OF SHAPING OF THE AUDIENCE'S ETHOS

OF SHAPING OF THE AUDIENCE'S ETHOS

We are living at the time, (pass Avengers End Game) where superheroes are acting like clowns, when they’re supposed to be the peak archetype of human character to look up for. If superheroes could not take themselves seriously on the big screen, how do they expect the viewers to?

There is a saying, a hero is as good as a villain. Meaning to make a great superhero character, you need an equally great villain. I grew up with classic mainstream villain that represent clear stake and threat, and where the superhero is the saviour.

At the start of Ironman 3 with the appearance of the threat of The Mandarin in Act 1 serve a serious threat to Ironman and the US government. To me Ben Kingsley pulled it off brilliantly with his threatening lines, after he hacked the Presidents handphone and assassinate one of the US officials on live TV,
“So run away, hide, kiss your children goodbye. Because nothing, not your army, not your red, white, and blue attack dog, can save you. I'll see you soon.”

Watching that scene on the big screen back then gave me the chills. I wondered how Ironman would deal with that threat. But they turned The Mandarin around as a comic relief and all the threat was fake! That was a hugely missed opportunity and I felt that I was being fooled. The mainstream Hollywood are not serious about their villains anymore. The writing on Thanos was lazy and using the ‘deus ex machina’ element of time travel to came back form defeat and finally beat him. This lame and lazy writing has been normalised to the modern audience just for ticket collection and that fan’s populist wish for the grandiose finale. And guess what, now they’re back again in desperation. The masculine superhero archetypes is making a comeback in droves after their goofy superheroes trope does not work.

Time will tell if this will work or not. But taken from many classical example from movies back then, film and story should have an ending and it is ok for the heroes to die, unlike in comics which are episodic in nature, The MCU Avengers already had all those. But its the rampant capitalist desperation and greed drove them to cancel the ending and go at it one more time. If its not the sign of a creatively bankrupt industry, I do not know what is. There should be a clear origin, conflict, climax, and resolution. There’s no breaking of the fourth wall, self-referencing, or narrative fragmentation. (But James Gunn’s Superman aware that we are in the Metamodernist era of cinema. One example is with the scene where teeth-bouncing-over-the-4th-wall.)

The attached photo is taken from the cover of 1996 DC Comics Kingdom Come. The visual pose of the main character itself shows command, power and most of all, maturity. Depicted through the visual principle of symmetry to symbolise balance and order, control and authority. 1978 Superman syncs with the post-modernist America which was the epitome of cinema and civilization as a whole. Superman is portrayed as a clear-cut symbol of good, embodying truth, justice, and the American way. There’s no irony, no ambiguity—he is a modernist hero in the traditional mold.

The same character 40 years post that version should have moved further up his own character arc, facing a tougher challenges and dilemma, like the one faced by the Kingdom Come’s Superman. Not another reboot. The ‘gestalt’ in James Gunn Superman screams immaturity and helplessness. In the new Supergirl trailer, the newspaper front cover of Superman has even been pissed on by a dog.

It is a bad sign that as a civilisation, we are not moving forward, despite the advancement in technology. Our portrayal of a superhero should have brought us the idea of growing and maturing up. Superman was the inspired by Nietzsche’s post-enlightenment and pre-modernism idea of Ubermensch, which literally means Superman. Cinema should play the role of shaping the ethos of the population. Who would the new generation of audience look up to as a role model? Mainstream cinema is on a deadly loop of reboots and more into feeding the numbification of the modern audience senses.

Perhaps it is true that a great story of heroism comes from those who went through conflict and turn them into a metaphor - like J.R.R Tolkien from his WWI experience. The return of Steve Rogers might be another example of a classical hero who has a clear moral code. An archetype from the conflict of WWII. In a world where the leaders acting like cartoon characters, the audience long for something in their cinematic escapism - a hero.

As I wrote in my previous post,
“This is where we are now as a civilization. Trapped in a vicious cycle of Kitsch and failed Pastiche. Toy-collector daddies are still stuck at Luke’s Lightsabers and TIE-Fighters. Also in Jules Leotard’s underwear-on-the-outside superheroes while we should already be reading the connotation instead of the denotation and moving forward. Grow further as a civilization. Not just of the spectacle but also of the substance.”

p/s: masculinity has nothing to do with the gender of the superhero.