For genre fanboys, we’re living amid a cataract of science fiction cinema—quite possibly, as quantified by dollars spent and asses in seats, a world-beating gold rush of sci-fi-itude. The problem is, most of the movies are about superheroes. We don’t ordinarily think of superhero movies as science fiction, but as they do not traffic in supernaturalia or overt magical thinking (as opposed to the corporate magical thinking that makes up so many of the screenplays), that’s what they are. Of course, we’re not actually supposed to “think” about these films (since X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002), I count 45 genre entries, worth more than $30 billion in global theatrical earnings) at all. We’re just supposed to gape, gasping like dock-stranded trout, and defer all judgment to our inner ten-year-old, when he isn’t picking his nose and getting bullied for lunch money.

So how has it come to this—science fiction you’re not intended to think about? One could at this point embark on a pop-history exegesis on exactly why our culture has arrived here. Why, perhaps, beginning when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg overhauled Hollywood into a machine that suckled and lullabied “the child in all of us,” why we seem to be so pervasively satisfied by the punching battles of color-coded-leotard digital figures with, ooh, “special powers.” Like so many dismaying aspects of pop culture, it’s a matter of acclimation and evolution. For over 35 years now, we’ve embraced the massively brainless and the visually stupefying, and the kids we were are now adults, and for younger generations something as simplistic and dimly conceived as a superhero saga is the Forever Normal, a condition that does not seem to be abating into bygone faddishness as we might’ve hoped.

So, let’s do some thinking on it. On the face of things, superheroes are what they were when they were invented 75-plus years ago: kid stuff. Superhero comic-creators, from Jerry Siegel to Stan Lee and beyond, knew their audience, and knew they’d lost them once the tykes were old enough to drive, drink, screw, vote and pay taxes. The signs of this reality should be readily available, starting with the costumes. Who but a child would decide that in order to fight evil or whatever, you’d need to first slip into some kind of snappy, muscle-tight, logo-bearing outfit, which could have boots and a cape, maybe, and certainly a mask of some kind that would never actually keep anyone’s identity a secret?

Youngsters can moon about cartoony sartorial coolness all they want, but once your short hairs have grown in, this dress-up business, even the let’s-be-practical techno-exposition of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, begins to look like a costume ball at a mental hospital for weight-lifters. The Incredibles, among other satires, has already roasted this idea, but it remains troubling that it goes uninterrogated, in the simplest fashion, by millions of adults who ensure that the Dark Knight and Iron Man and Spider-Man and Superman movie franchises each earn a small country’s gross national product.

A sneakier problem lies in the incredibly lazy idea of “super powers,” which is of course the most powerful allure the genre holds for kids, who are hardwired to daydream about strength, prowess, sensory ability and mega-skills they are very far from having. This is very likely an existential problem of modernity—a condition of the post-industrial age, when powerlessness and technology and disconnection from traditions and social structures make us all vulnerable to idly wishing we could fly, punch buildings until they crumble, become invisible, shape-shift, and so on. Diagnose the entire culture if you can, but I’ll settle for simply looking at the storytelling, which sucks. If your genre pulp requires a concocted and often arbitrary super power to answer the story’s dilemmas and make things happen—to dramaturgically move from A to B—then you’re operating in the red from day one. Certainly, as sci-fi conceptualization goes, it’s pure nonsense—and nonsense employed to make us empathize with übermensch heroics, not for any larger or more profound dramatic or thematic idea.

That übermensch-ness is just as damning, when you think about how it’s used in superhero narratives. All of the admittedly high-octane imaginative power poured into these epics always reaches the same conclusion: that any problem posed to mankind or Metropolis or America must be solved by mano-a-mano brawling. The hero and archvillain can be slugging each other across city blocks, or sometimes inflicting their superpowers on airliners and nuclear bombs, but textually the upshot is always the same: nothing goes on that wouldn’t happen in a playground spat, or in a late-night fistfight between drunks. The outcomes are always predictable, naturally, and so this simplistic spectacle—coming after a century of movies reveling in all varieties of moral dilemmas, emotional crises and inventive climaxes, and science fiction movies in particular utilizing inventive concepts to explore all kinds of thematic problems—appears to be a kind of codified version of militarism, all-American and packaged like a Happy Meal. Whether it’s in the form of desperate vigilantism (the lonesome Spider-Man and Batman) or of institutional jingoism (the corporate-military Iron Man, the martially official Captain America), it’s all about boiling dilemmas down to Might Is Right and American exceptionalism.

It’s no coincidence that this pop entertainment phenomenon emerged and thrived in the years of Bush II, and continues under Obama in the haze of distended military involvements in Asia, matter-of-fact executive drone assassinations, and the rapid dissipation of American supremacy on every front. Americans crave fist-in-the-face power, and if we can’t get it in a global situation swiftly spiraling out from under our boot, then we’ll settle for fantasy muscle men pounding the evil-doers into dust.

True, the X-Men series, being a thinly masked parable about the oppression of gays, has a consistent anti-military personality—but its most popular protagonist, Wolverine, is defined precisely and exclusively as being invincible in a one-on-one death match. Generally, superheroes appear to be a device with which adolescent frustration and the untamped adult urge to bomb, bash and beatdown are not only given expression, but made supreme in our collective headspace. These movies are just one large way that our over-entertained culture heroizes its own worst impulses—if in fact the subgenre isn’t an example of Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, a deliberate manipulation of norms and values by the corporate class in order to maintain the militaristic Weltanschauung that makes so many economic sectors so much money.

If we think of our culture as ours—and it is ours, we pay for it and can watch it wither without our attention and cash—then we should decide if we want it to be expressive only of our urge to smash somebody across the face with a girder. Science fiction is capable of being a popular culture’s front-guard idea generator, but ours right now is choked with the impulses and neurotic inspirations of sixth-graders. If we want more, we have to vote with our box office dollars—if we decide not to go, or to stream, then there may not be a sixth Spider-Man, or a fourth Iron Man, or anymore Hulks. Imagine what we might have instead.