The Death of Superhero
People have written for years about when “superhero movies will go the way of ‘The Western’”. Which is very ironic considering that comic books used to be carried by “western” stories, cowboys, and Indians, before comic superheroes showed up and ran them out of town. The “fattest draw in the west” was replaced by “the fattest man alive” and “the two-gun kid” found himself replaced by the likes of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and The Flash.
Superhero stories proved more flexible than traditional western tales which often carried the tropes of a bygone era — a very different time in American culture when men were men and women were housewives and life was brutal and resources often scarce. “A simpler time” as many are fond of saying.
To say I’m a superhero comic fan is putting it mildly. I’m an obsessive autist who has read superhero comics since I was five, amassing thousands, reading them all. So it might seem odd to say that in 2023 while reading comics my usual feelings of either “this is great” or “this is disappointing” (and I maintain I’ve never read a comic I hated) to “this is quaint”. I remember what is was specifically. I couldn’t get over the assumptions the story made “about the real world” — not the powers part — just the world they lived in.
When we talk about something “going the way of ‘The Western’” it’s a shorthand for a genre getting unpopular, or struggling to maintain an audience. Most of the reason it lacks dissection beyond that is the primary reasons often are not particularly interesting. “It went on too long”. “They made more than the market needs/demands”. “They got formulaic”. “They kept trying to one up the last one”. “The movie stars who were famous for them got too old”.
These are the primary reasons. That’s just an aspect of it that is not particularly deep.
However, maybe it is something else?
Westerns began to rub up against changing cultural attitudes. John Wayne, probably the first name anyone associates with western genre films, was racist in real life and often played a former Confederate soldier in his movies. The more we learned about the west the more we learned it wasn’t a story of brave explorers, but of genocidal colonizers. Today when you see modern westerns or western adjacent genres they usually dissect this aspect. Modern westerns are often what is referred to as a “deconstruction”.
In comic books the deconstruction period started in the 1980s, and was led by a man named Alan Moore, and he posited the thesis that superheroes are fascists.
The sort of sixth grade reading of that is “superheroes violently enforce their will on others and that is fascism”. That’s true in a very shallow way, but Alan Moore wasn’t quite talking about that aspect. He was talking about something else.
I had mentioned that comics felt quaint to me as of late, and the comics in question were Avengers comics from the same 1980s that produced Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and I noticed that the vast majority of these books revolved around fighting faceless hordes who were part of some “collective” who all think the same. Sometimes it was a horde of Ultrons, or other times it was The Sentinels in X-Men, or even other times it was just a group of suited henchmen in Spider-Man.
There are different political interpretations. Sometimes those groups likened to communist, as we were in a cold war with the USSR at the time. Sometimes they were literally that. Sometimes they could be likened to Nazis, with their matching uniforms and strict, almost religious adherence to a set of often hate filled ideals. Sometimes they were literal Nazis. However, above that was just the vague notion that *you* (the reader), were the true clear thinking individual (or at least the superhero is) and the horde, the villains, were NPCs.
In the 1980s it became important to challenge the infallibility of the hero — but once you start pulling that string it’s tough to put that quilt back together. In my opinion, that’s why the 90s is often so maligned in comics. They went back to the “classic” way of depicting heroes — so now they just acted like abusive and extreme assholes but were unapologetic about it.
Recently, a game who’s ending I will not spoil called KILL THE JUSTICE LEAGUE, was hacked recently a cutscene where Harley Quinn chews out a defeated Bruce Wayne/Batman. Many were upset because this scene was Kevin Conroy, a man I’ve called “my Mister Rogers”, swan song as Batman, arguably the world’s most popular superhero. The backlash was immense. But I contend it was because while I wouldn’t say the writing was amazing or groundbreaking, Harley was right.
She talked about Batman giving her poor, destitute friends PTSD. Making their lives demonstrably worse. “Batman goes around beating up drug addicts and the mentally ill” is basically a meme at this point — but the truth is Batman is creating drug addicts and the mentally ill, or he would be were he anything close to a real life equivalent. He would merely be an arm of “the system”.
Many people made fun of this image because it’s stupid. I mean it is, when you think about it. Superman and Aqua(people) could literally fix climate change in these comics. Storm could fix it in two seconds. The fact that they haven’t done something yet is actually quite villainous.
The thing about superheroes is you’re dealing with, inherently, the concept of “chosen ones” and “super”(but not exclusively)men — and this is the concept that is being slowly broken in reality.
Elon Musk was in Iron Man 2 ostensibly on the side of the hero, because Iron Man and Elon Musk both represent the same thing: western hegemony.
Who is the superhero? As mentioned one aspect that is either undercut or upheld is the heroes “infallibility”. The hero is righteous. The hero fights for “the good”. Captain America is not “the American government” with it’s corruption and flaws, he is the promise of America. He is what is in America’s soul.
Musk wasn’t a different person in Iron Man, it’s just that the ethos that is superhero cannot tell good from bad. That is what killed the western. The moral compass of that genre go exposed over time. What was once a flight of fancy now seemed terrible, icky, uncomfortable.
Superheroes protect western hegemony with the same ethos that drove manifest destiny, where once we ran roughshod over the people who lived on land we wanted to occupy, the superhero acts to colonize the world of the mind. The reason that for many audiences Brie Larson’s Captain America or the Miles Morales iteration of Spider-Man comes off as “forced diversity” or “wokeness” to many — perhaps one could say “the vibes are off” — is the same reason someone might find a western featuring a band of black women to be intentionally subversive. Isn’t Batman’s close working relationship with Gordon only feasible if Batman is white and privileged? Batman has never stood in that room and felt like maybe he should ask Gordon why the GCPD seems to stop black people disproportionately — in fact, he very much leverages the way the GCPD behaves, rightly or wrong, for his own purposes constantly.
In the comics and movies superheroes have colonized everything from space to the multiverse to even comic books themselves. There’s actually no reason the majority of US comics need to be about superheroes or need to specifically tell those types of stories, in fact, it’s often better when they don’t.
The death-grip they have on culture is similar to the western. It is a lack of desire to give up on this nativist and hyper individualist view of both ourselves and the world. Westerns did not “go the way of The Western” they became superhero stories. With no more lands to conquer, and dwindling numbers of Indians to genocide we turned to colonizing hearts and minds. That is what superheroes represent. The desire of small men, with small minds, who like violence, to see themselves as the one against the world of NPCs.
We’ve seen the results of this belief system.
2024 will be the year superheroes finally meet their match. Harley Quinn was right about Batman.