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Page 3 of 3 Perhaps this engenders the – what? – cynicism(?) I feel about the new super-hero movie phenomenon. I think it’s more than just the fact that technology and better storylines have led to this comic-book movie renaissance. The time has certainly come but those aren’t the only reasons why the time has come. Comic books have always been driven by wish fulfillment. Moments like swinging with Spider-Man through the skyscrapers of New York, taking off like a rocket ship with Iron Man or running on the water with Dash in The Incredibles, were exhilarating. That’s part of it. Spider-Man, in particular, presented a modernization of a particular kind of willful American innocence, and was quite possibly the pinnacle of this template of super-hero. On the other hand, The Dark Knight—and for that matter, The Incredibles and Iron Man in particular, made explicit much that had been implicit all through this past super-exciting decade in movies.
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 | These movies, in a very real sense, are about the state of America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Being movies, and super-hero movies at that, they are not a down and dirty, nitty gritty, discussion of the national identity. But this is a country whose citizens take it for granted that they live in the richest, most powerful nation in the world. Is it that much of a leap to see that on some level these super-heroes are metaphors for how we see ourselves as a people? The Incredibles took a look at the self-image of the middle-class American family with wit, wisdom and compassion to spare. You’ll find many of the same issues raised by The Incredibles in this year’s Revolutionary Road – sans the humor, excitement or fun.
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Iron Man offered the rather naïve hope that somewhere deep in the corporate war machine there is a conscience…good luck with that. That the hero was forced to fight that which created him – if he wanted to be a hero – was the center of Iron Man’s relevance. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark became a perfect metaphorical fantasy for corporate America, that is, if you think there’s any semblance of humanity in there: rich, excessive, talented, almost child-like in his ruthlessness and with a weak heart damaged by his own machinations. The Dark Knight had none of the hope of the first two. What it offered couldn’t even be called cynicism. It felt like that same corporate America daring us to look at it full in the face and accept that we are completely complicit in creating the monster we have become. 300 and Sin City, both products of the mind of Frank Miller, both had rather stark things to say about our society and never in a straight line. In 300, for instance, are we the Spartans, surrounded by hordes of strange invaders who want to destroy our way of life? Or are we, in fact, Xerxes’ army, a massive, amorphous monster of greed, decadence and lies? We’re a young country. Other places have their fairy tales, their hero myths, their knights in shining armor. We have Spider-Man, The Dark Knight and Iron Man. It only makes sense that the movies are the medium with which we pass down our myths. We’ve been in the forefront of technology since the Industrial Revolution. Movies—special effects BLOCKBUSTERS—are how we best show that off. Anybody can make a kitchen-sink, day-in-the-life character study. You have to have millions and millions of dollars, technology and know-how to even make a bad super-hero movie like The Fantastic Four. And these heroes aren’t created out of magic, or religion, they come from science and money almost exclusively, America’s twin gods.
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Take a bow, homey. | This is just the beginning of course. Super-hero movies had a number of critical and commercial hits in the past decade, the Chris Nolan’s Batman movies, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy movies…The X-Men, Iron Man…these were all huge hits and creative milestones. Probably super-hero movies will follow the same path as musicals and Westerns before them: they’ll speak to us for a while, all of our best cinematic talent will be turned to them and then one day they’ll be passé, only to be slowly revived years later to take their natural place in the movie hierarchy. On the other hand, for a bunch of perverts who wear brightly colored tights and talk funny, they’ve sure come a long way.
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