Malibu Spartacus Dream House

"America loves an underdog" is a thing people say, but is that actually true? Is that what drew us out in droves to watch Marvel films where people with powers ranging from being a literal god to being an obnoxiously, inconceivably wealthy tech guy who does quips to a genius/king/juiced up ass-kicker in a magic suit--an actual king!--are the ones we hope are plucky enough to pull through? Sure, they are fighting threats to literal existence and sometimes the physical/social/emotional structure of whole galaxies at a time, but that kind of underlines the point, doesn't it? In order to make these people relatable to regular humans, you have to put them up against a thing that could shatter a continent or eat the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The fantasy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't that Thanos exists, it's that its citizens get to live in a reality where there are enough monsters available to keep the people who already have everything too busy to set up an oligarchy.

Currently we don't get to enjoy such luxuries as a race of space behemoths impregnating the planet itself to gestate one of their offspring. That was the actual plot of Eternals, for those who either skipped it or blocked it out, even though it was absolutely fine. I found The Marvels entirely passable as well, but then again, I enjoy supporting actual underdogs when I can, in these cases large ensemble casts of mostly unknowns of many ethnicities doing their best with B-plus material.

Mostly, America doesn't love underdogs, America loves winners. We're not really going to celebrate those who simply get their asses kicked. No no, that's what all the guns are for: we're all about the get-back. You can be an underdog, fall as far and as hard as you can, but there better goddamned well be a redemption at the end of this arc and not just splattery streak of crimson when it intersects the ground at its terminus. Getting dropped just means you have that much more dramatic room to make up when you roar back against your oppressors/enemies/those rich jerks from the preppy fraternity. You can be a loser, but only for the first two-and-a-half acts of the movie. If you're still one at the end, well, you're probably in a European art-house wank fest, which we will ignore or--at best--lie about having seen when we're talking to bougie people. Probably not even in color, let alone IMAX.

We're entering an interesting age now where the realities of non-filmic life is out-movie-ing movies as America begins its Melodrama Era. We invented the beer-can hat, so I'm not going to sit here and pretend we've always been the subtlest country, but there at least seemed to be some kind of nuance to public discourse at least in some level. A lot of it was boring and obvious demagoguery (surely not every Democrat politician has been an anti-American hippie pro-terrorism socialist, have they?), but at some point at least someone would mention a bill in Congress or a hearing or something, just to put it in the government somewhere so the rest of us could choose to opt out and say "well, that's why we have representatives, so I don't really have to know about tariffs" or whatever the fuck.

Now, it's all cartoons, all the time, and all addressed directly to/at us. You want to not pay attention, but they keep making you by fucking with the prices of eggs and cars and cancelling science and organizing revival tours for long-dead diseases and firing big chunks of the largest workforce in the country, across every state and jurisdiction.

How gnarly is it out there? These motherfuckers got us rooting for Harvard. Did you hear me? Harvard. One of the few universities in this country made up almost exclusively of Omega Theta Pi people; a campus with such a dearth of hoi and not a dram of polloi, the lowliest of social outcasts there are still all Alpha Betas. Or, at worst, eventual parents of them.

I guess this tracks, though: what would it take to make a braggart, caustic, self-regarding, godzilla-sized social and economic force like Harvard--the pre-terrorist-cave Tony Stark of institutions--the People's Champion? Give them some stakes and a villain inconceivably bigger than themselves. In this case, the cadre of mega-rich bros and their semi-lucid venal figurehead leader out here floating the idea of extrajudicial deportation to concentration camps for the regular folks after watching school after school and law firm after law firm volunteer to jump in anticipation of The Push.

Look at us, out here simping for Johnny Harvard and his little book repository against the enemies of science and good manners. This is the same year neutrals thought it was acceptable to root for Duke men's basketball in the tournament. I guess it really is a new day.