Essays

I don’t know about you, but I’m burned out on superhero movies for the time being. Those guys all seem to go to the same two costume designers. There’s one who is obsessed with tights and capes and masks and cool boots, who isn’t terribly imaginative but who probably has an interesting and complex sex life, though he may be in danger of Spandex poisoning. Then there’s the costume designer who’s also an engineer, who makes the suits for Ironman and Ant Man and, I suspect, for some of the politicians currently lumbering robotically across the politiscape. I’ll get interested in superhero movies again when one of them dresses more imaginatively, maybe like the late Liberace or Elton John in concert, or like John Candy in his polka-band-leader costume.

Aside from being bored by their same-old-same-old costumes, I need a break from superhero movies because I’ve started to get an uncomfortable feeling some of them are closet fascists, strutting around in their flamboyant togs. Have you noticed that in the battles with supervillains, the superheroes destroy as many buildings and as much infrastructure as the bad guys do, like hundreds of billions in collateral damage? And then they expect to be praised. It’s as if Godzilla obliterated Los Angeles and then wondered why he never received a generous grant from the American Foundation for the Arts.