All our Heroes are Pyrrhus

That crunching sound is the new meta-narrative
crushing your nostalgia.

A while back I blogged about the summer blockbuster, Man of Steel. Jessie asked for a follow-up:

I want a post about people's oddly consistent reaction to how many extras died in this movie.

To really address this topic, I think we need to look more broadly at action and adventure movies. [I should mention at this will be a spoiler-filled post for any movies that come up, and that I will be talking about some movies I haven't seen.] Two movies this past summer have been particularly  criticized for their portrayal of successful attacks of mass destruction: Man of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness. Tor.com has a recent post discussing the new perspective on warfare portrayed in these films:

The most disturbing thing to me about both Star Trek: Into Darkness and Man of Steel was the collateral damage in both films and the rather blasé treatment that it received. [...]

We’re not reminded often enough that thousands have died in drone strikes in Pakistan over the past 9 years. It’s not stressed that over a hundred of those deaths were children. They are not important to the narrative.

That narrative tells us that these things happen, that sometimes mistakes are made. That in order to protect our security and get the bad guys, sometimes innocent lives are lost. They’re unfortunate accidents. Incidental. It’s the cost of our freedom.

The whole post is worth reading, and I agree that these films highlight a major difference in the way we tell action stories now compared to previous decades. But I think it misses a critical detail of the destruction in these movies, and therefore a critical part of the narrative they create.

The incredible levels of destruction don't happen to civilians in the enemies country / planet. They happen here. When San Francisco and Metropolis are decimated, the movies are not making a reference to deaths overseas. Not to be completely cliché, but it really is all about 9/11.

Now, action movies have always required a certain degree of collateral damage, both to prove the situation is serious and to motivate the heroes to fight back. Often a close friend of the hero has to die in order to justify the heroes being callous about slaughtering the enemy; as Mark Millar would say, "It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy."

What, a fiendish mustache isn't enough?

But mass destruction was typically been restricted to disaster movies or has taken place before the heroes get a chance to fight back. In both cases, a fair amount of attention was paid to the fallout, and the heartache of massive losses of life and property were kind of the point.

I think that changed after 9/11. Consider the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000 and featured the villains almost killing all of the world's leaders. In the end we had one dead senator and a broken torch on the Statue of Liberty. In contrast, the third X-Men movie came out in 2006, and resulted in dozens or hundreds of death, and the complete destruction of an equally iconic national landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge. Some of this is a matter of sequels escalating, but I think there's something different here than what we see going from Die Hard in 1988 to Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995. The process has continued over time, with city-wide destruction the heroes are powerless to prevent in 2012 in The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

What people have been commenting on the most, though, is not just the level of destruction, but the fact that the heroes don't even make it a priority to try. These days, movie action heroes have accepted their inability to save large numbers of people, and the filmmakers want the audience to play along. We almost don't notice until we are looking at long-standing franchises like Star Trek and Superman, where we've seen the heroes fight and overcome these sorts of world-destroying dangers before with far less collateral damage.

So what does this say about us? Again, I don't think it's about our drones killing civilians. It's about the fact that our real-life heroes--the soldiers, political leaders, police officers, firefighters, etc--couldn't do much except get out of the way while the iconic monument of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. They helped after the fact, but they were powerless to prevent the tragedy. That's the new narrative I see: not just that heroes don't always prevent collateral damage, but that heroes can't prevent it, and we shouldn't expect them to.

Gone are the days where Superman can conveniently discover the power to turn back time if the villain succeeds in sinking the West Coast and killing Lois Lane. This time, the best we can hope is that Superman uses whatever is at his disposal to stop Zod from making it worse, even if it requires him to kill. Even the most powerful on-screen hero must accept that they are sometimes powerless, because the audience needs to accept that our off-screen heroes are sometimes powerless.

this is what victory looks like in the 21st century

The backlash this year might mean this is changing. As the narrative has escalated what our heroes can't do, we've also gotten further removed from 9/11. We might finally be reaching the stage where it's not enough to see the side of good win only by sacrificing much of what the hero protects (Man of Steel & Star Trek Into Darkness). Or it could be that the new narrative has run against our nostalgia for these franchises and the narrative won. Only time will tell.

A Return to Blogging

Superman Returns?

After a few years without blogging on this page, I've decided to return. My intention is to put up links to articles, blog posts, and videos I find interesting. I'll also post my own thoughts on topics of interest from time to time. I'm planning to deal less with economics-related topics; I'll be leaning more heavily on topics like education, truth claims, mechanics and mystics, comic, and other fun tags from my new label cloud. (If you really want to hear my econ commentary, head over to my more academic blog, Subliminally Unemployed.)

As the first return post, I'll offer a movie review (poster provided) complete with spoilers below the jump break. But before I do, let me open this post with a request for requests: whether you're returning to this blog with me or starting it new, what would you like me to write about? Any articles you'd like me to comment on or share? Post your requests in the comments, and welcome to Metadoxy!