The Superhero Industrial Complex
It’s been over a year since a new Marvel film has come out. Thanks to the pandemic, basically no new movies have come out, so it’s not exactly like the lack of superhero films is letting the indie films shine, Off all the things 2020 has taken away from us, superhero films should be at the bottom of the list. They’re fine. They’re fun! They aren’t groundbreaking pieces of art, they’re attractions.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to soothe the itch left behind by the MCU, check out The Boys. Available on Amazon Prime, The Boys, adaptation of the Garth Ennis comic, tells a cautionary tale about hero-worshipping public figures (literal superheroes in this case) and letting giant conglomerates get away with murder just because the general public views them favourably (the irony of this show being on Amazon is not lost on me). Owned by mega-company Vought, The Boys answer to The Avengers are The Seven, and their answer to Superman is Homelander. He’s a charming all American Hero, who loves the troops and saving lives. He’s also a raging narcissist with sociopathic tendencies who fully believes every good word said about him. He’s the most powerful man alive, and he’s fully aware of it. Homelander and the rest of The Seven are an extension of everyone society has ever idolised. They’re politicians, cops, celebrities, athletes, influencers, actors. They’re not people, they’re figures. And as a result, they stop acting like people - decent humanity is replaced by narcissism and ego. “I can do whatever I want” grunts Homelander in the final shot of season 2, as he wanks in the moonlight over the cityscape. “I can do whatever I want.”
The message is clear - uncontrolled power is obviously bad, both physical power (as held by The Seven) and financial power, held by Vought. They monopolise superheroes and all their associated franchise, including brand deals, sponsorships, and most hilariously movies - every single Vought Cinematic Universe scene is objectively hilarious. The Boys, led by Karl Urban doing a masterclass in accent work, are determined to take down the Superhero Industrial Complex, to whom the normal rules don’t matter. They can run down a woman in the middle of the street and get away with it, they can senselessly murder people, and claim it was necessary in the name of justice, the American Way. After all, they’re the good guys. They’re the ones keeping America safe! Imagine what would happen if the bad guys had all the power? They’re the good guys.
The shiny boys from the MCU surely would never do such horrible things?
While it’s true, the MCU and DC heroes aren’t quite as sociopathic as The Seven, there are definitely issues with uncontrolled power and monopolies. In Spiderman: Far From Home, Peter Parker, aged 16, acquires a pair of glasses from his former boss and father figure Tony Stark. The glasses control all the weapons in the Stark Industries arsenal and hold personal data on basically everyone in the world. He can order a drone strike within seconds. The glasses get taken by evil Jake Gyllenhall, and only then are they a problem. No one had any issues with a sixteen-year-old boy holding this much power because he is inherently good. Sure, he’s a sixteen-year-old boy with a half-formed frontal cortex, but he’s one of us. He’s one of the good guys. Don’t worry about it. Sure, he might accidentally set a drone on a fellow classmate, but mistakes happen. The movie should have probably ended with Peter Parker choosing to do the morally correct thing and destroying the murder specs, but why do that when you could just not bother yourselves with ethical dilemmas about accountability.
Meanwhile, in the gritty world of DC, in The Dark Knight, Batman has tapped every mobile in the city to essentially create a sonar device that can spy on the entire city. Lucius Fox seems reluctant to help, and disappointed with the concept of it, but he still helps Batman find the Joker by using this massive invasion of privacy. Batman gets no more than a slap on the wrist, and besides, it’s fine! They defeated The Joker, no harm done. He’s a good guy. Invasion of privacy doesn’t matter if you’re a good guy. The bad guys were being bad, and the good guys came up with a solution. Simple. They can do anything they want.
The public has been craving simple solutions to bad guys for years now. Emily VanDerWerrf wrote that superhero movies have become an attempt to rewrite 9/11; “But in the world of the Avengers, there are few consequences. There's property damage, and PR damage, but no one dies. … These films are pop culture's most sustained response to tragedy. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, America turned to superpowered heroes to rewrite that day so that it ended as one where nobody had to die.”
Comic book legend and famed hermit Alan Moore went one step further:
“This may be entirely coincidence but in 2016 when the American people elected a National Socialist satsuma and the UK voted to leave the European Union, six of the top 12 highest grossing films were superhero movies. Not to say that one causes the other but I think they’re both symptoms of the same thing – a denial of reality and an urge for simplistic and sensational solutions.”
It sounds like Eric Kripke, showrunner of The Boys agrees.
“They’re there to protect white, patriotic America. That’s what they were designed to do, that’s what they do. They’re protecting the status quo. When the status quo is problematic, suddenly they become adversarial — not your hero. And I think it was written by a lot of people who at that time were trying their level best to fit in and vanish within white, American society. But we just don’t live in that time anymore. So the myth of the superhero taken straight, that’s where it starts to become fascist.”
Obviously, Trump didn’t get elected because of Captain America, and obviously, Man of Steel didn’t cause Brexit. Viewers can watch whatever they want without needing to feel responsible for the rise of fascism and collapse of society, but both Moore and Kripke both have a point. Superhero moves offer simple solutions to simple threats. There are bad guys and good guys and nothing in between. We’ve even started talking about politicians like that - Donald Trump is Voldemort, Joe Biden is Dumbledore, James Comey is Snape (please read another book).
The conflicts aren’t due to systematic failures in society; they’re because of bad guys. That being said, when the conflicts are at least linked to systematic failures in society, like in Spiderman Homecoming, and The Dark Knight Rises, the results are messy - the villains end up being more sympathetic than the hero, or, as in TDKR, the writer just looks like a Tory who doesn’t understand dissent and protest. Our bright-eyed heroes work with cops and the military, and there’s no consideration of them being inherently corrupt institutions. #GirlBoss Captain Marvel was literally propaganda for the US Air Force, and even Black Panther ended up working with the CIA. The Punisher emblem has been co-opted by cops across the country, because they relate to the idea of serving red hot justice at the expense of silly little things like the law. Superman no longer cares about the justice system, he straight up murders people now. It doesn’t matter that he was created by two Jewish writers, his current cinematic representation is a fascist.
The TV show adaptation of Watchmen, which is still one of my favourite shows of the past few years, acknowledges racism within the police system but does little to change the status quo. Furthermore, the “big bad,” isn’t the racists who want unlimited and uncontrolled power to create a white supremacist state, it’s the billionaire “philanthropist” who wants to “make the world a better place.” Ultimately, the unlimited and uncontrolled power, which was portrayed as a curse in the comic books, goes to a cop (Regina King, who admittedly I would trust with such power, but the point still stands).
Superhero movies are fun. They’re escapism into a simpler world where good guys win and bad guys get what’s coming to them. The Boys takes that view and turns it in on itself. There are no good guys and bad guys: there are simply corporations and people fighting for power. And they can do whatever they want.
