Do we still need superheroes?

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The other week, Marvel Studios released the cast list for its next alleged blockbuster, Avengers: Doomsday—in a nearly five-and-a-half-hour livestream. This was anticlimactic, to say the least. We—i.e., fans, I guess?—had known for months that the Russo Brothers, who directed the last two Avengers movies, Infinity Wars and Endgame, had hired Robert Downey Jr., most famous for his role as Leo Wiggins in the 1988 Anthony Michael Hall vehicle Johnny Be Good, as the Avengers’ metal-masked antagonist Doctor Doom. So the livestream was really just an overblown, overlong reveal of which minor characters would show up. Thor! Ghost! Bob¹ !

But does anyone really care at this point?

At one point, we all did. If you cast your mind back to the 2010s, Marvel’s movies were groundbreaking, exciting, highly anticipated. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk had their own movies franchises, coming together as the Avengers alongside Ant-Man, Spider-Man (on loan from Sony or something), Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Captain Obvious Branding Marvel, and Scarlett Johansson, with Samuel L. Jackson-Man as their civilian leader and the Guardians of the Galaxy as comic relief. Which is weird because in these movies, everyone was funny—that was partly why we watched them, for that ingenious mix of humor, violence, and star power. These superheroes were saving the day, the world, the universe, and having as much fun doing so as we had observing them. Marvel was the 2010s.

And then it all went to shit.

No Marvel movie since Avengers: Endgame has been any good at all. They made this one called Eternals, which starred Jon Snow from Game of Thrones and Kumail Nanjiani from Hot Tub Time Machine 2, and it was so boring and inconsequential that I watched all but the last, climactic 20 minutes and then just stopped and never thought about it again until this very moment. They made another called The Marvels, where—oh god, I’m not even going to bother.

The last several years of their movies have been bad. The TV shows have been slightly better. Loki gave us Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson trying to save the multiverse, which Doctor Strange had previously tried—and I guess failed?—to do in his movies. What If… gave us a cartoon Jeffrey Wright as a big-headed Watcher trying to save the multiverse. Wandavision gave us the third Olsen twin trying to save a multiverse she witched into being, and then Agatha All Along gave us Kathryn Hahn… I don’t know, I didn’t get that far in it, but I’m guessing it had something to do with the multiverse. In fact, there are a ton of Marvel TV shows, on Disney+ and Hulu and sometimes on Netflix and maybe even somewhere else, that I didn’t watch, because there are too many and for a while we canceled some of those subscriptions. But none of them strike me as being as truly bad as the theatrical-release movies, partly because their stakes are lower. You watch a 30-minute or 60-minute “TV” show because you want to be amused by the characters and the actors and the situations for a little while, but you don’t require the highs and lows, the sturm und drang, of a two-hour-plus film² . It’s okay if they don’t amount to much.

The superhero moment may be over

I have a theory that explains how all this has played out—and where it’s going. If you’ve read this far, my dear subscriber, you might as well bear with me. This won’t be like The Eternals, I swear!

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Phase 1: Holding Out for a Hero

The Marvel movies emerged from the Obama era. That was a time, it’s almost embarrassing to say now, of hope and faith: A unique individual had taken the presidency, endowed with the power of persuasive speech and a seemingly superhuman ability to connect with Americans of all stripes, even many of the unsalvageable racists (though, alas, not enough of them in the end). Technology, too, was charging ahead—iPhones and Facebook seemed like they might transform our world for good, or at least give our kids decent jobs in Silicon Valley. There were saviors seemingly everywhere, and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine them onscreen: an Asgardian god, an African prince, a billionaire playboy in a metal body condom, a patriotic super-soldier frozen in ice for decades. These were the heroes we wanted, and what we wanted them to do was black-and-white—we wanted them to save the goddamn universe.

Phase 2: Que Sera… Sera?

But once they did, finally, once and for all, save the universe—with a super snap of the super fingers, of course—things began to go awry. As the Trump/Covid era unfolded, we began to see the newly rescued universe differently. Namely, now that a guy who promoted himself as the only one who could save America was clearly not saving America, we started to imagine other ways it could have gone: other timelines, other realities, other universes. And the movies and TV have reflected that, becoming obsessed with the multiverse, the infinite collection of Ways It Could Have Gone. It’s not just Marvel, which made dozens of works trying to reconcile and rescue the possibilities—it’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, it’s the TV series Dark and Dark Matter, it’s the ease with which we now talk about living in “the worst timeline.”

In this phase, we could imagine all those alternatives but, being human, we’re stuck where we are, so we needed superheroes who could jump between them, finding realities that were worse, better, weirder, different to help us understand our place in this one. Again, though, that was a fantasy—a way of wishing that things were other than they are. We craved an escape, so we got more escapism. And that only lasts so long. Because when the credits roll—or, more likely, when we finish bingeing the current season—we find ourselves back in the same crappy timeline we’re doomed to inhabit.

Phase 3: Human, Not So Super

For the last few years, superhero fiction has undergone a shift, examining how the exploits of the indescribably powerful affect the less-powerful and the utterly powerless. The Boys, on Amazon Prime, is the gross-out king of this subgenre, set in an America where a massive corporation, Vought, not only creates superheroes through medical/scientific means but also operates an entertainment wing that makes movies about and starring them. In short, it asks: What if your typical craven Americans not only had indomitable superpowers but also were A-list celebrities? How monstrously entitled and destructive would they be, not to mention their corporate and political enablers? (Answer: very!) Likewise, Amazon’s Invincible operates on a similar track, minus the Hollywood angle, but with a civilian bystander body count that numbers in the thousands, if not higher, as whole cities are destroyed while the good guys try to stop the bad guys.

Both of those are quite cartoony (Invincible is animated, so natch), but several other recent shows emphasize the human over the superhuman. The British comedy Extra Ordinary imagines a world where, for the last decade, everyone gets a superpower around the age of 18—everyone except for one woman, who has to contend with the normal, excruciating experience of life (family, dating, etc.) surrounded by literal gods.

Darker still are Daredevil: Born Again (which I wrote about the other week) and The Penguin, the HBO Max series based on the D.C. villain, who previously antagonized Batman in the guise of Burgess Meredith and Danny DeVito. Now he’s played by a heavily made-up and fat-suited Colin Farrell, who has the handicaps of both a limp and an unplaceable mid-century urban accent, and whose desperation, downtroddenness, and honesty compel your sympathy even as he builds a drug-dealing empire from the sewers of Gotham City and along the way commits acts of truly shocking cruelty. The last ten minutes of the season-one finale, which I won’t spoil here, are just wrenching.

What all these series (except Extra Ordinary) have in common is their concern with crime and corruption at levels of American life. The rich, famous, powerful, and super-powerful operate with impunity, and their whimsical violence trickles down through these economies. The mere existence of such fantastically godlike beings ruins the world, even as it holds out the promise of salvation: Because we are worried about Thanos blipping half the life from the universe, or about celestial beings hatching from our planet with all the delicacy of a baby crocodile, a gangster like Kingpin can become mayor of New York City. And the worse the rot, the less we want to see of the superheroes who can beat back legions of aliens and multidimensional baddies but who can never save us from ourselves. They are the symbols of what we can achieve—they are the 1%—but also of what the remaining 99% know we will never achieve.

And at this moment, in this national mood, we are done with the 1%. So I’m betting that because of this, Avengers: Doomsday will fail. We have been abandoned by our gods, and now we will abandon them ourselves.

But What If…?

There are two ways that Avengers: Doomsday could succeed. One is by addressing this situation head-on. As we all surely know, Victor Von Doom isn’t just a bad guy. He’s the autocratic leader of the tiny nation of Latveria, and many of his plots, over decades and decades of comic books, have revolved around his attempts to build up and protect Latveria, and to bring—with equal parts earnestness and megalomania—the same benefits to the rest of the world that he’s brought to his own people. In a recent series called One World Under Doom, ol’ Vic becomes emperor of the world—the new “United Latveria”:

So maybe this new movie Doom will use something like that against the Avengers: Here he is just trying to make the world a better place, and yeah, he’s a dictator, but what are the Avengers protecting? Feckless governments that refuse to take care of their own people, that allow turn a blind eye to corruption as they stoke fears of alien-wrought apocalypse? The Avengers have to win, of course, but maybe it’ll be a kind of “Yeah, we’d rather everyone live freely but shittily, instead of in a dictatorial utopia.” That’s the moral gray area we crave from superhero movies, right?

Another option would be for Avengers: Doomsday to focus on an origin story: How did Victor von Doom become Doctor Doom? Because we love an origin story! There’s nothing better than seeing how a nobody gains the powers of the universe, and then has to grapple with how to use them, whether to use them, how that power is changing who they thought they were. Because as much as we loathe the 1%, this remains the fantasy—that each one of us could somehow become a one-percenter, and do it better, be better, than the nitwits and crumbums who’ve failed before us. The schmuck-to-superman arc is one we’ll never tire of. It’s the sequel, however, that invariably sucks.

Which is why, of all the superheroes in all the multiverse, Spider-Man is the best. His origin story, whatever its permutations, has the requisite elements—a scientific accident, the loss of a father figure, the tenuous potential for romance, and the utter wild joy of the powers themselves, the glorious acrobatics and pinball velocity that fulfill every wish of every city dweller ever glued by gravity to the filthy sidewalk. Most important is Peter Parker (or Miles Morales) himself: He’s a good kid. He understands that with great power comes great responsibility, and he tries, at every moment and in every movie, animated or live action, to live up to that responsibility in a way the rest of the Avengers rarely confront. We watch his origin story rehashed ad infinitum, with novel twists and novel actors, because it’s one we like to tell about ourselves: that we are at our cores moral beings who, granted the right abilities, would always do the right thing.

And there’s the tragedy: We already have that superpower, yet struggle to exercise it. At each turn, at each level-up, it slips from our grasp, and we take the easy, if wrong, decision to protect what we have and snatch what we don’t rather than to act on behalf of our fellows. (Not you, of course, dear reader! Just, you know, everyone else.) With great power comes great responsibility, okay, but also with any power comes great responsibility. We need to act like the superheroes we dream of being, not the ones we see onscreen.

Until then, we’ll always be the denizens of Kingpin’s New York or the Penguin’s Gotham, fearful of the cop or the thug in the alleyway, and just hoping a battle in the sky doesn’t drop a building on our heads. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Bourdain’s Facebook Afterlife

The Facebook “No Reservations” page has mysteriously started posting again, so I guess it’s time to revisit this piece:

If you have any intel on why this is happening, please let me know!

1  Yes, there is a superhero just called Bob.

2  Pronounced with a French accent, of course.