On Superheroes

I'm not a fan of superheroes.

Superheroes are very popular at the moment. I suppose it was inevitable once film production technology advanced to the point where superheroes could be represented realistically in film. Some attempts were made in the 70s, 80s and 90s to bring superheroes, until then represented only in comics, to film and television screens. But with the technology of the day they weren't particularly successful, except perhaps in animated form.

Enter the CGI revolution. With cost-effective photorealistic CGI, all sorts of previously-impossible visuals could be brought to the live-action screen. And superhero movies, if you will pardon the expression, took off.

I have always had something of an aversion to the things that everybody else likes. I'm not entirely sure where that came from, but for all my life that I can remember, I have avoided many of those things that are extremely popular. I never listened to the same music as my peers. I never hung out with the popular people in school. I didn't play sport. I have never even been particularly interested in following sport. It has always seemed to me that the extremely popular was synonymous with the trashy, the lowest-common-denominator, the mass-market. I felt myself above all that.

When the big-budget, live-action superhero movies hit popular culture, this natural aversion kicked in. They were popular, therefore I wasn't interested in them. That being said…

Did you ever notice that the entire superhero genre is based on the idea that some people are just inherently better than other people? A superhero, by definition, can perform feats that other people just aren't capable of. Superman can fly. Spiderman is ridiculously agile. Batman is…

Ah. Now we come to Batman, who is by far my least favourite superhero of them all. Batman's superpower is that he is rich. He is usually described as one of the wealthiest businessmen on the planet. Yet he is able to take time from his busy schedule overseeing Wayne Industries (running a multibillion dollar business doesn't tend to give normal people much leisure time) to extrajudicially beat up bad guys at night with gadgets that he can afford because he has more money than anyone else.

Anyway. The superhero genre is inherently classist. Those people who either are born with, or who somehow acquire through chance or accident (never by their own efforts), special powers are a cut above the huddled masses, and are either afflicted with megalomania or self-sacrificing altruism. The battles between the former and the latter make up the large part of the stories of the genre.

Now, I know that the genre is somewhat self-aware. One of the superhero franchises that I actually like a little bit is the X-Men, and one of the reasons that I like it is that it has addressed the class division between ordinary humans and Homo Superior. It has gone directly into the social, political and financial consequences of having a whole new class of people with special abilities running around the planet wreaking havoc. Similarly, Spiderman gets into trouble with the law fairly regularly and he is not well-regarded by the authorities. There are probably other superheroes similarly affected but I've never got into them so I don't really know.

I still have a plan to watch Deadpool at some point, because I understand it to be about the most self-aware superhero movie of them all, to the point of absurdity. That appeals to me, kind of. It isn't high on my list of priorities of things to do, but I'll watch it at some point.

Someone once quipped that I don't like superhero movies except for the ones I've seen. I have to admit, there is a certain amount of truth in that. Modern superhero movies (the good ones, at least) are generally well-made and well-written. They're good movies. My personal dislike of the genre does not mean that the movies are objectively bad. I just have an opinion that differs from what is apparently a large number of moviegoers.

Superhero movies aren't going away. I don't watch a lot of movies anyway, so this is no-one's problem but my own, and I don't consider it to be much of a problem, really. I mean, no-one's forcing me to watch them, are they?