BLACK ADAM Star Dwayne Johnson And Producer Hiram Garcia Address The Character's "Villain" Status

(Can I get a ruling on whether this complaining makes me a Marvel stanboy or whatever it's called now. I would think that having the most glowing words for a DC property and a pretty harsh assessment of Marvel's would insulate me, but I can never tell.)

@tmp3 - I was being a bit facetious on that last one. But based on what I've seen and heard, the movie either casts Joker as an outlet for populist rage, albeit flawed, or casts the whole lot together into a mass that some people will still view fairly positively.

I guess I'm just frustrated with modern adult storytellers taking these relatively simplistic children's stories and flipping the generally good messages and morals on their head for shock value, drama, or some imagined sophistication. As someone with a passing familiarity of storytelling, I understand the impulse, obviously. If "sympathy for the devil" was good enough for Milton, it's good enough for Hollywood, right?

But it's tricky when dealing with superheroes in a way that it's not for traditional fairytales or ancient myths. Old stories are built on cultural expectations that are generally very alien to modern sensibilities. Again, Milton is a great exemplar of this. When his Satan speaks of the valor of overthrowing a divine king, he does so with the same fervor that Milton had for dethroning the English monarchy. Milton was a Christian, but he was intimately sympathetic with the liberal and populist impulses that would lead a loyal patriot to kill a king.

But superhero comicbooks reflect a society of post-war America, whose values (in broad strokes) are still deeply ingrained in us today and (I think most of us agree) should be. To seek sympathy for comicbook villains, you inevitably have to contort yourself to endorse greed, psychopathy, fascism, rage, nihilism, and all sorts of malicious things. Because superheroics at their core are still pretty simple morality plays.

Marvel showed how dangerous this is with Thanos. The Russos talked about making him the protagonist (fair enough, that's a narrative structural thing), but also making him sympathetic. They showed him grieving the murder of his own daughter as a genuine tragedy for him. The internet was swamped with #ThanosWasRight by people willing to accept (or pretend to accept) unimaginable loss of life as a reasonable temporary solution to a resource problem.

This is complicated, and I've already written a book here about it so I won't go into the counterpoints and on-the-other-hands (and there are a lot of those). I'm just saying that this is potentially dangerous stuff, and it does concern me. This genre is important to me and increasingly helping to form the moral outlook of kids for years to come. I'm just putting that concern out there.

Or, I guess it's "above" now. Words.

And I said "modern adult storytellers", but I really mean to include the second and third generation of comic writers going back into the seventies. Not every deconstruction is bad or anything like that, but just that there is danger in taking something simple, pure, and aimed at children, and twisting it into the opposite of what it was to begin with, while still expecting those children to be in the audience.

@tmp3 - I do think that there’s a difference between saying “the viewer has to think critically about the character presented solely in this challenging R rated film”, and saying “the viewer has to think critically *this one time* about this widely known children’s entertainment character and possibly divorce the intent of all those countless other appearances from this one, when applicable.”

It is a different kind of minefield... which is not to say that it can’t be navigated, but it’s a concern.

@Spock0Clock - The one thing I did feel was missing from Endgame was a hero verbally taking apart Thanos’s argument. Neither of the two films gave a counterpoint to him. Emotionally, it wasn’t needed as Marvel was successful in making us feel the stakes... we all wanted the snapped characters back too. But for tradition’s sake and completion’s sake, I would have liked to have heard a dressing down from Cap. Thanos was a talker... there was room for it.