Enjoying all these people who understand past pop culture moments reflected political movements and anxieties but react to hearing super heroes movies reflect a desire for messiahs and hidden political powers to solve society’s problems by saying cmon, I just like eating popcorn.
America is suffering from learned political helplessness and personal detachment from politics, all of it capitalized off of by news that sells it as spectacle replete with heroes and villains. We’re late in the game, but let’s recognize just what it is.
American history shows the people pendulum between forgetting they have agency and remembering. We’re in an extreme forgetting phase and in those phases popular culture lionized vigilantes and super heroes. If we’re going to get out of this crisis we have to understand it.
People flocked to Rambo to see Vietnam era insecurities at play. They went to Terminator to see technological fears. Dirty Harry for crime and societal decline fears. It’s what we do. Period. It just so happens super heroes symbolically handle our larger problems for us.
