On contemporary cinema: Superheroes and the denial of humanity

Thoughts on a quote by Alan Moore

 
Every few years, the former comic book writer, Alan Moore, comes out of retirement to give an interview in which he effectively pours fuel on the detritus of the modern comic book industry, superheroes and the general state of popular culture, and takes a flame to it. Recently interviewed for Deadline.com, the writer was there to talk about a new project that he's been working on; a surreal, independently produced fantasy film called The Show (2020). The conversation however soon turned (or more accurately, was pushed) towards the ubiquity of the modern superhero movie, to which Moore made his feelings plainly felt.
 
"Most people equate comics with superhero movies now. That adds another layer of difficulty for me. I haven’t seen a superhero movie since the first Tim Burton Batman film. They have blighted cinema, and also blighted culture to a degree. Several years ago, I said I thought it was a really worrying sign, that hundreds of thousands of adults were queuing up to see characters that were created 50 years ago to entertain 12-year-old boys. That seemed to speak to some kind of longing to escape from the complexities of the modern world, and go back to a nostalgic, remembered childhood. That seemed dangerous, it was infantilizing the population.
 
This may be entirely coincidence but in 2016 when the American people elected a National Socialist satsuma and the UK voted to leave the European Union, six of the top 12 highest grossing films were superhero movies. Not to say that one causes the other, but I think they’re both symptoms of the same thing – a denial of reality and an urge for simplistic and sensational solutions."
 
 

Publicity image of Alan Moore in The Show [Mitch Jenkins/ Protagonist Pictures, 2020]:

 
Unsurprisingly, many commentators and fans of the modern comic book cinema have accused Moore of hypocrisy and called him out for criticizing something that he's admittedly unfamiliar with. While there's an objective truth to this critique against Moore, I don't think the writer necessarily needs to see any of the recent run of highly acclaimed and hugely successful comic book movies for his point to be more or less valid. He isn't arguing against the objective quality of these films, nor the method of delivery, but rather their oversaturation of the marketplace, the politics of the medium, their ideology and corporate intent.
 
Some comic book films, on occasion, might grapple with the moral ambiguities of the superhero as a vigilante, or the lengths that superheroes take in the war on crime, but they don't make them the subject matter or the narrative that defines the whole.
 
As one example, Christopher Nolan's film, The Dark Knight (2008), is a genuinely great work that has aged incredibly well. While occasionally weighed down by unnecessary exposition and narrative contrivances, Nolan's film nonetheless emerges as an engaging and powerful treatise on the morality of vigilantism, the dualism between good and evil, and the reality of how readily the former can be corrupted by tragic circumstances. The subtext is alive with issues of post-millennium terror, giving the action a much deeper emotional resonance. And yet the film isn't really "about" any of these things. They're just subtext. They enrich the action and drama, but they don't define it.
 
 

The Dark Knight [Christopher Nolan, 2008]:

 

Image credit: https://film-grab.com/2010/10/02/the-dark-knight/

                                                                                                                       
Throughout the film, the moral ambiguity of the Batman/Bruce Wayne character is called into question, just enough for Nolan to skirt some of the more right-wing or fascistic elements of the subject matter. However, the issue is never really investigated, dramatically, to the same extent as the corruption of Harvey Keitel's character in director Abel Ferrara's grueling urban drama, Bad Lieutenant (1992). Similarly, the psychological trauma felt by the character in Nolan's film is an important part of the Batman mythology, but it isn't dealt with as sufficiently as the mental illness of the protagonist in the John Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which is about the impact of mental illness on the individual, and the effect it has on the wider family unit. There, the issue is the text, not the subtext of the work, which is a significant distinction.
 
Further, the development of the Batman character is generated from grief and the processing of bereavement, but the film doesn't explore the intense and transformative aspect of grief as sufficiently, intelligently or destructively as Carine Adler does in her earlier film, Under the Skin (1997). These films are about serious subjects that genuinely affect us, whereas the modern blockbuster cinema, which, for all intents and purposes, is now the only cinema, aren't.
 
 

A Woman Under the Influence [John Cassavetes, 1974]:

 

Image credit: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare5/womanundertheinfluence.htm

 

 

Bad Lieutenant [Abel Ferrara, 1992]:

 

Image credit: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/blu-ray_reviews52/bad_lieutenant_blu-ray.htm

 

This for me seems part of the crux of what Moore is saying. Superhero movies, no matter how great or terrible they might be, pander to a very thin veneer of profundity, of "themes" that give context to the scenes of action and adventure, but they don't engage with the reality of these issues with any great intellectual or political complexity. Audiences are denied the realities of police brutality, of innocent bystanders being killed by rampaging villains, of property damage, of lost jobs, of war, of surveillance, of the misuse of technology, of eugenics. All of these are plot points across a litany of popular comic book movies, but they represent an ugly reality that the filmmakers don't want to see intruding upon the fantasy they're trying to sell. Batman might question his moral integrity or the ambiguities of vigilantism, but we're hardly going to see an entire film about the character dealing with the real-world ramifications of guilt and grief after an innocent bystander is killed during a hot pursuit.
 
Of course, another aspect of Moore's argument is that we shouldn't ever see that kind of film to begin with. By looking at real world issues through a prism of comic book fantasy, we're only seeking to further dehumanize the issues that affect us, placing them within an imaginary sandbox that is as divorced from the real world and its politics and corruptions as the space battles of Luke Skywalker. This is the problem with a film like Joker (2019), which attempts to present a serious psychological study of the cartoon character made popular in the Batman comics, but ends up merely exploiting themes of abuse and mental illness by applying them to a character with such a loaded history.
 
Attempts to imbue ostensibly "comic book" characters with serious emotion isn't impossible. It's been done with characters that don't carry as strong of a cultural footprint as the Batman villain; for instance films like RoboCop (1987), Big Hero 6 (2014) and Split (2016) do a much better job of exploring ideas of trauma, bereavement and abuse, because their characters have a veneer of being real and identifiable, at least initially. The attempt to approach an understanding of the Joker through a parody of the Paul Schrader/Martin Scorsese films Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983) can only feel like a post-modern joke. Whatever a film like Joker thinks it's saying about marginalized characters on the fringes of a society worn down by the abuses of the state and the systems that failed them, it still reduces its symbol of humanity, of identification, to an actual clown. Compare and contrast this to a social realist film like Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) by Ken Loach, and see how much more affecting and galvanizing the drama becomes when we recognize actual humanity on screen.
 
 

Joker [Todd Phillips, 2019]:

 
 

Ladybird, Ladybird [Ken Loach, 1994]:

 
Superhero movies, by and large, don't galvanize their audience. They don't inspire audiences to change their own worlds and make the experience of life better for those who are struggling with the world as it is. They provide only escapism, pushing the narrative that the world can only be saved by magical superbeings that stand above humanity and intercede on our behalf. Change won't come from without. We can't be saved by Superman and Captain America, Wonder Woman or Thor. Change comes from within. It comes from us, and the thousand little acts of charity and kindness that real people enact each day. Acts of kindness and charity that have been banished from the contemporary cinema and the presentation of our own humanity, in favor of superheroes locked in a battle with unreal elemental forces that provide no real-world threat.
 
Fundamentally, I don't think Moore is wrong when he links the popularity of the modern superhero cinema with the rise of Trump in America, or Brexit in the UK. Whether the fans of the sub-genre like to admit it or not (and they don't), the machinations of the comic book movie – the politics of them – are deeply conservative, if not genuinely fascistic. They're aimed at a level of populism; of black and white morality; of simplistic notions of good against evil; and the idea that someone outside of our own system and society can fix systemic problems that make the world worse for all but the 1%.
 
At their core, superhero movies promote the notion of the Übermensch: a corruption of a philosophical theory of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term Übermensch was used frequently by Hitler to describe the Fascist idea of a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic master race. This in turn spawned their idea of "inferior humans" (Untermenschen) who should be dominated and enslaved. Superheroes are, by and large, physically and intellectually superior to the average human. They're often attractive, independently wealthy, charismatic, white, and heterosexual. They stand apart from ordinary humans who are unable to protect themselves from the threat of potential supervillains that are intent on destroying the world.
 
If superheroes are beautiful and physically perfect, then supervillains are often alien invaders (frequently a coded shorthand for outsiders, or "foreigners"), or they're people that have been maimed or disfigured by some terrible incident. Again, there are many exceptions to this – some comic book characters are genuinely progressive – however, the notion of the attractive hero versus the scarred villain is a still popular trope that runs throughout fantasy fiction, from comic book movies and James Bond, even to the family films of Walt Disney. Think Scar from The Lion King (1994) for example.
 
 

The Dark Knight [Christopher Nolan, 2008]:

 

In the aforementioned The Dark Knight, crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent turns to criminality after being disfigured in an accident. The "evil" side of his new persona is physically personified by the scars on his face.

 

 

Captain America: The First Avenger [Joe Johnston, 2011]:

 

Heroes and villains: Clean-cut, all-American Steve Rogers, a genetically modified super soldier dressed literally in the stars and stripes, faces off against Red Skull, not only a Nazi, but a disfigured one.

 

 

Wonder Woman [Patty Jenkins, 2017]:

 

Heroes and villains: Wonder Woman demonstrated that female characters can also save the world, as long as they look like aesthetically perfect supermodels. Conversely, Dr. Isabel Maru has a facial difference, so she's obviously a villain.

 

There are countless other ideological problems that a person could have with the superhero subgenre, especially an avowed anarchist like Moore, who has been stung by the industry. Superhero films are increasingly pro-war. They fetishize the military to the point of mimicking the iconography of recruitment videos. They promote Eugenics. They valorize authority figures, police, military, politicians, while demonizing agitators, rebels, and freethinkers. They dehumanize our own civilization, making us background characters in our own apocalypse, just there to be terrorized, enslaved, blown-up, but rarely killed. Our cities might be crushed, our homes and livelihoods destroyed, our economies trashed, but we never see the real-life consequences of these atrocities.
 
Whereas cinema, books, theatre and art once showed us a reflection of ourselves, our suffering, our collaborations, our spirit of perseverance, the modern superhero movie denies us this identification. They refuse to show the real problems faced by the everyday world, they ignore our real-life heroes, our key workers, and they fail to show us an image of humanity banding together, of ordinary people working to create a better world. This is significant to what Moore is saying. Superhero movies to a large extent condition ordinary people to see themselves as powerless.
 
This is why a film like Glass (2019) by M. Night Shyamalan was so remarkable to me, because it presented its superhero characters – previously steeped in the same ableist tropes as the films discussed above – as victims of a corrupt and heartless system that had denied them their true expression and forced them to play the part of freaks and outcasts. Glass shows that the real supervillains that threaten our civil liberties are shadowy corporations that separate us, that work against our best interests, that convince us that we're powerless to stand against them. The final scene showed ordinary people, people bound together by loss, by grief, by the scars of trauma and abuse, make the first step towards revolution.
 
 

Glass [M. Night Shyamalan, 2019]:

 

Image credit: https://sesiondemadrugada.tumblr.com/post/185092367486/glass-m-night-shyamalan-2019

 

While the fallout from Moore's interview will follow the same narrative to that of Martin Scorsese, who incurred the wrath of the popular culture when he said Marvel movies weren't cinema. To clarify, the filmmaker went on to explain: "Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being." Scorsese was attacked for being old and out of touch with the popular cinema, but what he's saying isn't wrong. No matter how much we might enjoy a film like The Avengers (2012) or Black Panther (2018), they're not films that comment on life and the human condition. There is a world of difference between a film like Late Spring (1949), I Vitelloni (1953), Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), Wanda (1970) or The Godfather (1972) and a film like Batman Begins (2005) and Watchman (2008).
 
Escapism is fine and should always be encouraged. Life can be difficult, and we all need a release from the pressures and anxieties of modern existence, whether its movies, video games, books, or sport. But escapism without respite or alternative is a distraction. It's a snare and a delusion. We learn so much about ourselves, our humanity, our civilization, by seeing it reflected in media, art, and drama. Superhero movies, by their very nature, deny us this reflection. By allowing comic book movies to dominate the cinema, its discourse, and our conception of the medium, we've effectively created a culture that can no longer recognize real heroes and villains. A culture that has become unable to see itself and its own power and potential reflected on screen. A culture that is poorer, more divided, more deceived, and more consumed by hate and anxiety than it was twenty years ago.
 
Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Superheroes - Or: why no one is waiting for The Avengers to save the day [18^th April, 2020], The Politics of Hope: Glass vs Joker [7^th January, 2020], The Popular Cinema: A Question of Aesthetics [22^nd June, 2019]