Hacker News Reader

I think his problem is more along the lines of:

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.

Counter-point: our traditional role models and real life heroes have proven to be so fallible that we are returning to folklore for models of what to aspire to.

At least the distraction now isn’t blood on the sands of the arena, or burning witches. Most people want to be distracted most of the time, with sports, sex, drugs, music, movies, tv, books, learning new things, family... it’s called living. We can’t all be joyless pricks like Moore, who haven’t learned even the simplest lessons or history.

“There can be no disputing matters of taste.”

This would seem to be a fundamental disagreement over the cultural responsibility of creators. The simple Batman=cool paradigm is outdated for the modern world and attempts to update it such as Nolan's shoe-horned and instantly forgotten wall street raid have fallen flat. Amazingly, the most "escapy" version of Batman recently, Lego Batman, has most capably addressed this when the new police commissioner advocates an expansion of community involvement instead of, quote, "punching poor people". Batman punching criminals in alleyways doesn't make sense in today's world and if media is facilitating a retreat from this reality, then criticism on these grounds is just.

>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.

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.)

>> It's mythically important that a Nazi piece of shit gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from Brooklyn.

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.

> no modern "bad guys" can do unambiguous, demented evil as well as the Nazis used to

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.

Typo? (2011-09-11-> 2001-09-11)

Lol yeah, meant 2001 — 2003...

>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 film was set during WW2. If you portray Captain America punching Iraqi soldiers in 2004, well yeah your film deserves to fail.

I don't know about that. On the surface, it would seem comics are a display of clear differences of right and wrong, but actually more often than not these storylines specifically revolve around the ambiguity between right and wrong, and how fine the line between a hero and a villain can be.

They challenge our notions of clarity and discreteness, and replace them with a continuous function of circumstance, emotion, and personal morality.

I think some of it is just a change in the terms we use.

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.

I agree with the Greek mythology point, I just made the same one in anther comment.

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.

Star Wars is almost pure fantasy. Lightsabers block blasters because they are Bow vs sword analogs. The big evil is a guy in a robe who shoots lightning from his fingers etc. Hell the armor even seems to be purely asthetic.

Replace 'spaceships' with boats and 'planets' with islands and the entire story works just fine.

Star Wars is science fantasy in the style of old 1930's pulp serials and stories like the Lensman series or Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books... which still makes it a subset of science fiction, if not necessarily by modern standards.

I have only ever watched two thirds of a Starwars movie. That was some 35 years ago on television, and it struck me as utterly stupid and pointless. Bad science, bad space, bad soundwaves in space, silly costume party in a bar, idiotic storyline, and ill-conceived characters.

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'm curious...what stories sustain your attention?

There needs to be rules, there needs to be consistency. Which more or less means my kind of story has to masquerade as some kind of realism. So ... science fiction of the reasonably hardboiled kind, certain kinds of mainstream literature - doesn't need much of a plot if it's worth reading for the humour and the language. I do read some stuff considered de rigueur in nerdy circles. Neal Stephenson yes, as in Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle (but - you guessed it - disliked Snow Crash enough never to finish it, and found REAMDE tacky and movie scriptish). Heinlein, Gregs Bear and Benford, that kind of stuff. Quite a few British writers, as long as they're not Tolkien og Lewis.

I should probably escort myself out of here. I never did get into computer games either...

> I think that comics are a retreat from that...

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.

It doesn't quite fit into the black and white mold, but most modern action heroes are 100% righteous, which is a similar thing.

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.

> ...most modern action heroes are 100% righteous, which is a similar thing...

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.

A lot of the stuff early Superman did also wouldn't fly today. In many of those 30's and 40's comics, he has a habit of simplistic "might makes right" behaviors like clobbering low-level villains or simply threatening to kill or endanger them(e.g. "I'll drop you out this window -- now TALK!") in order to extract a confession in the next panel and move along the plot, and the narrative does nothing to critique his application of violence or suggest it's anything less than heroic and justified.

Here's a thread with some examples:

[0] https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/superman-165/golden-ag...

Or the scene in Iron Man 3 where his (privately-owned) autonomous drone-suits bludgeon a bunch of rogue veterans to death on a boat.