Daniel Bessner and the "Bad Writing" on the Marvel Cinematic Universe's latest

A year ago the press subjected us to quite a bit of drivel about various studio blockbusters suffering because they did not have "good writers"--as if those running the studios backing $300 million productions said "You know what? Let's get the not-good writers for this impossible task of making this umpteenth sequel to a long stale franchise that nobody ever asked for palatable to the public."

It was as stupid as it was shabby, the more in as with a writer's strike on it looked the more obviously like the cheap worker-bashing by bosses it obviously was, but the various figures who made such remarks in the press would not stop offering such comment, even extending it to other artists (as with Robert Iger's all too characteristically foolish crack about "unsupervised directors").

Reading Daniel Bessner's extraordinary article in Harper's about the lot of the writer in neoliberal, post-Great Recession, post-COVID, post-strike Hollywood makes it all the clearer just how illegitimate such nonsense is, given that, again, the studios have robbed the writers of their scope to do their jobs, with Marvel at the absolute forefront of the process. (Thus has Marvel brought the TV-type "writer's room" into film-making, and at the same time, expected writers to write whole seasons of shows without letting them know what the ending is supposed to be because the executives want to hold on to the maximum latitude to generate crappy spin-offs--and then blamed the writers for the failings of the material.)

For those seriously interested in the subject, and interested in the reality of the situation rather than the claqueurs' praises, the piece seems to me essential reading.

Merchandising and the Bottom Line for Today's Movies: Estimating Profitability

It has long been the case that merchandising has been crucial to the revenue stream for Hollywood films for a long time--for so long that many seeing Spaceballs over the years must have been unclear on just why Mel Brooks so pointedly raised the issue in that film. (The reason is that Star Wars was the watershed here.)

In its calculations Deadline has income from merchandising accounting for over a fifth of the revenue for PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie (which made the #10 spot in its Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023 tournament). Indeed, the publication's analyst Anthony D'Alessandro notes that merchandising was decisive where profitability was concerned, and indeed the film "greenlit" here because of this.

This is a more common story than one might think--but it seems to me that taking merchandising into account here and not in the case of other films (it is not mentioned in the report on Guardians of the Galaxy 3, of the huge importance of merchandising to Marvel's profits) is distortive of the rankings this time around.

Might Profits for Movies Mean Losses for Streamers? (Or Vice-Versa?)

Reviewing the numbers Deadline offers on the most (and least) profitable movies of the year one sees a differentiation of the revenue streams for those films by type, with streaming indicated separately.

As it happens, streaming platforms are largely studio-owned--with Disney owning Disney Plus, for example. And so an important part of the revenue for Disney movies consists of Disney Plus buying the rights to stream a Disney-made movie. (As Anthony D'Alessandro explains in the item devoted to Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the $180 million Deadline reports for the revenue from streaming "includes the amount for which Disney sells the film to itself, Disney+ being the pay-one window for the studio's movies.")

In and of itself this should shock no one who has been paying attention. In the current world economy, where things like antitrust law are so often dead letters, "related-party" trade in its various forms makes up a very high proportion of the world's total trade. Indeed, of the U.S.' import-export trade in goods in 2021 and 2022 over 40 percent was represented by related-party trade of this kind. Still, as Investopedia explains, while "there are rules and standards for related-party transactions," there are conflicts of interest, and particular difficulties for auditing the transactions, with "improperly inflated earnings, even fraud" something that can--does--happen.

Thus some see such numbers, and wonder. After all, no more are Hollywood studios than the rest of the corporate world known for their impeccable accounting, or for their forthrightness about financial reality--and it is all too easy for a studio to fatten the bottom line for a movie by selling it to its streaming service at an inflated price, or should the alternative prove more desirable at the time, sell the movie at a below-market price to help out the streaming service. And if it seems to me that the entertainment press does not much interest itself in such questions (like the rest of the press they are more likely to do PR for big companies than properly cover them), I have seen in comment threads and various other fora that the "armchair movie executive" at which that press sneers do see, and doubt, far from unreasonably.

The Erosion of Movie Ticket Sales Before the Pandemic

Writing in this blog in the past I have repeatedly discussed how after the collapse of theatergoing in the 1950s and 1960s North American theatergoing stabilized at about 4-5 per capita ticket sales a year.

I made that calculation over a decade ago, and it seemed to me that the situation did not change so dramatically as to compel redoing that calculation.

Reexamining the numbers for the 2010s I am no longer convinced of that. Certainly there has been nothing so dramatic as the collapse of filmgoing when Americans became TV-watchers. Still, consider these figures for 1995-2019 as split into five year periods.*

In 1995-1999 the average was 4.4 tickets per capita per year.

In 2000-2004 it was 4.6.

In 2005-2009 it was 4.2.

So far, so good. Of course, after 2009 the figure fell below 4, but that was in the wake of the shock of the Great Recession, after which the figure got back up to about 4 in 2012, so it looked like the old pattern held up to that point, 4-5 trips a year plausibly remaining the norm. Still, 2012 proved the anomaly just a few short years on. When we take the two five-year blocks after 2009 as wholes, we find that in 2010-2014 the figure was just 3.8 tickets per capita, and if one could think of the number as depressed by the Great Recession, in 2015-2019 the figure was 3.6. Of course, even this rounds up to four, so that one could say that North Americans saw four movies theatrically a year, but that is not the same as 4 to 5, while within the 2015-2019 block one could see the decline continue, the figure hitting 3.4 in 2019--a pre-pandemic low.

The shift from 4-5 in 1995-2009 to 3-4 in 2010-2019, a slippage of one trip a year, can seem a small thing relative to the drop in the '50s and '60s from thirty per capita movie tickets a year to just four. But proportionately it is still quite a bit, a decline of a fifth or a quarter from what it had been in the early 2000s to the late 2010s.

Of course, 3.6 per capita ticket sales, or even 3.4, is now quite a bit more than the business Hollywood is doing. In 2023, which plausibly looked like the "new normal" for the industry in light of moviegoers' habits and the abundance of major releases on offer, ticket sales were more like 2.2 per capita--2 to 2.5 rather than 3 to 4, another big drop, which may not represent the end of the fall. After all, 2 to 2.5 per capita ticket sales a year still indicates a good deal more moviegoing than we see in some other advanced industrialized countries (in Germany and Japan it is more like 1-2), suggesting that still less is far from implausible, while the factors that are driving moviegoing down continue, not least competition from other sources of entertainment (why not just stay home and watch streaming?), and of course, the reality that Hollywood's model for making hits seems to be in a state of collapse, with any shift to a successful new model at best in its earliest stages--and very possibly pure fantasy in the face of the financial, technological and cultural trend.

* For the 1995-2019 calculations I derived the figures on tickets sold from the web site The Numbers, the population figures for the countries encompassed in the North American film market from the World Bank's DataBank.

"Jobs for People Who Don't Need to be Paid"

Looking at recent reports about the working conditions faced by film and TV writers, actors, musicians and other artists one thing that has come up again and again is that the severity in the deterioration of conditions for all but the superstars has made it decreasingly possible for even those who have supposedly "made it" (landed a regular role on a hit show, signed with a major label) to live from their work. One consequence is that everyone must have another source of income--"you had your . . . day jobs or you had a trust fund" as Mad Men veteran Jason Grote put it. Especially as the demands, and costs, of trying to hold down a "day job" while making a career as an artist should not be trivialized (perhaps especially in these times, when wages' purchasing power have plummeted so), those who do not need to work for such an income have an advantage, even at this level, with the result that actual working people are finding less and less opportunity to pursue such a career. The result is that if the arts have always been dominated by the privileged, it may be that in our time this is becoming appreciably more rather than less the case.

Miserable as this is for all those who have artistic aspirations who committed the crime of not being born rich, it seems quite plausible that this has played its part in the extreme remoteness of the arts from the lives of the vast majority of the population in our time--to the impoverishment of both the arts, and society at large.

"Raising Eyebrows"

I have never cared much for the journalistic cliché that some remark or act has been "raising eyebrows"--their way of conveying that said remark or act has prompted mildly disapproving surprise. Apart from the ambiguity about whose eyebrows were raised, precisely, and why (weasel words time!), there is the fact that it is so often a poor descriptor. If at times muting the reaction to something quite serious, it is much more often a matter of insufferable priggishness at some trivial breach of "the proprieties," undeserving of the respect implicit in the journalistic coverage. It seems more fitting to speak of "dropping monocles" than "raising eyebrows" in such cases.

What's Happening with Boxoffice Pro?

For quite some time I have found Boxoffice Pro's comprehensive forecasts of upcoming and recently released films' grosses and their systematic updating of great interest, especially in these times in which so many movies surprise us amid what may be historic changes in the business of film--big franchise films crashing and burning (like The Flash), or unlikely-seeming movies becoming colossal hits (like Oppenheimer), as Hollywood confronts the possible end of the high concept-dominated post-New Hollywood era.

Alas, for some weeks now the forecasting section of the site has been much reduced, with just a handful of long-range (or even weekend) forecasts appearing this past month. (Thus The Fall Guy forecast I cited has not had a single update.)

I imagine that the impoverishment of the forecasting section is a temporary situation. (After all, Boxoffice Pro is a major film industry trade publication in circulation since 1920, before "movies" became "talkies.") Still, I have no idea when things will get back to normal that way--and can only look forward to when they do so.

Daniel Bessner's New Article in Harper's

Daniel Bessner's "The Life and Death of Hollywood" is exactly what journalism ought to be but all too rarely is--a deeply informed piece of reporting that goes beyond mentioning some facts or passing on some impressions to putting together a picture of its subject and explaining how things stand to the reader with, in this case, the analysis of Hollywood's development in recent decades, especially as seen from the standpoint of its writers, benefiting greatly from its combination of critical perspective, historical background and attentiveness to contemporary economic fact.* In this piece Bessner quite rightly explains Hollywood as undergoing its own piece of the broader neoliberal turn, affecting it in the same way that it has affected the rest of America's economy and society. Just as has happened elsewhere, the convergence of deregulation (in this case, particularly the collapse of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan administration, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 under Clinton), combined with creditist monetary policy to produce an extraordinary concentration of ownership, production and market power, and a triumph of speculation and short-termism, that has had catastrophic effects for the workers involved and society at large as the game became one of "winner take all." Thus did the early '00s see a half dozen vertically integrated giants (Disney, Time Warner and the other usual suspects) "raking in more than 85 percent of all film revenue and producing more than 80 percent of American prime-time television," while the ultra-loose monetary policy Ben Bernanke ushered in enabled further concentration as a mere three asset-management companies (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) to concentrate in their hands the ownership of, well, nearly everything ("becoming the largest shareholders of 88 percent of the S&P 500"), with the media giants no exception to the pattern. (As of the end of 2023 Vanguard "owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery," while also having "substantial share[s] of Amazon and Paramount Global.") Indeed, even the talent agencies supposed to represent the writers to those companies similarly became an oligopoly of a few giants in turn owned by asset management firms.

In the wake of the reduction of film and TV production to an oligopoly owned by a few financial firms, and the inevitable ascent of a pseudo-efficiency-minded short-termist control freak mentality among studio executives, it was no accident that, in line with his cite of Shawna Kidman, the share of "franchise movies" in "studios' wide-release features" surged from 25 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2017--the age of "multistep deals" and "spec scripts" increasingly a thing of the past, exemplified by the crassness of Disney, and perhaps especially its Marvel operation, which "pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story." (Thus did the writers have to generate a whole season of scripts for WandaVision without knowing how the season was supposed to end, because the "executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show." Thus did Marvel bring the TV-style "writer's room" into filmmaking--if one calls the result filmmaking--as the TV networks replaced their writer's rooms with "mini-writer's rooms" offering those who work in them still less.) Amid the declining readiness to support the development of many ideas in the hope that one would pay off (thirty scripts to get one which might be made into a movie in the old days), amid the declining creative control and bargaining power of writers ever at a disadvantage in relation to the executives whose media courtiers celebrate them as "geniuses" (as with a Kevin Feige), amid the studios playing the old game of exploiting technological changes to contractually cut writers out of any share in the profits (in this case, streaming and its revenues, as Bessner shows through the case of Dickinson creator Alena Smith), writers lost in just about every way. Moreover, the post-pandemic economic shock has dealt them another blow as media companies that had, however exploitatively, been funding a lot of production retrenched, and all too predictably won the labor battle of 2023--at the end of which they may be said to have imposed an at best thinly veiled Carthaginian peace, with what is to come likely to be worse.

Given all that Bessner naturally declined to end his story on a note of false optimism, instead going from the "Life" to the "Death" part of his title. As he notes one could picture various palliatives helping, like government regulation of asset ownership (or indeed, mere application of antitrust law here), but all this seems unthinkable--precisely because what is happening here is so much of a piece with what is happening in all the rest of the economy, and it is all too clear how that is going. Indeed, one can picture things becoming even worse still in the fairly near term if the Hollywood executive class manages to realize its fantasies of using artificial intelligence to dispense with its workers entirely in even a small degree--or even in spite of the technology's inadequacies, simply tries and fails to do so, but destroys a lot of careers and "disrupts" the industry in all the wrong ways in the process.

* Reading Dr. Bessner's biography I found that he is not a reporter but a professor of International Studies--and cannot help wondering if that did not make all the difference for the quality of the item, especially where the avoidance of the hypocrisy of "objectivity" and the contempt for context that characterizes so much contemporary journalism are concerned.

Upton Sinclair on the Greeks

Discussing the literary legacy of the ancient Greeks in Mammonart Upton Sinclair asks just "how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art, and how much do we just pretend to admire it?" Recalling Samuel Johnson's quip about a dog walking on two legs, and how "it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all," he suggested that the conventional exaltation of the Greeks is based not on a clear-headed judgment of the poetry and drama by modern standards, next to which these works are technically crude and representative of a world-view so unacceptable to modern people that as a matter of course we can seem "in denial" about it (far from Greek art being an art "of joy and freedom," their theme was invariably "the helplessness of the human spirit in the grip of fate," and at that, a fate which destroyed them), but rather a matter of "superstition" that has been "maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket," and the snobbery to which they cater (Classicism in itself become so "leisure class" by his time as to make "Homer . . . to the British world of culture what the top-hat is to the British sartorial"). Indeed, in Sinclair's view those who (like a Matthew Arnold or William Gladstone) "write volumes of rhapsody about Homer" testify less to Homer's superlativeness as a poet than his works' accordance with their prejudices--his "ha[ving] the aristocratic point of view, and giv[ing] the aristocratic mind what it craves," namely a vision of life in which aristocrats "unrestrained in their emotions and limitless in their desires" act out and are flattered in their self-importance by seeing the gods themselves take an interest in their personal tales, all as, one might add, they generally sing conservatives' militarist, patriotic, values.

This is not to say that Sinclair contemptuously dismissed it all (let alone was in any way a promoter of the kind of "cancel culture" that today seeks to "cancel" the Classics along with so much else). If Sinclair stresses the Greek pessimism he thinks too much overlooked, he is historically-minded enough to acknowledge, as others of like ideology have done, that to the ancient mind the world easily seemed "a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces which he did not understand," and out of this "made . . . a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but mournful despair"--and not confuse all this with the "dispensation of official pessimism" in more enlightened modern times (as with the apparent "'Classical' attitude" of "pathetic and heroic" "resignation to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth" of the aforementioned Arnold), which he saw as coming from quite other sources. Indeed, for all the limitations of that ancient mind Sinclair owns to pleasure in being able to see for ourselves "the beginnings of real thinking, of mature attitudes toward life" in in their early writings, and much else besides. If Sinclair finds much in Homer ridiculous and repellent, it seemed to him that one still did find "beautiful emotion"--albeit not the ones that moved lovers of the "heroism" of an Achilles, but "the mothers and fathers, the wives of children of those heroes [who] express for them an affection of which they are unworthy." He finds much to admire in the satire of Euripedes, "jeering at militarism and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy classes." Yet, if it seems to Sinclair appropriate to qualify one's criticisms, and that the works have their worthwhile aspects, that exaltation of the Classics in the familiar way as a matter of superstition and snobbery above all else stands.

Reading Sinclair it seems to me that there is an enormous amount of truth in this statement--which, indeed, ought to be evident to anyone who actually tries looking at those writings with clear eyes, as others have done, not all of them inclined to see things his way on most issues. (The critic John Crowe Ransom, who as one of the twelve writers of the Southern Agrarian Manifesto was far, far removed from Sinclair politically, seems to me to have grasped very well, and put even more poetically and succinctly, just how remote the Greek view of life, or at least the early Greek view, was from one of "joy and freedom.") Indeed, present a professor of literature today with the hard facts of just what is in "this stuff" and you are likely to get as their answer a sort of embarrassed agreement that reminds you just how much the Canon, and indeed what we say about the Canon, is the product of timid deference to received judgment, which one is expected to, in the words of Oscar Wilde, "endure . . . as the inevitable." And so the superstition and snobbery of which Sinclair wrote significantly prevail a century on--qualified, of course, by the decreasing extent to which anyone is paying attention to the Classics or to the humanities or to culture at all.

Alex Garland's Civil War: Some of the Critics' Views

Recently remarking Alex Garland's Civil War the movie theater trade publication Boxoffice Pro characterized the film's promotion as a "bait-and-switch marketing campaign that sold opening weekend audiences on the promise of an action movie" while "delivering a bleak drama that focuses a lot more on journalism instead."

It seems to me that many would regard this as not the only piece of bait-and-switch at work in the film, or even the most important one. As Forbes' Erik Kain remarked, the movie Civil War, in the publicity for which even the "action movie" aspect was arguably less important than the prospect of a drama about American political divisions (there are lots of action movies out there, not so many political dramas with a "high concept" draw like that one), ended up not really being about those divisions, Garland studiously "avoid[ing] the politics of the day in order to tell a more universal story." Kain's view of this approach was favorable, but others have been less impressed (finding in Garland's approach less universalism or "neutrality" than thoughtlessness and evasion and maybe worse in a piece of what one critic has described as a "gutless" cinematic "both sidesism").

However, whatever one makes of it, audiences would seem to have been pulled in by the offer of one thing, and given another. This weekend's gross will likely say something about the audience's ultimate reaction to that.

The New York Times, Right-Wing Publication

Recently reading the Columbia Journalism Review's analysis of pre-2022 midterm coverage of domestic affairs by the New York Times and Washington Post I was unsurprised (indeed, confirmed in my views) when they quantitatively demonstrated those papers' preference for politics to policy, and the rarity with which anything published in them actually attempted to explain the affairs of the day to the general public.

I was more surprised by the editorial contrast between the Times and its Washington-based counterpart. The Review article found that, if both papers were more prone to attend to the issues that Republicans care most about than those Democratic voters care most about, the Times was significantly more prone to do so than the Post. By the analysts count the Times favored the Republicans' concerns by a margin of over 5 to 1 (37 to 7 pieces, respectively), as against the 4 to 3 margin seen with the Post. It is an astonishing predominance, even in comparison with that other newspaper, that can seem to bespeak the political shift of the newspaper that publishes Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, Christopher Caldwell (to say nothing of figures like Thomas Friedman).

Media Biases: A Quantitative Analysis from the Columbia Journalism Review

Some time ago I extended my analysis of political centrism to the mainstream news media and argued that much of its conduct--and in particular much of the conduct that many view as problematic--is explicable in terms of centrist ideology. This particularly included the matters of the media's preference for politics to policy, and its declining to attempt to explain complex issues to the public.

As it happens a November 2023 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review setting out the results of a quantitative examination of the pre-2022 midterm coverage of domestic affairs by the New York Times and Washington Post (from September 2022 to Election Day) was consistent with exactly that reading. The analysts found that, apart from their both emphasizing campaign "horse race and . . . palace intrigue," only a very small proportion of the items had any policy content to speak of, particularly of the explicatory type. Of 219 front page stories about domestic politics during this period in the Times, "just ten . . . explained domestic policy in any detail," while of 215 stories in the Post just four "discussed any form of policy"--working out to less than 5 percent in the former case, less than 2 percent in the latter case. Indeed, the Post did not have a single front-page story about "policies that candidates aimed to bring to the fore or legislation they intended to pursue" during that whole critical period, opting instead for speculative pieces about the candidates and "where voter bases were leaning."

Remember, these are the most respected mainstream publications--the "papers of record"--the kind of publications that many of those complaining about "fake news" tell us to attend to instead of the rest of what we are apt to see online. Considering that fact, one can only judge these publications to be themselves a considerable part of the problem with regard to the deficiencies of the public's understanding of current events--with, indeed, the preference for politics over policy and the extreme paucity of explanation just the tip of the iceberg.

What is a Superhero? An Attempt at a Definition

What is a superhero?

It does not seem unreasonable to define the term. Granted, a certain sort of person dismisses such attempts as bound to fail given that exceptions will always exist to any definition--but the existence of ambiguities does not, as such, keep definition from being a useful, in fact essential, tool for making sense of reality. (The map may not be the territory, but that does not make maps useless, no matter how much contrarians addicted to stupid epistemological nihilism natter on.)

A good starting point for such a definition is an examination of those criteria that may seem least dispensable to the conception of the superhero as we know them today--the superhero tradition as established in the comic book medium, especially from the advent of Superman forward.

1. They Must Be Both a Hero--and Super.
A superhero must obviously be a hero--a figure that does something both positive and extraordinary such as is worthy of admiration by others. Where the superhero's sort of heroism is concerned there is an expectation of service to the community of some physical kind, usually entailing courage in the face of physical danger, to save the lives of others because it is the right thing to do rather than a matter of self-interest; with such action a vocation rather than an exceptional incident. Of course, people pursue vocations that have them performing such acts--firefighters are the go-to example--but superheroes are distinguished from them in that they are super, their abilities exceeding the human norm in a way which is quantitative or qualitative or both. (Conventionally the firefighter running into a burning building must make do with "merely" human physical and mental capacities, but a superhero might be able to put out the fire with a blast of icy breath, as Superman can.)

2. They Have a Very Distinct and Very Public Persona, of which Distinct Powers, Codenames and Physical Appearances (Usually but Not Always a Function of Costuming) Tend to be a Part.
The above seems to me mostly self-explanatory. In contrast with, for example, heroes who are secret agents, who are likely to conceal their "heroic" aspect behind cover identities as they set about their work, the superhero's cover identity, their public persona, is itself heroic--and indeed advertised to the world at large, the more in as its elements include the aforementioned matters of a power, or powers, that tend to be very individualized; a similarly unique codename; and a unique appearance, usually but not always derived from a costume. (Barry Allen is a hero made a superhero by his possession of "speedster" capabilities such as even other DC superheroes tend not to have to fighting evil; is, appropriately, known as the Flash, after his speed; and wears a red costume with lightning bolt insignia, also evoking that speed. Other figures such as Marvel's The Hulk and the Thing have distinct powers and codenames, and their distinct appearance--albeit less reliant on any costume in their case.)

3. The Superhero's Activity is Highly Individualistic.
As implied by the exceptional character of the hero's capacity, and their conspicuous public persona, the conception of the superhero is individualistic in action. Consider, for example, the firefighter and secret agent both. Both figures are conventionally employees of a public agency, which pays them money to do a job in line with orders--which does not make a sense of duty irrelevant by any means, but still raises the question of the paycheck, career, etc. in ways that unavoidably give their activity a different texture. Both also rely on their organizations for their ability to do their jobs--unlikely to have equipment or other supports necessary to their hero task if they were not so employed. By contrast the superhero is ordinarily alone, answering to no one--taking no orders, and often having a complex and fraught relationship with authority (epitomized by stories in which Batman falls afoul of the law), all as what equipment they need is their own (one reason why superheroes are so often independently wealthy, as Batman or Iron Man is).

Moreover, when we see superheroes "team up," teaming up is exactly what they do--these individuals cooperating in a joint effort rather than relinquishing their identities to be good "organization" men and women. (Iron Man is first and foremost Iron Man, and never "just" an Avenger.)

Of course, much else tends to go with this. The public persona is often a way of concealing a private identity, and at least attempting to protect a private life. And of course there is apt to be the unusual origin story--for superhuman abilities, and the decision to put on a costume and fight a private war against crime or some other such evil are the kinds of things for which most people expect an explanation, which is likely to be extraordinary because of what has to be explained. (Thus is Superman literally from another planet, while Batman has been motivated by childhood trauma and equipped by a lifetime of preparation for his vigilante mission, aided by vast wealth as well as extraordinary talent.) One may add that the superhero almost always faces a supervillain at some point--because any other sort of villain is a less than worthy adversary. (How long would Superman remain interesting just catching small-timers like purse-snatchers?) However, those three items seem to me to constitute the indispensable minimum--with any character not meeting those three criteria, which I think enable us to distinguish between superheroes and non-superheroes of various kinds, without bounding the category so narrowly as to deprive it of analytical usefulness, and permitting distillation as the following:

A superhero is a figure who, acting on their individual initiative and resources, and through a distinct public persona apt to entail codename and (usually costume-based) appearance, makes a vocation of defending the public from physical dangers such as accident, crime and "supervillainy," usually in a way requiring physical action and courage on their part, and drawing on abilities and/or equipment endowing them with more than ordinary human physical and/or mental capacities.

'90s Nostalgia-Mining and the Scandals of that Era

Amid the exploitation of memories of the '90s by the pop culture industry these past many years some have seized on the scandals of the era for material. Thus did we get a feature film about the Tonya Harding scandal, and FX miniseries' about the Bill Clinton impeachment and the O.J. Simpson trial.

I have no idea how much of a public response they really drew. What I can say is that these scandals absolutely do not make me nostalgic for the '90s. Quite the contrary, unlike, for example, 16-bit-era console gaming, the sci-fi shows of the era, the golden age of The Simpsons, or Baywatch, or any number of other things which really do make me feel nostalgic, what they bring to mind is the horror and disgust I felt when I looked away from the day's more amusing pop cultural products at the state of the real world, and the news media that brought it to us, the vileness of which played its part in the world's going from one catastrophe to the next.

Hiram Lee on O.J. Simpson

In the wake of the media response to O.J. Simpson's arrest back in 2007 Hiram Lee published a piece titled "The Media's Obsession with O.J. Simpson" (emphasis added).

As the title of Lee's item indicates the piece was about how the media, not the public, was obsessed with Simpson, even as with extreme stupidity and sanctimoniousness the media's talking heads relentlessly insisted that it was the public was obsessed, and forced the media against its will to attend to the matter to the neglect of all the rest of what was happening in the world. (As Lee wrote, the "anchors and pundits . . . occasionally pose the question: 'Why are we so interested in O.J. Simpson?' . . . lament the drawn out and salacious" coverage, and "[t]hen, with feigned regret . . . return to the tawdry story at hand.")

As Lee remarked, those in the media who did so "attribute[d] their own shameful behavior to the supposed demands of a coarsened, celebrity-obsessed audience," while totally eliding "their own role in cultivating and directing such attitudes toward celebrity culture."

An obscenity in 1995, their behavior was more obscene still in 2007. If, contrary to the celebration of the era as one of peace and prosperity the actual '90s were very troubled years, and the truth was that anyone of even slight intelligence knew it. (Indeed, as one of Mr. Lee's colleagues put it, "Despite the official triumphalism, America was coming apart at the seams.") However, the situation in 2007 was graver still amid the war in Iraq, and the first signs of a historic financial crisis, in the shadow of both of which we have lived ever since.

Talking about O.J. was a way of diverting public attention away from that, to say nothing of more broadly stultifying the public mind--and if some of the public went along with it that did not change the fact that it was the media, not the public, driving this particular piece of idiocy.

Remember that as the remembrances of the trial in which the media is now awash speak of us all having been "captivated" by the trial.