It’s not about the movies.  It’s about the inordinate hope being placed on them and about the cynical provenance of so much of that hope.  It’s about the rain of hyperbole from commentators wanting to establish diversity credentials or to assuage guilt or just to create box-office.  It’s about the dangerous pretense that movies about comic book, super heroes with magical powers can change lives, give hope, and bring on the rapture.  Movies rarely cause social epiphanies, even among kids.  

I was in college (yet again) when “Roots” came out, the mini-series that was to do then what Black Panther is to do now.  (That alone is a warning.)  I saw African styles and cultural symbols spring up around campus.  Pride became a byword.  By the next year, most of the dress and much of the ornamentation had faded.  Had the pride?  I don’t know, but there was no indication that it hadn’t and no reason that it shouldn’t have, no institutional changes having been made.

But this is about boosting the self-image of kids, you say.  Well, maybe movies based on comic books will have a more persistent effect there, but I doubt it.  There is only so much change that can be wrought in individual lives by external associations if not matched with internal nourishment.  There is only so much change that can be wrought on society if not buttressed by legal structure.  

Still, if you believe the hype, watch for the effect.  Watch for the change.  Make note of all the marketing and self-congratulating going on now and come back to it in a year – in six months – and ask yourself what changed at the time, what is the evidence that it has persisted, and what externalities had changed to nourish internal change.  Was there any measurable effect?

If you find a great movie, enjoy it.  If it has a point to make, an important point, tell people.  But don’t pretend that it is likely to change much.  For that, you need laws over time.  Anything less, and you’ve been sold a bill of goods by people who have a bigger stake in societal continuity than in solving problems.  Yet, people talk about these movies as if they had the potential of a renewed voting-rights act and a new equal-rights amendment.  We need both of those, but we need them in law, not theater.  

Andrew Fletcher, a seventeenth-century, Scottish writer, quoting a conversation he had had, wrote that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.”  Yeah ….  I’d take the laws, myself.