"this maelstrom of entitlement and self-absorption"
April 18, 2016 11:30 AM   Subscribe

There's a name for the kind of mindset that mistakes depression for profundity, that associates an inability to feel or express joy, or sadness, or any emotion other than anger, with heroism and manliness. In 2015, it informed the shape of most of our blockbuster movie villains, from Immortan Joe to Kylo Ren. In 2016, it seems, it also afflicts our heroes. The actual villain that both Batman and Superman need to fight in this movie isn't Lex Luthor, or Doomsday. It's toxic masculinity. -- Abigail Nussbaum dissects Batman v Superman.
posted by MartinWisse (73 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Well, that and Zack Snyder.
posted by Behemoth at 11:36 AM on April 18, 2016 [13 favorites]


And that's why I'm a Marvel kid. DC was like my parents. Marvel was like my friends.
posted by valkane at 11:38 AM on April 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


Well, that and Zack Snyder.

I can reveal, they are one and the same.
posted by biffa at 11:39 AM on April 18, 2016 [17 favorites]


My four year old decided after seeing the poster for this film that Batman and Superman were fighting over a toy and they should talk to their teacher instead of fighting.
posted by goatdog at 11:53 AM on April 18, 2016 [83 favorites]


>they should talk to their teacher instead of fighting.

Perhaps it's best if they save this idea for the Baman Vs. Piderman movie.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 12:00 PM on April 18, 2016


This is the first time I've ever heard someone describe Kylo Ren as heroic and manly.
posted by edheil at 12:14 PM on April 18, 2016 [8 favorites]


Anyone who tries to stop Harrison Ford reprising his roles as an old man can't be all bad.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:19 PM on April 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


It doesn't describe Kylo Ren that way.

If BvS is, per this very intriguing article, unintentionally revealing of toxic masculinity, then the fact that Immortan Joe and Kylo Ren embody the same flaws is interesting because they are villains, not heroes. I already knew that "Fury Road" was a feminist movie. I'd be interested in a feminist reading of "The Force Awakens".

The only person who'd describe Kylo Ren as heroic and manly is Kylo Ren. And deep deep down, even he's worried that it isn't so.
posted by Ipsifendus at 12:20 PM on April 18, 2016 [20 favorites]


I more or less consider Zack Snyder the directorial equivalent of Otto from A Fish Called Wanda, a man essentially incapable of grasping the themes of the work he studiously adapts*, but...I liked Man of Steel much more than most of the internet, and I like this one better. This is by no means the World's Finest movie I would make, but that doesn't make it bad. The criticisms in the article are either decontextualized (the reason Batman and Superman don't talk to each other is that they fundamentally misunderstand each other and regard each other as villains, not because men can't share or whatever) or subjective (Superman seems very much concerned with human life to me). Make of it what you will, but I think these are easily Snyder's best movies...but I'll say that with the caveat that I feel very distant sometimes from prevailing fan sentiment (I am not a fan of the BatNolan films, for example).

(*As in: "Apes don't read philosophy." "Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, okay? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not 'every man for himself.' And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.")
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:21 PM on April 18, 2016 [10 favorites]


"Toxic Masculinity" may as well be the motto of the legal profession here in Canada. I appreciate that the article shows another way toxic masculinity is rearing it's ugly head.

... wait, I should call it "his ugly head" because toxic masculinity would be a man, right?
posted by LegallyBread at 12:41 PM on April 18, 2016


I don't like this conflation of depression and anger with toxic masculinity. It seems to me that the men who do the most harm in the world are the happy, confident ones, secure in the knowledge that no matter how much money they steal or how many innocents are oppressed by their laws, they will always come out on top.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:46 PM on April 18, 2016 [21 favorites]


I'm not a comic book reader, but I've been watching Batman movies for twenty years, and good or bad they all depict the character as, at best, someone who is working out their mommy-and-daddy issues by beating up poor criminals, and at worst, an outright fascist.

QFMFT.

Why ARE we obsessing over characters and stories first conceived nearly 80 years ago, when fascism was ascendant? We need new stories, not the same boring old regurgitation of Batman's origin trauma, or some alien ubermensch who just so happens to be 'benevolent.'

Yes, yes I know...$$$
posted by Existential Dread at 12:48 PM on April 18, 2016 [7 favorites]


I agree with Nussbaum's basic argument about the movie, but I also wonder if it sets up a false hope to describe one kind of masculinity as "toxic" in apparent distinction to some other kind that isn't so. There are lots of ways to be a good person, I think, but I wonder if there are forms of "masculinity" that are not toxic, considering that masculinity (as it's usually deployed to refer to a specific way of being a male person) is oriented towards instrumentalization of various kinds, most of which involve the practice of interpersonal force or violence, and ultimately brutality in some way. Is there a non-toxic masculinity? I'm not convinced there is, because once you look deeply enough into the idea, it quickly begins to seem like a contradiction in terms.

The idea of masculinity itself is historical, too, though. I don't see any reason that men shouldn't choose and promulgate some other form of identity.
posted by clockzero at 1:00 PM on April 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


This is the first time I've ever heard someone describe Kylo Ren as heroic and manly.

Kylo Ren has an eight-pack. He's totally shredded.
posted by The Tensor at 1:09 PM on April 18, 2016 [18 favorites]


The only person who'd describe Kylo Ren as heroic and manly is Kylo Ren. And deep deep down, even he's worried that it isn't so.

I wouldn't even go that far. Kylo Ren hates himself because he knows in his heart that he doesn't measure up to the perceived masculine ideal of Grandpa Vader (who we now know was a whiny man-baby who got all of his limbs and man-parts chopped and/or burned off on Mustafar, but Kylo is probably only aware of Vader as a mythic figure of awe), and that self-loathing is what animates him to do the terrible things he does. Toxic masculinity isn't just the province of stereotypical manly men, it's also a source of pain for men who do not perform masculinity the way they feel they should.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:09 PM on April 18, 2016 [25 favorites]


> Really, just stop buying tickets to stuff you already know you'll hate.

I have not seen this movie and I'm not going to, but one of my coworkers is a huge comic book movie fan and was agonizing over whether or not to see it; people whose taste he shared and trusted told him he'd hate it, the reviews told him he'd hate it, and yet he went to see it anyway for reasons he couldn't quite articulate but which seemed to centre around a perceived sense of duty as a fan, even though he was expecting it to anger him. And lo, it came to pass.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:13 PM on April 18, 2016 [10 favorites]


Paving a driveway, getting a kitten down from a tree, grilling, having a brewski, mowing the lawn, fixing a car, standing up for the underdog, founding a university, etc, etc

One hopes this is not a sequence of events.
posted by Celsius1414 at 1:23 PM on April 18, 2016 [15 favorites]


"Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism." - Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, Flex Mentallo #4
posted by kewb at 1:24 PM on April 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Is there a non-toxic masculinity?

Non-toxic masculinity is the masculine energy, tempered with maturity and wisdom, that has made peace with death. What we usually refer to as "toxic" are the traditional male traits directed toward destructive or exploitative ends. For example, physical violence employed to abuse a man's family instead of to protect them.

Masculinity is aspirational and idealized - none of us men is "the most masculine guy", and even the one who is, doesn't hold on to his position forever. Eventually he gets old and he cedes his position to a younger buck.
posted by theorique at 1:28 PM on April 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Why ARE we obsessing over characters and stories first conceived nearly 80 years ago, when fascism was ascendant? We need new stories, not the same boring old regurgitation of Batman's origin trauma, or some alien ubermensch who just so happens to be 'benevolent.'

This is a really weird gloss, especially since Superman was created by two Jewish teenagers in Cleveland and started out doing stuff like taking downcorrupt lobbyists and politicians and confronting mine owners about poor conditions for workers. There's even a famous sequence in Look< magazine where Siegel and Shuster contributed a two-page story of Superman *dragging Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations* in order to stop their warmongering as bloodlessy as possible.

The value of Superman is that he's a utopian figure, the idea that force might not have to be unjust violence and that power need't be wedded to domination or selfishness. Yeah, why would anyone want to indulge that fantasy?

And Superman's hardly alone in his pop-cultural longevity. One may as well grumble about all the Sherlock Holmes adaptations or about the persistence of Scrooge McDuck.
posted by kewb at 1:34 PM on April 18, 2016 [15 favorites]


If anything, Superman was a New Deal Democrat created to be the antithesis of the the Nazi Ubermensch, in much the same way as Captain America was.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:42 PM on April 18, 2016 [17 favorites]


We need new stories, not the same boring old regurgitation of Batman's origin trauma, or some alien ubermensch who just so happens to be 'benevolent.'

"Like...like...Tootsie!"
posted by happyroach at 1:46 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


> Really, just stop buying tickets to stuff you already know you'll hate.

I have not seen this movie and I'm not going to, but one of my coworkers is a huge comic book movie fan and was agonizing over whether or not to see it; people whose taste he shared and trusted told him he'd hate it, the reviews told him he'd hate it, and yet he went to see it anyway for reasons he couldn't quite articulate but which seemed to centre around a perceived sense of duty as a fan, even though he was expecting it to anger him. And lo, it came to pass.


A good chunk of comics fandom follows characters not creators. Marvel and DC encourage this and the fans follow along. I've had many a conversation with fellow comics fans who grouse about how they hate the series that they're reading, but will patiently keep buying and hope that the next creative will serve them better.
posted by Eikonaut at 1:54 PM on April 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


I for one would be interested to see more superhero movies where the hero(es) work as part of a collective for positive social change, not merely defending the world from supernatural evil or over-the-top kingpins or dictators, etc. Do such movies exist? Anyone have good examples? The X-Men films are about as close as I can think of (not counting Watchmen).
posted by daisystomper at 1:55 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Is there a non-toxic masculinity?

Paving a driveway, getting a kitten down from a tree, grilling, having a brewski, mowing the lawn, fixing a car, standing up for the underdog, founding a university, etc, etc


Sure, those are all fine things to do. Isn't it buying into a lie about what makes men masculine that has us code those things in that way in the first place, though? Being capable with tools and machines, being physically capable, grilling (and its attendant associations of animal slaughter), drinkin beer, taking a socially unpopular moral stance; these might be enjoyable or noble ways to be alive as a human being, but do they have anything to do with men necessarily?
posted by clockzero at 1:56 PM on April 18, 2016 [17 favorites]


Faint of Butt: "I don't like this conflation of depression and anger with toxic masculinity."

Yes. As someone who has spent the last 20 years trying to manage depression while also trying to be a decent human being, I pretty much felt the piece seemed determined to conflate two very different things. It's entirely reasonable to argue that depression doesn't make you profound, but it's not at all okay to conflate depression with toxic masculinity. That's not just wrong, it's also trivialising mental illness.
posted by langtonsant at 1:57 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


he went to see it anyway for reasons he couldn't quite articulate but which seemed to centre around a perceived sense of duty as a fan, even though he was expecting it to anger him.

Ah, you see, I learned not to trust Club Comics back in the nineties, so I don't have that Eltingsville sense of duty anymore of having to see my favourite characters no matter what shit kind of movie or comic they appear in just because it's my duty as a comics fan.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:58 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


it's not at all okay to conflate depression with toxic masculinity.

I'm not sure Nussbaum does that actually. She's making the argument that Jonathan Kent is depressed or has a depressed outlook on life, as well as that both heroes are in the grip of toxic masculinity as an ideology, not that one is the same as the other.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:00 PM on April 18, 2016


I for one would be interested to see more superhero movies where the hero(es) work as part of a collective for positive social change

It's not a movie (yet), but you should read Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme to see what happens when superheroes decide to change the world for the better.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:00 PM on April 18, 2016


If anything, Superman was a New Deal Democrat created to be the antithesis of the the Nazi Ubermensch, in much the same way as Captain America was.

On this theme, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a great read.
posted by Celsius1414 at 2:01 PM on April 18, 2016 [12 favorites]


these might be enjoyable or noble ways to be alive as a human being, but do they have anything to do with men necessarily?

Besides being hard-coded into the dominant culture?
posted by Celsius1414 at 2:01 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


MartinWisse: "I'm not sure Nussbaum does that actually. She's making the argument that Jonathan Kent is depressed or has a depressed outlook on life, as well as that both heroes are in the grip of toxic masculinity as an ideology, not that one is the same as the other."

Yeah, about that:

Everything about Batman v Superman--right down to the color palette--makes sense if you assume that it's a movie written, created, and told from the point of view of people mired in toxic masculinity. People who go through life trapped in a low-grade but pervasive depression, and who are disconnected from most of their emotions.

If you're right, I am curious to hear how this sentence should be interpreted.
posted by langtonsant at 2:08 PM on April 18, 2016


I for one would be interested to see more superhero movies where the hero(es) work as part of a collective for positive social change

There's a book called Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask about two multicultural Toronto activists who discover they're mutant superheroes and become (literally) Social Justice Warriors.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:09 PM on April 18, 2016 [10 favorites]


valkane And that's why I'm a Marvel kid. DC was like my parents. Marvel was like my friends.

And at one point some editors at DC realized this, and decided that they needed new heroes who the Kids These Days could relate to. Characters who could compete with Spiderman and the X people. So they invented..... Batman Junior and Superman Junior, the Super-Sons. And yes, that's actually what they called them: Batman Junior and Superman Junior, and also sometimes the Super-Sons.

They lasted a couple of completely unread issues and were consigned to the memory hole.

As for this: I'm not a comic book reader, but I've been watching Batman movies for twenty years, and good or bad they all depict the character as, at best, someone who is working out their mommy-and-daddy issues by beating up poor criminals, and at worst, an outright fascist. I'd argue that was one of the main themes of Watchmen. Alan Moore was pointing out both that anyone who puts their underwear on over a pair of tights and goes out to "fight crime" probably has some mental problems, and that Batman specifically has some really awful psychological problems and represents a fascist sort of thinking. Rorschach is Batman with the glamour stripped away revealing the fascist underneath, and Nite Owl is the goofy 1960's gadget freak Batman running headlong into what happens when you really try that superhero nonsense and having a mental breakdown.

Harvey Kilobit Until just now I thought I may have been the only person on the planet who read that book.
posted by sotonohito at 2:20 PM on April 18, 2016 [8 favorites]


There are at least three of us!
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:36 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


We need new stories, not the same boring old regurgitation of Batman's origin trauma, or some alien ubermensch who just so happens to be 'benevolent.'

Tell the geek in the next cubicle to stop buying the shit. Money talks, afterall.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:58 PM on April 18, 2016


Everything about Batman v Superman--right down to the color palette--makes sense if you assume that it's a movie written, created, and told from the point of view of people mired in toxic masculinity. People who go through life trapped in a low-grade but pervasive depression, and who are disconnected from most of their emotions.

If you're right, I am curious to hear how this sentence should be interpreted.


I read it as toxic masculinity leading to and reinforcing "a low-grade but pervasive depression", not that all depression is due to toxic masculinity. FWIW, it rings true to me. That's pretty much how I spent my 20's.
posted by sapere aude at 3:00 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I thought she meant that toxic masculinity can cause a sort of low-grade pervasive depression. On preview, what sapere aude said.

Also, re her assertion that the DC vs. Marvel movies conversation has focused on jokes, I thought that was a reductive way to put it. The disparity in jokes per movie is the symptom, and one of the main examples people bring up when comparing the two movie franchises, but I'd say the larger issue is fun versus not-fun, or a relentlessly grim tone versus a more balanced one. Like, Captain America: The Winter Soldier isn't a funny movie. There are a handful of jokes, but it's Marvel's take on a political-ish action thriller, laughs aren't the point. It's still a fun movie though, the crushing sadness of Steve Rogers' life aside. Most of the MCU properties are fun in some way, and even the darker stuff like Jessica Jones is leavened with humor and earned sentiment.
posted by yasaman at 3:10 PM on April 18, 2016


Why ARE we obsessing over characters and stories first conceived nearly 80 years ago, when fascism was ascendant?

"a little bit faster, a little bit worse". Or, if we're lucky, "once as tragedy and again as farce".
posted by clew at 3:11 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


clockzero: "Being capable with tools and machines, being physically capable, grilling (and its attendant associations of animal slaughter), drinkin beer, taking a socially unpopular moral stance; these might be enjoyable or noble ways to be alive as a human being, but do they have anything to do with men necessarily?"

Necessarily? No. Culturally and historically. Yes.
posted by xtian at 3:18 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


sapere aude: "I read it as toxic masculinity leading to and reinforcing "a low-grade but pervasive depression", not that all depression is due to toxic masculinity."

That works as an explanation of that one sentence I quoted in response to MartinWisse, but it doesn't hold up if you assume that's her thesis and then apply it to the rest of the article. Take this passage:

"yet another unintentionally hilarious instance of Snyder and his writers mistaking gloom for substance, and the more it just seemed sad. As in: depressed. As in: Jonathan Kent clearly suffered from serious, lifelong depression (possibly related to the fact that he was raised by an asshole who thought it was OK to drown his neighbors' farms), and dealing with that, and with the poisonous worldview that he promulgated as a father, is coloring every one of Clark's choices as an adult and a superhero."

Firstly, this puts causality the other way around: Jonathan Kent suffers from depression which makes him a bad father passing poisonous views about masculinity onto Clark, which explains the toxic masculinity expressed by Superman.

Secondly - given that I know exactly where this argument goes next - suppose you want to argue that depression and toxic masculinity can form a mutually reinforcing and destructive cycle. Okay, sure, but that (a) ignores Faint of Butt's very good point that lots of non-depressed men produce toxic masculinity perfectly well if not worse, and (b) the author never actually makes that claim.

Thirdly, what is the point of using language like "unintentionally hilarious" in this context? If she's trying to make a claim that Jonathan Kent is depressed, then it's really obnoxious to make that argument at the same time as laughing at the writers for writing the character that way. She doesn't directly laugh at the character, but by putting her hilarity right next her observations about a character's mental illness she sets up this association that pervades the entire piece.

Basically she doesn't give a shit about Jonathan Kent or his depression. Later in the piece she throws around language like "joyless misanthrope", which is not at all okay to use if you're seriously making a point about depression. But she's not seriously talking about depression, because she really doesn't care about that - it's just added to the piece as a vehicle to slam the toxic masculinity displayed by Superman. There's nothing wrong with going after toxic masculinity, but there's no need to throw depression into the mix, and certainly little reason to do so with this level of cavalier disregard.
posted by langtonsant at 3:39 PM on April 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


clockzero:
"Being capable with tools and machines, being physically capable, grilling (and its attendant associations of animal slaughter), drinkin beer, taking a socially unpopular moral stance; these might be enjoyable or noble ways to be alive as a human being, but do they have anything to do with men necessarily?"

I feel like you already know the answer to your question.
Necessarily? No. By extension? Socially? Culturally? Historically? Yes.
posted by xtian at 3:44 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I have not seen this movie and I'm not going to, but one of my coworkers is a huge comic book movie fan and was agonizing over whether or not to see it; people whose taste he shared and trusted told him he'd hate it, the reviews told him he'd hate it, and yet he went to see it anyway for reasons he couldn't quite articulate but which seemed to centre around a perceived sense of duty as a fan, even though he was expecting it to anger him.

Or maybe he's in his mid-forties like me. Which meant he grew up watching lots of terrible superhero movies and tv shows that he just barely enjoyed because he loves superheroes that much.

It's better now because there's so much more good superhero media, but I'll admit that as much as I hated Man of Steel and am sure I'll hate most of BvS, I'm gonna see it when it hits the dollar theater and endure Snyder's shit just so I can see a few maybe cool scenes of Superman and Wonder Woman punching Doomsday on a big screen. It's no worse than the hours of badly-translated tedium I sat through as a kid to see a few minutes of dudes wrasseling in rubber Godzilla & Megalon suits.
posted by straight at 3:51 PM on April 18, 2016




It's still a fun movie though, the crushing sadness of Steve Rogers' life aside.

Tumblr makes it clear there's a pretty big group of people who find the crushing sadness of Steve Rogers' life enormously entertaining. Nobody be getting any entertaining feelings from BvS other than schadenfreude.
posted by straight at 3:57 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I am definitely one of those people. I mean, I love him and want him to be happy! (lol never gonna happen in the MCU) But also I live for how incredibly tragic everything about Steve Rogers' life (and Bucky Barnes, and Peggy Carter's lives) is.

Anyway, if you can inject some unforced levity into movies about Steve "Sadness Errands" Rogers, then you can sure as shit do it for Bruce "DARKNESS, NO PARENTS" Wayne and Clark "My Planet Is Gone" Kent.
posted by yasaman at 4:04 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Is there a non-toxic masculinity?
I am a REALLY GOOD DADDY to my cats.

Oozums-oozums-oozums-den!
posted by zenoli at 5:26 PM on April 18, 2016 [8 favorites]


these might be enjoyable or noble ways to be alive as a human being, but do they have anything to do with men necessarily

Does anything else?

I mean Greg is being silly but you're pretty much just begging the question by defining masculinity minus the components of traditional masculinity that most of us would agree are noble ways to be a human being.
posted by atoxyl at 5:48 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


As in: Jonathan Kent clearly suffered from serious, lifelong depression (possibly related to the fact that he was raised by an asshole who thought it was OK to drown his neighbors' farms)

I kinda thought the whole point of the story was 'shit is complicated, son, but you do what you can', not 'we got ours, so fuck 'em.' Nussbaum makes some great points about the film, but I think this is a really weird takeaway.
posted by P.o.B. at 6:01 PM on April 18, 2016


the components of traditional masculinity

Of several of which the classic idea of Superman is a well-known exemplar. Which brings me to something that I feel like is kind of missing from this essay which is that all these brooding super-sorta-anti-heroes represent one endpoint of a historical trend away from superheroes as unassailable moral beacons and toward superheroes as flawed human characters. Of course that approach is itself totally played out these days but

In Snyder and his writers' belief that being emotionally cut off, and treating others like dirt, and prioritizing your own anger over anyone else's feelings (or even their survival) are traits that make a character manly and heroic.

I don't think even Zack Snyder thinks that this "makes you manly and heroic." I do think it's just about the only way he can imagine to be a human being with human emotions though, which doesn't take us too far off the original point.
posted by atoxyl at 6:23 PM on April 18, 2016


In Snyder and his writers' belief that being emotionally cut off, and treating others like dirt, and prioritizing your own anger over anyone else's feelings (or even their survival) are traits that make a character manly and heroic.

I just don't think this is what the movie is saying. These traits are shown to actively work against Batman and Superman at every turn. It isn't until Superman asks Batman to save his mom that they see each other as real people. Within the world of the film, I would argue that these traits are identified as at least counter-productive, and probably as outright toxic.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:31 PM on April 18, 2016


There's a book called Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask about two multicultural Toronto activists who discover they're mutant superheroes and become (literally) Social Justice Warriors.

By Jim Munroe! It's a very fun read that also addresses their horror when they realize what they might be capable of.

This is the review of it I wrote when I read it last year after a friend recommended it:

Flyboy is about Ryan, a Toronto college student whose secret power is that he can turn into a fly. He meets Cassandra: she's a waitress, a single mom, and the former singer for a famous-in-certain-circles punk band. She can make things disappear.

It doesn't take much reflection to figure out that Ryan's superpower kind of sucks. Flies are annoying, but powerless; they can be fairly easily swatted, or trapped, purposely or accidentally. This is underscored from the first scene in the book, when one of Ryan's roommates smashes a fly on Ryan's bedroom wall, leaving behind a bloody smear that never gets cleaned up. To further complicate things, Ryan returns to human form buck-ass naked, and, if he's been a fly for very long at all, covered from head to foot in a layer of viscous green slime.

On the other hand, it takes Ryan and Cassandra awhile to figure out just how awesomely powerful she is. They join together as Superheroes for Social Justice, and lend their powers to the social and political action they're already part of, a community of young activists who deface offensive billboards and attend hastily-organized political meetings in the damp basement where they also attend terrible poetry readings when they're not busy organizing this year's Take Back the Night March.

As someone who was part of a community just like this back in the 90s, when the book takes place, I found Ryan and Cassandra's community very familiar and comfortable, and would hand it to my kids to read with the introduction, "Just imagine that everyone in this book is a lesbian, and, except for the superpowers thing, this is exactly what my life was like in my 20s."

Cassandra and Ryan don't want to hurt anyone; their goal is something more like civil disobedience, and shaping creative punishments to fit the crimes of the powerful. For instance, angry that the police did not respond to the organizers' request that officers assigned to the TBTN march be female and unarmed, they march the route, Cassandra disappearing each officer's gun as they come into sight. They then introduce themselves in their thrift-store superhero costumes and make a statement to the press.

The news coverage, when it comes, focuses on Cassandra's looks, and they punish the newspaper's sexism by driving around late at night, disappearing newspaper boxes. Ryan drives, and after awhile Cassandra slips into inattention, looking up quickly and doing her thing when Ryan tells her they've reached the next box.

This inattention is how she accidentally disappears a mailbox.

R & C are so conscientious that the disappearance of the mailbox bothers them on its own merits: "What if there were personal letters in there?" one of them says. But from there, the "what-ifs" pile up. What if instead of a mailbox, there had been a person there? Cassandra already knows she can disappear people; her power manifested when she accidentally disappeared an uncle who was trying to molest her when she was six. She and Ryan start speculating about the limits of her power. "Could you disappear the sun?" Ryan wonders. Cass doesn't want to think about it.

The superhero storyline is fun, and thoughtfully played out: Ryan's relatively weak power makes him, inevitably, the sidekick, and it's a lovely thing when a straight white guy ends up the sidekick to a bisexual woman. As a fly, he can observe (he helpfully retains his brain and ability to read), but his power to act is very limited, and there is a tense scene in the book when he is witnessing something terrible and can neither escape from having to see it, nor stop it. Cassandra's power, on the other hand, is almost infinite. She is ultimately faced with knowing she can stop a terrible thing, but only by doing a terrible thing. Can she do it? Can she live with herself if she does?

I don't love this book for the superhero stuff, though. I love it for the way that Ryan and his male friends are trying to navigate their relationships and their place in the community they've chosen. They are white guys trying to be decent white guys, and their efforts are touching. They want to be supportive of each other but aren't sure where the lines are; they want to be decent to the women in their lives, but aren't sure they know how. Ryan's friend Jack gives him The Female Eunuch to read at one point, and I admit that touched my crusty old battle-hardened feminist heart.

I love a moment, too, when Ryan, just getting to know Cass, is so overwhelmed by her vocabulary and intelligence that he has to curl up in a ball for a minute. A few pages back, he was admiring her looks, but it's her brain that renders him speechless. Ryan and Cass meet with one of her exes, who is territorial and hostile with Ryan. Later, Ryan wonders out loud what it means that he didn't feel threatened by her behavior, whereas he thinks he would have if she'd been a man.

Cass says, "It means you don't see a woman as a realistic competitor for a sexual partner. It means you're a little bit sexist, and a little bit homophobic."

Ryan thinks, "Ah. Good to know." (paraphrased from memory here)

I have three sons, and I would give them this book to read because they would be into the humor of it, and the superhero stuff. But I would really like them to see, too, the way Jim Munroe portrays male friendship, female friendship, community, and romantic relationships.

I did roll my eyes at Cass's Perfect Fiction Baby. As is so often the case in books and movies, Cass is a single mom who rarely suffers the real challenges of single motherhood. She says, "Just let me put the kid to bed and I'll be right back," and emerges from the bedroom a peaceful five minutes later. When adult conversations need to happen, the child entertains herself endlessly with toy cars; when an adult conversation has to happen in a restaurant, the child interrupts only once, and then only briefly, despite having nothing to entertain herself with but a napkin and a pair of chopsticks. Cass's apartment comes equipped with a Child-Loving Older Woman Who Lives Alone In The Apartment Downstairs, and who is so delighted to watch Cass's child that neither Cass's job, nor her social life, nor her political activism, have to suffer; Cass can set her own schedule and be relied upon to keep it, while the grandmotherly neighbor picks up the extensive slack.

I get that these kind of fictional children are an expediency that allows writers to include children in characters' lives while telling stories that are not primarily about parenthood and children. Along with everyone's bathroom habits, most of the meals they eat, the haircuts they never mention getting unless it's central to the plot, and the bills they must be sitting down to pay at least sometimes, most childrearing challenges take place off-stage so as not to bog the story down. I'm still in a stage of parenting, though, where I'm very aware of the enormous disconnect between these fictional children and the real thing, and so I can be forgiven an eye-roll or two.

You can buy copies of the book at Jim Munroe's website, No Media Kings, and I recommend you do. Munroe offers a pay-what-you-can ebook option as well. dan also recommended Munroe's book Angry Young Spaceman, if I recall correctly, and I look forward to reading that next.
posted by not that girl at 7:49 PM on April 18, 2016 [8 favorites]


And at one point some editors at DC realized this, and decided that they needed new heroes who the Kids These Days could relate to. Characters who could compete with Spiderman and the X people. So they invented..... Batman Junior and Superman Junior, the Super-Sons.

Infinity, Inc., it's not fair that the world forgot you.
posted by escabeche at 9:18 PM on April 18, 2016


The branding problem with DC at Time-Warner goes a bit beyond Snyder. We're talking about a publisher that threw continuity out the window a few years ago for an "edgy" print lineup, and as of earlier this year, everything's consolidated at a Time-Warner campus in Burbank. And on the TV side, you have the cheese-ball Flash, the never-ending soap opera of Arrow, Supergirl, and "I"m not really a Time Lord because I have a gun and an entire superteam." (I admit, I'm probably not being fair to Legends because the first two episodes made me wish the series was survival horror.)

Part of the problem is that we had the fun Batman with Burton (who followed the TV and serial versions), when the torch was passed to someone else, the franchise flopped and the pendulum swung to the moral dystopias of The Dark Knight. I think attempts to build a movieverse around the tone of The Dark Knight are bound to fail, because while dystopias are nice places to visit, you don't want to live there.

Sure, I'll buy the idea that Bats vs. Supes probably was mired in toxic masculinity. I suspect it's because chunks of the Time Warner marketing business appears to think of their audience as Miller fanboys. Disney, in contrast, at least recognizes that if you're going to throw sausage-fests on screen you might as well provide some shipping eye-candy.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:07 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Actually Burton's Batman was fashioned in the aftermath of Miller's Batman. Batman ('89) was very dark and violent which most people seem to forget because aside from Batman himself, who had bat armor and drove around in a tank, everyone else seemed to have popped out of the 40s. People also probably think otherwise because they get it mixed up with Schumacher's Batman where everything had neon lights attached it and everyone had plenty of punny lines to deliver. Sure Nolan upped the ante, and it looks like Snyder's Batman is so dark Gotham City can't even afford streetlights, but Burton's Batman wasn't all fun and games and his film set the tone for the "grim & gritty" superhero movies we see today.
posted by P.o.B. at 5:07 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


atoxyl >

these might be enjoyable or noble ways to be alive as a human being, but do they have anything to do with men necessarily

Does anything else?

I mean Greg is being silly but you're pretty much just begging the question by defining masculinity minus the components of traditional masculinity that most of us would agree are noble ways to be a human being.


I'm not begging the question, I'm proposing that the canonical and/or hegemonic masculinity that we most associate with the word itself is the toxic idea we associate with males and our behavior. Everything good -- being strong, protecting things, being skillful, feeling comfortable just drinking a beer on a nice Sunday -- belongs to everyone. If you strip away those good things (which anyone can evince) from masculinity, you're left with what's unique to it as a gender role, and those are mostly bad things: an ability to turn off empathy, willingness to use violence, an unjustifiable imperative of familial and social domination, a mostly-pardoned self-absorption, a perceived right to impinge on the boundaries of others, etc. Isn't it so? We don't really need to salvage masculinity because we don't need it to be good people any more than religious faith is necessary for the same. So when someone talks about toxic masculinity, it sounds to me more like a distillation.
posted by clockzero at 9:30 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


We don't really need to salvage masculinity because we don't need it to be good people any more than religious faith is necessary for the same. So when someone talks about toxic masculinity, it sounds to me more like a distillation.

What remains for men, as men, when everything about "masculinity" (as distinct from its antipode, "femininity", or from generic "nice human traits") is deemed to be toxic?

Surely there must remain some traits that are both specifically masculine and positive.
posted by theorique at 5:32 AM on April 20, 2016


What remains for men, as men, when everything about "masculinity" (as distinct from its antipode, "femininity", or from generic "nice human traits") is deemed to be toxic?

Liberation. It can't be done while clinging to a gender binary or spectrum which is a political ideology built around violent oppression. And unfortunately, imagining something without that caste system goes beyond the utopian to the alien from our current position.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:35 AM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


Less angrily, if gender is viewed as a qualitative plurality rather than antipodes, then it shouldn't matter if this or that element of masculinity is unique or distinct from what other people do.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:07 AM on April 20, 2016


What remains for men, as men, when everything about "masculinity" (as distinct from its antipode, "femininity", or from generic "nice human traits") is deemed to be toxic?

What's insufficient about wonderful human traits? Why do we need masculinity?

Surely there must remain some traits that are both specifically masculine and positive.

Perhaps. Can you think of any?
posted by clockzero at 7:57 AM on April 20, 2016


I'd argue that we should scrap both masculinity and femininity as concepts. They don't seem to do much good and they seem to do a lot of harm.

Why should "how do I live as a good man" be a different question from "how do I live as a good person"? I can't see how it should be.
posted by sotonohito at 9:04 AM on April 20, 2016


Also, having just recently rewatched both Burton Batman movies, I'd have to say that he took a radically different approach to Batman than I've seen in either comics or movies. Burton approached Batman as a sort of Gothic tragedy.

It's a bit less apparent in the first, I suspect because of executive meddling. There we have a weird juxtaposition of Burton's vision of Batman and the 1960's silly Batman.

But in Batman Returns he basically got to go all out in his vision of Batman, and the result is clearly not either a rehash of the Dark Knight version or the 1960's version, or the 1940's version, or really any Batman but Burton's. It is a brooding, gloomy, vision of Batman. Not grimdark and filled with ultraviolence and glorying in vengeance, but one where the world seems drab and hopeless, where evil is often petty and grimy.

Burton's Batman fits into the mold of the old Gothic horror hero. He's the brooding, cursed, lord in a manor with a tragic past and a hopeless quest. The villains also fit the Gothic mold well, cursed, deformed, murdered, abandoned, and seeking a vengeance that seems justified if not perhaps to the extreme they wish to take it. Burton's Penguin hit the tragic notes perfectly and you could really sympathize with his pain and his desire for revenge right up until he revealed just how random and misplaced his vengeance would be.

Trying to view Burton's take on Batman through the lens of the Dark Knight will fail, because that isn't how Burton's Batman works.
posted by sotonohito at 9:27 AM on April 20, 2016


Originally, superheroes like Batman or Superman were envisioned as some sort of idealized "greatest, most masculine men" - immensely strong and powerful, but also showing great wisdom and restraint in the use of that power. While they "could" deploy deadly violence, they would only do so in the most measured of ways, and only as a last resort. In the Marvel universe, we can recall the famous line offered to Spider-Man, "with great power comes great responsibility".

In this way, you can view (male) superheroes as exhibiting positive masculinity (in an exaggerated extreme), and super villains as exhibiting toxic masculinity - power combined with greed, envy, rage, destructive urges, etc. It's kind of unfortunate that the trend toward "gritty" movies and "realistic" superheroes leads us to have our superheroes have the same (i.e. negative) traits as super villains.
posted by theorique at 9:29 AM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Batman pretty much murdered everybody in the world early in his career. It wasn't even presented as grim, just that thing you have to do to criminals. Rob a bank? Out the window you go, plummeting to your death.
posted by mittens at 9:37 AM on April 20, 2016


I stand corrected. I thought Batman had some kind of honor code where he didn't use guns and didn't kill anyone.
posted by theorique at 9:57 AM on April 20, 2016


Batman DOES have an honor code where he doesn't use guns and doesn't kill anyone. This wasn't the case for a small handful of issues when the creators were trying to get a handle on the character, but as much as detractors like to point it out, it's an insignificant blip in the 75-year history of the character.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:55 AM on April 20, 2016


If your point is that it's long past time we forget the idea that any virtue should actually be considered particular to masculinity or femininity I completely agree with that. I'm just saying - if you take the bag of things that are handed to you as "this is what it is to me a man, my son" and toss out all the items that are most broadly approved of among human beings in general of course you're going to be left with a lot of bad stuff.
posted by atoxyl at 11:00 AM on April 20, 2016


You can get me to stand up for some of the more controversial ones too though. What theorique just said about Superman is pretty much exactly what I was getting at. There's a lot in masculinity that I think ultimately derives from - you have (physical, originally, but now it's more than that of course) power that could hurt people, that could protect people, that could build things, what are you going to do with it? And I don't think the lessons I was taught about that were remotely all bad.
posted by atoxyl at 11:14 AM on April 20, 2016


it's an insignificant blip in the 75-year history of the character

That's what I tried to tell police about my own early career, but did they listen? No.
posted by mittens at 11:26 AM on April 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Burton's Batman may not be the same as Miller's, but Burton's doesn't exist without Miller's. The most prominent Batman before Miller, and subsequently Burton, got a hold of the character was on Super Friends. Also, Burton made a clear line between revenge and his current state, and followed that line right up to the Joker making him Batman's arch nemesis and the very same person that killed his parents. I haven't watched those old Batman films in a while but IIRC Burton didn't seem to have a problem with Batman killing and or extremely hurting people either.
posted by P.o.B. at 12:52 PM on April 20, 2016


Burton's Batman movies are live-action translations of cartoons, with cinematic language derived almost directly from early Disney, Fleischer, and Jones. Keaton's Batman isn't subdued to make a particularly deep point about character, but because he's the straight man opposite Nicholson, DeVito, and most importantly, Burton's ridiculous production designs. There's no way to take Burton's batplane seriously. (Or Keaton's stunt double for that matter.) And the 80s were filled films that combined violence and comedy. The Indiana Jones franchise comes to mind.

This is in contrast to the way in which Nolan goes out of his way to make everything about Batman almost plausible in terms of urban decay, high-tech urban warfare, surveillance, and a rather explicit moral framework that spends almost 20 minutes on shit like the social psychology of the prisoner's dilemma.

Burton's Joker is a cartoon. Nolan's Joker is a moral mouthpiece attempting to engage the audience in dialogue. Burton's Gotham is a cartoon. Nolan's Gotham is a borderline reducto ad absurdism. Burton's Batman doesn't really have much of a philosophy other than monsters beget monsters. Nolan's Dark Knight expands on Miller's subtext that democracy isn't sufficient to contain ubermenchen and we need extra-legal ubermenchen to fill in the gaps.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:19 PM on April 20, 2016


If anything, the Suicide Squad trailer promises the same sort of cartoonish violence and team dynamics that seem to work well for this genre.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:46 PM on April 20, 2016


I wouldn't really disagree with any of that, but aside from aesthetics I would disagree with the idea that they are simply cartoony and fun. It's clear that Burton has a kind of whimsical goth type aesthetic, but his Batman films relied upon the idea of a brooding troubled guy out for revenge. Snyder recreated the exact same person albeit in much more two dimensional fashion. So much so, that when I talk to people about Batman vs Superman I pretty much have say Batman is Batman. There is no character development whatsoever, but you do get to see Affleck workout with his shirt off for 5 minutes. So there is that.
posted by P.o.B. at 3:51 PM on April 20, 2016


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