With my nuanced take on why capes bad, I rise above both sides :grill:
I don’t like it because it’s drivel aimed at infantalising an entire generation so they buy expensive swag that is made through slave labor and just ends up in a landfill.
What if I hate it for both reasons?
It’s mostly because libs like it and everyone hates libs
I’m fine with it being popular because it means we’ll get good Batman universe films, the only acceptable cape shit because it’s the most naked argument against it and the twizted society we live in. Beyond the ideological indoctrination I just don’t like excessive CGI. The behind the scenes footage is mostly people interacting with a circle on a blank set. That’s negatively impacting acting as an art, robbing production crew of jobs that can be easily outsourced to animation studios elsewhere, and investing a huge chunk of studio funds in films that look bad a few years later. When cape shit is mostly done with practical effects we get films like Joker where it stacks up against Martin Scorsese films.
To be honest, we need a Poison Ivy film where she does ecoterrorism, and this is portrayed as a good thing. And a trend in cape media to recognize that anyone doing anything good is defined as a villain.
Agreed. I hold Joker up because it’s all four aspects of Marx’s theory of alienation expressed through a vulnerable person in a neoliberal society that thrives on the spectacle of punishing the alienated. What happens is the obvious result of that contradiction. Even if it wasn’t written by or for Marxists, there’s a tremendous amount of agitation value there in asking how societal failures produce the monsters that attack us. The superhero side of it is forgettable enough that there wasn’t one in that film and it didn’t feel missing.
Set it in the 1980s, make it feel like the very worst of LA smog with the worst of Pittsburg water pollution. Have the climax be evocative of the Cuyahoga River Fire where a river literally burst into flames from water pollution as a backdrop, to really drive home that Ivy isn’t wrong.
Her origin story is born entirely of empathetic pain and anger. It’s a pity most writers suck at drawing that out.
The MCU is a great timeline of anti-imperialist sentiment getting recuperated and redirected to benefit imperialism. Early stuff like Iron Man 1 and early Captain America was skeptical of US hegemony because we were coming off of Bush’s presidency but now you have the white CIA agent in Africa being the hero
The first Iron Man movie had no real criticism of US hegemony. One day I’ll do an effort post on this, but in the first Iron Man they never ever ever criticize the U.S. military’s goals or motivations. The U.S. military is in the right when they bomb countries, Iron Man just thinks he can do it better. When he weeps to the press he doesn’t mention the collateral damage of local victims to US hegemony, he literally is just sad that Stark weapons got used on US troops and himself. Iron Man (the film and the character’s) only criticism of the US military is that it’s not neoliberal enough.
