Two weeks ago we discussed the many threads of manifesting culture that run through the film Captain Marvel. This is a part of a longer examination on the influence of New Thought on modern culture, a premise we began looking at in my discussion of the Gospel According to Southern California, and a study I’m hoping to continue today. These posts have performed very well so I hope that means you’re interested in talking about it as well.

The short of it is simple. Affirmation culture believes saying a thing makes it so. A quick scan of manifesting TicToks reveals most of the people who promote this lifestyle believe this power extends to the point of controlling other people. If you want people to respond to you in a certain way all you have to do is speak it into existence.

Sound unsettling? It really is, which may be why there are so many lists out there explaining how you can tell when it is happening. (Like this one.)

However, the fact that a thing cannot happen doesn’t prevent people from trying to make it happen, which is a distinction that is important to keep in mind. The conversation around Captain Marvel on the Internet in the days leading up to and following its release showed many attempts to manifest things. (And not entirely from the creators of the film. More on that later.) These threads of commentary demonstrate how SoCal’s religion of choice doesn’t just warp the art they produce. It also distorts attempts to discuss that art.

I am not the first person to notice this tendency. I found a review published at the time the movie was released that commented on the attempt to manifest trends around this movie at length. I found the author’s discussion of the marketing around Captain Marvel very fair and insightful. The attempt to turn just watching a movie into political activism was a very common theme of the time period, though it’s lost some favor in the last few years.

Marketers were not the only ones to partake in this kind of vision casting. This article on Vox dot com recounts a discussion between two women where the following is said by Constance Grady:

“Captain Marvel has to make enough money to prove that movies starring women can do well, so that studio executives will make more of them. It has to be good enough to make up for decades of movies that relentlessly focused on the narratives of straight white men. It has to give women a superhero in whom they can see themselves and their lives.”

All of this is absurd. I’ve watched the movie and discussed the film last week and I can confidently say nothing that Grady insists the movie seeks to do is a part of the movie itself. She is just trying to manifest these things through the movie. She wants people to be thinking about these things and thus she speaks them into existence with her positive attitude and wide ranging public platform. Or, at least, that is the goal.

Note that reality is not a part of these musings. For example, the film Wonder Woman had already released at this point, making huge box office numbers and proving that movies starring women can do well (not that there was any doubt about that even before Wonder Woman.) In point of fact, Captain Marvel was almost certainly made because of Wonder Woman’s success. So Grady’s first desire was already fulfilled – a movie starring a woman did well and prompted executives to make more of them. 

That said, I don’t know if either movie really gave women a superhero in whom they could see themselves and their lives.

Grady’s other concerns seem equally as detached from the history of film. However that doesn’t actually undermine an attempt to manifest something, because reality is just another thing that was manifested. You can always remake history with enough work, right?

The problem there is that in order to manifest something you need positive emotions like joy and love. You can’t have negative emotions. This resulted in a huge secondary concern for the media apparatus around Captain Marvel, namely the so-called misogynistic trolls. Early on these were set up as the enemy scheming to undo all the work Captain Marvel was putting into making women bolder and more empowered. Of course Vox got into the action, opening its article about the film’s box office take by slamming the sexists. However they were not the only ones on the hunt for the Patriarchy and its anti-empowerment schemes. Even PBS credited most of the dislike for the movie on trolls.

Reviewers just giving their thoughts on the film felt the need to go out and make it clear their problems with the film didn’t make them raving women haters, as you can see in this review from YouTuber Cosmonaut Variety Hour:

The whole situation stinks of an attempt to manifest the opposition to your goal and sideline it as ontologically evil.

Now, to be as charitable as possible, not everything commenters pointed at as evidence of unwarranted hostility to the movie is purely manifesting behavior. For example, many people did post reviews of the movie on Rotten Tomatoes before the movie was available to the public. At least some of those reviews have to have been made by people who hadn’t seen the movie. Captain Marvel’s star, Brie Larson, had actively antagonized a large chunk of her audience and they weren’t amused by it but weaponizing the review scores isn’t the best way to voice that displeasure.

That said, it is the privilege of the audience to show their displeasure. It cannot simply be manifested away. In point of fact, by attempting to affirm their own product and manifest their critics into irrelevance they may have actually empowered them rather than diminished them. Certainly many of the people who pointed out the shortcomings of Captain Marvel as a story have more of a career than Larson these days.

Sadly this wasn’t the only case of manifesting around the movie. Many people who took issue with Larson’s hostile behavior during press tours would later spread rumors of her bad relationship with the cast of the film Avengers: Endgame. This also strikes me as an attempt to manifest something in the lives of others. There’s not a lot of evidence to back up this assertion, although that’s not surprising given how difficult such rumors are to disprove. It could just be typical gossip mongering. Either way, I don’t think it’s a positive part of media discourse to have such things eating up so much of the space.

This is particularly true because Captain Marvel needed a lot of critical feedback. It wasn’t a good movie and it had nowhere to go after it was done yet it still received a sequel in 2023, a film called The Marvels. Unlike Captain Marvel, The Marvels flopped badly, costing the studio a lot of money and effectively ending Larson’s career, at least in the movies. She has not announced a film role since.

These failures were also blamed on trolls.

Positivity had to be maintained so the film would manifest as intended. Negativity had to be shoved onto critics, or else their own vision will manifest instead. It’s a horrible approach to media analysis.

Worse, all this casting of blame is that it doesn’t ring very true. As noted in the Transmedia review linked at the beginning of this discussion, just going and sitting in a movie doesn’t feel like doing something for a cause. Just saying things doesn’t really change ourselves or others. Manifesting is not a viable way to create art or live our lives.

If we want good art, and I do, then it is incumbent upon us to do things, not just say them. Yet in art, particularly literary arts, that line becomes blurred very easily, as many of the things we do create words. It is quite gratifying to imagine that our skill with words creates reality. Thus, the lines between words and work is blurry and ignoring the line entirely stokes our ego.

This is why I think the dogmas of SoCal have caught on so easily among the creative classes of the West. Yet they have proven far more poisonous to us than those who espouse them anticipated. We cannot continue to live by this faith and enjoy the bounties of great art.

Art is a collaboration between creator and audience. You cannot just manifest the art and audience you want, you must exist in cooperation with both these things if you hope to create something enduring. The religion of Southern California tempts you dominate them, instead. Turning away from this doctrine doesn’t guarantee your art will improve but as long as you stick with it your skills will only rot away. Hollywood proves it. Learn from their mistakes.