(In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, they’re called “metahumans” and elsewhere “transhumans.”) Posthuman, an imprecise, omnibus term that describes real-world human upgrades facilitated by advances in AI, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and prosthetics along with, in the unreal world of these narratives, a grab bag of transformations caused by encounters with aliens, radiation, and so on. I need to be a symbol.” 1 As he puts it, by transforming himself into a symbol, he dehumanizes himself.ĭiscarding the human, and favored with extraordinary powers, superheroes are by definition posthuman. Reflecting on his outfit in one of the Dark Knight movies, Batman says, “A man, however strong, however skilled, is just flesh and blood. The splashy costumes they favored worked to emphasize the differences that distinguish them from mere mortals. This was never the case in the past, when Superman and Batman dispatched our enemies with ease. What is it with these costumed freaks? The problem seems to be that they are, when all is said and done, too much like us, too human. It takes them five and a half hours spread over two movies, not to mention the waste of a considerable amount of acting talent, to repair the damage. In the Russo brothers’ Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), they allow melancholy Thanos, the big, bad ender-of-worlds in the two most recent Avenger movies, to turn them and half of humanity into ash by snapping his fingers. And now we see that the superheroes don’t seem to be much good at it either. And it’s not only the cops and politicians who are largely absent from the comic book blockbusters, or, if present, they are part of the problem, but it’s us, humans, who just aren’t up to doing the job themselves. For years we’ve been throwing our box office dollars at beefy men in tights (aka superheroes) who promise to protect us from a laundry list of dangers after the imbecile authorities have failed yet again to do so.
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