Alan Moore "ventured my opinion that the adult multitudes queueing for superhero movies were potentially an indicator of emotional arrest, which could have worrying political and social implications"
I can’t say if this is a sign of our decline or just the monopolized film industry churning out lower and lower-quality drek because it can.
For people with a cartoonish understanding of the real world, I’ve been saying that they have Marvel brain, or are living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or have Marvel Cinematic delusions.
I think Alan is an ancom unfortunately on a bit of a Debord "oh no not the spectacle" bent here. Cultural analysis of fascist ideologies falls flat compared to historical analysis of fascism.
Example I always give is Verhoeven putting a "sexless" scene in Starship Troopers essentially as a reference to Orwell's "people only have sex for the party in the evil socialist future, also young women are prudes and snitches grrrr" (let's skirt past the real reasons he wrote that) - it doesn't make any actual sense for the people watching it, like "oh this is weird why aren't they slavering over each other like dogs????” did not occur to people. The subtext is too literary and also not really subversive at all.
Trying to examine fascism as a collection of particular beliefs just doesn't hold up.
Is it disturbing people are lining up for Marvel movies? I guess, but he is treating this like a supply and demand thing. Do people really clamor for movies like Battlefield and Iron Man to have imperialist ideology in them, or do they just kind of go see what's on tap? It again reverses the cause and effect of fascist ideology. Ideology is a tool for them, a guise that can be discarded, or used to parody and mock other movements.