A Case Against Pop Culture Radicals
We ought to demand more than we get from mass cultural products, not be satisfied with crumbs.
[People] force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.
— Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered”
Following the lead of my colleague, Lupe Ramirez, whose excellent article on Black Panther can be read here, I believe it is time to sit down and have a chat about the presence of “radical politics” in pop culture. Superhero movies are as logical a place to start as any. So let’s get to it.
Lots of breathless praise has been expended for two recent superhero movies: Wonder Woman and Black Panther. Here you can read about all of the “feminist acts” in Wonder Woman. Here you can read about the fictionalizing/mythologizing/etc. of Africa in Black Panther, and how this portrayal is at bare minimum empowering, and, in the hands of good bloggers, presumably, downright revolutionary and radical.
There is something exciting about seeing a woman portray a strong superhero on her own terms. I don’t need to belabor the point here: women are routinely diminished, exploited, and rendered as objects robbed of personhood by popular culture, so it is gratifying when they are portrayed, well, like people who can do stuff. Too often that ability to do stuff has to be accompanied by some rather absurd titillation. For example, take a look at some fan-made and official, respectively, box art for the Bayonetta franchise to see how women are portrayed in a popular videogame — then ask yourself if that presentation is ameliorated by the fact that the woman character kicks copious amounts of ass. If your answer is “nope,” we’re on the same page. This is before I tell you that her clothes are her hair and that she uses her hair as a weapon which means her clothes steadily drift away from her body when she fights, and the whole game is her fighting… yeah, that’s how these games work.
But I digress. There is something too to be said for figures like Luke Cage and Black Panther getting their time in the sunny gaze of popular success and critical acclaim. My point here is not to criticize, piece by piece, blow by blow, the shortcomings of these characters. I will stick to some broader points with the aid of other writers before expanding my scope beyond superheroes and comic book power fantasies.
Wonder Woman’s faults are well-chronicled, though you wouldn’t know it had many at all judging by the number of posters, signs, costumes, and other items featuring her likeness at the most recent Women’s March in Chicago (I stopped counting at thirty). Here is a compelling critique of Wonder Woman’s role in all that bloodshed and warfare the movie so thrillingly doles out. Here is a take that questions just how “empowering” Wonder Woman is or can be as a feminist icon. And here is an argument about the feminist virtues of a film that extols American exceptionalism and overwhelming military might, even while it tries to wrap up its action-movie script with “only love can truly save the world.”
Black Panther’s problems are even more obvious. Again, Lupe tackles this with aplomb here, suggesting a need for class-based superheroism. Here is a damning assessment of Black Panther’s treatment of American black men. And here is an article positioning Black Panther squarely in the neoliberal camp, a political ideology which has done precious little to help the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised, and the routinely-screwed-by-the-privileged.
I cite all these articles to allow me room to explain my own position: counting on elements of pop culture, especially elements like superhero movies, to carve out a space for radical politics is at best naïve, and at worst intellectually lazy. These are films and characters and plots and “cinematic universes” designed to appeal to the largest number of people possible. It was inevitable that historically under-represented groups would eventually get their own big-budget superhero movies — of course they would, especially in a world as focus-group-tested as the one we currently have. No way is the potential audience of “woke”ness going to be left out. There’s money to be made.
“Representation” of the oppressed, disenfranchised, diminished, etc., has been repeatedly heralded as a virtue in and of itself, the visuals alone a revolutionary act. Male superhero shooting down the bad guy? Cool, that’ll make a few hundred million bucks at the box office. Woman superhero doing the same thing? A few hundred million more, plus breathless praise for the film’s “revolutionary” depiction of women, because, well, at least it’s depicting a woman doing something. Talk about damning with faint praise, though. It’s the “anything you can do, I can do” brand of feminism — happy to dance in place, rejoicing in having been allowed to join the festivities, failing to notice that outside the celebration, beyond the party hats and flashing lights and crowded dance floor, the world is on fire.
This glaring lack of awareness is not limited to popular cinema. It is manifest too in contemporary American politics — indeed, a case could be made that this sort of thing reached its pinnacle there. The Obama administration found a way to turn inclusion into the end itself. Some policies were still horrific under the Obama administration, but that was okay, because now others were included in the room where those policies were made. Obama’s politics share this with these superhero movies: image and marketing and iconography not only disguise status quo politics, but could be political acts themselves, presentation elevated. It’s a way of ending the conversation, really. “You wanted to be included,” they say, “and now you are. We trust you won’t cause any trouble, since, you know, we made you this nice welcome basket…”
These films have found a way to cloak themselves in radical politics and make utterly ridiculous sums of money at the same time. They’ve merely stripped down those radical politics to nothing but images and platitudes, replacing the radical content with status-quo-reaffirming predictability and expecting no one to notice or care, as the packaging is oh-so-shiny. And judging by the box-office returns and critical acclaim, they nailed it.
It’s not that the marketers of these films have tried to convince their audience that the movies are revolutionary that I find so offensive. They’re in marketing; their whole job is to lie convincingly and earnestly. What offends and frightens me is that the audience believes it, and far too often seems to believe these films are some sort of great culmination of years of struggle, the righting of horrible wrongs, victory rendered in IMAX. Liberals have applauded representation in these films and missed the forest for the trees. Image has replaced content as the matter of concern for mainstream leftist politics in pop culture, a sort of intellectual and aesthetic surrender. These superhero movies are heralded as revolutionary in the same way that Obama’s election was: a seat at the table has been acquired, at long last! But alas: at no point are the table-settings, the folks occupying the other chairs, or the whole damn room in which the furniture rests, even given cursory consideration. Instead: “Happy to be represented, thank you all for including me! Have any of you fine folks been to see Hamilton yet? And what was that about Syria?”
I hear the objections already. “This is a good start!” “No one wants to talk about class war!” “We have to find a way to reach these kids!” “It may be a guilty pleasure, but at least there’s some substance there!” There is an oldie-but-goodie response to these objections, ready-made all the way back in 1944 (English translation in ‘72): Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, one of the premiere works by these two Frankfurt School philosophers. These are the guys who coined the term “culture industry,” and we’ll get to that. And Adorno is the fellow who rather famously said, “every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.” So we aren’t dealing with little-known lightweights here. Onward!
Adorno and Horkheimer are deeply concerned about the “culture industry.” The culture industry is essentially mass-produced popular culture items — movies, songs, magazines, television shows, etc. — that are designed in a rigidly standardized, routine, sharp-edges-filed-off sort of way. These are not cultural products that inspire their audience to perform radical acts of societal change. Rather, they encourage and reward passivity, a casual acceptance of the way things are. Such cultural objects are produced by and for capitalism, in order to fog over the true set of circumstances their audience is immersed in: poverty, never-ending war, wage slavery, and so on. And these two superhero movies I’ve been talking about do precisely that, with the added bonus of pretending to be something else, something more. Their veneer of radicalism makes everyone feel better, makes everyone feel empowered. But empowered to do what, exactly? Love enough to save the world? Be the Wakanda you want to be? These are not solutions. They’re barely political concepts. They’re fluff, but fluff that lends itself to bumper stickers and t-shirts and witty cardboard signs carried at the next march. And this veneer earns these movies praise from precisely the folks who ought to be agitating for, no, demanding, far, far more.
Pop culture works like this, for Adorno and Horkheimer: “In a film, the outcome can invariably be predicted at the start — who will be rewarded, punished, forgotten — and in light music the prepared ear can always guess the continuation after the first bars of a hit song and is gratified when it actually occurs.” Predictability, and thus inoffensiveness, rules the day. It has to. Its goal is not to inspire, but to make money; not to surprise, but to delight; not to revolutionize, but to perpetuate. You can end a superhero movie with a bit about love saving the world, but that absolutely needs to follow a CGI action sequence, and your whole setting better damn well be one of those good wars. You can have a superhero lament the status of poor neighborhoods in Oakland, CA, but you better have him aim to solve that problem with massive infusions of cash and technology, nothing more, nothing less. Capital rules. Systemic change, a serious overhaul of the capitalist system, absolutely cannot be in the cards. There’s no money in that.
The real problem with guilty pleasures, then, is just that: the guilty bit. You know that there is something wrong with the exhibit you’re seeing, but… but what? Good enough? At least it’s something? A good start? But what happens when that “good start” never actually starts anything, but merely spins its wheels? It is easy in the age of Trump to be satisfied with the bare minimum. That’s what brought us Hillary Clinton. It’s what could bring us Joe Biden. It’s what brings us massive protests in metropolises that amount to little more than self-congratulatory joking rather than anything resembling a movement for change. Complacency. Self-satisfied “woke” sloganeering. Superhero movies with imperialist, capitalist heroes, the masses be damned unless they look a certain way, believe a certain thing, adhere to a certain ideology. And in defense of the bad, we are told this is the price of the good. Women as heroes? Better be supporting the right military force against the right bad guys. Black men as heroes? Better come from an incredibly rich, privileged background — and be okay with the CIA, to boot. We can’t accept that. That does not empower. That does not make things better. And dammit, we should stop kidding ourselves that it does.
So what can be done better? Well, to start, we need to stop accepting the bare minimum. We can no longer tell ourselves in good faith that it’s a start. We should not be delighting in image, in representation, in form without content. My generation, the millennial generation, has access to a tremendous amount of knowledge and an incredible array of tools to make things better, and yet here we are, applauding exactly the bare minimum — if we even get that. Adorno and Horkheimer recognized that the culture industry is catering to our needs and desires, sure, but it is doing so for all the wrong reasons (profit!), and in so doing is robbing us of the ability, and perhaps even the will, to do much more than just be satisfied. Our sights ought to be set far higher, and the longer we delight in the Wonder Womans and Black Panthers, the more diminished our capacities become to affect real, genuine change in how the world works. The satisfaction found in our passive reception of these products of the culture industry is far from sufficient.
