Stalemate in the Culture War
A brief corollary to my previous newsletter.
Earlier this week, I wrote about how right-wing outrage at any display of culture beyond their narrow white, patriarchal interests could never succeed in achieving mainstream popularity because of its perpetual grievance. I stand by that, but I did want to offer a brief corollary about how right-wing interests can’t win the culture war, but their constant whinging has a way of flattening pop culture for the rest of us.
This thought occurred as I sat through the aggressively bland Captain America: Brave New World. You can read my full review over at Decoding Everything, but I wanted to zoom in on the film’s aggressively apolitical nature. In November 2023, Disney CEO Bob Iger said “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.” Setting aside that Iger was singing a very different tune in February 2018 as Black Panther zoomed to a billion dollars worldwide, it’s odd that he would see these two as mutually exclusive. Of course, some see a political message, and any entertainment value is instantly obliterated (to which I would say, “Get over it. If I can enjoy 300 despite its neo-conservative subtext, you can watch Barbie critique the patriarchy).
Brave New World is “no messaging” in practice where you take a movie that’s made in the mold of a political thriller and siphon any political issue out of it until you have a dry paste of “Can’t we all just get along?” In his review of the film, critic Robert Daniels noted the ways the movie not only ducks the conversation of what it means to have a Black man fight for a government that has a fraught history and relationship with Black people but even avoids exploring what it means to cast Harrison Ford, who not only starred in the political thrillers Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger but played the President before in Air Force One. A film with even a modicum of effort would try to untangle what it means that Ford-as-President has gone from hero to villain (or tragic hero if you want to be sympathetic to his Hulking out), and Brave New World bails. This is entertaining first? We have no shortage of video games and movies where CG things smash into other CG things. Why show up for this one? Marvel’s answer appears to be, “Because we needed to clean up the loose ends for The Incredible Hulk and Eternals like the world’s most expensive housekeepers.”
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