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Superman 'Too Big' for the Big Screen
Evilelf writes "The new Superman is giving movie bosses a headache - because of the size of
his bulge. They fear Brandon Routh's profile in the superhero's skintight costume
could be distracting, reports the Sun. Hollywood executives have ordered the
makers of Superman Returns to cover it up with digital effects."
It's called a Self Fullfilling Phrophecy. If you get enough people to believe what you are saying - then it becomes reality for everyone and everyone believes it. Like everyone saying that IBM PCs are better than Macintoshes. Pretty soon (if your advertising budget is large enough) you have everyone using IBM PCs and thinking Macs are crap whether or not it really is true.
There are a lot of cases where this happenes. The war in Iraq for example. "We have to attack Iraq because they have Weapons of Mass Destruction!" Never found any, costing us Billions each year - but the government got what it wanted - a war. Sadly, it has cost us quite a bit (both in money as well as in people [both us and them mind you]) and is going to continue to cost us a lot for years to come.
Back to the packaged deal. Two things:
1. My wife's brother and his bride to be were given a party to celebrate their pending union. I had know him for a few years. He was a jogger who was skinny as a rail. Well, before the party he had gone jogging and when he came back he was soaked (due to the humidity though and not because he had been jogging). I never realized just how endowed he was until then. It became the talk of the party in whispers since he didn't go directly and change clothes. Finally his dad and myself went over and whispered to him that he might want to change his clothes. When he asked why we were polite but firm in telling him about the situation. He quickly retreated inside and came out in clothes that didn't show anything off. Much to the relief of the ladies who were present. (And his bride to be that was very embarrassed on his part.)
2. Movie studios try whatever they can to raise awareness of their movies and to get people to go to them. Movies that they think will strike it big with audiences they just hype the movie itself. But movies that they think they are not going to make much money on at all they usually try to get things rolling by bringing up some controversial item. (As in the actor's package.) The more hype that surrounds a movie - the worse the movie usually is. The more they stick to just showing you small parts of the film - the better the movie usually is. This is not always true though. It is just a general rule of thumb because as with everything - there are always exceptions to the rule.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
For some reason there is a huge aversion to male nudity in a lot of countries. I won't single out the US for this because I have seen it elsewhere. The Greeks and Romans didn't seem to have this problem, yet if you go to the main train station in DC (Can't remember the name) they have a gallery of roman/greek style statues around the main lobby. A sign thoughfully points out that shields were added to the statues in the 20th century in order to hide the male genetalia.
.. well they're gay. (Let alone that lesbianism is more socially acceptable that homosexuality)
In a similar vein, I was in a photography class where we were shooting nudes. One time we had a male model, and I was laughing at my class mates who had spent all this time happily shooting women, but the site of one nude guy got them all confused, and they were all trying to arrange the angle so hi groin wouldn't be in the shot. Yet to me one of the best shots was a full frontal of the guy.
I have been thinking (now and in the past) that this is all part of the indoctrination that male nudity equates with homosexuallity, and that homesexuality equates with paedophilia, hence male nudity is bad. Which is a ridiculous and totally line of reasoning. But the media has got us all conditioned as to how we should react.
This is especially seen in the comparison that woman are allowed to appreciate how other women look, but if guys appreciate how guys look
I could rant on about this for a while, but basically I agree with you. Men appear to be dominant in a lot of areas, but everywhere else they are supressed/repressed as much or even more than women. (Check out funding differences between breast cancer and prostrate cancer) But in the areas that men are repressed, society has told us not to look in that direction, so the repression is deemed acceptable.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I think the news for nerds appeal is more this: look at this ridiculous use of technology. Look how far digital effects have come that the possibility of subtly manipulating every frame in which the lead actor appears (for a trivial reason) is accepted.
/. in a timely fashion.
Granted I read both this story and the debunking of the story ages ago, so it certainly didn't appear on
I understand that you have a strong opinion about this, but there are certainly far better ways to make your point. The instant you used the phrase, "Christopher Reeds fetus brain sucking stem cell cheerleading" I lost any respect for you I might have ever had.
Even if you're going to be insulting and ridiculous, at least get the late actor's name right.
Mallrats. I knew Larry Niven discussed the same earlier, but i found Kevin Smiths' dialog funnier and more "to the point" :)
Awfergodsake... Batman can have nipples that could cut glass on his costume (not to mention the whole matching Robin homoerotic costumerie), the Mystique character from x-men can crawl across the screen buck-ass nekkid but for a few well-placed scaly-things, and even the Spy Kids characters have proto-breasts and pouches to stimulate the (hopefully) 12-year old pervs in the audience. And I'm still scrubbing my brain from watching the characters in Lost in Space.
And Superman can't appear too male. Jebus. I'm not in favor of having a super-dong waved in my kid's face on the big screen, but come on, the bar is pretty low these days. This is the least of my worries.
I think not...(*poof*)
I agree completely. I would also note that in recent years, due to all the PC stuff going around, males in general seem to be afraid to assert their masculinity.
There have been some books in the last few years attempting to buck the trend, about raising boys and not denying or disparaging their masculinity.
People who have come to believe that everything about the nature of men is wrong need to be contraverted. Violence and aggression can be very good things when disciplined and used for the right ends. Toughness and will to overcome weakness and weak urges can make one a strong and powerful leader. And these traits are not bad in and of themselves. In fact, they're necessary to the proper functioning of our social institutions.
Am I the only one slightly pissed off by this?
Women prance around almost naked in both TV and movies all the time. Nipples and boobs stand out way more than any guy's package.
But we can't see even an indirect indication of male genitals? What's the problem?
There are 2 things here.
1) Men and women are not particularly interested interested in looking at a soft dick. Men get excited to some degree seeing a woman naked or in a revealing outfit. I guess its because there is not too much difference between a woman physically between before after/during sex. Nothing as noticeable or physically significant as the difference between a hard and soft penis. Many women paint themselves to look more like they are having sex by adding blush to their cheeks and red lipstick to their lips.
2) Men are basically in charge of most everything, including movie production, and the quiet smart guy that is paying for or putting together a movie does not want any additional competition for sex by somebody that is already in the limelight. Also, many men for some reason are scared that another man is going to fuck them when they are not looking. This is something I simply do not understand, but homophobia is a pretty common psychological problem for men. Its at least common enough that my spell checker didn't question it.
that male nudity equates with homosexuallity, and that homesexuality
I think you could have stopped right there and been spot on, since pedophilia is a characteristic that is equally present in both camps.
I remember watching a PBS documentary called "The Boy Code" (I hope that's right), which discussed the manner which boys are indoctrinated early on not only to reject, but outright destroy (literally or figuratively, depending on the circumstances) anything that threatens the notion of what is masculine. Boys are expected to give up any semblance of emotion, love sports (or anything rough and violent), etc., etc. For those that have a hard time fitting into this mold, they are ridiculed, teased, bullied, etc.
The irony is that we reap what we sow...we create these people as a society, and then wonder why men are so uh, "challenged" in some ways. It's all quite pathetic, in my opinion, because it doesn't *have* to be this way.
"male nudity equates with homosexuality" - I'd say it's the other way around. The huge bias against male homosexuality (when compared with the smaller bias against lesbianism) is due to the same cultural deprecation of men and masculinity. Compare the greek system of pederasty, homosexual adult-on-teenager mentoring. That culture lauded the male, and homosexual love was praised for keeping maleness undiluted.
If anything I'd say that current harsh attitudes towards men are what has led to this present extreme taboo on pedophilia. The idea is that men are animalistic, selfish, coercive, sexually driven and liars who will say, do and pretend anything to talk their target into sex. Therefore, a male can't be trusted around children, the archetype of vulnerable innocence. Therefore also, a male-on-child relationship is built on lies and intended purely to lead to sex. There's even a word for it, "grooming". (A male-on-adult relationship is assumed to be the same - as witness the suspicion in a woman's face when a male stranger approaches to talk - but our present culture no longer regards grown women as innocents, so they must sink or swim.)
As is usual with sexist bias, both men and women hold this belief. It's not a feminist thing, it's an everyone thing, and it's way, way older than feminism. It was already solidly established in the Victorian era - their ideal of the gentleman is plainly an attempt to restrain Mr Hyde with an ascetic moral code.
The Greeks and Romans were notoriously homosexual, so their being exceptions over male nudity is interesting in this context.
The Greeks, yes, the Romans, no. Roman sexuality was a bit on the odd side, really.
In any case, Greek and Roman sculptors regularly, and deliberately, created statues with small pensises. The logic, iirc, was that a large penis was evidence of being dominated by your sexual drives. This was a bad thing for a number of reasons, and to the Romans this was evidence of femininity, because women are ruled by their emotions, and men by their logic, so an overactive sex drive made you more of a woman then a man - told you they were odd! by our standards at least. Only satyrs etc. tend to get big willies in ancient sculpture.
Oddly enough, and trying not to invoke Godwin, a similar attidute pervaded Nazi attitudes, although their logic was different. Like a lot of Nazi logic it has a grotesque evil beauty to it: white men are superior to black men; black men have big dicks; therefore it must be better to be undersized in the trouser snake department!
I've always loved the idea of SS men in the shower thinking "look at him, he's tiny! Lucky bastard!".
In fact, you get similar ideas throughout western history (can't speak for others, don't know)
No apologies for the length of the post, although I've never had complaints about length before...
I am a teacher at a junior high school in Japan, and this mindset is completely foreign to the boys here. I often see boys hugging eachother, holding hands, and sitting on eachothers laps among other things. I don't think I have lived here long enough to understand exactly why it is like this here.. but my best guess is that the Japanese don't think that any of them could possibly be gay. This is a country that isn't too open to the idea of being gay, so you would think that boys acting like this would be scrutinized. Since they assume that there are no gay Japanese people, then they don't have to worry about acting too feminine. I see boys with pink stickers all over their pencil boxes. The kind of stuff you see here would get a boy beat up in America. I am sure I don't understand it completely.. but I thought I would just share my experiences from the other side.