A Satire of Modern Society
Satire of the superhero genre has existed for about as long as the superhero genre itself has existed. The notion of people dressed in tights or leather jumpsuits, with powers as oddly specific and random as “shooting laser beams out of their eyes”, alliterative names like “Peter Parker” or “Reed Richards”, fighting other people with such operatically grandiose titles as “Doctor Doom” or “Darkseid”, has simply been too ludicrous and laughable for the humorist to leave it alone.
The Amazon Prime series “The Boys” is nothing new in this regard. Franchises and series like “One Punch Man”, “Deadpool”, and “The Incredibles” have done similar things before the series, or the comic book that it was based on came along. What sets this series apart, then, is not in fact the subject which it chooses to lampoon, nor the grim and mordant nature in which it satirizes things.
Do a simple Google search on the show and one would find that the word which most commonly appears in association with the show is “irreverence”. And indeed, after having watched the show, I find it hard to disagree with that description. The series does not pull any punches, and it does not seem to care too much about the people that it targets with its satire. The series quite cleverly uses these superheroes as a means of producing a more general critique on just about every aspect of modern American society.
In the show, the superheroes are managed, in the same manner that celebrities are, by a giant conglomerate named Vought International, who manufactures the chemical compound that grants the superheroes their powers. This company milks these superheroes for all that they are worth, producing vapid and shallow action movies (greatly) fictionalising the real-life exploits of the superheroes that they manage, sending them to “protect” American cities for a hefty fee, and trying, throughout the show, to get their superheroes into the military. Through this, the show manages to criticise, through the figures of superheroes, celebrity culture (the utter degeneracy of most of their lifestyles as well as their desperate, often pathetic, antics to stay relevant and in the zeitgeist), the horrific military industrial complex (allegorised rather well in a plotline throughout Season 1 of the flagship product of the conglomerate, a superhero named Homelander, purposely aiding in the development of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists gaining superpowers, in order to force the US military to deploy the superheroes for operations; mirroring the real-life development of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, very much a product of US foreign policy through their favouring of destabilisation of the Middle East with a sordid series of coups) and the media which keeps the country complicit in, or at the very least indifferent to, all this.
The show is not coy in its criticism either, when lampooning out-of-touch celebrity antics, the show produced an exact parody of Gal Gadot’s now infamous “Imagine” video, with a series of superheroes singing that exact song in the show’s version of the video.
The Elephant in the Room
However, watching the show, entertaining as it is, the most attention-grabbing aspect of the show was not one of their famously shocking moments of irreverence, but rather a conspicuous lack of irreverence about a very specific subject.
Before I get to that, it would be helpful to note that the show’s satire takes on a distinctly leftist bent. The main villain of the show is the flagship product of Vought, the superhero by the name of “Homelander” (the name is stupid on purpose), and he is depicted as being a murderous, narcissistic psychopath with a God complex, and it just so happens that his politics in the show are decidedly right-wing, spouting talking points about immigration and other such issues that are suspiciously similar to that of Donald Trump.
The point of my identifying the politics of the show is to point out that despite its rather left-wing bent, and its tendency to not pull its punches when it comes to criticism of figures and institutions, no matter how big or how well respected those institutions might be, there is one group of people that they dare not touch: Amazon itself.
Given the state of left-wing politics in America right now, what with much political energy being dedicated to fighting the obscene mistreatment of workers in Amazon warehouses, largely through unionisation, I do find it passing strange that the show does not so much as bother addressing the issue, especially given that it likes to cover current events and viciously criticise corporate and governmental overreach.
Worker Mistreatment
To give some coverage of the issue at hand, Amazon has, despite their pretensions about being “woke” and standing with progressive causes such as BLM, a terrible history of mistreating their warehouse workers, most of whom happen to be black.
Yes, as it turns out, when it comes down to a question of living up to their proclamations about the fair treatment of minorities and actually treating their mostly black workers well, though suffering a little in terms of corporate profits; or exploiting their workers by systematically underpaying them, making them resort to urinating in bottles and having them work till they literally drop dead, Amazon, a profit driven corporation, has opted for the latter. Who would have seen that coming?
The need for these workers to unionise so that they can resist the kinds of gross corporate exploitation that is being enacted by Amazon should really be something that a show like “The Boys”, that seems to care so deeply about corporate oversight, should focus its attention on.
Why then, have they not done so? Well, at the end of the day, it seems that in showbiz, the most important thing is ultimately to not bite the hand that feeds you.
This is a problem which pervades much, if not all of the media that we consume, how could it not? At the end of the day, every editor, writer, blogger, columnist and pundit, no matter how noble and virtuous they may be, needs to find some way to feed themselves. Especially with the tastes of the general public, much of which displays a preference for the big-budget and the spectacular as opposed to the more mundane but considerably more thoughtful.
In such circumstances, the need to find financial backers is especially imperative for the producers of mass media, and we would be fools to believe that these financial backers will not make their need a feature of the media that is being produced. Why does “The Boys” not do anything that so much as alludes to the problems that Amazons have been having with their worker abuse? Because Amazon is providing the budget for their productions and if they act in a manner contrary to Amazon’s financial interests, to their bottom line, there is no way that they can be allowed to continue receiving a budget from Amazon. Unfortunately, this is just the way it works.
Objective Media
Even the media producers that we would consider to be of a more reputable nature, such as the mainstream newspapers, this problem of advertiser influence pervades. Ever wondered why the New York Times has been the cheerleader for just about every American military intervention despite its purportedly liberal bias? Well, a quick look at the NYT business model yields an answer, 31% of their revenue is from advertisers, if a third of the lights in their offices are kept on by advertisers, you can be pretty damn sure that they will refrain from publishing anything that might draw the consternation of advertisers, primarily positions considered too anti-government— such as, perhaps, questioning some of the rather blatant lies that the Bush Administration told about WMDs in Iraq, or questioning the moral grounds of the invasion in Afghanistan. Or wondering why the Washington Post has decided to run articles such as “Think twice before changing the tax rules to soak billionaires” with a heavy criticism of the tax policy that aims to tax billionaires, especially the wealthiest men in the world like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk more? Well, just look who recently became their owner: Jeff Bezos.
What a surprise that the newspaper which Jeff Bezos owns has decided to run articles highly critical of a policy that would cost people like himself, more money. I for one am almost as surprised about this as when I found out that the show being streamed on the platform owned by him refuses to address his mistreatment of his workers. A more cynical person might even say that Jeff Bezos is muzzling the media outlets that he owns when it comes to issues that cast him in a negative light, if not actively using them as his personal Pravda. You, the reader, can draw your own conclusions.
This is not a problem limited to America either, it would be remiss of me not to mention both the Agence France-Presse and the BBC’s own biases, stemming from their status as news agencies funded by their government. Sure, these news agencies’ stated mission is to provide fair and impartial reporting on world events, and the government funding is of a no-strings attached nature; but are we really to believe that the money that the editors and anchors of these stations receive from the French and British governments do not in any way cause them to self-censor?
Self censorship still exists with these agencies, as when Agence France-Presse decided to stay curiously silent about France’s return of 24 skulls to Algeria (taken as trophies during French colonial rule) out of deference to the French government’s taboo about addressing their colonial atrocities; or when the BBC put out an interpretation of the situation in Iraq broadly similar to the picture that the British government was painting to make their case for the invasion of Iraq.
Of course, Singapore is completely free of these problems, and our media is absolutely unbiased and fair in their reporting of current events, who would even think to question that…
As of now, there are no solutions to these problems, or at least, I am not smart enough to come up with one. As long as the distribution of news requires money, the interests of the rich and the powerful will always have an inordinate influence upon the media that we consume.
One might make the case that the presence of the internet would resolve this problem, as the internet allows for the cheap dissemination of materials, including news. However, without even getting into that whole other can of worms that is the emergence of the likes of Alex Jones, one can rebut the claims of the internet being a panacea by simply pointing out the fact that even independent news outlets that exist purely on the internet are going to need money for their maintenance. Staff like researchers and editors are unlikely to work for free, they are not going to be able to feed themselves with editorial integrity. That’s why even news agencies like The Young Turks have had to resort to taking funding from major financiers though they started off with the aim of providing an alternative to corporate media.
And that is assuming the news agency was truly independent before taking on funding from major financiers. Its initial financial model of taking small, grassroots donations was, if we think about it, its own kind of dependence. If they were to depend on the money that their fans donate to them, it is pretty certain that they are going to produce content that panders to these fans orrisk losing their fan’s support and their fan’s donations. This is still self-censorship, and still a way in which impartiality and fairness in news reporting would be violated.
The best thing that we, as consumers of new media, can do at the end of the day is just to be aware of the biases of the media that we consume. To, in the words of the movie All The President’s Men’s famous line, “Follow the money”. Look at who is funding our media and understand that every news story that we read is tainted with the lens that best serves the interests of the people funding it.
Written by: Khoo Kia Song Kendrick (22A14)
Edited by: Widyayuki Triyono (22S6D), Reyess Peh Qi Xun (22A15)
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