Coombs wrote:
What is more silly to me is that people are so hungry to be represented by the very cultures and institutions that oppress and disenfranchise them. They want to be represented "like" them. The super hero is a nasty propaganda tool at it's core, yet we want to see someone of our own skin color as a super hero.
You're overthinking it Coombs. Normal people care no more for the politics of big-budget Hollywood films than they do about advanced calculus. They just go and see something for a bit of entertainment at the theatre, or switch on their tv, or plug in a new video game, and they realise that they're invisible.
Do you really think that people care about Wonder Woman's misogynistic beginnings as a comic book character or about the supposed (I haven't seen it) political underpinnings of the film? The feminism of the film is that one of the highest-grossing cinematic experiences of all time was directed by a woman and starred a woman in the main role. The progressivism of the film is that it exists.
The current season of American Crime Story addresses a similar phenomenon. I think it is deeply interesting how Andrew Cunanan, a sociopathic killer, became a sort of symbol for exile philippines in the US. People who were represented nowhere, who had no status or leverage in society, found a famous symbol, any symbol at all, that made people sit up and take notice, that made a footprint on the culture. They didn't care that Cunanan identified more with the group of straight whites who oppressed people like him than with the philippino gay community that had his back.
We can bemoan the shallowness of the pop culture we all consume until the cows come home, or we can accept at face value that people (regardless of whether it's because of gender or race or other divisions) want to be seen, that they deserve to be seen, and that the rest of us are in no place to simultaneously deny them space in the cultural spheres that do exist and then mock them when they object to that treatment.
