Agree or Disagree - Action Movies/Superhero Movies are basically fascistic.

[thucythucy]

78. I think there's actually a lot of great literature

that focusses on ordinary people, as opposed to gods or superheroes.

Moby Dick is about an ordinary whaler, which in America of the 1850s was about as low socially as one could get.

Huckleberry Finn is about a semi-literate runaway "river rat" and his buddy an escaped slave.

Ulysses is about a college student, an ad salesman, and his wife.

Death of a Salesman is about, well, the death of a rather boring and ordinary salesman.

The works you cite all come out of patriarchal oligarchies. Even as limited a democracy as ancient Athens produced the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, which (on rare occasion) featured ordinary people (as opposed to gods and superheroes) as their main characters.

I'd even hazard to say that much of the great literature produced since the 1850s has been about relatively average people, in terms of social status or class. And when "great" people are introduced as characters, as often as not it's to mock them or portray them as ridiculous--Napoleon in "War and Peace," Stalin in "The First Circle", the various military higher-ups in "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Catch 22" and "All Quiet on the Western Front." And so on.

Superheroes seem to me a definite throwback to an earlier, even classical tradition. Whether or not this constitutes some thread of fascism: that seems a bit much. But it does conform to a sort of "great men" vision of drama and literature, as opposed to something more modernist. "The Iliad" as opposed to "The Tin Drum," etc.

Anyway, it's nice to see some critical discussion about media on DU without an immediate piling on about how social or literary criticism inevitably leads to "banning" and censorship.

Best wishes.