Fox News vs. Superman

The scripted Republican attacks on Superman 2025 don’t seem to be working. It’s cleaning up at the box office.

“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld whined as an on-screen graphic proclaimed that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”

Fox News has always peddled such ugly fascist trash propaganda aimed at destroying empathy and decency. Previously, Fox News called Captain America, Wonder Woman and Superman “un-American,” while describing the children’s gentle champion Fred Rogers as “evil.”

In its constant quest to gaslight its willing victims, Fox News uses panic mongering, character assassination and ad hominem arguments, psychological projection and flipping, the rewriting of history, scapegoating, conflation of violence with power, bullying, confusion, populism, invocation of the Christian God, saturation, the disparagement of education, guilt by association and diversion. 

Fox News’s most basic propaganda technique is simply to lie about facts, and it does so constantly.

Fox News is where Phineas Taylor Barnum meets Paul Joseph Goebbels.

Why We Love Sherlock Holmes

“He is Galahad and Socrates, bringing high adventure to our dull existences and calm, judicial logic to our biased minds,” wrote Edgar W. Smith in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

“Let it be said, more simply, that he is the personification in us of something that we have lost, or never had. For it is not Sherlock Holmes who sits in Baker Street, comfortable, competent and self-assured, it is ourselves who are there, full of a tremendous capacity for wisdom, complacent in the presence of our humble Watson, conscious of a warm well-being and a timeless, imperishable content. 

“The easy chair is drawn up to the hearthstone of our very hearts — it is our tobacco in the Persian slipper, and our violin lying so carelessly across the knees — it is we who hear the pounding on the stairs and the knocking at the door. The swirling fog without and the acrid smoke within bite deep indeed, for we taste them even now.”

Less Than Meets the Eye

The whole hackneyed concept of being “seen” now has narcissistic vibes.

What we actually need is to be moving toward a principled goal — whether we are “seen” to be doing so or not.

A.I.? Aye Yi Yi Yi!

AI art is attracting a lot of bitter Luddite invective these days. 

But I calmly reply that all artists borrow elements of other artists’ styles, particularly when they’re developing. So let’s not get all high dudgeon about AI here.

I have used AI to generate thematic sample comic book images. And it’s a funny thing, as Stan Lee used to say. The reaction to one of my AI images was instructive. 

People asked, “Where’d you get that wonderful image?” 

And when I answered “AI,” several of them immediately replied, “Oh yuck, it’s awful!”

Literally, they’ve said this! Their hypocrisy was instantaneous.

Remember, the comic book industry was built on artistic swipes. 

And style cannot be copyrighted. 

“It’s not always bad,” observed my comics historian friend Joseph Lenius. “Al Williamson was a genius, and he obviously followed in the footsteps of Alex Raymond. (Frank) Frazetta as a comic book artist did so to an extent from (Hal) Foster. MANY have tried to follow in the footsteps of Wally Wood (who borrowed from others and constantly swiped), although few have succeeded.”

Also, there are literally hundreds of thousands of public domain comic book images which can be sampled by AI. 

“AI using that is no worse than a person doing the same,” Lenius remarked. “Again, there are a lot out there who think NOTHING bad about artists swiping, tracing, light-boxing.”

AI’s art’s detractors decry it as “lazy” and “soulless.” 

That’s claptrap.

I’d say it’s the detractors’ hysterical knee-jerk Luddite reactions that are intellectually lazy. And as for “soulless,” well, are blueprints “soulless?” 

AI art is a tool that enables you to visually describe your concepts — swiftly, helpfully and very effectively. 

So let’s just leave the “souls” out of it entirely, shall we?

We're Surrounded by Selves

Watch for all the commercials in which people talk to various duplicates of themselves, often more than one. These “selves” have all emerged from their smartphones, I think. The algorithms endlessly echo us, even as they manipulate us.

A Thought Expermient about Superwomen

In several of the earliest versions of Superman’s origin, his mother Lara is offered the chance to go to Earth with her baby, but chooses to die with her with her husband on Krypton instead.

But what if Jor-el had insisted that she go? She would have ended up on Earth with her Superbaby, perhaps around the time women got the vote.

And unlike the infant, she would have been fully aware that she’d lost her people and planet, not to mention the love of her life. 

That could make quite a mini-series, a kind of ElseKryptons story.

How Amorality Is Advertised

Let's get a wider view and watch how amorality is sold to our society. 

Once we regarded “Lord of the Flies” as a horror story. Now we treat it as comedy on “Survivor.” 

And children raised on nothing but Hollywood's product could be forgiven if they thought the two most popular professions in America were “assassin” and “prostitute.”

Inside the Digital Skinner Box

The hunger for constant, instant digital stimulation has made Skinner Box pigeons of the lot of us. The need for the digital fix turns out to be as compulsive as yanking the levers on a slot machine, training the human attention span to be reduced to that of a gnat.

The Eternal Sincerity of the Talk Show

 

“I suffered in silence,” confessed the blonde, flashing her practiced smile on the Today Show.

In the Depression, They Weren't Depressed

Superheroes are metaphors about the soaring human spirit, born of necessity in times of powerlessness and despair like the Great Depression. 

Their function is the same as the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies from that era — to enable the downtrodden to fantasize about defying gravity in fancy duds.

The TV That Would Play Anything

When I was a small boy, I had a vivid dream about a TV set that would play whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. You just pushed large buttons bearing the faces of various TV characters. 

And so it came to pass…

Now, settle down at home any evening and you can summon up any television program that aired any given night since network broadcasts began in 1947 — hell, any movie that people once stood in line to buy tickets to see since the silent era, for that matter. 

It’s the next best thing to time travel.

The sheer volume of choice we have now mocks our ability to take it all in. 

I, a child of the 20th century, will never fail to be astounded at what children of the 21st century must certainly regard as commonplace and really rather dull. 

But then, biplanes, refrigerators, air conditioning, radio broadcasting, moving pictures and horseless carriages amazed my grandparents and great-grandparents. Not me.

We strangers simply accept whatever strange land we’re born into, however strange it may be.

As Johnny Williams recalled, “When Neil Armstrong took his famous first step, my maternal grandmother said to me, ‘When I was a little girl, there were people still using horse-drawn wagons. Now I’ve seen a man walking on the moon. I’ve seen a lot.’ She had such a look in her eyes and such a sound in her voice.”

“This came up the other day, but really we are getting everything we saw on The Jetsons, even more,” remarked Pat McDonald “Yeah, no flying cars ... yet. Another interesting observation that someone else made about The Jetsons, all of their buildings are on sticks and platforms, presupposing that the ground level had become inhabitable (due to climate change?).”

TV producer and author Patrick Hasburgh observed that “…the connectivity and synergy of film and television … is suddenly — and at once — both magical (and) commonplace in our culture. Everyone is famous, everyone knows everyone, our stories are everywhere; not only can I watch my favorite film or television show whenever I want, I can, if I’m pressed for time, just watch favorite scenes of hear bits of my favorite dialogue. 

“This overload might kill the art form, we’re gorging ourselves. Movies used to be so special — are they still as special? I wonder.

“Anyone with a few thousand dollars and script can make a decent movie with a bunch of their buddies — I think that’s the future of film and TV. My kid makes amazing surf films, edited with music and action — I’ve never told him how to do it and he’s never asked. It’s just what he can do, with his iPhone or a video camera. In 10 seconds he knows how to use it and where to point it.”

“I think what I am trying to say is that the artist, the amateur, the auteur with only passion and an idea will save the form — those little indie movies you stumble across, often brilliant and just minutes long, might be where all of this is going. I’m often knocked out by the brilliance, accessibility and simplicity of some of the work. That's not to suggest it isn’t complex; it very often is.”

“I think within 10 years or less we will be able to write movies on our computers, pounding out scenes at AI will instantly produce with likeness and tone, music, etc... we will be able to conjure up anything.”

“We’ll always have Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, etc. as sign posts to the possible re: film making,” Williams said. “Even with modern tech, while many may be able to make decent movies, ‘classics that stand the test of time’ is another matter.

“While AI is a threat, I’m pulling for ‘art’ to somehow win out. We still marvel at prehistoric cave paintings.”

We, the Vampires and Werewolves

On a Washington Post analysis headlined “American Democracy Is Cracking,” I asked the following question:

What happened to make serial killers, vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies such sympathetic figures in American popular culture?

The American corporate right wingers made ruthless evil fashionable. That’s what happened.

And I don't mean Wiccans, but witches as a monster symbol. Popular culture is a funhouse mirror that distorts — but actually reflects — the society which spawns it. 

Ruthless predatory behavior is admired and rewarded in American society, so what's wrong with monsters? Nothing. They just want to rend and tear. Is that so wrong?

And Superman is only acceptable now if he breaks some necks.

SilkkyFire replied, “I'm 61 and probably a little bit of a weirdo, even among my own generational cohort. But I can tell you, the explicit violence and constant references to torture and suffering in streamed drama is both shocking and unbearable. It makes a lot of programming (some of which is otherwise excellent) almost impossible to watch.

“Many years ago now, I was watching an episode of CSI and there was a scene where the techs were pulling pieces of a man out of a tiger's gut while making catty comments. Network television! I shut the thing off, and I was done. Never watched that show again.

“We have become very blasé about explicit depictions of pain and suffering, taking it all in with crude cynicism. Does it make us more compassionate to be entertained by those things? I don't think so. I think it becomes more like porn, with the ante constantly rising, and the mind engaging with it, corrupted. It doesn’t bode well for what we are becoming.”

Habbbb replied, “Agree with you both, and would note that the insistence on ‘getting back to normal’ while covid continues killing and disabling large numbers of people, as well as tourists in Hawaii swimming and snorkeling where more than a thousand still are missing and where bodies were seen floating soon after the devastating fire, are real-life examples of this dissociative/sociopathic horror.”

SilkkyFire said, “Thank you. Our politics is a horror show, but the increasingly indecent nature of our culture (which our politics reflects) makes me deeply sad. When I say ‘indecent’ — well, I don’t care if you wear a tank top to the grocery store or say ‘damn!’ when you stub your toe. That is not what I am talking about. To me ‘decency’ really is comprised of two things: Honesty, and a caring attitude in regard to others. Is that who we are? Is that what we value?”

Disgruntled in CT replied, “It started long ago. Exploitation is not new. It was the bedrock on which this country was built. The culture reflects it. Long ago it was the brave gunfighter fighting the bloodthirsty Indian. All societies seem to develop in similar fashion. But in developed nations, we should want to progress toward a more equal society. Unfortunately, this can’t happen if our standard for success is wealth.”

Re: The Perfect Film

I have a mental category of "perfect films," by which I mean movies in which every minute works, and every second ticks toward a satisfying conclusion. They don't have to be great art, though many of them are.

Off the top of my head: “Chinatown,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Apartment,” “Pillow Talk,” “Life with Father,” “I Remember Mama,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the 1933 “King Kong,” the 1978 “Superman…”

I posted that on the TCM fan Facebook page and got an ongoing tsunami in response... hundreds of nominations from movie lovers.

A Lesson in Humanity from Star Wars

Why popular culture heroes are so important, summed up in one anecdote.

"Hearts may inspire other hearts with their fire."

The Four Colors of Liberation

Umberto Eco on being a 13-year-old in Italy in 1945: "A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good."

Dreams of Courage and Daring

It always amazes that some people seem to think that good works can somehow magically appear in a corrupt world without idealism and dreams of courage and daring. My other blog, Great Caesar's Ghost, uses superheroes as a lens to view cultural history. You can browse it here.

The Power of Mr. Rogers

'Whosoever holds the hammer, if he be worthy...'

I once interviewed children’s television host Fred Rogers about superheroes, an issue that concerned him. He had once taken his TV audience onto the set of The Incredible Hulk to explain that Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno were really two different people, that it’s all just make-believe.

Mr. Rogers said superheroes are natural for children. “The first superheroes, of course, are the parents themselves,” he said. “There is a very natural stage in the development of the human personality in which we believe that we ourselves are omnipotent, and that our parents are omnipotent, and that we’re able to do anything. But we have to help children gently along the way to realize that nobody is omnipotent, and neither are the heroes on television.”

I asked him why he stressed “gently.”

 “Because even though children would love to think that they could take on the world and win, it can also be very frightening to they to think that they are omnipotent — and that what they think will, indeed, happen.

“One of the things that our Hulk program came from was reading about kids who were killing themselves playing superheroes, and also knowing how widespread superhero play is among children. It’s important for adults to know how blurred the lines are between reality and fantasy in young children’s minds.”

I asked why he thought children find superheroes so attractive.

“Children are small. There are all kinds of powerful things in their environment over which they feel they have control. When they get angry, they often project that anger onto people and things around them, expecting them to have the same intensity of feeling. So in order to overcome the fear which results from being little in a big, scary world, children often pretend that they have superhuman powers — powers even greater than the big people and things around them. Seeing superheroes on television and in comic books feeds that ‘personal pretend.’ In the face of very difficult circumstances, everybody wishes once in a while that he or she had superhuman ways of dealing with difficulty.

“As usual, we’re not condemning fantasy. It’s often the basis for resolution and invention. What we’re doing is helping children to understand that human beings can pretend about being super-strong, super-big, super-fast, etc. but that it’s their real selves which do all the important things in the world. It’s essential for their play to be safe so they can grow and develop into what’s really super about each one of them.”

Beyond lifting Thor’s hammer, Fred Rogers also achieved that other ultimate proof of goodness. He’s been attacked by Fox News.

Sweet Land of Lottery, Of Thee We Sing

I am particularly fascinated by the revulsion with which many readers of the New Yorker greeted Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery when it appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue.

“One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers,” Jackson wrote later. “I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.

“It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the 300-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only 13 that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me.”

The readers seemed unpleasantly surprised, as if Jackson’s fantasy tale were some big, hard stone thrown by one of the residents of Jackson’s pious and traditional American town.

People who choose to wear blinders often get blind-sided, I suppose.

It can smart, even today, when you suddenly realize that behind the ringing Madison Avenue slogan of “Liberty And Justice For All” lies the ritualized shooting of unarmed black men by America’s anointed agents.

Rereading the story last May, I realized how aptly it anticipated Donald Trump’s America  — happy small-town families selecting innocent people to torture to death in a ritual that serves their self-satisfied, never-to-be-questioned tribal traditions and vanities. Then, no doubt, they do a little shopping and argue about dinner.

“‘The Lottery’ takes the classic theme of man’s inhumanity to man and gives it an additional twist: the randomness inherent in brutality,” wrote New Yorker writer Ruth Franklin in a 2013 retrospective. “It anticipates the way we would come to understand the 20th century’s unique lessons about the capacity of ordinary citizens to do evil — from the Nazi camp bureaucracy, to the Communist societies that depended on the betrayal of neighbor by neighbor and the experiments by the psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo demonstrating how little is required to induce strangers to turn against each other.

“In 1948, with the fresh horrors of the Second World War barely receding into memory and the Red Scare just beginning, it is no wonder that the story’s first readers reacted so vehemently to this ugly glimpse of their own faces in the mirror, even if they did not realize exactly what they were looking at.”

And although she died in 1965, I don’t think 21^st century America would surprise Jackson much.  She described the tone of the first letters she received as “…a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence. People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.” 

The Antifascist Adventures of Superman

Superman introduces himself to a Washington lobbyist in 1938.

Think About That, Snowflake