Superheroes and the Worship of Power
Popular media is informative, both as a barometer of society’s attitudes, maturity, and world views; and as an indicator of what the managers of society wish those views and attitudes to be. I remember an old George Orwell essay in which he talked about a then popular series of novels which were quite blatantly fascist in their message — though they were not at all political. The idea was that they basically worshipped brute power and violence. Now, I think this is undeniably the message in most popular American films of the last 50 years, particularly action movies.
But there is something somewhat new in todays most popular film franchises, or new, at least, in terms of the extremity. And that is the indestructability of the hero. Technically, in order for you to be invested in a cinematic thriller or action movie, the hero has to face some palpable danger. Now, of course, it is always a given that the hero will survive and triumph in the end, and that has always been the case; but the suspense and drama comes from how he will survive, how he will endure, how he will navigate the risks he is placed in within the course of the story. Even if the hero’s ability to survive often requires suspension of disbelief, traditionally, the action hero was exposed to genuine peril. Violence could hurt him. The fights were dangerous.
In the wildly popular superhero genre, this has been almost entirely dispensed with. In today’s popular movies, the superhero can get struck and knocked literally miles across the city, and we all know he is going to be fine. We watch battles between indestructible characters, knowing full-well that none of the blows, none of the explosions, none of the fires, none of the magic blasts of weird glowing energy beams or what have you, will have any serious impact. What there will be, however, is massive collateral damage. When two titans face off on screen, we know neither of them is going to get hurt, but we know their fight will level entire city blocks, buildings will be reduced to rubble, roads, bridges, cars, trains, buses, all will be decimated over the course of the confrontation between superheroes and super villains, while they themselves will remain more or less unharmed. It goes without saying, of course, that hundreds if not thousands of people must surely die in the background of all this. People like everyone in the audience. People who can’t fly and don’t have super powers. And, this is precisely why we watch…to see the general destruction. The obliteration of everything in proximity of the battle between superheroes and super villains — the destruction and obliteration of our comparatively powerless, irrelevant existences. And what’s more, the conceit of all this devastation is that it is undertaken for our sakes — to save us.
Now, if you think about this in terms of its political messaging, it is pretty horrific — but also pretty revealing and surprisingly frank. The worship of power is inevitably accompanied by an indifference to, if not contempt for, the powerless — or anyway, for those with less power. And that is us. All of us. We are not the heroes, we are not even participants, we are merely the milieu, the setting and props that frame the great battle between forces of unimaginable power.
As propaganda, superhero movies are tremendously disempowering and self-negating for the population, and highly useful to the unaccountable powers in society, while also being incredibly insightful about the dominant perspectives held by those powers with regards to the population, and with regards to themselves. It is noteworthy that superheroes are not agents of the state, but independent entities that both cooperate with the state, and at times defy it, and are often seen as dangerous to the state. They represent, in other words, private power. And just as action movie heroes have become indestructible superheroes with unparalleled strength, so private power today had reached a level of dominance far beyond what has ever existed before.
And again, we, the public, the people, are cast only as spectators or victims, whose only function in the plot is as the rationale for the great destructive battle that will wreak havoc on the world in the process of saving it. When the villain is vanquished, and the cities lay in ruins, the superheroes fly home.
If the dime novels in Orwell’s day were fascist, these pop culture messages of modern blockbusters are something far more inhumanly brutal. The message is clear — the masses do not matter except insofar as they can be used to justify wanton destruction on the pretext of rescuing them. Regular human beings are inadequate, cannot compete, cannot participate, are inferior, and as such, must accept being collateral damage in the conflict between the powerful. The super powerful always know best, and any efforts to impose accountability upon them is viewed as irrational and irritating. This is a very corporate message. Note that the line “with great power comes great responsibility” is not “with great power there must be great accountability”.
Whether you are talking about the Avengers or the Justice League, or any individual superhero — these characters represent the 1%, and these films promote the worship of their unequalled power and the counterpart of that worship; the disregard for the masses.
This should not be ignored, because it reveals the true nature of Western non-Muslim society — particularly in the United States. Democratic, liberal values have never taken root in this culture — that is itself propaganda. It is a culture that worships power and brute strength; it is not a culture that truly believes in accountability or the consent of the governed, it believes in and admires ruthless rule by force, and the unalienable right of the powerful to dictate the way society should be managed. The narratives of superhero movies, and most action blockbusters express the morality and world views of feudal lords from the dark ages as much as they do the morality and world views of the current elite. This is not a civilised morality, it is not an enlightened world view — it is primitive, nihilistic and brutal. Don’t dismiss popular media as unimportant; these are messages that reveal the culture, and what they reveal is the ugly truth about a society that has utterly failed to ever absorb or even truly believe the values they proclaim. Just as in the old days in Europe (and indeed, since at least the time of Fir’aun) when people attributed divinity to the king; this is a culture that continues to view the powerful as gods.
After the Prophet, the closest thing we ever had to a superhero was perhaps Khalid bin Al-Waleed — the Sword of Allah, who never lost a single battle; and Umar bin Al-Khattab removed him from leadership in Syria precisely because he feared that the Muslims would rely upon him for victory and attribute their success to Khalid instead of to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala. We do not worship power, we do not believe anyone is unaccountable. We believe la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah, and that all men are slaves to the Rabb il-‘Aalameen. These narratives in popular Western media reflect a disease of the heart and a diseased society. Pay attention to the contradictions in what they proclaim about themselves and what they actually celebrate and promote about themselves, because these reveal who they truly are.
