No B.S Friday: What’s the fantasy they’re selling?
I’m not sure I can handle another superhero movie.
At first they were fun. They’re supposed to be fun. A bit of escapism. They’re based on comic books after all.
But I’m not sure they’re healthy.
And it’s not that they glorify violence in a PG13 kind of way. It’s not whether glorified lycra is really appropriate in combat scenarios. Though there is all that too.
It’s about the fantasy they’re peddling.
And what’s that?
That everything is easy.
When you watch superhero movies, they’re never really working that hard.
Want an amazing body, with six-pack abs and buns you could break a bad-guy’s nose on? Easy. Seems like there’s no effort required at all.
Want to move great distances at supersonic speeds? Easy. Just fly. You won’t even be tired when you get there.
Want to blow up trucks with a high-powered laser beam? Simple. Just concentrate a bit, my squint your eyebrows a little.
Want to shoot the detonator out of a boss’s hands at 100ft, bouncing your arrow off three separate obstacles before it gets there? No worries. You barely have to look, let alone set yourself.
And I don’t want to be too much of a grinch about it. I know I’m complaining about the exact thing that makes superhero movies fun to watch.
There’s a transference that happens when we watch a movie. When we watch a hero in action, we see ourselves in them. We move with them. We clench our amazing glute muscles with them. The mirror neurons of the brain light up and go crazy.
It really is the next best thing to doing it yourself.
And so it’s fun to imagine ourselves as a muscular god stomping through the world without a care for physics or fire power.
Of course its fun.
But in this we are being seduced by easy.
It’s fun to imagine ourselves leaping over tall buildings – we feel like that represents who we truly are on the inside – even though in our day to day reality we’re not jumping over buildings. In fact, peeling ourselves off the couch feels like too much effort somedays.
And the way I see it, this fantasy is running straight into the tech juggernaut of taught helplessness.
Technology wants to take every task from our hands. Soon, you won’t google anything even. You’ll just ask your phone.
You’ll ask your phone where to buy the thing you want, what you should eat tonight, how to get home.
Before long, that will become, just tell me when it’s time to eat, time to shop, what to buy. Tell me what I want – I can’t be bothered figuring it out.
All effort will become outsourced.
And for all intents and purposes, we will be useless.
So we don’t want to be glorifying easy at this particular juncture in history. We need the opposite. We want to be glorifying hard work.
Give me Captain On-to-it – who uses planning and systems to optimise his productivity.
Give me Mr Consistency – who always does the things he should, even when he doesn’t feel like it.
Give me Girl Delayed Gratification – who knows that great things tomorrow often come by giving up good things today.
These are the superheros we need.
Maybe I’ll write a script. Or get ChatGPT to do it.
No wait dammit.
JG.