We Don’t Need Another Hero

https://youtu.be/-njxKF8CkoU?si=cAze-71Gjan-d4Ga

The video above—Adorno being interviewed about Vietnam-era protest music—has been living rent-free in my head for years. Adorno was the original negative dialectician, or what gets called these days, a little too simply (and non-dialectically), a “pessimist.”

In the clip, Adorno argues that couching protest against the Vietnam War in popular song—a medium that serves as a vehicle for the mass deception of consumer culture—sounds worse to his ears than a harmless moon-June-croon tune. The protest song, he suggests, is more insidious than mindless entertainment because it makes us believe we’re resisting while we’re actually consuming.

As someone raised on Joan Baez, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and other voices from the folk revival and civil rights movement, I winced. Like many critics of Adorno, I could easily dismiss him as elitist and Eurocentric, deaf to the formal complexity and genuine power of popular music traditions.

But musical polemics aside, the recent response to the new Superman film has brought this clip rushing back. I haven’t yet seen the movie, but I understand the director has crafted it as a thinly veiled allegory of the US-sponsored Israeli assault on Gaza. If true, this would make Superman the second major Hollywood entertainment—alongside Disney’s Andor—to use consumerist spectacle as a vehicle for “protest.”

This is murky territory. Adorno’s position isn’t that of a right-winger blasting “woke Superman.” It’s more subtle and yet more forceful. His question cuts deeper: If we feel like we’ve acted to stop a genocide by consuming a TV show or cheering on the latest exploits of the Man of Steel, haven’t the culture industries captured our attention even more effectively than if they were serving up truly mindless entertainment?

I think about this as I scroll through TikTok, watching creators celebrate Superman’s alleged political messaging. They praise how “clever” the director was to slip scenes of a Middle Eastern population being bombed by their high-tech neighbor past studio executives. Some have even stitched those Superman images with real footage of actual horrors in Palestine.

While I understand the impulse to celebrate what appears to be a breakthrough in the media blockade, something feels deeply unsettling about this response. Are we witnessing genuine solidarity, or are we watching the culture industry perform its most sophisticated trick yet—turning even genocide into content?

Adorno’s analysis of media enlightenment as mass deception hits me with renewed force here. The most effective form of ideological control isn’t censorship or propaganda—it’s the illusion that consuming the right entertainment constitutes meaningful political action. When we mistake allegory for activism, metaphor for material change, we may be participating in our own pacification.

This doesn’t mean that all political art is co-optation, or that we should retreat into pure criticism without engagement. But it does mean we need to ask harder questions about what it means to “resist” through consumption, and whether our celebrations of clever directors and bold allegories are distracting us from the more difficult work of actual solidarity.

The people of Gaza don’t need Superman. They need the real world to stop turning away.