Let Aaron Sorkin do the preaching. I’d rather watch superheroes save the day

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I went to see The Social Reckoning last week. In the great tradition of Aaron Sorkin productions, the movie was mainly scenes of people moralising to each other at double speed and doing brave things and then grand orchestral music arriving to play them all out.

It was a completely infuriating watch because (and this is not a spoiler) THERE IS NO SOCIAL RECKONING. Also because I suspect Sorkin genuinely believes we are only ever a rousing speech away from righting every wrong in the world.

Marvel fatigue or not, the superhero genre’s clear line between good and evil is essential right now.Jamie Brown, Sydney Morning Herald/The AgeI left the cinema irritated that a subject so compelling had been translated so poorly to screen and yet simultaneously appreciative of the cinematic earnestness of it all. The Social Reckoning had so many speeches. There were so many times Mikey Madison proclaimed variations of “I love working at Facebook” and “I believe in Facebook”. There was so much sincerity. When the real world is glib and unserious, when terrible people make dumb jokes and do hurtful things just because, seeing people act on genuine conviction feels like a revelation.

I realised I needed more of this is my life. Indeed, we all do! Sincerity is due for a comeback but it needs to be in a way that offers simplicity and resolution and tells me explicitly who the baddie is (my phone has ruined my brain). And I can think of no better candidate for Earnest 2.0 than the superhero movie.

I know you are probably thinking about the recent disasters that were Supergirl and The Fantastic Four and Masters of the Universe, and how they were as unexciting and culturally irrelevant as “Sharon” and “Claire” found my most recent novel (I read the Goodreads reviews). After years of box-office dominance, there is a narrative that we are collectively suffering from Marvel fatigue. But this is wrong! The superhero movie is what we need and deserve right now.

You know how, at the moment, it is totally normal for people to say and do horrible things? There is a glibness in the culture, a collective assumption that nothing much means anything, so we can all just do whatever we want. It’s like the world is run by first-year arts students trying to read Nietzsche for an essay but getting distracted by r/shitposting. If we are mocking politicians for having prolapses, and the leader of the free world is planning live executions, does anything even matter any more?

You know where this doesn’t happen? You know where every thought and action is imbued with planet-saving significance? The Avengers! Superhero movies will never be too sly, too quippy or too jacked-up on peptides to save the world, and they will always tell you how important it is to come together, stand up for what’s right and do the fighting.

There is a lot to be said for the moral clarity of the superhero genre. I am sick of stories that focus on the complex reasons people do the things they do. I am sick of stories about normal people making bad decisions or becoming evil.

Superhero movies will always make the bad guy explicitly evil. He will always have horns, or scales, or be a billionaire with a mysterious lab. We don’t need to contemplate whether he destroyed the Earth because he would have been more suited to a Steiner school or should have been hugged more as a child. We can simply see and accept evil.

And because there is no complexity to this evil, there is no stirring of sympathy in the audience. The baddies do the bad things and are punished. The superhero movie has no moral ambiguity, no hard questions – just clearly delineated lines between good and evil.

The absence of any real resolution in The Social Reckoning was one of the things that bugged me about it. It is bizarre to have a story end with a brave deed that goes nowhere. You know where this wouldn’t happen? In any superhero movie! In superhero movies we know that good will prevail over evil before we even buy the ticket – it is just a case of what famous city will almost be destroyed in the third act before the villain is neutralised.

So let’s do away with Oscar-bait in these dire times and engage with the world of capes and tights and cool cars. Let’s bask in the simplicity of good being good and bad being bad, while actors in hilarious costumes speak with earnestness and sincerity about how destroying the Earth would actually be a net negative. The real world is full of unkind and unserious things. We deserve this.

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