I'm reviving this essay-title after having not used it in roughly thirteen years, because Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment seems so appropriate to these times. Here's what Big Friedrich said in "On the Genealogy of Morals:"
“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios 'of noble descent' underlines the nuance 'upright' and probably also 'naïve'), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."
And here's what modern nerd Kevin Feige said in an egotistical comparison between himself and Stan Lee:
In July 2021 he detailed to Rotten Tomatoes, “Representation is important across the board. And the comics has charted…charts the path in almost all ways for what we do in the MCU and in the comics there are many LGBTQ characters and we want to showcase that on the screen as well. We want to bring those characters to life on the screen.”
“We also, as Stan Lee used to say, Marvel represents the world outside your window. And outside of our window, there are all different types of people in all different types of places with all different types of preferences and we want that reflect in the MCU and in our fictional world as it is in our real world,” he continued.
Feige then stated, “So it is of utmost importance that when people go in and see one of our films or log on to Disney+ and watch one of our series that it represents the true world outside their window when it comes to the types of people portraying the heroes and the characters.”
To say the least, I doubt that Lee shared Feige's concept of representational realism. Lee may well have made a few statements about realistic depiction of certain aspects of life, but he was first and foremost a fantasist. Not even in the sixties could anyone have said with certainty how much Lee expoused liberal causes out of personal conviction, and how much he was influenced by a will to appeal to liberal readers. Maybe even Lee himself could not have said with certainty. But even though he must have made the conscious decision to increase Marvel's diversity-- almost exclusively in terms of more Black characters, ranging from superheroes to support-characters-- Lee never forgot that he was crafting fantasies for kids. He was never a preacher of political ideology, and in many of his stories with political content, he would come off to ideologues as being (to borrow Nietzsche's term) "naive." But any naivete on his part would have informed by a concomitant "upright" belief in telling good if simple stories.
Feige has none of this noble nature. He pretends to be the humble servant of liberalism, showing "the true world outside [one's] window," but he shows his covert egotism in his advocacy of a particular political agenda. I'm surprised that he doesn't default to his avowed passion for generating scads of new heroines. Given that in the US there's usually a 50-50 distribution of males and females in the populace, it would fairly logical to state that if half of the population is female, there should be more heroines in the MCU. But because he wants to make himself look even more the staunch Progressive, his first reference to diversity is to "LGBTQ characters." This effectively destroys his point, for only in tenderloin districts can one look out one's window and see people sporting overt signifiers of their sexual preferences.
Feige represents the most extreme representation of nerd ressentiment: the idea that he's being open and honest about things when in truth his true ideal is manipulation. Nothing shows this better than the covert dishonesty at the heart of the MS. MARVEL series, in which the series misrepresents the history of the Partition just to bag on Evil White Colonials. Of course, Feige, lacking any of the creativity of Stan Lee, could never have originated any of the icons he so casually trashes for his political ends. Maybe his very lack of creativity is the thing that makes him popular with his fans?
No comments:
Post a Comment