Superheroes are a bunch of fascists
In his article, Superheroes are a bunch of fascists over at Salon.com, Richard Cooper points out that “Today’s comic-book movies are all about superior beings dominating everybody else” and asks “Where’s the left-wing superhero?”
A good question. Here is an excerpt from that article.
Fascism also relies on people who must be crushed. The Batman films — and indeed the entire Batman mythos — are based on the idea that what criminals really need is a damn good thrashing, because it’s the only language these punks understand. The vicarious thrill in seeing Batman yell “Swear to me!” at some pitiful creep who swears to God he doesn’t know anything is for the nasty-minded child in all of us: an innocent pleasure until you start to think about the politics. Always lurking in these movies, too, is the assumption that whether or not we should torture people is actually a question, surely the most obscene symptom of the cultural shift toward right-wing ideas in a liberal coating (seen also in “Homeland” and “Battlestar Galactica”).
