Racism and Blockbusters

Blockbusters are struggling, and what they will look like moving forward is now an open question. People aren’t just willing to line up for any old superhero movie anymore. Audiences call any attempt to make Captain America black or Captain Marvel female “woke garbage”, and the white men who once flooded to watch the next MCU installment are leaving. Entering into 2024, the year has been tough to predict. Especially after last year, who’s big successes were films about Marvel superhero J. Robert Oppenheimer — I’m sorry, historical theoretical physicist and real life creator of the Atomic Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, by former superhero brand director Christopher Nolan, and the Barbie movie, by cinema darlings Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. These were, make no mistake, blockbusters in the traditional sense of the word, but also not.

Superhero movies are really what blockbusters are designed to sell. They are usually star driven, or had been until recently. They usually adopt broad storytelling. They often feature a hero and a villain. There have been periods where this has changed. Where we enter these kinds of No Man’s Land we are in now.

That’s a good thing. We should stay here.

The problem with Blockbusters, and especially those of the superhero variety are both fascist and racist. Why?

It all dates back to the first blockbuster, Birth of a Nation.

Birth of a Nation, a film by the first blockbuster style director, D.W. Griffith, who’s reputation is somewhat whitewashed in Hollywood academic circles due to his films that weren’t racist and fascist propaganda.

The plot of the movie is a world beset by subversive invaders, who are both weak in character, while being strong either in absolute terms or in numbers, invade a country, and attempt to take it over as the rightful leaders of this place fight them back and recall their world. Now did I describe Birth of a Nation, or Black Panther? How about Star Wars? Many will first note that the latter two examples flip the script. This time those fighting back are the oppressed. Because movie heroics are rarely about collective action — in fact such movies are notoriously difficult to right, films are usually about somebody — any hero is naturally a stand in for the audiences, and the invaders are “something foreign”. Even in Star Wars, despite Luke explicitly being a “rebel” who is losing a battle to “the Empire” with a meager force backing him up, the stormtroopers, Vader, and Palpatine, are made to look like something unearthly. The stormtroopers are just faceless entities, completely stripped of humanity. Palpatine represents a kind of cruel old age. Vader is disabled. All things that play on natural fears, but maybe also things that are rather swallow and lead to ageism, ableism, and fear of foreign invasions.

This is why they used Blackface in Birth of a Nation. The film industry was already the Wild West, and many things filmed overseas, or in the north. They could have included black actors back then. They did not intentionally. You have to always understand, film is about intention. The intent of that blackface was the render the inability to see emotion or identity. The make their enemy a faceless, in human horde. To make the viewer afraid of them, and by nature afraid of their fellow man. To stir those emotions specifically.

This is something all superhero media does. In an interview during the Marvel boom, the venerated actor Crispin Glover remarked he would never do a Marvel or Superhero movie because “they’re propaganda”. This is what he means. It’s very hard to divorce the fascistic elements of comics that Alan Moore satirized so much throughout his career, and the naturally racist and nativist sentiments that persist in the nature of the modern blockbuster.

I want to highlight an area in Blockbuster history where this was not as prevalent. If the idea of blockbuster is simply reduced to busting the block, or how much money it makes, the 90s nearly moved away from this entirely.

The racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and inherent fascism to certain films in the 90s was incidental to it’s time, meaning largely not tied inherently to the storytelling choices. It resulted in a series of off-beat movies making money such as Jurassic Park, Adam Sandler comedies, Romantic comedies, Titanic, Keanu Reeves vehicles like The Matrix, Speed, and buddy comedies/action like Men in Black.

Some of these films incorporated the kind of spectacle which unites modern blockbusters, but they’re choices in storytelling were often very different. They would touch on societal issues less overtly because they would be more incidental to the plot being a more intimate film. Agents Jay and Kay get played by two actors, one a rising black star at the time because no one has preconceived ideas of what these characters “should be”. To draw even more away from these types of films that drastically soften issues with the modern blockbuster being more original, more focused stories, less bogged down by lore. These are characteristics so integral to D.W. Griffins Birth of a Nation, resurrecting this lore, this legacy.

I want to go further though. Into the world of foreign cinema. I won’t go far to start, Akira, an animated feature. Something that strikes me about that film compared to modern American action features is how ambiguous the ending is, in an almost 2001 A Space Odyssey kind of way, leaving the viewer with more questions and not leaving any room for any kind of sequel. The story changes, making Kaneda “the hero”, but there really isn’t one. Everyone basically sucks here, but Kaneda felt responsible for taking Tetsuo down. In many ways, the way this film progresses is more American than a lot of other foreign film and foreign film markets.

I’ll expand further. Many films in other markets don’t follow these traditional heroes journey kinds of stories, or will opt for more experimental storytelling (e.g. this years Zone of Interest), or will be far more intimate, being about a marriage, or a single person navigating every day life. They do this by focusing on smaller budget films (respectively). These facilitate stories that give a wider opportunities to prospectively actors. They need to be marketed more. Movies like Poor Things, Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, and American Fiction can be appreciated by wider audiences, even many of those that would just go see another superhero movie, if they were marketed more. The problem for big studios is the risk associated with that. For every The Holdovers you have dozens of middling dramas, or unfunny comedies, or even worse in the streaming era, the movie that doesn’t find it’s audience until years later. It’s easier to make the next Captain America, and yes, even make him a person of color, because when the budget expands, so does your need to capture every demographic. However, for me, it is tough to see these big broad films ever really tackle this material in the way they want because the nature of a blockbuster limits their storytelling potential.

This D.W. Griffith approach is very studio friendly. That’s why it became popular. That’s why so many writers are taught to execute it. It’s not that all writers and all movies are racist, or xenophobic, or fascist, it’s that the incentive structure for what kind of stories we tell and sell to a blockbuster audiences carry a series of tropes that are. This is the true legacy of Birth of a Nation, setting down principles on which the concept of a blockbuster is even today.

The Black Panther mention was intentionally provocative. However, I did get a good bit of advice once: “imagine your favorite character taking a shit”. I always thought about this in an approach to evaluating visual storytelling and movies. Not just a shit. A bad shit. Something that I feel comics do better than movies is come at the characters more from this angle. In Marvel especially the story was never “good guy fights bad guy”, it was “good guy has to get groceries, bad guy appears”. Sometimes there were big showdowns, things that culminated from epic storytelling, but was also driven by money. The true spirit of comics lay in those one off issues. Those “day in the life of” stories that used to be a huge part of the glue holding the comics together. There are very few superhero movies, in my opinion, that have accomplished that (and, to stress, even these have those problems).

For me it isn’t about preserving the superhero, or guy with a gun, or John Wicks, or who will or won’t be our next great action icon, it’s about expanding and experimenting beyond chasing the next big IP or video game movies to replace the void of 300 million dollar cinema. I think for me, that is when the specter of D.W. Grittith’s racist attitudes and tropes rear their ugly head into new productions.

Even though I blame social media for crying “woke” — I get giggles when the right-wing film critics struggle to explain why having a movie about a civil war is “woke” because they are photo journalists, or one looks foreign. It really lays bare the dumbassery of it all. Yet the problem is they often have a point with these superhero movies. It was decades before Sam Wilson “Falcon” took over the mantle of and became the regular Captain America — and the MCU kind of has to rush through this stuff because actors get older. Also though, there is some inherent sense of “purity” to many superhero stories, which is intentionally toxic. Perhaps not the greatest film, but Will Smith’s Hancock about a misbehaving black “superman”, explores this concept, illustrating that we have a certain “view” of what a hero “looks like”. There is a “purity” to their side and an “impurity” to whomever they are fighting against. These issues again chronically plague blockbusters. It is not that we can’t reform the “traditional” blockbuster.

Something I have noticed in blockbusters that have done it right come from blockbuster television, which rather than drives story with action, rather has the action as part of the environment. Civil War is a good example of this.

One thing I shun is the idea of “good” and “evil”. Being a lifelong comic reader, while I think many issues and many writers eschew this concept in superhero books, it is the driving narrative of most comics produced. That simple reduction on it’s own makes the slow creep towards the fascist extremes presented so frankly in Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

Moving forward I think the conglomerates now in charge of almost all are entertainment must give in to the biggest risk taking in cinema. Experimental scripts. The kinds of high concept ideas being floated around in the 90s. The kind of maverick directors that defined the 80s and 90s.

I honestly feel like while entertainment can be reflective, it can also amplify. Much of the division in this country takes on these hero complexes. So much so there are countless examples of either side claiming some hero from some movie made to sell other movies and action figures. Guns. Violence. Sometimes sex. Villains with crazy names. The fleeing damsels in distress. A kind of sexualized violence that is often present. These are things present in so many stories told in a visual medium that do not have to be, and, in my opinion, do cheapen the power of cinema when it become oversaturated with it.

I’m also not blaming movies for sowing division in the country — but I think when they see that these movies are causing more blowback, than support, seek out new ideas. Movies like Nope and A Quiet Place have flourished and found audiences. Horror is a great genre to explore depth. Comedy is as well. Hollywood needs to resurrect this kind of experimental filmmaking and actually push boundaries again.

The problem with the modern blockbuster, is while it carries these problematic tropes, it should not define the kind of movie that is popular. We can get back to a time where maybe one of these kinds of films is in the top grossing films of the year, instead of most or all of them.