"The Boys" Are Back In Town

If you have not yet had your fill of "superheroes viewed through a gritty lens" then head over to Amazon Prime to watch "The Boys." If "Umbrella Academy", and "Jessica Jones", and binge reading Worm hasn't made you sick of the genre (and you know I love "Hancock.") A friend pointed out that at this point, the MCU are the only ones doing straight takes of superheroes for others to subvert.



Still, the Boys is well worth watching. Karl Urban is as good as the ads say, the plot is much better than the comics and goes interesting places by the end, and the political themes are rich. Spoilers below.

With any show that is trying to be so "relevant", and use superheroes as direct analogies for celebrities and athletes and brands, it has to be political. And so we get the question: well are they right-wing, or left-wing? On the right we have... the Punisher and most cop shows. On the left we have... every other superhero show. The Boys straddles a line.

On one hand, the leftie messages are obvious. The bad guy is a corporation who misuses the ideal of superheroes in order to raise stock price. The heroine gets Harvey Weinsteined in the first episode as her introduction to how bad the world of superheroes is. There's a repressed lesbian who is abused by her ex-boyfriend. And there's an extended segment about Christian superheroes and their convention, who are grifting constantly from their desperate and religious fanbase. "Pray the Gay Away" is directly mocked and censured. The scariest character is called Homelander and wears an American flag as his cape.

And yet... it's more conservative than you might think. The entire genre is "working class boys take down effete corporatists with ultraviolence", which is the plot of beloved gorefests from Boondock Saints to Die Hard. That's a fairly right-populist fantasy, at least for film. And the lead heroine is a genuine midwestern Christian gal fighting to keep her dignity, in the face of the "casting couch" and publicists who want her to wear skimpy, revealing costumes under the name of "feminist empowerment." Two male characters are motivated by fridged women. And if the white male characters fail in stereotypical white male ways (for liberal circles), you can't miss that the black character fails in stereotypical black ways.

The #MeToo plot is probably the most interesting and complex here. Again, it starts with a vile scene of exploitation in the first episode, leaving no ambiguity about who is the bad guy, and how powerless women feel. But after that... when she forces corporate PR and HR to finally deal with it... the corporation easily co-ops her struggle, and turns the victim's triumph into a Lifetime movie that makes them even more money than keeping the bad apple (and leaves the heroine feeling used a second time.) And the rapist character goes on to be portrayed as genuinely human and pathetic, having some of the most hilarious scenes of the rest of the series (including a very disturbing scene where he is served his own medicine.) It's just weird and despite multiple episodes about harassment, I could not say where the show stands on it.

So what is the Message here? Well instead of looking for the explicit moral, we should be looking for how this world works, and what that says about how the creators and audience think our world works. And the fundamental engine of what makes this show interesting is the battle between labor and capitalism.

The most interesting tension to watch throughout the show is "who is in charge among the bad guys - the human staffed corporation, or the superpowered costume wearers?" And we get shown examples favoring either perspective throughout, right up until the climax which is WAY more concerned with this dichotomy than with the titular Boys.

And the Vought corporation is capital, with the superheroes themselves being classic labor. Oh sure they may be rich, like baseballs players on strike, but they are still the workers, and reliant on their employer for the means of production (in this case, social media campaigns.) Who is in charge, the labor with superhuman strength, or the capital that is feeding them their billions of dollars in merchandising cuts and CRIMESTAT services and lobbying for friendlier bills? Every scene featuring Madelyn and Homelander is really about a battle for dominance between capital and labor. (And note what I said above, about the corporation coopting the personal struggle of a hero for even more profit.)

And those of you who have seen the end, know that it is about the horrors of one side of the labor/capital divide actually winning.

This also answers the ubiquitous femdom of the series. Frenchie getting his balls grabbed, Popclaw's movies and bedroom homicide, Starlight talking about the trouble of being stronger than her boyfriends, Deep's comeuppance, and of course the main plotline. All of these make this metaphor front and center - which in other cases might just be written off as the director's personal fetish - and match fairly well with the capital/labor relations. The show's metaphor for capital trying to restrain labor is simply female dominance in the bedroom, and that... works until it doesn't, they're saying.

Stuber: Whiteness in a Decentralized Era

AKA the Spiritual Successor to Hancock

I just went to see Stuber on a lark, and it is amazing. All of you must see it immediately.

Because it's good? Oh hell no. It's two central actors - Dave Bautista and Kumaili Janjiani - are mediocre to decent comedic talents performing at the upper edge of their middling range, and the plot is the most paint by numbers buddy-cop movie you can imagine. Nothing you see in this movie will make you sigh "this is true craft."

But the writing. The writing captures this current cultural and economic moment better than any other film of the decade. Future generations will be lucky if they remember this movie to accurately portray the teens. It is not "deep" in any sense, but rather leaves everything at the surface, to be so easily analyzed.

The movie is prominently "about" Uber. What is the brilliant malevolence of Uber? That it is a faceless market-network that connects labor and consumers directly in a race to the bottom for both of them, while the network takes a cut. Of course, small business founders have been working inhumane hours and floating their meager savings as startup capital - often losing it all - forever, but Uber and similar apps are the commodification of their self-exploitations, encouraging more people than ever to enter this cutthroat environment in order to take their cut. It is Capital finding a way to eat its cake (exploiting labor), while never having the legal responsibility of an employer or the personal relationship of a manager. There's no employment protections - if you're unlucky enough to get customers who have bad days and drop your rating on the app below 4 stars, you are impersonally dropped from it (as Kumaili's character - Stu - worries over.)

Cool, we all know that. Now what is whiteness? To quote SMG about multiculturalism:

The idea of multiple cultures, in itself, is not wrong. The trouble is that it's employed as a substitute for antiracism, antisexism and so-on. Those are issues of class, and the reduction of various communities to just 'cultures' serves as a distraction from class. 

Like, as a basic example, you go to a generic multiculturalism festival and there's going to be a Chinese pavilion, Portuguese pavilion, whatever. What you won't see is a Homeless pavilion, or a Poverty pavilion. 

Tumblr's solution is essentially to create endless new pavilions, so there's a little booth for 'homeless culture' slotted inbetween the ones for bronies, sentient anime characters, and dogs. Little recipe cards for how to drink Listerine without going blind, that sort of thing. Maybe a special seat for the transhomeless - those who are rich but have a 'hobo spirit.' 

And FYaD, I suppose, would have effectively the same setup: ironic pavilions for n*****, goku, doge, etc. 

The thing is that multiculturalism is already assimilationist. People are grouped into a 'multiculture' that is subordinate to white culture and, in a broader sense, liberal capitalism.

Now of course any Marxist (like SMG) will say that "race conflict is just a mask for class conflict" --but the epiphenomenon of racism and whiteness can still be interesting to discuss as this superstructure.

And the message of Stuber is that "whiteness is like Uber - it can work even when there is no white person around present to enforce it."

What does that mean? First, it means that none of the main characters of Stuber are white. Not the two main characters of the cop and the Uber driver. Not the villain, who is East Asian. Not the heroine/daughter of the cop. White characters are all at the periphery - the platonic friend/love interest, the cop's corrupt boss, the dead partner who is mourned like a surrogate daughter, the bro-asshole boss - who all represent the different authority figures and objects of pursuit that whiteness dominates in our culture, but are not really central figures full of agency themselves.
(And they're outnumbered by other peripheral characters of color). And all of these side characters are flat caricatures, lacking even the minor depth and nuances that Stu and Vin get.

And the entire setting of the movie is a multicultural, boring, suburban LA with set-pieces of banal multicultural commodification: a gay strip-club (which has the best scene in the movie), a sriracha factory, Koreatown, the omnipresent Uber, a sporting goods store, an art gallery, a women-only spincycle gym. It's a tour through "new world same as the old world." A goddamn sriracha factory with workers hiding in a van fearing ICE!

And the two main characters, neither white? One is an overly macho cop who is short sighted, and the other is an over-educated Uber driver who is desperate for money and the approval of a white woman.

And yet, the two main characters have no way to interact with each other except through whiteness. The young precariat Stu through his educated-class wokeism, and the old cop Vin through his establishment machismo. Here are some of the best jokes in the movie between them:

STU: Oh sure, haul me in. A white cop dragging a brown guy around. That will look great.
VIN: I'm not white.
STU: What are you? Puerto Rican? (Vin shakes his head.) Mexican? (No again.) Libyan? (No.) Chinese?
VIN: (eyes squinting from Lasik) Oh, now who's being racist.
STU: Ugly people come in all races.

***

STU: That was trauma. You're going to put me in therapy. And neither of my jobs give me insurance. So I'm going to have to get it from college students. Who all read books by white guys with Indian names. And they'll tell me to mediate. I ALREADY MEDITATE.

 ***

VIN: When I was fourteen, my father took me camping in the desert. When we ran out of food he went back to town. Except he just got drunk and hooked up with his local sidepiece. So I just had to wait in the desert, cold, hungry, afraid of wolves, and with nothing but this switchblade. That night I become a man.
STU: First off, your father was abusive. Second, you don't have to starve alone in the desert to become a man.

Which is all topped off with Stu showing up, dating Vin's daughter, wearing a Bad Christmas Sweater (white cultural appropriation) and saying "this is your night in the desert."

Or perhaps the peak is when these two ethnic men are letting out all their aggression by beating the shit out of each other -- but they do it in a sporting goods store so they are using golf clubs and climbing ropes and other bourgeois toys.

There is nothing they can do that captures their authentic ethnicity in a way to interact with each other. And that's because in this world there is no authentic ethnicity that has not been captured and intermediated by whiteness (aka upper class capitalism, really.) And viewed through this lens it is very, very funny.

It's like my favorite movie Hancock, as I say above, except you don't even need the white-male figure supervising the characters anymore. We live in a decentralized world where the oppressed classes do it to themselves now.

There are so many examples of "brave new multicultural frontiers sublimated into white/capital relations" in this movie that I am too tired to list them all (and the movie and the script are not online yet.) Just go see it, and bask in the best movie to Capture Our Era so far.

Hancock: Apologies

A touching moment to end our exploration of Hancock, is a contrast of the two apologies given by Hancock.

Hancock: A Good Ol' Bank Robbery

The "superhero stops a bank robbery" is probably the most standard trope that Hancock uses, and Berg subverts the cliche delightfully while maintaining its essence. Let's go over it today.

Hancock: Back to the 1930's

A great deal of this movie is wrapped up in the 1930's, which is the time period of Hancock's origin. We're not given any flashbacks, just occasionally told hints of what happened that fateful night. This is a really telling period of time for Berg to use.

Hancock: Miscege Nation

It's not really possible to discuss Hancock without discussing cultural attitudes towards black-white romantic pairings in media. So let's rip the bandaid off and jump right in.

Hancock: Celebrity

One of the few things most critics noticed about this movie was the imagery of celebrity. But beyond "I guess superheroes are like a basketball star or OJ", not much was added to the discussion. Let's examine these allusions more in depth.

Hancock: Noted Stanford Professor and Bank Robber...

After the big three, very few characters in this movie even get multiple scenes. Aaron is the lovable moppet who always likes Hancock despite his gruff exterior. And there's the villain, who is relatively minor but pretty interesting for all that.

Hancock: Mary Part Deux

So Hancock the movie spends the first hour establishing how systemic racism (primarily through class signals, and not explicit antipathy towards blackness) degrades black men who become depicted as angry and slovenly and thus not worthwhile members of society, even when they have so much to contribute.

Having done that, Peter Berg goes for the hat trick by applying the same lens to feminism and intersectionality too. It's so great.

Hancock: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

The plot of Hancock is like an M. Night Shyamalan movie where the twist is... the woman was an actual character all along.

Hancock: PR Man vs Realism

Before jumping in to a character like Mary, let's actually give a bit more space to the philosophical stances represented by Ray.

Hancock: Boy

Just for a focus on the use of one word in one scene, I'm going to copy paste SMG's analysis of how Hancock uses the word "boy". Like most SMG critiques, it uses historical context and the tone used in the film, and it takes the form of arguing with forum trolls.

Hancock: Ray, a Drop of Golden Sun

At first blush, Jason Bateman's Ray is the cliche hero of this tale. But there's more nuance to his position.

Hancock: What Could Have Been

Something that's interesting about this fairly weird movie, is that the original script that inspired it was completely different.

Hancock: the A-Word

And when we’re talking “uncomfortable class imagery” there’s nothing more direct than the pervasive use of profanity. The defining word of this entire movie is…

Hancock: Weather and Critical Observation

As mentioned before, Hancock contains a lot of uncomfortable class imagery. Holy hell, does it contain a lot. And the easiest thing to do is dismiss this as juvenile attempts to appeal to "frat boys" with no more substantial meaning in the film. "That's a nice theory but do you really think the director was thinking that?"

This is the wrong outlook. As a demonstration, let's talk about weather in this movie.

Hancock: Progression

Hancock's character arc is the evolution from Jar Jar Binks to Luke Skywalker.

(Obviously, full spoilers ahead for all posts from now on.)

Hancock: Preview

Tomorrow or over the weekend I'm going to write about the best superhero movie of the post-2000 age of cinema, Hancock. This is a very controversial and very rich movie. There are so many details and social lessons we could pry into.

Individually, Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Peter Berg are all signs that a movie is going to powerful commentary on class and oppression. (I Am Legend, Mad Max Fury Road, Friday Night Lights.) When they get together...

Except I think most people reading this blog haven't seen it. You should, you can rent it for $3.

So I'll probably only write one post. But if people have seen it, sound off in the comments letting me know (or +1 this on some social media or whatever). If so, we could really dig into this one. You know, form a truly authentic reading of the text and re-examine our role in the social hierarchy? If that's not your idea of a fun weekend why are you even reading this blog.