Sunday, August 31, 2014

A Gatsbean Odyssey: The Man Himself (1/7)


I’ve never understood The Great Gatsby. Like Odysseus departing for Troy, every time I embark upon reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece I have the highest of hopes only to find myself lost at sea.

The main problem is Jay Gatsby himself. When I first approached the book as an adult, I thought Fitzgerald was offering us an image of the ideal man, an image to which we should all aspire. Perhaps I had this impression because of how perfect Robert Redford appears in the 1974 film, which was forced on us in high school. Perhaps it was because I had been reading a lot of Ayn Rand and assumed Fitzgerald was offering a kind of John Galt: a hero in demeanor and acumen.

 

I was disappointed, then, to find that whatever virtues Gatsby may possess, he is a fake and a crook. Of low birth by early 20th-Century American standards, he allies himself with bootleggers, World Series-riggers and thugs to become the gaudiest of the nouveau riche. He is desperate for a welcome by old money and, even worse, he has a serious crush on Daisy Buchanan, the most vapid and annoying character I have ever encountered in literature.

This confused me. Was Fitzgerald criticizing successful self-made men?

And yet Gatsby remains admirable. He is intelligent, capable, polite, kind, equable, and faithful to a fault. He shows a remarkable ability to create himself, exemplified by his to-do list as a boy: dumbbell exercise, practice elocution, study inventions, and so forth. He is too good for his own parties and doesn’t attend. He may be a copy of the gentleman of wealth, but he is a testament that some copies are very good, so good as to equal or even best their inspiration. Thus, Nick Carraway’s parting words for his neighbor are no surprise:


“‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’”

But this solves nothing. It would be one thing if he were a complex character with contradictory elements, but I always feel as if the two sides of Jay Gatsby fit together poorly. Each half undermines rather than complements the other.

What to make of such a man? I don’t know, and multiple readings have brought me little closer to an integrated picture of the whole character.



1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
 


 

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

An Open Letter to Feminists


Dear Feminists,

I’ve been with you ever since I knew what the word feminism means. I wasn’t always a vocal supporter, but I have always believed that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men.

But I’m beginning to question the quality of my company.

I’m with you in the fight for equal pay and the fight to break glass ceilings, including Hillary Clinton’s “highest, hardest” glass ceiling. I’m with you in a woman’s right to choose and I support her right to affordable birth control for whatever reason she wants it. I’m with you in fighting the War on Women in all its forms both blatant and sneaky. I’m with you in the fight against rapists and rape defenders. I’m with you in condemning the shaming of women over appearance. I’m with you in the use of politically correct language down to every last him or her. I love the intellectual muscle you bring to the day’s issues and I’m thankful for your cultural critique, so often insightful and sorely needed. I’m with you when your message is equality for all, and I’m with you in the fight against bona fide assholes on Twitter.

I’m with you in all that and more.

But you lose me when you dedicate your energies to inflating minutiae in popular culture and personal behavior into the worst misogyny. You lose me when everything is about rape or rape culture--even incidents that don’t involve rape committed or threatened in any way. You lose me when you lump every critic in with the worst critics. You lose me the more exclusive you become: you attack women whose lifestyles and appearance reflect stereotypes and norms you decry, you chastise any who refuse to wear your label, you intelligence-shame your critics and you lay down misandry with abandon. You lose me when you deny you do these things. And finally, you lose me when you abuse reason in pushing dogma.

Recently, when the Women Against Feminism campaign started on Tumblr, you reacted the way you usually do, with snark and combativeness, but you only have yourselves to blame, for your snark and combativeness win no converts, only enemies. The dominant strain of feminism on the internet is hyperfeminism. It’s like a religion or political party, forever preaching to the choir or solidifying its base while alienating regular folk and critical thinkers, many of whom would otherwise be your allies.

Sure, some of the women using the hashtag #WomenAgainstFeminism lack your education and fancy vocabulary, but many of them also show a keen understanding of what feminism has become in reality. Still ostensibly about equal rights and opportunities, we turn on our computers each day to outrage over trifles, negative stereotypes of men, and constant belittling and demonizing of anyone who disagrees. Many of the messages displayed by Women Against Feminism encourage a message of love, understanding and respect for all people. You could learn from that, and you could learn from their perception that your brand of feminism isn’t welcoming, positive or empowering.

I will always believe in equal rights and opportunities for women and men, but I’ve begun to feel like the rancor and knee-jerk analysis that dominates feminism online, often perpetrated by individuals of great intellectual and artistic potential, shrinks me as a person and a thinker the more I focus on it. Perhaps I should look away to explore the broader movement, its history, its dissidents, and its leading lights. Why is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex sitting unread on my shelves? Why did I buy but never finish Camille Paglia’s Vamps & Tramps?

Now is as good a time as any to seek healthier fare.

When I post this to my Twitter account, I’ll use the hashtag #FeministsAgainstFeminism, because that is one way to describe what I and many others are. I support the movement and real methods for addressing the problems feminism identifies, but I am disappointed by the behavior of the rank and file online.

Respectfully,
A Feminist

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Django Unchained as Catharsis: Pity, Fear and Celebration


 
Aristotle said the essence of tragedy is “pity and fear.” Django Unchained--Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti western about a former slave’s revenge--has much of that, and like Greek tragedy, the film unites viewers in a shared catharsis and goes beyond to celebration.



We find the following definition of tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics:

“Tragedy then is the imitation of a good action, which is complete and of a certain length, by means of language made pleasing for each part separately; it relies in its various elements not on narrative but on acting; through pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) it achieves the purgation (catharsis) of such emotions.” (translation: G. M. A. Grube)


In Tragedy and Philosophy, Walter Kaufmann questions the usual translations for eleos and phobos, but if we take the traditional English equivalents at face value, Django Unchained certainly fits Aristotle’s definition. The horrors of American slavery--the lashings, the imprisonment, the split families, the sexual humiliation, the general abasement, the servitude--cannot fail to awaken a great deal of pity and fear in any who learn about them.

As the title of a book by philosopher Cornel West states, race matters. In America, we have grown up with the history of slavery and a subsequent century and a half of racial segregation, discrimination, prejudice, stereotype and hate. Racial tension persists today and has taken new forms and refreshed urgency in the blogs, forums, tweets and comments of cyberspace. For decent folk everywhere who have never questioned the dignity of all human beings, this ugly past that persists in staying is depressing.

And that’s why Django Unchained can provide catharsis. Catharsis is that moment in a highly dramatic film when you are in deepest, fully in tune with the characters and feeling their pain. It’s the emotional peak of Schindler’s List, The Shawshank Redemption, Legends of the Fall, Philadelphia or 12 Years a Slave. You’re riveted, you sneak a finger behind your glasses to wipe away tears, you take a deep breath . . . and then you feel as if a weight has been lifted. It’s all over now and the world looks different, starker somehow.

Much of the catharsis in Tarantino’s latest is achieved through the director’s trademark violence. Django blows holes in slave-owners, slavers and racists by the dozen. All the killing of white people caused some critics to complain that the film is a call to race warfare, but that misses the point. The film is, to my mind, primarily about killing, killing, killing the hell out of the awful legacy of racial prejudice.

And that feels good.

Tarantino’s uses of violence are anything but conventional. In Django Unchained, he uses violence as a tool for subverting narratives about race in America today. Many in America like to pretend that racial discrimination is behind us, so there is no need for discussion, while others sugar-coat talk of race with appeals to shared humanity and calls for dialogue. Django’s violence undercuts all that. The effect is not a literal or even metaphorical call to war, it’s a shared purging of past and present tensions through sublimation in art.

Thus it’s only fitting that Django Unchained moves beyond fear and pity to celebration. The film concludes with Django riding off with his wife, ending this tragedy with a happy marriage, if not exactly the traditional wedding of comedy. In art, an end is possible, but in real life the fight goes on.

Friday, August 15, 2014

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln Is a Racist Mess


I’m returning to familiar territory here because I’m fascinated by the idea that something can be racist completely apart from its creator’s intentions or its explicit aims. I first encountered the idea during a brief look at deconstructionism in a college course in Hispanic literature, but I see it everywhere now in online critiques of pop culture.

I ran across a startling example on YouTube in a clip of philosopher Slavoj Zizek. In it, Zizek explains why The Sound of Music, which would appear to be anything but anti-Semitic, is indeed just that:

 
This is why it is possible to cast Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln as a “racist mess” (a phrase I picked up here while working on a previous post), and we don’t even have to dig as deep as Zizek does with The Sound of Music.

Lincoln, based on the book A Team of Rivals: The Political Genius ofAbraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns, focuses on Lincoln’s efforts to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution while also trying to end the Civil War and cope with family stress. The film spends a great deal of time portraying Lincoln’s hatred of slavery and his dedication to ending it, so it would seem to be another installment in a venerable Hollywood tradition extolling the dignity and equality of all peoples regardless of skin color, much like Steven Spielberg’s own Amistad.

But that is only the movie’s manifest content.
Look again and here we have the same old story of a white hero saving an oppressed non-white people. Despite a large cast of characters both historical and fictional, there are only a few minor, token black characters, characters generally trotted on to fawn over how noble Lincoln is in his efforts to save them, because apparently they can’t save themselves. The film’s weak attempts to hit all the politically correct notes only have the effect of showing the movie for the sanitized, self-satisfied hagiography of a white man that it is.

 
You object. After all, barring a few minor historical inaccuracies, doesn’t the film portray what actually happened? Surely a movie named Lincoln is allowed to focus on the man himself! The Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the congress that passed it, and heroes like Ulysses S. Grant aren’t fictions, you know! We cannot rewrite historical fact to satisfy the social aesthetics of our own time. Should we not, rather, praise the movie for its clear message of racial equality? Should we not commend it for showing us black soldiers in Union uniforms and courageous souls from various walks of life risking all for a just cause?

But that doesn’t matter, some say. The movie, the work of art, is still another version of that old staple the white savior. Short of not making the film at all, it can’t be avoided or erased.
The death of the author, the irrelevance of authorial intentionality, is a concept I circle a lot these days, and Lincoln makes a good example precisely because it would seem so beyond reproach. Indeed, I could just as easily have written that blog post: a post lauding the film’s apparent message. Even though Spielberg’s post-Schindler’s List films are often too innocuous for my taste, as I watched Lincoln I found myself moved by what men and women of character could accomplish in 1865 when equivalent moral courage seems so scarce today.

Using Lincoln as an example also nicely illustrates how ridiculous the outrage factory can be. I don’t know if there was any outrage over Lincoln, but those prone to shooting beams of moral rectitude from their eyes are not above using the most tenuous of pretexts to attack people who are  on their side broadly speaking but not with them down to every last dogmatic dot, tittle and strained interpretation. These people love taking a stand so much they’ll even take a stand against their own cause.

I mainly watched Lincoln because I try not to miss anything starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and indeed he proved once again that he is one of the greatest actors, not just of our time, but in the history of film. If there was a flaw to his performance, it was that it captured the ideal of his subject so perfectly that at times I itched for something imperfect to tarnish the icon. The film may not be edgy, but it does entertain and provide food for thought.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?


A police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shoots an unarmed teenager dead (the facts) and suddenly the streets of a small suburb of St. Louis look like something from a near-future dystopian nightmare: Frightened people raise their hands before snarling dogs, masked men in riot gear level guns at women and children, clouds of tear gas sweep the streets.

How did we get here?
 
Unfortunately, the events in Ferguson are nothing new. These events and the controversy surrounding them are recurring symptoms of many underlying problems that have plagued America for a long time: abuse of authority, racial inequality, economic disparity, fetishism of violence, imbalance of power, opaque bureaucracies, and unhinged debate.

I began to pay more attention to these types of tragedies while living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ferguson was nothing unusual in the news out of San Francisco and Oakland. Police officers were regularly shooting an unarmed man, often innocent and black. It played out the same way every time: Communities would flood the streets in protest, ne’er-do-wells would loot and break car windows, the officers involved would go on leave while an investigation was carried out. Soon after, the officers would return to duty without further punishment or reprimand.

It was clear who had the power and who had none.

The lede of an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch summed up this feature of American justice nicely immediately after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson:

“Michael Brown didn’t get due process. The still unnamed police officer who shot the 18-year-old black teenager dead in Ferguson will get plenty of it.”

Something often lacking from the narratives of the radicals and rabble-rousers I follow on Twitter is an admission that the police serve a necessary function, often risk their lives in doing so, and must make split-second decisions in fraught circumstances. If society at large extols them as heroes, it is because they often are.

Except when they aren’t.

And this is missing from the narratives of the police’s habitual defenders. While many, perhaps most, officers do their best to protect and serve, many do not. We know this better than ever because the prevalence of mobile technology ensures their deeds are caught on camera and uploaded online. Everyone saw the New York City Police strangle Eric Garner last month as he lay face down, hands shaking helplessly, repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe!”

Similar videos are coming out all the time thanks to radicals, rabble-rousers and everyday people just standing around.

What is needed isn’t indiscriminate condemnation of law enforcement, but reform. Some police departments have instituted changes--when I lived in the Bay Area, San Jose tested head-mounted cameras to record every encounter between officers and the public--but a lot more needs to be done. Investigations need to be impartial and transparent, and when wrongdoing is found, punishment must have teeth.

To the extent that any one of us could find ourselves or our family members the victims of excessive force and be unable to do anything about it, not one of us should hesitate to declare--as many protesters and other voices of dissent have--that we are Michael Brown. We are Eric Garner. And we should stand in solidarity in calling for a change in our nation’s systems of power so those who often kill with immunity may no longer do so.

 

Monday, August 11, 2014

Israel-Palestine: Why Does It Take a Socialist?



As another ceasefire begins in the Israel-Gaza conflict, I’m returning to the issue for a few reflections on some reading I’ve done since my last post.

A few days ago, President Obama sat down to talk with journalist Thomas L. Friedman, largely about criticism of his foreign policy (column and videos). Many of the president’s comments display the intelligence and vision that attracted me to him as a candidate in the 2008 presidential election. But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, he disappoints yet again:

“It is amazing to see what Israel has become over the last several decades. To have scratched out of rock this incredibly vibrant, incredibly successful, wealthy and powerful country is a testament to the ingenuity, energy and vision of the Jewish people. And because Israel is so capable militarily, I don’t worry about Israel’s survival.”


Thank you, Mr. President, for that rousing summary of Zionism. I expect to be similarly moved as I work my way through Leon Uris’s Exodus, but when innocent civilians have died in the thousands in the last few weeks, is describing the pioneer spirit of the Israeli people really pertinent? Is it really a time to be praising Israel’s military when they’ve been bombing schools and refugee camps?

The president does go on to express a desire for progress through peaceful negotiations, but any pol can do that in his sleep and I’ve never taken Obama for just any hack. Previous presidents have stuck their neck out to bring the two sides together, and to some success, so maybe this one could do something more than mouth the usual platitudes?
 
The president likes to lead from behind, but as I’ve written before, on this issue he’s just way behind. I want the administration to express a stronger understanding of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to express firm condemnation of Israel’s actions.

Such statements are rare from politicians in or running for office, but this past week, one of America’s best did just that. Socialist Kshama Sawant (previous post) presented to her fellow Seattle city council members the draft of an open letter to President Obama and Congress that makes and demands such a statement:

“We call on President Obama, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate to issue a formal statement denouncing Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. We also call for an immediate end to all U.S. government military aid for Israel.”


If socialists are so bad, why does it take one to condemn slaughter and other crimes that even prominent Israeli intellectuals such as historian Ilan Pappe (another socialist) have said deserve to be labeled genocide and ethnic cleansing?
 
 

I suppose at least part of the answer is easy. America’s political system has calcified around play-it-safe centrism, with the center-left all too often resembling the right. In a land where glorification of Israel is practically in the high school curriculum, it’s not surprising politicians, who are good at getting re-elected if nothing else, refuse to take a stand. Sawant, on the other hand, may be a rising star but she has less to lose than a U.S. congressperson or the president.

But perhaps there’s more to it than that. Perhaps something good can be said for the real left’s ideology, for its emphasis on human rights and internationalism. When all people are equal, all deaths are lamentable, whether those of Palestinians, Israelis or others caught in the crossfire, and indeed Sawant’s letter, while focused on Israel’s extreme violence toward Palestine, also raises concern for Israeli soldiers and a Thai worker killed, condemns Hamas for attacks on civilians, and voices support for regular Israeli citizens:

“We stand in solidarity with the ordinary people of Israel and their desire for security, and in particular with the Israeli anti-war movement.”


Again, why does it take a socialist to take an ethical stand on this issue? This is a question the politicians of America’s two major parties should be asking themselves, and a question we should be asking ourselves as voters.

 

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Israel-Palestine: When Civilians Die, the Killer Is to Blame


In the Six Day War of 1967, a war Israel fought against Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan--not Palestine--Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank and decided to stay. In the years since, Israel has relinquished control of some areas, but settlements continue to expand onto Palestinian lands, and since 2007 a blockade has turned Gaza into what some have labeled an open-air prison. To make matters worse, Israel’s military--one of the most advanced and effective militaries in the world, backed by the world’s most advanced and largest military--occasionally conducts airstrikes and ground incursions against the destitute, jobless and hungry imprisoned there.

In a statement on July 21, 2014, President Obama took little to no stand:


“Israel has a right to defend itself against rocket and tunnel attacks from Hamas. And as a result of its operations, Israel has already done significant damage to Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure in Gaza. I’ve also said, however, that we have serious concerns about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives.”


Meanwhile, this from The Guardian on Monday, August 4:


“A hospital near the site of Sunday’s attack [on a UN school], in the southern town of Rafah, was overwhelmed with the dead and injured. Children’s bodies were stored in an ice cream freezer as the morgue ran out of space.”


I don’t mean to ignore Hamas. As every good American knows, Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorists and Hamas’s charter does state the group’s intention of destroying Israel. We all know Hamas fires rockets that sometimes kill noncombatants, and even a cursory investigation of the group turns up a long list of ideological and methodological sins, including the use of human shields.

On the other hand, if I remember my Noam Chomsky right from Hopes and Prospects, Hamas has shown a willingness to negotiate when Israel has not, its rockets are often ineffective, and its attacks show a focus on military targets often ignored by Western politicians and news organizations. Hamas is also part of the democratically elected government of a sovereign state under continuous occupation, siege and military aggression by a neighbor.

Good Americans also know you have the right to bite when tread upon.

For decades, many in America have looked at the historical and political complexities I’ve outlined above and decided, like President Obama, that the fence is a comfortable place to sit, but if anything should have the power to inspire them to climb down, it is the brutality of Israel’s recent invasion of Gaza.

Consider these numbers from The Guardian on August 4:


“Palestinian deaths pass 1,800, while 64 Israeli troops have died.”


Note the numbers, but also the choice of words. “Palestinians” and “Israeli troops”--that’s because overwhelmingly, the ones dying are Palestinian civilians. (chart, article) Not terrorists, not combatants, just kids going to school, parents going to work, couples getting married--everyday folk going about everyday lives and getting bombed while they’re at it.

The horror stories are numerous and you can find plenty of them on any major news site that claims to be objective and takes an honest stab at it. Just today, after international outrage at multiple attacks on schools, Israel declared a “humanitarian window” of decreased attacks, which it then broke by bombing a refugee camp (article). In a recent interview (which I can’t find right now) on Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky discusses a document from some years back in which the Israeli government explicitly states that it will target everyday people as a matter of strategy: exact such a toll that no one will fight back or support anyone who does.

That is what we have just seen, and what may resume if the ceasefire underway as I write this doesn’t hold.

Surely, there can be no sitting on the fence about the wholesale slaughter of innocents, even in a war against terror. President Obama should grow a spine on this issue (previous blog) and join the rest of the world--save Israel’s government--in strongly condemning Operation Protective Edge. And to the extent you have a voice, you should condemn it, too. On occasion, politicians listen to their electorate, and on occasion, they broker better will between warring states.


 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recommended reading:
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter
“9 questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict you were too embarrassed to ask” on Vox

 

 

 

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Proof that 2016 Was the Best Year Ever for Movies


A little while back, I ran across some click bait claiming 1999 was the last great year of movies. The author compared such medium-expanding greats as Fight Club, American Beauty, Magnolia and Being John Malkovich with the sorry profusion of superhero films today. I was surprised a whole genre could be so slighted, and then when the first photos of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman appeared, I realized something must be said, preferably with some hyperbole:

We live in the Silver Age of Hollywood.

In 1989, I was all about Tim Burton’s Batman. Before it came out, I caught teasers on a little black-and-white television with rabbit-ear antennae. I had the movie comic. My dad, who knew Purple Rain was among my earliest music purchases, bought me the soundtrack by Prince on cassette. My friends and I all agreed that Kim Basinger, who played reporter Vicki Vale, was “hot.”

Batman was a big deal. Until then, superhero movies had been a lot like Shakespeare in the park: men in colorful tights, stilted dialogue, occasional fighting. Batman and Batman Returns changed all that by turning the tights into armor and shrouding everything in a lot of shadow. Suddenly, actors--and big names like Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer--could look like the larger-than-life figures from the pages of comic books, and the movies could be cool.

New-style fan trailer for Batman:


 
After that, the Batman films trundled on, but superhero films on the whole languished until X-Men in 2000. Perfect casting, emotional subplots, and more stylish costumes set a new standard that director Sam Raimi quickly met with Spider-Man in 2002. Big budgets, new technology, and artistic vision were making the bizarre and tacky worlds of comic books--and fantasy (The Lord of the Rings) and science fiction (The Matrix)--possible for the silver screen in ways that weren’t cringe-inducing. Thus, 1999 wasn’t Hollywood’s last good year, it was the beginning of a better Hollywood.

Now we have the glory that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more. The Avengers in particular showed that Hollywood can pull off a superhero ensemble wearing costumes that resemble the traditional ones, make it appeal to a broad audience, and rake in a fortune at the box office. It’s the apotheosis of Stan Lee! Someone go commission a painting!

As a lifetime reader of comic books, this is a dream come true.

Cynics might insist that for all their success, for all their dazzle, superhero movies are still fluff, but don’t buy it. That’s only on the surface. Underneath, there are powerful, universal themes of justice, responsibility, morality and identity. Along the lines of that last is the nature of masks: what they hide, what they reveal, how they represent the different sides of a single personality, how they spice things up. A lot of that can be found in the iconic scene in Spider-Man when Spidey kisses Mary Jane in the rain.


I don’t expect many people to agree, but I’ve long felt genre flicks and comic books are where the true edge is in art today. Literary fiction and whatever’s winning Academy Awards are largely playing it safe, no matter how serious their stated subject matter. Comic books, by hiding what they’re really about under easily dismissible manifest content, can be much more effective, moving and subversive.

Director Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (previous post) is a great example of how superhero films can be arty and deep, and with Man of Steel (previous post) director Zack Snyder finally delivered a Superman with dramatic potential. Henry Cavill, one of the highlights of The Tudors, plays a Kent/Kal-El who is pretty, sympathetic, gritty and not a putz, so I’m glad he will be reprising his role in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Which brings me back to Wonder Woman, whose Amazonian costume revealed recently recalls some of my favorite designs from the comics:

 

If you had told me in 1989 that in 2016 I would be able to see a movie called Batman v Superman and it would also feature Wonder Woman, I would have started paying a lot more attention in Science so I could make a Hot Tub Time Machine. The uses are obvious: quality time with Kim Basinger and traveling to 2016 to see The Bat, Supes and Princess Diana tear it up on the big screen.

And that’s why 2016 will be the best year in movies that ever was. Superhero movies aren’t what’s wrong with Hollywood today, they’re why Hollywood is bigger and better today and looks only to improve for a while to come.