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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Why We Need Superheroes

In troubled times, Americans turn to the heroic ideal.
Marvel Civil War

You like superheroes.

I have friends who insist they don’t, picturing newsprint muscle-men in Mardis Gras outfits fighting villains with names like Doctor Atrocity and making little “BLAMMO!” signs when they punch. Those friends, though, inevitably turn out to like James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, or some other fictional hero doing things real people can’t do—superheroes in civvies. Every culture has stories like this; our forebears told them around campfires or mead-halls, 20th-century kids read them in comic books.

By the end of the century, moreover, comic books had grown up with their audiences, with series like Sandman and Watchmen winning literature awards competing against regular fiction. Moving to the silver screen, though, proved a delicate business: do it well and you distill decades of character development into a few hours; do it badly and you get a money pit of special effects. To see both of these results in action, you can see this spring’s two competing blockbusters, Captain America: Civil War and Superman vs. Batman: Dawn of Justice.

The films have much in common. Each pits two good guys against each other, and even the good guys themselves are similar: a patriotically colored idealist (Superman, Captain America) and a genius playboy billionaire who invents a techno-suit in a cave (Batman, Iron Man). More importantly, both films ask thoughtful questions: if superheroes wield enormous power and answer to no one, how do they represent freedom and democracy? Or should they answer to governments that we don’t trust ourselves? Americans, after all, have mixed feelings about regular, non-super-powered police, who don’t fire lasers from their eyes.

Such questions have the potential to make a great story in which decent people find themselves on opposite sides of a moral dilemma. None of it works, though, unless the heroes are, on some level, decent people. Both films promised; one delivered.  

Superman/Batman failed with critics and audiences. Much has been made of its lava-pit color scheme, incomprehensible plot, misguided casting, and slow-motion action scenes—but what cut fans more deeply was that the heroes did not act heroic. A film in which Batman carries a gun, kills people, and brands criminals’ flesh with a hot iron is a film that invents a different character and puts him in a Batman costume.

Superman receives even greater disservice. Let’s be blunt: there has never been an interesting story about Superman. Any interesting story is about Clark Kent. Clark Kent has the power to leave his desk, punish his bullies, and reveal himself at any moment—and every day he must refuse to turn the stones around him to bread. He must endure casual disrespect from the woman he loves, knowing secretly that he is the man she loves. That makes for an interesting and sympathetic character in a way that a man in underwear throwing giant things does not. Here, though, the one relatable aspect of the character is removed.

Most dispiriting, though, are scenes with Superman’s parents, in which his father (dead, in a dream) implies that there’s no point in helping people and his mother (alive) tells him that “you don’t owe this world a thing.” If this guy doesn’t feel obligated to help anyone, in what way is he Superman? Comic books already have costumed, super-powered characters who feel unconstrained by civic responsibility—they are called villains.

If you want to know how to handle the same premise well, however, you can look to Captain America. Marvel does superhero films right: witty without being silly, dramatic without being dour, and never forgetting to have fun. Its movies feature Shakespearean actors and comedians rather than movie stars, people who can take absurd comic-book premises and imbue them with the proper gravitas or cheerful humor.

Most importantly, Marvel spent years slowly developing its characters over the course of a dozen or so films, making this film feel like the next logical step in their journey. The mercurial Tony Stark, who started as an irresponsible hedonist, is now haunted by his near-death and having caused the deaths of innocent people. Desperate to assuage his guilt, the former rogue commits himself to following the orders of a higher power, even if it means turning on his colleagues. Captain America’s character arc has taken him on the opposite track; the quintessential patriot has seen his trust in authority betrayed again and again in previous films, until he trusts no one but his conscience.

Other characters rally behind the two leaders, each on their own journey. Most don’t get more than a few lines or camera shots, but we often don’t need a lot more. Spider-Man makes a brief appearance here, and the film gives him more character in his few minutes than Superman gets in a 150-minute film. Refreshingly, he looks and acts like a real teenager, unlike the 35-year-old underwear models who usually play teens in American films, and the filmmakers had the intelligence to skip the origin story. He’s Spider-Man; we know who he is.

Like a Greek tragedy it sets up a conflict between loyalties, in which good people betray one oath to keep another and live with the consequences. Within the confines of a fun summer action movie, it shows its heroes as people—flawed, stubborn, and conflicted, yet essentially good-hearted, taking responsibility for their actions and striving to become better. This kind of story is what superheroes were for in the first place.

Again, all human cultures have had superhero tales, from Gilgamesh and Odysseus to Robin Hood and Zorro. When cultures are at their peak, they write about the heroic ideals to which they strive, as Sophocles did of Ajax or as Vergil did of Aeneas. During the Depression and World War II, the U.S.’s peak of power and conflict, it began creating superheroes, an image of what we would like to be.

When cultures abandon that heroic ideal, when they acquire the “philosophic indifference” of Gibbon’s latter-day Romans, the culture is in deep trouble. As our country slipped away from the post-war glow into an era of escalating hedonism, it abandoned superheroes save as pablum for children. Yet Generation X-ers and Millennials, children of the counterculture, embraced them even into adulthood, perhaps desperate for the heroes their culture no longer provided. In this century, as the nation grows ever more troubled, we are turning back to stories that give us heroes to believe in—a sign that there is hope for us.

Brian Kaller has written for Front Porch Republic, First Things, The Old Schoolhouse, Mother Earth News, and Grit. He writes from his home in rural Ireland and blogs at www.restoringmayberry.blogspot.com.

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