A Sense of Doubt blog post #1795 - The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became our Cultural Overlords
Straight up share. Catching up. But what a great article!
https://gen.medium.com/the-decade-comic-book-nerds-became-our-cultural-overlords-f219b732a660
The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords
Why do they have to be such sore winners?
This piece is part of the The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s.
The most significant pop-culture story of the decade is superhero culture’s evolution from nerd culture to monoculture. Nothing else has altered the map as profoundly; nothing else that seemed this unlikely 10 years ago feels as inevitable and possibly irreversible now. It feels weird to even refer to superheroes as “nerd culture” at this point. It’s like calling Facebook “computer culture.”
But for the record, there was once a social cost associated with being into superhero fiction past the age of 14 or so; it marked you as an immature or unserious person. When people made movies and TV shows based on comic books they were generally pretty bad; bad in a cynical why-try-harder way, and largely uninterested in digging into the thematic richness of their source material. Even the okay ones weren’t tailored to the tastes of people with a preexisting investment in the characters or otherwise optimized as product. The best you could hope for, as a comic-book-loving moviegoer, was either a competent action film that happened to be about Blade or the Punisher, or an actual filmmaker running away with comic-book subject matter in some interesting direction: Ang Lee using the Hulk to tell a story about the sons of angry fathers, or Tim Burton using Batman and Catwoman to tell a story about freaks. If any of the people making these movies and shows imagined their work might someday tie into a massive interconnected fictional universe to rival the Star Wars galaxy, they kept that weird notion to themselves.
Anyway, that was then, and in terms of comic-book-based filmmaking you could argue that “now” starts in 2005 with Batman Begins, the first of three self-serious and super-well-made Christopher Nolan movies starring Christian Bale as Batman. Or it starts in 2008, when Jon Favreau’s Iron Man made almost $100 million during its opening weekend. There’s also a case to be made that the advent of nerd-culture entertainment not watered down for general-audience consumption starts with the shift from the interpretive to the comprehensive — the let’s-shoot-every-page approach taken by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, the Twilight and Harry Potter franchises, and Robert Rodriguez’s strict-constructionist take on Frank Miller’s Sin City.
Eight years after Avengers, the nerd-cultural takeover of pop culture is complete.
But the real inflection point here is 2012, when the first Avengers movie opened and raked in $207 million, establishing that a cinematic “universe” that mimicked the long-form storytelling and all-hands-on-deck crossover events of superhero comics was something people would actually be interested in. It seems insane to type that now, but as anybody who’s ever tried to marathon the MCU will undoubtedly tell you, the character-introduction movies that came after Iron Man and before Avengers — Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor, both out in 2011 — were a little flabby and underimagined. Plus, nobody had ever actually tried anything like this before.
Marvel declared bankruptcy in 1996 and spent the early 2000s loaning out properties like Spider-Man and the X-Men to movie studios for chump change. It had come up with the table stakes for what became the MCU by essentially betting the House of Ideas, putting up 10 of its most potentially-valuable properties — including Captain America, Dr. Strange, Black Panther, and the Avengers — as collateral in exchange for a $525 million loan from Merrill Lynch in 2005. Kevin Feige, now the president of Marvel Studios, likes to talk about going around hat in hand to completion-bond companies and foreign-rights buyers before the first Iron Man, just another indie producer on the grind — and watching their eyes glaze over when he started to talk about Captain America. And why wouldn’t they? The MCU worked because Feige (and whoever else, but it’s Feige who gets print-the-legend auteur status here) realized that the interconnectedness was the thing, that the allure of Marvel’s paper universe had less to do with its echoes of Perseus or Gilgamesh and more to do with what it took from soap opera. But try explaining that to anybody who didn’t grow up with this stuff in their blood. Try explaining to a non-acolyte the vast and beautiful and ridiculous fictional edifice that is the Marvel Comics universe, brought to life over the course of decades by work-for-hire artists and writers who’ve since been retroactively made into serfs on the most lucrative IP farm in history — a Witwatersrand Basin-scale gold field of story, complete with a built-in audience eager to see these stories retold with name actors on a humongous screen, to check them off a list. Collect them all.
Eight years after Avengers, the nerd-cultural takeover of pop culture is complete. Nerds won the war before anyone else realized there was a war on. We don’t yet know what kind of long-term effect the unprecedented dominance of a single pop genre is going to have on moviemaking and moviegoing and life on Earth in general. But we’re starting to see some data on the effect of that dominance on nerds as a cohort and the initial results on how we’re going to govern as the overlords of pop culture are not great.
Last month in an interview with Empire magazine, Martin Scorsese was asked about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he said he’d tried to watch a couple of the movies. “But that’s not cinema,” he said. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks... It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” In November, he doubled down on these remarks in an impassioned op-ed for the New York Times. “What’s not there [in superhero movies] is revelation, mystery, or genuine emotional danger,” he wrote. “Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”
Feige characterized the things Scorsese said as “unfortunate” and Disney president Bob Iger called them “puzzling.” MCU-affiliated talent like James Gunn and Mark Ruffalo also pushed back diplomatically, and director Adam McKay suggested that the director of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull might change his tune about what is and isn’t cinema if he’d just watch Thor: Ragnarok. (Which, to be fair, is better than a lot of these movies.) I have no way of knowing this for sure but I’m assuming a smart person like Mark Ruffalo accepts the job of playing Bruce Banner and his mo-capped green alter ego with open eyes, and understands exactly what kind of movies he is and isn’t signing up to make. I’d also assume that when Marvel mounts a Best Picture “For Your Consideration” campaign around a movie like Endgame it’s meant to be taken seriously but not literally, and that in general everybody from the Marvel U family who objected to what Scorsese said was actually objecting to his having said it out loud.
The response that emblematized the whole controversy for me was the guy on Twitter who posted, as a rebuttal, a multi-Tweet thread (addressed to “@MartinScorsese” who is not on Twitter) of screen grabs from Marvel movies in which the characters looked sad or angry or happy or were about to kiss or maybe die or were otherwise in some way visibly reacting to stimuli, which would have been a fairly devastating dunk on Scorsese if the director had accused the Marvel movies of not including any medium close-ups of characters displaying emotion:
@ Martin Scorsese pic.twitter.com/eNqw3xLXZ1— Michael Cammett™ (@MCammett23) October 6, 2019
Things got more ridiculous from there; it being 2019, the language of social justice was eventually deployed against Scorsese, who fans accused him of being an old white man speaking from a place of prejudice against the diverse MCU, which rolled out its first films with a nonwhite lead (Black Panther) and a female lead and female co-director (Captain Marvel) in 2018 and 2019 after years of films starring white men named Chris, and appears to be diversifying at a rate consistent with the rest of 21st century popular entertainment as a whole. But what was striking and a little disturbing about Marvel fandom’s response to Scorsese was the specific hill those fans chose to die on. They were arguing that Marvel movies were too cinema and did too contain all the things Scorsese said they didn’t. Obviously this is the behavior of aggrieved fans, but it also felt like a seismic shift in the way pop-genre entertainment’s partisans talk about it.
There have always been people who will tell you that arty things are stupid, that liking them is pretentious, and that preferring arty things to mass-market entertainment is a symptom of elitism. The thing that’s new about MCU Twitter’s reaction to Scorsese’s statement is that the people making these arguments against the supposed privileging of a certain type of arty thing are doing it without rejecting the notion that movies should aspire to fulfill an audience’s need for profundity. They’re just arguing that we can and should look to corporate superhero movies to provide it.
If you could somehow — using a Time Gem or whatever the fuck — bring forward a person of sufficiently reactionary philistine tendencies from, let’s say 1985, and gave them Scorsese’s op-ed to read, they would undoubtedly dismiss Scorsese as an egghead whose tastes were hopelessly effete and out of touch with what real people liked. They would take issue with Scorsese’s assertion that “aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual revelation” should be the goal of cinema. What our hypothetical 1980s anti-snob would probably not try to argue is that we could find more than enough aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual revelation in Rambo: First Blood Part II or A View to a Kill.
There have always been people who will tell you that arty things are stupid, that liking them is pretentious, and that preferring arty things to mass-market entertainment is a symptom of elitism.It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison between 1985 and 2019; the fifth- and seventh-highest grossing movies of ’85 were Mask and The Killing Fields, both of which would probably be straight-to-Netflix prestige loss-leaders today. But as far back as I can remember there was an understanding that Rambo and The Killing Fields, while both technically Hollywood movies, were playing in different leagues and maybe even in different sports. Unless you were a true snob or a true vulgarian you tried to experience the best of what both these categories had to offer; the mark of a thinking person was the ability to evaluate these very different things by different criteria, to weigh a movie’s achievement in the context of its genre and its specific aspirations. The argument against Scorsese is that the same blockbuster movies that dominate what’s historically been the Rambo category should also be part of the conversation about art; that they should be taken seriously by the critical and awards-distributing infrastructure whose de facto function is to honor the best of the Killing Fields category; that the presence of certain signifiers of middlebrow classiness (Tilda Swinton in a supporting role, a glancing evocation of Three Days of the Condor) means that movie is somehow “about” something other than advancing the Mighty Marvel Metanarrative; and that the failure of that establishment to bend the knee before Thor and Captain America is proof of snobbery or even corruption.
But the need for certain areas of film culture to hold the line about what is and is not cinema (and therefore worthy of critical lionization and Oscar gold) is no longer about maintaining an abstract set of aesthetic prejudices and qualitative standards. It’s about protecting every other kind of moviemaking from the existential threat of the blockbuster. Now more than ever, the existence of a reward structure for certain kinds of prestige cinema — the fact that critics’ year-end top-10 lists and the stakes of awards season give the culture a reason to spend a few months out of every year talking about acting and directing and foreign films — is just about the only thing that keeps non-blockbusters from being completely drowned out of the public consciousness by the next phase of Marvel, the next Star Wars trilogy, or the newest and most twisted take on a Batman villain. This isn’t about what is or isn’t cinema. It’s about whether the corporations that already dominate so much of the cultural landscape through pure market share should also be allowed to set the parameters of what we can ask for from art. It’s not about whether superhero movies are capable of making us feel things, but about the need for movies that show us dimensions of human feeling more complex than Bruce Wayne’s childhood trauma or the raccoon that talks to the tree.
TThe reason all this should worry you, even if you have zero investment in superhero movies or their relative position vis-a-vis film culture as a whole, is that the response to Scorsese is a populist groundswell in service of the status quo, of corporations, and of power. In the case of Marvel Stans vs. Marty it’s the expression of a vestigial inferiority complex and hypersensitivity to gatekeeping left over from the days when the culture at large couldn’t look at anything comics-related that wasn’t Maus or Watchmen without making jokes about Adam West’s tights, but functionally it’s a mass movement rising up to defend a Goliath against the impertinence of a David.
It’s unlikely that superhero movies will ever drive adult dramas and foreign-language films and independent movies out of multiplexes entirely, but it’s impossible to imagine the opposite happening.
It’s unlikely that superhero movies will ever drive adult dramas and foreign-language films and independent movies out of multiplexes entirely, but it’s impossible to imagine the opposite happening. There is no way what Scorsese says about superhero movies imperils their existence and a million ways in which the omnipresence of those films in the marketplace creates barriers preventing the next Scorsese from making her Mean Streets.
We’re now in a historical moment where anyone can claim to be a victim of bullying, irrespective of the relative power relationship between the accused bully and the party ostensibly being bullied. Before it became a catch-all banner uniting misogynists of all stripes, Gamergate was about defending the $43.4 billion video game industry and the fans of its most popular products against the perceived threat of independently produced text-based role-playing games about depression. What superhero movies and violent video games aimed at 16-year-old boys and YA fiction novels for teenagers have in common is that they were once looked down upon by the culture at large and have since become market forces so supermassive that no individual’s objection to them means anything at all. Yet their adherents will tolerate no dissent, rushing to the barricades at the drop of a mean tweet.
It’d be funny if it weren’t funny at all. Most of the time, corporations have to pay people to lay down this kind of Astroturf on their behalf. This is what nerds are now: a volunteer army of PR freelancers for the biggest media companies in the world, shouting down anybody who refuses to read “BLACK WIDOW EQUALS FEMINISM” or “BABY GROOT IS AWESOMESAUCE” off a cue card held by a dancing Spider-Man. To these poor souls I recommend carving out a few hours of the waning decade for a movie called The Irishman, in which a guy commits for life to an institution that doesn’t care about him at all, and realizes too late that he’s absolutely powerless.
WRITTEN BY
seen/heard in/on GQ MTV Grantland the New York Times the Los Angeles Times & Men’s Health & a couple of times Esquire and the New Yorker & various podcasts
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2001.17 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1658 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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