12/17/2022 0 Comments Superpowered cowboy![]() ![]() I agree with him that a decisive factor in the continuing production of superhero flicks is the presence of greedy “corporations” - the catch-all fascist bogeymen of modern times! - and their desire for familiar and easily replicated franchises. (Ironically, this is the same tactic that he and others derisively attribute to Christopher Nolan in his “message” movies.) But it occurred to me to link it because he at least makes an attempt to address this question. He doesn’t really come to any definitive conclusion he mostly throws some explanations at the wall in the hopes that they’ll stick and add up to some sort of allegation against our current culture. I can’t hear our national fears-of economic decline? of international irrelevance?-under the roar of all the flapping capes.ĭavid Bordwell wrote this article in 2008 pondering why superhero films are so popular right now: Like everyone else around me, I’m trapped inside America’s sleeping brain too. We are currently living in the Golden Age of the Hollywood Superhero, though I’m not certain what that dream says about us. Cowboys were not called back from their increasingly sidelined frontier to corral Afghanistan and Iraq. America did not dream in comic book colors when the twin towers fell. Now the superhero is more a figure of corporate enterprise than cultural soothing. Marvel nearly ended in the early 90s too, their fate nearly tied to the vanquished Soviet Union, but they and their superheroes struggled through. I would have expected the cowboy to have battled back-maybe with the end of the Cold War when the whole comic book industry was in freefall-but that dream is apparently over. Superheroes survived, but they were changed. When that war ended, so did the western and its 25 year Hollywood reign. But after the My Lai massacre, old school American heroism collapsed. Superhero and cowboy battled side by side through the Vietnam War. The Thing, the Hulk, Marvel’s entire radioactive pantheon literally embodies the national fear of nuclear fallout. War itself was now the monster, and Silver Age comics offered up a radioactive heap of ambivalent hero-monsters to reflect the mutating times. Mutually Assured Destruction was scarier than any enemy. When Cold War fears turned MAD, the superhero returned. Superheroes tried to battle back in the 50s, but their Commie smashing violence was too direct, too like waking life to lull America’s dozing brain back to sleep. Just as the Golden Age of Comic Books petered, the Golden Age of the Western took off. After Hiroshima, the frontier was once again the perfect escape destination. But not to worry, those sidelined cowboys were ready to tag back in. What had once calmed America’s slumber now disturbed it. When the Axis started to fall, so did their overly authoritarian comic book kin. Which might be why switching back was so hard. But Superman and his superpowered platoon had always been about the here and now. Hollywood’s western frontier gave way to frontline combat movies. After Pearl Harbor, the gunfighter and the costumed crime-fighter parted ways. That may be why the cowboy had to bow out as soon as the U.S. The gunslingers usually hung out on America’s mythical frontier, that quasi-historical realm writers reinvented as soon as historians noticed the real thing had vanished. America snoozed more soundly to the sound of superheroes Ka-Powing Nazis across newsstands and the thunder of cavalry hooves riding to matinee rescues. ![]() The gunfighter, marooned in B movies during the Depression, leapt to feature films the same year Germany invaded Poland. Hollywood responded with its own vigilante. The ultimate fascist-fighter, the Man of Tomorrow was a bit of a fascist himself, discarding due process for a vigilante’s dictatorial self-assurance. When a fascist war loomed in Europe, comic books dreamed up Superman. I’ve been reading Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation lately, and I’m noticing how the paths of these two breeds of very American heroes weave in and out of our country’s 20 th century anxieties. Powerful heroes who use their powers to protect a vulnerable nation. When it feels threatened, the stories the great sleeping brain of America likes to tell itself often star a gun-toting cowboy or a caped crusader. Which means inventing stories when outside noises-slamming doors, gunfire, the Rape of Nanking-try to disturb it. Like any sleeper, it wants to stay asleep. Superpowered cowboy tv#Movies, TV shows, comic books, those are the dreams and nightmares playing in its 24/7 unconscious. Picture American culture as an enormous sleeping brain. ![]()
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