Grossing nearly two billion dollars at the international box office, the post-pandemic period’s most successful Hollywood movie so far stars British actor Tom Holland in his third outing as Marvel’s Spider-Man. (It also happens to feature British actor Andrew Garfield as an alternative incarnation of the comic-book web-spinner, alongside British actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Wong, Rhys Ifans, Alfred Molina, Charlie Cox, and Tom Hardy. Just saying.)

The movie fared significantly better than the more recent superhero mega-blockbuster The Batman (starring British actor Robert Pattinson). It also did better than the UK’s Daniel Craig in his final appearance as James Bond. The latter film was ultimately as forlorn as the former was, for the most part, grindingly grim and desperately dark.

The latest Spider-Man film had one great advantage over those other two. It was light, funny and optimistic. That’s something which audiences recovering from the global trauma of Covid-19 seem to appreciate.

Yet that emphasis on escapism does not necessarily make commercial cinema intellectually and emotionally empty. Spider-Man had both brain and heart working to boost its big-budget brawn. That has not however been the way with every recent screen hit.

Last summer, I introduced readers of this column to the British TV phenomenon that is Love Island. This moral atrocity – this crime against the fine art of television – is a globally franchised reality show in which a set of blandly attractive, vacuous, and scantily clad young women and men, all sporting fashionably enhanced body types, couple off ‘romantically’ in bids to win social media fame and a cash prize. There is of course nothing romantic in this at all. Its shallow materialism is the exact opposite of the ‘love’ its title proclaims.

This year’s iteration has brought the format to new depths of inanity. It is so mind-numbingly dumb it makes 2021’s series look, in comparison, like an Aramaic adaptation of King Lear directed by Ingmar Bergman. No one would wish the participants any harm, but one often feels like screaming at the screen one’s heartfelt wish that they would all simply cease to exist.

The bad news is that the producers think that this is aspirational television for British youth. This, they believe, reflects the upcoming generation’s dreams, ambitions, and identities.

The good news is that, for the most part, it really does not. Like the transnational reality show The Apprentice (whose American version was famously fronted by a tangerine-featured future president), the sight of a group of narcissistic idiots competing for attention tends to amuse viewers rather more than it inspires them. It is watched by many not with lifestyle envy but with irony, laughter, cringes, and groans.

Despite a slight upturn last month, Love Island’s viewing figures have been declining for the last few years and, despite the hype it receives in the tabloid press, have never been especially high. This season’s launch episode, for instance, attracted less than a third of the British TV audience drawn by May’s Eurovision Song Contest, and fewer than a quarter of the number of viewers who tuned in for the Queen’s platinum jubilee concert at the start of June. Faced with life under the most frustratingly frivolous and self-servingly callous government the country has ever known, it turns out that audiences might prefer slightly more edifying and heart-warming fare. We get enough of the circus clowns on the news.

The success of Spider-Man has shown what can be achieved when the western entertainment industry’s escapist fantasies make efforts to be both hopeful and wholesome, to reflect with a reasonable degree of intelligence the better parts of human nature and culture. By contrast, the depthless vanity of Love Island looks set to become little more than an obscure and tawdry footnote in the history of contemporary popular culture.

A nation in political and economic turmoil might take some much-needed comfort in the richness and consistency of its finer cultural traditions. We may not be able to afford food or fuel or confidence in our political leadership, but we can still find pleasure and pride in the better parts of our heritage and histories, and in the ways in which we recall and revisit them.

Forty years ago, a British taskforce journeyed thousands of miles to defend the Falkland Islands – locally known as the Malvinas – from their occupation by the military forces of the Galtieri regime which was then in power in Argentina. The UK lies more than twenty-five times Argentina’s distance from those disputed islands, but Britain protested that it had secured permanent rights over those territories on the grounds that it had first colonised them in the eighteenth century. (So, admittedly, had France and Spain, but let’s not dwell on that.)

In 1982, this conflict had offered a great occasion for flag-waving zeal across the​ UK, and its populist appeal, riding the tide of a resurrected myth of rightful British supremacy, secured for Margaret Thatcher the keys to Downing Street for the rest of the decade. Even the sinking of the Argentine cruiser the Belgrano, with the loss of 323 lives, an event whose legality remains controversial even today, was a matter for brazen triumphalism when The Sun newspaper notoriously splashed the exclamation ‘Gotcha’ across the front page of its early editions.

This year, however, in the immediate wake of the royal jubilee celebrations, the Falklands anniversary has been mostly marked with quiet acts of commemoration. These respectful moments of remembrance have recognised the lives lost on both sides. There has been little space for jingoism at the memorial services or in the British media. This may have come to many on either edge of the Atlantic as a welcome and perhaps surprising development. Though time may thicken the fog or war, it can also calm its storms.

Our engagements with the mass media are often likely to make us despair. But sometimes, just sometimes, they might give us pause to think and even cause to hope. After all, as this column noted in April, pretty much everyone in British television now appears determined to deploy all their powers of forensic analysis and satirical wit to expose the utter imbecility of the country’s current Culture Secretary (and Boris Johnson’s most loyal apologist), the dreadful Nadine Dorries. Although taking verbal pot-shots at Ms. Dorries may seem the journalistic equivalent of shooting particularly intellectually challenged fish in a barrel, it nevertheless remains a satisfying spectator sport. 

Popular culture can, at its best, be underpinned by moral complexities and radical possibilities. And, as I reported in May, after sixty years’ waiting, we’re even about to see our first black star of the BBC’s flagship science fiction series Doctor Who. (And, obviously, it’s about time.)

So, even as we return to the questionable cultural delights of Love Island, our finer thoughts might at the same time take us back to reflect rather more soberly upon the bloody battleground in the South Atlantic which, four decades back, the leftist songsmith Billy Bragg called the Island of No Return.

Meanwhile, although Tom Holland’s Spider-Man may have feared there was (as his latest movie’s title warns) No Way Home, a fantasy film about the reconciliation of mortal enemies and the renunciation of violent solutions might, in its own silly way, earn the admiration of its audiences precisely because it offers a way back to a world we suspected we had lost, or even, as we continue to learn from the traumas of our histories, towards a possibly better place.

Last month saw the fiftieth anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s seminal album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Like it or not, this came as a timely reminder that it is possible for a work of culture to be revolutionary, influential, and popular, all at the same time. Shakespeare, Dickens, Cervantes, Mozart, and Michelangelo all knew that, as did the authors of the world’s great sacred texts. 

The recent renaissance of some of the greatest work of the veteran British singer-songwriter Kate Bush should also remind us of that. Last month, her thirty-seven-year-old hit song, Running Up That Hill, a haunting and moving meditation upon gender relations and sexual politics, topped the UK charts once again, following its prominent use in the latest season of a Netflix fantasy series set in the 1980s. The best of our cultures will endure and will help us to endure.

Of course, Hollywood's fantasy franchises tend for the most part to play it safe. They have an eye constantly fixed on their financial returns; they aren’t out to change society or civilization. But still, even the most commercial filmmakers, if seeking to represent the worth of fundamental human values and invoking the treasures of their own cultural inheritance, can maintain the possibility that truly popular works embracing world-changing ideas may one day come.

The Marxist cultural theorist Terry Eagleton once declared that ‘all great art is socially progressive’ – even art which is ‘overtly reactionary’ – in that it works to ‘disclose the essences or essentials’ of its historical conditions. In revealing those underlying truths, it rocks its world upon its axes. As George Orwell supposed, art does not have to confront the hegemony directly, but can serve to expose the soul of society’s monstrosities from inside the belly of the beast. 

What is true of great art may also be true of popular culture. Indeed, as the media theorist John Fiske argued, it would seem reasonable to suggest that the popularity of mass media franchises may be related to the extent to which, consciously or not, they capture the tensions and contradictions which underlie the ideological zeitgeist of the circumstances of their production. 

The latest film in the Spider-Man series, absurd though it is, is about revisiting one’s history and having the opportunity to do things better than before. It is the product of a world mired in chaos and conflict; yet it offers the hope of second chances: the chance to redeem one’s enemies, one’s own mistakes and oneself, and the possibilities of transformation and regeneration. This may seem like naïve idealism; but it’s why audiences liked it as much as they did.

The film also renews its mythology’s understanding of its iconic maxim that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. In doing so, it advances an urgent invocation of a principle from which certain powerful individuals might appear today to consider themselves immune. In May, for instance, Britain’s Prime Minister shrugged off damning indictments of his conduct published in an official government report. Last month, he ignored calls to resign raised by many members of his own party, including two former Tory leaders, following two catastrophic by-election defeats. Earlier in June, he had narrowly survived a vote of no confidence initiated by his own MPs. Having become the first British premier to be sanctioned for lawbreaking while in office, he is now the first to be formally investigated for lying to parliament. And he still doesn’t seem to care.

The day after his humiliation at the polls, he continued to appear unable to take responsibility for his actions. In an interview with the BBC, he referred to the allegations against him as the sort of ‘criticisms that you get in a job like’ that of Prime Minister, as if his scandalous breaches of his administration’s pandemic lockdown rules were merely the kind of everyday minor follies in which the grumbling electorate might find cause to gripe about their government. He repeated yet again that people were ‘fed up’ with hearing all those complaints about his conduct and that we should instead focus on his plans to ‘take the country forward’. He said he certainly wasn’t going to undergo any sort of psychological transformation.

This resistance to transformation is the tragedy of a narcissist who believes he has achieved perfection. And it is the greater tragedy of a nation enthralled to his delusion.

Britain is now reaping the disastrous economic consequences of believing the lies which he told about Brexit, both before and after coming to Downing Street. It has suffered the consequences of his moral cowardice and his administration’s incompetence, negligence, and corruption in the ways it has approached a series of crises: the pandemic, Afghanistan, climate change, and now the hugely inflated prices of fuel and food.

Halfway through the worst-conducted first term of any British Prime Minister imaginable, Mr. Johnson last week told the press that he is already ‘actively thinking about’ his plans for both a second and a third term in office. (Yes, you read that right.) He appears to be inhabiting a realm of such deluded fantasy that his headspace would make Doctor Strange’s multiverse of madness seem pedestrian and sane.

We cannot expect our politicians to be superheroes. But when our superheroes choose to abandon the treacherous cults of their own charisma and take responsibility for the impacts of their actions, to reject the corruptions of power and to seek to submit to processes of moral metamorphosis, then their legends may contain lessons from which our leaders might usefully learn.

But if you really need to learn how to do your job from the popular success of the fable of a young man who gained miraculous powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider – to come to understand that what people want from you is honour, honesty, decency, consistency, and kindness – then it is unclear how fit you might have been to do that job in the first place.