Yet another trailer for yet another superhero movie -- Batman, this time -- was released today. It reminded me of a 1998 book, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" about the movies of the 1970s and how Star Wars ruined Hollywood and infantilized popular culture. 1/x

George Lucas was absolutely clear about what he wanted to make with Star Wars. It would be a "Disney movie," he said repeatedly. Black hats and white hats, action, action, action, the good guys win. The audience would be "10-year-old boys." 2/x

At the time, that was a throwback. Early 70s movies had gone complex and dark. Lucas was, wisely, remembering that people also like occasional escapism -- thrills, simple characters, and easy moral judgments. 3/x

So Lucas makes Star Wars. It becomes a monster hit, dwarfing everything that came before it, and it changed the economics of movies and the structures the industry was built on. Now, everything became a hunt for the next Star Wars, which had many, enormous consequences. 4/x

Biskind, writing in 1998, rightly bemoans that Hollywood became a factory for churning out big, loud, dumb movies, all of them in the Star Wars mould. He singles out superhero movies in particular, which was a relatively small subgenre at the time. 5/x

Reading that 22 years later, it's stunning to see that every word applies today. And then some. Superhero movies have metastasized into an industry unto themselves and most are little more than the latest iteration of George Lucas' movie for ten-year-old boys. 6/x

What does it say about us that popular culture is now dominated by an art form which can be traced in a straight line to a director saying he wants to make a Disney movie for ten-year-olds? 7/x

That said, there is a big asterisk. When Biskind was writing in 1998, HBO was just coming into its own and streaming didn't exist. There are complex, intelligent dramas being produced and they're finding decent audiences. They're just not movies. 8/x

As for where the balance lies between the rise of smart TV and the decline of movies into comic books, and whether we can judge the intelligence of popular culture as a whole, well, probably not. But I'll leave that to others who have thought about this lots more than me. Fin.