I have recently read a rather disturbing article about how young people do not care about sex anymore. Too busy arranging the background for the latest image, too obsessed with a filter that would give them a better light, too preoccupied with placing hashtags in the right order, young people no longer have time for making love. I find this genuinely tragic, and, aside from the usual suspects, I blame Marvel for that.
Marvel and its sexless world of sexless superheroes. Kids just do not see it onscreen anymore, actors and actresses engaging in the good old-fashioned act of love-making. Instead, they see people with no particular genital organs save the world. In fact, you could argue that sex is disappearing from cinema altogether, and The Guardian asked that very question in a recent and surprisingly incisive article titled The end of erotica? How Hollywood fell out of love with sex. Mind you, I am not even talking about a passionate sex scene with two lovers making it out, screaming, on a car roof.
Also, I blame Marvel for Chernobyl, and not because Chernobyl was bad or anything like that. The TV show was great, powerful and educational even for someone who grew up hearing quite a number of stories about Chernobyl and enduring a million remarks from my maths teacher about how my generation is nothing more than 'sick children of Chernobyl'. In fact, I was downright impressed by the bleak faces on the sorry-looking buses. The particulars of Soviet life are depicted with wonderful restraint and precision. Having said all that, Chernobyl did stumble on its poorly constructed axis of heroes and villains.
This, too, is Marvel, and its world of superheroes and supervillains. The brain of modern audiences is simply not wired to understand the subtlety as well as the gruesomeness of the fact that sometimes you cannot do it by merely juxtaposing the good and the bad. Because sometimes the good are not that good and the bad are not that bad. Sometimes it is the whole fucking system which is responsible, and Dyatlov, too, might have had more dimensions to him (as one who chooses to dig a little deeper into the history of Chernobyl will see). The TV show targeted the wide audience. It showed us dozens of naked miners. It pitted good against evil. It chose the fairy-tale angle. It went the easy way. And I blame Marvel for that.
Of course, you could knock me down by saying this is all just good clean fun and Gaspar Noé has not stopped making films and how about this latest by Abdellatif Kechiche? Marvel is not supposed to be anything more than deriving some feel-good, CGI-infused fun from the seventeenth sequel to Avengers. Yeah, sure, but then again: history teaches us that engagement with sexless fun leads one to the discovery of a deep social message in a latest hit by Taylor Swift.
