Waiting for Augustus

A few days ago, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy set a box office record for an August opening weekend of $94 million. That's on top of $713 million earned worldwide by the latest Captain America, $707 million for The Amazing Spider Man 2, and $739 million for X-Men: Days of Future Past. The $2 billion-plus bonanza is just for 2014. Next year we're due for another Avengers opus, something called Ant Man, and the first attempt to resurrect Fantastic Four since way, way back (in 2007, that is). With these kinds of numbers, Marvel's deep catalog, and the fact Hollywood prefers to package familiar, pre-sold properties that don't require much explaining to sell, it appears we're very far from "peak-Marvel".

          Arguably, all this is a quintessential American success story. Marvel Comics Group, which Stan Lee launched in its modern form in 1961, began as an upstart challenger to then-dominant DC, owner of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.  Marvel revolutionized the genre by introducing more complex, troubled characters that resonated well with audiences in the latter '60's and early '70's. Shortly after, Star Wars revolutionized Hollywood by pioneering both the "event" movie and the special effects epic. From there, it probably was only a matter of time before the Age of Movie Comics dawned.

          It's an inspiring story, and from the box office numbers it's clear audiences like what they've seen. Yet Marvel (along with DC's movie properties) are only the tip of this cultural iceberg. They typify a way of telling stories that studio elites increasingly love: the superhero archetype, where everything depends on some gifted individual who transcends all limitations. Before they green-light a movie, studio developers typically ask: "What about this figure that makes him or her indispensible? How are they uniquely capable?" Examples of this mentality in action—the Star Wars movies, the Jason Bourne movies, the Mission Impossible movies, the 300 movies, the resurgent 007 series—are not hard to list. Even Guardians of the Galaxy, which is supposed to present an ironic take by making heroes of a handful of misfits and criminals, is rendered "superhero-ish" in its big reveal at the end (which I won't spoil here).
          True, it's in the nature of archetypes that they've always been around. Trouble is,  this one arguably never been more dominant than now, and that surge in popularity suggests a few troubling things about us.

          The flip-side of needing superheroes to solve our problems is that ordinary folks become—and in practice are almost encouraged to be—useless. In the Thor movies, the heroes are literally gods, in the path of whom ordinary mortals don't stray. At the climax of The Avengers, as New York City is under attack by aliens, only six people fight back while the rest of humanity stands around and watches. Both the Marvel and DC-derived movies are full of scenes like this, with the regular folks consigned to varying degrees of passivity.

          What is it about our contemporary problems that make superheroes so appealing? It's tempting to look at the raft of intractable worries we face, from arrested organs of government to planetary climate disruption to economic upheavals on a globalized scale, and conclude that many of us have simply given up hope that ordinary people or institutions can handle them. In a sense, we all seem to be waiting for our Augustus Caesar—a colossus who will bestride our world and single-handedly set it right. That this rescue, like that of our Roman antecedents, would come at the expense of our unquestioning compliance is, well, the price of the ticket. (I suggest Augustus here because, with his rise, the Romans finally turned away from the challenge of governing themselves.) Behind fantasies of super-powers lies the fear of powerlessness.

          Compare this with the kinds of stories Americans used to prefer. In virtually every old movie about war, and in modern throwbacks like Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, it's the average Joe under extraordinary circumstances that rises to the occasion. In Ryan, Tom Hanks is not only not able to fly, teleport himself, or control metal objects with his mind—he was a rather unremarkable English teacher from Pennsylvania. Steven Spielberg's film was released sixteen years ago, but it seems almost inconceivable now, a curio of bygone, weirdly can-do times. At today's multiplex, it is only the hobbits of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, who save Middle Earth despite their preference for comfy chairs and pipe-weed, that faintly echo that ideal. But of course, nobody goes to Jackson's movies just for the hobbits.

          A world where only superheroes can change anything is a world doomed never to change. But that's where we seem to be now in our collective imagination: stuck, passive, and waiting for someone with "a very particular set of skills."

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro