My generation read comic books growing up: Superman, Batman
and their various ancillary Supers and Bats. Green Lantern and Green Hornet,
Archie and Jughead. And then most of us stopped at about 12 or 13, and moved on
to other literature.
In those days, any movie based on a comic book was a Sunday serial
or a cheaply made B movie, or a TV show made especially for children. Even Batman with Adam West was for children,
although like Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mad Magazine and now The Simpsons, adults could also enjoy
its tongue-in-cheek satire. Again, at
about 13 or so, we stopped watching the movies and TV shows based on comic
books.
Or most of us did.
Some of us, especially men, stayed in the juvenile world of comic book
heroes.
That was the baby boom generation. More kids from the next
generation kept their comic book habits into adulthood. And even more from Generations X and Y.
Something else happened, too, in the late 70s (okay, it was
1976!), about the time the country took a turn from its commitment to economic
equality to the harsh social Darwinism that now rules. Star
Wars showed the new Hollywood of the late 70s and 80s the possibilities
of presenting what was formerly low budget B material as first run high gloss
features. The new Hollywood also quickly learned the value of sequels and of both
appealing to and cultivating the growing market for adult versions of juvenilia
such as science fiction. Disney had already introduced the concepts of branding
and merchandising. The recognition that comic books were the mother lode came
quickly to Hollywood. Superman
started it in 1978, followed by Batman movie franchises, and now the recent run
of Marvel comic book hero films.
My son, a PhD student in structural engineering at Stanford,
asked me to review Marvel’s The Avengers,
which is well on its way to becoming the most financially successful film in
the 120 some-odd years of the cinema. I told him I’d take a pass. It’s not my kind of movie, and as a social
critic, I consider its very existence res
ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for “a thing that speaks for itself.” The
thing, in the case of The Avengers is
the infantilization of American adults, which means that instead of graduating
to adult-level entertainments, many adults today keep their childhood pleasures
such as comic books and video games. The
ultimate mass market symbol of adult infantilization are the scientists in The Big Bang Theory, who live for comic
books and video games and never crack a book open, volunteer, go to the
theatre, or serve on the board of an organization.
I’m not saying the film isn’t well made. It has the
brilliant-but-always-seems-to-be-slumming Robert Downey, Jr., which means that
whenever he’s on screen, there is at least something interesting to watch and
listen to. And it looks as if he may have issued one of Hollywood’s lasting
lines. Fine movies sometimes produce
great lines such as “I could have been a contender,” but they are more likely
to produce great images, like the girl waving to Marcello at the end of La Dolce Vita or Jack Nicholson playing
classical music at a piano on the back of a moving truck in Five Easy Pieces. But it seems as if
many of the most remembered movie lines are from schlocky movies such as
Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back” and “Hasta la vista, baby” or Clint Eastwood as
Dirty Harry saying “Do you feel lucky today punk?” and “Make my day,” which our
Actor President Ronald Reagan resurrected when hard-balling Congress about
taxes.
The magic line for Downey is in every ad for The Avengers that I have seen, and
despite not watching that much TV, I have seen a slew of ads for the movie. A bad guy says “We have an army,” to which
Downey replies with an arrogant insouciance, “We have a hulk.”
Great line that may prove to be timeless.
But it reminds me of what my father once said about a sappy
middlebrow costume drama starring the A list of British actors at the time in
which a churchman sanctimoniously defies a King on religious grounds. My
father’s words, sanitized here: “If you take a piece of crap and you polish it,
you have a polished piece of crap.”