Heroism is missing from superhero movies

In the last few years, I have grown to despise modern comic book characters, superhero movies, and animation series. The Dark Knight series was good. The Mandalorian is good. A couple of Iron Mans and Ant Mans were okay. Everything else was predictable and pathetic. Perhaps this was assisted by the physiological reality that I am older, which naturally helps. Perhaps this was because there’s nothing new and everything is woke, including comic characters quite literally with names like Snowflake and Safespace. But most importantly, it's because the stories turned predictable.

My disastrous experiment to be “inspired” during a quarantine I gave in to temptation, and watched a couple of latest superhero flicks. It was a mistake.

As if in a Sophoclean tragedy, where even superior men are helplessly destined to commit completely preventable mistakes, after a weeklong quarantine level of Tyrion Lannister imitation, stubble and copious amount of wine included, I decided to be “inspired,” and watch a couple of latest superhero flicks, Bloodshot, and Birds of Prey, to ease my ennui. I shouldn’t have and I have only myself to blame. It was a mistake.

Bloodshot starts with the character of Vin Diesel, a Navy Seal, or a Delta Force or something, returning from a trip, from a lane which might be geographically anywhere between Afghanistan and Tunisia, where he kills a hostage-taker slash terrorist mastermind, by an incredible feat of martial athleticism. Fair enough. I actually always liked Vin Diesel before he got famous, and Pitch Black, and (the original) Triple X remain underrated classics.

Then our hero goes to Italy with his fiancée, where the market scenes are enough to give anyone mild palpitation, given the Coronavirus news, where they are trapped and murdered. Interestingly, the man was “brought back” from death, with the help of nanobots, thereby giving him the requisite superpower.

Long story short, this one is however as awful as it can get, with a predictable plotline, of a protagonist betrayed and used as a weapon, by power-hungry futuristic techno-freaks who erased his mind and created memory loops, with different changing targets. Of course, our “hero” understands what is going on, and is helped by a high IQ genius who acts like a grime artist, but who can also figure out genetic coding, as well as the design of nanobots, in a matter of minutes; and a frail 80 lbs heroine (shero?), who can easily dispose of groups of trained killers and bodyguards, all of whom weigh 190 lbs on an average, in hand to hand combat. She also has a moral composure, and heart of gold. And there are scintillating and witty one-liners like “you can’t control me forever” and “you know nothing about men like me”.

Stoic that I am, I persevered with the torture, this time with Birds of Prey, unofficially known as the Harley Quinn the movie, which has not one, but four sheroes. A police officer, who’s obviously pushed around by the patriarchy and turns to a life of crime, a helpless down on luck singer with the ethics of a saint and a voice which cracks bones, a vengeful killer spawn of a former murdered crime boss, and our protagonist, a savant-level psychiatrist who’s also a criminal, and with a penchant for some serious overacting.

Four of them team together to save one juvenile perp, also a female, who is hiding some ill-gotten stuff, and instead of doing their civic duty, they team up to save this kid, from an army of men, with predictable result. That is, obviously, the army of men were vanquished, and the kid pushed to what one can guess a life of crime and notoriety. Moral of the story, there is no objective good, and you can always be an outright criminal and punk, and anything psychologically stunted, abnormal, and deviant is something to be actively emulated, as long as you can couch it up in revolutionary feminist terminology.

Imagine, a person, who is a combination of the student protesters of Evergreen college, and severe porn-addict onanists to the point of mental delirium, and then consider them to be the HG Wells of our generation, writing plotlines for the consumption of impressionable brains. The adults are barely functional. Every single character’s emotional, verbal and intellectual range is that of a preteen. No one has any composure or fortitude. Virtues like civic duty, personal responsibility, sacrifice and patriotism are all considered “reactionary”.

Modern comic books and superhero movies still aspire, at the end of the day, to be good over evil morality tales. There’s nothing wrong in that. All mediocre tales nudge you to take sides, and comic books are the most mediocre forms of art. Humans are not evolved enough to be completely amoral and Vulcan, which in itself is a Wildean tragedy. But, despite all that, unlike the silver age comic books, or even the various series I grew up watching in the 1980s and 1990s, the modern ones are a bizarro rendition of morality, as perceived by emotionally stunted, psychologically repressed, deeply damaged id of man-children refusing to grow up.

It is a pop-culture which has replaced virtues and resilience of true heroism, with slogans found in a second-year college women’s studies module. Their flaws are not that they are not pushing you to be good, which ideally any children’s literature should do, but that they are pushing you to be what in this case, the freakish plot-writers consider good, which, in itself is bizarre, abnormal and freakish. There’s nothing worse than what we consider “heroic” in contemporary pop-culture, because almost nothing in them are bold or brave in the true sense of the terms, but are some of the most banal pastiches of pseudo-intellectualism. I hate all the faux-existentialism in contemporary comic book culture.

I should have stuck with Camus during a pandemic, which is perhaps far less depressing.