Letting Go

Letting Go

I have a great love for superheroes. Ever since Batman the animated series, Spider-Man, and X-Men aired on TV, I was hooked. I poured through my parents' comics before I even knew how to read one, puzzling over them like hieroglyphics, fascinated by the action-packed artwork. And back when I was told comics were junk food for my brain, I would still guiltily sneak over to my public library and read whatever they had on the shelf.

So it pains me to see what superheroes have become. Once, they were mostly the playground for the young man's imagination. Now, they seem to be a political tool, no, a weapon to be wielded in a cultural war. How many times will we read about some self-aggrandizing author who thinks that our favorite characters need to spout rhetoric that decries middle America or President Trump? An insidious ideology has infested popular culture, and I'm not simply referring to leftist politics. Nay, the pernicious perspective to which I refer is one based in some sort of artistic social teleology. 

To speak plainly, there are different perspectives on what art is supposed to do, what function in life it is supposed to have. Classically, you have Horace, who instructs in Ars Poetica that art (poetry specifically) should instruct and delight. This philosophy is one that is still going strong today. How often have you watched a TV show and seen a "moral of the story" tacked on at the end? Contrast that idea with the modernist vision expressed by Archibald MacLeish, who said in his revision of Ars Poetica that a poem "should not mean / But be" (apparently, MacLeish thought a poem should mean and be, but that's a discussion for another time). According to this modernist view, art doesn't need to be reduced to the lesson that it teaches, it can be more of an objective, an end unto itself. 

Currently, however, another view of art seems to be prevalent. this theory of art sees everything through the lens of social power, struggle, and conflict. Pulling straight from Karl Marx, this viewpoint looks at the "haves" (bourgeoisie) and the "have-nots" (proleteriat) in a cultural sense. In a Cultural Marxist worldview, everything, including art, is an expression of political power. From this standpoint, art has a moral imperative to try and effect social change in the world. You can imagine what kind of havoc this can wreak upon the arts.

Of course I am not saying that art cannot or should not have a message; but when the entire goal of all art is to try and revolutionize the world, you can see how the quality of the art might suffer as a result. Time and time again, we can see this effect playing out in popular culture. Instead of telling stories for the sake of telling stories, creators seek to make statements about diversity, equality, and other such rot. If you want to feel suicidal, try watching or reading interviews with the creators of the Ghostbusters reboot or the new Star Wars films. Notice how many times the identity of the cast is brought up, as if that fact alone somehow guarantees a good story will be told. Each time a new comic is launched nowadays, it seems that at the forefront of the marketing is a statement of the identity of the writer, rather than the quality of the work itself.

These issues have been discussed to death at this point, and very little change seems to be in the works. We keep getting more of the same. As much as I love superheroes, they've gone mainstream, and the stream is full of poo. Perhaps the only way to reclaim superheroes as the guilty pleasure of action/fantasy junkies is to let them go, to let them die. Hopefully, the world at large will let heroes go eventually, and we can have them back.