The Trope of the Evil Other Dimension in Our Superhero Franchises

As has been lamented in numerous places big budget movies especially the Superhero franchises seem to be getting somewhat stale. They lack new and original plots, focus to much on visual effects, need to cater to too broad of an audience spectrum, are too much of an investment to take any "risks" etcetera. The thing that has been bothering me the most lately was a particular trope that is not just lame and overdone, it is also particularly concerning considering our global political climate at the moment. That is the portal to the evil other dimension.

The plot of seemingly every other Superhero movie these days is that some ill-advised human opens a portal to an evil other dimension that threatens to bring chaos, suffering and death to all of humanity. Then, of course, it is up to our heroes to basically plug that hole and keep the evil other out. Even if, in the theatre,  we may be too bedazzled by special effects and funny banter to realize how problematic that is. The recap should give us pause. Because we are inundated with this narrative not only in our Superhero franchises but also in the news. Name the ill-advised human Angela Merkel for example and the evil other dimension the so called Arab world and you suddenly you are not in your fun-escapist-special-effects-fest anymore. Suddenly you find yourself in the midst of our current real-life drama where blocking the Balkan route and building a wall to Mexico are on actual political agendas. The problem is that in real life things are not all so neatly black and white and solutions are not so easy.      

Most of Hollywood does like to show itself rather more progressive in their politics. Many actors, directors and writers advocate for refugee aid, compassion and more inclusive politics. And yet, when it comes to their own back yard and their biggest influence - the cultural narratives they shape with their storytelling - they irresponsibly draw draw on tropes like this. They perpetuate narratives where evil nature of that other dimension and the beings within it are never even questioned, where there is never any real engagement with the other side or attempts at understanding. Our heroes don't even try. They don't communicate with the other, they communicate at it, usually in a rather aggressive and threatening manner. They attack and they kill. No questions asked. And, as last seen in Doctor Strange, they better not let any aspect of the other side contaminate our world. We as the audience are lead to buy into these foregone conclusions and we get manipulated to believe in the need to close up that portal. So when we return to our own world why would we not seek some equally easy answer to our own problems. Why would we not look for a "hero" to close our portal for us, or build us a wall ...

Sure, we are not going to solve all the world's problems with better movies. The real world is more complex than that. There are always many other factors at play. But everyone needs to do what they can and I think it is time Hollywood put their narratives and their budgets where their mouths are and reconsidered some of the messages they are putting into the world. Story is a tool to be used wisely for it can do a lot of good but it can also do a whole lot of harm. We should not forget that and be responsible about what we put into the world. Maybe we can avoid harm, maybe we can even inspire change and adjust failures of imagination. Fiction is known to have done so before.

Olympics: Benign Patriotic Fun or Destructive Potential

As I sit down to write this, the Olympics in Rio have just come to a close and I can't quite shake the feeling of uneasiness about how this whole event played out once again. Of course the official rhetoric is, as always, all about the Olympic idea, people coming together, and equality. However, if you actually sat down to watch the thing itself - or, if you are me, to watch other people watching the thing - you would have had a very hard time seeing that rhetoric reflected in the actual spectacle, its symbolism, or commentary.

True, that is not an entirely new development. Since their inception, the modern Olympic Games have been all about - as John Oliver put it so nicely - finding out

"who is better than everyone else, so that we can make them stand higher than the other people who are not as good as them. Because the point of the Games is not to celebrate equality. It is to celebrate individuals' excellence."

That already sounds much closer to reality than the official rhetoric. However, is it really about individuals' excellence? Considering how the whole thing is set up, how the commentary goes, and what the audience cares about, it should be fairly obvious that the athletes as individuals are actually a secondary concern. They are not competing as individuals so much as as representatives of their respective countries. Both the commentators and the audience seem much more concerned with the medal count than even with the disciplines the medals are won in - much less individual athlete's achievements. Patriotism is very much embraced and encouraged. After all what is so wrong about a little patriotism?

Well, if you think about it, quite a lot actually. For one thing, patriotism is essentially irreconcilable with the Olympic idea as it stands. It divides people and fosters an Us-vs.-Them-Mentality that can be - and has historically been - utilized to both distract people from internal problems and reinforce enemy stereotypes. Clearly that supposedly harmless bit of patriotic fun carries quite a bit of destructive potential. Not to mention that divisions along national lines keep us from addressing global problems we are all facing together. Problems that are very much driving nationalistic moods around the globe.

These moods and attitudes are in turn fed by things like broadcasting choices and commentary of the Olympics (or other international sports events) and, of course, the news media, which very much imply and teach something like a hierarchy of care. We all know and expect that any kind of event that effects the western world and particularly our own country is going to get quite a different kind of coverage than anything that effects people we identify much less with. I can't help the anger boiling up inside every time they inevitably start any report of international events by establishing whether or not Germans were affected. And of course, what works on the global scale also works for internal affairs, as exemplified by the difference between reports about people attacking refugees and their accommodations vs. reports about refugees' and immigrants' misconducts, criminal activity, and potential danger to society.

Shouldn't we have learned by now that such discrimination has a strong potential to drive either party to their worst? Wouldn't we benefit from less self centred reporting? Maybe we can not get invested in everything that happens around the globe and neither should we, but a blind man with a stick should have seen by now that our modus operandi has not been doing us many favours - especially in about the last couple of hundred years. We all have neglected issues that we should have addressed and instead gotten involved in things we should have kept out of. Thus we have fostered and escalated conflicts at home and abroad that are now coming around to bite us.

And yet we never seem to learn. We go right back to our nationalist thinking. We don't even acknowledge that we might carry some responsibility for developments that are inconveniencing us now. And we refuse to even entertain practical solutions and solutions that favour long term benefits over short term profits. We distract ourselves with medal counts and the seemingly benign patriotic fun that events like the Olympics offer. Bread and Circuses. Business as usual.