Spider-Man looking typically heroic, a key virtue in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As pop culture scholar Noah Berlatsky riffed in an essay for The Verge in early 2019: “Great power is used to protect the world, not revolutionise it”. There is very little of this in the Marvel universe, especially the films. For Castoriadis, the point is not simply to follow certain laws or parliamentary procedures, the point is to interrogate and reimagine the basic cultural assumptions beneath these. They steadfastly avoid what Greek-born French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis called the “political imaginary”: our power to invent new collective identities and institutions. For all their speeches about freedom and justice, these heroes almost always end up punching their way back to the global status quo. Put another way: the studio’s writers have “faith” in individuals too, and these individuals have yet to let their accountants down.Īlongside this individualism is conservatism. Which is why I can’t let them down either. And I’m happy to say that, for the most part, they haven’t let me down. Captain America summed up this cinematic approach with his own ethos in Captain America: Civil War: These fistfights or firefights can symbolise broader and deeper issues – but the symbols are used for close-up entertainment rather than wide-shot social and economic analysis. Businesses like Marvel are interested in characters thumping or blasting other characters, often while looking beautiful. Politics is about the organisation of society: who we are who our enemies are who rules whom who controls what institutions or resources. Still, the logic of superhero stories is rarely political, strictly speaking. In short: yes, there are politics in and behind Marvel’s tales. “It’s not difficult to see the common thread,” writes Alex Abad-Santos for Vox, “that superhero and other franchise movies with woman and people of colour as protagonists are regularly met by toxic trolling online.” As in Australia and the UK, many white men are furious at small but noticeable challenges to their power. Captain Marvel was also co-written and co-directed by women, while Black Panther was written and directed by African-American men. These were the first Marvel movies featuring female and black solo heroes. Similar campaigns were attempted against Black Panther. The film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, for example, reported a pre-emptive spike in “non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling” from fans unhappy about Captain Marvel. For the franchise to profit as it does, the violence has to mean something more. Still, the digital marvels are not enough to move me or to keep me returning for the next episode, in perpetuity. The studios cannot make back their production and advertising costs – perhaps more than half a billion US dollars (A$746 million) in this case – with a quiet seminar on Aristotle or Confucius. There must be explosions and cosmic ripples and glowing pulses and beings turning to dust and so on. The protagonists must sprint faster than cars, punch through walls, swing off buildings, shoot rockets from their shoulders. And again, as my children and I saw it together. I confess that, for all my weary cynicism, I was moved as I watched this scene. Instead of punching or shooting at each other, the two superheroes look into one another’s eyes - and touch. After three years of conveniently aggressive animosity, these Avengers are once again allies.
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