San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tom Hanks vs. Kevin Costner?
Hey Brent:
You’re referring to my comment that Tom Hanks has become the American actor of his generation, even though 30 years ago it seemed as though it would be Costner. First, I want to stipulate that I really like Costner as an actor. But if I were going to answer why Hanks and not Costner, I would say vanity.
Costner is great, but we get the feeling that he knows it, and that sometimes he’s even preening for himself; whereas, Hanks is great, and either he doesn’t know it or he’s an absolute genius at concealing it. So it’s easier to love Hanks because, before you can get to loving Costner, you sort of have to push Costner himself out of the way. Costner and Costner don’t need us; they have each other.
Dear Mick:
During certain periods, Hollywood has responded to more or less current events with movies that reflected the fears people felt at the time. What I can’t make sense of is the immense popularity of superhero movies. I can understand an occasional movie capturing the imagination of the viewing public, particularly young teenage boys, but why the sustained popularity?
Michael Taylor, Inverness
Dear Michael:
You’re right to suggest that anxiety is the source of most movie trends. So, the question here is: What’s the anxiety at the basis of superhero movies?
I see them as expressing a crisis of individuality, a crisis in the belief that one person can matter. The Great Recession damaged Millennials’ faith in the future, just as the current crisis is having and will have the same influence on Generation Z. Then add to that the growing influence of social media, in which people are obligated to package and promote an idealized version of themselves, with all the vulnerability to attack that that creates.
Superheroes are fantasies of undeniable specialness and invulnerable power, and I think we can confirm their source in collective anxiety by virtue of the ways in which they are willfully misunderstood by their fans. For example, people almost always talk about superhero movies as idealistic and benevolent, when they’re almost invariably murderous, homicidal fantasies, which have, at their basis, a mix of terror and rage.
Dear Mick LaSalle: I too went to school in New York and was never taught “most slave owners were nice.” Nor were we taught that (Ulysses S.) Grant was a disaster as a general. We were taught he was a good general but a disaster as president, and most scholars now agree, as did even many Republicans then, who bolted the party when he ran for a second term. We were taught appropriately, I think, that slavery was not the sole cause, but a contributing factor to the war.
Ernest B. Hook, San Rafael
Dear Ernest B. Hook:
Well, congratulations on missing out on the nicemasters propaganda, as well as the Grantthebutcher propaganda. But it sounds like you got a dose of the rest.
Grant has advanced to the middle of the pack of American presidents, according to the most recent scholarship, and he continues to rise. No one bolted the party when he ran for a second term, or even a third, though he didn’t get a third nomination. And slavery was not a contributing factor in the war. It was the sole cause. What else was it? Economics? Yes, the economics of slavery. States’ rights? Yes, the right of states to have slaves. It certainly wasn’t states’ rights as a principle. If it were, the South would have agreed that the Northern states had a right not to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. Read about this stuff. Seriously, the books have gotten so much better since we went to school.
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