Why do we go watch superhero movies? After all, variations of these stories about brave, superhuman heroes predate recorded history. We used to tell them around campfires before written language even existed. They were created as a way to teach you how to behave.
Thousands of years ago, when your ancestors were living in tribes and hunting gazelles for food, nobody knew how to read. Even if they could, paper wasn't a thing, parchment was rare and precious. They had no written historical records, they had no educational system that could devote years to teaching history to the kids.
This was a problem. Once humans started forming civilizations, the guys in charge didn't just need the next generation of children to know how to fish and hunt, they needed citizens who would fall in line and fight for the tribe. That meant the kids needed to understand the big picture: why preserving the tribe is important, why we hate the tribe across the river, why our tribe is better than that tribe, why it's important to go off and fight in the next war no matter how scared you are.
Now, to do this, they could either A) bore the kids to death with a years-long recounting of the history of the tribe, which nobody has probably written down anyway or B) tell them a cool story. They could tell the thrilling tale of Kolgor the Valiant who, when the evil neighboring tribe came to slay all of the women and children, stood alone and fought bravely through the night, with four arrows in his chest, until the enemy retreated in terror. You want to be like Kolgor, don't you, little one? Otherwise,
he will have died in vain.
Clearly "B" is the one that is going to stick in the kid's brain. It doesn't matter that the story is either fiction or grossly exaggerated -- it gets the job done, it makes the kid conform to be the kind of citizen the tribe needs him to be. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- your tribe may very well be better than the one across the river, your real history is probably full of real heroes whose sacrifices were just as important as, if less romantic than, Kolgor the Valiant's. The tribe didn't go with the fictional version because they were liars, they went with it because it
was the only way for the "truth" to survive.
So while we use the word "myth" these days to mean "a lie that needs to be debunked," often the myths were simply more efficient versions of the truth. They're easier to remember, they don't take as long to tell and they eliminate a lot of the messy ambiguities that can confuse the point. Also, they won't bore the listener to tears.
The point is,
this is why stories were invented -- to shape your brain in a certain way. A guy named Joseph Campbell
wrote whole books about it, you should read them. These basic stories, these myths of the hero overcoming the odds, the great man who sacrifices himself for the greater good -- they're what make civilization go. In a society, the people and the buildings and the roads are the hardware, mythology is the software.
And while your ancestors had their heroes that they heard about around the campfire, you have Batman, and Luke Skywalker, and Harry Potter. And yes, the movies you watched this summer serve the same purpose as those ancient myths. Sometimes this is super obvious (clearly Rocky IV and The Day After Tomorrow are trying to cram a message into your brain with the subtlety of a sweatpants erection). But what's the message behind James Bond? Or Iron Man?
"There isn't one!"
That literally isn't possible.
Quiz Time: What do these hugely popular hero characters all have in common?
Batman
Spider-Man
Superman
Luke Skywalker
Frodo from
The Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter
Finn from
Adventure Time
Got it yet? They're all orphans.
That's kind of weird, right? Do you think that's a random choice? Do you think the writer just flipped a coin? Or do you think
there's an emotional button that is being pushed there, the writer reaching around the logical part of your brain and triggering something inside you without you knowing it?
That sounds devious, but those little subconscious tricks are Fiction Writing 101 (we
covered a bunch of them here). It's a scary power to entrust someone with, if you think about it. Especially if you, as the audience, don't pay close attention to what they're doing. You leave the theater a different person than you were when you came in. It's a difference in millimeters, sure, but you're going to watch a thousand hours of the stuff in the course of a year. It builds up.
"What, so you're trying to tell me there's some hidden agenda behind the
Transformers movies? It's freaking robots punching each other!"
No, there is no
intentional hidden agenda (well,
maybe a little), but there is certainly a set of assumptions that the filmmakers are passing on to you. In the case of
Transformers, the assumption is that combat is beautiful and exciting, that military hardware is sexy, that destruction is gorgeous and fun and completely free of consequence. And, most importantly, that the solution to all conflict is to be more masculine, powerful, aggressive, confident and destructive than the bad guys.
"But the people already think that! These movies are just giving us what we want!"
Right, but
why do you want that? You think you came out of the womb thinking that military hardware was cool? If you grew up in a real war zone, and didn't have movies and TV, would you have the same opinion?
I'm not saying Michael Bay is a secret tool of the military industrial complex trying to brainwash you into supporting the next war, no more than the makers of
Jaws were trying to wipe out the sharks -- they were just trying to make a scary movie, and Michael Bay is just a dude who likes explosions. It doesn't matter
why the message is there -- it soaks into your brain either way. This is what everyone misses when debating this stuff -- one side says, "Hollywood is trying to brainwash you!" and the other side says, "Michael Bay isn't smart enough to brainwash an armadillo!" and they're both missing the point.
This is why, when some people point out
how racist the Lord of the Rings stories are (i.e., orcs are evil by virtue of being born orcs, dwarfs are greedy because they are dwarfs, Aragorn is heroic due to his "blood"), it's both correct
and unfair. It's correct because, yes, that is the way Tolkien's universe is set up -- nobody in the stories hesitates to make sweeping generalizations about a race, and they're always proven right when they do. Frodo's magical sword didn't glow in the presence of enemies, it glowed in the presence of a certain
race (orcs). Go write a movie about a hero with a gun that glows in the presence of Arabs. See what happens.
But it's also unfair, because Tolkien clearly didn't sit down and think, "I'm going to increase the net weight of racism in the world in order to firmly establish white dominance! And I'll do it with
elves!" He was just writing what he knew. Of course a guy born in 1892 assumed that Nordic races were evolved and graceful, that certain other races were born savages and that midgets love axes. Hell, he could have been the least racist person he knew, and he'd still be the equivalent of a Klansman today. Whether or not the agenda was
intentional is utterly irrelevant.
I can't emphasize this enough --
there is no conspiracy. Yeah, you'll occasionally have a movie like
Act of Valor that is transparently intended to boost military recruitment, but 99 percent of the time, the movie's "agenda" is nothing more than a lot of creative people passing along their own psychological hang-ups, prejudices, superstitions, ignorance and fetishes, either intentionally or unintentionally. But
they are still passed on to you, because
that's what stories are designed to do. Michael Bay feels a certain way about women, and about the role of women in the world, and you will leave his movie agreeing with him just a little bit more than when you came in.
