superman: you'll believe...

 

"Unlike the seventies Superman, who suffered from all the angst and self-doubt that has washed over the entire comic-book field since Stan Lee's early sixties innovations in Spider-Man, the movie Superman has a clearcut sense of purpose and no conflicts of ideological interests (could Superman have intervened in the Vietnam war or in the Middle East? On which side? Why?)"

- Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 23rd December 1978

 

The original Superman and Star Wars movies (late 1970s) were revisionist-or-perhaps-I-mean-revanchist enterprises: while turbo-charging genre cinema, they may also have sought to empty it in some important respects...

 

I loved both franchises, needless to say - little did I then know (aged 8 to 10) that, in my innocent magnetic attraction to these instantiations of the hero's-journey mythos, I was in some wise the dupe of the hegemonic late-capitalist culture industry as it prepared the ground for the Reagan-Thatcher axis and all the awfulness that followed...