Superheroes a 'cultural catastrophe', says comics guru Alan Moore [2014]
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.
And Tolkien said:
> There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish [mythology] (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.
I see "comic book" universes as evolving into a modern mythology, complete with monsters, heroes, and gods. So I would disagree with Moore about the merits of comic book stories. They may be "squatting" on the cultural stage, but maybe the same way that King Arthur and Ulysses do.
I expect, in a thousand years, when Superman and Wolverine are aged and in the public domain, the parallels between them and Beowulf and (non-Marvel) Odin will be even more clear.
I think you missed why I quoted Tolkien. There's something compelling about a common mythology for a culture. The modern cosmopolitan culture, American especially, doesn't have an ethnic, racial, or language identity to fall back on when exploring identity, struggle, the merits of sacrifice, moral issues, etc. Mythological figures allow us to explore these themes in a less traumatic way.
You can call that "escapism", I guess, but I think The Dark Knight was one of the few films that wrestled with the War on Terror in honest ways. It had to be a mythological film (Batman v. Joker) because the same subject would have gone over rather poorly in one way or another if it were an actual terrorism/spy thriller or something.
Anyway, I think Tolkien wasn't exactly wrong to pine for an exploration of culture, language, and identity through mythological archetypes. He, in particular, wanted non-borrowed ones. We are sort of in the same boat since nearly all content is borrowed in a global market.
Not to belabor the point, but why the guys in tights and not, say, the characters from the Abrahamic faiths? Well, you say, it's dangerous to mix faith with fantasy. But that's exactly what the old myths did and what Tolkien could do by implicitly associating his stories with Christianity, and exactly what Batman will never be. So much for the structural similarities between the Superman and Hercules.
But, again, this is all beside the point. The devil is in the details. There might be nothing inherently wrong with making superheroes the source of a shared cultural vocabulary about "spiritual" questions: what is right, what is wrong, what is bravery, etc. But how has it actually unfolded, in the world, right now? Again, Moore argues that, in the concrete, it has led to a kind of infantilism.
You bring up the Dark Knight. I don't personally like what I took away as the message of the Dark Knight, but I understand if you do. But can you name a single other example with actual critical value? Or do the vast majority just serve to make unhappy people, sleepwalking through life, continue unhappily sleepwalking?
When there is no low hanging fruit left to ponder the pondering gets done by specialists. Likewise there is less need for light practical advice books because industrialization has made the individual crafstman less common, and again specialists take center stage in their silos of information. It's also unlikely to be in a book.
Are we sure Congress won't just keep extending the term of copyright for the next thousand years?
Or rather the other way around: you see mythology as some kind of old superhero stories.
But, as they already have been, and as nascent mythology tends to do, the stories and characters will be updated to fit the modern times. I kind of like watching that.
For example, how after the golden age of comics, a lot of Marvel stories started dealing with the perils of modern technology, and the shrinking need for heros as well as increasing perceived need for controlling these heros. The Avengers story in the MCU is a great example of this, pulling on decades-old storylines about the relationship between a society and its heroes. I mean comics aren't even 100 years old yet, complaining that they are bad for culture is kind of silly because we have no empirical data to compare it to.
Born special, good at trying, wildly powerful, noble, etc.
Superman = just a regular man + devices = Tony Stark - the creativity. When I understood this, I kind of cooled off from superman.
Also, it means you haven't really read any great Superman stories. In the last 10-15 years, there have been many amazing stories centering around Superman. All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is probably top of the list.
Also, look at the Injustice 2 video game for a new take on Superman, my jaw dropped at how they took Superman off the edge.
Or there is some kryptonite around. But he never throws a big thing at Batman to kill him in those situations (where he is given the power elsewhere to throw whatever the hell he wants).
I do agree it makes for kind of a boring character though.
This has been a half formed thought bouncing around in my head, but I think part of the reason for the resurgence of comic books and superheroes is the simple fact that we live in a complex world where there are very few instances of Good and Evil. We live in a subtle, complex, and nuanced world, where if you take the time to dig in to an issue, you find more complexity...and a lot of really morally compromised people. We don't live in a Good/Evil world, but we want to. I think that comics are a retreat from that, a mental/moral bulwark that gives us an outlet for our need for Right and Wrong. We might not be able to figure out <insert political issue> without coming to blows, but we sure as hell can agree that Thanos is a piece of shit, and that Batman is wicked cool.
Is this a retreat from reality? Sure, but we need that. Moore is wrong here to suppose that adults need to be doing Adult Things at all times. The world is hard enough as it is - taking a few hours respite from it is hardly a crime.
Rather that an entire country or group of people getting angry because people in power are morally corrupt they're just watching the latest Iron Man and discussing pointless things like Art Direction and the Actresses Performance.
“There can be no disputing matters of taste.”
Now, I always think this, but I think we also need some amount of moralizing mythology to remind us that, at the end of the day, when the time comes to act, there really are such things as good and evil. My favorite superhero movies tend to be the ones that show it, rather than trying to add "complexity" by actually removing the mythic content by invoking gray-vs-black morality and calling it "complexity".
Captain America: the First Avenger did it well, though I'd have liked them to have kept the Red Skull as a loyal Nazi. Let Hydra genuinely be portrayed as a Nazi cult, carried from its origins in WW2 to the modern day. It's mythically important that a Nazi piece of shit gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from Brooklyn.
It's mythically utterly unimportant that one manic-psychopath and another brooding, resentful psychopath "can do this forever" (The Dark Knight).
It's moral complexity when a fortunate kid from Queens tries to find some responsible way to deal with a working-class villain just trying to make it good in a world dominated by the Tony Starks and Thors (Spiderman Homecoming). White versus mid-light gray (with a good reason to be gray) offers us a compelling conflict, in a way that "two pieces of shit fight each-other" does not.
(Yeah, Marvel > DC, and holy war upon anyone who says otherwise.)
But is it as mythically important that a sandal-wearing goatsherd from Helmand province (AK-47-totting or not) gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from Brooklyn?
What about Captain America punching civilians in Sarajevo, as the Sarajevo TV building is being bombed in the background?
Iraqi soldiers confronting the invasion of their country by the US army, being punched in the face by Cap?
Cap punching little Vietnamese women and children in My Lai?
What I mean is that the world itself has changed quite a bit since the time of the Nazis. In terms of dramatic evil, no modern "bad guys" can do unambiguous, demented evil as well as the Nazis used to. And the good guys don't look that unambiguously, selflessly good themselves anymore, either. In fact, if you ask me (and I'm a westerner) they look more and more like the bad guys themselves.
Maybe comics can't just go on pretending the world is all black and white, when most of us can see around us that this is not the case.
The Nazis were complete shits on an unprecedented scale, but there was quite a bit of "demented evil" done by Americans too in WWII, like carpet-bombing European cities and interning citizens of Japanese ancestry.
The world has never been simple. "Black & white" is always a result of hegemonic propaganda more than actual conditions. It so just happens that certain strains of propaganda seem particularly ineffective on the most creative personalities of our age; but it takes very little for things to change. A lot of stuff produced in all media between 2011-09-11 and 2013-03-14 was very black & white, and without that senseless invasion we'd probably have many more monodimensional "Arab baddies" around today.
The film was set during WW2. If you portray Captain America punching Iraqi soldiers in 2004, well yeah your film deserves to fail.
They challenge our notions of clarity and discreteness, and replace them with a continuous function of circumstance, emotion, and personal morality.
Take Guardians of the Galaxy for example. A fun superhero movie! Except it’s really just a science fiction movie that avoids the “SF” term. It’s pretty similar to something like Star Wars in terms of the characters and technologies shown... but for some reason, Luke Skywalker isn’t a “superhero.”
Or consider the Greek myths. Instead of superheroes, they had “gods” and “demigods” and such. What’s the difference? None, really.
Humans have always enjoyed morally unambiguous tales of heroes beyond the ordinary. There’s a place for complex entertainment too, but it’s unreasonable to expect it to dominate.
But I wouldn't consider Guardians or Star Wars to be science fiction since "what if" is not a huge element of either. I'd consider each to be "space operas" and have more in common with adventures (Indiana Jones, The Mummy), fantasy (magicians and monsters), or Westerns than science fiction proper.
Replace 'spaceships' with boats and 'planets' with islands and the entire story works just fine.
Didn't ever come back for more.
It was obvious to me then that this was simply a concoction of fairytales and tall stories with a new coat of Hollywood paint sprayed on. Fine by me, as long as I don't have to watch, but offensive seeing it touted as science fiction, when so clearly it is fiction with no trace of science.
Mind you, I am difficult and probably annoying. Even as a child, I never liked fairytales and fables, which would usually lose my attention about thirty seconds in. Like "Okay, someone has magic/holy/super-powers. No need to wade through a tedious story, then. Resolve the damn thing with your powers, and move on". Magic was cheating, it undermined any kind of predictable ruleset for me.
That's right. I'm on HN, and I never read a word of Tolkien, nor ventured anywhere near the films.
I should probably escort myself out of here. I never did get into computer games either...
Except most comic book stories are about heroes that are morally compromised in various ways: their pasts, their methods, the unintended consequences of their actions, etc. What's more, outside of issue films, I have a hard time thinking of much popular film these days that is black and white.
Take the incredible scene in Iron Man 1 where Tony Stark flies halfway around the word, kills a bunch of men (probably for good reason) and then almost kills an allied pilot. These events weigh so heavily on him that he cracks wise with his buddy on the phone while they are happening.
That's too postmodern for my taste, but it's a perspective I hadn't considered yet. Thanks for the elaboration.
In my mind, this should be contrasted with Superman battling a scenery-chewing mad scientist who unleashes Destruct-o-bot to enslave Metropolis. All of golden-age Superman villains were clearly in the wrong and Superman invariably did an admirable job of cleaning things up. The narrative wasn't about how hard it is to do the right thing, how cleaning up messes made more messes, or the tension between vigilantism and justice.
Here's a thread with some examples:
[0] https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/superman-165/golden-ag...
We are losing the taste for collaborative work. We are promoting the idea that only a single individual can make things better. The idea that the humble contribution of the masses can amount to a powerful wave are totally lost.
You have a tough road ahead of you if you want to convince most creators that this is the wrong direction.
That said, there have been some literary periods when writing about ordinary, completely unexceptional individuals was fashionable, and I suppose it still is in some circles.
Take the Star Wars franchise. Most of the original trilogy is about a bunch of heroes helping a huge resistance movement against a bigger empire. In the end, the heroes are the drops that tip the scale in the rebellion's favor, but the rebellion had to push all their might to make that possible.
Look The Force Awakens: a bunch of clueless heroes, dismissing the while rebellion, manage to make a big thing go boom with almost no external help.
The point of the article - that there is something weird about grown adults and their willingness to live in the comicbook rather than real world - is a fair point.
At some stage we crossed over from only seeing 'comic' based movies as kids where adults would only go to escort their children to what we have now. Now grown ups with no children of their own or signs of learning disabilities can go and watch this comic-superhero rewrites on the big screen and talk about how great the acting, story and everything else was, as if it was serious art that they had seen.
There have been too many occasions over the last few years where it has been much too easy to hide away and watch these comic super-hero movies than endure what has been going on in the world. Times like when Iraq was being bombed to pieces, why engage with that when you can spend all week thinking about some make-believe movie?
This is not to dismiss the craft, dedication, skill and effort that goes into these movies or to deny the pleasure that they do bring to people. However, how did it happen that movies for kids became movies for grown ups?
How is this any different from e.g. Kyrgyz nomads listening to a bard recite the Manas, in which the eponymous hero shows veritably superheroic strength in battle? Indeed, if you are an ordinary man barely making ends meet and the politics of the world are rough, the make-believe of an epic tale where your people are depicted as great and once capable of great deeds, can be a great consolation.
Now, the reason that the Manas and similar folk epics have been acclaimed as masterpieces of intangible culture is that the bard is expected to improvise much of it, and Western superhero stories might not show that particular kind of skill. But in terms of the subject matter, the contemporary superhero obsession isn’t all that different from previous genres worldwide.
Logan was the only genre movie in recent memory that eschewed this formula and confronted the messy topic of the senescence of the age of the superhero.
Having familiar characters in a known environment can certainly help pick the audience up to get them to a point where more complex topics become palatable. The fact that these characters are "superheroes" is incidental, and not terribly important to the overall plot of the movie.
As opposed to any given non-comic-derived action, comedy, romance, or horror movie? I didn't know that something has to be "serious art" to comment about the acting or the story. Moreover, given box office results, it's rare that any movie considered to be art is all that popular.
The same could be said of literally any fantasy fiction. We love it precisely because it is an escape from reality.
IMHO Luke Cage and Jessica Jones by Marvel on Netflix are very well done on every level and compare well to other high quality drama series.
Think about who can partake in Fandom. What an elevated position they're in, globally. What a luxury such indulgence is.
While I agree that all people should be learning and growing I would have to argue that if someone is truly motivated by hiding away I say let them.
The people who do this do not have the capacity to expose themselves to reality IMO. Being forced to do it is just like when you were forced to do something you didn't want to as a child (fitting that we're talking about super heroes).
Later on they might look up and decide to change. I know I did. Until then you just have to let them make their own decisions.
It's a bit a cancerous era IMO. Too many uncertainties, too many technical possibilities, not enough social tissue.
Bang on. I think technology (not just the internet kind) has advanced so quickly that none of our social conventions have been able to keep up to help people.
I believe both the democrats and republicans have lost their way a bit - they'll both be spending their time playing big-data social media games to get in power rather than actually trying to give things people want and need.
> scam jobs
While I do believe that this is true, I wonder how much of this is caused because after college is the first time these kids are exposed to the "real world". They've been so insulated their entire life that the older adults see that they can easily manipulate them.
When you start talking about whether things are "serious" or "real" art or not, you've lost sight of what art really is.
It's pretty easy to identify serious vs. non-serious art, and we'd been doing it for thousands of years. Great epics in music and poetry, literature and painting are great because they are serious. What's happened now is that if you level the critique the parent did, we get your reaction - a subtle insistence that we must consider all art serious, no matter how lazy it is.
That is a difficult claim to back up if you look at the literature from Greece and Rome that was thought worth preserving over the centuries. A lot of plays by Plautus, for example, are pretty low comedy comparable to our low comedy today, but they nonetheless entered the canon of “great art”.
[1] - https://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-moore-...
I just finished watching the new Stranger Things season. One of the things I love about that show is that it juxtaposes the 1980s kids' sci-fi genre with a storyline that would have been totally intolerable to the consumers of that genre back then. The tone that results is kind of this weird combination of nostalgia and tragedy.
The media of today is often created by the very people who were dissatisfied with what was available to us back in the 80's. It'll be interesting to see what people dissatisfied with the media of today come up with in another 30 years.
This is a good observation, and seems to be true to me throughout literary/artistic history. You can look back through time, and many eras are obviously predominated by a particular creative movement, and each movement can be seen as a reaction of the previous dominant movement: postmodernism as a reaction of creators who were dissatisfied with modernism, modernism as a reaction of those who were dissatisfied with realism, itself a reaction to romanticism, etc. Hegelian dialectics come to mind.
Of course, the avant-garde of any era didn't necessarily dislike the former movement (or otherwise be entirely unappreciative of it) to be dissatisfied with it; the only needed to recognize the shortcomings therein. The ebb-and-flow of these movements makes me wonder if the arts are inherently unable to characterize and embody the human experience. I don't see any reason why that must be true, but the notion that people have been identifying and responding to the shortcomings of their broader artistic environments since the dawn of art itself makes me contemplative. Perhaps it's simply that the human experience itself is in a constant state of flux.
But as a kid I suffered long term child abuse and it was about escapism for me from day one growing up. I seriously talked myself out of suicide more than once on the premise that I would get to find out what happened in the next episode of ______.
But now I'm older, away from those horrible people and have much less to escape from... It's more about the intellectual curiosity, and yes, the dilemma of good vs evil.
Upon reflection, my experience is literally the opposite from what you and Moore are claiming.
That's overlooking the plague of zombie stories since the turn of the century. They were pretty rare, and then, boom, you can't move without bumping into one of the things.
My pet theory is that we're reduced to beating up the dead because they can't complain.
I guess you can put aliens and AI robots in that theory as well. Except both of those have the potential to be understood.
Zombies can't be cured! Our only choice is to kill them! My Conscience is Free!
Is that something we don't ask ourselves today? Why wait decades?
The reason they made these films is because the 60+ woman demographic is the highest spending right now. People want to see their own experiences reflected in cinema.
I can't join in my head how westerns were a reflection of young and middle aged males. Possibly it depends on the demographic?
ie: middle aged men stuck in a boring job and providing for a family makes them feel powerless. Seeing a strong male on his path gives him the feeling he desires.
So maybe it's not about reflection of experiences but rather an expression of the feelings the demographic wants to feel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_shot_in_Almer%C3...
The thing is we didn't. Hollywood did. A gigantic industry devoted to churning out movies designed in some Hollywood exec's mind to make the most money possible. That's why we have so much crap.
Why is today's crap superhero crap and yesterday's Western crap? Probably because people just got bored of Westerns. Some day Westerns will be back in style. What's old will be new again.
Superheros might be dumb (with the odd flashes of brilliance), but they are not really dumber than James Bond or westerns or Agatha Christie or whatever escapistic genres have been popular.
I also think Moore understands this pretty deeply (considering his deep dives into historical popular culture in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but he just have some personal bitterness towards the superhero business, so he likes to disparage its fans.
DC is a villain to Moore because he willfully traded away the rights to his greatest creation (Watchmen) and then watched them cash in on it.
Moore is a great writer but a poor (contract) reader and he's been ranting about it ever since.
DC comics bought the rights to Watchmen fair and square but Moore will never let it go, he made many early claims to want to be the greatest comics writer in history...but he just ended up making someone else money
you could have learned most of this from Google in the time it took you to paste your canned response
Since then, the doors have opened wider for a more diverse group of writers in comics, and that’s a good thing, but I don’t think you should be too angry at Alan Moore for at least trying to address complex issues in an intelligent way.
So you are basically asking Alan More to shut up and stop producing literature because he is white and middle aged?
It is comforting to imagine a world in which things make sense, where good triumphs over evil, where you have an opportunity to be a part of something larger than yourself; especially when you're working a dead end job and you feel like your nation is falling apart.
Unfortunately, unlike most religion, comics and comic based films are lacking in the "nutrition" that religious escapism can provide, in the way of community and self improvement, so we end up with man children withdrawing from society.
It is ironic, I think, that the waning of religion in the first world may be very much double sided. Perhaps we as a society are not prepared for secularism, and this may manifest as a moral crisis wherin people on average still require external guidance for morality and ethics.
Rejection of society and worldly things, and withdrawal from them both has been a rather common practice in religions for millennia. Religious hermits and ascetics, and moralists escaping or otherwise rejecting corrupt society are a pretty regular staple of religions the world over.
Superheroes could be a seen to be a kind of echo of that, in so far as they are usually pretty moralistic and extreme in their world-rejection and escapism, if you prefer to view it that way.
Something of that speaks to their fans, who are also greatly dissatisfied with the world, yet usually don't have what it takes to escape, so they escape vicariously -- through their movies, comics, and books where live heroes that can.
This seems to be a newer phenomenon, possibly because we now live in a time where it is possible to contribute little and still survive for the majority of a population.