, don’t write if my précis has omitted many fascinating plot twists over the decades. My point is that keeping up with these guys is a full-time job. And even the fellows whose basic bio doesn’t change much get “reinvented.” The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt. In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.
When I was a lad, a lot of my pals didn’t dig this stuff. Boys who were into war stories valued verisimilitude, which made it hard to get past the capes and tights on Green Arrow or Ant-Man. So, even among the male youth demographic, the superhero catered to a niche market—and a parochial one at that. One can certainly detect, as scholars do, a long cultural inheritance of Übermensch mythology underpinning the Marvel and DC universes, but putting the Übermensch in Sharpie-coloured fully accessorized costumes is very American. Wolverine may have been born in northern Alberta and may have spent many years struggling, somewhat improbably, to escape the sinister clutches of his masters at the Canadian Defence Ministry, but, to the best of my knowledge, he has never been spotted flying down Yonge Street fighting for truth, justice and the Canadian way as he battles Islamophoboman, the deranged Maclean’s columnist whose evil powers grow stronger with every human rights complaint against him. Canada is just a place Wolverine happens to come from, not something he embodies. Back in the seventies, Marvel Comics introduced Captain Britain, with, first, a Britannic lion on his chest and, later, a modified Union Jack, a conscious hommage to Captain America’s star-spangled pectorals. It never really worked, in part because it seems an alien cultural vernacular: the Union Jack is fine on Austin Powers’ Y-fronts or Ginger Spice’s knickers, but looks very foreign on the rippling chest of a superhero.
So the conventions of the genre seemed quintessentially American in their expansive confidence. Or so I thought. Now, as last summer’s superheroics are succeeded by this summer’s, I’m not so sure. Recently, in Reason magazine, Jesse Walker mocked me for claiming to have detected Bush Doctrine subtexts in the first Spider-Man movie while entirely missing the masturbatory metaphor. Well, I saw Spidey in 2002, the day after visiting the World Trade Center site on what was the last chance to see it “as is,” before the authorities closed it for redevelopment (if that’s the right word for a decade of bureaucratic sclerosis). So perhaps my emotional compass was pointing elsewhere. I thought Spidey’s big-screen debut made a case for Bush-style pre-emption in that “the men who killed his Uncle Ben were small-time crooks Peter could have stopped earlier but chose not to.” On the other hand, apropos his uncle’s famous advice to Peter Parker—“With great power comes great responsibility”—I seem to recall my colleague Paul Wells defending Jean Chrétien’s 9/11 anniversary plea for the Americans to “be nice” to foreigners as simply a Shawinigan variation on Uncle Ben: “Wid da great power come da great responsibilities.”
Who’s right? Me? Wells? Both? Neither? Well, it’s seven years on, and I can’t remember a thing about the movie except Kirsten Dunst’s clinging shirt in one rain-sodden scene. Mr. Walker is right that too many of us went looking for messages in the superheroics, and seized too eagerly on the slim pickings. As he says, the superhero genre has a “philosophical flexibility.” Spider-Man himself compared biceps with Don Rumsfeld on stage as part of some Pentagon war promotion. But in January he was trading fist bumps with Barack Obama in a presidential inaugural special. Boy sidekick to Rummy, arachnid ivory to Obamessiah ebony: which is the real Spider-Man?
Er, well, there isn’t a real Spider-Man, is there? Look, I know several comrades of mine were very taken by Michael Caine’s speech as Alfred the butler to Master Bruce—“Some men just want to watch the world burn . . . ”—hailing it as an incisive analysis of al-Qaeda et al. But I don’t think so. Terrorists enjoy the body count, yet, unlike the Joker, they do have an end rather than just means. The notion that they merely “want to watch the world burn” is more readily applied to your average Hollywood studio. For almost a decade, the summer blockbusters have avoided saying anything about terrorism, Islam, 9/11, Bali, Beslan, Madrid or London, but they do like to “watch the world burn.” And so they opt for explosions and fireballs and shattering glass and screaming civilians unmoored from any recognizable reality. Hence, the Age of the Superhero: the Sharpie-bright spandex boys helped the movies off an awkward hook.
In the eight years American troops have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the studios have failed to produce a single film on the subject, other than a handful of unwatched flops about rendition and torture. The Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears was about Islamic terrorists, so naturally the cinematic version made them neo-Nazis. The Nicole Kidman yawneroo The Interpreter was originally about Islamic terrorists attacking New York, so naturally they were rewritten into terrorists from the little-known African republic of Matobo. If a thriller’s set on a hijacked plane, the hijacker turns out to be a bespoke minion of some obscure Halliburton subsidiary. A couple of years back they made a high-tech action thriller in which the bad guy is the plane. That’s right: an unmanned computer-flown aircraft goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is—stop me if this rings a vague bell—a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard. The jet itself is the terrorist. This is the pitiful state Hollywood’s been reduced to: let’s play it safe and make the plane the bad guy. In the nineties, upscale Brits made a nice living playing the exotic foreign evildoer in Hollywood action pics. But, unless Jeremy Irons has been practising twirling his fingers like propellers and taxiing down the garden path with outstretched arms, he’s not going to be getting many roles as the psycho aeroplane.
Some studio vice-presidents just want to watch the world burn. So we have movies about nothing. You can discern subplot if you wish, but in the end what 99 per cent of moviegoers notice is the stuff that’s not sub-: he’s dressed like a bat! He has a groovy car! Whoa, did you see the way the Joker jabbed that guy’s eye out? You can debate allegory and metaphor, but once upon a time you didn’t have to—even with superheroes. The very first issue of Captain America showed our hero punching Hitler in the kisser right on the front cover—and look at the date: March 1941, months before the U.S. even entered the war.
The critic James Bowman thinks the current vogue for big screen superheroes helps to “isolate and quarantine heroism in fantasy-land.” “Heroism” is what people who’ve been bitten by radioactive spiders do. Until that happens to you, best to steer clear. And so a world of superheroes leads to a world without heroes. Gone now are the amateur adventurers of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, chaps who’d find themselves caught up in something, and decide to give it a go, initially because it’s a ripping wheeze but also because, in some too-stiff-upper-lipped-to-say way, they understood honour required it. Now the conventional romantic hero is all but extinct, and as giants patrol the skies those of us on the ground are perforce smaller. In The Incredibles, there’s a famous line aimed at the feel-good fatuities of contemporary education: when everyone’s special, nobody is. The failure of storytelling in today’s Hollywood teaches a different lesson: when everyone’s super, nobody’s a hero.
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[...] to avoid expressing the reality of the age is through liberal use of comic book superhero movies, Mark Steyn writes: Look, I know several comrades of mine were very taken by Michael Caine’s speech as Alfred [...]
….gathering from the parasites who regularly clamor for attention from Mark’s shadow,
Mr. Steyn seems to have really hit the big time…
Your name max shinty I thought for a second that the last part was a bad word lol!
[...] week Steyn dissects Hollywood’s obsession with superhero movies – and uncanny ability to avoid addressing the key enemy of our age. (hat tip: Ed [...]
What the heck what is this place!
Or worse yet,
how many true war heros (you know like the guy who stayed in a nest of terrorists to be shot up, so his buddies could get away) occupied headlines or anywhere near the front pages.
Forgot to mention…Keaton was the best Batman. d=^)
[...] Superheroes are starting to bug me No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an [...] [...]
You’re just pissed that your talentless country couldn’t even get a team in to the conference finals of the Stanley Cup.
A Canadian is nothing but a Mexican in a sweater.
A hockey sweater that is. Count the Canadians who play for the four remaining teams. They outnumber all other players combined. It must suck to be a complete know-nothing.
And “Americans” wonder why they’re nearly universally hated around the entire planet.
It’s not “just” for having hundreds of military bases in 130+ countries that they are “allegedly” not at war with, and it’s not for the unjust wars they are currently waging either, but it is because of those few “Americans” who are both intensely ignorant and riduculously outspoken in their idiocy.
Not all “Americans” are inherently evil or imbicilic, mind you. The problem is that those majority of decent US citizens are so rarely heard from, in contrast to the loud-n-obnoxious rednecks that seem to believe that they are representative of the remainder of their compatriots.
THEY ARE NOT.
PS: They’re not “sweaters”, they’re toques. Perhaps you’ll have that updated in your manual at your next anti-MENSA meeting?
It’s funny how people claim Americans are universally hated while typing on their Dell computer into their Apple or Microsoft software wearing their Nike shoes and Levis jeans with HBO on the television and a Coca Cola on the coffee table.
Anyway, no2marriage is clearly just an a**, it has nothing to do with being American. And frankly, there are more Mexicans in America than there are in Mexico, so he was just insulting himself anyway.
As for sports, funny he should make that hockey comment when the only Canadian MLB baseball team is the best one. One Canadian winner and 29 American chasers.
In response to:
You’re just pissed that your talentless country couldn’t even get a team in to the conference finals of the Stanley Cup.
A Canadian is nothing but a Mexican in a sweater.
* yup we got health care -you got guns… do you think we got something you need? It does no good to blast ppl to ribbons when it costs you your house to get fixed up.
Further, bet you folks wish ya had all that clean fresh water we have lyin’ all over too huh? The mid west of yur coutry seems like its a might toasty right now! Snikerz* Mexico indeed! in conclusion”bite me!”
Thanks, Mark, a very astute analysis of Hollywood movie-making in the 21st century. Do you think the writers and directors avoid making Islamofascists the enemy because they fear for their lives? After all, these guys don’t cotton to criticism of any kind – remember Theo Van Gogh.
No, it has to do with who is ultimately funding the product, you wouldn’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.
The TV Series 24 did a good job of reminding us that Muslims can be terrorists, with an Islamic group acquiring nuclear weapons and (unsurprisingly) blowing up half of Los Angelese with them.
The next series was Africans again…
What gets me is that Hollywood’s first instinct in creating film is ‘wait to the IRaq War’, then we won’t have to care about 9/11. I noticed they began to scream about what gun-toating racists we are supposed to be and yet people still go to the movies.
Marvel comics is behind most of the super hero adaptions, but they’re comics have become irrelevent even in fantasy land. They did some poorly concieved Guantonomo Bay like story and put it out as they’re big ‘change everything’ story. Yes, it changed everything in the Marvel Universe and introduced a dark look to Marvel but as a long-time Marvel reader I’m sad to report that it was absolutely terrible. It didn’t have much of a begginning as Captain America will lead some super-powered against some government led super powered good guys who lock people up who don’t register. Spider-man became the worst character I ever read and they refused to use the idea of everyone finding out who Spider-man is as a main story because all the Editor In Chief wanted was for him to be not married anymore, possibilities be damned. It really hit Marvel hard and there was no reference to an Al Queda like enemy anywhere in that insipid series. I would hate to see comic books as bland and short-sighted as Movies have become. I hate that idea.
Shorter Steyn:
“Imagine what “Syriana” would have looked like, if only all of that annoying real-life complexity had been jettisoned and replaced by a heroic tale of the Iraq War, featuring Americans wearing white cowboy hats, and Arabs wearing black headdresses.”
Imagine if Hollywood made movies criticizing the U.S.A during WW II and questioning if the Nazi’s are truly the bad guys.
How many movies has Hollywood made that has been against the War in Iraq…which has been propaganda for the enemies of the United States. It is shameful.
What about some true stories?
Fallujah. Where the US rewrote the book on urban warfare. There is a story there. Even the New York Times reporter had a story from that battle. Look it up.
What about the insurgency tactics of putting a small group of marines into the middle of a city. Dangerous, stories to tell. What about the Anbar awakening, and all that led to that? Very interesting, entertaining, and stories of courage all around. Would make great film.
Maybe it is all too fresh. Saving Private Ryan was a great war movie with a very large audience. I’m sure there are some stories to tell from Iraq. True ones, not something made up. In fact, with a bit of digging, no doubt the truth would be stranger and more fantastic than anything one could make up.
Derek
Enjoyed this article. The proliferation of movie superheroes is most peculiar, and the way that these days they never encounter bad guys who resemble any actual bad guys like, for example, the ones that Daniel Pearl or Theo van Gogh met up with.
But at the end you erroneously attribute to The Incredibles that famous epigram, “when everyone’s special, nobody is”.
In fact it was WS Gilbert who coined the original in The Gondoliers back in 1889 when he has Don Alhambra del Bolero, the Grand Inquisitioner of Venice, convincing gondoliers Marco and Giuseppe Palmieri to sing along with him that (http://math.boisestate.edu/GaS/gondoliers/libretto.txt),
When every one is somebodee,
Then no one’s anybody!
Regards,
Cabdriver – I wasn’t all that impressed with Syriana. Nuance is alright but don’t you ever get tired of the same nuance every time? When I first started watching movies heroes were less ambiguous and now over the years it seems they’ve become too ambiguous. However, I think you miss the point. It was edgy 40 years ago when the CIA or the president or General Ripper turned out to be the bad guy. Now, it’s de rigeur. It would actually be edgier to show a true story of American heroism on the battlefield that took place after WWII. A movie featuring an unambiguous hero who didn’t turn out to be so flawed that he’s actually impossible to like. Hollywood’s automatic disdain and distrust for the military gets a little tiring. Really, a very tiny minority are actually murdering rapists. Heck, Hollywood prefers to make Monster, a movie based on a totally demoralizing story, the only point being, how ugly they could make Charlize Theoron. You got and liked Syriana. Maybe they could try something a little different for the rest of us. Box office shows their present plan isn’t really working. A lot of us are sick of this particular type of nuance and are literally no longer buying it. When the bad guys are always us or from fictional Moboto, who the heck cares? It’s 2009 and I believe there is a huge market for a true story of modern warfare. Who knows maybe one where a few brave soldiers fight a nasty, dangerous enemy and our side could be the good guys. Could these brave, edgy filmakers be too afraid of what could ensue if they told the truth and made the enemy some actual women hating, child murdering Taliban? Oh my!
In Superheroland, nobody is really a hero. It can get pretty slimy. For instance, Stan Lee is facing “the largest intellectual property law suit in the history of Hollywood” for using his own name: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2225123/posts .
I know nothing more about it than that and so can’t say whether Lee was dumb to assign those rights to SMLI (if he really did so) or if the complainant is, well, a joker; but those Sharpie-bright Spandex boys’n'girls aren’t really heroes, and most of us know from the getgo that it’s really all about money and illusion even before something like this suit comes along to put it all into focus.
Most of us (those of us outside of the prestige media and Hollywood, anyway) know where the true heroes are. They live among us; they *are* us, and maybe it’s good thing Hollywood isn’t trying to exploit that, although the exceedingly poor illusions that they offer for our consumption sure does limit entertainment choices.
Sigh. I wish Doug Fairbanks, Sr., and Jack Webb were back with us, and in their prime (Mary Pickford and Sam de Grasse, too, to name two Canadians). Those were good illusionists whose work still stands up well today.
Thomas- first of all, you have to understand my personal viewpoint, which is that television and films are not the information format to rely on in order to learn about the world.
There- I’ve just stated a position so conservative and traditional, that I’ve alienated the majority of my fellow American citizens.
That said, when I do attend movies that address real-life political issues, I expect better than war propaganda.
I’m going to leave the “Superhero” genre to the side- I don’t recall making it through an entire sitting, or broadcast, of any of them in nearly 30 years. Which, coincidentally enough, is about the same extent of time since I’ve kept a TV in my house.
I’m fairly sure that last fact largely accounts for how it is that I was able to follow the plot of “Syriana”- which hardly villainizes the CIA while lionizing the adversaries of the USA, incidentally; a book by a CIA agent, Robert Baer, was after all the principal inspiration for “Syriana”, and Baer was a consultant for the film.
I’m more than prepared to read accusations of “snobbery”, in response to those observations. As a cab driver, I admire their absurdity. All I ever wanted to do is stop making myself stupid by devoting so much time to watching TV and movies. I read instead- along with, of course, that much-cherished “real-life experience” that some people like to go on so much about, when they’re trying to impeach a person’s credibility for having too much book knowledge to suit their taste.
“It would actually be edgier to show a true story of American heroism on the battlefield that took place after WWII. A movie featuring an unambiguous hero who didn’t turn out to be so flawed that he’s actually impossible to like…”
An “unamibiguous hero”? Not even the superhero comics I’ve read feature those. Not the ones that people recognize as classics, at any rate.
It sounds like what you have is nostalgia for John Wayne movies.
I wasn’t in Vietnam (19 in 1974; lottery #315) , but I lived in a college dormitory full of Vietnam vets, just returned from places like Khe Sanh. What they told me of their time in Indochina sketched out a place and time that Vietnam vet and Hollywood director Oliver Stone eventually depicted a lot more accurately in the film “Platoon” than in John Wayne’s 1968 movie “The Green Berets.”
That’s reality. There it is.
Incidentally, if you saw “Platoon”, I’d like to know what it was you found so “impossible to like” about Willem Defoe’s character…that he wasn’t perfect?
When was life ever a “Superman” comic book?
Too many Americans getting tricked due to holding a view of the world as made up of cartoon superheroes and supervillains is what landed the USA in Iraq in the first place.
Don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to another summer of edgy metrosexual space operas recycled from 60’s TV, edgy attacks on Catholics and, if we’re really lucky, another edgy (and Brave!) McCarthy Era speaking-truth-to-power manifesto.
This, of course, assumes there will be a movie featuring Hitler–the only acceptable boogyman–ala the all-Hitler-all-the-time, er, History Channel.
“Some studio vice-presidents just want to watch the world burn.”
So true.
Watching it burn is far easier than fixing the myriad of problems which desperately need attention.
The longer we are distracted from the real issues, the longer those abuses and failures can compound…and the more willfully ignorant we remain, the easier those abuses can continue unabated. But to what purpose?
So Black Hawk Down doesn’t count as a post-9/11 hero movie??
The book Black Hawn Down was released in 1999. The movie was released December 2001. Filming would have been pre 9/11. The book took pains to show both sides of the battle. There is a bit of ra-ra USA in the movie but it is still ultimately about USA running from a Muslim country, very safe Holywood story matter.
Mark Steyn on superhero movies…
Mark Steyn, who was a comics fan in his youth, writes in Macleans about superhero movies…
oh go hump a moose. and leave me and my childish obessions with fantasty characters alone.
[...] to the World (and possibly the Universe), Mark Steyn theorizes in a recent bit that Hollywood’s superhero films are Tinseltown’s cop out instead of showing the real heroes [...]
As much of a “fanboy” as I am when it comes to most superheroes, I have to admit that, as good or bad as storytelling has been over the years (both in print and on-screen), most of the time characters like ol’ Cap, Spidey, Supes and the Bat are usually just forms of escapism. You’ll find no shortage, however, of dissertations out there about the cultural and psychological meaning and importance of these characters, but in the end, the question that should be asked is “are these stories good?”
Whether or not they’re relevant depends on vintage: most superhero stories have a presence and resonance that is meaningful at the time, such as the relevance of X-men during the Civil Rights movement, and then again as North Americans struggle with gay rights issues. Few comic stories from the golden or silver age, as they’re known, escape being “dated,” and the themes and styles (visually as well as narratively) seem campy and even absurd as the years go by.
What Hollywood is cashing in on is more than just superhero escapism: it’s general escapism, where relevance is often lacking anyway. Hollywood is tending toward properties with “proven” audiences. To that end, superhero flicks are safe bets, as are remakes, sequels, sequels of remakes, “reboots,” etc. It’s all about supposedly clever marketing, and very garish efforts to be as risk-averse when it comes to telling stories. Gone – for now, at least – are the days of edgy Hollywood “big tents” that actually encouraged moviegoers to really think about themselves and their world, and maybe even talk to each other about how to improve things. Equally absent are instances of popular entertainment where escapism (sci-fi, typically) is used as a vehicle for overt political and social criticism that is delivered in an accessible way, as had been the case with the original Star Trek series, which was rebooted with much for ADD eyes to feast on and some satisfactory character interaction but little thoughtful discourse in the vein of what Roddenberry’s vision was actually all about at its best.
Hollywood thinks that it may be “off the hook,” in that it can still eke out profits, but it has lost a fundamental raison d’etre in that it has generally abandoned the “untested” stories, and if studios keep avoiding risky, avant garde filmmaking, they are doing everybody a disservice.