Exactly 28 years ago last Friday, Die Hard premiered in theaters
and set the standard for action films thereafter. Part of its success derived
from Bruce Willis’ brash, wise-cracking, quintessentially American character –
the perfect foil to the late Alan Rickman’s suave Eurovillain – and partly for
that reason, Die Hard is still my favorite action film. That’s why I was
so disappointed to read that its director John McTiernan recently spewed some
anti-American nonsense about another quintessentially American film hero in an interview for the French film magazine Premiere.
In response to a question about the recent decline in quality of “action
cinema,” McTiernan derided Hollywood comic book adaptations like the Marvel and
DC Comics franchises as mere “corporate products… made by fascists.” They’re
populated by cartoon characters, not real people, he complained. “There is
action but not of human beings,” he said dismissively (in translation). “Comic
book heroes are for businesses.”
“You find that the big studios poison action cinema with ideology?” the
interviewer asked, and McTiernan went off. “I hate most movies for political
reasons,” he responded. “I cannot really see them. I'm pissed off the minute it
starts.” He cannot watch a movie like Captain America, he says, “without
laughing,” because
the cult of American hyper-masculinity is one
of the worst things that has happened in the world during the last fifty years.
Hundreds of thousands of people died because of this stupid illusion. So how is
it possible to watch a movie called Captain
America?
“I’m incapable of watching [such movies] calmly,” he concluded, and the politically
like-minded interviewer reluctantly moved on.
McTiernan, whose résumé also includes Predator,
The Hunt for Red October, and The Thomas Crown Affair remake, has
plenty of company criticizing superhero movies as the fascistic worship of
“might makes right.” It’s de rigueur now
among cultural critics to dismiss American heroes, real and fictional, as fascists. British documentary filmmaker Nick
Broomfield, for example, condemned Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster American
Sniper, about the late American hero Chris Kyle, as an example of “American
fascism” that “Hitler would have been proud to have made.” Richard Cooper at Salon laid out his position
equally bluntly in the headline, “Superheroes Are a Bunch of Fascists.” Andrew O’Hehir, also writing at Salon (they really don’t like American heroes over
there), called Cap “the corporeal embodiment of American superpower hegemony” – as if
that’s a bad thing. O’Hehir proclaimed that the premises of the American
comic-book universe and of fascism are the same: power is good. “They are also the fantasies of children,” he sniffed.
My friend Chris Yogerst, who teaches film, pop culture, and
communication at the University of Wisconsin Colleges, tried to set them all
straight in a piece for The Atlantic
online called “Stop Calling Superheroes Fascist,” in which he pointed out that the glaring difference
between superheroes and fascists is that the former do not abuse their power;
they wield it in the service of good and of freedom. But in our time of easy
moral equivalence, good and evil are all relative anyway. After all, fascists
themselves believe they are using their might for the right reasons. Who is to
say, then, whether Cap’s “American hyper-masculinity” which McTiernan finds so
disgusting is any less fascistic than Mussolini’s Roman Empire-inspired Italian
nationalism?
And then there is the issue of Cap’s unconflicted morality, which greatly
irks his critics. Traditional notions of heroism have given way in recent
decades to a more cynical era of the
Hollywood anti-hero: Walter White, Dexter Morgan, Tony Soprano, Don Draper,
Tyrion Lannister. By contrast, the Captain America of the recent Marvel
blockbusters – straight-laced, upstanding patriot Steve Rogers, transplanted
from the 1940s – is depicted as amusingly old-fashioned in our morally muddled
age.
But that is precisely why we need such a role model. Captain America is a
throwback to a time when, as a culture, we did not agonize over the distinction
between good and evil. In Cap’s World War II heyday, Americans knew that Nazism
and Japanese imperialism were evil movements, just as we later knew that
Communism was as well. We did not doubt that America’s defense of justice and
liberty for all was right and good and necessary. We were not beset by the
poisonous strain of anti-Americanism and cultural self-loathing that we wrestle
with today, which, for example, led Superman
Returns director Bryan Singer to twist the credo “Truth, Justice, and the
American Way” into “Truth, Justice, and all that stuff.”
That could account for why the Captain
America movie franchise is so enormously successful, and why after
three-quarters of a century Cap continues to dominate the comic book world despite
the cultural influence of jaded Salon critics and anti-American film directors:
the majority of us are still compelled by his moral integrity, his unabashed
patriotism, his humility and masculine strength. Captain America remains the
quintessential American hero.
From Acculturated, 7/20/16
