Are Superheroes Super-Childish?
Growing up as part of the Asian diaspora, I have never watched a movie that has resonated with me as much as Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Though the film tackles the uncomfortable aspects of the Asian experience, it still manages to exude warmth and emotion throughout. In particular, the subtle clash between cultural values and queer relationships was masterfully portrayed in the strained mother-daughter relationship of the film’s protagonists. I found myself pointing out all the parallels between the characters’ family and my own: the silver wire-rimmed glasses my grandmother wears, the baggy 90’s striped polos I see at every family reunion, the things we can’t talk about. This movie feels like home to me.
At the same time, it’s unapologetically absurd. The superhero-esque film isn’t afraid to play with silliness and humor in spite of its central themes of depression, familial strife, and the immigrant experience. Characters travel to wacky alternate realities, ranging from a world where everyone has hotdog fingers to one where the characters become sentient piñatas.
So when I stumbled across “What Will It Take for Hollywood to Grow Up?” in the New York Times, I immediately felt a little defensive. In the essay, author Freddie deBoer laments the recent tumble in media quality, describing July’s Deadpool and Wolverine as being “another big-budget franchise movie based on empty nostalgia and catering to childishness, if not children” (deBoer, 2024). He complains about how the film leans heavily on aimlessly reviving well-loved characters and crude, graphic jokes without creating any real emotional depth throughout its two-hour runtime.
deBoer is right about how the film has attracted its audience. With the rise of action and superhero films, it has been easy for blockbusters to rely on immaturity in order to reach the widest possible audience. Most recently, Marvel’s releases have begun to feel as though they were written for viewers with no media literacy—for instance, the narrator of 2023’s What If…? patronisingly tells the audience moral takeaways from each episode, almost akin to a storybook.
Critics assert that this is a product of declining audience comprehension, claiming that social media has ruined our collective media literacy (Eisikovits, 2024). To their credit, making media creation more easily accessible does have the potential to worsen audience comprehension. However, I’d argue that poorly written and shallow stories like What If…?—produced by large and experienced production companies—are what lead to declining media literacy, not the other way around. It has the potential to become a vicious cycle: as media literacy decreases due to consistently sloppy, thoughtless writing, it can fuel more demand for similarly iffy stories. The plots of many of Marvel’s releases in the last four years have been regarded as mediocre by critics (Rotten Tomatoes). Conversely, audiences still provided generally positive reviews across sites, demonstrating that there is sizable audience demand for similarly low-quality films (CinemaScore). Granted, critic opinion is not the end-all-be-all decision of movie quality. Though, if multiple critics across various publications alike came to a consensus on the second-rate quality of these films, it’s an indicator that they may not be as good as audiences initially concluded.
Urging the audience to “gently prod the adults around [them] who watch nothing but superhero and Harry Potter movies to expand their range”, deBoer goes so far as to recommend making them feel “a little embarrassed” about the breadth of their entertainment consumption (deBoer, 2024). He argues that there are “core aspects of the human experience that superhero stories just can’t reach”, and points to a past era where “serious” films like Philadelphia—centered around the AIDS epidemic—reached massive success (deBoer, 2024).
Of course, there’s a place for so-called grittier entertainment. Darker media hasn’t fallen as far out of public consciousness as deBoer leads us to believe, with stories like Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Anatomy of a Fall sweeping awards ceremonies in 2023. In fact, these examples cemented themselves in our collective memory much more than most superhero movies released in the same year—while people continue to talk about Oppenheimer, the discourse surrounding Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom just hasn’t remained as spirited.
The root of the problem deBoer describes with superhero movies isn’t that the genre is inherently bad, but instead because it’s populated with poorly written stories. It’s a fairly hot take (and a little reductionist) to argue that an entire genre is too immature to capture “certain core aspects of the human experience” (deBoer, 2024). I’d argue that genres some see as childish have the potential to portray the experiences that often go unrepresented. Even now, it’s rare to see people like myself in the media I consume: unsurprisingly, there aren’t that many stories in popular media about mixed-race, third-culture, queer kids in Southeast Asia. Everything, Everywhere resonated with me exactly because it captured core aspects of my lived experience in a way that most other films haven’t been able to. It’s in these stories—from genres that, like me, have struggled to be seen as valid—that I finally find myself.
deBoer worries that the rising popularity of superhero films will be “the death of grown-up entertainment,” but what does grown-up really mean? It’s not an easy question to answer. I think we have a tendency to automatically equate grown-up with better, when that isn’t necessarily the case. Stories that can be childish at times can also be poignant; simultaneously, stories that are somber throughout can also be shallow. If we stopped projecting our ideas of what grown-up or immature should look like onto movies, we’d find that they can comfortably reside in nuanced grey areas rather than being restricted to black-and-white worlds. Telling a great story is all about balance. It’s time we stopped worrying so much about which movies are “mature enough” and which movies aren’t, and focus on uplifting layered, authentic stories—from all genres.
References
Boer, Freddie de. 2024. “What Will It Take for Hollywood to Grow Up?” The New York Times. August 11. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/opinion/deadpool-wolverine-audience-rating.html.
Cinemascore. https://www.cinemascore.com/.
“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” 2022. Rotten Tomatoes. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/doctor_strange_in_the_multiverse_of_madness.
Eisikovits, Nir. 2024. “TikTok Fears Point to Larger Problem: Poor Media Literacy in the Social Media Age.” The Conversation. April 24. https://theconversation.com/tiktok-fears-point-to-larger-problem-poor-media-literacy-in-the-social-media-age-226667.
“Eternals.” 2021. Rotten Tomatoes. November 5. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/eternals.
“The Marvels.” 2023. Rotten Tomatoes. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_marvels.