“Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”
– Republican Senator Ted Hruska of Nebraska, in regard to Harold Carswell, a failed Nixon Supreme
court nominee, dismissed, by anyone in his right mind, as “…a mediocre intellectual lightweight.”
As noted, I work in the mainstream comic book business, an “industry” which can be most effectively represented by a dying flea on a tail that’s wagging a billion dollar dog.
Although they are part of the entertainment industrial complex, by textual influence if by absolutely nothing else, mainstream comic books exist on the outskirts, the swampy boondocks of what we think of as the show business, to serve almost entirely as intellectual property—to be clear, rarely intellectual, accent grave on the property—for the ancillary media that has become what is clearly a casino that only pays the house.
Now, over the past decade and a half, a vast and previously untapped market for movies and television shows based on the same endlessly juggled conceptual slag comics have been churning out for nearly a century to exponentially shrinking sales has been found, identified and exploited to a startling and alarmingly profitable degree among customers whose indifference to such stuff had once seemed a bulwark of taste, if not sanity.
Civilians, many if not most of whom have no idea comic books even still exist, are lining up like forgotten men at a depression soup kitchen, spending billions on material that is rarely more than a transliteration of comic book narrative to the big and not quite so big screen, and, to double down on the soup kitchen metaphor, eating it up with a spoon.
Thanks to ever evolving computer technology, movies can now recreate the hyperbolic action we enthusiasts had all grew up with, and sadly, for me at least, only some of us outgrew, in comic books. We who spent far more time than was healthy in the world of the adolescent power fantasies fed to us by hacks failed to convince our contemporaries of the value in that crap, despite our best efforts in this regard, and often despite the private terror that had we succeeded, the material would be co-opted by those previously oblivious to the lure and magic of our magnificent obsession.
Who knew the day would come to pass when those civilians would join us, and yes, co-opt our enthusiasms so completely? Who could have imagined that the day would come to pass that the rest of the world would join us in universal celebration of a narrative template nearly identical to Chuck Jones’ Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, in which liberal ends are achieved by fascist means, featuring “characters” which live up to the expectations conjured by that word only by the crudest of possible definitions?
And, lest you forget, Hollywood is, of course, the same people who mocked us, ridiculed us, and beat us up for reading comic books, now making beaucoup bank off this stuff. Nowadays, everybody claims geek credibility—as if a dismally asocial childhood is some sort of merit badge of privilege in this modern age of ours.
Having lived, and put behind me, such a childhood, I can speak with perfect conviction that I would have gladly sacrificed that aspect of my boyish experience for more actual friends, not to mention an earlier introduction to what sex had in store for me.
That civilian audience has even begun to make itself visible at comic book conventions, which have, for better and worse, become tourist attractions. Before the lockdown, and even now as the pandemic is blithely ignored or dismissed as someone else’s nuisance, Mom, Dad and a stroller are regulars at these events, looking for a piece of worthless Funko Pop shit to commemorate their movie-going/television bingeing experience.
So now we have several generations of consumers, with what seems to me like a generally unhealthy, not to mention unearned, investment in popular culture and its entertainment/distraction division.
If it isn’t Star Wars, it’s Star Trek. If it’s not the DCU, it’s the MCU. Or Doctor Who, for fuck’s sake. Or, of course, something new, or revived, or rebooted, all fuel to maintain social combat for what seem to me to be the attention deprived.
Thus, with the arrival in town of each new distracting circus, modern culture, with grudging, not to mention terrified, thanks to the kangaroo court of social media, identifies that circus, often without actual experience of the acrobats, the sawdust or the clowns, as the best.
Perfectly sturdy, perfectly average, perfectly middling entertainments are deemed to be art for reasons having jack shit to do with execution, with craft, with excellence.
Rather, this stuff is rewarded for its intentions, for its representation, for its acknowledgment, by wink or dog whistle, to an audience that desperately wants to be believe it’s in on the joke, as opposed to, as is too often in this case, being part of the punchline.
Minds are blown. Blown! By material that puts the “un” in unchallenging.
Lyric beauty is found in what anyone with a half ounce of self-awareness could recognize, with a bit of detachment, as B movie nonsense with a budget that could eliminate homelessness.
This, I suspect, is what happens when most people stop reading, and those who do read, read children’s books.
Or, of course, there’s the same pell mell rush to identify this stuff as burn it at the stake, kill it before it multiplies, the absolute worst.
These selfsame time eating, occasionally yawn inducing, now and then mildly amusing presentations are condemned, often, I suspect, by the same people on different days, as a blight on humanity, a scourge to the eyes, head and heart. The complaint that a childhood is ruined by such mundanity by a man closer to retirement age than grammar school is far from uncommon, and just as pathetic and sad as it sounds.
These reactions are, of course reactionary responses to the halo effect imposed by nostalgia on material that doesn’t live up to the memory of the work that made enthusiasts of those often hysterically disappointed fans in the first place.
To be clear, this crowd doesn’t do a lot of the sort of critical thinking called for by reading anything challenging, either.
For the innocents among you, both of these mindsets are politely referred to as proprietary fandom, and of course, not so politely, as toxic fandom.
All of this sound and fury, of best and worst, makes no mention, nor even acknowledgment, of the mediocre middle, to which, I am inclined to think, based on both actual experience with the product under discussion, and yes, with all due respect, an educated contempt prior to investigation, derived from having been around the block more than a few times, most of these mildly to marginally entertaining circuses richly deserve to be consigned, despite all those blown minds and ruined childhoods.
The desperate need to wildly overpraise the middling, and conversely to brutally attack the equally mundane, is, to my mind, a perfect reflection of a social culture bereft of any grasp of depth, of nuance, of any experience with actual narrative character development, maybe even of any real human interaction.
What we have here is an asocial social group systematically bled of confidence in its own tastes, incapable of feeling comfortable enough to like what it likes, dismiss what it doesn’t, with the capacity to avoid pointless and insipid internecine flame warfare over what is basically junk food for the eyes.
Enjoy this anodyne chazerei or don’t. If you care what I think, give careful consideration to being confident and comfortable in your choices, neither overpraising for what it is, nor over criticizing for what it isn’t.
Either way, the material at hand isn’t really worthy of criticism, certainly by any standard that doesn’t operate from a baseline so adolescent as to render such criticism pointless in any context outside the material itself.
No matter how much you love it or hate it, from a creative perspective, it remains, as noted above, just the same thrills, chills and laughs comic books have been selling to that previously specialized niche audience for decades, now gussied up with special effects and performed by actors following the scent of fuck you money in order to never have to do this sort of bullshit again.
And no, despite what you’d like to believe, those actors aren’t just like you.
Nope.
And then, of course, running on tangential cultural tracks of the mundane, the mediocre and the conventional, there’s the New Hilarity, or, as it’s known in my house, Cleverness Adjacent…not really funny, but an amazing simulation.
But that’s another screed, for another day.
