Contemporary Mythologies – Tradition, Synchronism, Proximity

Nicu Gavriluță, Why do we like superheroes? The mythology and symbolism of the Marvel movies, Polirom, Iași, 2022

A logic interrogation gives the title of this work signed by Nicu Gavrilută, a sociologist and an anthropologist, an author of several important works for the academic references of these two fields of knowledge. It may seem like a risky idea, doing an incursion into the world of cinema, into the world of superheroes, and not having the area of aesthetics as main objectives. In fact, after reading this book, the critical and academic approach to this cinematic area is revealed as an incursion into the area of the most intimate and vigorous motivation of the human condition. After we finish reading, we see how the hedonism invoked in the title shows its functionalist, instrumentalist meaning and we guess the true question: Why do we need superheroes?