It offers escape for a society lamenting its traumas and regretting its choices
pretty to think so, and if Hollywood got its mitts on Hemingway’s oeuvre today, the story would not end with such aching futility.
The newest summer spectacle, “The Flash”, resurrects not only three different Batmen but also several Superpeople of both genders reaching back to the black-and-white era. It winks at the audience with references to “Star Wars”, “Scooby Doo” and “Back to the Future’‘. The effect is of a self-aware palimpsest begat by TikTok and a pinball machine. “Look at this!” cries the Flash—well, one of the two or three Flashes—at the climax.
Earlier this year a multiverse movie, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, won seven Oscars, including for best picture. It was in essence a Marvel action film dressed up in musings about identity . Evelyn, played by Michelle Yeoh, is a Chinese-American immigrant who discovers she has great power in an alternative reality and must travel the multiverse to save it from destruction by another powerful being who turns out to be a different-reality version of her alienated daughter.
As those summaries suggest, these films are also obsessed with choice and contingency. When the show ends and the lights come up you can feel less inspired than sad, considering a society suffused with regret, more preoccupied with individual trauma and with sorting out the past, and recycling its tropes, than dreaming of the future. The escapism on offer is not just the old comic-book fantasy of a humdrum existence transformed by a spider bite.
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