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Don't you even dare compare Les Vampires to Marvel movies. LOL.
Jodie Foster: Superhero Movies a Phase That’s Lasted Too Long.
Here is Joseph Campbell's implicit critique.
Super-hero movies are endlessly rebooting, because we are endlessly rebooting, looking to start again, carefree, fit, and 21, rather move on to the next chapter of life. James Bond can fall in love, but his loves must all die. And the actors who play Bond must themselves replaced now and then so that Bond himself can remain evergreen. Captain America can fall in love and have a life, but he must do so as an exit, handing off the shield to the next Captain. When the writers of these films find that they've written themselves into a corner or that they're out of ideas (after a whopping four stories), they restart the entire series again. We know how to do the bit about the joy of Spiderman and Superman finding their powers and learning to sling, swing, and swoop.
And in this joy, is an identity-based elevation of the self above others. If everyone could fly, flying would be no more remarkable than bipedal locomotion, it would be quite pedestrian. Like the kids at Hogwarts, the hero learns that he really is just better than his peers. And with this condescension comes the assumption that he has the right to break the rules that restrain little people. Spiderman's big moral lesson, "With great power, comes great responsibility" carries a concerning implication. If Spiderman has greater responsibility, then he also has greater rights. And this is why Batman gets to fight crime, and you don't (he's not the one wearing hockey-pads, prole!). And with this sense of essential, identity-based power (e.g., your identity is that YOU are THE spider-man, or THE super-man, or THE bat-man, etc.), comes an inevitable sense of superiority. Col. Jessup has a speech for you if you question how he uses his great power. Then again, Worth in CUBE rejoins, that "Not all of us are conceited enough to play hero."
It's fun to imagine that you could shoot lasers out of your eyes and punch your frustrations into submission, but it's not edifying. It is not a myth that helps a grow. At most, it has all the insight of a "Hang in there, kitty" poster.
Foster is lamenting not being able to participate in more interesting mythologies, stories that touch more sublime, sensitive, and exigent human needs and potentials. Our story-telling is retarded (in the basic sense of being denied forward motion), but life has many chapters, and in it we wear many masks and play many roles, and the needs of this world are varied and substantive.
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexercised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her. And so, while husbands are worshiping at their boyhood shrines, being the lawyers, merchants, or masterminds their parents wanted them to be, their wives, even after fourteen years of marriage and two fine children produced and raised, are still on the search for love—which can come to them only from the centaurs, sileni, satyrs, and other concupiscent incubi of the rout of Pan, either as in the second of the above-recited dreams, or as in our popular, vanilla-frosted temples of the venereal goddess, under the make-up of the latest heroes of the screen.
And in this joy, is an identity-based elevation of the self above others. If everyone could fly, flying would be no more remarkable than bipedal locomotion, it would be quite pedestrian. Like the kids at Hogwarts, the hero learns that he really is just better than his peers. And with this condescension comes the assumption that he has the right to break the rules that restrain little people. Spiderman's big moral lesson, "With great power, comes great responsibility" carries a concerning implication. If Spiderman has greater responsibility, then he also has greater rights. And this is why Batman gets to fight crime, and you don't (he's not the one wearing hockey-pads, prole!). And with this sense of essential, identity-based power (e.g., your identity is that YOU are THE spider-man, or THE super-man, or THE bat-man, etc.), comes an inevitable sense of superiority. Col. Jessup has a speech for you if you question how he uses his great power. Then again, Worth in CUBE rejoins, that "Not all of us are conceited enough to play hero."
It's fun to imagine that you could shoot lasers out of your eyes and punch your frustrations into submission, but it's not edifying. It is not a myth that helps a grow. At most, it has all the insight of a "Hang in there, kitty" poster.
Foster is lamenting not being able to participate in more interesting mythologies, stories that touch more sublime, sensitive, and exigent human needs and potentials. Our story-telling is retarded (in the basic sense of being denied forward motion), but life has many chapters, and in it we wear many masks and play many roles, and the needs of this world are varied and substantive.