--Christopher Smith, Peacemaker (season one, episode eight)
The redemptive themes that spring from the two live action Suicide Squad films and from the general Christological bent of the early DCEU remain intact in Peacemaker despite the context they are presented in being far less serious this time. Peacemaker is built on the accurate premise that even someone as deluded as Christopher Smith, the "Peacemaker" who is willing to murder or torture anyone for the sake of bringing about peace, can change for the better. It is also devoted to exploring just how nuanced this pseudo-pacifist character is, as he is someone who is opposed to racism but more than willing to be sexist toward both men and women, someone who is so obviously in the clutches of conservatism (as evidenced by his hyper-patriotism and gender complementarianism) but not totally averse to liberalism (he is presented as a practicing bisexual), and someone who loves his extremely cruel father despite disliking some of his father's idiotic philosophical mistakes. With the shadow of Amanda Waller's tyranny in the background and a new extraterrestrial threat to conquer, Peacemaker must still confront his father's White Dragon identity, the Aryan Empire of white supremacists that the White Dragon leads, and his own foolish hypocrisies.
Peacemaker and White Dragon are ironically both theists, praying to God or talking as if they both have divine favor--ironic in that Peacemaker never seems to connect his moral philosophy with theism very thoroughly and White Dragon severely misrepresents Christianity by talking as if the God of Abraham, which he identifies with, is not described in Genesis as imbuing all people, not just white American males, with his image. This is even more ironic since White Dragon makes it clear that he is very deeply misandrist, as he almost constantly insults men and boys for not matching the sexist stereotypes that shackle men just as they do women. This sexism against men with non-stereotypical personalities is one of the ideologies other than theism that the two share despite their enormous differences. No matter how many fallacious comments or emotionalistic outbursts come from his father Auggie Smith, though, Christopher expresses affection to someone who does not deserve it even after he is repeatedly treated as worthless for being a man while not having White Dragon's even more monstrous personality traits, reflecting the asinine but popular American idea that family has some special moral significance that demands allegiance to people over true ideas.
Intentionally or not, the misandry of Western gender stereotypes is actually at the forefront of the show. Peacemaker does an excellent job of displaying some forms of sexism against men through the biases against men without a very specific, malicious, egoistic personality that Auggie Smith and sometimes Chris himself voice support for, whether or not James Gunn recognized this as misandry. Even if this was not the intent, Peacemaker actually illustrates how asinine conservatism and liberalism are, though of course the plot is more overtly aimed at satirizing and criticizing white supremacy and to a lesser extent sexism against women, the latter of which there is sometimes far less of in the show than sexism against men. However, with characters as incredibly stupid as practically every single person in this show is (when it comes to philosophy, though, the typical person in real life is no better at approaching and understanding even basic knowable truths than Peacemaker or Vigilante are at not fucking up situations), there is never a point at which the series actually has characters do anything more than just express dislike for things like racism.
Yes, racism is inherently irrational because it involves assumptions based on the color of a person's skin, making racism against people of all skin colors equally irrational, but Peacemaker, Vigilante, Harcourt, Economos, and so on at best just react to white supremacy with an emotionalistic aversion rather than even a loose, undeveloped framework that still starts to resemble rationalistic analysis. Truths about racism as a concept inside and outside the context of the specific American relationship with racism can be effectively communicated by humor as the show attempts to do, but here and elsewhere, Peacemaker dives into issues that themselves have great depth by parodying hyper-conservatism and (rightly) presenting it as an immensely destructive thing, all without ever starting to address why anyone should or should not live in any specific way regardless of how destructive it is. All that the characters do, from White Dragon to Peacemaker himself, is wallow in the stupidity of preference-based beliefs and actions, yet there is still the occasional flash of direct irony to hint at some of the characters being recognized by James Gunn as hypocritical fools.
For instance, Peacemaker's admirer Adrian Chase, whose "superhero" persona is called Vigilante and who oscillates between somewhat intelligent bursts of practical competence and grave incompetence, has a worldview that he pathetically fails to live out on some of the most basic levels. Vigilante, whose name is literally Vigilante and who murders people for breaking almost any law, is not only stupid enough to confuse legality for morality, but he also routinely breaks the law he illegally serves by killing people, making him a fool on multiple levels as both an utterly incompetent thinker and an oblivious hypocrite. No one ever calls him out for this in any unrelenting, rationalistic way, of course! His idol Peacemaker is too lost himself to ever say more than a few sentences at once that seem to suggest at a deepening concern for anything beyond feeling better about pushing people away or killing Rick Flag in Corto Maltese.
Peacemaker is ultimately a series that is excellent at revealing the more nuanced nature of irrational, selfish, unjust people, but this is in spite of it never doing anything more to make its most significant points than rely on emotion-driven moments for the main characters. Artistically, other than its extreme tendency to crowd out genuinely dramatic scenes with utterly random humor, it is executed very well. When it comes to its philosophical themes, though, it offers a great opportunity for some viewers to reflect on issues facing the world today without actually establishing much more than that people with different worldviews will be in conflict. There is no grand attempt to convey the demonstrable truths that the tenets of racism and sexism--all racism and sexism--are objectively false ideas that have never been embraced on any grounds but preference, assumptions, and social pressures. There is no strong attempt to explain what evidence there is for Amanda Waller's dehumanizing ideologies actually being evil as opposed to just subjectively unappealing. These things are taken for granted by people inside and outside of the fictional story who are likely too stupid to even understand the simplest aspects of rationalism on their own.
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