Folding Ideas - The People vs Clark Kent

Wait this applies to 2020 intensely

What was the deal with Batman's cellphone-based sonar anyway? What did it accomplish?

There is issues with this form of story, but you got it wrong with where/what those issues are.

Let's take the premise as written for a movie like Batman.

Premise 1. Batman is trustworthy.
The problem with a regular governmental intelligence agency having peoples personal information is how that information might be exploited, like Mcarthism red scare etc. Batman is a hero with strong morale compass who won't do shit like that. We as a audience know this without a doubt. We can trust Batman to only use it to catch the great evil/threat and nothing else.
If Batman were real and somehow we could all know for sure he was this pillar of trustworthiness, then it should be fine in said unrealistic circumstances.

Premise 2. The bad guys are all unrealistically pure evil.
In animations like certain Spiderman cartoons, the "bad guys" often also need to be saved or have their good side or at least reasonable side. For example when a dimensional hole high in the air is made that is sucking in all of earth and needs to be shut down up close, Kingpin, a greedy evil crime boss that is the regular ultimate foe of Spiderman, just gives a jet so Spiderman, and the guy who made the hole can close it, there is no profit to be made with the destruction of the planet after all. For that matter the guy who made the dimensional hole was using them to robe banks, but realizing his dimensional hole was threatening everyone, sacrifices himself to stop it.
And because the bad guys are complex, the hero can get it wrong. Many times Spiderman is shown charging into a situation not understanding what is going on, which can make things worse, and the show let's us know this.

When the heroes foe is pure evil, then any cost is worth stopping them. There is no point in negotiating with Zod if the movie has established Superman can absolutely know such would be useless without trying. If Zod was pure evil, than it would be easy enough for Superman to know this if he knew of Zod. Thus the collateral damage is worth it for stopping the greater evil. Like for a RL example, the allies during WW2 never bombed the death trains taking jews to be slaughtered in concentration camps, or the camps themselves, even though it was known to at least some extent, such did not have military value. But bombing such trains/and or camps would be for the greater good, even though you can be sure some innocent people would die in the process, doing so would save more lives in the long run. Of course the tracks could be bombed as well, but that would be less effective. Unfortunately none of that was done.
If Zod were as evil as concentration camps, then a similar equation would apply. Similarly if joker is just a crazy serial killer that can't be contained, then arguably Batman has more justification for even just killing joker to stop any future crimes of his.

The flaw is not in what the the "heroes" are willing to do to stop pure evil, it's that their foes are pure evil in the first place.

I think you missed Tony Stark's entire MCU arc.

It's fascinating how different this is from Thought Slime's take on the superhero mythos.

Whew! Glad it was worth the cost. Had me worried there for a bit.

I don't get the the argument you're trying to convey here. The basic formula you're playing with here is hero meets villain -> villain is being stopped by hero from doing evil villain stuff -> hero saves the day but destroys lots of property and people in the process.

You're framing this issue within the superhero world without acknowledging the mere definition of superhero film. Such is the equation and yes, it could be considered idiotic when counting the actual damage that's being done by these heroes, but it is in the very core of what superhero movies are. It's like criticizing ice skating for being slippery. It is part of the entire whole of this particular story type.

a hero must go through a great of suffering, he must be willing to sacrifice his life in order to save the day. Destruction and chaos is always brought up by the bad guy of the story. Stakes are high. Not really sure where you're going with this. Yes. Superhero films could be a bit better and not as spoon - feeding and simple in their execution of the central problem resolution of the story. But there is a deeper broader topic that lies here. It pertains to the whole epidemic of passable movies that Nerdwriter talks about. These decisions within the stories, of mass destruction of the setting the hero finds himself in, are ultimately brought up to increase the chances of making most money. Not making the best quality film it can be.

Framing Batman from perspective you described is also really one sided and unwelcoming of the entire situation the hero finds himself in. You can't apply same real-world rules to a superhero movie. Beucase it's a SUPERHERO movie. We expected to suspend disbelieve on these things. Because the viewer knows that these kind of films are not of the real world. The realistic factor is only applied from the film makers side, so the viewer associates the world of the superhero as close enough to the real world without really delving too deep in the particulars.

I can't find the proper word of what your argument actually is here. But it's definitely nonsensical.

I still like your channel though. put a thumbs up either way)

But, were they wrong?

commenting in a video almost 6 years old - I was giving a look at the novelization and it is funny that in several parts the writer had to put pieces to justify that superman was deeply torn and worried about people during the whole destruction, which snyder didn´t think about it probably because psycho

Oh my god.

I know this is a super old post, but I just had an epiphany and I want to share it. I was like "come on, these are just dumb movies, nobody would want batman/superman in real life". Then I realized something. As italian, I grew up with a certain mistrust versus the government, police and army. I'm not an anarchist or anything, but it's in our past. I'm talking about dictatorship, civil war, military occupation and....propaganda. It's ancient stuff, granted (for me, born in the early 80's). But it's there. So when I watch a movie, it's just a movie. It's entertainment. I see batman on screen and get excited. I enjoy playing as batman in arkham city. But then the idea of a real batman sends a shiver down my spine. When I see soldiers in the street I get anxious.
I think as italian (dare I say european?) I have a net separation between fiction and reality. But for the US hollywood still acts as a propaganda tool. I remember some politician justifying torture citing JACK BAUER from 24. My first thought was "jesus the americans are like children" but now I get it. I get why the superhero concept can be dangerous in reality.
Just a disclamer. I do not think italian or europeans are superior or anything, just that our not so distant past taught us (through our grandparents and parents) to be veeeery careful and suspicious of governments, police, army and quite aware of propaganda.
Of course that's just, you know, my opinion, man.

What's the intro song?

Some of what you say EXACTLY crosses over into the whole objectivism philosophy of Aryn Rand that all of his works follow. A lot of food for thought Dan. The American imperialist idea and what the heroes we have say about it. Someday we'll get Morbeius the film, and we'll find out the other old adage, when the cure is worse than the disease. The means justify the ends. it's all okay it's always worth the cost. Stark words.

Arkham Asylum bothered me so much for this. Given the treatment of the patients, Joker was absolutely justified to rebel. The greater crime would have been in NOT rebelling. And Batman just goes around hurting a lot of mentally ill people rather than doing anything to provide them with better treatment that might improve their lives.

I got curious about the $1,000,000,000,000 thing, so I double checked that's what he meant instead of using "trillion" to mean 10^18 and then did the calculation. Given that he shows 2 trillion as having 12 zeroes a few seconds earlier and the population of Earth in 2013 was 7,170,000,000 (writing it in full to avoid confusion), that works out to less than $140 per person. So I have to call Dan a liar when it comes to how much that can actually accomplish.

If we went back to the original meanings of those numbers (trillion=10^18 and billion=10^12), then it would work out to $140,000 per person, so yeah, that could accomplish a whole lot more, but we'd also be assuming there are about 700 times more humans on the planet than have ever existed (alive and dead), so that would be one doozy of a hypothetical.

The Trillion Dollar calculation is way off. A trillion dollars divided to the 7 billion people on the planet is only a couple hundred dollars. That's not enough to do one of those things listed let alone all of them.

Gee I'm sure all of this has absolutely nothing to do with the direct oversight of Hollywood war movies by the Department of Defense, more specifically the explicit deals Marvel and DC have with the Pentagon concerning access to shooting locations and props.

Big ooof

It's shocking to see the jump from Batman at least acknowledging that spying on everyone was bad, to the scene in The Avengers where SHIELD hack everyone's devices while looking for Loki, which was treated so casually that it was ages before I even really noticed it.

it’s funny how these movies also have deep ties to the pentagon, less of an unintentional allegory and more pressured being into propaganda

This is why actually SHOWING superheroes helping people without violence, or where their powers aren't relevant, is essential to somewhat disarming the implications of the violence. You can do all the tell you like, but unless we see your superhero helping people, preventing accidents, talking to people, all we see is violence. Violence becomes the end itself, not a means; it can even create the troubling implication that this hero either seeks out problems that must be solved with violence to justify the violence, or worse that they see non-violent tasks as unworthy of them.

This is why as much as every Superman story has him helping people sooner or later, all of the good ones show him helping people in entirely mundane ways. If there's a jumper he could use his power to stop them, but he will instead listen to them, understand, actually help. When there's a fire or a sinking ship or a crashing plane, he doesn't just end the disaster, he also reassures and comforts those involved. When he has to fight someone, he also tries to make them do better. We know that his goal is to help people and that he thinks his powers are a good fortune that lets him help even more people, because when someone around him can be helped in a way that someone else could, he does that too. This could be done by a friend or a therapist or just a kind stranger, but they aren't here, and he is. That's the biggest difference between Donner's Superman and Man of Steel, the scene where he literally saves the cat. After that, the little girl scolds the cat for not obeying, and he stops her says say 'we all get a little scared of heights sometimes'. A man who can fly and is nearly invincible says he is scared of heights, because he wants the girl to be more empathetic with a cat. It is impossible to imagine that scene in any of the modern alleged Superman films; not just because the idea of small stakes would offend the grandiose posturing of the plot, but the idea of putting himself on the same height as a child would there only be 'lowering' him and undignified.

While I love most of your other videos...I think you got this one completely backwards. Yes, superheroes do do a lot of morally questionable things...BUT! They're generally facing world-ending threats. Avengers 1, Avengers 2, and Man of Steel all showed the heroes fighting threats that we were explicitly told would result in the destruction of all human life if they were not stopped; collateral damage to a single city, no matter how severe, literally does not matter at all compared to the importance of stopping the end of all human life. Let's consider two hypotheticals. In both, you have been kidnapped by near-omnipotent aliens who promise that they will kill everyone on Earth if you don't play their game: Will you push the button?

In the first, should you push the button, you will kill X people. If you don't, the aliens will kill everyone on Earth. What amount of collateral damage are you willing to accept? Are you a moral absolutist that will not accept the murder of a single person but whose morals will lead to humanity's extinction? Or are you a pragmatist, who accepts that any value of X up to the current population of Earth still leaves some humans left?

In the second, pushing the button results in the guaranteed death of a million people, but not pushing it gives the aliens an X% chance of killing everyone. What value of X, if any, would convince you to push the button?

In both scenarios, there are values of X where a rational and conventionally moral person would press the button and values of X where they would not. I would argue that for low values of X, not pressing the button is immoral! In either case, you are a single non-elected and non-representative person, but you have been put in a position to determine the fate of humanity by circumstances beyond your control. The Avengers didn't choose for the Chitauri to attack and Superman didn't choose for Zod to attack, but they made the best of screwed-up situations and realized that only an insane moral absolutionist would stand back and watch as their principles resulted in the death of every human on Earth.

1 trillion dollars is hard to comprehend eh?
Try the current 2022 deficit of 30 times that... 30 trillion dollars. Easy to say. Impossible to comprehend. Let's add a few more trillion to it. Who cares? Nobody can comprehend it anyhow.

This was terrifying, Jesus...

I can't help but feel that the acknowledgement of wrongdoing in batman and the other movies is intentionally trying to make the point that he isn't respecting anyone's privacy and that's not ok. the movies could have just cut the scenes and it would have worked the same in the end, I think the directors aren't ignorant to the idea that these superheroes are from one perspective, a menace. until marvel comes along and just stops questioning or thinking about anything.

This seems very prescient 7 years later.

why did this years old video explain why i actually felt like the new spiderman movie was the first real superhero movie ive seen in years

Your “what one trillion dollars can buy” comment didn’t age well

Alright, but somebody explain this to me. What the fuck does Clark Kent have to do with Superman?

THIS. So much this.

This is the best video DanO has ever made.

I don’t know if anyone else has ever referred to him as DanO but now it’s a thing because I have.

Well…… shit.

Dan is pro-tony in civil war confirmed.

Also could you not view heroes as a proxy for humanity? Like how do you justify direct action/anti-fascist action without acknowledging the current systems are broken and don’t actually solve the problems. The cops in the avengers are pretty accurate to the cops in our world no? Incompetent and not actually fighting for the people? Isn’t the take away, that good people should rise up together and do what’s right for the betterment of humanity?


If we’re specifically talking about the actions that hurt average people like the plowing through buildings and shit and that this is necessarily bound to the criticism of the other ideas then okay I agree

Take it easy folding take it easy Edward folding take A trillion dollars is a lot of damn money Take it easy America's in debt for over 21 trillion dollars And fucking Brandon is still fucking spending money

Someone once made the point that every superhero's real superpower is certainty. Whichever superhero you want to discuss never has to worry that the building they're blowing up, the person they're beating into a fine mist, etc. is the wrong one.

You are not wrong. Sadly real life is much worse.

One of the things I enjoy about the web serial Worm is that it treats a world of superheroes as the disaster it really would be. Granted, in addition to the superpowered people, there's also the Endbringers, which are non-human apocalyptic threats, but in effect the clashes with them are not so different from the Avengers taking on the supervillain of the week.

But it sucks. The world sucks. The city that provides the setting for most of the story gets wrecked, it's practically post apocalyptic after the first third of the story. The main characters end up as superpowered warlords, and sure they keep the peace, or try to, but noone in their right mind would consider it a desirable outcome. It's not just that buildings getting wrecked is expensive, it's a much deeper theme where the fact that the world has these people who are above everyone else is a giant problem.

And on the hero side, they do have the PRT, which places emphasis on being led by non super powered individuals, but even that is easily usurped by a supervillain whose power isn't obvious, but who uses it and his many connections to essentially set himself up as a dictator controlling both the hero and villain sides of the city, and it was damn close to working, too.


And I'll admit, I enjoy the occasional Marvel movie. They're movies designed by clever people to be fun and satisfying. But it's refreshing to see some conflicting takes on the nature of them.

TL:DR Read Worm

The reason that this type of story (the type of story that flagrantly covets a highly proactive extrajudicial force that actively solves problems) is popular is because the current views of authority is that authority is in itself broken. If the judiciary system is judgemental and biased, then the assumed correct solution would then be an extrajudicial force.

It is a reflection of a deep seated distrust of authority and people with power, except it uses people with power to counter people with power. Unfortunately, they're not wrong.

People with power are the only people that can realistically combat other people with power. The populous lacks the ability to meaningfully engage with power.

Finally a non political video. Just good movies.

I enjoy superhero movies, cartoons, shows, etc. My friends laugh at the fact that I cringe and mutter about property damage and the impact on the economy and livelihoods of people during a smashing our action figures together scene. I love the action, but regularly wonder why the heroes don’t make more of an effort to get out of populated areas when possible. Of course, taking the time to assay the situation and have a more productive action is much less dramatic or glorious, and frankly less fun to watch. OMG. I am part of the problem.

i’m watching this video today, for the first time. a child born on the day this video was released could be in third grade right now. im watching this while knowing thousands of miles away, american and israeli soldiers are slaughtering palestinians like animals. however relevant this video is im still hit with a wave of sickness when i remember the biggest films on the market are arranged just so to exonerate the genocide of hundreds of thousands of living breathing people, and the fact that im just trying to ignore it. i doubt i’ll take any more action than i already have just from watching this, but i will say im at least glad this video was made.

You know shits getting bad when Dragon Ball is actually a good example of what should be done.

Holy shit if this wasn't foreshadowing...

Holy shit watching this in 2024 when Luigi Mangione is being tried as a TERRORIST to try and remove his rights AND after trump saying Canada is the 52th state is insane.

“They should’ve stood so close to justice”
🤣

"existing power structures are incompetent and what we really need is a small group of people with unlimited power and resources making all the decisions with no practical oversight" hits a little close to home today