WK7 Material culture: The Hollywood Sign

 

In the past two decades superheroes became very popular in the film culture. To attract wide audiences' screenwriters are using more and more twisted and interesting character progressions that keep our eyes and mind glued to the screen. Recently, with superhero movies filling so many cinemas, we’re seeing Hollywood pay more attention than ever to the importance of the multifaceted, empathetic bad guy.

Super villains are presented in many different ways usually with a desire to destroy the world as we know it or destroy the human race, they provide the meaning and cause for super heroes to fight for. The Avenger's Loki delivered what could be perhaps the greatest world-domination plot, opening a portal to usher in an alien race to publicly defeat The Avengers and assert himself as ruler of the Earth. So why do we really need super villains in movies? The answer might seem obvious, super villains are made to replicate the problems we face or have faced in our everyday lives. I think bullying if the perfect example, we all were bullied in one way or another throughout our lives and thought how good it would be if we could just take care of the problem with our imaginary super powers. This is the reason why super villains exist, they give the audience the satisfaction of seeing the evil being defeated by good. However, lately we see that the popularity of super villains is rising rapidly. A perfect example of this could be Deadpool (even though I wouldn’t call him a super villain, he is definitely not a good guy either) who is presented as a humorous mercenary. Even though he is a villain, many comic book fans consider him their favorite and even empathize with him. The cause of this is possibly the deteriorating morale of the American society and society in general, we see people being more and more aggressive, jealous, unpleasant and not willing to accept the differences we are faced with on a daily basis.

The state the whole world is in at the moment is not helping the situation we have with our society, while super heroes are cool, we should focus more on the human part in them and learn how to fight our “evil” and save what’s left instead of descending further into abyss.