Sunday Tourist Miscellany
Dumb Superhero Movies
One of the funny things about our era of “franchises” (a word that sticks in my mouth almost as bad as “iconic”): the way their products come to resemble the other sort of product with which I associate that word, the fast-food meal. I have had fast-food milkshakes that were so good they almost were works of art, in a Warholian kind of way, but most of what I buy from a fast-food place Gets the Job Done, and the more of the stuff I eat the more the average difference between “worst” and “best” gets just eradicated. So Black Adam, which I saw yesterday, and which is already emerging as “critically-drubbed box-office failure,” is basically not that different than Black Panther, which is one of the few superhero films it’s still relatively respectable to like. BP was a little more visually inventive and had better acting. BA has, if you think about it, way better politics. It takes everyone’s critique of Black Panther — that Killmonger had a better argument for his position than did our hero (which he did, if you ignore the part where he is obviously really excited about killing and conquering as many people as possible while he has the excuse) — and acknowledges it by basically making, from an offensive old ‘40s villain/’00s antihero, a character who fuses the qualities of Killmonger and Black Panther. He is the leader of his hidden utopia, and also the avenger of a colonized place. (The colonized former utopia is “Kahndaq,” which is an actual place name in the Middle East. I’m so glad they didn’t go with some of DC’s other made-up Foreign Countries, which include “Qurac.”) Also, the movie breezes past the question of whether it’s OK to just kill “bad guys” by the metric ton; in this way it flatters the military ethic of both anti-colonial movements and the US government. The film basically asks “What if there was a superhero who was cool and scary and he worked for the Palestinians” and answers “It would be rad. It would be straightforwardly rad.” Which is … true!