GIRLBOSS TROUBLE

 This CRITICAL DRINKER video was posted to YouTube in the last week. An "Open Bar" discussion followed but didn't add anything

 much.

I've followed Critical Drinker for some years now, and though I don't agree with him on various subjects, this was one of his better rants, even with the predictable, eyeball-grabbing title of "XXX IS DEAD." In many of his videos CD repeatedly complains about the offense to verisimilitude every time a female outfights a male in a way CD doesn't like. Yet until this "Female Action Movie was Killed by the Girlboss" thing, I didn't think he was very good on the history of femme-fight movies. 

Here, however, he contrasted a lot of the female action franchises of the 2000s and 2010s prior to the rise of the girlboss, such as Resident Evil, Underworld, Lara Croft, Hunger Games and (potentially) Kill Bill. He said they were accepted by mass audiences in part because none of them were trying to usurp the place of the male action movies, which is something we began seeing with increased frequency in the late 2010s. To those franchises one might also add some above-average one-shot films like Jolie's Salt and Theron's Atomic Blonde, though the latter showed up during the flood of the girlboss flicks. The Open Bar mentions how some of the nineties movies promoted actresses who clearly didn't have any command of fake-fighting, like Halle Berry and Pam Anderson. 

I hesitate to say that any particular moviemaking craze (talking here about the crazes of the moviemakers, not the viewers) kills things dead for all time. But he made a credible case for audiences avoiding reasonably competent flicks like BALLERINA and FURIOSA because audiences got burned so many times with crapfests like BIRDS OF PREY and THE MARVELS. Of course the Disney STAR WARS films were profitable even though they did what Drinker most hated-- slotting in girlbosses in place of established heroes-- but that was before we were drowned in all the MCU dreck, as well as some DC dreck as well. The new FANTASTIC FOUR movie sounds like its makers are still infected with the girlboss disease, so we'll see if it flops and validates CD's fatigue claims. 

Now I don't think this century is the first time filmmakers have overpowered female fighters. 1974's POLICEWOMEN, despite a scene in which Sondra Currie only beats Big Big Smith thanks to judo techniques, concludes with a scene where Currie vanquishes another male hulk with several straight punches and one kick. CD gives the Asian female action films a pass, but how often did chopsockies and "girls with guns" movies show women duking it out with men the same way, and not really getting thrown by a loop by superior strength blows? Only a couple hundred times, I'd say.        

Lastly, I am aware of one still successful girlboss franchise: HBO's HARLEY QUINN show, which enjoyed five seasons so far and is allegedly getting a sixth. I watched the first three seasons and thought they were all crap except for the general quality of the animation. HQ is entirely a girlboss, and the third season even has her replace Batman in the "Bat-family" of heroes. Granted, Harley earned a degree of spinoff success before HBO, and the character still seems wildly popular with cosplayers. And the HQ cartoon has an advantage over the BIRDS OF PREY movie, since the cartoon is sort of a Liberal version of SOUTH PARK, with loads of foul language and ultraviolence. So if HQ is the only current girlboss franchise that bucks the failures of MCU movies and of streaming shows based on the STAR WARS and STAR TREK properties, it could partly be due to other factors that the pure girlboss project lacks.

MY CAPTAIN AMERICA REPLACEMENT THEORY

 To some extent the recent debut in theaters of CAPTAIN AMERICA BRAVE NEW WORLD plays into some aspects of my essays about totalitarian tokenism, beginning here-- though there are also some other aspects to consider in the response of reviewers to the controversial movie. In this essay I'm not responding to the movie itself-- which I don't plan to see until it hits DVD-- or to complaints about its narrative failures. I want to address just one subject: the question of how Captain America should have been replaced.                                                                                  

The conclusion of AVENGERS ENDGAME laid down the new dispensation: whatever the MCU's behind-the-scenes reasons for getting rid of the Steve Rogers character, as essayed by Chris Evans, Steve Rogers was written out of the Marvel Universe. I didn't think much of the idea of the MCU rather arbitrarily transferring the shield and costume of Cap to Sam "The Falcon" Wilson, and many of the reviewers I mentioned have cited reasons why they thought the replacement was badly executed. I would probably agree with most of these arguments. However, I also disagree with one of the most-cited alternatives of said reviewers: that the MCU should have put Bucky "Winter Soldier" Barnes into the star-spangled costume instead.                                                                                                         

                                                                                    


 To boil down many of the complaints about Sam Wilson to one narrative, the dominant gist seems to be that the showrunners presented no compelling reason for the Falcon to take on the Captain America mantle. What I think many if not all of them wanted was something along the lines of the "grenade scene" in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST AVENGER. In that scene, pantywaist Steve Rogers, one of many candidates for the super-soldier transformation, proves his fitness for the role through an act of imagined self-sacrifice. The logic with which AVENGER's script makes Steve' selection seem credible proved key to making Steve Rogers himself compelling to a mass audience that had no particular investment in the Rogers Cap of the comic books.                                                              

Now, the 1940s MCU version of Bucky Barnes also makes his debut in AVENGER, but that character has next to nothing in common with the juvenile sidekick of the comics. The new Bucky is a strapping young adult, a friend and contemporary to Steve, and what little the audience knows of him in that movie is that he just seems like an all-around nice guy. Also, he's able to join the army during WWII, unlike Sickly Steve. But Bucky, just as much as Sam Wilson, is given no specific connection to the American ethos, of which Steve Rogers is the embodiment, according to AVENGER's script. So if neither Bucky Barnes nor Sam Wilson was justified in terms of symbolizing that ethos, why would Bucky be any better a replacement than Sam? And these considerations don't even take in the problem that in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE WINTER SOLDIER, Bucky of the 1940s is preserved beyond his original lifespan, after which he's transformed into a brainwashed assassin with one metal arm. Call me crazy, but that personal history doesn't resonate with the ideal of Captain America any better than a Black military officer whose feelings about the United States of America are left vague, whether by design or by incompetence.                              

I personally don't want to either Falcon or Winter Soldier to assume the mantle; their characters are already set, and I don't think they can be retooled to make them resonate with audiences as Steve Rogers did. Nor do I think the current MCU can produce a new character, of any race, creed, or color, who can replace Steve Rogers. I assume that the current showrunners are married to the idea that the Rogers of the "official timeline" must go back in time and live out his life with his destined wife, so even though that outcome could be altered with the usual time-traveling BS, I don't think it will be. But now that DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE established that alternate-world versions of characters can travel to the main timeline, that means that a new Steve Rogers could still show up in the MCU, though not necessarily one played by Chris Evans, in case the MCU is too cheap to pay his price.      

THE RETURN OF THE TWO ELITISMS

 Back in 2013 I took advantage of a public debate between two comics critics, Gary Groth and Ng Suat Tong to show how both were wrong about their chosen subject (the artfulness of EC Comics) and I, of course, was right. In my essay ELICITING ELITISM I observed that although I considered both critics to be elitists (in contrast to the pluralism I practice), Tong's approach consisted of "form elitism," in that he only recognized art in terms of the form of a given work, while Groth's approach (at least in his defense of the EC comics he was re-publishing) consisted of "content elitism," in which he recognized art in a work's elements of content. This week I found a similar opposition in the public arguments of one acclaimed artist and one not-so-acclaimed performer, put on display in this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay. 

(Note: before proceeding I should note that I have not seen the MCU "Shang-Chi" film, so I have no opinion of the merits of Simu Liu's performance in that film, only of his public remarks.)

Liu's remarks respond to two interviews given by Martin Scorsese and one given by Quentin Tarantino. I don't know why Liu includes Tarantino in his screed at all, given that Liu's main complaint is about "Hollywood racism," and Tarantino has distinguished himself for having scripted strong starring and supporting roles for POC actors. Further, though Tarantino has made his share of ideological statements over the years, his comments about not wanting to be a "hired gun" for the MCU are merely practical in nature, and do not condemn the superhero genre as a whole as does the remarks of Martin Scorsese. So I'm focusing here on Scorsese's remarks, which show him to be a "form elitist."

Scorsese takes exception to the box-office dominance of Marvel films, by which he means superhero films, though he says nothing about the films of any other studio. Scorsese says:

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. 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.

The famed director's remarks spring forth as a defense of his personal tastes, and that's why they are vague at best in a critical sense. Phrases like "revelation" and "mystery" may have special meaning to Scorsese, but they mean nothing in a wider critical context. Both in this excerpt and the rest of the essay, Scorsese's main complaint is that superhero films depend on "a finite number of themes," while with the filmmakers he loves, Scorsese feels that he's going to be "taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience."

Without my defending the overall quality of 21st-century superhero films, though, I believe what Scorsese really wants are works that fit the mythos of drama, in which most of the central characters are put through rigorous tests of their beliefs or personal loyalties. In contrast, most though not all superhero works fall into the mythos of adventure, where the main purpose of each narrative is to fill the viewer with excitement and invigoration rather than the purging of one's belief-system. Even in the many botched storylines of the MCU, this potential is always present. It's certainly possible to work purgative elements into an adventure-context. In my review of the BLACK PANTHER film, I pointed how it had given shorter shrift to its dramatic elements than had the Don McGregor comics on which the film was partly based. But had Scorsese been exposed to the original "Panther's Rage" arc of the Marvel comic, I tend to think the director would not have recognized the dramatic elements therein, because they weren't as important to the story as the hero physically triumphing over his various opponents. Almost all of Martin Scorsese's work falls into the mythos of the drama, and though he probably enjoys films that fall into other mythoi, most of the filmmakers he applauds also excel in dramatic works, not those of comedy, adventure, or irony. This is what causes me to label Scorsese a "form elitist," who cannot fathom excellence apart from the form he likes best.

Scorsese's essay ends with a complaint about the "financial dominance" of the films he cannot bear to call cinema, and his case is at least strong in terms of his personal tastes, not just his own prosperity. Simu Liu's remarks, as represented in the BOUNDING essay, start and end with the philosophy that "if it's good for me, it's good."

Even if Liu had only attacked Scorsese and left out Tarantino, his vile "everything that doesn't benefit me is racist" would not be any better. Since Scorsese does not bring up racial concerns of any kind, aside from (over)praising Spike Lee, Liu's attack seems grounded in nothing more than. "Scorsese doesn't like the genre which allowed me Sam Liu to get a starring role." 

Liu also manages to talk through both sides of his mouth, praising the two directors' "filmmaking genius" but condemning them as "gatekeepers" who, unlike Woke Disney and the MCU, would never have allowed an Asian star to star in a major Hollywood film." Of course Liu also tries to link his ascension to the entire Asian-American community, to their "lived experience." The entirety of White Hollywood existed for no reason but to keep POC performers down, and any work that does the opposite, no matter how meretricious it might be, is good for possessing that racism-defying content-- making Liu a person who makes his choices on the basis on content, though calling him any sort of "elitist" is a stretch.

I acknowledge that Liu is not engaged in an intellectual discussion as were Scorsese, Groth, and Tong. Yet the ideology he represents (but certainly did not originate) has permeated much of the Hollywood business community, insofar as even hard-hearted businessmen perceive the need to virtue-signal to gain cultural approval. Indeed, though Scorsese makes no comment upon the political content of MCU superhero films-- which it's possible the director did not even notice-- the virtue-signaling aspect of those films bears much of the blame for the aesthetic failure of most modern superhero films to measure up to the comics they pretend to emulate.

OH CAPTAIN! BLACK CAPTAIN!

I stated some of my opinions of "Black Captain America" in my review of THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, but here's another take on it that I wrote for a political forum.

________

Disney/Marvel devoted a whole series to the idea that it was terrible to have a white guy be Captain America, and that having a Black Cap would be the best solution to intersectional injustices of the past.

On the contrary, though, if your vision of America is one of White guys making everyone else go to the back of the bus, then what does a Black Captain America say about that? The fantasy is that it says, "we're overcoming all the intersectional injustices by casting a Black person in this role." But it could also say, "we, Black Americans, are claiming all of the power White people accrued when they conquered this country, but we don't accept any of the guilt of those acts." 

The advantage of a White Captain is that it captures the way White Americans thought about themselves at a point in history, when they were unquestionably the dominant racial group in America. Now you can take that idea and play it straight, as most conservatives would, or you can satirize it, as liberals would. But the idea of Black Captain America doesn't lend itself to any multivalent interpretations. You either follow the Lib program of what it's supposed to mean, or you don't. 

And frankly, I liked the Falcon. He's the first Black American superhero, so why is that heritage so easy to put aside for a mere gesture of phony intersectional triumph?

ADDENDUM: And if the showrunners were really trying to sell the idea of the new Black Captain-- why didn't they entitle the series CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE WINTER SOLDIER?

DON’T GIVE A FEIGE

 

Upon completing my viewing of the FALCON AND WINTER SOLDIER streaming series, I’m moved to comment on some of the parallels between Kevin Feige, founder of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel Comics in its crucial sixties incarnation.

Stan Lee, like his mostly middle-aged colleagues at Sixties Marvel, certainly had no idea that their company would someday become a major influence on the course of American pop culture. Certainly, there could have been no thoughts of a coherent “universe” as such; early on, there would have been nothing more than the attempt to cross-promote Marvel’s various titles through the act of guest-starring appearances. That said, once the idea of an interacting universe caught the attention of the fans, Lee certainly did much to promote the idea, sometimes with minor effects, like having the Avengers consult Paste-Pot Pete on the subject of glue removal. The overall effect was playful, since comics were dominantly aimed at children.

Yet Lee made some cautious responses to fans who wanted to expatiate on heavy subjects like politics and philosophy. The ruminations of the earth-imprisoned Silver Surfer were never deep, but Lee knew how to dramatize the tone of the character’s forlorn exile from the heavens. As for politics, in the late sixties the editor apparently realized that America’s youth was trending toward liberalism. Thus he largely dumped the anti-Communist rhetoric of the early sixties—even though such rhetoric contributed to one of the better FANTASTIC FOUR stories—and he attempted, with mixed results, to write stories about hot-button issues like student protests, the Vietnam war and the Black Experience.

In one interview, Kevin Feige claims to have been far more of a film-nut than a comics-nut. Most of his professional efforts appeared in films that were “superhero-like” in some way, and unlike many pros who only dabbled in superhero films for sake of career advancement—Christopher Nolan for example—Feige seems to have intuited that he could make superheroes his specialty long before the launch of the first MCU film in 2008.

Still, when he produced IRON MAN, Feige would have known that the continuity game had proven very profitable for Marvel Comics. He would also have known that the 1980s had given birth to a new method of cross-promoting properties: the “crossover event,” sometimes involving the linked plotlines of five or six ongoing features, sometimes encompassing developments in all of a company’s titles. The first few MCU films were poised to build to a “regular crossover” insofar as the heroes of THOR, IRON MAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA and INCREDIBLE HULK would coalesce into THE AVENGERS. Managing such a crossover situation within the medium of theatrical film was arguably more involved than doing so at a comics-company. But Feige took things even farther. Starting with the second THOR film, Feige introduced the potential for a “crossover event”—one that would involve all the franchises under his control-- and he did so by drawing loosely upon one of the first such events from Marvel Comics: Jim Starlin’s “Infinity Gems” narratives.

Within the context of comics aimed largely at kids, Stan Lee was stronger at philosophy—at least insofar as he could convey philosophy through characterization—than he was at politics. Feige took the opposite course. Though he didn’t signal his full political agenda in the earliest films, over time the success of the MCU allowed him to indulge in considerable Leftist constructions—not least with the dissolution of SHIELD, whose spy-games had been of inestimable service to the Marvel Comics superheroes. But his philosophical scope never progressed beyond politically informed platitudes, and his interpretations of such Marvel favorites as Thor, Ant Man, Wasp, Black Panther and Spider-Man show a disinterest in strong characterization and a tendency to drift into inane comedy.

In conclusion, although Stan Lee and Kevin Feige both found new ways to make superheroes appealing to mass audiences beyond the sphere of kids, they diverged sharply in their strategies. Stan Lee did so by opening up the dramatic potential of superheroes, giving them all different voices and orientations. Initially Feige showed some skill with superhero dramatics in IRON MAN, which he might have learned from observing the way Sam Raimi transferred the saga of Peter Parker into his superior take on SPIDER-MAN. But over time Feige came to emulate Lee less than Jim Shooter, the Marvel editor-in-chief who launched the first “crossover events” at the company. Thus in the AVENGERS film-series a promising emotional arc, such as the romantic interaction of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch, is conveyed through by ham-fisted exposition, because the script requires far more emphasis on forcing lumps of event-oriented plot-action down the throats of the viewers. I frankly cannot guess how Feige will further monetize Marvel characters for fun and profit in the next ten years. However, it's worth remembering that Stan Lee's "golden years" petered out in the space of a little over ten years-- and he was much more creative than Feige on the latter's best day.

QUICK THOUGHTS ON STAR WARS FILMS

I posted this on a BOUNDING INTO COMICS thread--

_______

I don't dismiss the idea that [the STAR WARS producers] may've come out with "too much, too fast," but that wouldn't have been a problem if the people in charge of STAR WARS had taken as much care to keep their content (rather than just the actors) truly "diverse."

IMO a better comparison than Pixar would be the MCU, because Pixar's releases aren't part of a shared universe. I have a lot of problems with assorted MCU movies, and with Kevin Feige's take on the Marvel Universe. But I would never deny that Feige is a canny producer. He knows how to come out with three-four movies a year and not have them step on one another. Some are big and cosmic, some are smaller and more comical than cosmic. But the tone of NEW STAR WARS is all one big brown blur. I think the producers of the SW universe all trying too hard to keep the brand looking the same, and that results in a tiresome sameness.

PLAYING ON THE LINKS

I know I shouldn't trifle with referencing dopey, politically slavish BEAT-posts, but since I didn't get an answer to one of my dissenting posts, here it is.

So on this BEAT-post, "culture critic" Samantha Puc goes on for a while about how certain toilers in the MCU have cagily announced that someone in the heroic ranks is gay, but they're not quite ready to "out" him or her. I certainly hope it's the new "Captain Whose Name May Not Be Spoken," because with her there's no history to mess up. But Puc, in the course of assessing the MCU's history with LGTB stuff, cites a link labeled as "accusations of queerbaiting."

Except that it's not, you know. It's a weirdly unfocused complaint that shippers of a gay Captain America and a gay Bucky didn't get their needs satisfied by AVENGERS ENDGAME. Hello? Bueller? How does this subject relate to the Wiki definition of queerbaiting?

a marketing technique for fiction and entertainment in which creators hint at, but then not actually depict, same-sex romance.

Xena and Gabriele-- that's queerbaiting. It's obvious that during the production of the XENA series, the producers observed that a lot of fans liked the idea of the two heroines being warm for each other's form, and though the two were never stated to be lesbians, there were numerous scenes in which they were shown together in intimate situations. One transparent episode even showed another warrior-woman, Najara, attempting to "steal" Gabrielle from Xena. The signs, however submerged, were still clear.

Neither the essay to which Puc links nor anything Puc wrote supports the idea that the MCU's versions of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes are gay for each other. I'm not saying that the MCU-stewards wouldn't do so if they felt it in their interest.

But the signals are not there, and all people Puc can create is a lot of noise.

QUICK COMMENT ON JAMES GUNN'S FIRING

Here's another one of my reworked forum-posts, beginning with a quote from my favorite literary critic, Northrop Frye:

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye wrote this in the 1950s, when some intellectuals viewed bestselling authors like Mickey Spillane (who did a LOT of "brutal thrillers") as threats to the intellectual landscape. Frye is arguing that there's a "protecting wall of play" that keeps people from becoming literally infected by the mood of the lynch-mob, which, about ten years previous, Gershon Legman seriously argued was going to happen.

How does this apply to nasty jokes? I think that there's a "wall of play" in Gunn's tweet-jokes. They may not be good jokes, but he's not claiming that he attacked some kid after watching THE EXPENDABLES (one of the more coherent jokes), he's talking about how the movie made him feel "manly" enough to do it-- which I would bet he didn't *really* believe back in the day.

The gist of your post seems to imply that if a real rape-victim read Gunn's jokes, or jokes like them, they would feel terrible to see their trauma trifled with. But if it's a joke, it's NOT REAL. I can't tell a real victim how to deal with trauma, but their pain is not coming from a joke, it's coming from a real act of violence.  Gunn's tweet-jokes are not to my taste, but I have seen black-humor jokes I found funny. Yet no matter where you go, you can find someone, somewhere, who's offended by any joke. 

Black humor is part of our culture, and maybe of every culture, even if some cultures don't want to admit it. I can understand why some people conflate the joke about something bad with the act that actually is bad. But I can't agree with the conflation.

INFINITELY REGRESSIVE UTILITARIANISM

One of the CBR threads informed me of this VOX article discussing the interactions of utilitarian philosophy and "deonotological philosophy" in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

Frankly, I've yet to find any MCU movies, except possibly the original IRON MAN, which articulate a coherent philosophical stance. In any case, I responded to the essay twice in the CBR thread. First:

In the essay the writer associated "the greater good" with pure, unfettered utilitarianism. I think that's an overstatement, and the writer himself brings up an extreme case of real-world utilitarianism, as well as pointing out that sooner or later Thanos will just have to start killing again. It's pretty hard to regard either example as being truly "for the greater good," particularly since the result is a total acceptance of brutality as a means to an end. 

BTW, if there's one intellectually dishonest aspect of INFINITY, it's that it doesn't really specify why Thanos thinks that galactic overpopulation is a given. At least when Ra's Al Ghul excoriates the ecological chaos of Earth, it's something readers can see for themselves.

The "no-kill" policy is often framed as a preventive to unfettered utilitarianism. Sometimes the arguments in its defense are clever; sometimes not.  But the policy isn't quite as divorced from real-world consequences as the Kantian model suggests.

Second:

 I'm not convinced that utilitarianism applies to INFINITY WAR. I think it's a big weakness of the script that the heroes have access to two stones, the destruction of which will prevent Thanos from the specific goal of destroying half the people in the universe. But OK: say that in some alternate world, the heroes succeed in destroying one or both stones, whether it costs Vision his life or not. What happens then? Thanos just shrugs his shoulders and goes home? Hah, we're talking about someone who's already wiped out multiple worlds with his space-army. No, thwarted of his goal, Thanos takes revenge and obliterates Earth.

On another thread I saw someone complain that the Wakandans were being needlessly sacrificed to protect the Vision's life. I wasn't particularly fond of the "ticking clock" trope involving the Vision. But the Wakandans are not being used as cannon-fodder. It's their bloody world too, and they've just as much reason as anyone to defeat Thanos.  Suppose the movie starts out with a pure endorsement of utilitarianism: some hero who doesn't mind "trading lives" kills Vision right off, defeating his larger goal. The menace doesn't go away; Thanos just goes after the whole world, and Wakanda's isolationism doesn't help it one damn bit. So here's another case where, in contrast to the thrust of the online essay, pure utilitarianism leaves those involved no better off than they were before.

I didn't bother pointing it out on the thread, but this 1980 issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, written by Mike Barr, plays Captain America and the Punisher off one another as representatives of what might be called "enlightened vigilantism" vs. "unenlightened vigilantism," or what I called "unfettered utilitarianism."

Morally, Barr's story does set up its oppositions better than INFINITY WAR does. In this scene, the Punisher takes the utilitarian POV, referring to his ethic of treating the war on crime in terms of real war, while Captain America holds to a vision of moral compass, stating that there's a moral code that the "good guys" should advocate.

The upshot of the story is clearly in Cap's favor, particularly when it's revealed that one of the Punisher's "hits" on a big mob-meeting would have killed  not only real criminals, but also an undercover police agent. The Punisher escapes Cap and, to the best of my knowledge, rarely encounters such challenges to his utilitarian POV in his own title-- much as, in my own experience, the critics of the HOODED UTILITARIAN website rarely responded well to having their regressive ethics challenged.

I GOT THE BEAT (POST) AGAIN

Responding to this BEAT-thread:

Heidi and I will certainly never be on the same page re: the quality of the MCU movies, since for me RAGNAROK is the "self-indulgent mess" and GOTG2 at least has a coherent story and better than average set design. In fact, the design of Ego's world, with all its faux-Hindu imagery, proves Heidi's point about the benefits of loosening the purse strings far more than any of the visuals in TR. 

I don't think that even with continued success MCU movies are ever going to permit a wide number of "individual directorial visions" or whatever one calls it. There's just too much damn money at stake. You want individual visions of Ant-Man; keep watching his latest comic-book outings. Maybe Edgar Wright will guest-author an Ant Man comic and we'll all finally see just what he might've done with a movie.

Moving to BLACK PANTHER, i'm going to play prophet and predict that, no matter how good or bad the film is, it will be one of the ten films nominated for "Best Picture" next year at the Oscars. I'm hypothesizing that the Academy will look upon the film as an opportunity to disprove the brain-dead accusations of the #OscarSoWhite crowd, and that the voters will see PANTHER as a superhero flick they can nominate, in the sure and certain knowledge that it, like DJANGO UNCHAINED, will have no chance to win.

While I don't really want to devote a lot of space to justifying my comment on the #OscarSoWhite mess, I'll toss out a few extra bon mots.

I'm constitutionally against the idea of using art primarily for the purpose of political issues, and that's why I deem #OscarSoWhite to be "brain dead."

Here's the tweet that started the Net-meme in 2015:

they asked to touch my hair.

OK, the author says that this was meant as a "cheeky" putdown of a mostly white nomination list. I suppose that this is an aspect of Afro-American humor that communicates best to other Afro-Americans. Maybe it's meant to imply that persons of The Unnameable Phenotype are always going to be nothing but curiosities to white people, that white people just want to touch the hair of black people, maybe in line with the old superstition-- that IMO no one is keeping alive except people like Reign-- that touching kinky hair brings good luck.

I've read nothing in any of Reign's online interviews that suggests that she cares about the quality of films or any other artistic medium. She cares, first and foremost, about representation of racial and sexual coteries, as if this representation is a good in itself. Clearly it would never occur to her that maybe the 2015 list of nominated films might have omitted POC nominees simply because the year had been bereft of outstanding POC works. No, in any such situation, the only solution must be a racist conspiracy.

And that, in my considered opinion, is brain-dead hyper-politicized thinking.

LOWBROW, BUT HIGHLY SERIOUS

He Chaucer lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important part of their virtue.-- Matthew Arnold.

I seem to be one of the few people in the country who didn't like THOR: RAGNAROK, and found its over-dependence on jokes to be an indicator of how little the show-runners "got" the character.  However, the more I think about it, the failings of RAGNAROK may indicate even more about the problems of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as put forth by the fellow most associated with its success, studio chief Kevin Feige.

I say this with the full knowledge that Feige's version of "the Marvel Universe" is not likely to be surpassed within my lifetime. Feige clearly gets some of the key elements that made 1960s Marvel a success. Had there been no Marvel, it seems unlikely that (1) fans would have been motivated enough to create the direct market, and thus (2) mainstream comic books probably would not have survived their distributor problems of the 1970s.

Feige has reportedly called himself a "fanboy," and almost all of his cinematic credits support this assertion. Prior to 2008's IRON MAN, Feige worked in a production capacity on fourteen films, all based on superhero characters. In time he may be seen as being every bit as influential as Jim Shooter in promoting Marvel as a "superhero-first" company. And in some ways, Feige "got' Marvel better than Shooter. Feige understands three major aspects of Marvel's "Silver-Age" success;

(1) The Continuity Thing.

Stan Lee, as editor of the Marvel Line, probably had no aim beyond cross-promotion whenever he had Spider-Man try to join the Fantastic Four and the like. However, as time went on, he apparently found that continuity was not only popular with readers, it was a useful tool for a writer. For instance, in 1964's AVENGERS #4, he and Kirby whipped up a villain, Baron Zemo, who used a super-glue against two of the heroes, Giant-Man and Captain America.

How to get out of it? Well, you have the Avengers consult another expert on glue, the Human Torch's foe Paste-Pot Pete (whose face Kirby apparently forgot, making him look rather like his sometime partner the Wizard).

More importantly for the MCU, Lee also found a lot of material simply in having heroes from different milieus, and with different speech-patterns. Here's Daredevil trying to prove his "mad skills" to a certain thunder-god.

Whereas a lot of writers would have written the two characters indistinguishably, Lee understood that a thunder-god wasn't going to talk the same as a modern superhero. This discovery also led to another aspect of Lee's approach:


(2) Heroes with Problems.

For Stan Lee, this was clearly another device to draw readers into the fictional worlds of the Marvel characters, so that they would buy each and every issue of a given series, rather than just picking up random issues according to chance. But there's every indication that Lee himself became invested in the characters, as when he decided that he wanted to lay near-exclusive claim to chronicling the adventures of the Silver Surfer when the character graduated to his own series. I can't be positive that there might not have been some hard-boiled business decision behind Lee's claim, since he'd publicly admitted that Jack Kirby alone created the character. However, Lee definitely attempted some things he never attempted in other Marvel features, such as making his main character a Christ-figure.

(3) The Prevalence of Humor.

Of these three aspects of Marvel's success, this is clearly the one that Kevin Feige most emulates. Long before the rise of Marvel Comics, Lee's writing demonstrated an ability for "snappy patter" in humor comics like TESSIE THE TYPIST and MY FRIEND IRMA, and in many ways he simply translated that talent to the 1960s superhero books. However, he also made much of the humor flow from character, which had generally not been the rule for the superhero genre. Most of the Marvel features of the Silver Age were replete with a jazzy sense of humor, and even the more "serious" titles, like the aforementioned THOR, allowed for moments of whimsy, as seen with characters like "Volstagg the Magnificent."

Ironically, SILVER SURFER was possibly the only Lee-written title that boasted no humor of consequence, which may have contributed to the feature's early demise.


I believe that no fans familiar with Silver Age Marvel would dispute these three aspects as major factors in the Marvel success,but I think there's a fourth one that usually goes unacknowledged, and that is Lee's flirtations with what Arnold, in the quote above, called "high seriousness."

What Arnold meant by the phrase doesn't matter to me here, since the phrase has taken on a life of its own. In general it connotes a sense of gravitas, and is almost always applied to works of literary merit. At the time Lee made his first breakthroughs with Marvel, it's a given that the forty-something editor had no illusions about the status of comic books, no matter what he may have said later in his "bullpen bulletins." He knew that they were deemed lowbrow entertainment, and that any efforts he made to "elevate the form"-- like SILVER SURFER-- were aimed to impress fan-readers who wanted something a little different with their superhero action.

But even though Lee probably knew that he'd never be "taken seriously," he showed a talent for scenes of faux high seriousness, even within a lowbrow context. For instance, here's Thor facing the death-goddess Hela from the Mangog saga I analyzed here.

Granted, Jack Kirby staged the visuals that contribute at least fifty percent of the page's serious tone. Still, it's easy to imagine a modern writer-- say, Peter David-- trying to dialogue the same page, and missing the boat entirely. Lee's amateur experience in the theater, however limited, seems to have contributed to his sense of how to show characters both in their "light" and "heavy" moods.

My personal interpretation of Feige is that he's someone who may have read Marvel Comics like a demon, but who was into Marvel, like many readers, mainly for the jokes. The rapid-fire quips of Downey's Tony Stark read a lot more like the snappy patter of the Stan Lee persona than they do like the relatively sober-sided Stark of the comics. Feige even showed some facility with characters with a basically serious outlook, like the Evans version of Captain America, finding ways to exploit humor in other characters without hamming up the main hero.

In the first two THOR films, one can see Fighe and his collaborators trying to do something similar, keeping Thor basically serious while allowing support-characters-- in particular Kat Dennings' "Darcy"-- to provide the humor. That said, Fighe's Thor films don't really make any organized attempts at "high seriousness." The wars of the gods and the giants have no more mythic resonance than the opposing parties of a videogame, and thus it's not surprising that the figure of Hela the Death-Goddess becomes similarly over-simplified in RAGNAROK.

The only other time that Feige attempted another Marvel feature grounded in Lee's lowbrow version of high seriousness was the 2016 DOCTOR STRANGE. I've not yet been able to force myself to re-watch this artless adaptation for purposes of review. But the mere fact that it had to import some dumbed-down humor into the straight-laced STRANGE mythos in the form of the master magician's CAPE speaks volumes about the producers' inability to do anything without the support of jokes, no matter how inane. Thus I shouldn't have been surprised when THOR RAGNAROK stuck a bunch of pratfalls into the encounter of two of Stan Lee's more poker-faced characters, the thunder-god and the master of the mystic arts.

Before seeing RAGNAROK, I had numerous warnings as to how much comedy to expect, but I like to think that I kept an open mind, hoping for something no better or worse than the two GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films. But when the film started out with Thor, chained in Muspelheim and teasing info out of evil Surtur--

-- and I realized that it was just a steal from a similar scene in 2012's AVENGERS, with a bound Black Widow interrogating her captors--

-- it became clear to me that Feige's MCU is beginning to cannibalize itself, and with less interesting results that when Marvel Comics began repeating themselves so badly in the 1970s.