In a follow-up to last week’s column, the real meat of the entertainment burger issue: a widespread decline in media literacy. In certain online spaces, namely TikTok, discussions are ongoing about the failure of many fans to understand what a given show or movie is really about.
Fans of Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys encounter this often, with many political conservatives identifying with the character Homelander, a parody of DC’s Superman but secretly a psychopath created in a test tube by a villainous corporation. These fans of The Boys, now in its fourth season, react with incredulity. “I thought this show was about us!” they say, only now realising that the show, much like the original comics, is purposefully poking fun at people on the political right.
Homelander is, after all, the image of American exceptionalism, with an American flag cape and a costume that resembles a military dictator’s uniform. His powers are those of Superman, but Homelander is not an alien raised with the values of a small-town farmer, he’s just the most recent model in a series of super-powered products invented by the Nazis.
So, back to media literacy. It took some fans four seasons to figure out that the want-only murderous Nazi creation with an obsession with milk, was the hero. In a show where the protagonists go around meting out bloody, vigilante justice on so-called superheroes, entirely creations of the same corporation and not the scions of truth and justice as most other superheroes, some fans thought Homelander was the hero. But why?
I know who Gen-Z blames; lazy studios trying to pull blood from a stone instead of making something new. The viewer is handheld where once a certain level of previous knowledge or insight was, rightfully, assumed.
Now, the blue curtains. This is a meme from when I was in secondary school, a complaint levelled at English teachers for asking, “What is the significance of the blue curtains?” in reference to some deeper metaphorical meaning. Which was followed by a chorus of “It’s not that deep.” But this meme, to the despair of Gen-Z, got away from us, and while we are still capable of that analysis, there is a widespread decline in the ability to read into symbolism, suspend disbelief, and tackle media with fair assumptions and premises among our numbers and Gen Alpha, our successors.
Thus, while some fans of The Boys think the show is a conservative rallying cry, there are also media production companies that are happy with spoon-feeding us, making media that is a copy of a copy of a copy, just because it is guaranteed to make a bit of a profit (see the online discourse surrounding The Acolyte on Disney+). This, opposed to backing a new property and taking a risk like Fox did way back when George Lucas was trying to get Star Wars into theatres, a property that, while new and risky, was still familiar enough to give the viewer that permission to make assumptions and suspend disbelief.
My hope now is that Gen-Z will soon be in the director’s chair and these problems will go away. However, given the fact that we have been consuming that anaemic media for almost three decades, my true fear is that entertainment media will be limited to cinematic and TV universes. Their creators so worried about guarding canon, there will be a whole generation of artists incapable of reading between the lines.