Illustration – Page 3 – Stephen Bobbett

The Real Punk Rock

I wasn’t a fan of Superman growing up. He was always a little boring to me. Every decision he made seemed to be the right one, and besides proximity to a glowing green rock, he had no natural weaknesses. Morally and physically, Superman’s strength always made the stakes feel too low for his stories to be truly heroic.

I gravitated more towards heroes like Batman: ones that were brooding and flawed. I liked that Batman walked a mental tightrope, barely hovering over the psychological precipice his villains would often willingly plunge themselves into. I liked his lack of superpowers, how his thinly armored mortality meant that his heroism required more risk. In the battle for my fandom, Batman often won, and Superman often lost.

That said, I always wanted to love Superman. I remember when the teaser for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel first dropped—the swelling orchestrals, the bucolic scenes of a young Clark Kent—I thought we might get a movie about whether the world’s most famous do-gooder from the Second World War could exist in a 21st-century world of moral grey.

Unfortunately, Snyder’s answer to that question seemed to be: who cares? Sure, he gave us a couple of ham-fisted allusions to the Christ and a paint-by-numbers scene of our hero crying over having to murder of General Zod (which, to me, seemed to be a no-brainer given Zod was a genocidal maniac). But otherwise, there was no wrestling with the anachronism of Superman. If anything, the MCU took up that banner with their Captain America saga. But no such exploration for the man in red, blue, and gold.

For that reason, I was hopeful for James Gunn’s Superman. Gunn’s stories are usually about the exploits of barely reformed thieves and mercenaries, so a Boy Scout like Superman might seem like an odd fit. But Gunn knows how to find what makes comic book characters tick, and how to match that ticking to the beat of your own heart.

In Gunn’s film, I found a Superman I could root for—and who felt like he was rooting for me.

As an adult who’s a fraction less cynical than his teenage self, I’ve come to understand what Superman is, and I think James Gunn understands it, too. Superman is, at its heart, a thought experiment: in a world where power and cruelty often go hand-in-hand, what would it be like for the world’s most powerful man to be kind? It’s why Superman must be kind in his stories; otherwise, despite the laser vision and the freezing breath, there is nothing truly remarkable about him.

His rival Lex Luthor has power, too—in some ways more power, as his intelligence gives him an omniscience about the world that allows him to manipulate it in ways that Superman can’t. Lex tells himself that people’s reliance on Superman’s strength weakens them, a self-deceiving humanism that acts as a smokescreen for his solipsist view of the world. In truth, Lex isn’t jealous of Superman’s power but of his kindness, the actual quality that indicts Lex Luthor as just another unremarkable, power-hungry man.

There are so many things about this movie I could praise. The casting is flawless, especially with David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan. I could watch a two-hour stage play of their Clark and Lois, just dialoguing about their strange, budding relationship in a Metropolis studio apartment. I love the genuine Midwestern warmth of Ma and Pa Kent, the plucky grit of the Daily Planet staff, the disjointed foibles of the Justice Gang. I love how weird this movie is, how unabashedly it embraces the cosmic, surreal, and eclectic nature of comic books. I love how it promises a DC universe where many stories can be told and voices can be heard, without the MCU burden of sterile cinematography and tangled plots that clumsily weave between films.

But mostly I’m just glad that it gave us a Superman our pop culture has desperately needed for the past decade: one who recognizes that kindness is the most rapturous and radical way to wield power. James Gunn has given us a modern Superman we can now hold up to the Lex Luthors of the world and say: see, you bastards? This—this is how it’s done.

We Shouldn’t Need Another Statue

A couple of weeks ago, I was on vacation with my family in Ireland. During the last few days, we stayed at a hotel right on the River Liffey, and near us was a series of bronze statues by Rowan Gillespie called Famine. The statues are stark, melted figures—reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream—depicting Irish refugees of the Great Famine departing for American shores in the mid-1800’s. Gillespie unveiled the statues in 1997, and shortly after in 1998, the City of Boston, which is the closest metro to me, commissioned Robert Shure for a similar work, memorializing the arrival of those same refugees.

I don’t have any Irish ancestors to speak of, although if you ask my dad, we’re more Irish than James Joyce. He took a 23andMe test years ago that, according to him, says he’s over half Irish. I’ve always had my doubts about this, given that 23andMe seems to lump British and Irish results together without much distinction. And unfortunately for Dad, his son is prone to hyperfixation. So I spent the better part of an evening building my family tree, to see if any Irish immigrants were, in fact, sitting in its branches.

Turns out, most of my Dad’s side of the family has been American for a long time. I found long lines of New York agrarians and Tennessee hillbillies. He did have great-grandparents who emigrated to New York from a town called Wookey Hole in Somerset, England, which sent me on a tangent learning about the fabled witch who once lived in its caves. (Years ago I learned that I’m a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, the last woman to be convicted in the Salem witch trials. There’s a theme in this family, apparently.)

Lots of fascinating leaves in the tree. But no Irish progenitors to be found.

My Dad’s belief in his Irish heritage is shared by over 30 million Americans. In a place like Boston, with its long history of Irish immigration, it’s likely true for many people. But I doubt it’s true for everyone. It gets me thinking about why so many Americans are obsessed with finding an Irish connection. Culturally, I get it. The art, the music, the libations—so much Irish culture is interwoven into American life, especially in the Northeast, that it’s not surprising people want to imagine it’s their birthright. But there’s nothing wrong with just enjoying—even participating in—a culture without being native to it, and I’ve yet to meet a bona fide Irish American who didn’t want to freely share it. I think it’s something else that makes us white Americans long for Irish heritage. And I think it has much to do with guilt.

When my dad first mentioned his DNA results, I asked his mom about it. His dad’s lineage is demonstrably English, so she would be the most likely conduit for any Celtic roots. She wasn’t certain, vaguely mentioning a family acquaintance who might have visited from Ireland when she was a young girl in the 30’s. But she did remember distinctly the signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” in the windows of shops that were hiring in her Midwestern town, and how sad it made her that people would treat the influx of immigrants that way.

“No Irish Need Apply” is mentioned on Shure’s memorial as a phrase that appeared frequently in Boston, a town that now embraces its Irish heritage with fervent pride, despite its initial hostility. I think this is instructive of why so many Americans want to claim Irish heritage, even if they can’t prove it. None of us want to think of ourselves as descending from the oppressor. It brings with it a specter of guilt we either feel is undue or don’t know how to reconcile. Rather than grapple with it, I think a lot of us would rather rewrite the narrative to claim we were part of the oppressed, especially if we can do so under the cover of a vague ancestry test.

To be fair, I don’t think was my dad’s motivation. As someone who lived abroad most of his young life, I think he just has an abiding love of immigrants in general. I think a lot of natural-born Americans crave the inherent dignity of being an immigrant. To immigrate to America is to pursue a radical faith in merit—the belief that under the stars and stripes, one’s hard work can reap the reward it deserves. Maybe that’s why so many natural-born Americans also resent them: often the superior patriotism and work ethic of the immigrant undermines their claim that their blessings due to merit, not inheritance.

We don’t have to reach for non-existent ancestry, Irish or otherwise, to honor the dignity of immigration. We can do it—we must do it—now by demanding it from our legislators, especially as the administration seeks to demonize and persecute them. The signs no longer read “No Irish Need Apply.” They read “Mass Deportations Now,” and they are being wielded with the same gleeful, banal cruelty as during the fallout of the Great Famine.

I don’t want to give mournful sculptors any more reasons to build statues. There’s one standing on Ellis Island now, torch in hand, welcoming the foreigner to our shores. For the near future, let her be the only one we need.

You Can’t Fight the Void Alone

Martin Scorsese once described Marvel films as less than cinema and more like roller coasters. Even though I’m a fan of them, I tend to agree. Since the beginning with Iron Man, I’ve taken the time to watch them in theaters. When I do, I’m not looking for the complexity and depth of a Dostoevsky novel. I’m looking to sedate my brain for a couple of hours, popcorn and soda in hand, ready to just enjoy the ride.

But every once in a while, a Marvel property hits an emotional note with such earnest simplicity that it has to be more than just a theme park attraction. WandaVision gave us a portrait of mourning with a slice of poetry—“What is grief if not love persevering?”—that stayed etched on my heart years later. I refused to watch Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in public, knowing the story of a cyborg raccoon (of all things) confronting his core trauma was going to send me into a sobbing fit.

Who would’ve thought the next Marvel tearjerker would be Thunderbolts.

In truth, this movie was always going to be a sucker punch for me. I love ensemble stories that center on secondary or throwaway characters. And I love superhero movies with lower stakes than universe-ending catastrophes. This movie has the added juice of Florence Pugh and David Harbour reprising Yelena and the Red Guardian, whose debut shined in the otherwise unremarkable Black Widow movie.

But what this movie did better than almost any other Marvel property is pick a theme and knock it out of the park. From the start with Yelena practically sleepwalking off a building and bemusedly ambling through an adrenaline-fueled solo heist, this movie wants you to think about loneliness. The color palates are desaturated and monotone. The characters endure flashbacks to their most sequestered moments. The lead-up to the climax of the film has the Thunderbolts literally breaking through walls of their psychological torment to save each other.

But nowhere is this theme driven home harder than in Bob’s story. Him being absorbed by his alter ego the Void the more he tries to beat it senseless—and it receding only when Yelena and the others embrace him—caught my emotions off guard. I’m a sucker for an unconventional superhero climax in general, but this one really anchored itself in my head.

Melodramatic as it was, it’s the kind of blunt instrument I need sometimes, that community is the only remedy to isolation. Believe it or not, you can’t fight loneliness alone. It’s such an obvious statement to most people. But for me, it takes a superhero blockbuster to remember. I’ll take it.

No Web Left to Conquer

A few years before the pandemic, the chamber of commerce for my quaint New England city sent its bohemian enclaves into an uproar. They were proposing a promo campaign to draw more businesses from out of state. The main image was a cloud of cute, lineal drawings of laptops, kayaks, and to-go coffee cups—the digital nomad lifestyle craved by the tech workers of the late 2010’s. The slogan read something like “Tiny Big City,” the promise of urban amenities without the overstimulation of Boston or New York.

The vibe of the campaign was sterile and innocuous. But anyone with a keen cultural nose knew, this was the beginning of the end. The gentrification cycle was nearing completion: an old port city whose original industry had dried up was now a target of conquest by the wealthy, thanks in part to the artists and tastemakers who had made it an appealing place to live for the last couple of decades. Slowly but surely they would be muscled out by soaring rents as luxury condos devoured the market. The same would be true of many independent pubs and shops, clearing the way for familiar franchises awash in out-of-state capital.

The day I knew there was no going back was when I was sitting in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on an older couple from Connecticut, talking about buying a home in town so they could summer there. When you hear a newly inducted local use the word “summer” as a verb, you know it’s game over.

I wrote yesterday that it might be game over for the internet, too, at least when it comes to its major platforms. Thanks to things like Google Veo 3, generative AI has reached a threshold where it requires a lot more scrutiny to discern than most algorithms give us time for—let alone what most modern attention spans are equipped for. GenAI has absorbed enough of humanity’s collective endeavors that it can effectively walk around in our skin, with only the most anal-retentive sleuths able to call its bluff.

What makes Google Veo 3 truly foreboding, though, is not just its uncanny facsimile of human-born imagery, but also its $250-a-month price tag. Like an old port town renovated by the creative class, tools like Google Veo 3 are trained on untold billions of hours of human ingenuity, only to be gated and sold for the wealthy’s unfettered use—gentrification in its most resource-hungry and accelerated form.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of this new, gentrified internet. At best, corporations and content creators will succumb to the siren’s song of cheap, predictable labor, and culture will begin to stagnate. At worst, propaganda will become more virulent and convincing than it’s ever been, as the forces of oligarchy drip poison in the well of political discourse.

The real mystery is, what happens when genAI has nothing left to consume? Already it runs the risk of becoming a self-diminishing ouroboros, devouring its own outputs. The disingenuous push of the Technocrats against IP laws is a testament to this fear, as they look for the last remaining scraps to put in the belly of their beast. What frontiers are left, when even the settled places have been recolonized?

Sooner than later, genAI will have no web left to conquer. Maybe then the internet will weep, longing for the grit of originality again.

Is the Internet Over?

When I was a kid, there was a saying: don’t believe everything you see on TV. “Everything” was the operative word there. With TV, you could be reasonably certain that at least some of it was true. On the internet, I’m not sure anymore.

I used to be confident in my ability to discern generative AI content. The output of Google Veo 3 has me taking a knee. I’m not convinced that if I swiped through it on a scrolling video platform, I would distinguish it as artificial. We might be swiftly reaching the generative AI endgame.

I don’t think the world is ready for it. I think people still approach the internet with a level tacit credibility. But those days must by necessity be over. Without scrutiny and context, and with the indiscriminate faucet of algorithms spewing content at our eyes faster than we can process, we are in a golden age of lies.