Next: Obama-man?

Some were good superhero movies. Some were bad superhero movies. Yet, they’re all beginning to merge as a very long series of whammies, and fireballs and ironic quips. In my mind, Hancock is taking down Indiana Jones. Zohan canoodles and karate chops Agent 99. My butt is kicked. Your butt is kicked. Sigh.

With Hancock, which zooms into theatres next week, Hollywood has gone all meta, giving us a superhero — Will Smith — who is a drunken power ranger having an existential crisis. As superhero dramas go, I’d give it three capes. But the pure boom-boom factor of the genre made me feel bludgeoned. Again.

OK, I’m not a 14-year-old boy; so all this superhero firepower isn’t hitting me in the solar plexus. But I did take my 5-year-old son to Target and bought him a whole array of superhero underpants. He really likes wearing Hulk on his butt. Sometime he wears his underpants backward so he can just look down and see his jolly green friend more easily. Maybe it comforts him. Empowers him.

Author Peter Biskind, who has written books about movies and culture in the 1950s, ‘70s and ‘90s, assures me that superheroes return with bad times. Superman reached iconic status during World War II. The gas crisis and economic malaise of the Carter years begat Superman again — with Christopher Reeve. And now, well, given the mortgage crisis, the morass in Iraq and oil prices, we need Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Iron Man, all at once.

Asks marketing guru Jane Buckingham of the Youth Intelligence Group, “Who doesn’t want somebody to come save the day when the world is a mess?” Buckingham notes that the reason summer is all about superheroes is because of a demographic perfect storm. “Generation Y is a hopeful, optimistic generation. They want to believe from the start. Not naively, but just let me believe that it could be true that superheroes are out there,” says Buckingham. Janine Basinger, a film historian, has a slightly different take on it. “We all want a daddy, don’t we?”

Basinger says the recent wave of superheroes is partly driven by the technological revolution in movie making. “When I was little, a superhero movie was either a B-movie, or a serial. You couldn’t do it right. Now you can make the comic book come to life.”

Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer who produced Hancock along with action maestro Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice), points out that the psychology of Hollywood’s superheroes has deepened of late. “They used to be pretty two-dimensional — good guys or gals. Now they seem to be human beings that have stumbled and have to find their way again — to struggle a little more and earn the chance to be righteous.” Superheroes routinely have faced crises of confidence. They cry now. They need to pop Xanax before they get back to the hard task of saving civilisation.

While I believe in hope and change, I know some cynics (mostly diehard Hillary Clinton supporters) who think Barack Obama taps into the same collective yearning — he might as well be called Obama-man, political wonder boy, able to leap giant deficits in a single bound, vanquish scores of angry Iraqis merely by batting his doe eyes.

Obama-man has no past. Like all caped crusaders, he is a mysterious cipher, and yet a reassuring figure, like Superman or Spider-Man. Personally, I have more confidence in Obama. Imagine John McCain as the Incredible Hulk?
-Rachel Abramowitz(LAT-WP)