Week 7: Material culture – The Hollywood sign

 The term “superhero” is very popular in contemporary cinema. Movies quite often depict a character as the paragon of justice and a lawful do-gooder. Today, Hollywood most often paves the way for a ton of superhero movies while brushing aside any other “non-superhero” title. It is often a shame when a good regular non-superhero movie goes unnoticed because some superhero movie came out in the same week and took the spotlight.

When we think about superhero movies, we often think about the ones based on comic books. Famous publishers like Marvel and DC comics cannot wait to get movies based on their superheroes. Typically, the stories from the comics are linear. The hero starts as a zero. Something tragic happens to him or he has to find a purpose and later on he goes to fight bad guys or supervillains. Rarely, we get to see the supervillain’s actual background and story. There are sometimes even movies and TV shows dedicated to their stories, in which they are not depicted as a supervillain, but rather an anti-hero or vigilante. Deadpool would be one example of this anti-hero as he doesn’t explicitly do any good, not intentionally anyway. He has his own motives and does whatever he can to pursue them. There are other characters like deadpool. In the recent Star Wars TV show called: The Mandalorian, we follow a bounty hunter who travels worlds in search of people who have high bounties on their heads. He brings them back to his order, either dead or alive and he gets paid for it. But one time, a contract was put up for an unknown green alien life form, which was actually force sensitive, meaning it has a connection to the Jedi order. That order is depicted as the typical order of superheroes who keep the balance in the world. Although the main character, known throughout the show simply as “The Mandalorian” or “Mando” for short, takes the contract and finds the “asset”, he does not complete his task. Instead he searches for someone who offered a better reward. This turned out to be a Jedi master who wishes to train the “asset” to wield the force properly. Here, Mando did not do good “on purpose”, he was only looking for a greater reward, but instead he actually turned out to be the protagonist of the story.

In conclusion, I believe that the theme of “anti-hero” simply reflects on the society being fed up with all the superheroes and their clichés. Oftentimes we look at the good side and the protagonists always win, but I believe that with movies and shows like “Deadpool” and “The Mandalorian” people are trying to say that we need to face reality and not get blinded by superhero stereotypes anymore.