Superhero films are bad for democracy
The movie genre epitomizes the right-wing idea that we need elites to save us
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TOPICS: DC COMICS, DEMOCRACY, DONALD TRUMP, GLOBAL ELITES, IRON MAN, MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE, NEOLIBERALISM, SUPERHERO POLITICS, SUPERHEROS, TECHNOCRACY, THOR, WONDER WOMAN
Here’s a joke you haven’t heard: What’s the difference between Wonder Woman and Donald Trump?
One is an moralistic aristocrat with a superiority complex about Western civilization who autocratically thrusts their warped notion of “justice” upon the world. The other, of course, is the president.
Lest you think I’m singling out the hero du jour, I should note that virtually any superhero can be inserted into that joke. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Thor, Iron Man — with few exceptions, superhero blockbusters read as if they were underwritten by the American Enterprise Institute. That’s because nearly all superhero movies glorify wealth (and the freedom it provides), aristocracy and/or monarchy, militarism, unilateralism, and right-wing fantasies about criminality.
You might object to this harsh critique of America’s most beloved (and profitable) film genre. After all, aren’t these movies little more than harmless summer popcorn flicks?
Not really.
Superhero films are far more than mere moving pictures. They are billion-dollar spectacles and marketing bonanzas, with endless spin-offs, product tie-ins, video games and toy lines. Many impressionable children come to identify with the archetype of the ultra-unique, mercenary hero, unilaterally deciding what is right and wrong. Just as worryingly, some children and adults are only exposed to global politics by what happens within the confines of action films.
The newly released “Wonder Woman” is an excellent example of the worst kind of superhero politics, the kind that cut across franchises and movie studios. As an origin story, the film begins in a common superhero setting: the demigod’s alternate-universe home — the land of the Amazons in this case — where Wonder Woman and her family live in an edenic paradise that also happens to be a monarchy.
The recent Thor and Superman films begin in much the same way. It is telling that these otherwordly paradises that superheroes often fall from have medieval politics. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a superhero come from a planet of primitive communists, or anarcho-syndicalists?
That’s unlikely to happen, of course. Superheroes are almost universally defined by their status (that’s what makes them super!). Hence, they tend to come from worlds that glorify individualism and hierarchical forms of government where elitism, not equality, reign. While Wonder Woman is almost unique in that her homeland is not a patriarchy, it is still a monarchy. Less than egalitarian, Themyscira sees plenty of squabbling between Amazonians of different ranks.
For a genre that is obsessed with superficial notions of “good” and “evil,” the distinction is often difficult to discern in many of its films. Early on in “Wonder Woman,” our hero rescues an American spy who is being pursued by a group of trigger-happy German soldiers. Yet, because the American spy was the one in distress, and the one whom Wonder Woman laid eyes on first, she comes to see the Allies’ side as “good” and the Germans as “evil.” Lucky that it didn’t happen the other way around or we’d have Wonder Wonder backing up the Central Powers. As it is, Wonder Woman’s belief in the righteousness of wantonly slaughtering Germans rests entirely on random chance.
As much as superheroes feel entitled to decide who’s good and who’s evil, they also give themselves license to decide who is a criminal and who isn’t. Yet no one individual can dole out justice. Justice is a collective principle. Hence, functioning democracies create complex systems of courts and jurors to ensure fair trials. For superheroes to serve as juries, judges and executioners makes them authoritarians acting outside the law by definition.
And besides, criminality is not something absolute or moral. It’s generally born of circumstance, a byproduct of inequality or perhaps a failed social welfare state.
Furthermore, the law itself — something superheroes like to uphold as righteous — is not inherently egalitarian. Anatole France perhaps put it best: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” When Batman busts a thief, is he working for absolute justice or absolute capitalism?
These nuances about the law are typically lost in the din of superhero movies. Often in these films, enemies are inherently evil and inhuman — think of Thanos or Ultron in the “Avengers” series — and irredeemable, consigned to death or imprisonment. It makes what’s going on here seem easier and less problematic than it actually is.
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