Holding out for a Hero

I was watching a trailer for the upcoming film The Marvels and remarking to my daughter how much I'm looking forward to it. I have had a fascination for superheroes since childhood, and I’ve particularly enjoyed watching them come to life in the movies and on television. Judging from social media, I may be one of the few men in the world who enjoyed the 2019 Captain Marvel movie, so I’m very interested in seeing her story continue.

However, it seems that not many people share my enthusiasm for the upcoming film. Box-office projections are placing The Marvels at the low end of a typical opening weekend for a Marvel film. The film’s focal point, Captain Marvel, portrayed by Brie Larson, seems to draw the ire of many fans, critics, and even people who’ve never seen her in the role but dislike what they think she represents. As one comic features writer put it:

Captain Marvel is the definition of strength in the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe]. However, trolls have criticized her left and right, primarily because she comes off as arrogant and a bad fit among characters that they've known for years. There are others who hate her for completely irrational reasons.

I should say right up front that I’m not the best person to seek out for an incisive critical review of a movie or TV show. If it deeply moves me, I’ll say as much, but I don’t have my critic’s antenna deployed and fine-tuned when I watch something. I’m just looking to be entertained, and if my family’s assessment means anything, that’s not a high bar to clear! I would hate to be a critic whose job is to find the strengths and flaws in a production; I want to enjoy the time I spend in a movie theater or sitting in my media room in front of the TV screen, and that means suspending my critical faculties for a couple of hours.

That said, I have a soft spot for superheroes who fight for the poor, oppressed, and underrepresented, and if they rose from those ranks, I’m even more predisposed to giving them the benefit of the doubt.

For example, I thought the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel was delightful. Iman Vellani played the main character with all the energy, spunk, and wide-eyed amazement of a teenage girl who fangirls superheroes and suddenly becomes one.

What made the series for me, aside from Vellani’s endearing portrayal of Kamala Khan, was how it introduced its audience to the Pakistani-American community and the history of their land of origin. It reminded me of the hope embodied in the American story for so many who come here to realize their dreams or escape the horrors of their home countries. I enjoyed how Kamala was a typical American teenager but was also part of another culture at home that was normal to her but rarely seen by most of us. I marveled, pun fully intended, at how the Pakistani culture adds to the richness of America and was reminded that this is a benefit accrued to our nation by all immigrants who come here. America has always prided itself on being a nation bound together not by ethnicity, language, or land but by a creed - “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator” - and that under that creed resides the hopes and dreams of countless tribes, peoples, nations, and tongues.

I also learned more about Pakistani history than I ever thought possible from a Marvel TV series. I was aware that the British divided the Indian subcontinent they had colonized into the nations of India and Pakistan. However, I didn’t understand the scope and trauma of what the Pakistanis call Partition, which “caused large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration between the two dominions.”

It was the largest mass migration in human history, and its portrayal in Ms. Marvel led me to read more about it. It is no exaggeration to describe it as a human tragedy on a massive scale, as historian and writer William Dalrymple recounts:

By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead. The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched as it may seem. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost unimaginable violence.

Art expressed in movies and TV shows can tell us stories that expand our world. I’m old enough to remember the impact of the Roots TV series on America, and there are other examples of how visual portrayals of history and culture help to scale barriers between and increase our awareness of people otherwise unknown to us. Superhero movies and TV shows can be powerful vehicles for representation and universalizing the human experience.

I wrote previously that I understood the appeal of Black Panther and Wonder Woman to the people groups they represented because of how they had been previously portrayed in popular culture throughout history, rarely as heroes:

More telling, however, has been the groundswell of pride the movie has engendered in the black community here in America, in Africa, and around the world…I confess the cultural impact of Black Panther has impressed me greatly.

The only thing comparable that I’ve seen is the reaction last year to one of 2017’s blockbuster films, DC Comics’ Wonder Woman, and it mirrors the response to Black Panther in character if not in scope, although Wonder Woman broke some new ground of its own at the box office as well. In fact, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and men who exploit their position or strength in a relationship to treat women poorly arose in the same year that Wonder Woman took the world by storm.

Essentially, these works of entertainment represent a validation of the people groups they represent, portraying them in ways that elevate them in a world that has too often put them down.

Even the Amazon Prime superhero movie Samaritan, panned by critics, captured my attention because of its blue-collar protagonist, played by Sylvester Stallone, using his considerable strength and durability to serve people who lived hard lives and had no one to look out for them.

However, one Amazon Prime series I will not watch is The Boys, based on a comic book of the same name. The powered beings who inhabit this world are corrupt and megalomaniacal, none more so than their leader, the Homelander, the most powerful of The Seven, a group of corporately funded superhumans. The series has been a success for Amazon and bred a couple of spinoffs, including the recent Gen V, which has already been greenlit for a second season. I have no interest in any of them, but many people do. I have the same enmity toward the movie Brightburn, which takes the Superman origin story and turns it into a nightmare with a superpowered alien child wreaking murderous havoc on the small Kansas town where he was found and adopted. As far as this film is concerned, we’re not in Smallville anymore.

A recent article examining the failures of recent superhero movies to capture audiences like Marvel Studios did in its heyday suggested that the evil superhuman genre holds more appeal to millennials and Generation Z than the traditional superhero film. I don’t believe that accounts entirely for what the industry calls “superhero fatigue,” but it led me to ponder why they would be attracted to these violent and nihilistic superhumans.

I concluded that we live in a dark and cynical age and these movies and TV shows reflect the pessimism of younger generations about life and the future. They blame older generations and existing institutions for the state of the world and perceive them as using power and influence to their benefit and at the expense of others. This tracks with the portrayals in these evil superhuman shows of powerful beings fulfilling their selfish desires regardless of the impact on the less powerful.

This distrust of great power is captured in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and its sequel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which are notable to me because of Henry Cavill’s excellent portrayal of Superman but also caused a lot of debate over their gloomier take on the traditional Superman story. In many respects, Man of Steel is as much a reflection of the generation in which it was created as Superman: The Movie is of my generation and those which preceded it. The version of Superman that the late Christopher Reeve played is the hopeful, optimistic, and revered superhero I remember from childhood, the embodiment of goodness and morality or, as the old TV show and Reeve himself said in the movie, “truth, justice, and the American Way.” Later iterations of that slogan dropped the last part, but that is another conversation altogether!

That said, Snyder and Cavill’s Superman is an accurate reflection of the 21st century’s attitudes toward influential people and institutions. The younger generations have witnessed the global breakdown of a shared moral order and the abuse of power and influence to feed the voracious appetites of the strong while the weak suffer. They have witnessed terror inflicted on non-combatants, corruption in corporate boardrooms and the citadels of government, and sexual abuse by the shepherds of our faith, and they perceive nothing is being done about any of it. The arrival of an all-powerful being from an alien culture would probably cause great fear and suspicion in an environment such as this. As Lawrence Fishburne’s Perry White said in Man of Steel in response to Lois Lane’s decision to quash her story about a mysterious superhuman being performing good deeds in secret, “Can you imagine how people on this planet would react if they knew there was someone like this out there?"

Batman v. Superman features a worldwide debate over the presence of Superman and whether it is wise for him to operate unchecked, given his immense power. Lex Luthor, Superman’s greatest earthly nemesis in comic book folklore, and even Bruce Wayne, the Batman, portrayed by Ben Affleck in the film, were mistrustful of Superman’s power. Wayne says of Superman:

He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there’s even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty… and we have to destroy him.

Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor quotes the Epicurean Paradox when he declares to Superman:

I've figured it out way back, if God is all powerful, He cannot be all good. And if He's all good then He cannot be all powerful. And neither can you be.

Unlike many of my generation who longed for the Big Blue Boy Scout that everyone adored, I thought this examination of Superman through the lens of an untrusting world was pretty much on the nose for our times.

For his part, Cavill’s Superman always sought to do the right thing, even if it was not always well executed. When he finally confronted the reporter chasing him around the globe, he threatened to disappear. However, Lois Lane called his bluff, saying, “The only way you could disappear for good is to stop helping people altogether, and I sense that's not an option for you.” The movies that comprised the Snyderverse, as Zack Snyder’s portrayal of DC Comics’ superheroes came to be known, didn’t modify the characters' personalities as much as they placed them in today’s world and suggested how we might respond to them and them to us.

The cynicism toward superheroes manifests not just in the deconstruction of the “good superhero” mythology but also in the hostile response toward the “woke” superhero that some segments of the population perceive in stories and representations like The Marvels, Black Panther, Wonder Woman, and others. For the record, I dislike the term “woke” in the modern vernacular. However, I will use it here in the context that it’s typically offered, even though I think it’s wrong and dishonors its originators and their history.

Ironically, anyone who knows the history of Superman, the character widely credited with popularizing the superhero genre, would see elements of “wokeness” in the comic books of the late 1930s and early 1940s as he fought against corrupt corporations, greedy landlords, and crooked politicians on behalf of the average citizen. Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman to the world, described him as a “champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need.” The early evidence of Superman as a purveyor of social justice is voluminous and persuasive. If the stories written about him from the beginning were read today within a modern construct, I’ve no doubt they’d be tossed into the bonfire alongside the books about black history and the Holocaust.

However, I am drawn to superheroes precisely because they use their power to help the powerless and bring righteousness and justice to the world. I sometimes wonder what the “anti-woke” crowd wants from their all-powerful beings if not to “comfort us in all our affliction” (2 Corinthians 1:4) and bring “down the mighty from their thrones and” exalt “those of humble estate” (Luke 1:52).

Ultimately, I believe my love of the superhero genre and my inability to buy into either the cynicism of the evil superhuman stories or the exclusion of the “anti-woke” comes from my devotion to the only true superhero, the God who came to earth as a man, Jesus Christ. He is undoubtedly a being of universal power that transcends space and time:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1: 1-3)

Despite His infinite power and presence, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14) and lived and died as one of us. During His life, he made no doubt as to his favor toward the downtrodden:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

His power was evident in miracles of healing and raising people from the dead, but He exhibited His greatest superpower early in His ministry:

Some men brought to him a paralytic, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven." At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, "This fellow is blaspheming!" Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, "Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, `Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, `Get up and walk'? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...." Then he said to the paralytic, "Get up, take your mat and go home." And the man got up and went home. When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to men. (Matthew 9:1-8)

Despite his external human frailty, He made it clear who He really was - “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58) - and when His enemies sent their troops to capture Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, He forbade his disciples from fighting them, declaring:

“Put your sword back in its place,”Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?” (Matthew 26:52-54)

When evil believed it prevailed over the hero, He burst out of the grave and announced to the world that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). He could well use His power to destroy us with a mere thought. However, He willingly surrendered His power for us:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

He even forgave us for murdering Him!

Our hero promises to return one day to set everything right, but not before everyone has a chance to come to His side:

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)

Thankfully, Jesus is not the hero we deserve because we fall short of His glory, but He is the hero we need because He loves us and wants us to “have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).