I don’t even mean a bad thing, necessarily. I mean a thing that is made to normalize the status quo, pave over inherent contradictions in late stage neoliberal capitalism, make even the idea of changing society somewhat seem evil or impossible, and have lots of performative gestures that hide the stench of affluent arrogance. :zizek-preference:
I know it came out well before 2020, but I finally got around to seeing Iron Man 2 and I stopped at the instant Tony Stark said “I’ve successfully privatized world peace.” It was bad. Very bad. The original movie was entertaining even if it had some painful deliberate adjustments to the comic book character to make him more like :my-hero: but the sequel played out like Ayn Rand fanfiction, especially the big smart awesome genius giving a speech about how the evil government and the ungrateful moochers were taking the sweat from his brow and so on and so on. :zizek:
The flood of MCU movies wore me out to the point that I stopped watching them and because of that I have only seen maybe half of them by now. Maybe it was a mistake returning to try watching Iron Man 2 because I now have even less interest in seeing anything MCU ever again. :zizek-fuck:
The writer of V for Vendetta Alan Moore is literally a communist space wizard which makes this quite a funny one. The point of that story is really supposed to be a superhero doing revolution against British fascism. Of course the whole 1 person thing is a problem but that’s always going to be a problem doing a superhero style graphic novel, but the overall premise beyond that is just revolution and not moralising about it.
Moore disowned the movie, saying it was Liberal performative whining about 2000s-era Neo-cons
The graphic novel presents V as way more ambiguous morally