When we think of “popular art,” the first and most prominent thing to usually come to the minds of most people is cinema, even more so than music. This is because of all the money that is involved (production value, tickets sold, etc., equals an industry worth billions) and also the actors, who become secular deities of sorts, with many adorning their rooms with posters of their faces or or of them striking heroic poses, etc. They even go so far as to try and emulate them to the best of their ability, despite the fact that they are far from being models of virtue.

Similar to idols, cinema is mainly about images, and like idolatry, beautified by Shaytan, it gains a certain power of attraction that seems almost mystical, serving the observers something larger, more transcendent, in comparison to their everyday life. The late Ingmar Bergman—considered one of the most influential movie directors and whose own movies were ambiguous in the way they portrayed women and even traditional religious questions (The Seventh Seal, 1957)—summarized, probably the best, this approach to films as a sort of secular religiosity.

To quote him:

Film has dream, film has music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.

Of course, Hollywood in particular has played a sinister role, being more prolific and more universal than all other forms of national cinema, mainly due to the United States’ power projection and economic stature (we covered the dark side of Hollywood in an earlier article).

Let us take a look at how cinema conveys a certain ideology, while analyzing roughly a century of its history, albeit only minimally.

“Hitlerian Cinema”?

German Expressionism was one of the most important European artistic movements during the beginning of the last century, even though it remains unknown in the modern popular consciousness, unlike Surrealism (France) and Futurism (Italy), for example.

Yet it was quite prolific and influential, especially in cinema. Among its representative movies are Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), both by Fritz Lang; and a few years earlier, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) by Robert Wiene. The latter popularized narrative techniques that are now almost clichés, such as the final twist (“plot twist”) or the idea of the unreliable narrator, with some even considering to have inaugurated the “thriller” genre.

German Expressionist cinema was characterized by the ambiguity, both moral and physical, of its characters (especially the protagonists). The set designs defied geometry, and the protagonist had extravagant expressions or clothes and always manifested a dubious sense of morality.

More generally, German Expressionism has been described as conveying apocalyptic-messianic tendencies. It was primarily anthropology, a discourse about man as man (unlike contemporary modernist movements like Futurism and Vorticism, which favored the machine) that combined a constructive political project (unlike the “nihilistic” tone of the Dadaists, who wanted to destroy the bourgeois world with no palpable alternative) with a cosmic, not to say metaphysical, vision of humanity (as opposed to Surrealism and its implicit Freudianism). It was thus, by its very nature, a critique of modernity. “The Adding Machine” by Elmer Rice is considered to be the best American play with German Expressionist tendencies, and it is a ferocious critique of the progressive technologization that subjugates man to the machine before replacing man himself with the machine. Rice had also anticipated, as early on as the 1920s, what is now, a century later, referred to as the danger of AI automation.

It is therefore not without reason that Siegfried Kracauer (we had mentioned him in an older article about detectives), who authored an entire book on German Expressionist cinema, said that it prepared German society for Hitler. The reasoning being that the introduction of the ambiguous main character in an apocalyptic-messianic atmosphere with skepticism towards the modern world could only be translated into charismatic leaders. (The film critic Lotte Eisner refutes this exclusively “Nazifying” interpretation in a book that was published after the Second World War.)

German Expressionism still remains relevant, as it has influenced prominent American movie directors such as David Lynch and Tim Burton, whose character of “The Penguin” in Batman Returns (1992) is inspired by the aesthetics of a movie we’ve already mentioned, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Superhero or the Aesthetics of American Imperialism

In the last 15 years or so, superhero movies and animated series have emerged as some of the most profitable ventures for producers due to the money that they generate. All of these franchises from our youth (Batman, Superman, etc.) have been milked to death in different forms of media and consumerist objectification, through everything from big budget movies to toys for little children.

This presence that saturates our everyday lives has to be rationalized. It just can’t happen to be the case that superheroes have become so fashionable without interests extending beyond mere entertainment.

To begin with, very few have analyzed the superhero as an archetype. The late literary critic, Umberto Eco, perhaps Italy’s best-known modern intellectual, had penned an essay in the 1970s, The Myth of Superman, where he tried to analyze the Superman archetype from different angles, mostly related to ancient mythology and modern psychology.

However, I think that many have completely missed the idea of the superhero being an incarnation of American imperialism. Think about it. The superhero is defined by his superpowers. Just as the modern West imposes its superiority by means of its newest technologies, the superhero moves wherever he wants, whether at the city level (Batman and Gotham) or on the global level (Superman). The point is, there’s no sovereignty. No territory limits his “ideals.” Similarly, the USA can navigate all over the world however it wishes as long as it can impose its liberal ideals (think of Iraq). Another aspect is that the superhero is rarely ever appreciated. His identity is hidden to the common folk as they simply wouldn’t understand him. This is comparable to the USA, being criticized despite supposedly trying “to do good,” eternally “misunderstood” on a geopolitical scale.

In the same way that James Bond is a postcolonial reconstruction of English masculinity—the aristocratic English can’t openly “save the world” through colonialism and have to do it as a spy—, the superhero is also a symbol of American imperialism: technologically conquering, motivated by ideals but also, in a form of self-criticism, aware that his actions won’t be viewed with any sort of consensus.

If the superhero ended up being “in” again during the Obama administration and thereafter, I do believe that it was a way for American civilization as a whole to admit that its idealism is lethal and out of touch with much of the surrounding civilizations.