RJ from The Fourth Age recently released an incisive takedown of the new Superman film, and if you haven’t seen it, you should.
His meta-commentary identifies what many already feel in their guts but can’t articulate: This movie isn’t a story, it’s a sermon. And the sermon isn’t for you, the viewer. It’s for the managerial class that made the movie. Consider it the studio heads telling themselves “We’re still in control.”
RJ does an admirable job drawing out the film’s underlying ideology, laying bare the baked-in assumptions of Progressive storytelling: the rejection of unalienable rights, the replacement of identity with utility, the fantasy that everyone everywhere secretly wants to be part of the same utopian bureaucracy.
Where I part ways with RJ is in regard to the ideal to strive for. He’s frustrated because he remembers when these stories were good. He remembers a time before every pop culture product was a smirking, focus-tested insult.
In short, he remembers the 90s. And he wants them back.
He’s not alone. Plenty of folks in the new counterculture fantasize about rolling the clock back to their childhood. They want Christopher Reeve flying across the screen again, preaching truth, justice, and the American Way.
Look, I sympathize. But if we want a new vision, we have to be clear-eyed.
There is no going back.
Let me explain why.
The 90s Didn’t Work
Let’s drop the nostalgia glasses. The 80s and 90s weren’t a golden age. They were the slow-motion collapse of a cultural engine already running on fumes. Yes, we had better music, movies, and TV. But Pop Cultism had already replaced culture.
RJ’s own video confirms this view. He pines for a past in which even a Superman movie like this would have gone unnoticed.
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He’s right, but not for the reason he thinks.
In 1995, this Superman movie could have slipped under the radar because it was normal. The Neoliberal order was at its peak. And everyone—left, right, and center—more or less accepted its core assumptions.
Pop culture had already degraded into catechesis. People just didn’t notice because the programming was subtler, so the rot hadn’t started showing.
Recall that the whole concept of “Hollywood storytelling” was built to deliver Progressive morality under the guise of relatable characters. Three-act structure, Save the Cat, Campbell’s Hero’s Journey were shaped by and retooled for a Liberal anthropology. These are the myths of a managerial society, not a heroic one.
So no, we don’t want to go back to the 1990s.
The 90s got us here.
That’s the lesson no one wants to learn.
And here’s why …
Cultural Ground Zero Was Always Coming
You won’t like hearing this, but the collapse we’re living through now was inevitable.
The writing was on the wall by the mid-90s. Hollywood had nothing left to say. Every IP was in the Milking Phase. Every genre was exhausted. We were about to hit Cultural Ground Zero: the point after which consumers could no longer reasonably expect each new release to surpass the last.
What’s happened over the past few years is the rot has become unignorable. It’s the inevitable consequence of a content mill that long ago traded truth, justice, and the American Way for algorithms, market segmentation, and trauma politics.
Superman 2025 isn’t a betrayal of the twentieth century mythos.
It’s the logical end of it.
RJ sees the 1990s’ rotted corpse, but he still wants to pretend it has something to say.
Here’s the catch, though …
Resurrection Requires Death
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There is no returning to the past because the past was built on lies. And those lies were always going to curdle into the Pop Cult ritual cant that Superman 2025 now promulgates.
Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs. What can we do about it?
The answer isn’t to try and hijack the Hollywood pipeline. Nor is it to make a “good” Superman movie, as if that would fix everything.
To break past Cultural Ground Zero, creators have to to do what authentic mythmakers have always done: Build new stories on true foundations.
We need heroes whose virtues come from diligence and sacrifice, not checking approved boxes.
For that matter, we need monsters that reflect the real spiritual threats of our time.
And we need myths that aren’t afraid to name sin and preach redemption like true myths always did.
Don’t expect salvation to come from DC, Disney, or any megacorp with a billion-dollar-plus valuation.
It can only come from the Spirit of Truth, through ready and willing instruments.
If we want to be the men of change, newpub authors, independent animators, and all creators who care about the future of the West, can’t just stop at striving to make worthy art. We have to make ourselves worthy.
That means cultivating the virtues we want our fictional heroes to inspire in real people.
RJ’s critique is correct. But his solution is backwards. Don’t go back. Burn the ships, learn from what failed, and avoid those mistakes by staying focused on the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
The age of myth is not over. It’s just waiting for men brave enough to speak the truth without irony.
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.
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Yep, burn it all down. It's the only way to be sure.
We are witnessing the collapse of Secular Globalism, the heir apparent of Atheist Communism. Each a utopian vision of a godless, man-made Eden. Each utter tripe.
Yes, the artist class has been working towards today's putrescence for decades. From Seinfeld to Garfield to rap music, the seeds to normalize and glorify feel-good vice were planted long ago. If we go back, we will just end up right back here again in another decade or two.
We have to go forward. Raze every media machine to the soil beneath its foundations, and let a new generation build something radically different and better atop the ruins.