Have some superhero movies been about agenda politics lately

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ironpony
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25 Apr 2020, 3:09 am

It feels like some superhero movies lately are following a trend to be about agenda politics or pushing an agenda.

Wonder Woman, for example, in the movie, they alternate dimension of women talk about how men have poisoned the Earth and we need to stop them, and maybe there is some hope for them to learn... But this feels like maybe the writers had a big of a misandrist agenda, perhaps? Or maybe I am totally wrong and this is in the comic books as a recurring theme, and they are just trying to be accurate to the comic book?

In the Black Panther movie, they talk about how black people have been mistreated all over the world, etc. And I am thinking the writer may have been trying to push an agenda there? I'm thinking why can't you just be a superhero adventure? Why do you got to bring racial injustice themes into it? Unless the comic book is also about those themes?

And Aquaman is about how the human race has polluted the oceans and now they are needing to be taught a lesson for it, like the writer couldn't write a superhero script without trying to force some sort of environmentalist agenda into it.

However, I could be wrong and maybe these themse are in the comics? Or are they really not, and it's just writers trying to force politics?



Bradleigh
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25 Apr 2020, 3:47 am

This sort of political themes have been baked into super hero writing from like the beginning. You don't think Captain America punching Hitler, who was a political figure at the time, this happened in April March 1941, America did not enter the war until Pearl Harbour in December 1941. And indeed there sympathisers to Nazi Germany in America, and this was not necessarily considered the wrong opinion in all circles like you might believe.

I think that it is true that a number of super hero movies have become more overt with their political themes, as I think some people are not so afraid to actually make statements. But many of those existed in the comics already. The very basis of the X-Men is that it can be a stand in for minorities that are discriminated against.
"Have you tried not being a mutant?"

Geek culture has kind of always been at the forefront of progressive politics, just can kind of be easy to miss when looking back because it often followed political shifts that make it look less extreme. Like Star Trek having TV's first interracial kiss.


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ironpony
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25 Apr 2020, 4:05 am

Oh okay, I knew X-men definitely had those themes, but I wasn't sure about the other recent ones.



Karamazov
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25 Apr 2020, 10:27 am

Some of the themes you may see are even older than the comic book: Wonder Woman which you flagged up is derived from Ancient Greek myth, the island of warrior women where no man may enter is straight from there: WW herself is the goddess Diana.
If you wanted to take umbrage with radical reinterpretation for modern cinema the characterisation of Ares is very different from in the surviving poetry & plays.
Same could be said of Hades in the Disney film “Hercules”: or Hercules himself for that matter.

This does not mean there aren’t folks in the entertainment industry out to provoke strong reactions to generate free publicity from the controversy: that ones been going on for decades (just think of heavy metal for instance).

Afterthought: “agenda politics” is a tautology, all political movements, positions and parties have agendas.



ironpony
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25 Apr 2020, 12:21 pm

Oh okay, but does this island of women in the real myth, dislike men and distrust them, like in the movie?



Karamazov
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25 Apr 2020, 1:01 pm

In the Greek original(s)* the Amazons are the daughters of Ares by a goddess: they live somewhere off east, sometimes and island, sometimes a river valley.
Strongly matriarchal society: all male babies have their legs and arms broken to prevent them from challenging female dominance in all areas of life.
(So there are men with the Amazons in the Greek original, but they’re virtually enslaved skivvies/breeding studs only)
Every Amazon warrior has to kill a man from another people in battle before her first time with a man in bed.

So the film actually toned down how strongly “girl power” the Amazons are! :lol:

Amazon means “moon-woman”, Diana/Artemis (Wonder Woman) is a moon Goddess: Hunter, virgin and lady of the wilderness.
Virgin in Ancient Greek context means she’s her own boss, and no man can tell her what’s what.

*multiple different versions which contradict each other: there were over a thousand independent Greek states for hundreds of years, and they liked to reinvent their religious stories to comment in current events. The above is the outline of what is consistent across the majority of versions.



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25 Apr 2020, 1:08 pm

I don’t know. I’m not a fanboy of the genre.



ironpony
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25 Apr 2020, 2:31 pm

Karamazov wrote:
In the Greek original(s)* the Amazons are the daughters of Ares by a goddess: they live somewhere off east, sometimes and island, sometimes a river valley.
Strongly matriarchal society: all male babies have their legs and arms broken to prevent them from challenging female dominance in all areas of life.
(So there are men with the Amazons in the Greek original, but they’re virtually enslaved skivvies/breeding studs only)
Every Amazon warrior has to kill a man from another people in battle before her first time with a man in bed.

So the film actually toned down how strongly “girl power” the Amazons are! :lol:

Amazon means “moon-woman”, Diana/Artemis (Wonder Woman) is a moon Goddess: Hunter, virgin and lady of the wilderness.
Virgin in Ancient Greek context means she’s her own boss, and no man can tell her what’s what.

*multiple different versions which contradict each other: there were over a thousand independent Greek states for hundreds of years, and they liked to reinvent their religious stories to comment in current events. The above is the outline of what is consistent across the majority of versions.


Oh okay. Do you think that for the movie Wonder Woman, it would have been a better twist if:

SPOILER


The female villain turned out to be Ares? That way, Wonder Woman would not have seen this coming at all. But since they wanted to make men out to be the bad guy it seemed, you see the twist coming in who Ares is going to be, a mile away it seems.



Karamazov
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25 Apr 2020, 2:51 pm

^ tbh: I didn’t like the whole “Ares is the bad guy” thing: it makes sense in a modern context to make the primary war god a baddy... but it’s a radical distortion of the underlying source material.
Same goes for making Hades a baddy incidentally.
I don’t think it has anything to do with their maleness: but their respective domains of war and the underworld.

In the surviving texts the three principle divine antagonists to the heroes are Hera, Aphrodite & Dionysus, but none of them are “baddies”: implacable forces of nature that squish silly arrogant humans yes, evil no.
But having romantic love (Aphrodite) depicted as a chaotic force that upends the world and leaves a trail of corpses in its wake, whilst true to the original mythos, would be pretty out there for modern audiences.
Same goes for maternal love (Hera): we get it’s defensive potential for violence depicted in modern stuff, sure: but a mother who spends the entire movie trying to kill the main character to eliminate her husbands love children? Might be a difficult pitch.
And Dionysus in his Classical Greek form (so pre-Alexander the Great) is far too weird and spooky for a modern audience considering he’s always in the right when he gets down to business with tearing people limb from limb, driving whole ships crews insane and so forth.

So. Yeah, Greek heroes are always deeply flawed and get their comeuppance at the hands of appropriate gods: even Aphrodite & Dionysus the most dangerous and unpredictable of the gods are just doing their bit to keep the world as it should be, and if we get in the way... Splat!



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25 Apr 2020, 6:25 pm

ironpony wrote:
The female villain turned out to be Ares? That way, Wonder Woman would not have seen this coming at all. But since they wanted to make men out to be the bad guy it seemed, you see the twist coming in who Ares is going to be, a mile away it seems.


I thought the point was that Ares did not actually create the villain, but only slightly stoked the flames of war. That Doctor Poison was a person who was spurned by men, and really to the audience was to say that we should not be defined by our anger hatred of what others have done to us. But probably also that she put all of her faith in a male authority figure.

As it stands, things like WW1 with mustard gas became a big symbol of how none of us should use such cruel implements of war, that poison gas internationally banned as a weapon following it.


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ironpony
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25 Apr 2020, 9:48 pm

Oh okay, but I thought Ares was inside a human body rather than creating a villain. Wasn't he?



Bradleigh
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25 Apr 2020, 10:52 pm

I don't remember anything about him possessing anyone, I just thought that he was disguising himself as a normal person. His whole rant at the end was that he did not really do anything to create the villains, other than essentially little whispers to stoke what was already there. Only really using his powers at the end because Diana was stepping into stop the conflict, and he wanted to show Diana even that she was no better, that war is the way. Rather than winning by pure strength, Diana's win came from understanding that people can act out of selflessness and love, and even do things like forgive.

I think it is silly to say that Wonder Woman was against men, her team and friends was actually made up of a diverse group of men, a number of whom would find themselves discriminated or looked down on such discrimination for race or PTSD, and she respects them as they respect her. I think that dynamic is not anti-man, but you could possibly say anti patriarchy where certain ideas of strength are held up over others.


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26 Apr 2020, 12:48 am

The people who complain about people wanting diversity are the worst ones yet.


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ironpony
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26 Apr 2020, 10:30 pm

Bradleigh wrote:
I don't remember anything about him possessing anyone, I just thought that he was disguising himself as a normal person. His whole rant at the end was that he did not really do anything to create the villains, other than essentially little whispers to stoke what was already there. Only really using his powers at the end because Diana was stepping into stop the conflict, and he wanted to show Diana even that she was no better, that war is the way. Rather than winning by pure strength, Diana's win came from understanding that people can act out of selflessness and love, and even do things like forgive.

I think it is silly to say that Wonder Woman was against men, her team and friends was actually made up of a diverse group of men, a number of whom would find themselves discriminated or looked down on such discrimination for race or PTSD, and she respects them as they respect her. I think that dynamic is not anti-man, but you could possibly say anti patriarchy where certain ideas of strength are held up over others.


That's a good point. I guess it's not really against men, but it's a male redemption movie, in the sense men are redeeming themselves in Wonder Woman's eyes.

But Black Panther was like this too where they talk about how black people are being mistreated all over the world, and Black Panther has to put his faith, in a white CIA to help him. So it's a white redemption movie.

Where as in Aquaman, the human race has to redeem itself for mistreating the Ocean.

So I guess the movies are not against men, or against white people, are against humans on land, but movies wanting to redeem them?



Bradleigh
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26 Apr 2020, 11:50 pm

I don't remember anything really about the men having to redeem themselves to Diana, if anything she mostly learned about them.

I don't think the CIA guy represents all white people, and it really was not so much about white people needing to redeem themselves. Rather the CIA guy was just kind of evidence that white people in general are not the enemy. And the movie's conclusion that that those with privilege should eschew away from just following tradition, and should try and do what they can for those who are disadvantage. Killmonger's idea of being controlled by anger and trying to punish people by spreading his anger, is not the right way.

I thought that there was barely any humans in Aquaman, the one that would stand out the most would have been Black Manta, not counting that Arthur was half and half. If anything Arthur's journey was to learn to show more mercy, as it was the lack of it he showed when refusing to save Black Manta's father that created that villain. It was through things like Arthur having empathy rather than fighting that he was not killed by the monster and was able to get his title and stop the fighting, while the villains on the other hand stoked tension and spread anger to accomplish what they thought was a just cause. The political lesson of Aquaman if anything was that striking back out of revenge just to punish them does not make things right, rather just creates more victims and makes things worse when they strike back. The sort of thing that would be against a lot of American war policies.


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