"Superhero Fatigue"

   The best time to be a musical lover was the 1940s and 50s. The genre was uniquely equipped to exhibit the capabilities of the film medium, both visually and auditorily. And for a world that had just gotten out of two back-to-back world wars, singing about a world somewhere over the rainbow just made sense. This flow of films brought about masterpieces like Singin' in the Rain, White Christmas, and The Sound of Music, films that are not only still regularly brought in modern discourse, but often feature as shorthand within pop culture interactions.

    Why would I start an essay about superhero movies by talking about musical movies? Well, partially because musicals are my jam, but mostly because the two genres have much more overlap than fans of either want to admit. Both musicals and superhero films are very spectacle-heavy, both require a lot of carefully planned choreography, both genres are the best possible way to experience Hugh Jackman, and both have historically been huge draws to the theater. Basically, musicals set the stage for the modern landscape of superhero dominance.

    For some moviegoers (well, a lot of moviegoers) this all-you-can-eat buffet is a dream come true. On the other end, you have people who blame the decline of the movie theater more on The Avengers than on the coronavirus. You either love superhero movies, or you can't wait for them to die. 

    As a reference point for my own investment in the genre, I typically only average 1 MCU film in theaters per year and didn't even see the first Avengers on the big screen. I've only seen bits and pieces from Loki and Falcon and the Winter Soldier that I catch at work when my boys have it on, but I've also seen WandaVision all the way through three times now. On the DC front, I didn't even see Man of Steel until last year, but I am the rare internet critic who actually sincerely liked Wonder Woman 1984. In short, I am not a superhero nut, but neither do I pretend to be above the superhero mania. I get that no one's really an "unbiased perspective," but for what it's worth, my take is that there's no harm in reveling in the superhero mania; neither is there any pride in shaming it. 

What is "Superhero Fatigue"?

    This term "superhero fatigue" really entered the conversation around 2014-15 when the second phase of the MCU was wrapping up. In October 2014, Robert Downey Jr was the first major celebrity to admit that there was a surplus of supers, saying, “Honestly, the whole thing is just showing the beginning signs of fraying around the edges. It’s a little bit old. Last summer there were five or seven different ones out.”

       Since then, the superhero craze has only been exacerbated. As a reference point, 2021 is offering a record of 4 new films from within the MCU in a single year, and Disney didn't even start pumping them out until July. As more supers have lined the theaters, we've seen a bajillion or so celebrities give similar assessments. Even as recently as this month, Matt Damon had thoughts on the matter. Most notable was the pronouncement of filmmaker extraordinaire Martin Scorsese that superhero movies are "not cinema." 

    “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

    After he received a butt-ton of backlash, Scorsese clarified his comments in an op-ed with the New York Times. He tried characterizing his stance as a mere difference of opinion,

    "The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself."

    Still, Scorsese's gesture falls flat in my opinion. He appears to operate from this assumption that his "personal taste" is just nobler than ours. 

    "What’s not there is revelation, mystery, or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes."

    See, it's not that he's elitist. He just thinks your movies can't be revelatory ...

    Now, a few things to note: 

    1. Martin Scorsese is a famed film director with a career spanning decades. He has directed nine best-picture nominees during that time with The Departed taking home the best picture trophy in 2007. He is one of the most oft-discussed film directors living today. He is not some internet rando just dropping his hot take. He is very well-respected in the film community and has absolutely earned the right to give his opinion on things. 

   2. There are a lot of superhero movies, and they leave little oxygen leftover for other movies, including those he makes.

    3. Scorsese is not the only person of influence to share this opinion about superheroes, or one like it. The reason I spotlight him is that he is the most high-profile person in the world of film to express this opinion, which makes him a good anchor for this conversation.

   4. People are allowed to like what they like, and not like what they don't like. I myself don't really love Taxi Driver, arguably Scorsese's most famous film. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not for me. (Don't worry, I really like King of Comedy.) It's not a sin for someone to simply not care for something popular.

So why is this kind of rhetoric so bothersome?

    In large part, because he goes out of his way to set parameters around a subject he does not care to understand. Admitting that he hasn't seen a superhero film all the way through while using his credence to deem the entire genre as "not cinema" speaks to an incuriosity that is just so thoughtless.

Big Hero 6 (2014)

    Again, my personal investment in the superhero genre isn't more than casual, but I do know what it's like to be a part of a fandom that is constantly striving to have its legitimacy recognized by the gatekeepers of pop culture. For me, that's Disney films, which like superhero movies are frequently, deliberately fenced off from conversations about "true cinema." These films are thought to be too "base" or exclusively serving capitalist ends. Avid consumers of these films are not often thought to be discerning or mindful viewers, and they are not welcomed in critical or intellectual spaces.

    These self-appointed arbiters of high art often think they are somehow safeguarding cinema by imposing these divides, but all this really breeds is animosity between the two groups. Fans of mainstream cinema are made to believe that there is no space for them in the space of more "elevated" cinema, so they elect not to participate in those circles, which closes off the opportunity for them to engage with more cerebral brands of film. Likewise, these more academic circles lose out on potential new audiences that would be enlivened by their involvement. Neither do enthusiastic consumers of mainstream film necessarily need the involvement of some detached third party to help them sort through the wheat and the tares--when a superhero movie fails, no one is more disappointed than superhero fans.

    But to answer Scorsese's claim ... 

   Are Superheroes Killing Cinema?

   When someone decries movies like Infinity War for killing movies like First Man, there is a valid concern underlying what kinds of movies are allowed to play in the box office game, and I do want to acknowledge that. The invulnerability of the superhero film can be really grating when you're a maker of small-budget cinema, or even a lover of small-budget cinema, and your movie faces an uphill climb staking out a theater to play your movie. (I'm writing this shortly after the $2 million belly-flop of Reminiscence.) 

    Jason E. Squire, a film professor at the University of Southern California, told the New York Times, “These huge franchise pictures are elbowing out midrange and lower-budget movies. It’s harder for midsize movies to get theaters in the first place, much less hold onto them long enough to build an audience.”

    I'm somewhat glib in dismantling Scorsese's comments because I find his tone incurious and condescending, but I am sympathetic to the crisis underlying his stance. The fact is that anything outside the small window represented by the superhero movie never gets its shot at the walkway. There are anomalies, but those are only becoming rarer in a post-covid landscape. (Consider as one example that the sequels to Knives Out, the rare mid-budget non-franchise megahit, only earned a theatrical release after securing a deal with Netflix.) Maybe audiences ought to be more curious with their filmgoing. But superhero films are, at worst, a symptom of the disease that is killing movie theaters, not the ailment itself. 

    Even mediocre movies like Kong vs Godzilla or Pick-a-Disney-Remake, both worse than your standard MCU flick, have a sort of safety net that comes with offering thrills that are uniquely suited for the big screen. Do I think that the folks who were running gofundme campaigns for "Endgame" to beat Avatar could have instead used that money to support a film like Lulu Wang's The Farewell? Absolutely. But the attitudes that are leaving non-franchise films out in the dust run a lot deeper than the moment's fascination with superhero movies. It has to do with audiences responding to the surge in streaming options amplified by studio wars to compete for the biggest library of titles. 

    This is also perhaps why people like Scorsese dump their frustrations on superhero movies: they're very invested in this fight, but the outcome is ultimately out of their hands. It's audiences who are continually choosing to reward studios for excessive franchising, even as they gripe about excessive franchising. (I cover the psychology of this behavior in my take on the Disney remakes.) What are people like Scorsese supposed to do? Just make better movies? Movies that audiences are just going to wait to catch on Netflix anyway? So, like anyone else with a lot of angst and no real way to be productive with it, they take out their frustration on the easiest target. 

        Audiences are rewarding studios for delivering movies straight to their doorstep, and that is worth interrogating and correcting, but this has as much to do with attitudes toward consumption in general. We could just as easily be having this fight over westerns or spy movies if those were what the public was in the mood for. The exact target isn't as problematic as the game itself. 

    Maybe rather than shaming superhero movies, and the audiences who perpetuate them, we should ask ourselves why this fascination is there to begin with and what we can learn from it.

    

Why Superheroes? 

  The concept of the superhero arguably has origins in ancient folklore, like the Greeks with their epics about Hercules and Odysseus. But the modern concept of the superhero didn't show up until the 1930s when the first Superman comics hit the shelves. 

    Superhero films have been weaving in and out of the spotlight since the late 1970s with Richard Donner's "Superman." As visual effects have advanced toward the early late 90s and 00s, they started growing more frequent with Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies and Bryan Singer's X-Men movies. But this modern influx of superhero movies that interact with one another? There's something specific about 21st century living that leaves contemporary audiences starving for superhero movies.

    Film commentators often attribute this appetite for superpowered individuals fighting against larger than life forces to an injured sense of pride Americans experienced in the wake of 9/11. Is it such a coincidence that of all the major cities in the U.S., it was New York City that the Avengers rose to defend in their first film? In her piece for Vox, Emily VanDerWerff  writes,

"They began, as with America's actual reaction to 9/11, as films about vulnerable individuals finding the strength in themselves to overcome tragedy. Then they became stories about beings and organizations with nearly infinite power that would do whatever necessary to keep the homeland safe. And now, increasingly, they are grappling with the costs of the retribution they've doled out, and the security systems they've built ...

"For instance, take 2006's Superman Returns, one of the most poetic and best films of the recent superhero boom. In it, director Bryan Singer points out, frequently, that Superman has been missing for five years. He flew off into space to visit the ruins of Krypton, his shattered home world, and then returned. Singer doesn't make direct note of it, but five years before 2006 was 2001. The implicit point is that the only way September 11 could happen in a world with Superman in it would be if he were somehow missing.

"The tone of Superman Returns is at once mournful and joyous. The film is sad that no Superman actually exists and grateful for the idea that humans have invented him to save us from imagined tragedy."

    I want to draw parallels to the social climate in which superheroes first rose to popularity and the modern superhero renaissance. Both periods of time were marked by a sense of defeat and hopelessness where America learned that it wasn't invincible. The systems in place weren't enough to keep us safe, and it seemed the only truly inexhaustible resource we had was our righteous conviction. And so, popular imagination did what it does best and crafted fantasies in which noble individuals overflowing with goodness rise to the occasion and teach a lesson to anyone who would dare question the efficacy of good old-fashioned American idealism.

    This is a truism of not just superhero movies but of movies in general that is worth repeating: films aren't made in a social vacuum. They respond to audience demands, to the hopes and fears sometimes unspoken that shape our complex inner lives. Superhero movies are dominating the field for a reason, and if we stop dismissing them long enough to consider why they're here, we might just experience ... what was that word Scorsese used ... revelation? 

Super-Héros Artistique

    At the heart of the superhero argument is the classic war between "popular art" and "high art," a somewhat misleading dichotomy that can't fully be explored in the confines of this essay. For now though, let's just abide by the assumption that, sure, a film can be either popular or intellectual. The question left hanging is whether or not films made for the masses can offer the masses anything of intellect. To that, my answer is, "why not?"

    The pushback against superhero movies specifically tends to rest on the assumption that superhero movies are literally nothing but rockets and punches. But these action-paloozas do tend to have ... a plot. All this shooting and blowing up of buildings tends to start for a reason. There stakes outside of just beating up the bad guy. And the players involved tend to have flaws, histories, motivations, and all those things we usually associate with character arcs. Throwing a dart at the board ...

     Captain America: The Winter Soldier sees Steve Rogers trying to thwart an evil organization that has infected the homeland and is conspiring to pre-emptively eradicate future threats by ending millions of lives. Solving this problem isn't just a matter of getting the biggest gun. Different parties within this film have different ideas of how to solve this problem, even within the faction of "good guys," and the characters involved will have to take some leaps of faith in order to save the day. There are stakes to this mission, not just buildings and explosive things, but principles as well. Steve is fighting to see whether America and the world at large has held onto its goodness even as so much corruption has taken root within its systems, an idea which you see typified in a very personal way to Steve as he must face off against his childhood best friend who has been brainwashed by the enemy and no longer even recognizes him. Yup. Even superhero movies understand metaphor and stuff. Who'd have thought? 

    This is all obviously dependent on the audience choosing of their own volition to engage with it in such a way, and different entries will have varying levels of success here, but in that way, superheroes only have that much more in common with the larger cinema tree as a whole.

    The word Scorsese uses, "finite," is also revealing. It dismisses the possibility of something like exploring the avoidance and self-sabotage that accompany grief through the eyes of a superhero who builds her own sitcom world to cope with the loss of her lover. I didn't think we'd be here five years ago, but the creative process is a funny thing.

       Detractors of the genre have long awaited the day where superhero movies inevitably exhaust their goodwill, but every time the genre conquers one field, it finds a new mountain to climb. It's in this field that we get critical darlings like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, a movie proving that there is a virtue to being both familiar and novel. Far from growing stale, this new wave of superhero movies has proliferated new ideas and pushed the boundaries of what this field was capable of.

    Like most films, the conflicts in superhero movies have roots in human psychology, conflicts within the human heart. It is reductive to assume that Batman and Thor are just here to punch up some bad guys and go home. What is Guardians of the Galaxy if not James Gunn trying to convey the "emotional, psychological experiences" of five criminals who, after years of abuse and disappointment, find healing by not only banding together but by collectively choosing to take active roles in their own healing, by choosing to act in the service of a higher purpose that is greater than any one of them? 

    Yes, it's an "action movie," but the action is born from thematic conflict. The displays of explosions and spaceships in Guardians of the Galaxy aren't incidental to the growth and conflict of the interstellar outlaws any more than the displays of ballet dance in Black Swan were to Natalie Portman's psychotic breakdown. When you and your friends take on the weight of the world together, there's an air of invincibility. At least, you feel like there ought to be. A film like Guardians of the Galaxy gives the viewer that space where it's okay to acknowledge that sometimes it even feels like purple glowing fireworks are going off all around you.

    Other brands of films can be, and have been, built on these same ideas of goodness, redemption and family. But you get some things with a superhero film (visual spectacle, heightened tension, Arthurian grandeur etc.) that you don't with a film like Tender Mercies. That's not to say that one is better than the other, you need to drink from both fountains to have a balanced media diet, but a film like Tender Mercies never faces the same backlash as a film like Guardians of the Galaxy.

    This isn't a blanket defense of every superhero movie that has every been made in the last fifteen years. Like every crop of movies, there are ones that work really well, and then there are learning experiences. Empty spectacle is the case in the worst superhero movies, but to diagnose the entire caseload like that is turning a blind eye. 

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

    It's deliberately overlooking not only the craftsmanship that has gone into many of these movies, which I do believe are passion projects on part of the filmmakers, but also the social conversations they've spurred. Again, societal reflection hasn't been on pause since Tony Stark rocketed onto the big screen. That kind of introspection just naturally fills whatever container it's presented with. This decade, that container is superhero movies. 

Saving the Day

On the Town (1949)

   Every decade, every time period is marked by the popular genres of its time, and nothing lasts forever. The musical mania of the mid-20th century didn't last forever--though I'm sure glad that we had it while we did--and neither will the superhero craze. The shape of our collective subconscious will eventually morph such that superhero movies won't fit in that hole anymore. Who knows where we'll go after superheroes? Maybe westerns will become our go-to for collective comfort? Maybe 2019's Cats is going to inadvertently usher in a whole new era of CGI furry nightmares. 

    I don't think this inevitable decline is something we should necessarily anticipate, nor is it something all good and true cinephiles have a responsibility to expedite. It will happen when the world is ready to move on. In its wake it will leave a fascinating oeuvre of films that future film scholars and lovers will get to dissect and, hopefully, appreciate. Maybe not in the same way they will a film like Roma, but like anything popular, superhero films are capsules of the collective subconscious, and that makes them valuable.

    I think it's possible to love superheroes a little too much (again, looking at the kids who made Endgame's box office dominance their life mission), but it's also possible to love most anything a little too much. The vitality of the cinema would be better if we could all remember to leave a little room for the mid-budget adult drama film that we were probably going to catch when it hit Netflix. At the same time, maybe it's time to stop buying into this baseless dichotomy that a person has to choose between liking a popular thing and being intellectual.

    What I would give to go back and talk to whatever newspaper columnist in the 1950s was griping about how he was just "so over musicals," and tell that fool to just enjoy it while it lasts. 

--The Professor