"Neoliberal Superheroes"

It has long seemed to me that the superhero's popularity today is primarily a cinematic phenomenon, and that the superhero's stature as king of the box office has more to do with the need of film studios for splashy action-packed sci-fi spectacle with salable brand names attached than anything really to do with the narrative or thematic content of superhero stories.

Of course, that is not to say that the narrative and thematic content of those films is meaningless. Quite the contrary, I do think that those films reflect significant tendencies within contemporary culture as a great deal of the analysis demonstrates quite successfully (with, to cite but one piece, Keith Spencer's piece in Salon sufficiently impressive on that score to raise my opinion of that web site a notch, at a moment when my opinion of the great majority of media outlets has been plummeting).

Most of this comment stresses the right-wing tendency of the superhero genre (e.g. its affirmation of defense of the status quo by an elite using force as good), and in particular the neoliberal character of its more recent incarnations (in its ultra-individualism, its imbibing of the "Silicon Valley" mythology about technology even in the depiction of places like Wakanda, etc.).

However, as with so much else of what we get from the media (the entertainment media as well as the news media) all this seems to me to say much more about the values of the elite who get to make movies, and set the tenor for contemporary culture more broadly (which has been resolutely neoliberal in our times), than these ideas necessarily having all that much purchase with the public--precisely because of the way in which it experiences action films, as casually enjoyed, highly disposable spectacles received at a neurological rather than dramatic level (while taking rather less interest in the form in those media where story, character, theme would mean more--like the comic books from which these characters hail).