No Heroes Left In Hollywood
It was a long, long time ago…
A kid walks into a cinema, holding their parent’s hand. The smell of fresh popcorn immediately hits as they pass the entrance and get their tickets. The excitement is hard to describe, that kid isn’t about to watch a movie, they’re about to experience it in the flesh.
Do you remember that feeling at all? As we grow older, the sense of wonder leaves us behind, we become a little colder and a tad more rational. We distinctly and easily differentiate the events on the screen (which even looks smaller than before) from real life, we know we’re watching a farce conjured explicitly for our entertainment. But we forget about what cinema meant to us as kids we once were. To a child, old enough to go into a movie theatre without crying halfway through the screening, a movie is an experience in a major way. The screen towers over them like a giant and for about 2 hours it becomes their reality. Whatever the screen says goes and the images they see there leave their mark inside them forever.
We currently live in a period of time in which Superheroes have become the zeitgeist, they’re somewhere at the core of our modern consumer culture, but the word “hero” has in itself lost most of its meaning. The term “Superhero” has perhaps never been more prevalent and used in such loose manner, there are so many of them now that I think people have completely forgotten what the word even means. What is a hero anyways? What does that represent?
To me the answer to those questions should be a simple one: A hero is a person that does the right thing no matter the cost, therefore a Superhero should be the exact same thing but on a grander scale. When a common man risks his life to run into a fiery building and rescue someone from burning alive inside, that man is a real hero. Should a Superhero not make us feel that same kind of awe? Has any spandex wearing clown in the current Marvel/DC lineup performed any such act of true bravery, compassion or even just responsibility?
When I look at the current state of the super genre I can’t help but ask myself these questions, it’s hard not to. I’ve seen my fair share at this point and I’m not sure it makes any sense to continue calling them superheroes; truly they ought to prove they’re regular heroes in the first place. They all seem to fall into a certain archetype of a cocky, awkward and or otherwise maladjusted manchild; the kind of character that bemoans and evades their responsibility to basically anything that surrounds them. Narcissistic to the core, this new line of so called Supes make a mockery out of the word “Hero”.
You might wonder, dear reader, why I chose to go on this long winded rant just now. Where is all this coming from? Well, I recently had the absolute disgrace of watching “Spider-Man: Far From Home”, their latest addition to the franchise and I was honestly appalled; this certainly has to be their most insufferable attempt yet. Peter Parker is back and hasn’t aged a day, that is physically and mentally it seems, as despite his constant engagement in the kind of high-risk battles you’d expect a Supe like him to be involved in he remains unchanged in his whimsical, childish and borderline mentally challenged approach to his new Super-life.
Just look at him, look at this his face…
As I mentioned before, there’s actions we universally understand as heroic due to their toll on the person that takes them. For example, a person that risks their own life to save you from being hit by a bus can be said to have performed a truly heroic action. The same, however, cannot be said of Peter Parker using technology handed to him by fellow Super-mentor Iron Man to call a drone strike on a school bus full of students simply because he’s horny and, again, quite possibly mentally deficient. There is simply not a single truly heroic action done in the entirety of the movie; every action Peter takes to help or save people is done merely as a consequence of his own pathetic mistakes (mistakes which I may add will remind anyone growing up late 90s/early 2000s of the type of hijinks done by Dan Schneider’s characters). A lot of this you’re meant to shrug off as him being “just a kid” but in my opinion there’s quite a difference between being young and stupid to behaving like a complete, unforgivable tool.
Allow me then for a moment, to compare this absolute joke of a movie to one that tells the story of an actual SuperHERO. Back in 2002 Sony Pictures released a movie that would spawn a trilogy with such success that it would eventually lead to this saturation of the genre we know today. Directed by Sam Raimi, Spider-Man was the first heartfelt portrait of a Superhero to come out of Hollywood. Back in the day, and I’m talking way back now to the 70s and all the way to the 90s, Superhero movies were incredibly rare; only two major series come up when you think about those days and those would be Superman and Batman.
Christopher Reeve as Superman in the late 70s
Both Superman and Batman were in their own regard treated with a certain amount of care or respect; plenty of people remember them fondly for their flashy cinematic pieces that became iconic of their characters. However, to me they have both always been missing something crucial, a human element to which the viewer can hold on to; both characters happen to be so unique in their own way that they barely seem human. On the one hand you have Superman, someone who’s virtually invincible and hails from outer space, his experience of the world surrounding him is something no human would be able to fully understand. Batman in turn is shown to us as an incredibly meticulous man, a complete loner by choice, filthy rich, super intelligent and someone who chose the path of being a hero by night, like some form of vengeful ninja. Whoever felt identified with that description please raise your hand… anyone?
Yes, there have been superhero movies done before and they were good in their own rights, but it wasn’t until Raimi’s take on Spider-Man that the audience was able to truly connect with what I would consider the perfect example of what it means to be a Superhero. Peter Parker is presented to us a vulnerable and fragile human being that is unexpectedly granted an immense responsibility he wasn’t prepared for and probably didn’t want. We see him commit a grave mistake by rejecting said responsibility and paying a very steep price as a consequence; Peter’s life is one of constant sacrifice. We see him grow however, into a real hero, someone who makes the decision of putting his own needs aside for those of the people around him, time and time again.
In the first movie we witness Peter’s ego and selfishness unleash a series of events culminating in a terrible tragedy that marks him for the rest of his life and at the end we see him push the love of his life away, the one thing he truly wanted, to symbolize the sacrifice of his desires for the sake of his duties as a true hero.
Two years later, the sequel makes its way into theatres; this is in my opinion the one true masterpiece of the whole Superhero genre. It’s clear from the first installment in the series that Raimi is pouring his heart out on these; there’s a clear vision leading the characters and their motivations, fleshing out their interactions, providing them a soul, establishing the stakes and choreographing exciting stunts and fights (this is, at the end of the day, an action movie). But even more so than in the first film, Raimi chooses to focus heavily on Peter’s inner turmoil; this is not just a movie about having superpowers and kicking ass, it’s a story about what it means to be.
In Spider-Man 2 we meet Peter Parker now trying his best to fend for himself, working those dead end “wagie” jobs to try to make ends meet and living on his own in one of those classic NYC Housing Authority nightmare buildings; he’s late on his rent and has to accept monetary assistance from his aunt who, it’s made very clear, is going through her own financial hardships herself as she no longer has her husband by her side. This in and of itself is already a situation which a lot of us can relate to on some level; no one is safe from the struggle of life and Peter’s struggle is very real. This makes it easier for us to connect with him, root for him and cheer him on as he makes his way through; his success is our success and Spider-Man’s victory over evil is in turn humanity’s victory as well.
To add to the chaos of his life, Peter has to juggle his subsistence with his “job” as a hero which makes everything twice as hard for him; we see this in the very first scene of the film as Raimi shows us the sad and unglamorous side of being Super. His personal life and aspirations are constantly being put in jeopardy by his higher duties to the people of the city and this takes a major toll on him, such that he has started to slowly become weary, disillusioned and doubt now clouds his mind. Just like any other person at some point in their lives, Peter has lost his way and in this troubled state of mind has made a fateful decision: to reject the path given to him and stop being a superhero. This has an immediate effect on him as we see him suddenly enjoying life again, feeling carefree and fulfilled. But the moral question remains. Is this not a betrayal of your values? We all know what the right thing to do is, whatever the situation we’re in the answer is always in the back of our minds but we’re usually misled by our stubbornness of wanting the world to be perfect when in reality it can never be.
In Spider-Man 2 Peter not only goes through a journey of being lost then finding himself again, but Raimi also delivers message on our divine purpose. I’m not saying this is a religious film, but Raimi’s story talks to us in a way about the ultimate sacrifice. In this story Spider-Man isn’t simply fighting off evil to save lives; once he comes back with spirits renewed, our tight-clothed hero goes so far as to sacrifice his own body in order to save the people of NY. Giving himself completely to his values, he stops a moving train with nothing but his arms, legs and spiderweb, ending up in a visual parallel to Christ’s crucifixion. His duty to protect the city and whatever harm this may mean for himself, that is the cross he must bear. However, Raimi believes in the human spirit, and as such he reminds us that Spider-Man’s cross is not his to bear alone for we see that as soon as he sacrifices himself for his people they in turn show they are willing to reciprocate. The hopeful tone of the movie serves to remind us that it’s our actions that turn us into heroes, not our clothes or abilities; being a hero has nothing to do with how flashy your attacks and transformations are, and this is truly a movie about heroes.
Having gone on for too long this time, I would like to add these closing thoughts if you allow me. As newer generations of children are born every day, with minds like clay, moldable, vulnerable and susceptible to all these different forms of media available today. Should the focus of these super stories not be deliver a well thought out message on the importance of our responsibilities to ourselves and others as human beings? It is often said by people who can’t really find words in their vocabulary to properly express themselves, that there are things that have Soul and those that don’t, and while I often prefer to avoid using this type of rhetoric when I’m trying to make a point I must say that in this situation it is perfectly fitting. Sam Raimi has imprinted his films with a quality that can certainly be fairly described as a soul. They are above all, human at their core. It already speaks volumes the way he treats his characters as if they were real, showing us optimistically that just because we think someone’s an asshole it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re evil or even bad and yet there’s so much more to take in. Just compare: Raimi’s theme for Spider-Man is based on the beautiful Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy, on the other hand MCU-Man has no discernible theme and his movies are simply sprinkled with a bunch of horribly tacky pop music that is so old only the 30 year old Peter Pans in the audience will recognize it and applaud it. A painfully clear case of a work of love full of soul pitted against a market-researched, committee approved and soulless product made entirely to be sold, consumed and discarded but never to be appreciated.
Based NYC citizen helping fend off the Green Goblin:
”You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”
Thank you once more, friends, for taking the time to read my thoughts on this. I would love to hear your take on this or if you’ve got anything to add. Otherwise, I will see you next time!
