The Last Picture Show
Superheroes are lots of things for lots of reasons. Alan Moore once called them science heroes, identifying that the difference between The Phantom and Superman was mysticism gave way to scientism: Superman has no magical exotic root or ancient regimen: he is from outer space. I’ll add another, first spotted by Jack Kirby: during the Silver Age, along with the monkeys, supers are morality tales, writ large. They get ruined by “who could beat up who” of course, but alongside that is something kind of beautiful and interesting, regardless of being stupid.
I’d hypothesize that they got this from the western which in the 1950s had become nothing but morality tales – and when they decayed beyond that, had to mutate into brutal anti-morality tales. But High Noon (1952) is a great example: criticized by both Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its politics, it has a sheriff who is asked to kill someone and is torn between the pacifism of his wife, the nihilism of his deputy, and various other political beliefs concentrated into single characters, who file out to discuss political violence. Shane (1953) also has a big moral pillars, with the title character suggesting that although he saves the day, he’s as monstrous as the men he killed. The Searchers (1956) can’t make up its mind but it suggests something similar about Wayne’s brutish bully who sets out to murder a white girl for the crime of being kidnapped by the native Americans and thus being tainted. Hawks and Wayne got so mad at High Noon they made Rio Bravo (1958) where literally everyone in the town has a murder boner.
The proliferation of the Western on American film and tv screens was almost terrifying in its totality, and this makes it also like superheroes now. The likes of The Boys and the pointlessly nihilistic Invincible are evidence we’re in our Fistful of Dollars era, where cruel bitter anti-heroes are all we will tolerate. It’s easy to point to the MCU being a paean to the American techno military complex. In much the same way Shane and High Noon broadly ended on the note that sometimes it’s ok and patriotic to shoot people. That’s not the point. Nor is it the point that superheroes are simplistic because they represent values. Just as each person in High Noon represents a particular philosophy on personal, political and state violence, the chief point of superheroes is grand philosophical opera. They’re supposed to boil down Nobility and Pragmatism into operatic singletons and have them debate these concepts through a fistfight. At least for me, this is the only real reason FOR superheroes. Every step away from that makes them less interesting.
The MCU was particularly appealing to me from the get-go because it seemed to understand this. And by starting its run with more grounded stories that featured some ideas of international politics and espionage, superheroes could be commentaries on all those things. They could become pantimentos of society. Captain Marvel was not a feminist essay but it was patently about a bunch of men and complicit women stopping a woman from unlocking her near-infinite gifts by putting her inside a system where she was taught to emulate her male superiors, or be removed. Captain America 2 said Hydra instead of Nazi but was about how easy it would be for America to reenact Nazi germany if it continued to enshrine mass surveillance with the most cynical and oligarchical realpolitik. Why, under such a scenario, our best friends might become our enemies and patriots would be criminals.
The weakness of the adventure story is of course it doesn’t really work in war time. Indeed, we don’t know what to do with art at all in these times. It has been suggested that for the rich west, the last fifty years have been an unlikely bubble, an unprecedented age of peace and prosperity the like of which nearly all of humanity has never seen before and may not see again. During World War Two much of the west turned to German expressionist films and crime stories with unhappy endings which were called noir, because watching heroes win made us feel sick. People needed to grieve, not cheer.
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It has become a cautionary Hollywood myth that Francis Ford Coppola signed Marlon Brando to Apocalypse Now expecting him to look as he had in 1975: a lion-mained, craggy silver fox, able to out act Olivier, out sexy Robert Redford, out angry Gene Hackman and with a chin more fearsome than Charlton Heston. What they got was someone “fat, bald, mumbling and suddenly Jewish”, leading to Coppola shooting all Brando’s scenes in the dark.
One imagines then that Thunderbolts is the Marlon Brando of superhero films. The studio made tens, maybe hundreds of billions — BILLIONS — of dollars from hugely bankable hunk-filled hits and now the world has moved on in every possible way. It’s not just fatigue from the concept, although that’s a big part of it. The higher-weirdness of Dr Strange, Wandavision and the Loki series were the last gasp of innovation, and there’s nothing actually interesting about the superheroes that just shoot people. At the time of needing something fresh, we have the bottom-of-the-roster heroes, barely distinguishable from other heroes or worse, lesser versions of them: dime store Captain America, dime store Black Widow, dime store fat Thor, dime store Nick Fury, Iron-Man-but-Only-In-One-Limb, a villain nobody remembers from the Black Widow film, it’s a terrible roster. But on top of all that, nobody wants heroes because they live in the occupied United States.
Some have suggested that they couldn’t have known this was coming but the film was shot in 2024. At the very least, creeping doom of the end of all things could have been a strong script note. Because why not let superheroes do what they do best: talk about big feelings? The Thunderbolts could have been actually perfect. Left with the idea that even at its best the MCU/America was trapped in an endless cycle of violence, the decay into a bunch of dime-store killers could have been a great way to look at things. It could have been a film noir. They could have chosen a villain like The Mole Man — a creepy jerk who undermines everything good because he has problems with women, and suddenly seems to burst forth and start running the world with a loyal army of assholes. He’s even a dark mirror of being the dime-store, run-down loser type, which is what you want in a comic villain. Loki was a trickster because the Avengers were unstable and unable to coordinate. Ultron was a new life form because the world was being reborn. (Captain America fighitng an orange hulk is politically on point, although Hulk is a terrible villain too, because he’s not a reflection of anything to do with Cap.)
The problem, I’d suggest, is that the MCU ended up getting high on its own supply. When the world creamed its nerd jeans with the Thanos reveal in Avengers 1, MCU thought they’d cracked some nerd code: if they dug deep into the continuity files and brought out the big guns from comic history, they’d get free publicity from nerds eager to explain to their tired girlfriends or angry youtube listeners who Thanos was. Clearly the movies seemed to be for Marvel fans so they kept pitching at Marvel fans…but more and more we live in a world where fans are poison.
That was always the general opinion back in the 90s, too — constantly appealing to the hard-liners was always a bad idea, because they tended to hate everything anyway, and it meant your material never got new fans. For every “Batman isn’t like that” of nerds (who were, by the way, outraged that a short comedian was being cast), there were a hundred people who thought the new Batmobile was amazing. Kevin Smith did that great bit about the Superman meetings he took where the studio insisted the character couldn’t be shown flying or in costume because it would look stupid and “gay”, respectively, but that instinct did come from a place of not leaning too hard on what came before because audiences tend to age out of superheroes FAST and like new takes. Both the original Keaton Batman and the Nolan Batman felt very unlike what had come before…because mainstream audiences weren’t comic fans and were comparing them to previous films and TV shows. That is, unsurprisingly, how you make a billion dollars from a franchise: don’t appeal to nerds. That was true in the 90s and it’s much, much more true now when the nerd-to-nazi pipeline is built entirely out of hating the thing you’re nominally a fan of.
There’s more of that pantimento poetry, then, in that the villain they’ve chosen from Deep Comic Lore is The Sentry. The Sentry was always a painfully self-referential idea. He is literally an old fat white man who everyone has forgotten about but is really, truly, superman, except he was put in jail because he was falsely accused of killing his wife, because he has a “dark side” but pretends to be insane to save the world. He hid his noble self inside comic books, and was originally defeated by being made to realize he couldn’t save everyone at once. Superheroes are already a deeply masculine fantasy but The Sentry is almost too on the nose.
So maybe this IS the movie we deserve, after all. Maybe it’s about what happens when you listen to the nerds and go full toxic comicbook lore, and maybe at the end, the Thunderbolts will realise they’re part of the problem. I doubt it. More likely they’ll defeat the Superman because that’s what Invincible and The Boys are about: Superman, the symbol of all that is good, is a wuss. Meanwhile, the Fantastic Four film has the literal metaphor where the 1950s American Dream is literally another universe. They will be fighting the Mole Man, which is a huge shame: if you’re going to reboot them back to the 1950s, they absolutely should be fighting Red Ghost and his lunar apes. Monkeys, as we knew in the Silver Age, are always a crowd-pleaser. Plus, what could be a better villain for the modern day than an intangible thing that you can’t hit into submission? That’s suddenly everywhere and nowhere? And who beat you to the moon to remind you that America is a fading power, a lickspittle to a Russian dictator? If we must believe in something, let us at least believe in something relevant. (Plus, he’s an actually deep cut into comics lore, not some boring 90s villain like The Sentry, because nerds aren’t even technically correct, which is the worst kind of correct.)
Elon Musk running the White House is a pretty great example of what happens when we let nerds get what they want. Killing the MCU is another. The latter is insignificant compared to the former, of course, but art holds a mirror to life, and we can learn from that, even if we learn too late. And as much as the current apocalypse is due to capitalism and greed and hating the other, Elon is absolutely our boy. King of the Nerds. Which makes this OUR apocalypse. And we should take a look at that, really hard. Maybe the MCU being good at some point was part of the problem, letting the Trojan horse in, or helping us turn a blind eye to things. Maybe I’m trying to split the world into Good MCU and Bad MCU and into Good Nerds and Bad Nerds and they’re all bad. Either way, it feels appropriate that the MCU ends in absolute, unimaginative failure, with women and black people forced to lead an impossible task of fixing something ruined by greed and capitalism and listening to nerds, just like America.
Liking science fiction and fantasy and superheroes isn’t a bad thing; making liking those things your personality and having a sense of entitlement from them absolutely is, and we now live in a world where that broken mindset played a big role in radicalizing men, elevating psychopaths and destroying the world. The recent documentary “The Toys That Made Us” weirdly refused to ask “is it actually good that a massive slice of our culture is based on the decision to deregulate children’s TV so advertisers could sell toys to children, something everyone at the time considered deeply unethical and absolutely a terrible idea?”. The question we should ask is what did the toys make us? And why did we let them? And can we let go of them now we realize, at the very least, that we need new stories to get us through this dark new age?
