I often wonder how much I’d disagree with teenage me. He was
a surly little shit. There are definitely things I’ve done that I know, I know, teenage me would snort at with
disgust. We’d probably still agree on music. I had impeccable taste in music as
a teen. And we’d agree on how great it is that superheroes are out in the
public consciousness in a way we haven’t really seen since the very early days.
And I know, I know, you’re all sick of them, and they’re all the same story,
and the effects are covering up a pretty thin story, and how many times can
they go to the same well over and over and over?
Which, honestly, is what you can say about every fucking
myth ever, including the Abrahamic ones – let’s just put that in there right
from the beginning.
Just like every other thing in our lives, our myths and
beliefs are becoming more public. Superheroes have always been one of the ways
that we do this. The story is created as a reflection of a hoped-for zeitgeist, and as the story spreads the
change is reflected, one hopes, in the affected culture. This is also how
advertising works – think about that. It’s not a perfect process. The trouble
is remembering that these are human-made stories, rather than divine truths.
They’re metaphors. Once we recognize this, it becomes much easier to manipulate
these myths in our favour – which literally every religion ever has done. But
once we realize that the myth is in our power, we can begin creating new ones –
thus Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. Women have, in these
films, wrested the mythic power from the men who’ve wielded it a good few
thousand years, and have given us back the mythic women we’ve needed for so
long.
Of course, teenage me would just be fucking in love with the
special effects. He thought Masters of
the Universe: The Motion Picture was a pretty good film.
*sigh*
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