The Superhero and His People 1 comments

In our fall issue, Santiago Ramos considers the recent burgeoning of ambitious superhero movies, and explores the religious dimension of this new genre. The first section of his essay is below. The full version appears in the print journal.

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one
                                   —Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the First

A SUPERHERO MOVIE is foremost an entertainment, often kitschy, sometimes trashy, but regardless, it is a story. “Story” is implied in “movie,” but it’s worth emphasizing the concept precisely because so few others have. In his essay “On Stories,” C.S. Lewis places himself at the end of a sparsely populated lineage of critics who have focused on the mechanics of “story considered in itself”—there was Aristotle, there was Boccaccio, there was Carl Jung, and, according to Lewis, not many others. This is unfortunate because it means that, among other things, we don’t have many explications of the ways in which “different kinds of danger strike different chords from the imagination,” or why it is that only the first trip to a new planet is the one worth writing about, or, to serve our purposes here, what a superhero story tells us about justice and human nature. The stories behind two recent superhero movies with artistic ambitions, The Dark Knight and Watchmen, make it clear that the superhero is the character in which our desire for justice and order meets our questions about what it means to be human. A superhero is, in this way, a religion unto himself.

Dozens of superhero movies have been made in the last two decades, and it remains Hollywood’s most bankable genre. The Dark Knight (which came out in the summer of 2008) and Watchmen (which premiered last spring), however, differ from the rest in that they aspire to a slightly higher perch on Mount Parnassus. Both films are long (well over two hours), and take place in human cities on the brink of anarchy and destruction (Gotham in The Dark Knight, the whole world in Watchmen). The superheroes suffer through a crisis of identity in which they question the fundamental reasons for doing what they do, as well as their moral qualifications for claiming to be upholders of justice, and they contemplate the profound ambiguity of their role in the city. These films repeat their themes over and over, explaining themselves to an audience accustomed to superhero movies full of spectacle and excitement—but they also indulge the audience with the same, making an ironic quid pro quo: a little bit of philosophy for a little bit of fireworks. The fireworks are part of the point, though: the violence that permeates the films is the violence of the city breaking apart, and the strength of these films lies in their depictions of how the superheroes try to keep things from disintegrating—the fundamentally religious problem of managing the brokenness of the human will and the fragile order that is built around it. But when the question of justice turns to the question of human nature, the dramas buckle before the gravity of the question: they are better at asking than at attempting to answer.

Recently and memorably, Andrew Tracy, writing for the film journal Reverse Shot, complained that “Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious. The slew of hyperbolic, overheated critical rhetoric that follows in the wake—hell, in advance of—the latest high-concept blockbuster is enough to make one gag.”

But Lewis would see the matter differently. Toward the end of “On Stories,” after giving a survey of different ways that fantastical stories can reveal truths about our own real-world psychology, and quoting widely and seemingly indiscriminately from low and high works, Lewis defends himself: “This does not mean that I think them of equal literary merit. But if I am right in thinking that there is another enjoyment in story besides the excitement, then popular romance even on the lowest level becomes rather more important than we had supposed.” We could argue the same for superhero movies.

To read the rest of the essay, please purchase the issue here.