FILM IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 8 2 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R A scene in Richard Lester’s 1981 film Superman II points up everything that’s wrong with today’s superhero movies. Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) has guessed Clark Kent’s secret identity, and rather than watch her age and eventually die while himself remaining forever youthful, Clark (Christopher Reeve) decides to renounce his super powers so that they can love and live together as mortals. It’s an irresistible romantic conceit, the stu√ of myth. But what immediately follows is a reminder that myth’s power to a√ect us lies in its relation to the human. Dropping into a truck stop for a bite, Clark and Lois encounter a bully who comes on to her, and when Clark steps in, the bully beats him up. The scene ends with Reeve – so beloved now as a figure of tragedy we forget what a wonderful actor he was – wiping his bloodied mouth, looking at his hand and saying, ‘‘Huh, blood,’’ with an awful, crumpled laugh, the sound of someone realizing the joke fate has played on him. I’ll never forget watching that scene in a theater and feeling as if the floor of the world had dropped away: if Superman can’t protect Lois, then the rest of us have no protection as well. The New Yorker critic Richard Brody might have been talking about 1 8 3 R this scene when he wrote last summer of superhero movies: ‘‘In their often-blundering way, they bring together world-scale con- flict and intimate dreams and failings. That is the very reason for their success. They represent, in cartoonish form, great fears, great hopes, and great yearnings.’’ The occasion for Brody’s comments was the declaration by the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu that making superhero movies constitutes ‘‘cultural genocide .’’ This was especially rich coming from a man whose recent film Birdman, a serviceable backstage comedy tarted up with the kind of illusion-and-reality games that, for some, signify depth, depended on deprecating allusion to Tim Burton’s two Batman movies, whose poetry and grandeur Iñárritu has never begun to match. As his lead, a washed-up movie star most famous for starring as a superhero, Iñárritu cast Burton’s Batman, Michael Keaton . The irony was that the role gave Keaton no opportunity to reach the depths he sounded as Bruce Wayne’s alter ego. Iñárritu, though, did have a point, which Brody granted: ‘‘The engine of [superhero movies’] commercial success is also the cause of their most common failing, and it’s exactly the one that Iñárritu cites: money. . . . The budget of the new Avengers film is estimated between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and seventynine million dollars. . . . There’s no reason to expect that a filmmaker will enjoy the same level of creative control over a project with a nine-figure budget that he or she would with a six-figure budget. The problem with superhero movies is built into the system of their production. The generally disheartening experience of watching them results from the lack of creative freedom that their directors enjoy while making them.’’ When I tell people I’ve stopped going to superhero movies – as well as to most big-budget spectacles – they assume I’m saying that I find the content juvenile. That’s not it at all. I love superhero movies, and fantasy movies, which, at their best, work on us the way a great night at the opera does, by magnifying elation and tragedy and providing the pleasure of being swept up into something bigger than ourselves. To achieve that, though, room must be made for human feeling within the mythic, and in superhero movies with quarter-billiondollar budgets, the human no longer exists. Hell, movie stars don’t exist in these movies. Stars are no longer listed in the print ads or 1 8 4 T A Y L O R Y billboards or in the previews for these movies, and they’re often...