According to the Woke Taliban at the far-left Time Magazine, there are “approved” superheroes and “unapproved” superheroes — and the “unapproved” have got to go.
Approved superheroes are those, of course, who are not white and who have a social conscience that conforms with the far-left. This would include Black Panther, Blade, HBO’s Watchmen reboot, and the Spider-Man stories with the black kid, Miles Morales, instead of lily-white Peter Parker.
Unapproved superheroes are pretty much everyone and anything else.
Here’s Time’s argument:
In the past several weeks, as calls to defund the police have gone mainstream, pop culture critics and fans have been reconsidering how Hollywood heroizes cops. Legal procedurals and shoot-em-up action movies have long presented a skewed perception of the justice system in America, in which the police are almost always positioned as the good guys. These “good cop” narratives are rarely balanced out with stories of systemic racism in the criminal justice system. The “bad guys” they pursue are often people of color, their characters undeveloped beyond their criminality.
[…]
With a few notable exceptions (more on those later), most superhero stories star straight, white men who either function as an extension of a broken U.S. justice system or as vigilantes without any checks on their powers. Usually, they have some sort of tentative relationship with the government: The Avengers work for the secretive agency S.H.I.E.L.D.; Batman takes orders from Gotham police commissioner Gordon; even the villainous members of the Suicide Squad execute government orders in exchange for commuted prison sentences. And even when superheroes function outside the justice system, they’re sometimes idolized by police because they are able to skirt the law to “get the job done.”
The article offers some lip service to ideas like “creative freedom,” but the entire premise is an indictment of white superheroes who work within the justice system, who work with the police. The article is also an indictment of superhero stories that don’t portray America as racist or the justice system as even more racist.
You don’t need me to comment on the madness of this, how these pious moralizers on the left are not only lying about the American justice system…
Police shootings of unarmed people (including blacks) have dropped dramatically over the past few years, black and white deaths at the hands of police officers are almost perfectly representative of the country’s racial make-up involving police interactions, the black imprisonment rate has been dramatically shrinking since 2006, and blacks and whites are equally satisfied with their local police…
…but are openly calling for, no — demanding — a chilling conformity in storytelling.
The sad thing is that it’s going to work. Hollywood is nothing if not a pathetic gang of conformist cowards, and so we are in for a very long slog of storytelling that instructs rather than entertains, storytelling that will adhere to a very strict and narrow set of ideological rules.
This zeal will crush every upcoming television show, every movie, music, video games, and more… If you think modern-day entertainment is suffocating now, you ain’t seen nothing yet…
No matter how unpopular or awful the product, those who conform will be rewarded by their peers and those who dare not conform will be smeared as racists and find their lives and livelihoods destroyed by the doxers in the media. No one will be safe (see: Rowling, JK).
Things were not even this bad in Hollywood during the McCarthy era. Back then, some topics were off limits, but no one was telling you how to tell your stories, no one was telling you what your stories must say and how they must say it.
I am holding my home video collection closer than ever.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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