"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.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

A quick rundown, spoiler heavy.



The opening segment of saccharin In Memoria for the heroes who died in Endgame was the funniest thing in any MCU movie so far. That was just great.

The "blip" (where half the population died for 5 years then came back) as a metaphor for puberty ("that guy who was a dweeb just overnight became this tall hunk all the girls like and I'm still the same me") and for life passing you by (Nick Fury's pathos) were better metaphorical uses for that whole 5 year snap than the previous films had done.

The painful high school movie awkwardness was not bad... so much as an accurate recreation of a movie genre that died in the 90's. And it was a good reminder of why we don't watch those movies anymore. I can't criticize but I don't want more of it.

Parker's desire to live a life without responsibility was really undersold and tied back. If the filmmakers had wanted to sell this "you don't own me" is a pretty easy and powerful message in this day and age, hell Captain Marvel just did it. Instead they focused on his whininess, which was a concrete decision to make us sympathize with him less.

Mysterio slamming the entire MCU and genre of superhero-CGI movies with his scheme and "who buys this bullshit" schpiel was uh, pretty devastating from within the franchise. The message wasn't literally "people will believe anything" (as they say) but "people will believe this specific cheesy, saccharin set up we hired a screenwriter for" as an indictment of how bad the writing in superhero movies is.

Both of the Spider-Man MCU movies so far have been about "who is the heir of Tony Stark?" and specifically pitted him against employees or workers who rely on Stark. It's easy plot fodder for compelling B-list villains, and "the innocent young chosen heir vs the cynical servants who think they should be ruling" is a tale as old as fairy tales. However monarchism is also as old as fairy tales, and in the modern context, all these schlubs being the punching bag sounds pretty classist and anti-worker.

Now the most important point: the Reality Stone.

A major theme of this movie was special effects, illusion, and the warping of reality. We have Mysterio's shenanigans and holographic projectors. But we just as strongly have EDITH and this AR (Augmented Reality) system with an AI and attack drones and being able to read what is on everyone's smartphone, which itself is a key into what they are thinking. (Tertiarily, we have Nick Fury able to change where this high school trip is going on a whim, controlling the reality of the poor teachers.) This entire movie emphasizes the fluid nature of reality, as a series of illusions and invasions controlled by the whims of capital. Which is fine subject matter for a movie but...

As I wrote before about Ant-Man:

…the Infinity Stones themselves - aka the Captain Planet elemental harmony of this universe - are just criminally under-explored. Like yes we have two good scenes about the Soul Stone, but all six of them should be doing something different and interesting and powerful, that makes their combination more interesting than “you have collected 5 out of 6 Macguffins.” What is wielding the Mind Stone like? How does using the Space Stone change you? What is the Reality Stone even doing? (Granted Doc Strange did discuss the Time Stone some, but let’s just admit that was bad even if explored.) This would be whinily asking for a fictional universe to reveal more of its wikipedia to you except that each stone got at least a whole movie about it. They spent a movie on each stone before uniting them, and we still know barely anything about them other than “with our powers combined.” Criminal. 

So I just watched “Antman & Wasp” and, well, you know the Space Stone? 

AKA the Tesseract? There are at least 3 movies centering on the Tesseract (Captain America 1, Avengers 1, Captain Marvel, am I missing any?) and they do nothing interesting with it qua the “Space” Stone in those. It’s used to open a large portal in Avengers which is space like, but otherwise it’s just this mystical object which grants a lot of power or knowledge in vague and undefined ways. 

Well what better can we expect from Marvel except they actually made the perfect movie for the Space Stone. They could have injected it as the plot element into Antman that gives him his powers, and so all the weird growing smaller and larger pyrotechnic displays would have match up thematically perfect. It would have been a really cool demonstration that this is what existence is like when space bends to your whim, and the different meanings and perception that gives you to distance and comparison. 

Compare that with Captain Marvel, who is supposedly powered by the a byproduct of pollution from experiments with the Tesseract. Are her blasty powers anything space like?

The "Reality Stone" got a whole movie about it, Thor Dark World, where the stone just makes red blob stuff, and one scene in Infinity War where Thanos uses it to create a false reality to fool his daughter.

If they had made *this* movie about the Reality Stone instead, where both Beck's tricks and EDITH relied on its world-altering properties, we would have appreciated the power of it more, and what sort of god acquiring it (and combining it with time and space stones) would make you.

So my BamBamCanon of the MCU movies would be:

Ant-Man and Wasp [Space Stone]
Dr. Strange [Time Stone]
Far From Home [Reality Stone]
Captain Marvel [Power Stone]
Some movie where the hero unlocks the other 90% of his brain [Mind Stone]
Infinity War [Soul Stone]