Not everyone has to like same thing

Marvel Studios' CAPTAIN MARVEL, starring Brie Larson (Photo: Chuck Zlotnick..©Marvel Studios 2019)
Marvel Studios' CAPTAIN MARVEL, starring Brie Larson (Photo: Chuck Zlotnick..©Marvel Studios 2019)

The sturm und drang over the recent release of Captain Marvel highlights a familiarly depressing cycle of empty-headed opinions, rebuttals, rejections, trolling, and the kind of misery-inducing chaos that always ensues when a piece of pop culture has been tossed into the bubbling acid bath of the culture wars.

We are at the depressingly predictable point in this political cyclone fire where both sides quickly sluice and duce the narrative to fit their own thesis statement. So, too, is the fate of every pop culture epoch at this juncture of American history: Nothing can be released on its own merits, it has to choose one side or the other, and be ready to be attacked on all fronts in the process. This is true of relatively benign fare, so when a major-studio film comes out from one of the most profit-engineered genres in history, with full publicity machinations set to 11, and actually has the audacity to feature a woman as the power-laden lead, you can put on lockdown what will come next.

So intense was the invective against Captain Marvel, a Marvel Comics Universe film, at last, about a female superhero — one whose power is such that she might well turn the tide in next month's Avengers: Endgame extravaganza — that negative "reviews" and comments started piling up over at Rotten Tomatoes weeks before it had ever screened for a general audience, causing Rotten Tomatoes to finally halt the madness and disengage the site's pre-review ability (a functionality, it must be said, that seems pretty asinine in the first place) in order for the film to at least get a chance to be seen before being eviscerated by a thousands of outraged fanboys and mess-stirring trolls on the strength of their wounded preconceptions.

Playing into this faction's greatest outrage, a purported demand by star Brie Larson that she only be interviewed by nonwhite-male journalists (none of which the least bit true: All Larson ever said was she wanted her press events to be particularly inclusive of writers from underrepresented populations), which only "proved" to the already fuming misogynist fans their greatest fears realized.

Unfortunately, for those MCU fans who lean hard on the alt-right platform, I have even worse news for you: The very concept of superheroes sacrificing themselves to the greater good of the oppressed represents a perfectly socialist construct.

Remember, the O.G. himself, Superman, was first introduced in 1938, on the tail end of the Great Depression, where FDR had called upon the country to embrace the Socialist-tinted New Deal, enacting programs to help support the underclasses, and providing jobs for thousands of people, under the auspices of a caring government. Supes, with his array of enhanced talents, came to Earth from a distant planet, and was raised by God-fearing Midwestern surrogate parents to help the weak and defenseless, a mantra he has followed ever since.

Similarly powered human beings who use their extraordinary abilities to enhance their own wealth and power — i.e. what capitalism would most certainly dictate — tend to go by a different moniker: Supervillains. Every hero in a cape, singlet, or web, more or less follows Superman's ethos, using his or her powers to the betterment of people at his or her own personal sacrifice, all for the greater good.

In fact, the one true capitalist in the MCU gallery, Tony Stark, learns from painful personal experience in the course of becoming Iron Man, that his previous exploitation of war for personal profit was dead wrong. The film's emotional arc has him seeing the light and seeking ways to use his fantastic wealth to help make wrong things right. Ditto, Bruce Wayne, for those clinging to the DC Comics Universe. It is only when they realize the error of their capitalist ways that they actually become heroes (although, to be fair, Bats is a bit more esoteric on the topic of his wealth).

Alas, we have no such enhanced beings walking among us — and if we did, woe betide them in the social media age — but we can think of wealth and influence as a sort of superpower, a means to help people in need, selflessly supporting the downtrodden masses. Since getting married, Bill Gates has used some of his vast fortune to truly help humanity, ditto with other billionaire philanthropists like Warren Buffet. In this way, it's pretty clear that the heroes we so revere in the comics, are admirable precisely because of their negation of capitalist principles. Despite misogynist comic fans' collective wailing about forced diversity and progressiveness with their entertainment fare, the genre platform itself had a left-centric ethos baked in from the start.

Make no mistake, there is no greater capitalist representative than Disney, owner of the MCU (and about 90 percent of all entertainment it feels like at this point). They didn't make Captain Marvel to be socially conscious, they made it to make bank, exactly their thinking behind last year's Black Panther, which was the highest grossing film of the year. Any societal good that comes out of their films is merely a happy side effect of their being made in the first place.

In truth, studios don't have a ton of choice. Play it safe, keeping a franchise entry to the most obvious greatest hits and you end up with Solo, yet another Disney property, one of the few movies ever released under the Star Wars auspices to be considered a financial failure; stick your neck out and attempt something new and different, and you might get Rian Johnson's unfairly ripped The Last Jedi, and risk the strangled invective of the fanboy coalition, a force every bit as disruptive and organized as the bloody Tea Party was in the 2010 midterm campaign, ignored at a studio's peril.

With the financial success of Marvel, however, it continues the trend we've seen over the last few years. After the sterling Wonder Woman (and, as with last summer's smash hit Crazy Rich Asians), studios are coming around to the idea that films don't have to appeal to everyone, they can speak to anyone, trolls be damned.

Style on 03/22/2019

Upcoming Events