WysockiFall2016

Grasping for (Simulated) Heroes

Rick Wysocki

In a 2014 interview regarding his movie Birdman, Alejandro G. Iñárittu was asked about his feelings toward the current cultural dominance of big-budget superhero films, a major thematic element taken up in his film. He responded,

I think there’s nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are 7 years old, but I think there’s a disease in not growing up. The corporation and the hedge funds have a hold on Hollywood and they all want to make money on anything that signifies cinema [....] Basically, the room to exhibit good nice films is over. These are taking the place of all those things [....] I sometimes enjoy them because they are basic and simple and go well with popcorn. The problem is that sometimes they purport to be profound, based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing. I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be. I hate that, and don’t respond to those characters. They have been poison, this cultural genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human.¹

From one perspective, Iñárittu’s answer is easy to criticize. Its valences of artistic elitism are off-putting, not least so because of the success of superhero films in recent years: these are cultural artifacts that people enjoy. Perhaps even more troubling than his argument’s false consciousness narrative is its nostalgia for a Hollywood that pre-existed big business and the claim that “the room to exhibit good and nice films is over.” At the risk of undermining the major accomplishments of independent filmmakers, the film industry has always been market driven. Furthermore, that Iñárittu should implicitly name himself the arbiter of quality film-making is disquieting.

And yet, there is a sense in which he is obviously correct. There is something culturally disturbing about films that frame their heroes as literal superhumans who transcend politics and the law to assert their global will. These heroes represent and, to be sure, valorize a masculinist will-to-power that does away with deliberative activity. They simulate the most aggressive, violent aspects of humanity, launder them through culturally-situated straw-men scenarios,² and invert them for their audience, framing violence as the exertion of noble and just power. Read through Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, however, one sees that superhero movies are not the cause of the “cultural genocide” and fascistic tendencies that Iñárittu laments, but symptomatic of a cultural crisis of heroism.

In this book, Berardi reluctantly and mournfully engages the massive displays of mass murder in Western countries in recent years, arguing that they “are the extreme manifestation of one of the main trends in our age. I see them as the heroes of an age of nihilism and spectacular stupidity: the age of financial capitalism.”³ Far from extolling such acts of “heroism,” he claims that, at least since 1977, “the complexity and speed of human events overwhelmed the force of the will [and] epic heroism was replaced by gigantic means of simulation.”⁴ These interrelated phenomena—the accelerating tendencies of financial capital, a concomitant attenuation of the efficacy of the human will, and the simulation of heroism—develop into a psychopathological social sphere in which “Late capitalism is transferring the military logic of mobilization into the sphere of the economy: work, production and exchange are all transformed into a battlefield whose only rule is competition.”⁵ The horrific act of mass murder, for Berardi, is the psychopathological subject’s extreme attempt to engage this world in an assumed, though certainly failed, act of “heroism.”

It is easy to see the relevance of this framework to the filmic landscape described by Iñárittu. In fact, one might think of Berardi as providing the evidence to Iñárittu’s point. Not missing the fact that James Holmes, the Aurora movie theater shooter, chose The Dark Knight as the site of his heinous act and The Joker as his persona, Berardi avers that Holmes’s act was to some extent a grotesquely failed attempt at heroism, at a simulated masculinity that has become part of the dominant social code. Citing the similarities between Nolan’s Batman Begins and the “ideology of the Bush administration,” Berardi reminds us of Karl Rove’s great hymn to simulated existence:

That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.⁶

With Berardi’s analysis mind, one can conceive of the violent and fascistic subtext of superhero films as a reflection of contemporary capital and the political landscape that Rove describes. In this respect, these films are not “cultural genocide,” as Iñárittu remarks, but a symptom of a larger cultural dis-ease.

Robert Downey, Jr.’s response to Iñárittu, to push the point further, shows that celebrities provide an acute reflection of the problems inherent to these simulations of heroism. The Iron-Man actor, when asked about Iñárittu’s comment, responded with a pointed, bigoted statement: “Look, I respect the heck out of him, and I think for a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like ‘cultural genocide’ just speaks to how bright he is.”⁷ It is not insignificant that this statement might well have been spoken by Tony Stark himself: comments such as Downey’s are what passes for heroism today and Downey, as a certain sort of cultural hero (a celebrity), performs that role. From Berardi’s perspective, moreover, it is only through the cultivation of autonomy from the compulsion to compete, through refusal, that we can heal the most violent tendencies inherited from the naturalization of competition. Unfortunately, as Iñárittu suggests and as Downey represents, today’s heroes work in the opposite direction.
Rather than solely blaming the representations of heroes by companies such as Marvel for the failure to deliver real heroes or, more modestly, less aggressive social ideals, we should look closely at the social contexts within which these representations take shape. There is, of course, no moral equivalence between mass murderers, superhero films, and film-actors. We should, on the other hand, attend to the fact that the actions carried out by these disparate social subjectivities rely heavily on a model of economic and social competition that, far from “natural,” is a byproduct of financial capital. If we are to ameliorate this destructive condition, it is not the films that must change, as Iñárittu suggests. Instead, the social apparatus that ensnares their audience must be subverted.

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1. Bo, Armando, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone, and Alejandro G. Iñárittu. Interview by Mike Fleming. “Alejandro G. Iñárittu and ‘Birdman’ Scribes on Hollywood’s Superhero Fixation: ‘Poison, Cultural Genocide’—Q&A.” Deadline. Deadline Hollywood, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2016.

2. See, for example, the constant deployment of World War II-era Nazi topoi in the recent Marvel films’ representation of “HYDRA,” a global conspiracy launched by the remnants of the Third Reich.

3. Berardi, Franco. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. New York: Verso. 2015. 3.

4. Berardi 5.

5. Berardi 26.

6. Rove, qtd. in Berardi 23.

7. Downey, Robert Jr. “Robert Downey Jr and the Avengers: Age of Ultron cast hit back at superhero movie critics.” Interview. The Guardian. The Guardian, 2015. Web. 1 Feb. 2016.