(Or What Does It Say about Our Society When the Heroes Act Worse than the Villains)
For those who know the movies, this
rant has to do with MCU, specifically our war-friendly inhabitants of Asgard. With
Thor the Dark World (and somebody explain to me why the German title is Thor
the Dark Kingdom. That is so very
German. Right. Makes perfect sense). I just have
to rant about that because certain aspects of the movie (and the two movies involving
Thor that came before) pissed me off beyond belief. I won’t go into details and
discuss the plot; there is tumblr for that, and I’d be in danger of throwing
up. Instead, I want to talk a little about how the plot reflects our society.
So. We have this group of people that
makes a movie. They come up with a plot, with the way the characters behave, their
personality traits, their weaknesses. Their values. Their roles in the society
they live in. It doesn’t matter if that world is fictional or not, what that society
is like, even whether the characters are human or not—they inevitably resemble
our society as we know it. Our norms, even if they’re trying not to. Behind every
movie, there is a subtle message. This is, when you strip away all the glitter
and blood, our world they’re showing.
Our norms, dressed in different colours. And it should be completely unacceptable
to produce a movie that basically says: if you’re the victim, it’s all your
fault.
Apparently, it’s not. I don’t know
what the producers think. That their audience is a mindless crowd who will be appeased
if they show us a topless, muscular guy for the female part of the audience,
and a lot of explosions for the male part? Are you kidding me? People can and will think. They will see all the plot holes, all the double
standards, the hypocrisy, more plot holes, and just plain bad writing.
Though, perhaps those who won’t think about what they see are even
more important. They will catch the message somehow. But they won’t stop to
consider it’s not a good message, and they will carry that mentality out of the
cinema: that it’s okay to blame the victim, that you couldn’t possibly have
done something wrong if you can find somebody else to blame, that double
standards are okay, and that some people are at fault just because that is the
role society has attributed to them, made them a scapegoat, so to say. But it’s
not okay. It’s not okay to show that
on screen and make the bullies look like heroes. For god’s sake, yes, punish
the crimes, but punish everybody’s
crimes, not just those committed by a person who happens to be disliked and convenient
to blame.
If nothing else, how do such movies
make the real-life victims feel? Those people who’ve suffered abuse and perhaps
had to struggle for years to stop blaming themselves, or may not even have
recovered from it yet? How can anyone produce a movie that tells those victims
it was their fault? That they deserved the suffering?
A couple of days ago, I came across
a story of some American soldier who returned from Iraq. He knew he had
problems, so he went to the doctors and asked them to help him because he felt
he was going to hurt somebody if they didn’t. They gave him something to help
him sleep. Some time later, he got into a fight with somebody who threatened a
woman, and beat the guy. Badly. The court sent him to prison for ten years. The
same guy who had gone asking for help that nobody was willing to give was later
blamed from what he had done because
nobody had helped him.
That is not right. And neither is it
okay to show that you can get away with starting wars, committing treason,
killing other species, stealing valuable artefacts, and leaving whole nations
to slowly die if you are destined to be the hero of the movie, and that you get
condemned for doing the very same things
if the heroes happen to dislike you. Not okay, people. I wish Marvel would stop
and think about that for a second instead of keep planning how to earn more
money, and where they could potentially stick a topless guy in the movie to
make the girls go crazy, and make things explode. To use a quote that should
have been it TDW: “Hitting doesn’t always solve everything.” And it doesn’t
satisfy the audience, either.
~S
(P. s.: If anyone wants to discuss
the movies, I’m all for it. On tumblr.)
No comments:
Post a Comment