The Cultural Shale Revolution

Full disclosure: I like superhero movies. When I was a toddler and I used to go on trips with my Dad in his truck, there was a little TV with a VCR in the sleeper that I would watch Max Fleischer Superman cartoons on because they were in the public domain by then so you could get the tapes for cheap at truck stops. Some of my earliest memories are of being obsessed with the Christopher Reeve movies and trying to draw the climactic final conflict between Superman and Nuclear Man from Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. This interest persisted into adulthood, kicking into overdrive when I saw a bunch of scanned pages from Grant Morrison’s X-Men run posted on a message board and started voraciously consuming every CBR file I could get my hands on. When Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I was there at the first available midnight showing, because I was the type of person who was already buying and enjoying the source material it was based on.

In my twenties, all of my friends used to come with me once a year to go see whatever Marvel’s big flagship release was as a birthday present, even if they actively disliked comic book movies and/or each other. Those are honestly some of my happiest memories of that time in my life. I understand and fully believe that for others, it was the films of David Lynch or whoever that cracked open their hearts and allowed light to get in, but for me, it was stumbling into Five Guys after having smoked half a spliff in somebody’s Hyundai Elantra on the way over from the theater where we had all just watched GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Anyway, as a conossieur of this bullshit, I can tell you with great confidence that very few of the superhero movies that have been released in the past five years have been bangers. I will list the exceptions here in bullet point form and then move on to my actual point:

• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was a banger. The discourse surrounding Simu Liu and Awkwafina on Twitter is generally very unpleasant, but by the end of that thing I found myself genuinely invested in the question of whether or not their characters’ relationship was platonic or romantic.

• Spider-Man: No Way Home