Some of Robert Downey, Jr.’s close-ups in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” have more intensity, complexity, and individuality than many acclaimed actors’ movie-long performances. Image courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures via Everett

In a recent video interview to promote “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Robert Downey, Jr., Iron Man, lost his mettle. The interviewer quoted a remark by the director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu that superhero movies are “cultural genocide.” Downey seemed taken aback and responded offensively, with a nativist slur: “Look, I respect the heck out of him, and I think for a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like ‘cultural genocide’ just speaks to how bright he is.”

There’s no defending Downey’s remark. But as I watched the video, I wished that he had simply made the two-word suggestion that I’d bet he was thinking. The import of Iñárritu’s hyperbolic phrase is to tell Downey, “You’re not just a guy making a movie, you’re a kind of killer.” Iñárritu Godwinized the subject in a flourish that’s worth viewing in its remarkably vituperative context.

Actually, both Iñárritu and Downey have recently delivered great caricatures, not on screen but in speech. Iñárritu, in the interview last fall that featured the “cultural genocide” charge, caricatured superhero movies even better than he did in “Birdman.” Then, last week, Downey caricatured independent films. Like all good caricatures, these interviews capture something of the truth, even if with exaggeration, and, as in all good interviews, the subjects speak freely, as if they were riffing unguardedly among friends.

Here are Iñárritu’s remarks. The flurry of invective should be savored in its entirety, but his main points are:

I think there’s nothing wrong with being fixated on superheroes when you are seven years old, but I think there’s a disease in not growing up.

The enormous sums of money to be made on superhero movies are drying up the streams of financing as well as the prospect for distribution of lower-budget non-action films.

They have been poison, this cultural genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human.

It’s a false, misleading conception, the superhero. Then, the way they apply violence to it, it’s absolutely right-wing. If you observe the mentality of most of those films, it’s really about people who are rich, who have power, who will do the good, who will kill the bad. Philosophically, I just don’t like them.

Reading Iñárritu’s comments is like reading an atheist on the subject of religion. It’s one thing to reject particular beliefs or doctrines, another to dismiss the psychological, mythological, and social power that inspires devotion.

Iñárritu is correct: superhero movies are about power—personal power and military power, national authority and individual fantasies of power. In their often-blundering way, they bring together world-scale conflict and intimate dreams and failings. That is the very reason for their success. They represent, in cartoonish form, great fears, great hopes, and great yearnings. Certainly, they have little to do with the practicalities of daily life—but they have plenty to do with the constitution of the imagination.

Most of life takes place off-screen. Abstract forces, whether political or economic, psychological or sociological, play a far greater role in determining the content of individual lives than individuals are able to grasp. This frustration has long been the case. I doubt whether the superhero movie is, as Iñárritu suggests, intrinsically right-wing (the exercise of power belongs as much to the left); in any case, “right-wing” isn’t an aesthetic category. The appeal of superhero movies derives from a primal mythological power that taps into similar nerve centers to those that religion gratifies. (That’s why the slightest changes in character incite panic at a nearly scriptural level.) They’re not my cinematic religion, but just as the scriptures for other people’s religions can have a mighty mythopoetic allure, superhero stories can refract a big picture of a complex world into potent parables. Yet the engine of their commercial success is also the cause of their most common failing, and it’s exactly the one that Iñárritu cites: money.

Iñárritu is right that the business side gets in the way of what superhero movies can be. It’s good news that Marvel has approached Ava DuVernay, the director of “Selma,” about making a superhero film. But if her experience with the studio is anything like Joss Whedon’s on “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” her involvement may not matter as much as it should. In a recent interview, Whedon discussed the tense negotiations with Marvel potentates over the script and the horse-trading over particular scenes—the studio’s insisted that he shoot a scene that he hated in order to get one that he liked.

The budget of the new “Avengers” film is estimated between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and seventy-nine million dollars. That’s an awful lot of auteur money, and there’s no reason to expect that a filmmaker will enjoy the same level of creative control over a project with a nine-figure budget that he or she would with a six-figure budget. The problem with superhero movies is built into the system of their production. The generally disheartening experience of watching them results from the lack of creative freedom that their directors enjoy while making them. At their best moments, they can deliver a distinctive kind of thrill—whether it’s in the climactic flight in “The Avengers” or in the close-ups of Downey in “Age of Ultron.” But these moments tend to be rare, tiny jewels that are hidden, almost incidentally, in overstuffed boxes.

At the very least, the production of a superhero movie is the result of long and exacting work. Everything Whedon and the crew did was the product of a great deal of thought, negotiation, and planning. Maybe it’s the sort of planning that, like any committee’s work, seems unfulfilling, impersonal, compromised, blanded-out. The film may play like a feature-length press release, but the sense of seriousness, of attention to detail, of a weighing of options—simply, of mutual exertion in a common purpose—is apparent.

That’s where Downey’s caricature comes in. Whereas Iñárritu mocks the superhero, Downey, when asked in another video interview, “Do you have a craving, after you’ve finished wrapping one of these, just to make a five-hundred-thousand-dollar indie movie?” answers, “No.” Asked why, he tees off on independent films: