Alan Moore on superhero culture | Hacker News Reader

Alan Moore on superhero culture

bbc.co.uk

290 pointscmsefton354 comments

FYI, the full interview is available here https://alanmooreworld.blogspot.com/2019/11/moore-on-jerusal...

EDIT: The relevant quote (although the whole interview is pretty interesting):

"I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand. I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks."

This is probably the most astute comment on the current media landscape I've ever seen. Just as Moore says, much of our world is trapped in the 20th century. The media, the philosophy, the people in charge...

I once read Baby Boomer culture described as an ugly toad squatting on the rest of society, holding it back. The truth turned out to be a bit different though. Even the younger generations still willingly embrace 20th century life (probably more than they realize).

I think social media will finally tip things over into a new era though. The narcissism that is its core feature is also an outgrowth of 20th century individualism and a quest for self actualization. Pushed to its limits, it destroys its participants and society at large.

For anyone interested in these topics, I highly recommend The Century Of The Self. It talks about the intersection of psychology, marketing, technology and the generation that grew up with them in the 20th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

sounds like a film version of Christopher Lasch

I feel it’s a chicken - egg problem.

Are we embracing 20th century life by clinging on to old movie IPs, or are we just constantly being fed the same type of stuff by Studios who’ve found “their formula” for making content with a low risk of flopping, for example.

Por que no los dos?

Indeed, I am patronizing the indie cinema much more these days. Mainly, because they have actually interesting movies, unlike the bland drivel that being spooned out of Hollywood.

We're embracing a subset of 20th century themes. Star Trek: The Next Generation was a very popular XX century series, and yet after it, never again[0] did sci-fi embraced the themes like optimism about the future, exploration, diplomacy, a society as a protagonist just as important as the heroes, etc. I'm saddened about it (and about post-ENT Star Trek reboots). I want my TNG back, and I'm not ashamed of clinging to it.

[0] - With the possible exception of Disney's Tommorowland, and of course DS9, VOY and ENT Star Trek series from the same universe as TNG.

The very popular Culture series by Iain M. Banks offers a very optimistic vision of the future.

Viewed through a certain lens it does; viewed more cynically it's a decadent utopia that engages in CIA-eqsue interference programs purely to stop a small percentage of dissatisfied citizens going haywire within the boundaries of the Culture. All controlled and directed by quasi-omniscient, paternalistic machines.

I think it's a very interesting exercise in exploring the space of post-scarcity, and Banks does a good job of looking at those consequences. It's telling though how little of narrative interest happens within Culture borders.

EDIT: But you're not wrong that it's at the upper end of the optimism scale!

DS9 had an all-out war, Section 31, and Sisko being compliant in murder to further the war effort.

have you seen the recent DS9 documentary "what we left behind"?

https://ds9documentary.com/

Didn't know about this, thanks for the link!

DS9 was definitely the darkest of Star Trek series of the era, and made the realities of the Federation seem a bit less rosy. But it was dark relative to the very bright Star Trek baseline; in absolute sense, there's lots of positivity to be found in the series.

The Orville is the spiritual successor to TNG in my opinion.

If you can get past the somewhat juvenile humor in the early episodes it's surprisingly good.

Thanks for recommending and reminding me of it. I've seen the first two or three episodes and then stopped because life interfered; I'll revisit it!

There's a Star Trek: Picard coming that might offer you some hope.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Picard

I'm waiting for it, but I've already heard rumors that they're taking it in the new direction and don't feel particularly obliged to the original Picard character, so I'm not too hopeful.

Even aside from rumors, just watching the trailer for it alongside the trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate does not give high hopes.

Probably the latter. Because as you say, studios have found their formula and want to stick to it as much as possible to minimise the likelihood a new film/TV series/book/game flops.

This makes perfect sense for a company (since they're almost always very risk adverse), but doesn't work so well if you want more original works or creativity. Entertainment requires outsiders, non corporations, etc to provide at least some of the works there, otherwise you'll get endless sequels, reboots and rehashes until they stop selling.

"I once read Baby Boomer culture described as an ugly toad squatting on the rest of society, holding it back. The truth turned out to be a bit different though. Even the younger generations still willingly embrace 20th century life (probably more than they realize)."

I think part of this isn't the selfishness of the new generation but because society hasn't really changed since 2001 and 2008 in terms of major problems. Children grew up in the rapid privacy and legal rights violations caused by the fallout of 9/11 are still dealing with it and nothing has been resolved regarding the erosion of consistutional and human rights. Global warming is still a major concern and that is also being exacerbated. Several places never recovered from 2008, and the younger generation is among the top in terms of disenfranchisement by being saddled with all this student debt- which also hasn't been resolved. Same for healthcare, income inequality, etc.

Arguably, all of society's problems are still the problems of 2001/2008. Doesn't it make sense that our culture has also somewhat been placed in amber within that generation?

I don't think this is remotely true. The rise of China as a notable geopolitical force, the wave of populism across the world's democracies, the return of interpower conflict (by proxy, so far), the retrenchment of globalism, the rapid decline of organized religion as a political force in the US: these are just the big headline-grabbing trends off the top of my head, and I didn't even touch on the societal changes caused by bringing the world online.

I'm actually talking more specifically about the culture and philosophy that arose during the 1960s-1980s. It's not so much about the problems each generation are facing (older generations having dealt with a constant reminder of potential nuclear annihilation of the human race), but the underlying philosophy and goals that drive individuals. The dissolution of the family unit and an extreme focus on the individual and personal satisfaction being the core tenant. We've gone from "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" to "follow me on Instagram" but the theme is the same.

The problem with that characterization of the 1960s and 1970s is that it's also the period of the civil rights movement, the rise of the environmental movement, and anti-war protests in the United States whose scale dwarfed anything we've seen here since -- protests the police responded to at times by opening fire with live ammunition. When the boomers were the age that the millennials are now, a lot of them were expressing -- and acting on, and in some cases literally risking their lives for -- goals that are a lot less solipsistic than "me me me."

I'm far from convinced that most millennials can be summed up with "like and subscribe," either, though. If anything, this seems to be an extremely politically engaged generation with an interest in radically reshaping their world. Which sounds, you know, an awful lot like the boomers, originally.

There's a similar book by Bruce Gibney called "Generation of Sociopaths" that addresses this notion - a thought-provoking read

Isn't that normal? The people in charge are typically older than 40 years. And those were born in the previous century from people born in the same century or the one before, teaching those "old" values, etc. I would say the next 20 years will be interesting, because more and more young people will be in charge and apply more modern ways to do things than their predecessors.

We are used to machines that we can replace like nothing. The truth is, things take time.

I would say the shift from pre-boomer to boomer culture was much more extreme than anything we see today. Boomer culture was defined as being the near opposite of everything that came before it. The extreme focus on self actualization and the individual being the defining quality. While there are shades of difference with younger generations and boomers, the underlying foundation still feels firmly rooted in the 1960s-1970s.

> I would say the next 20 years will be interesting, because more and more young people will be in charge and apply more modern ways to do things than their predecessors.

This is always the way, surely, by definition?

I wonder if that is an effect of current economic situation. New generations have largly negative outlook on their future prospects. They also have statistically lesser future prospects in terms of income as oppose to their parents' prospects. Debts, shitty jobs, wage stagnation etc. Maybe even lack of possibility for change; all mass counter culture events/movements where stifled and snubbed as quickly as they pop-uped (for example wallstreet protests).

I am not surprised a reality escapism to simpler times culture effect was created. After all if future seems bleak looking back at simpler easier times might be only coping mechanism.

> I once read Baby Boomer culture described as an ugly toad squatting on the rest of society, holding it back. The truth turned out to be a bit different though. Even the younger generations still willingly embrace 20th century life (probably more than they realize).

This is a generational conflict that happens with every generation. (Each generation has issues with the other) The whole ok boomer thing has me pretty concerned. It's a hostile dismissive attitude towards a previous generation. (That's a terrible thing)

> I think social media will finally tip things over into a new era though. The narcissism that is its core feature is also an outgrowth of 20th century individualism and a quest for self actualization. Pushed to its limits, it destroys its participants and society at large.

Unfortunately it hasn't. It's tied to the economy. I would agree that it actively destroys it's participants and society at large. (I don't even think this is an extreme case of it)

My point is that the conflict is only surface level though. The underlying philosophy of both the boomers and the younger generations seem identical. That's quite a shift from how people thought pre-boomer and post-boomer. Boomers and younger generations still hold the individual at the pinnacle of society whereas pre-boomer cultures did not.

Is that really true of the US prior to the 1950s? I would say the US, at least, has been highly individualistic since the Revolutionary War.

I don't see 'ok boomer' as a hostile attitude, but rather as a response specifically towards the media that has been calling millennials lazy and entitled for the past decade, despite the fact that education, housing, and healthcare and much more expensive for them than they were for boomers. It is dismissive, but I would say those who spout these generalized, ill-informed complaints have earned it.

And I'm sure there are some who use the phrase to refer to every boomer, but I don't believe most do.

Ok poster.

(Easy there downvoters, I'm demonstrating why 'ok <label>' is dismissive and hostile to others by showing a similar dismissal statement.. read and see below for the argument)

Or I could respond with why I believe what the other party's response is incorrect and understand that the other party may hold conflicting beliefs. What you're stating about the beliefs held by millennials about others view them. (It may or may not be correct.. media representation of the belief is there)

> Even the younger generations still willingly embrace 20th century life (probably more than they realize).

This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I really understand what you mean. Could you elaborate on what embracing 21st century life would look like in your mind?

I'm not sure that anyone could define it yet, but it would have to start with breaking away from the 20th century philosophy that's still very ingrained in most of society. The defining feature of that philosophy is that self-actualization and the individual are almost deified.

I actually think a lot of that was fueled by post-World War II prosperity in the US, and ultimately the rest of the west as the century got past its midway point. Globalization in a way is normalizing that "peak" and I suspect that, in addition to the corrosive effects of narcissism at scale will cause some sort of reaction that looks very different than 20th century teenage rebellion and extended adolescence.

For a theoretical example of 21st century life, I could imagine multiple generations sharing the same home, as is already the trend. That may seem very old fashioned but I see it as more post-modern as it will be mixed ad hoc with other more future forward conventions (for better or worse). Maybe some of those living in the household are gig economy workers enabled by technology for instance.

That last paragraph screams of societal failure to me. Gig economy workers who live with family out of necessity, the only work they can get being lowest common denominator "go here, get thing, take here" work, paid peanuts with no rights.

There's a reason the individual is the primary unit in western societies - we saw and can still see societies structured to put the group, the commons or the country first. They committed atrocities against masses of individuals in the name of the group. No thanks.

Yet depression and isolation are at an all time high. Who's to say strengthening family and community bonds would result in a failed society? It would certainly have negatives and positives. It's only purely negative when viewed through the lens of individual economic achievement (which may not be possible to the level seen post-WW II in the west).

> Who's to say strengthening family and community bonds would result in a failed society?

Nobody, but getting there by forcing everyone together because it's no longer possible to afford to do otherwise seems to be a good indicator that something has broken.

> It's only purely negative when viewed through the lens of individual economic achievement

I'm 41, I moved out of my folks place when I was 18. My life would have been quieter and poorer if I had had to stay in their house for the last 23 years, following their rules, and it would have driven me insane. I lived in shared houses for several years, then moved to my own place, now live with my partner.

It's not just about economic success, it's about having your own space to be yourself and live life the way you want it.

> (which may not be possible to the level seen post-WW II in the west).

Oh rubbish. Endless growth may not be possible or even desirable, but being able to make your own way in the world is not over, nor is it likely to be any time soon.

--edit-- I do understand that, for instance, owning property is much harder in many places now than ever before, I think we have work to do as a society to mitigate that. But I also think that perhaps we've over-centralised on a few desirable, expensive cities (in the UK, where I live, but also other western nations). A re-balance by distributing the wealth-generation around a bit more would help.

Others have long been saying the same.

Here is a really good takedown of the superhero mass-produced trash and the cultural pit we find ourselves in:

https://jacobitemag.com/2019/05/14/capeshits-endgame/

Great quote. I'd add to that (or perhaps supplant) Tom Holland's observation that our collective cultural points of reference are all steeped in christianity, even when not explicity christian. The superhero trope has strong overtones of christian morality and usually follows the new testament surprisingly closely: man, from humble origins, is bestowed supernatural powers, performs miracles, struggles with his own nature, saves humanity, etc..

What made me realise this too was seeing Endgame. Thanos with his population control, cosmic agenda could have been satire from an angry christian conservative who wanted to rant about climate change liberals and the club of rome or something.

It's really funny if you pay attention to villains in super-hero movies how often they're foreign or alien in origin with some environmental or grand agenda. Ra's al ghul is no different, and Bane of course who in Nolan's movie is the villian for bringing wall street down.

It's funny how loved these movies are usually by stereotypically 'woke' audiences when the moral of the story so often seems like something that could have come straight out of the 1950s.

Not just superheroes. Middle-Eastern/Russian/British bad guys are de rigeur in action movies.

Been a long time since I've seen a Chinese bad guy in an action movie. Funny, that.

> man, from humble origins, is bestowed supernatural powers, performs miracles, struggles with his own nature, saves humanity, etc..

That's very common even outside of Christianity, greek/egyptian/nordic myths. It's more of a "human" thing than a "christian" thing.

Agreed

You are forgetting (at the very least) Homer.

The above does not describe homer at all. He is not from humble origins and does not follow black and white morality of Christian myths. Does not save the world either.

> In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks."

And ironically a superhero radio serial helped seriously weaken the KKK in the 40s:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/23157/how-superman-defea...

I heard elsewhere that, after the program aired, the children of KKK members were angry when they found their children playing "Superman vs. the Klan" and understanding the Klan to be the enemy.

I'm not defending the superhero genre targeted at adult audiences, and I think the movies tend to be boring and unimaginative.

This is in line with some observations I’ve made. If you notice, decades ago, superheroes were imbued with some sort of power and then study it and train diligently, eventually mastering it. The majority now, however, are suddenly thrown into a confusing and frightening world, eventually asserting themselves.

I wonder whether that trend reflects our trends in psychological states or simply on our seemingly more complex, information overloaded world.

Arguably, he made these points better in... Watchmen.

And the last point seems to be being made quite ably by Lindelof in... Watchmen.

Beside the HBO adaptation of Watchmen, I'm also watching the Amazon adaptation of The Boys right now. It addresses the übermensch-worship-culture even more directly. Highly recommended (though not as highly as Watchmen).

"The Boys" even hits this directly: (not a direct quote as I go from memory) "The people like feeling safe, they don't want to know what problems sups are causing. They prefer ignorance.)"

This is why I have my own idiosyncratic notion of how HN is very, very conservative.

The artistic taste, the aesthetics of personal tech blogs, even the aesthetic of this website itself. It's hyper-functionalist. It's all-about-the-business. Don't forget those with perceptual access needs.

And the colors, styles, and general artistic output of web media has been... all-about-the-business. Gone is the spirit of the Flash era. Tech is so business business business.

Is that a criticism? Because if it wasn't the tone of your last line I'd take it as a compliment to the site. What would the value being non-hyper-functionalist, or to ignore access needs of some people? Are you trolling?

Agreed, and in doing this we've robbed ourselves of what makes us human. We have built machines and now we seek to emulate them, see how in games like System Shock the evil AI is referred to by terms like 'perfect' or how its often said that 'robots don't make mistakes'.

Hum... HN is minimalist. It has a large share of web site makers in its users, and the one esthetic strategy that makers can always agree on is minimalism.

The web in general is hyperoptimized. Sites that do not fit all the requirements for showing on Google searches do not get visitors, and do not count over the overall web esthetic. If you look deeper, it's easy to notice that the all-about-business of the web is very different from the all-about-the-business of HN.

So as a thought experiment what dos that make the Iliad, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles Euripides all of which use Gods and Super hero's

And don't forget that a lot of what is now considered cannon was considered trashy and Dickens that "penny a word hack" even worse.

Let me ask if you've read Homer, Aeschylus and the rest of the classics, because assuming that is the case, you really should know the answer to your question.

All the classic writers fundamentally write about the human condition. They are not concerned with anything other than that. They are masterpieces that capture essential truths and have the power to transform human thought and civilization. Which is whey their works have endured the test of time for thousands of years.

Compared to the classics, modern superhero films are garbage. They are focus-grouped, market-tested, mass-produced filth aimed at "everybody" (a close approximation of Nietzsche's "last man" [1]) They possess no intelligence, do not want to make you think, rattle no cages and aim at nothing but pandering and exploitation.

Do you see the difference?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

Not to offer a defense of Hollywood's throwaways, but I would say that enduring classics like The Illiad or The Bhagavad Gita were intended to reinforce the cultural norms of their times, which of course is an aspect of the human condition, but not about "making you think" in any sort of critical way. In that sense superhero movies are not so far afield...

I would argue that Homer is more nuanced then Hollywood by a lot. And the Illiad does not make you feel so good about violence as Hollywood war movies either. When it comes to "making you think", they are miles better.

I am not saying there is no other art (movie/literatture) that makes you think more then these. But like, superheroes and hollywood are not that.

For a modern reader, I'd agree. I don't think the Greeks especially saw the message as being anti-violence, except in the sense that Achilles' rage goes too far, say. Their society was in a warlike stage, and their heroes died glorious deaths, that was what they expected from a good story.

I'd like to think that at least some modern literature is thought-provoking; I'd even say that Hollywood sometimes makes films which are unexpectedly deep (though they tend to be smaller-budget than the superhero stuff). That said, given that billions of dollars go in, what comes out is... not very impressive.

I did not said the message is anti-violence. For that matter, Hollywood is not anti-violence either. These old stories portrait of violence is less glorifying then what Hollywood or superhero does. The tragedy of events is actually shown, unlike in superhero movie.

I said "nuanced" and "better at making you think" which is something completely different. One big reason why it is better at making you think is that it is not having simplistic singular message I am supposed to learn so that I feel like the movie had proper message.

If anything, I would compare it to Westworld or game of thrones, neither of which is Hollywood and neither of which is super simple message of "violence is bad".

I did do classical studies, and are not super hero films about what it means to be human.

And in terms of filth (your bias is showing) presumably that makes deadpool a satyr play.

Well, on cases like the Aeneid, we can even point to whom it was meant as a flattery and propaganda. So there's certain resemblance.

I understand the point of the quote but I don't agree. I don't think it's worrying that millions of people enjoy escapist movies, we used to have Die Hard and whatever Arnold and Nick Cage were in, now we have superheroes. What's worrying is that the movie landscape has been hollowed out and NOTHING ELSE is available, so different kind of stories are not financed and promoted anymore (at least with the same energy as in the 90s).

Netflix, HBO and the other streaming services are filling the void but artistically we definitely have gone back a bit.

The BBC writer really seems to want the conversation to remain focused on the slightly childish topic of "Are superheroes GOOD or BAD?", and avoid discussing the larger issues of human dignity and worker's rights that Alan Moore raised, by changing the subject one paragraph later to Martin Scorsese also saying that superhero movies are BAD or at least not film. Like, what? We are not really talking only about superheroes, here.

Yes, the superhero culture was definitely much better before, in the olden days when

Greed was abhorred, it was taboo to snatch

Radish tops, aniseed, or parsley before your elders,

Or to nibble kickshaws and giggle and twine one's feet.

This commentary gets the psychology of superhero narratives entirely wrong:

> Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods

It’s the exact opposite. Superhero movies speak most strongly to those whose childhoods were traumatizing. The misfits, the rejects, the nerds who were bullied and had no protector. These narratives are about downtrodden heroes discovering their inner strength and standing up to evil and abuse. Look at the archetype of the mild mannered geeky protagonist who hides his incredible abilities - Spider-Man, Superman with his Clark Kent glasses and persona.

The reason these movies are resonating so deeply in this cultural moment is we have an entire generation of traumatized kids, now adults, who are searching for stories to help them make sense of their reality. This is directly linked to the rise of so-called mental illness, aka trauma.

I’m not saying that all of these mass produced movies are works of art, but you need to understand where the appetite is coming from. The root is in collective trauma.

The only connection to DW Griffit’s racist film is surface level - literally just the fact that masks and capes are involved. Pointing to that film as a forerunner of superhero movies is frankly absurd.

I can accept that that's part of the reason. Back in the day bullied kids watched Karate Kid to watch the underdog emerge victorious against all odds. But even the most die hard fan will tell you that Karate Kid 3 did not need to be made, it was a cheap cash-in on a successful franchise.

What explains the desire to make a mini-series or spinoff franchise about every single character, if not the desire to cash in? A couple of years ago Netflix had Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage as standalone shows, and The Defenders as its own show. The Defenders had the exact same cast playing the same characters as on the standalone shows. What is the point of that? Certainly not to put traumatized adults at ease I imagine.

I’m not arguing about the motives of the big studios cashing in with superhero franchises. Merely pointing out that the root cause of the demand they’re tapping into is the exact opposite of what the parent comment claims i.e. childhood insecurity not security.

Adding on to Moore's point about superheros and clinging to childhood, the director Pedro Almodovar makes an interesting observation^[1] that the Marvel movies are neutered and almost sexless. All of the relationships shown in the films are practically chaste. The characters who display sexuality are considered immature (Tony Stark in Iron Man, Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy), until they "graduate" to a relationship that immediately removes any trace of sexuality from their being.

[1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/pedro-almodovar-wants-sexi...

i mean do we need to sex everything up so much? i am down for this is we are going to put up some realistic sexy stuff but i am also fine with comic movies not focusing on it.

Given that pretty much anything I had seen lately had sex in it, I really don't think superheroes movies need to have sex too. It is ok to not include it.

And also, part of audience are children.

Plus it is not like sex on screen in movies was typically an adult realistic depiction of how relationships go. So it is double fine.

Even kids shows feature romances. Have you not experienced love or attraction as a major motivator in your personal life, even as a child?

You jumped from "neutered and almost sexless" to romance which is something different, especially when considering kids potentially watching movie (sex gives you higher rating). And no, sexual attraction was not motivator majority of the time, definitely not as a child.

Speaking of romance, I dont need romance in the movies. Not every movie needs it. Most relationships in real life are not romantic, most cooperating groups of people dont actually have couple in them. Repetitive same-stupid-hero-falls-in-love with girl that is there to be fallen in love with plus some excuse is worst then no romance.

Well more than the physical act of sex, the films are lacking any sort of sensuality. There's no intimacy, whether between friends or family within the films. Even when there's dramatic loss, such as that particular scene in Endgame, we only know that this relationship is important because the two characters relayed quips to each other, not because of any sort of emotional intimacy.

I wonder if there's a simpler answer, which is that we finally have the tech to do the special effects, and seeing all of these characters come to life is entertaining.

How many people are really enamored with the idea of super heroes, as opposed to just enjoying the spectacle of it?

"The writer claims adults enjoy superhero films because they don't wish to leave their "relatively reassuring childhoods" behind, or move into the 21st century."

What justification does he have to make this claim? Perhaps he thinks adults are taking these movies seriously? These movies have had about as much impact on my life as some of the stains on my carpet. I watch them for the same reason I eat cotton candy when I go to the fair..

"I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying,"

Again, what impact?

I think this is part of it, but also suspect that the rise of tribalism and polarization is playing a role. There's little desire for nuance when in this mode.

Our side is good, the other side is evil. With us or against us.

Superhero movies tend to embody this simplistic view of a complicated world. We're the good side and we destroy the enemy who is irredeemable. Fin.

They do. It would have been more interesting in the Captain Marvel move if the Kree and Skrull both had legitimate claims while also being at fault, instead of just one side being the bad guys, so that Carol could easily pivot to the good side once she bacame aware. And then put Earth in the middle of a morally complex predicament, giving the hero a truly difficult decision to make.

Even Thanos with his environmental message just ending up being treated as another villain to be defeated in Endgame.

This is the same line of thinking that people use to want to regulate music, video, video games, and everything else. They are entertainment and nothing more. They're basically the same as ballads and stories told round the campfire. Alan More is off his rocker.

I have to agree with Scorsese here. I don't remember the last superhero movie I saw where I didn't walk out with a yawn. They're just so predictable. Everyday guy or gal gets bestowed with or discovers powers of some sort and cut to blowing a bunch of stuff up. End credits with some teaser afterwards. And that's just the first of what will inevitably be many more movies culminating in blowing even bigger things up (has any of them gotten to the point of blowing up a whole planet yet?)

If I'm being fair, this predictability problem is pretty rampant in Hollywood. I rewatched Pulp Fiction recently and I remember seeing it for the first time and being blown away. It was anything but predictable. It was hilarious and disturbing at the same time but, most of all, it was creative. To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore.

Why do you have to be surprised by your entertainment?

You re-watched a movie which you found again enjoyable despite being a predictable experience now.

There are other metrics on which do judge entertainment or even art.

I certainly judge it that way. I can't stand rewatching a movie and I really can't stand watching a movie that is predictable. I beleive this is related to my personality type though. Maybe it's an ADD thing?

You don't need an excuse for either of those, that seems pretty normal

I'm not sure why you're getting voted down when that's a perfectly valid point.

I watch GalaxyQuest, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Robocop, Fight Club, and other films almost every year. They're predictable to me but I still find them to be fantastic films with a lot to say and they help remind me to look outside of myself.

Your examples prove my point. Those are all wonderfully creative movies (not sure about Robocop since I don't remember it much) I never said I wanted to be surprised. I said I wanted creativity which is something I personally find lacking in many movies these days and especially in the comic book movies.

>I never said I wanted to be surprised

This is probably why the parent was getting downvoted. I blew right past that and conflated surprise with unpredictability when they're, arguably, not the same thing.

Would you consider the recent Joker movie to be a superhero movie? I do absolutely consider it cinema.

If we define cinema to exclude boring and predictable, then a lot of US cinema stops being so, super hero movie or not. The same goes for most Hollywood comedies and tons and tons of love stories. Guess it is time to switch to French arthouse.

Guess my point is, whether a movie is considered cinema or not has little to do with whether it is a super hero movie.

I don't see it any differently than the rise of science fiction as a genre. Science fiction can be a platform for storytelling, but it can also be a dumb excuse to use special effects, or to fantasize about the future, or any other amount of vapid justifications. If you blow it off completely due to the few movies you've seen, you're gonna miss out on a lot of excellent storytelling. For example, if you've dismissed The Watchmen or The Dark Knight because you think Iron Man is dumb, you're missing out.

This is exactly the type of arguments I've had recently about Star Wars and Star Trek. Both franchises are now owned by a corporation whose interest is to serve that to as many people as possible. If you use the latest offerings as the barometer for whether these sci-fi properties are "good", you'll be stripping yourself of some fantastic science fiction simply because of its veneer.

> To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore.

It's important to specify in mainstream cinema, if one wants to make this critique.

Although it's a different context, one hears with some frequence the same about videogames, but always omitting the fact that the creative product of modern indepedent studios is evergreen (very simply, due to the considerably lower entry barriers than 20/30 years ago).

> (has any of them gotten to the point of blowing up a whole planet yet?)

They did that once or twice in a spin-off series.

The Star Trek reboot also did this.

But Star Wars already did it in the 70's come to think of it.

Pish Sam Carter and Rodney blew up entire solar systems as well as the odd planet

Hell, Rodney McKay did it by accident.

In Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Peter's Dad is revealed to be Ego the Living Planet and they end up destroying him in the end (the planet doesn't really explode; it kind of disintegrates into itself, but close enough).

Avengers: End Game is a prime example. Filmmakers have gotten too liberal with using deus ex machinas to push a story along. And even with these lazy devices, these films are still riddled with plot holes and absurdity.

It's not like the source material in the comics is different. These are superhero stories with characters like Thor, the Guardians and the Incredible Hulk. Do you really think they won't be a bit absurd?

It's unreasonable to expect hard science in superhero comics and films, but if you pay attention you get a "are you kidding me with this b.s.?" type of reaction.

Just take the opening scene in Endgame, for example. Tony Stark, stranded in space many light years from Earth, with mere minutes left of breathable oxygen. Captain Marvel conveniently appears out of nowhere and escorts him back to Earth and Tony makes a full recovery. That's lazy writing.

How about how Tony Stark conveniently invents time travel? Another example of poor writing and lame plot devices to move the story along.

The recent Stars Wars films are even worse.

I agree with those examples and they annoyed me, but I think they were done to save time more than anything, which is a product of having to shove so much material into a movie that serves as a culmination for twenty-one other movies.

Still, it's a fair criticism of superhero movies, and Star Wars.

Not necessarily to save time, the first one was because Captain Marvel was a late entry and they had to shoehorn her into the plot somehow. All her appearances in that movie had an alternate and more cohesive way It could have went, such as Stark and Nebula finishing the rudimentary repairs they were seen doing and limping home on their own power.

Time travel was also mentioned in the Ant-Man and the Wasp stinger, so it didn't completely come out of nowhere. Stark didn't invent it, he invented a navigation system.

I really hope Scrosese and articles like that re-appearing and gaining upvotes are indicators that the genre has finally peaked.

Nah, it is just grumpy old men, who when they were young were castigated by the previous grumpy old men. Capra excoriated Coppola for Apocalypse now, and others of his age did the same to other younger filmmakers and their subject matter.

You should definitely consider korean movies (Parasite, Train to Busan, The Handmaiden, Memories of Murder, The Wailing, I Saw the Devil, ...)

It's mandatory I mention:

Old Boy.

But you're right, there are a lot of great Korean movies. A few more of my favourites are: - New World - Welcome to Dongmakgol

yes! i recently saw old boy for the first time. disturbing, thought-provoking, well-made, well-acted, emotional, tense, even funny at times, but oh-so-disturbing.

Scorsese misses the point of the genre. Superhero movies, and any sort of movie franchise, are about getting to revisit a world that you like. We care less about whether the story represents a "window into our soul" and more about soaking in the environment that brings us some level of joy.

Scorsese doesn't understand this because he likes mafia movies; not the type of universe you want to live in. Mafia movies are about taking a peak into a grimy sort of world that we all know exists to some degree but don't want to be part of ourselves.

> Superhero movies, and any sort of movie franchise, are about getting to revisit a world that you like. We care less about whether the story represents a "window into our soul" and more about soaking in the environment that brings us some level of joy.

This sounds like a theme park to me, which was exactly Scorsese's point.

His point was to move the genre away from movies he likes into a box with things he perceives to be lesser. But he's wrong, a movie has more in common with other movies than it does a physical location where you go to have fun.

How is he missing the point when you're basically restating exactly what he said? They're an escapist ride, not a story of the human experience.

They are both escapism and stories of the human experience. Spiderverse, for example, is partially about overcoming self-doubt.

> Spiderverse, for example, is partially about overcoming self-doubt.

this is a laughably bad example. successful art at its best can reveal something new about yourself or the human condition; it can make you feel emotions that you don't even have words for.

overcoming self-doubt is something we teach children.

Happy to hear that you've moved past that human emotion, but you don't need to insult those who still experience it.

How do you teach someone to overcome self doubt? Asking for a friend.

You really need to do some research on Scorsese if you think he is only interested in mafia movies. You completely undercut about 75% of the movies his makes, and the work he does outside of directing when it comes to supporting others in the film industry.

Happy to be educated. Movies about crime and organized crime in particular is a major part of Scorsese's filmography, and certainly his most popular films. I haven't seen every movie he's made but I'm not aware of any that could be called "uplifting". My point was that the types of films he creates hits at a particular emotion that is far from the emotions evoked by so-called event movies.

Well you point is correct then, because he definitely doesn't have anything that would be considered "event movies" (which I assume by this you mean tent pole movies like what Marvel does, or other summer blockbusters).

With that said, my counter point was mainly to point out that you boxing in Scorsese as the "mob" guy is really bizarre. He has plenty of other kind's of movies, some of which you might find uplifting. The Aviator, Silence, or Hugo might fall into the uplifting category, but I feel a lot of his work (and the work of good artists) ends up being more nuanced to the point where associating one emotion to it is kind of diminishing the work.

Not just event movies, any sort of movies that can be considered "feel-good" in any way is pretty outside of what Scorsese does. I haven't seen Hugo and maybe that applies! Maybe he's had 1 or 2 or 3 that apply, I can't say. It's still fair to say that it's not the typical type of movie he creates, which was my only point.

"Hugo" was beautifully done, was uplifting, and wasn't crime related in the way other of his works are. I just finished the book it was based on and he was very faithful to it.

Great, so there's 1 example. That doesn't negate my point.

I don't agree with the "it's not cinema" line, but I do agree with "It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."

I've watched almost all Marvel and DC movies, and I quite enjoy them. They're a creative endeavor and they're pretty cool. But I sometimes side with Ian McKellen griping about greenscreens on The Hobbit set. Getting your emotions out to a blank space with no feedback must be quite a challenge.

I don't think this is a sustainable criticism.

Iron Man 3 is all about PTSD. Black Panther has a atrong theme about the damage done to children when they are abandoned. Captain Marvel is about the way women are taught to keep their strengths in check. Endgame has Thor's whole plot being about dealing with dismal failure and depression, and how this doesn't have to define you as a person.

I mean, sure, they aren't incredibly deep approaches to these topics. But there is definitely a thread of emotional, psychological experiences running through the Marvel movies.

Eh, not so sure. Black Panther is the most critically acclaimed of the bunch and I haven't seen many people describing the movie using this angle. Sure, it's something that's there, but it's not the meat and the purpose of the movie. Certainly not how Black Panther is describe on its marketing material.

Just check say its IMDB or iTunes or Google Play or the back of the DVD is all about "a powerful enemy reappears putting the world at risk". Even the foe himself states its reason as a revenge for how blacks are/were treated around the world and he needs Wakanda's tech and weapon.

Hey, don't get me wrong. Black Panther is a good movie, and an actual good story. But check some of Scorcese's movies description or blurbs or reviews, or trailers. I think Black Panther's story is secondary to the spectacle. And that's fine! It doesn't go as far as Transformers into the abyss :)

Before I lost interest in Marvel movies altogether, I used to get annoyed at how they would show these little glimmers of creativity, only to then crush them under the boot of The Marvel Formula.

The most interesting parts of the early Marvel movies weren't the super powers or special effects, it was the little notes they gave to their protagonists to humanize them -- Tony Stark as a selfish alcoholic, Thor as a cheerfully oblivious fish out of water, Captain America as earnest but painfully naïve. They seemed to be opening up the possibility of superhero stories that were also human stories, rather than just the kind of juvenile power fantasies Moore is decrying here. But each movie would eventually put that stuff aside and build to yet another Epic Battle as climax, which was disappointing.

In retrospect, it's pretty obvious that the stuff that I found appealing was the result of Marvel, still finding its feet, allowing its filmmakers to doodle in the margins of their studio-approved blueprint a bit. Once the movies took off and the Marvel Formula was proven, they no longer needed to allow space for such divergence from the formula. So we get movies like the Avengers entries, where the entire story is just moving chess pieces around to get them into place for the inevitable Epic Battle.

The Marvel movie I always wanted to see was one that put the Epic Battles aside completely, and focused 100% on telling a character-driven story. Something like the Matt Fraction Hawkeye comics, where the point of the story is deepening our understanding of this one character, grounding him in the context of the brownstone he lives in, the ways he interacts with his neighbors, and their common problem of potentially losing their homes to an aggressive developer. Human-scale stories about human beings.

In other words, I didn't want Avengers: Endgame, I wanted My Dinner with Ultron. But once the Marvel juggernaut picked up enough steam, that was exactly the movie I was never going to get.

> The Marvel movie I always wanted to see was one that put the Epic Battles aside completely, and focused 100% on telling a character-driven story. Something like the Matt Fraction Hawkeye comics, where the point of the story is deepening our understanding of this one character, grounding him in the context of the brownstone he lives in, the ways he interacts with his neighbors, and their common problem of potentially losing their homes to an aggressive developer. Human-scale stories about human beings.

It kinda sounds like what you dislike most about superhero movies is the superpowered heroes.

Seems more like he's upset about the stories being about the super powers rather than the effects of the super powers. Superheroes are always as powerful as the plot needs them to be. Of course they're going to win in the end with their power. But most of Marvel's movies just come down to reacting to the movie's 'twist', and believing in themselves to become stronger.

The more interesting ramifications/consequences are often only footnotes. Not every problem can be solved with super strength - Show those.

Not really. Read All Star Superman for a great example of how you can have a story be about the fantastical and make it very human.

That story is about Superman basically becoming overexposed to sunlight in a way that makes him progressively more powerful (than Superman was already), but it is also going to kill him.

It is about what a man like that might do when he knows he is going to die and a lot of it is Superman's connection with people.

> Something like the Matt Fraction Hawkeye comics

Will be interesting how the forthcoming Disney+ series based on his run turns out.

I think the ground level superhero shows would do well as a movie then such as a big budget Jessica Jones drama or a Daredevil psychological thriller.

for a realistic approach to the superhero genre you might want to check out the amazon original series The Boys

obnoxious narcissists making the world worse, one deed at a time.

This is what I always enjoyed about Fox Kids Spiderman series. It focused so much on Peter Parker's life troubles, and what he was going through.

> Everyday guy or gal gets bestowed with or discovers powers of some sort and cut to blowing a bunch of stuff up.

That comes across the same way as if I said "all romance movies end up with a couple, who don't get along, and there's some obstacle in their romance, and then they discover love, and end with smooching- end credits with some sappy music."

Yes, the elements you pointed out are a predictable part of (many, but not all) super hero movies- but there's plenty of variation if you dig just a little bit deeper. Iron Man 2 has themes of substance abuse and trust, Black Panther questioned the roles of loyalty and honor in running a country... the recent Spiderman had themes of responsibility and whether it's okay to abdicate it...

> To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore

And this sounds a lot like the patent office commissioner who said, about a century ago, "we should shut down the patent office, everything that can be invented already has been."

Yes, there's a lot of unoriginality in cinema, and also a lot of originality, and both of those statements have been true for about a century. Maybe you just need to take a break from cinema for a while, you're sounding burned out.

> That comes across the same way as if I said "all romance movies end up with a couple, who don't get along, and there's some obstacle in their romance, and then they discover love, and end with smooching- end credits with some sappy music."

I find this to be a very good comparison. Most superhero movies and most romance movies follow a pretty strict template from which they don't deviate, so that you can usually very easily predict plot points and in fact can get frustrated if they deviate from the template, even if briefly. These genres of movies are (by the most part) made in a way you can get up, go outside to use the restroom or to buy more popcorn, come back and instantly understand the point of the movie you're at and resume your enjoyment.

This makes for very formulaic, predictable and (to me) boring cinema. Other people enjoy it and in fact get upset in the rare cases where this template gets subverted. (And thankfully, very occasionally it does get subverted)

> To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore.

Ehh, when I see people who say this (or say they don't make good music anymore), I just assume they don't actually listen/watch anything new anymore.

There are obviously issues in the movie industry between viewer expectations, publisher resource allocation, and competition with streaming services, it's kind of one big crap shoot. But there are plenty of amazing movies coming out every year from both big and small productions. Scorsese himself listed plenty of good examples in his piece (Ari Aster being a personal favorite of mine), but there is plenty of other directors out there doing great work. As a big fan of horror films, I honestly think there has never been a better time for horror movies. Outside of horror, there is plenty of other great stuff too. If you are really looking for creative films, I am a big fan of basically any A24 published movie - they really do a good job of finding and supporting creative teams.

If you continually yawn after leaving these movies, why do you keep going to them? Serious question.

You should watch The Boys on prime .... the superheroes are the villains

> Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century.

Or, you know, sometimes we just like a little escape-ism. It's no different than reading a good sci-fi/fantasy book where the hero(es) win in the end. It's fun. Not everything needs to be a deep exploration of our intellectual and emotional destitution, not for everyone.

The particular common themes and tropes used for escape-ism are not irrelevant to understanding the cultural context. Superhero stuff obviously isn't the only kind of fiction that can be used to get a little escape-ism, and fiction isn't even the only way to find a little escape-ism, but superhero movies are a currently especially popular one, and it is not silly to look at the cultural resonances of why that might be.

> superhero movies are a currently especially popular one

Is this really a new thing? As far as I can tell, the trope of the superhero has been wildly popular throughout cultural history. Achilles, Thor, Arthur, and so on.

When was the last time in the past couple centuries that people were flocking to dozens of plays about Nordic and Greek heroes for 15 years straight?

Cowboy movies (westerns) and plays were the superhero movies of the past couple centuries, until they faded out (from mass popularity) in the 1970s or so.

Cowboys are the antithesis of the superhero. They don't have fame and glory, they don't live well, they're usually struggling to make ends meet, and they're barely able to save themselves or a wagon train, much less the country/world. They definitely have no super powers. They are the hard-working common man, the underdog. Part of their admiration was about a country which had become wealthy and powerful that wanted to re-imagine itself in rough-and-tumble working-class ideal. Even in the 19th century, stories of the West were fodder for most of the "civilized" cities throughout America, more for their salaciousness than anything else. Shoot-outs at the O.K. Corral were sold alongside gangs of thieves robbing trains.

Although, the "hero" cowboy was very much what Moore is going on about - symbols of white supremacy bringing order to the native savages, killing who they wanted, chivalrously treating women as inferior and delicate, ignoring the law when it was convenient, though somehow still revered as symbols of righteousness. They're more akin to Old Testament figures than Captain America.

Well Superman is the story of an immigrant, Captain Marvel is an orphan boy who was living on the street and even after he receives powers has to work a job to survive, Miles Morales is from a middle class family who is unhappy about having powers, etc. I'm not sure why you think the superhero genre is about fame and glory. There are examples of that for sure, but it's not the norm, and definitely not the roots of the genre.

Uh, I think you meant Captain America.

I meant Captain Marvel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Marvel_(DC_Comics)

Hold on a minute, are you saying Thor wasn't real?!

I don't think superhero films are as popular for their themes as their predictability. The Avengers universe hit on a formulaic, y-o-y predictable movie strategy and Marvel has been taking it to the bank.

By franchise, superhero films are doing fairly poorly. It just happens that Marvel has a war chest of shitty content and can tell publishers with confidence that they have a profitable movie.

Why is it profitable? (Somewhat circularly) because it is successful. They can pour these big budgets into lame tropes that no one really likes, but critically no one really hates so they can get that mass (international) market appeal.

The problem that all of these racism narratives ignore is that while, yes, North America has the largest box office revenue it's still on 30% of the global market. Super heroes are popular because they are boring and appeal to the 12-year-old child in everyone.

Your comments seem at odds with the popularity and the sales figures for Marvel movies. If their content is so "shitty" and their franchises are doing poorly, yet their profits and film attendance are huge, those seem to directly oppose your opinion.

Their films are successful, profitable and they are making more of them. The audience goes to films they find interesting. They vote with their dollars. Big budgets do not guarantee success or profitability.

Popular as boring makes zero sense. Avengers Endgame box office had international sales of $1,939,427,464 vs $858,373,000 for domestic sales. The point being it was extremely successful and profitable worldwide. Facts like box office appear to negate your supposition.

It is unclear who the publishers are that you refer to. Marvel publishes their own comic content. They decide what movies to make from their IP. They hire writers and directors to adapt that IP to movies.

Do you mean their stockholders? Or the press?

I specifically addressed profitability and why boring would lead to profitability in my original argument.

Publishers, in this context meant the people who are responsible for signing off on the funding of movies.

>superhero movies are a currently especially popular one

To be fair, we're just now in an age, technologically speaking, where the stories of superheroes can be brought to life without seeming campy or ridiculous. The surge in popularity is because this is the first time in the history of these types of stories where they can be visualized with a realism that allows us to hope for that type of escapism in the real world.

There are too many people who just hate the grind of every day life so watching a movie that injects something supernatural and even superlatively good into the "real world" is naturally appealing.

I'm not sure this is the case, as the popular superhero movies are precisely the campy and ridiculous ones (centrally, the MCU, the Kidz Bop of movies).

The MCU movies are not considered campy by most standards since they take themselves and their internal universe completely seriously.

Batman of the 1960s was campy. The Flash TV show is campy. The MCU may have some humorous moments but the tone, overall, is serious and thought-provoking. Civil War, Black Panther, Winter Soldier, and Iron have all been mentioned here already but you can go on and on with those films.

Okay, but using such a strict bar for campiness also invalidates the original claim. There are plenty of superhero renditions that don't qualify as campy that predate the recent wave and the technology that supposedly enabled it. (eg Burton's Batmans).

No it doesn't. The Tim Burton movies were also campy and they reveled in it. Also, the point isn't about whether the movies are campy or not but simply that we're at the point where you can show superheroes on screen believably. Even Burton's Batman had to use fake penguins and matte paintings to try and make Gotham seem real and it still looks wooden and lifeless.

I would say that Raimi's Spider-man (though not fully) and Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy pushed us into the age of superhero believability and popularity.

It's the difference between Lou Ferrigno being painted in green makeup lifting up cardboard and foam vs. a fully realized Hulk that matches what was originally in the comic books in ferocity and strength.

> The Flash TV show is campy.

The current one? By 90s and earlier standards, it really isn't even close.

Not by those standards but, by believability and realism standards, it definitely is. The difference is that the Flash TV show is one of the shows that knows exactly what it is and when it's campy and it leans into that instead of trying to play it straight.

I think his point is that escapism is fine for kids, but we're adults now and we're hindering ourselves by always escaping to a black-and-white good-and-evil fantasy land where there's no need for compromise or understanding as long as you have a big gun and supernatural powers.

Sometimes a hero is someone who unites, explains, or educates. But there's precious little of that in the kind of simplistic, violent, nuance-free "win" that continues to be perpetuated in this material. And that is to the detriment of society's ability to reason.

There’s no reason why escapism should only be for kids. There’s plenty of ‘deep’ art in this world, and fantasy escapism isn’t preventing that from existing.

"There’s plenty of ‘deep’ art in this world, and fantasy escapism isn’t preventing that from existing."

But even you quote 'deep' as if it isn't deep at all. By this rhetoric there isnt any deep art, whatsoever, in existence. And I think that bolsters the point that we need less escapism and that actual real critical thought needs to be applied.

Go read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and even the Book of Exodus and tell me it wasn't comic-book movie fare for ancient Greeks and Hebrews.

It kinda is if you think about the economics of the box office. Scorsese makes this point in depth with his NYT Op-Ed. Basically studios have become preoccupied with making purely franchise tentpoles and not funding lower budget creative movies.

Now the common response to that studios are just giving the people what they want. But A. people will tend to like what you put in front of them and B. that doesn't mean studios should starve creative, new ideas. It's a sign of the times that someone like Martin Scorsese has trouble getting money, that a film with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci has to be made with Netflix.

Also, studios seem to forget that these franchises started as risks themselves. Iron Man was a huge risk. Star Wars was massively precarious. If executives hadn't taken the original risk, these franchises wouldn't be the cash cows they are.

Escapism isn't necessarily bad but it's a little noticeable how much escapism is being sold to us at the detriment to real, innovative, intelligent art.

People vote with their attendance and requisite dollars. Terminator Dark Fate and Charlie's Angels have bombed at the box office. Studios are about making money. They always have been and always will be. I would suspect Mr Scorcese would find the same thing in Bollywood as well.

All genres go through cycles in film in terms of popularity. Marvel will have a down cycle at some point. Disney movies lost their way when Disney himself died. It takes leadership, a great script,great acting and creativity, to build successful movies that can grow into franchises. or be even something people enjoy watching more that once on it's own.

> And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.

From the Scorsese Op-Ed. I did explain in my previous comment that "voting with their attendance" is a faulty excuse, because it's a self perpetuating cycle.

Also, if studio execs just blindly gave people more of the same franchises without trying new ideas, we wouldn't have Marvel or Star Wars. Executives need to take creative risk if they want to receive financial gain.

The idea that Marvel is just having a genre moment doesn't really follow. We've never seen a genre that subsumes all genres, that dominates the box office in such a relentless manner. Has there ever been a time where horror movies were playing at every movie theater, where everybody talked about horror movies, where practically every actor under the sun had starred in a horror movie?

Marvel must be doing something right, because their last film made over 2 Billion dollars. Marvel has found a formula that works and allows them to expand their set of characters and put them in movies of their own. They have used a diverse set of directors and actors to work on their films.

And apparently, people like them. Some don't.

Iron Man was the risk. Marvel's approach of a 15 year cycle of building and interlinking was what worked.

For Warner/DC, they tried the same thing for DC characters and could not pull it off.

Nor could Universal with the attempt to force a Monster Cinematic Universe. Their Tom Cruise Mummy movie failed.

Marvel is getting beat up here, because they are so successful. DC gets beat up, because they have not figured out how to tonally present their movies in a way that can build a franchise.

As to the size of the budgets, they are large because of the CGI that makes the characteristics of the superheros seem more real.

The first modern Superman movie's tag line was: You will believe a man can fly".

The Hope and Crosby Road Trip movies, the Abbot and Costello franchises or the Jerry Lewis Dean Martin movies were all franchises as well. Hell, Rin Tin Tin was a franchise.

We've been here before and will be there again. Studios will milk what works for them until it no longer does, and the other studios will copy the genre and try to get in on the money there.

Or they just reboot something that doesn't have a new story to tell, or has a weak cast or uninteresting story line. That is the business.

You weren't forced to go and neither was anyone else.

As for Scorcesse, he is reviled within the Academy community for some of his films.

Sure, you shouldn't "always" escape like you say, but I don't think the people the author is criticizing are watching marvel movies 12 hours a day.

Moore seems to be implying they escape in their free time instead of working to improve the world. So they gripe, feel powerless to do anything, and comfort themselves with movies and comics where powerful people like them improve the world.

Reading between the lines of what Moore said I don't see the problem as simply watching superhero movies. It's watching too much TV at all. It's spending too much time on Facebook. It's buying a new [insert product here] that we can't afford because the short-term hit makes us feel better. It's drinking a little more alcohol than we know we should. It's telling our primary car doc that we want that pill because it's too scary and expensive to visit a therapist.

My point is that there are more ways to escape now than there probably has ever been. Most of them in isolation and used moderately are harmless but far too may people don't use them in isolation or in moderation.

Neil Postman is over this way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Moore would prefer that there be "better" art people are enjoying instead of the Marvel and DC superhero movies. But there is no specific barometer of "better" for him, he suggests something created in the 21st century would be "better" rather than an adaptation, but I don't think he really has a workable definition of "better".

I agree and I think we've lost the ability to be our own heroes. We're all walking around with massive anxieties and not facing them only makes us more anxious. And don't get me wrong; there's a place for escapism. Everybody needs and deserves a break every now and then. But what I think most people don't realize is that facing those anxieties and fears is far more rewarding and enriching than watching a movie for 90 minutes.

It's ironic that we choose to watch something impossible like a guy who can shoot rays out of his eyes because we think overcoming our own fears is impossible.

> It's ironic that we choose to watch something impossible like a guy who can shoot rays out of his eyes because we think overcoming our own fears is impossible.

But... we don't. I watch him shoot rays out of his eyes because it's fun and relaxing. I'm literally going into surgery tomorrow so they can cut out part the bone behind my eye, by sticking a knife up my nose, so that I don't go blind. I'm anxious above that but I'm doing it because it needs to be done. You know what I'm not going to do tonight? Try to face my own fears. I'm going to watch TV with my wife and relax. Because not every moment of my time needs to be facing my fears. Down time is _good_ for you.

What would happen if you spent some time paying attention to that anxiety? Noticing where you feel it in your body? Is it in your chest and shoulders like it usually is for me? Where in your chest and shoulders? What thoughts do you notice you have around the anxiety? And then I'm curious how you'd feel an hour after that exercise? A few hours?

Yes, down time is good for you. That's why I said "Everybody deserves a break sometimes." But most people don't take a break sometimes. They take a break most of the time.

Our minds and bodies have something to tell us and nothing good comes from not listening. In other words; paying attention to that is a form of down time. A very very useful one.

I truly wish you the best with your surgery, though. Ask the doc to fix it so you can shoot rays out of that eye while he's in there. ;)

There are comments like this defending escapism all over this thread, and I think theyre missing the point. Escapism is fine, just as dark, depressing, morally revelatory films are.

The comment is about the degree to which one type of movie is relatively dominant in mass culture: the corresponding concern would be equally valid if (eg) brooding meditations on the nature of evil grabbed as much of our cultural mindshare as shallow escapism does today.

Its not a commentary on the individual taking a moment to relax, but rather on a shift in tendency across the population

> I think his point is that escapism is fine for kids, but we're adults now and we're hindering ourselves by always escaping to a black-and-white good-and-evil fantasy land where there's no need for compromise or understanding as long as you have a big gun and supernatural powers.

One of the most popular entries in the Marvel universe was about a moral argument between Captain America and Iron Man regarding the appropriate use of power, and the limits of personal autonomy versus international law.

Yes, it was dressed up in bright colors and had plenty of pew-pew-pew, but it was very much not a black and white story. To this day you can find people who agree with either side.

> But there's precious little of that in the kind of simplistic, violent, nuance-free "win" that continues to be perpetuated in this material.

Stephen Strange's first outing featured him having an emotional breakdown over causing the death of someone who was actively trying to kill him, and saw him save the world through cleverness, not violence.

Are comic book movies the pinnacle of moral debate? Of course not. But they aren't always punch-hard-save-day simple, either.

Is there are second example? This is the first thing I thought of ... and then couldn't come up with more.

Spider Man Multiverse is a 21th century movie, if movies can be labeled that way.

The fascination with gadgets; the assembled, diverse family; the revere/mocking of speed (this follows a secret American cinema tradition masterful described by Manny Farber).

Captain America: The Winter Soldier made a strong point about the issues of surveillance and trading freedom for security, where even the good guys (SHIELD) didn't realize until too late that they were doing the work of literal nazis. There was lots of boom boom in it, but it wasn't a dumb movie.

Arguably, Iron Man 1 was quite explicit about the issues of war, terrorism, and sales of weapons; it had a quite dark undertone for a MCU movie.

Black Panther was like the civil rights movement, with one faction advocating for peace, and the other component advocating violence against their oppressors.

The hero of the movie wins against both M'Baku and Killmonger by being the most physically powerful and violent.

Strip away the civil rights veneer, and the moral lesson of the story is still that the punching-est man is the best man.

The moral lesson was that the best man had to become the punching-est man, in order to thwart the power of someone who wanted to use his might to conquer.

And, moreover, that an incredibly rich nation's resources should be shared with the world at large, in order to make the world as a whole a better place.

> Is there are second example?

Captain Marvel ends with a fight, but the entire point of the movie is that the people we are taught to fear as an insidious infiltration into our society are, in fact, only trying to make a home for themselves, and lash out only when terrorized by an imperial power. The hero of that story is a soldier who realizes she has been used as a weapon against innocents, and who then sets out to make amends.

Thor is about someone with the powers of a god and the simplistic morality of a child, and his entire first movie is about learning restraint and the importance of peace.

Iron Man is about an arms dealer who realizes, quote, that he has more to offer the world than things that blow up. This isn't the best example, because he's still better known for making things blow up, but he also becomes the world leader in clean energy. Iron Man also creates a rampant AI and learns that even though he's a genius, he can't build a suit of armor around the world, especially without the world's permission.

Black Panther has some reasonably complicated things to say about imperialism and the White Man's Burden. And, I guess, the stupidity of placing the world's most advanced technology and weaponry into the hands of a man who can win a fistfight about it.

Some Marvel movies have more meat to them than others. It's important to remember that there are a lot of different writers working on these movies, they are not a monolith. Some of them are good at fitting important, thought-provoking themes into the framework of Disney's aesthetic requirements, and others are not.

Spiderman: Far From Home is a great example. The movie deals with the legacy of technology as Mysterio re-appropriates Tony Stark's drone network to create a virtual reality propaganda monster. What once protected and improved the world now threatens it when it falls into the wrong hands. What does this say about things like mass data collection? Nuclear weapons? Virtual reality? The infrastructure of technology stays in place after its well-intentioned creators are gone. How will we as a species deal with that legacy in the coming decades and centuries?

It also deals with the theme of 21st century propaganda in our "post-truth society". Mysterio doesn't need to have actual super powers, he just needs to make people believe he does. He takes on the role of film-director-as-superhuman, who through visual trickery controls the perception and beliefs of millions.

Yeah it was a 2 hour escape in some aspects and I got to watch Tom Holland kick ass. But the movie also left me thinking about some pretty heavy and challenging stuff.

> One of the most popular entries in the Marvel universe was about a moral argument between Captain America and Iron Man regarding the appropriate use of power, and the limits of personal autonomy versus international law.

An extremely shallow moral argument on those subjects. They weren't really explored much, beyond Captain America saying "I think X" and Iron Man saying "No, I think Y."

(And then of course the argument was resolved not by having these two characters actually argue their points, but by having them punch each other a lot.)

> To this day you can find people who agree with either side.

My sense of this is that you don't so much find people who agree with a particular side as you find people who identify with a character aligned with a particular side. The agreement isn't grounded in a philosophical position, it's grounded in whether you're a fan of Captain America or Iron Man.

Which is exactly the kind of downside to superhero storytelling that Moore is on about. When the only solution available for any problem in a story is to find the right übermensch to throw at it, people are naturally going to start sorting themselves according to which übermensch they think is the ideal übermensch.

How about the Bond style spy movies.

The movies where everything gets better by breaking out in song and dance.

The crime dramas where the nice, hard working lawyer gets someone else to confess on the stand while defending his client.

Even "The Godfather" is escapist in the sense that they really are just about their families in the end and aren't really that bad, except to the other gangsters who are worse. They're protecting us.

Same deal for sports. What difference does it make if green team beats yellow team this week?

I think this is really another case of looking down on comics as being "for kids".

Really, if people are going to take down anything purely for being escapist, musicals should be the first to go :)

Well this is Alan Moore, the author of such comics as From Hell and Watchmen, so I don't think you can fairly accuse him of looking down on comics as being for kids.

And why do you think he should care about musicals more than his own medium of choice?

>Even "The Godfather" is escapist in the sense that they really are just about their families in the end and aren't really that bad, except to the other gangsters who are worse. They're protecting us.

This is a pretty weird and shallow interpretation of the movie.

I don't dismiss stuff for being "for kids", I love manga and cartoons, hell just this weekend I binged "green eggs and ham", still I'm perfectly aware that almost all of this media has a bad execution, shallow themes and well it is for kids, and if I get a discussion with my friends (specifically about superhero movies) is about how blatant the topics and absurd the topics are.

> Same deal for sports. What difference does it make if green team beats yellow team this week?

You know..... you know sports are real life right? Like, there is an actual competition happening, it's not pre-scripted. Sports fans like sports because they like watching talented athletes competing with one another.

This is one of the reasons I love Hayao Miyazaki's movies. The characters are nuanced. Which is both more realistic and far more constructive.

Take Princess Mononoke for example. There's the antagonist, Lady Eboshi, who runs a mining town and is destroying nature. Generally this would be the complete character. That's the villain, easy to hate. Must be vanquished. End of story.

But then you learn she's empowering women and taking care of lepers, the most vulnerable. Her workers and the townspeople adore her.

Now you have mixed feelings. And the answer goes from "destroy" to "cooperate" and seeking a peaceful, win-win solution.

Bringing up Studio Ghibli in a conversation about good cinema is as close to cheating as you can get.

I see your Ghibli and raise you a Woolly Aardman

Farmageddon is pure gold

Goddamn it, you have me beat.

So as adults we must reject the power of myth?

Only if it gets too popular, apparently.

Ironically, the best superhero story going right now, the one that truly explores the possibilities and the depths of the medium, is a cartoon for kids, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

If most of what you read is sci-fi or fantasy, it's possible that your entire life revolves around escapism, which isn't good for your mental development. I have found maybe two fantasy novels which can combine the real personal struggles and moral quandaries of regular human beings with fantasy themes and captivating writing.

Superhero movies can be emotionally deep or thought-provoking, but the vast majority of them are designed not to stimulate your mind, but to get you to keep buying buckets of popcorn for $15 and action figures. The one thing we don't need more of is mindless entertainment that coincidentally reinforces our biases and problematic thinking.

I think the recent Joker movie was a good counter-example, of a comic book character study that was not comfortable to watch. Most people I know left the theatre with a lot of questions and/or a sense of unease, not with a spring in their step.

On the other hand, perhaps Joker is the exception that proves the rule. It was certainly unlike every other superhero movie thus far.

I think part of the problem is the massive success of the MCU. Before the MCU, superhero movies did not seem so homogeneous. There were plenty of flops, but more interesting experiments as well. Consider the weird artistic and tonal shifts between the 90s Batman movies.

The MCU is such a homogeneous set of films. None of them are actively bad like many of the DC movies, but they all blend together so that nothing sticks out or feels unique either. This is made explicit in how Disney exercised creative control over these movies to keep them from straying too far from the intended formula and feel[1].

[1] https://www.cinemablend.com/new/How-Iron-Man-2-Ruined-Jon-Fa...

Also, the relatively recent Tencent (China) effect ensures that the plots are non-challenging.

The interplay between Catwoman and the Penguin in Batman Returns is a fascinating bit of cinema. You get two different people, crazy in different ways, but equally crazy in magnitude, trying to work together, to get along for a common goal. It's a wonderful bit of underappreciated cinema from Devito and Pfeiffer.

I don't think the recent Joker movie is a good counterpoint. This iteration of the Joker was rather whiny and needy. More than anything, he embodied the kid mentality of "pay attention to me, or I will throw a tantrum!" over the "I don't give a f..., I'll just do what I want" mindset that's normally associated with Joker.

If anything, this Joker felt like a typical incel, a typical angry young man. It's not a superhero movie as there were no superpowers on display.

Not everything needs to be a deep exploration of our intellectual and emotional destitution, not for everyone.

I think Moore's criticism and your push-back kind of dovetail into Martin Scorsese's critique[1][2] that comic book movies aren't cinema. It would be fine for comic book movies to be the escapist entertainment they are if they weren't the overwhelming majority of type of movie that is getting made these days.

I wonder if Moore would be as critical if instead of there being 20+ Marvel Character Universe movies in the span of 10 years there had only be say 4 or 5?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m...

[2] The article lightly touches on Scorsese's critique but doesn't go into depth, probably because Moore is critiquing the "matter" and Scorsese is critiquing the "medium", but they intertwine heavily.

> I wonder if Moore would be as critical if instead of there being 20+ Marvel Character Universe movies in the span of 10 years there had only be say 4 or 5?

Would it even be a topic of discussion? Lots of bad movies get made. The question is why is this drek the dominating force in American movies now?

Would it even be a topic of discussion?

That's my point, it probably wouldn't be.

Lots of bad movies get made. The question is why is this drek the dominating force in American movies now?

The movie that kicked off the MCU train was the original Iron Man in 2008. It was actually GOOD and was still somewhat novel; and it made a shit-ton of money. That's why the all the follow ups happened, Disney's corporate lack of imagination and the audience's uninterest in holding them accountable for it, which is where Moore's and Scorsese's critiques of the audiences intersect.

This misses the point of Marvel movies, though. There is an entire universe of characters and stories. Iron Man's success paved the way for putting those stories on the big screen. Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Dr. Strange, the Infinity Saga, and so on. That's what Keven Feige, and many of the Marvel people have been trying to do. Setup a universe to tell these stories instead of just having one-off superhero movies.

So instead of Spider-Man or Iron Man just being in their own movies, they can fight alongside (or even against) Captain America, Thanos, etc.

So it's not necessarily that there were 20+ MCU movies in the span of 10 years (and from what I understand the majority were at least good and some great), it's that during that time period the MCU movies became a dominant slice of the overall movie pie instead of the entire pie growing bigger. That, overall, seems to be Scorsese's gripe, because Avengers Endgame and DC's Justice League and Joker, etc... suck up so much oxygen Scorsese couldn't find a studio to back The Irishman so now he had go with Netflix. Now I'm starting to diverge a lot from where Scorsese and Moore intersect and it becomes more about Scorsese and a matter of sour grapes.

Yeah, I can understand being concerned about the genre taking up too much of the pie, preventing other kinds of movies from getting funding. But also a little bit of sour grapes.

But the pie has also only stayed the same size (or possibly shrunk) from the perspective of people-chair-hours in big chain theaters. Scorsese himself is an example that a lot of the same filmmaking is still happening, it's just moved to Netflix and other streaming services (and "prestige Cable", which is a branch of streaming services).

It's interesting the forces trying to fight that "real cinema" means people-chair-hours in building labeled a theater, and the obvious fact that the more serious/prestige/independent cinema is increasingly moving directly into people's homes. Netflix versus Cannes, for instance, has just been a fascinating thing to watch, because you've got economic forces versus traditional nostalgia for a cinema that only briefly ever existed as people-chair-hours, and has always been fighting economically for theater time versus whatever "lowest common denominator" fads were current (look at complaints over the decades aimed at Universal's early monster movies, the many decades of cheap musical spectacles, the eras of cheap westerns, etc and so forth).

If you need big events to push people out the comfort of their home theaters and streaming services, of course it is going to be some "lowest common denominator" fad.

(Also, mafia/gangster films were another one of those cheap film fads, and Scorsese and others "elevated it", but that was once considered a genre like we consider superhero films today that maybe didn't qualify as true "cinema". What debate that is old is new again.)

> For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.

I don't know, it seems like Scorsese's critique is for people who might possibly get some sort of actual budget from a production company to make something, because his statements can't possibly apply to someone genuinely just starting out. Having an outlet such as YouTube where you can gain worldwide distribution for your zero-budge work seems pretty amazing compared to options during the period he compares things to.

> I wonder if Moore would be as critical if instead of there being 20+ Marvel Character Universe movies in the span of 10 years there had only be say 4 or 5?

Almost certainly, he did write the Watchmen after all.

I think his point is that at a certain point we should start questioning why we need so much escapism, and work to fix that.

Because reality is increasingly depressing.

Reality is not increasingly depressing. Reality is simply itself. It has no tone, no emotions, no motives, no trend. So saying this is not helpful; in fact, it's sort of highlighting part of the problem. The fact that people are more frequently describing "reality" as something that exists as a sphere that can be rejected or escaped or avoided is concerning to me. If "reality" is itself what's depressing, what other choice is there? Reality is all there is.

Don't forget that one of the goals of the flavor of government seen in my country, America, is that of cultivating mass apathy. It's tyranny by way of "nothing I do really matters so why try." Convincing people that this concept of reality is what's going sour, and not the "leadership" evidenced by the 0.001%, must be a massive win for them.

Escaping from your personal stressors for a little while by sinking into a movie or a book is perfectly reasonable. It's when it turns into an -ism and becomes the centerpiece of our cultural milieu that we should be very concerned.

Bingo... one of my favorite quotes, that I try to live up to as best I can:

"Be miserable. Or be motivated. Whatever's next, it's your choice."

and

"Whether you think you can't, or think you can, you're right."

Can't say I'm a miracle worker but I try to remember that believing I can't do something is the start of my feeling miserable, and every time I break through that wall _something_ happens.

I don't know if we need escapism anymore or less than before. Now it is more available than ever before and people are wealthier than ever before. So they have time and opportunity to do more of what they want.

Because people enjoy it. Why do we need to fix other people's enjoyment? Would this still be a criticism if we were talking about people reading too much fiction or watching too many plays, or telling too many stories by the campfire? Maybe playing too many board and card games?

a) There were no heroes in "Watchmen" b) If there were, they certainly didn't win in the end.

>Or, you know, sometimes we just like a little escape-ism.

What kind of escape-ism we chose, and how much escape-ism we chose, also has societal consequences.

>Not everything needs to be a deep exploration of our intellectual and emotional destitution, not for everyone.

His point is much larger than deep vs shallow entertainment.

Isn't any entertainment (movies, music, reading, gaming etc.) by itself escapism? i.e. few mins to few hours of escape from the pathetic(most) life.

Alan Moore talks about Super Hero worship, but if you take a country like India; people have been worshipping 'movie heroes' literally, they command huge power, in certain states movie actors get regularly elected as 'Chief Minister' i.e. highest position of state power. I tend to think, it's because here people need more escapism due to obvious reasons.

I tend to agree. Movies in general seem to be escapism[0]. Even incredibly depressing/artful movies like Requiem For A Dream, Joker (since it was brought up on this thread), Irréversible, The Truman Show, Martyrs, Saw, etc. are a form of escapism.

Now, each person may have their own preferences as to what type of escapism they want, but ultimately it's really just spending a few hours at a theatre or in front of a TV.

(We could argue about the intellectual merits of each of the films I've mentioned, but that's irrelevant as to whether they're escapism or not.)

Hot take: The problem isn't "shallow movies" or similar. It's that well-enough-off people are increasingly getting bored.

[0] Hell, I'd even extend that to most art.

What's your definition of "escapism". How is watching Irréversible escapism?

In the same way that RFAD is. It distracts from one's own life and "at least I haven't got it that bad".

Fair enough, but do note that's not what most people (or dictionaries) mean by "escapism" -- and your interpretation will puzzle people who use it in a derogatory manner. When discussing fiction such as movies, books or shows, the most commonly accepted meaning is of a thrilling fantasy, usually with a strong component of wish-fulfillment or adventure, that allows one to be distracted of the boring realities of actual life.

Neither Requiem for a Dream nor Irréversible are escapism in that sense. In fact they are terrifying movies, with zero wish-fulfillment, and which often remind you of real life rather than distracting you from it.

As an aside, if what you got from those movies was "at least I don't have it that bad" then you got a completely different message than me...

I was wondering exactly about the same. It seems to me utterly silly to critisize any fictual work - may it be movies, books or games - for its fictual nature or what he calls escapism.

In my view the only thing he is really saying is that these are not promoting his world view and set of values. I personally find this attitude of telling other people which fictual work they may enjoy absolutley disrespectful.

Taste is a reflection of the culture and time we are living in. All what AlanmMoore does is showing that he aparently can no relate to the fictual preferences of a large part of the movie goers out there.

The fact that escapism and fun is of certain style and theme tells a lot about the mind of people who consume it and people who provide it.

Also the underlying assumption that something you watch for fun and entertainment must be mindless and stick to repetitive format seems to be weak.

What is being escaped? In these movies, the heroes don't seem to be seeking to make significant changes. To escape anything. Status quo preservation is the game. It's the opposite of escapism; for the audience, it's a comforting blanket of things remain the same. Perhaps that's what they need.

(Yes, they're escpaing doing the housework for three hours while they go to the movies; if we're going to discuss superhero movies, a brutal literal interpretation of everything is not helpful :) )

Well, it's sort of like the Bechdel Test. A single movie can fail it and it means little for its quality (12 Angry Men, for instance) but if the overwhelming number of movies fail it then we know something's up.

This is ludicrous. Historically, all cultures have tales and myths involving heroes and villains, including in religious texts. Is the illiad for 12 year olds? Is Arthur and the Round table (Le Mort de Arthur) or Jason and the Argonauts or the works of Ovid not stories of superheros? All cultures have had stories which have been transmitted orally, via song, via poems, via books and even gasp via comics.

I have a theory that this obsession with superheros is part of a greater obsession with continuity. Whether it's TV shows or cinematic universes, people crave a sense of continuity in their narrative. Right now there's a lack of continuity, a lack of semantic cohesion within the world. Values have disintegrated. Stuff that would have been otherwise meaningful, whether that be working class life, or the institution of the presidency or the guarantees of a college degree, are now meaningless or less meaningful.

> I have a theory that this obsession with superheros is part of a greater obsession with continuity. Whether it's TV shows or cinematic universes, people crave a sense of continuity in their narrative.

I have a strong suspicion this part is correct, but that most are unaware of it. Kind of a "you don't miss what you never had" situation. Not so sure about the rest.

Aside from realizing it about myself several years ago, here's some evidence:

* Up above, someone mentioned a couple of failed cinematic universes [0]: Warner/DC and Universal's Monster Universe.

* No one has mentioned a second successful one: The Conjuring Universe.

* The Conjuring Universe did one of the exact same things that the MCU did, that the failed ones did not: Separate films drawn together.

* The MCU's first films were completely standalone, just sharing things like Coulson and Fury as easter eggs, and only later drawn together into the same universe. Until Avengers, it was entirely possible for the casual moviegoer to miss this, creating a low barrier to entry - you didn't have to know the previous film, as you would a sequel. Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America could each draw in a different audience.

* The first "universe" film in the Conjuring, Annabelle, was designed to work standalone instead of as a sequel, same as the first MCU films. Like the MCU, they included callbacks that fans could catch, but nothing important that broke the movie's flow. Again, low barrier to entry for moviegoers who are used to standalone films and don't want to commit themselves to a longer series.

* On the flipside, DC and Monster both announced up front they were creating a cinematic universe, before the first movies were even out. This created a high barrier to entry for casual moviegoers - they knew up front they'd have to see further movies to get the full story.

I think that's the big key, capturing the casual moviegoers with seemingly standalone films, then holding their attention with extended continuity only after they're invested. It's really easy to go see a second movie if you'd already seen the first. Conjuring and MCU both did that well, without creating an initial commitment by announcing multiple films.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21577536

This is a serious mic-drop line that had my jaw hanging open:

> In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

Super heroes capes and masks as inspired by KKK hoods? I don't think it was probably intentional/conscious in the minds of those who originated it, and I don't think Moore necessarily means it was either... but it's definitely an interesting cultural collective unconsciousness sort of lineage.

I'd point to that right alongside the recent obsession with bacon as a subtle anti-Jewish anti-Muslim sentiment. Certainly plenty of folks do just like the taste of the stuff, but I think often those folks are along for the ride on the coattails of a dog-whistle.

If you're someone whose faith commands that you not go near swine of any sort, a catalog with several pages of bacon-themed products might start to feel like it was written with someone else in mind...

Why can't a BLT just be a BLT? Seems like a reach.

Pretty positive the person you are replying to is being sarcastic and/or trolling, and agrees with you.

Or just a clever marketing campaign by the pork industry...

Bacon is delicious. Nobody is forcing you to eat any.

That's why I'm always leery of ordering shrimp cocktail when having dinner with my Jewish friends.

- signed, the world's most passive aggressive dinner companion

Sorry to break the bad news, but Carly Simon was probably singing about someone else...

While bacon-mania certainly has some corporate/big-farm backing, and at least a small amount of being a pushback (like some pro-steak sentiments) to being demonised by some for your choice of food preference, I find it more than a bit of a stretch to suggest there is any antireligion thing going on aside from those few for who everything is a chance to be anti-[insert-religion-or-other-thing-here] that they jump at enthusiastically.

Most Americans probably don't even know that practicing Jews don't eat bacon. If anything, snarky bacon memes seem to be directed at vegans.

Superman was created by two Jewish guys who would have been quite unpopular with the Klan. His costume was inspired by circus strongmen, not the Night Riders.

Art can be inspired by or a reference to something without being an endorsement or homage to it.

Can be unconscious/unintentional connections too.

But I think Moore's real point is simply that the Birth of the Nation does some of the same things as later superhero movies, with the KKK as the superheroes. They also happen to wear uniforms that are strikingly similar as it happens...

But it doesn't mean Siegel and Shuster were consciously -- or even unconsciously -- inspired by Birth of a Nation and the KKK. It might mean that there is a connection/commonalities in the reasons both forms were so popular.

Birth of a Nation was released in 1915. It was enormously popular, it was not some fringe thing, it was a mainstream popular success which generally did not have it's politics questioned in the mainstream, although there were protests by Black people. According to wikipedia, "It presented the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a heroic force." Heroic, eh?

Superman's first apperance was in 1938.

There's a difference between the KKK being represented as heroic in BoaN and the KKK being the origin of all super heroes, though. Moore is slandering the genre, or at least attempting to, by association, and that association is absolutely not deserved.

Every culture has heroes, and every culture tells tales of impossible heroics. It would be more accurate to call Achilles the first superhero, or Beowulf, or Gilgamesh. All of these characters are larger than life, and all of them are morally flawed.

American racists had racist, American heroes. That doesn't mean that Captain America is devoid of commentary about the nation's role in today's world. And if Moore had watched Civil War, for example, I think even he would be forced to agree.

The original Superman also wasn't raised as a corn fed All-American from Iowa with good moral farming parents. He was supposed to come from an orphanage. One must wonder why the former origin story turned out to be much more appealing.

Right, because the Jewish creators of many of the most famous super heroes were all about the White Christian supremacists.

It's been said by academics and by Moore elsewhere that Batman's look and method of operating seems to resemble the KKK.

Everything can look like KKK if you really, desperately want to make it into a race issue.

Far from academic, but this is the first thing that came to my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l1PMVvfjDM

So does captain underpants. Let’s just ignore the much more likelier option that Batman operates exactly like you’d expect a billionaire vigilante too and he almost never kills...

I must have missed the issue where Batman leaves a burning cross on Mr Freeze's yard.

Alan Moore is a great writer, and he's also a self-important kook. There's no connection between the KKK and comic book heroes.

Right, the man sure knows how to turn a phrase! One of the best ever.

He's not saying there is a connection.

He's saying that there are so many white heroes and the whole culture of the "super men" in comics, that they might as well have been the "Birth of a Nation".

Nothing kooky about it.

>I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race.

It is kooky, and ironic, to imply that people dream of racial genocide solely because of the color of their skin.

What? What are you talking about, where did Moore or anyone in this thread do that?

If you are trying to suggest that the movie Birth of the Nation glorifying the KKK, or the KKK itself, have nothing to do with white supremacy and racial genocide... then we're just done here.

Master race != racial genocide. Master race could even have pity or compassion for the lesser race. The key differentiation is not that of genocide vs not genocide, is of imagining a superior set of people, vs not doing it.

Super heroes are described as that superior set of people, more advanced than mere humans (stronger, smarter, genetically advanced in many cases, and more relevant to boot). Heck, even the name superhero/supermen etc alludes to Nietchtze's and the Nazis' Ubermench.

They are also predominantly white, with good looks and physique.

That's the very definition of a super race...

Just saying it isn't so isn't an argument.

To be fair, Moore didn't really flesh out the argument either. But I definitely find it enticing. if you don't, that's fine.

If you try hard enough you can attribute anything to racism and half our country is ignorant enough to believe it.

Masking goes back a long way to Athenian theatre and religion

In our post-shame, fact-resistant world, maybe we should recalibrate what a superhero is. Perhaps it's someone who values public good over personal profit, and someone who doesn't compromise their principles in the face of trolling and smearing. Children should be looking up to THAT, not being able to punch through walls. The bar is pretty low.

But superheroes provide convenient excuses why we don't do that: they're super. Oh sure, you can argue that some of them don't have magic powers, like Batman and Ironman, but that's ignoring super-wealth (and impossible engineering).

What we need is a superhero who's just a guy with a crappy office job who wants to make the world a better place, and his only tools are his sense of justice and a costume he bought at a garage sale. Someone so utterly unremarkable that they just use their regular name as their superhero name.

That's right, I'm saying we need an Arthur movie.

...more realistically, I think we could use more stories about regular people who made a difference just by be being good people.

Reminds me of "Super" (2010) by James Gunn

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512235/

>...more realistically, I think we could use more stories about regular people who made a difference just by be being good people.

Plenty of those exist, but they scratch a different itch. People can enjoy both.

How about a hoodie and we all watch Mr. Robot?

> ...more realistically, I think we could use more stories about regular people who made a difference just by be being good people.

TNG-era Star Trek had a lot of that. Sure, the protagonists were not regular people, but they also didn't have superpowers. Their specialness served primarily to ensure they had lots of problems thrown at them, problems they very often solved through the strength of their character (and the character of the organization backing them), instead of trickery or violence. I miss that in today's entertainment.

"What we need is a superhero who's just a guy with a crappy office job who wants to make the world a better place, and his only tools are his sense of justice and a costume he bought at a garage sale. Someone so utterly unremarkable that they just use their regular name as their superhero name."

We had that comic book and TV show decades ago, except he was a homeless guy and it was called The Maxx. People keep acting like this kind of storytelling is new or doesn't exist, but we've always had it. The people asking for it just have a really narrow perspective.

> What we need is a superhero who's just a guy with a crappy office job who wants to make the world a better place

You should probably check out "Dark Waters"

https://youtu.be/jvQUIt0BWcU

Saints? What has replaced the genre of hagiography in the modern world anyway?

Press releases

>Perhaps it's someone who values public good over personal profit, and someone who doesn't compromise their principles in the face of trolling and smearing. Children should be looking up to THAT, not being able to punch through walls.

So... almost every single super hero then? Have you even watched any of these movies?

CA Civil War is all about authoritarianism and how much freedom we should trade for safety. Dr Strange grapples with a death he caused in self defense and uses his mind to save the day. Captain America represents the pinnacle of self sacrifice, and Iron Man's entire journey is about him eschewing his old ways and becoming selfless. Beyond this, they've done a good job of making less one dimensional villians lately.

And yes, there are fights and super powers. Lots of them. People like action and mysticism, and they always will. That doesn't make them dumb, get over it.

An actual superhero universe would be much closer to Amazon's The Boys, I would argue.

I agree, but why do you think that matters? "Fantasy" is a genre for a reason. We don't always need or want 'realistic' interpretations.

There was no mention of realism in your comment. You argued that we should be emphasizing other traits in these movies, and I argue that we already are.

That's basically Spider-Man's usual character arc.

I can't imagine worrying about Alan Moore's (or Scorsese's) narrow opinions when choosing entertainment.

For one thing, I think Moore is clearly wrong about what adults typically get out of superhero movies. I think it's entertainment, and not some kind of deeper emotional experience.

Put it this way: if people generally need movies for meaningful emotional experiences, there are some profound problems in our society that goes far beyond cinema.

It really is OK, and not a sign of some deficiency, that people are making and enjoying well-made, epic action/fantasy films.

Anyway, when I see something like this:

> He says superheroes are written and drawn by people who've never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them - saying they appear "to be largely employed as cowardice compensators".

I think he's really struggling with understanding the perspective of people who don't see the world or think of it the way he does.

I think it is a "deeper emotional experience". But I'm skeptical that this is anything new.

Today we (or at least me and Alan Moore) look back at the 60s and 70s and think "wow a movie like Easy Rider was a hit. How times have changed". Maybe. But maybe we just remember the hits from 40 years ago that were actually good. And maybe 40 years from now we'll remember a handful of good movies made today that did well in the box office but we'll forget all the junk.

Part of me does think that big movies today are essentially philistine. But it's also true that movies are cheaper to make than ever. And plenty of wonderful movies are being made, so I find myself unable to get too sad about our situation. There's more interesting movies coming out than I have time to watch, so if I was complaining, I'd be complaining that "other people don't have the same taste as me," which seems childish.

> Put it this way: if people generally need movies for meaningful emotional experiences, there are some profound problems in our society that goes far beyond cinema.

I think you're deeply wrong. People experience "meaningful emotional experiences" via narrative, fictional or not. This has always been the case and there's no reason to assume it will ever not be the case. Movies are just another narrative form.

This is the same guy who claimed The Watchmen could never be made into a film; "could only work in a comic" were his actual words. I thought the movie, while not great, deep, or even a top-twenty-superhero film, was a fantastic rendition of the graphic novel. He still refuses to have anything to do with that legacy, and that's fine. I'm not looking to Alan Moore for film reviews or really, any commentary on modern society.

There's no timelier follow up to Alan Moore's stance on superhero culture than Damon Lindelof's Watchmen which is currently in the middle of its first (and likely only) season run on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/watchmen

It's not only a high-flying feat of television writing, acting, and directing. It's something Moore will likely never endorse or even see (he's apparently denounced any adaptation/continuation of his work) and yet embodies the spirit of Watchmen better than anything I've ever seen in the genre.

Lindelof and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin records an hourlong podcast (https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/watchmen-listen-to-official-pod...) for HBO talking about the genesis of show, its relationship with the Zach Snyder movie (respect for the form, detachment from the execution and alterations), and the very subject of this BBC piece: people who wear masks to enact vigilante justice are and should be concerning.

The parallels between 1985 and 2019 malaise, worldwide unrest, and that awful feeling that something's not quite right with the way the world is running are incredible well capture by the show.

Whether you've read the graphic novel or not, I can't recommend watching HBO's Watchmen enough. Even if you dismiss it as an unworthy heir to Moore and Gibbon's work, you will without a doubt be blown away by the show and how impeccably crafted it is.

For detail-hungry folks, the show's writing staff is release ancillary material that expands on the world (re)building within the show at https://www.hbo.com/peteypedia. Obviously don't read this before you watch each specific episode.

PS: I found the premise of the Amazon's The Boys interesting but beyond some impressive sequences and shocking twists, the show's writing is a bit too cynically shallow for its own good. There's not much commentary beyond the rottenness of (almost) every character in the show and that ends up feeling a little too much of one-note throughout the whole season.

Also - the music in Watchmen is incredible and really sets the tone.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross definitely deliver the goods. It kind of baffles me how little I see this show discussed.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/trent-reznor-a...

> I can't recommend watching HBO's Watchmen enough.

Fair warning though: Damon Lindelof is responsible for Lost and The Leftovers, which had notoriously unsatisfying conclusions. Some of the plot arcs are starting to terminate with actual plot movement, so there is hope that the season might achieve some form of closure. If this show finishes after one season and succeeds in telling a coherent story, I will be surprised.

You shouldn't be. The show was explicitly designed to be self-contained in a single season and satisfyingly tie loose ends.

I recommend Alan Sepinwall's Rolling Stone piece on the show if you can't take my word for it. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-reviews/watchmen-hbo-revi...

I don't think most people who've watched The Leftovers would agree that it had an unsatisfying conclusion but, yes, you could argue that every single event in the show wasn't clearly explained or that ambiguity remained concerning one important disagreement on the course of events towards the end of the show. This ambiguity, in my mind, is precisely what made the emotional conclusion of the show so great.

Unlike Lost, which resulted in a brazen (and IMO tone deaf) cop-out with many more loose ends left either unresolved or haphazardly resolved in a way that seemed to avoid popular (and better) fan theories. I think a few people throughout the years have posted accounts of people who were on the writing staff of Lost saying "they were just making it up as they went along" as if that's somehow a shameful thing to do. Some of the best writing (especially for TV) isn't constructed with a clear ending scaffold in mind but rather iterated on to allow for believable character evolution and movement in the direction of the plot.

The Leftovers was Lindelof's redemption song. And I think he's earned back the trust required to give Watchmen a serious consideration. More importantly, if you listen to him talk about how the show came about, you'll see a much more mature writer who has learned to rely on a diverse team of writers who challenge him away from some of the problematic instincts he showcased on Lost. It really feels like a musician who's slowly honed their craft after years of being a popular hothead and no longer plays to show off how clever they are but instead to deliver a tight emotionally resonating set.

Well, I suppose I should say thanks that an actual auteur of the genre has finally said this. Should a regular person make the same point (although not as articulately), they'd be shushed by the "let people enjoy things" industrial complex.

I would have no issue with superhero movies if we lived in the pre-Spiderman (2002) world where comic book franchise products co-existed with other types of cinema compared to dwarfing them in terms of budget and release frequency.

That development has sucked all of the oxygen and funding out of other types of films, and has poisoned the well to the extent where studios are too risk-averse to put money behind anything other than a spinoff or reboot of something that already has name recognition.

Admittedly, this is Martin Scorsese instead of Moore, but....

> It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.

I'm in my late 40s, and I teared up when during the death scene in the most recent movie. And again during the scene with his daughter, talking about burgers. If I had been watching it at home alone, I would probably have been outright crying, thinking about how I miss my own father.

Just because the movies don't speak to everyone doesn't mean they don't speak to anyone. I feel like there's an awful lot of people out there that think they're better than everyone else because they're more limited in what they can understand. That seems backwards.

I'm right beside you. It spoke to me due to experiences, emotions, and fears about my own responsibilities I didn't have as a teenager.

Romanoff and Banner.

Stark and Peter Parker.

Thanos and Gamorra.

Gamorra and Nebula.

There are plenty of interesting relationships there.

I find the non-romantic relationships to be far more interesting. Romanoff and Captain America, for instance. Male-female friendships on screen are rare, especially when both the man and woman are attractive and the woman fills the "temptress" role outside of the friendship.

None of my examples are romantic. Notwithstanding a Stark ‘hide the Zuchini’ gag, that’s not how I read their relationship.

I'm a person within the superhero demo who has seen a couple of Marvel movies recommended to me, and have not connected to them at all.

That being said, they certainly mean a lot to a lot of people, and it elicits a feeling they seek out, which is enough to call it art in my books.

I may not enjoy the films, but I'll always be interested in getting to know why people feel as strongly as they do about it, instead of dismissing it because it isn't mutual.

EDIT: This is more relevant re: the Scorsese quote. Alan Moore obviously hasn't discounted them as art.

Bad cinema can (and arguably must) stimulate the emotions, but I don't think that is what Scorsese is trying to get across here.

The marvel movies or whatever may stimulate emotions in us, but they do so primarily by dramatizing conditions which are so universal that we can all identify with them. That has limited artistic potential.

The critical phrase in Scorcese's quote, up there, is "to another human being". Literally almost anyone with a dead father misses their father. You aren't learning anything about the human condition by being reminded of the fact that you loved him. Being so reminded isn't bad by any means, or valueless. These movies help us process our emotions and live in the world.

But they aren't necessarily doing the hard artistic work of carrying you into the mind of someone else whose experiences, desires, pains, might be quite different than your own. They definitely aren't doing the artistic work of offering serious critique of the world.

These films are definitely escapists. I don't think Alan Moore is against escapism. I think he is worried by its total domination as a cultural form.

Where is it stated that relatability and universality are lesser artistic qualities?

I would argue that universality isn't an artistic quality because it's the exact opposite of individual expression. Art can be universal but something that's intended to be universal is rarely impactful or expressive enough to be art.

Art is meant to stoke and provoke thought and discussion. It's pointless if it only evokes passive agreement.

Edit: To clarify, I disagree that the Marvel films are not art or cinema.

If all important experiences were universal then communication would be superfluous, if not, in some sense, impossible.

We don't need to do much work to explain what we all experience. There is no virtuosity of the obvious. Communicating those things we don't share is the province of skill and a particular kind of value not present in the immediate and universal.

That sounds like you agree with me, though...

My point is that art is meant to share the non-universal experiences. Art can be universal but not everything universal can be art.

I'm not advocating for any sort of prescriptive definition of art, obviously. There are certainly lots of ways to talk about art, and in many respects the Marvel movies meet the definition.

But just as it would be absurd to be totalitarian about the definition art, it would be absurd to suggest that The Avengers 12 or whatever is identical to, for instance, Cinema Paradiso, and that there isn't something in the latter film that is missing from the former.

From there its not a leap to ask broader questions about what sorts of films dominate popular culture and whether that state of affairs is good or not.

This is a discussion of art, and thus the human condition. We're unlikely to find anything like a concrete conclusion. But its note futile either.

He isn't suggesting that the movies don't reliably make people feel things. He's questioning to what end are these feelings being evoked, and the absence of other probings amidst those archetypal evocations.

A hallmark commercial can also evoke loss and make people cry, but that doesn't mean it's more than a commercial or that its only motive isn't broad emotional manipulation employed to sell product.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Didn't tear up per se, but they are extremely well executed movies. The characters mostly have a distinct character arc (except for Captain Marvel), and their actions follow their character development. Weaving so many movies and so many characters together into a cohesive story line is an impressive feat. Some of the choices seem obvious now, but were really risky. Like a sci-fi movie featuring a talking racoon and a walking tree. (Closest I got to a tearing-up moment was when Starlord's mom gives him the mix tape.)

Ending Infinity War with Thanos triumphant rivals "Luke I am your father" as the emotional twist to a major blockbuster movie. (Even knowing from the comics what was going to happen, it was still a weird emotional state walking out of the theater after that.)

I think the reason the success of the Marvel movies was so universal was because even people not normally interested in comic book stories still recognized they are executed so well.

You are being emotionally manipulated to feel. That's all cinema, really. That doesn't, on its own, make it high or low-brow (and I'm not ascribing a good or bad quality to this emotional manipulation). What makes art Art is conveying a profound aspect of the human condition. A recognition superseding the mundane.

"But I just want a good yarn, there's nothing wrong with that," you protest. OK, fine but at some point, preferably not right at the moment of your death, you ought to challenge the conditioned mind you've been born and raised into because otherwise we find ourselves living out the story that we've been living since the dawn of humanity. It's this story that rapes the earth and covets possession.

Art should challenge. That can happen at any age. These two dimensional superheroes duking it out with transparent villains don't do much more than the manipulating.

By that logic portraits aren't art.

Portraits are meant to capture the essence of a person and the challenge is to think about who/what that person is rather than yourself.

What is the Mona Lisa challenging? Michelangelo's David was never challenging, but it's very much art. You're moving the goalpost.

Looking up art: "the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."

That right there is what they felt. Some art challenges, some art doesn't, but if it makes you feel or is beautiful it's art.

I fundamentally disagree with this definition of art, "consensus" as it may be. It's OK as an application to the field of "making art" but as an M.F.A. I see artists in this form of purely aesthetic/emotional production all over and it's not in service of what I see as its real weapon: the challenge to the viewer.

I can't say I'm challenged in my corner of art by the Mona Lisa or David so I won't speak to it. How about Ad Reinhardt's "Black Square", an obsessive pursuit of the pure object, the Thingness of the Thing stripped of the heart? Or how about Detroit techno that Jeff Mills described as "architecture" (you mean music can be architecture, can this be real?) and makes immanent that other artist Wagner when Godfrey says to Parsifal, "here my son time turns into space"?

That's the shit right there. That's the stuff that blows open your head and lets the good stuff come rolling in. That's worth fighting for.

Like I said, just because some art challenges, but not all art does. Some of it is just beauty and emotion for beauty or emotions sake. Some it was just art for a paycheque. Just because it's not your cup of tea doesn't mean you should discount is as not being art. I find "Black Square" neither invoking of emotion, nor of beauty, it doesn't appeal to me nor does it challenge me in the slightest, it feels far more pretentious than artistic, it seems of an intensely low effort and it says nothing at all about the human condition, but I won't discount it just because I don't understand why it speaks to you.

And I disagree with the beauty or emotion product labeled as art. It's not art. That's what I'm saying.

Fair enough. If we can't agree that Michelangelo's David is art, there's really no room for agreement.

I actually enjoy anti-hero series such as "The Boys" which runs counter to the MCU

I enjoyed The Boys too. That being said, part of why I watch super movies/shows is to enjoy the escape, to see people being ... more. I can see people being assholes anywhere, so a story that focuses around that needs to be significantly better than one that doesn't for me to enjoy it.

I enjoyed that show quite a bit. It's fun to see supers w/ both light & dark sides.

I haven't watched the show, but as I remember it, the light side was pretty much absent from the comics. I assume they heavily deviated from the comics?

I'll know when its gone too far when they make "Crossed" into a TV series.

If you enjoyed The Karate Kid when you were younger, I would recommend Cobra Kai. It's a very good expression of the idea that everyone is the hero of their own story; everyone thinks they're the good guy, and yet everyone is a jerk in their own special way.

I think this is more the kind of thing Moore is criticizing.

Is "The Boys" really deep and insightful look at human nature, or just continuing to indulge in material meant for kids with more violence and nudity to make you feel more grown up while watching it?

I love comic books by the way. But it's meant as simple escapist pleasure where you know at the end the good guys win. Making them anti-heroes and upping the "transgressive" content while keeping all hte other tropes doesn't automatically make it deep art.

Was “the boys” meant to be any of those things? I found it entertaining and well done, who cares about categorizing the people in tights

If anything it is a satire on the trope and that’s it

I like the anti-hero in tights trope, it makes them more grounded

The new recruit going through with sexual harassment while being praised by her family and fans for being recruited? Wanting to be mad but also being a sexual being?

There is no grand lesson just a story, one relatable to a broadening audience

I watched it just after reading "7 habits of highly effective people". The entire time I watched I was critiquing the characters

1. They all lied, all the time, in different ways 2. There is zero trust between anyone. 3. I don't recall any female nudity (perhaps I've become more numb to it?) There was male nudity. 4. Even the "good guys" are terrible people. No one likes them, they are just as big of jerks as the "Heros". Main Character has PTSD from Episode One and it only gets worse (due to his own choices and actions).

It goes to the opposite extreme running the a basic premise of "everyone is a person", everyone has faults, everyone has needs.

The "best moral character" is perhaps Starlight, and she's abused, co-dependent on her mother, and struggling to come to terms with her new job requirements asking her to lie and confronting childhood beliefs and cultures (homophobia, premarital sex). In the show thus far: no one has dealt with their baggage. No one's trying to in a health way (The Deep might be an exception as he's seen talking with a Therapist, but he's far from "good").

Without having read the comics: I'm not sure the "good" guys win. The protagonist wins. The "factually right" guy wins. But even that has yet to happen in the show.

Something that continues to haunt my dreams on the popularity of "anti-heroes" kind of stuff (in particular the Punisher) and some scary cultural implications and resonances is this amazing graphic essay...

https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/

It is terrifying. And definitely related to the cultural meanings of the current obsession with superheroes of various sorts that Moore is talking about.

Wow. Thank you for linking to this. As an army brat I can relate to the transitions in the post-Vietnam Army to first Gulf War ( when dad finished his 20 ). He always felt that we should have kept some level of conscription, if only to ensure that folks from all walks of life ( including our political leaders ) were exposed and could influence military culture.

That's a pile of extremely poorly-supported claims strung together with only the occasional, vague gesture in the direction of facts.

If you have not read it and don't mind reading, I'd like to direct you to Worm: https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

People with powers have their behavior explained, the good guys are far from perfect. The world is a dark place, dead protagonists stay dead (and it's not the worse which can happen) and the cause of the powers is explained. This kind of take on superheroes make the Marvel and DC universes bland.

I'm about 72% of the way through so far, and I'm really digging it. I was a bad person and converted it to ePub so that I could read it on my Kindle. I should send Wildbow some love with Paypal, given the sheer number of hours of entertainment I've received so far.

Seconded! Also, the criticism in this article about lack of diversity doesn't apply very much to Worm (and its sequel, Ward).

To give some examples -- one of the protagonists of Ward is gay, as are two of the antagonists. One of the protagonists is trans. One is black. Two are Hispanic. One of the side characters (a hero) is a recovering homophobe. Another side character is a white supremacist who's trying to turn over a new leaf.

One of the main villain groups in Worm are white supremacists -- and one of the heroes is a kid who leaves that life. Two of the protagonist villains (brother and sister) are black. There's a lesbian couple -- one a hero, one a rogue/villain. There's a character who I think would be called genderqueer? One of the protagonists is asexual.

It sounds like a lot, but there's a huge cast of characters, and it never felt tacked-on to me.

And so much of the story is about really, really traumatic stuff. It's really dark, sometimes horrifying, sometimes tragic, sometimes awesome, and overall really gripping. It's sort of ruined mainstream superhero media for me -- it seems so flat and predictable in comparison.

Highly recommended.

One half of the lesbian couple is of Arab descent as well. That part of her, as far as I have read, is only important with respect to her backstory / trigger event and helps the reader understand her behavior and actions better.

I often cite Worm as being one of the largest factors in my abandonment of the conventional Marvel/DC movies. They're so stale and ill-conceived by comparison.

Something I've noticed in recent superhero movies is the idea that:

* For all the talk about "heart", superheroes are extraordinary by some aspect the rest of us can't expect to get

* Yet supervillains are often just normal people who got too pissed off. The villains in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Spider Man: Far From Home, Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man, etc are just people that got ticked off.

We have to count on others to be superheroes, but we're all one bad day from becoming supervillains.

Co-opting Thor as a superhero was a clear commentary by the writers on how superheros and theism are intertwined. The most popular supers of our cultural imagination are Jehovah, Muhammad, Buddha, et al. So this is no sort of new phenomenon, but a secular reinvention of an ancient one. Apparently there is a deep psychological need for the great Father or Mother, and superheros are a way that modern markets attempt to fulfill it. Or to sedate it.

Moore is spot on here, IMO, but there's another dimension in which our current mass obsession with kid's characters is embarrassing: the comic books that make it to the big screen are far from representative of what's available.

I started collecting comics ironically a few years ago. I was watching "The Big Bang Theory" and had the thought that I should go buy comic books as a kind of joke. I started going to the local comic book store each week after work on new comics day and dropping ~$50 on 10-12 books.

It didn't take me long to realize that comic books today are among the most awesome and mind-blowing stories and art being published in any medium. (I mean, the Internet et. al. has more, but you know what I mean: in physical form the story and art has been reified into something particular and special. A comic book is a physical event. Even the serial nature of the format is part of it. It's just now quite the same to read a graphic novel or a web comic. I don't mean to disparage those formats, I'm just lauding comic books here-and-now.)

They have really become an art form far beyond the stereotypical superhero in tights and a cape. (Which is not to say that there are some comics out there that treat the whole super-beings idea in rich and fascinating ways!)

Comic books are going through a new Golden Age right now. Go to your local comic book store and ask them about it.

Funny that the most durable stories of all time (Gilgamesh, Greek Myths, Norse Myths, the Bible) are all basically superhero stories.

Mythology has served various purposes over the course of human history. This is referring specifically to modern superhero culture which may be derived from mythology but isn't comparable to it.

Maybe we've just replaced gods with fictional stories? I think the two can still be talked about (HBO is making American Gods about mythology as written and updated by Neil Gaiman)

Ok so persuade us - that's a very big statement to make there

religion != entertainment

Depends.

The first two seasons of Pretty Cure looked like religious education to me.

The first season was about Shinto and the second about Confucianism. The series systematically worked through about how you would feel about your place, your town, nature, the people around you, history, work, community, etc.

That statement is not as obvious as it seems at first.

Cinema in particular is way more similar to temple sermons than it seems at first.

"Not comparable" is the favorite phrase of the snob. Roger Ebert thinks that video games are "not comparable" to movies. Scorsese thinks the movies he make that mine negative stereotypes of Italian-Americans are "not comparable" to superhero movies. (Funny how you find so many Italian-Americans working construction jobs but not so many making films...)

There was a "making of" feature in the 1960s Marvel Comics where Stan Lee was talking on the phone and said "How can he say it was a cheesy story? I ripped it off from the best classic I could find!"

Similarly it's just as fair to say that Shakespeare was like Joss Whedon than the converse.

This is an important insight. Modern superheroes are gods to a society that has largely forsaken organized religion. Not only that, but they borrow symbolism and myths wholesale from older religions to establish their credibility. Case in point: Thor. He's incredibly cool in the Marvel Universe, but was a huge dick according to the Norse myths.

I find Moore's criticisms a little odd. Imo part of what has made Moore's work so notable is that it turns the genre sideways, or obviously deals with subjects in a much more mature way than an audience is used to seeing. The subversion doesn't work if there's nothing to undermine.

There's things like The Killing Joke that are sort of things unto themselves, but I feel without the context of 'normal' superhero stuff, you lose quite a bit of the venom in like Watchmen or like The Boys (although it's Ennis, they're in the same realm).

But I can admit some sympathy with what they may be getting at indirectly, perhaps there's a risk it draws in too much talent. There's the Banksy quote "The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists."

It feels a bit self-aggrandizing, but instead of just criticizing people and the stuff they make, ask where the talent is going, and is that a good development?

Superheroes are so...conservative. Nothing ever changes. If you want to change the game then you're probably the villain, who is to be stopped by the superheroes, who don't really have a plan themselves.

Batman has huge wealth and advanced technologies and the best way he can come up with to fight crimes is beating the "criminals" up himself, rather than contributing his power to improve the economy (or run for an office to change policies or whatever) to prevent people from having to commit crimes. No wonder there're always more crimes for Batman to fight...

This criticism seems similar to the criticisms that Bill Maher has leveled in the past (of course Moore has much more understanding of the culture).

They both are based on the premise that we must live our entire lives focused on cultural and political issues. That it's somewhat shameful to take a break and rest your mind on something comfortable.

It's the atheist equivalent of many religion's focus on suffering as being a virtue. By visiting pleasant worlds in our mind we are not spending enough time focused on progress.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy. People are obsessed with super heroes because they are hopeless and helpless to change the society and move forward due to the large forces in society holding us back that can only be changed with collective action. But no collective action happens because, at least in America, people expect one person to rise up and fix everything, to "save the world," as it would be. This is as impossible in the real world as the concept of "saving the world" itself is stupid, childish, selfish, grandiose, and ultimately beyond delusional.

Why does the world need saving all the time? It's been going on for millions of years (human populated world) or billions of years (the whole universe) without ever needing saving. Maybe instead of waiting for Superman to come fix our healthcare or inequality or climate or insert any other modern problem, we should try to do something about it ourselves together. Unfortunately, these movies standardize the idea that people working together cannot achieve anything and only super heroes alone or in small groups can. That's completely delusional, the opposite of reality. And this mindset has become the cornerstone of our real society feeding the helplessness that leads to hopelessness that leads to hoping to be "saved" by imaginary children's stories.

They aren't meant to be anything more than a quick thrill. They are literally the equivalent of a theme park ride and that's the whole point. Contrary to popular belief not everything you do in life needs to be mind blowing and life changing. Sometimes you just need to sit back and enjoy the ride.

"Life is a playground or nothing." -Jaco Van Dormael

I also think that the everyday super hero, for all purposes is not available in movies any more.

What happened to movies like Volcano or Speed?

Event Films. Even Fast & The Furious are basically low-powered superhero films. We want deeper dramas (so TV) and the price of buy-in for films is pretty damn high. Plus, you need to appeal to US, China, and maybe Europe. High powered stuff works better. Horror seems surprisingly resilient, but that might be the nature of going to a theater.

I'm sure the trend will switch again, but I have doubts that some genres will ever return to movie theaters in mass.

Lots of people have been exposed to Watchmen - his book about masks (vigilantes, no more "super" powered than the hero of any Hollywood movie they won't die if shot but they can't fly), but he'd also by that point written Miracleman - which is about supers (whose identity may not even be a secret, since they are to varying extent god-like and it hardly matters). In both cases Moore covered all the ground popular culture still thinks is radical and interesting today and went beyond it - thirty years ago.

Miracleman in particular has a lot of stuff about abuse of power, the title character has been brain-washed basically by the government, so as to have a tame superhero who can be sent out to do whatever they want. Once he is free and understands what's going on he doesn't beat up muggers, or even corrupt politicians, he destroys _capitalism_ and remakes the whole world as a utopia. Moore was done with the book at that point.

And so here we are in 2019 and people haven't moved on to even where Moore was in the 1980s, that's got to be fairly frustrating.

I enjoy deep philosophical exploratory stuff and at the same time love the quick respite that a movie like John Wick or a X-men provides. To each his own.

I love the current superhero movies. I'd be worried about this backlash from people like Moore and Scorsese if it wasn't for the fact that these movies are pulling in around a billion dollars on average. Disney is in it for the money and as long as the movies are pulling in the $ they will keep making them.

There isn't much difference between superheroes and Disney protagonists: inherent and unearned talents followed by lying and abuse of them and then finished up with their (usually powerless) friends reminding them how special they are which fills their egos enough to defeat the antagonist.

Was he asked about James Bond movies?

Agree, Marvel characters are narcissistic elitists that in every movie seems as if they like destroying civilian cities for things that they caused themselves. The MCU movies are overdone but Disney knows that it’s like crack for kids and teenagers.

The MCU format is also acceptable in China. That's what really matters the most to Disney.

My heroes are folks like Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. I think that any time someone takes entertainment too seriously, they've missed the whole point.

Actually I'd argue modern superhero culture is a rebuttal to the kind of ponderous dreck Moore and the rest of the British invasion put out. A reaction against the constant need to politicize and comment on a genre as opposed to simply explore it.

Sort of the reason why Manga is so popular is that it doesn't focus heavily on political themes; My Hero Academia is really just about the superheroes.

I tried to get into Watchman and I couldn't...found it too embarrassing. I do get what he wanted to do through the story but the dresses and die dialogues are as cringe worthy as the rest of the genre.

I'm not going to defend Alan Moore, weird wizard who worships a snake god as he is, but the Watchman movie isn't his baby. He's only put his name behind the graphic novel, which you might find much less cringy.

These movies--including V--are violent power fantasies for people without agency.

This is "anime was a mistake" tier clarity on Alan Moore's behalf. Good on him!

Hollywood is self serving. Supposedly they come off as liberals, but how many superhero movies are there where the world isn’t being saved by a white, American man?

I mean - Arabs are typically terrorists or something along those lines in these movies.

We want to depict a scene shot in Mexico? Change the colors to yellowish/orangish.

Russians or East European characters? Typically mafia.

As much as many of these celebrities supposedly care about immigrants, diversity, inclusivity - how often is that shown on film? Oh right - it really isn’t unless the studios are convinced they can monetize it.

> [Marvel movies are] theme parks. It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being. --Martin Scorsese

I find so much wrong with that view. Scorsese thinks they should be "something other than cinema." Cinema is just movies. There are all kinds of flavors. I like to just tune out and enjoy the ride on some movies, and some talk to the depths of the human condition. I find lots of things relatable in the Marvel movies. Loss of loved ones, awkward social interactions, elbow jabbing at friends.

When I'm searching for something to watch, I tend to go with Rotten Tomato scores as a valuable data point. One very valuable data point is high critics score and low audience score. Critics want everything to be psychological experiences, but I think a lot of them fail to realize that some movies will ring closer to home for some vs others.

An example is Joker. Not your typical comic book movie at all. With a very limited data set, I've seen people who have experienced the kind of life that Arthur experiences in that movie and it hits too close to home. Meanwhile, others who can't conceive of that as a reality dismiss the movie. Different films speak to different people.

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