The Breitbart doctrine states that politics is downstream from culture: change the culture, and you change the politics. If you agree, you will also agree that modern cinema was a gift to Donald Trump and his white supremacists. He began in television — he was, I joke, the apprentice — but his possibilities were cinematic.
Cinema is America’s native culture. It was glorious, but not recently; it has been eroded to a series of franchises, particularly Marvel’s the Avengers, which has, over 23 films, raised $23 billion. Avengers Endgame is the highest-grossing film in history and, apart from the fact that it features an alien enemy and brightly-coloured superheroes, I couldn’t tell you anything about it, and I watched it. Except that I suspect the American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer loved it.
The modern superhero film was born from the disaster film. This is important. America loves disaster films, which play out its endings, like a child imagining itself dead for the pleasure of knowing it isn’t. It is a game it plays with itself, and it’s an old game: space aliens in the 1950s; animals and technology in the 1970s; climate disaster in the 1990s, before it became too imminent to enjoy.
Then the disaster film became the superhero film. The semi-ordinary protagonist — the American everyman, flawed, generic but essentially sane — retired. He was too adult for the infantilised viewer to identify with. He was replaced by a relic from the mid 20th century — the superhero. Now there is nothing else to admire on screen, except wizards perhaps, but they are old, and Jedi knights, and they are space aliens. Modern cinematic heroes are defiantly inhuman. If that feels self-hating, and incurious — there is no finding here, there is not even any seeking — it is.
But there is always peril. That is the first principle of disaster cinema. You are in danger from vast, uncontrollable events that require vast and violent solutions because searching for your real enemy — yourself — is less exciting. The second principle is more important still: the protector in this time of peril will not be, in any terms you would recognise, a heroic man. He will probably be an idiot. I wonder if cinema persuaded the credulous in America that it needed Donald Trump, and if it also persuaded the less credulous in America that it needn’t really fear him. The threat on the screen isn’t real. Perhaps Trump isn’t either.
The superhero is made exceptional by tragedy: Batman (bereavement and trauma), Iron Man (the same), Hulk (an accident at work) and Magneto, the mutant survivor of Auschwitz. The scene where Magneto raises the barbed wire of Auschwitz is typical of the genre, because it is emotionally and intellectually deadening. You feel nothing. It is nothing. I couldn’t watch the X-Men after that.
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