Editor’s Note by Noah: Ben originally wrote this on a thread at the Comics-Scholars listserv in response to what he called “the banal, tendentious, flat-footed, and largely comics-ignorant commentary of Manohla Dargis and AO Scott. I asked to reprint Ben’s piece here, and he kindly agreed. With his permission, I’ve edited his piece slightly so it can stand alone without confusing references to a conversation we’re unable to reprint in full. I’ve included ellipses to show where I’ve made deletions.)
_____________________
…as someone who can enjoy some superhero comics and films, and who can even find things to admire and teach in the work of superhero comic-book creators from the 1930s to the present, I have a mixed reaction to the (very common) ideological critiques of this material – that is, critiques that focus on the supposed racism, nationalism, and sexism of the genre.
Depending on the degree of intellectual subtlety and rhetorical talent of the critic, I can find such responses stimulating, informative, educational, and provocative; but I can also find them reductive, repetitive, self-righteous, and (occasionally) no less ideologically dubious than the material purportedly being “critiqued”. Most often, though, I just find ideology critique boring.
To be clear: I am entirely persuaded that the superhero genre as a whole is vulnerable to critiques in term of racism, nationalism, and sexism.
So is the genre of the Western. So is the Crime/Noir genre (in fact, I would say the problem of misogyny is far more fundamental to the crime genre as a whole than it is to the superhero genre; and I like a lot of crime/noir stuff, too). So is the SF genre. (Any Robert Heinlein readers out there?) So is the Romance genre. And on, and on, and on.
My point is NOT that “all these genres can be politically problematic, so why pick on superheroes.” (Although an honest, aesthetically searching discussion of why different genres at different times get cut all sorts of critical and ideological slack, while other get dismissed on such grounds – well, that might be worth reading.)
My point is rather that ideological critique can only take us so far. It tends to proceed as if works of art (or acts of representation, if you prefer) are best judged in terms of their political content and efficacy. In other words, the (generally unspoken) assumption of such criticism is that politics should serve as the primary evaluative yardstick by which the “success” or “failure” of a work of art (or act of representation) can be measured.
I happen to disagree, strongly, with this assumption (although that does not mean that I do not have an interest in and cannot learn from or do not sometimes practice ideology critique!).
One serious problem with the “superhero movies are racist, nationalist, sexist” arguments (and I use the term advisedly) of Dargis and Scott is that it insults those members of the audience who consider themselves to be anti-racist, anti-nationalist, and anti-sexist. I would number myself in that crowd.
And do I really need to add that there are in fact quite a lot of women, people-of-colour, and non-Americans, who enjoy superhero fantasies? How are they supposed to respond to the “arguments” of Dargis and Scott? “Oh my, you are so right! What a fool I have been for enjoying the propagandist “entertainments” of my oppressors! Would you please supply me with a list of approved movies and books so that I may become as enlightened as a New York Times journalist – for surely there is no one wiser or kinder on God’s green Earth!”
I suppose one could make some argument about false consciousness in order to “explain” the phenomenon of, say, a woman-of-colour who just enjoyed the heck out of, say, The Avengers. But personally I find such arguments deeply patronizing, and self-evidently inadequate.
A more productive line of reasoning (to my mind) would be to ask what it is about superhero fantasies that attracts so many people (across lines of race, gender, and generation), DESPITE the ideologically troubling aspects of many of those fantasies.
Isn’t it possible – just possible – that there is something genuinely emotionally compelling and even aesthetically powerful about the best examples of this genre? (Just as there is about the best examples of the Western, the Crime genre, the Romance genre, and so on?) Isn’t it possible – just possible – that sometimes people are responding to those compelling and aesthetically powerful aspects of these narratives (and not just, say, giving in to their inner fascist)?
It might also be worth pointing out that it is possible to be aware of the ideologically poisonous aspects of an art work (or act of representation) such as, say, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or (to take a more recent and perhaps even more disturbing example), The Birth of A Nation, while also considering those artworks important enough to be worth teaching, and even defending in terms other than the political.
And BTW, I don’t find a movie like The Avengers to be anywhere near as troubling as D W Griffith’s racist version of history, or even Shakespeare’s The Merchant. I’m not arguing for some sort of equivalence between these texts – I’m arguing that ideology critique is, at best, an opening move, in critical terms. To my mind, you have to have more things to say about a movie or book than “it’s racist/sexist/homophobic” if you are really engaging with it as a professional critic. Of course, you don’t HAVE to engage with any text critically if you don’t feel like it or think it’s worth it. But if you aren’t engaging in that way, don’t pretend that you are.
Scott and Dargis, I submit, fail this basic test of critical engagement when it comes to the superhero genre… Scott and Dargis just come off as art-movie-snobs, and their attitude is all too lazily familiar. But hey, we already knew that the NYTimes doesn’t have much of a clue about pop culture. This is the same NYTimes that just criticized Comic Con for being too serious, after all. (And they say superhero movies are stupid and incoherent!)
For those of you who might be interested, I’ve found Jonathan Dollimore’s book, SEX, LITERATURE & CENSORSHIP to be very smart and useful when it comes to parsing out the vexed relationship between aesthetics and politics – and in moving beyond the more knee-jerk tendencies of ideology critique. Dollimore’s work is definitely somewhere in the back of my mind as I write all this, and it seems appropriate to give him a nod.
It’s hard to recognize the Dargis-Scott dialogue from this piece. The critics, both of whom acknowledge enjoying certain superhero films, are largely just venting their exhaustion with the simplistic aspects of the genre, the peculiar defensiveness of the fans, and the business ideology that has created the glut. Toward the end, they note that the films blithely (and perhaps obliviously) reinforce some anachronistically hegemonic attitudes about race and gender (the powerful white man as savior, the cheesecake treatment of women, etc)–most of which is pretty hard to disagree with.
Ideology is mostly what makes superheroes fun for me. As for seriousness, I’d say Nolan’s Batman is just as much an engagement with revolutionary utopian thinking as any of the current terrorist cum entertainment spectacles that have popped up in the past few years (most of which I love, too: Carlos, Che, etc.). Where he falls flat is in the action sequences. I’m more entertained by his villainous speechifying.
Good for you, Ben. Actually engaging with the formal properties of art, and how those create content, is hard work; ideological readings are so easy that even I can do them. In other words: ideology is the last refuge of the lazy. Tintin’s use of colonialist tropes is predicated on denying the basic zzzzzzzzzz
[I hereby half-heartedly apologise to everyone for that simple-minded, reductionist straw man]
But, to be fair to critics at somewhere like the NY Times, how many of their readers would actually be interested in reading about, say, Nolan’s inept blocking of action sequences or use of severely restricted mise en scene? Boring!
As I mentioned on the thread, one of the things that’s interesting to me about Ben’s complaint is that…Ben’s book, Do The Gods Wear Capes? is…an extended ideological critique. Or at least it seems so to me. It’s definitely more engaged with ideological theory than comics criticism generally is (for example, he has a lovely discussion of submission and feminism in Wonder Woman using the work of Christian feminist Susan Coakley.)
I didn’t find the NYT piece especially irritating…I suppose the insights weren’t especially new or revelatory, but, on the other hand, I don’t think they’re wrong either…and superhero movies are *such* a big deal now, and so popular, and so generally validated, that I don’t think it’s a bad thing for a mainstream venue to point out the obvious flaws.
I don’t know that I think that formalist criticism is necessarily more difficult or less lazy than ideological criticism…it seems like either can tend towards default tropes and easy truisms. Terry Eagleton has some pretty funny quips about formalist poetry critics hearing the wind whistling through the “s”‘s. When it’s done well (as Ben did in his book) I often find ideological criticism exciting and moving and engaging…all those things you want from art, whatever it’s form happens to be.
Here’s me puking, ideologically or otherwise, on Batman Begins.
Yeah, the first one is a turd. (You can click on my name for a brief ideological reading of the 3rd film.)
Oh yeah, Jones? Well, formalist critique is nothing more than a description for those too lazy to look for themselves.
Eh, maybe I was projecting my own preference and experience as a universal truth — which would be a world first for the internet in general, and HU in particular. Maybe it’s just that most of the ideological readings I happen to have read have given me less insight than the formalist ones I’ve read. Speaking personally, I can learn far more from one sentence by David Bordwell than several thousand by Slavoj Zizek.
Anyway, I’m really a pluralist at heart: let a thousand critical flowers wilt!
Ideological critique may be “easy” but I think it’s still important to utilize in super-mainstream publications like the Times. An A.O. Scott article is going to reach a lotta people from a lotta backgrounds, and it’s reasonable to assume that plenty of those people are going to be victims of systemic oppression; and not all of them can (nor should be required to) quietly swallow the continual prejudices of superhero shit. Forget ruining the movie, a day or week can easily be tainted by an egregious encounter with normalized oppression. I think it’s crucial, therefore, that these be the principal facts disseminated about any piece of media, before we get into the comfortable privilege of aesthetics. If a film is especially racist/et al, people should know.
(I’m not saying that the Avengers is particularly odious, in fact I haven’t seen it lol. it’s just a general stance i’m taking)
Also: Even though you acknowledge it as patronizing, I’m still a little annoyed at the cheeky citation of a hypothetical WoC who liked the Avengers. Was this necessary to include? Because despite the fact that you introduce this anomaly only to dismiss it, it comes across like you’re emphasizing it. I blame the italics.
I’d say Nolan’s Batman is just as much an engagement with revolutionary utopian thinking as any of the current terrorist cum entertainment spectacles that have popped up in the past few years (most of which I love, too: Carlos, Che, etc.)
Yeah, is someone gonna review the Batman movie? I’m so conflicted about it. On the other hand, Nolan is clearly trying to show how much true revolutionary change really would suck, maybe as a counter to the more radical 99%ers. (But he draws from an older example of revolutionary change, the French Revolution, complete with a Bastille Day emptying of the prisons and revolutionary “tribunals” that find everyone guilty – and has to resort to very improbable series of events in order to set up a situation where NYC would be as cut off from the rest of the world as eighteenth-century Paris. Even if no one is physically crossing the bridges, couldn’t the US government use high-flying invisible planes and satellites etc to figure out the location of the bomb and communicate that information via phone lines, cable lines, wireless phone lines to a trusted person the ground? Do I just have too much faith in the US government? How did Batman sneak back into Manhattan, anyway?).
But also, as always, Nolan is building a movie out of very, very powerful psychological pieces. Bruce Wayne is trapped in a public life he doesn’t want to live anymore – a situation lots of famous people (including Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan, I’d bet) can probably relate to. The villain grew up in a literal hell on Earth. The stakes include nuclear war, a nuclear bomb, the destruction of the current world order starting with the financial system. Etc etc. It’s an extreme movie. I think it has the power to communicate something to even the most desensitize or complacent person. And unlike The Dark Knight, it ends in the most psychologically satisfying and “happiest” way it could possibly have ended, given the premises of the whole thing…
It’smore ideologically interesting than the terrorism-videogame-inspired movies that had trailers playing with it, anyway. Mixed feelings.
I’d run a Dark Knight review if someone wanted to write it. Nobody seems to have wanted to yet…but perhaps someday.
Noah, print this review:
“it’s a mess.”
Heh. Probably I’d want something a little longer, though that is undoubtedly eloquent. I’ve heard from a couple of people who said it was horrible….
No time (you can be grateful for my messed-up schedule) to do a proper job of commenting on the “ideological” readings of the last three Batman films. (And who knows when I’ll get to see the third.)
But, as usual, I get reminded about how looking at art or reality through “ideologivision” warps, distorts, ignores inconvenient details.
If these three Batflicks are “a conservative trilogy,” howcum in “The Dark Knight,” it was not only a criminal, but a black criminal (for more bonus liberal-points) who nobly, self-sacrificingly, chose to throw that detonator overboard and doom himself and his fellow cons, while the boatload of law-abbiding folks where shown as eager to blow up the other one and save themselves?
Sure, for a superhero to thwart a bank robbery, halt a mugging, etc., does not challenge, much less attack, the countless exploitations and oppressions by which “civilization” keeps the rich on top and everyone else lower down.
But is it truly fair to attack this as “upholding the status quo,” and interpret it as supposedly a “hooray for capitalist exploitation and economic inequity”?
You might as well equally condemn paying our taxes, obeying the traffic laws, not robbing or raping, as “upholding the status quo.”
With the Joker in “The Dark Knight” said:
————————
…But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.
————————
http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2008/08/writings-from-the-holy-texan/joker-s-wild-or-batman-degree-zero-the-dark-knight-2008-.html
Hogwash; there’s nothing “fair” about chaos. The little people suffer, the rich can afford private security forces, take a helicopter to another mansion, etc…
I liked DKR way more than the previous two Nolan Batman movies. It does seem pretty conservative in some ways…though…as it turns out…the “Bad Guys” are not really 99%’ers at all and are just manipulating political unrest and class division to take revenge. In some ways this is a copout (just another madman/madwoman bent on revenge or world domination), but in other ways it mitigates the conservatism of the film (which initially seems to take the side of the rich/status quo vs. the “crazy” poor and downtrodden). In some ways, one could read the film to suggest that it’s the mistreatment of the poor and mishandling of the economy that “primes” that (large) section of society to be manipulated by “evil.” That is, there is some suggestion that if we had a more egalitarian society, revolution/anarchy wouldn’t be necessary (or on the verge of happening). (Just as criticizing the results of the French Revolution in the short term doesn’t necessarily mean one is in favor of the ancien regime). For all those reasons, it’s an interesting film, that (to me, anyway) made more sense plot-wise than Batman Begins or Dark Knight…and had enough fun mindless superheroing and explosions to make it enjoyable. Anne Hathaway was also surprisingly good as Catwoman.
I also liked the new Spider-Man movie quite a bit. That one had almost no ambitions that I could see… I liked the return to Gwen Stacy, though, since I read about her in Ben’s book. Both DKR and ASM were better than Avengers, to my mind (which really made almost no logical sense…never mind the ideology).
Also…the fact that Bruce Wayne loses all of his money is meant to make him a more ambiguous figure (not clearly on the side of the rich). Instead he ends up in the same place as Bane—stripped of everything…at the bottom of a well…etc. I don’t think this really works to make Batman a “working-class hero” (it’s something to be, I here)… but that’s clearly the intent…and it adds an extra layer to any kind of ideological reading. To some degree, I agree that “it’s a mess”—but at least it’s an interesting mess…which is more than can be said for something like Avengers…which is both a mess…and completely mindless.
I enjoyed the action in DKR, but I’m no connoisseur of movie action so I may be a cheap date. Any advice on how to wise up about action (besides just watching John Woo movies) would be appreciated.
Anyway, I enjoyed the film way more than I expected to; I disliked the second and missed the first. I found it hard to draw an easy bead on the partisanship of Nolan’s political comment, so either Im dense or the movie’s more complex than simple political comment, in which latter case I like it all the more.
Aaron: Kung Fu Hustle, by Stephen Chow, is as good a superhero action film as we’re ever likely to get.
For a nice critical perspective on contemporary Hollywood action, see this pair of video essays on “chaos cinema”, and this piece by David Bordwell contrasting that modern style with the “classical” style of Jackie Chan and other Hong Kong filmmakers.
Jones, thanks for the tips!