KIRK LAZARUS IS “THE BLACK PANTHER”
No Condom Forever or: Hollywood Went Full "R"
“Propaganda...serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.”1
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
[Author’s Note: This article was written as part of a Chapter in Herd Immunity: Societal Deprogramming titled “Media is Propaganda.” It was also written before the announcement of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and the untimely death of Chadwick Boseman. That said, I’m not going to be less critical of Disney and Marvel just because a great actor died. However, while the shills in the access media continue to carry their bathwater and praise a subpar product, Herd Immunity dictates you call out the garbage when you see it.]
It's no secret that Hollywood has moved away from storytelling over the past few years in favor of pushing diversity narratives. Unfortunately, two damning instances, particularly with Marvel movies, push female superheroes into more prominent roles and race-swap established characters. It’s not that an all-female superhero team is a flawed premise or that films shouldn’t have diverse casting. The problem is that it rarely serves the plot.
A few prominent YouTube channels discussing comic books and films have made this exact point. If you want strong female superheroes, there are many instances of powerful female characters that already exist in the pantheon. Why does Thor have to be a woman? Same with race-swapping: there are many great black superheroes. You don’t need a superhero to be black to identify with their motivation. Why does Spider-Man have to be a half-black, half-Latino teenager? You can be a black female and like Superman, Batman, Ironman, Wolverine, and Spider-Man. You can be a white male and like Blade, Bishop, T’Challa, and Storm. I’m a white man, and Scarlet Witch is one of my favorite comic characters. Same with Storm from the X-Men. Their race and gender shouldn’t matter. The strength of their character, flaws, back story, character development, and character arcs should be the focus of the comics and films, respectively. Weirdly, these characters are always race-swapped to a person of color or gender-swapped to a woman. We’ll never see a white guy cast as Black Panther or a man cast as Rogue or Jubilee. A missed opportunity to bring Robert Downey Jr. back to the MCU.
[2024 Update: At ComicCon 2024, Marvel Disney revealed The Russo Brothers will return to Direct the renamed Avengers 5 Project, Avengers: Doomsday, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Dr. Doom. This article jokes about RDJ returning as Kirk Lazarus as The Black Panther. However, to see Johnathan Majors/Kang white-washed by RDJ is peak ‘memeage’ even by Disney diversity standards! They could not live with their failures, which brought them back to their cash cows. Now they’re looking like lolcows.]
I remember being excited about the inclusion of Scarlet Witch into the MCU. With the release of Marvel’s WandaVision in 2021, Marvel and Disney proved my point, and Scarlet Witch is one of the most popular characters in the world. Both Elizabeth Olsen and Katherine Hahn took home MTV Movie Awards for their Scarlet Witch and Agatha roles, respectively.2 However, with the release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Marvel took this once-great character and destroyed all the goodwill by making her an unlikeable villain. We no longer understand or agree with Wanda’s motives. She held a town hostage and tried to kidnap a young girl to go to a parallel universe where her robot husband and fake kids exist. No one can identify with these motives, but because she’s a strong female, she’s championed.
Sadly, Hollywood embarked upon this quest of remaking popular films with female leads to drive diversity and pander to feminist thought at the expense of storytelling or character development. Why? To show how “badass” women can be. The feminist remakes never live up to the original films: Ghostbusters (2016), and Ocean’s 8, they even remade Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but this time the women are conning those evil men. It’s lost on modern audiences that Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a remake of the 1964 film Bedtime Story, and Ocean’s 8 is a continuation of a franchise that was also a remake. These movies all underperformed at the box office because the moviegoing audience is tired of being told what to believe when they want to be entertained. If an all-female-led cast was what movie audiences wanted, wouldn’t these films be box-office billions?
There were rumors that Disney bought tickets for Captain Marvel to make it appear like it made $1 Billion at the box office, despite several theaters running at empty or near-empty capacity.3 I remember when my best friend bought tickets to see the movie, she told me it was nearly sold out. Yet when we arrived to watch it, the theater was empty, and maybe 15 people showed up. Of course, this is mostly speculation, but there are kernels of evidence, particularly with sites like Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes changing their rating system.
The same happened when Amy Schumer released her 2017 stand-up special, The Leather Special. People mass-rated the special one star because it was terrible, forcing Netflix to do massive damage control and change their rating system to a thumbs-up, thumbs-down system. Miss Schumer, incapable of taking responsibility for a lousy special, off-loaded the blame onto alt-right trolls.4 I may be a troll, but I’ll never be alt-right! So it couldn’t be that she’s a joke thief and an unfunny person. If these women are so stunning and brave, surely they can handle a little criticism from us “toxic man-babies.” Changing content aggregation systems or streaming services and disallowing fans to vote or rank is the exact definition of controlling the narrative.
Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max censor older movies and television shows or remove certain properties from their platform because the message doesn’t jive with modern social politics. Streaming services were supposed to end the need for purchasing physical media. Instead, buying and saving these great works of art seems more important. I can’t wait for the Disney+ cut of Blazing Saddles:
Steve Carrell recently stated that a show like The Office, beloved by millions of people and streamed billions of times on Netflix, could never be made today because of cancel culture.5 Hollywood types live in an echo chamber and think everyone wants politics and social rhetoric in their entertainment. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like the Hoffer quote at the top of the article, these Hollywood types have tons of white and female guilt to unload on the audience.
It’s the same thing with athletes. Athletes from major sports have become too comfortable voicing their views on politics. I can’t stand when liberal athletes bash Trump, yet I also despise hearing conservative windbags calling for boycotts of the league because of Colin Kaepernick or LeBron James. Grow up! I think that regardless of your skin color if you get paid millions of dollars to play a children’s game, you don’t get to lecture people on privilege. But to go so far as to boycott a sport or league because an athlete doesn’t like your favorite politician is deranged and deserves to be called out.
Please understand whether it’s television, films, streaming services, music, artwork, or podcasts–media is propaganda. Every artistic medium in modern society now comes with a political and social message attached to it. It’s not good or bad; it just is. Even if you identify with or agree with the message present in modern entertainment, I urge my readers to stick to the classics where the political message was an undercurrent. It seems as though Hollywood has written “identity politics” on a giant mallet and sent Harley Quinn to whack you over the head with it. Expecting nuance from modern-day screenwriters is akin to searching for Eskimos in the Sahara.
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Hoffer, Eric. 1989. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper Perennial. Quote Taken from: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/17715-the-true-believer-thoughts-on-the-nature-of-mass-movements
Jackson, Dory. 2021. “WandaVision Sweeps the 2021 MTV Movie & TV Awards.” 2021 People.com. May 16, 2021. Accessed May 23, 2021. https://people.com/tv/wandavision-sweeps-mtv-movie-tv-awards-2021/
McGloin, Matt. 2019. “Disney Confirmed to Have Manipulated Captain Marvel Perception.” Cosmic Book News. March 15, 2019. Accessed May 23, 2021. https://cosmicbook.news/disney-manipulated-captain- marvel-perception
Scott, Ryan. 2017. “Netflix Ditches 5 Star Rating System, Is Amy Schumer to Blame?” Movieweb. March 17, 2017. Accessed May 23, 2021. https://movieweb.com/netflix-cancels-5-star-rating-system/
Singh, Olivia. 2018. “Steve Carell Says, ‘the Office’ Probably Wouldn’t Work Today: ‘the Climate’s Different’ - Insider.” Insider. October 11, 2018. Accessed May 23, 2021. https://www.insider.com/steve-carell-the- office-probably-wouldnt-work-today-2018-10