I BLAME SUPERHERO MOVIES

The movie, POLTERGEIST, had a big impact on me as a kid. I see it every so many years while flipping through channels. It sucks me in every time. For me, it is the emotional impact of the loss of a child to forces that feel entirely beyond a family’s control. There’s also that tv snow; the several hours during which there is no contact with the outside world. You’re alone in a sense unfathomable today.

There is the motley crew of psychics and paranormal investigators who enter Carol Anne’s home, but vanquishing evil ultimately lies with the parents’ deep connection to their daughter. Mum and dad step up to the plate to take on a beast they are in 100% terror of… because that’s their job.

I have been contemplating, since the rise of the Tea Party, how it is that populism can plant such a strong toehold in relatively sane and stable societies like the U.S. and the U.K. There have been correlations made before between a presidential system and populism, as it is a system in which the head of state is a partisan figure. But this does not explain the rise of populism in the U.K., which now threatens what is considered to be the most successful political union in human history.

There is the long-term game played by conservatives since the Reagan-Thatcher era, that we have only recently been able to understand the methodology behind by taking an aerial look down at forty years of political history. The movement successfully supplanted religion with political allegiance over many years, all the while referring to policies in terms of faith.

But how does a society change from an independent-minded [even eccentric in Britain’s case] – culture to one that swears blind loyalty to a politician even if he or she flips a party’s platform on its head? A populist politician achieves this by convincing a populace of its inherent helplessness and that only the leader can solve the voters’ many problems.

Maybe the reason I have never believed in populism is because I’ve always hated superhero movies. If my daughter was kidnapped by an evil spirit living in my 70″ flatscreen, the last thing I would do is call upon some ridiculously good-looking tosser in a cape, who’s obscenely wealthy and struggles with an inferiority complex. I’d leap into the mouth of the beast myself. That’s my job.

Just maybe, as a society, we should give any further superhero movies a miss for a generation or so.