Broken Frontier

Flass:  "I don't know where they're going, I swear to God!"
Batman:  "Swear to ME!"

In Batman Begins (2005), Batman is tormenting Flass, a corrupt police detective.  Batman has snared Flass with a rope tied to his ankle, dangling him upside down from the roof of a tall apartment building.  He releases him to plummet to the ground, just short of splitting open his head on the pavement, before raising him to face more questions.  Flass is terrified, but you don't feel at all sorry for him.  He's done his share of tormenting the helpless.  "God" can't help you now, Batman seems to say.  You only have me.

The 20th century was the first century without an intervening God, voice of the outcast and tormented, liberator of the powerless and enslaved.  This God of the ancient Hebrews, and Roman-occupied Palestine, the God of the Bible who repeatedly punished worldly powers for exploiting the weak, was Himself weakened in the religious wars of the 15th and 16th centuries.  He received a mortal wound in the centuries of absolutist states, bourgeois clergy, and religious persecution.  His grave was dug in the European wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and His coffin was filled and covered by the 60 million dead of the Second World War.  In a world without a savior God, who would save the powerless?  Someone had to pick up the slack.  Enter the superhero.

Library of Babble has made much of the superhero myth over the last few weeks, but this week, we'll consider the possibility that superhero stories have nothing to do with myth.  Superheroes, far from being figures of mythology, may simply be protagonists in optimistic stories about the promise of human possibility.  In a world missing its Divine Savior, superheroes represent a kind of do-it-yourself approach to salvation.  Superhero stories speak to our ideas about our humanity, and especially our potential to carry on as defenders of the vulnerable, with or without God's help.

Superman came from another planet and has powers beyond anything conceivably human.  But it is his sense of fairness and concern for the welfare of others that has endeared him to readers for decades.  Bruce Wayne has billions to spend on technology and training, and his is a darker story of street justice, informed by a sense that the vulnerable and unsuspecting deserve a defender in a harsh world.  Peter Parker has the proportionate strength and agility of a spider, but we love him for his inability to turn his back on those in need.  The X-Men have mutated to acquire powers and abilities similar to the ancient gods, but their abilities are so specific that they must work as a team to accomplish anything good.  We empathize with them because of their struggles to build a sense of community. 

None of the powers of these superheroes speak to the heroic goodness they exemplify.  Their heroism results from something anyone can do: they choose the well-being of others over their own.  Aunt May explained it to Peter in Spider-Man 2 (2004):

"[Henry] knows a hero when he sees one.  Too few characters out there, flying around like that, saving old girls like me.  Lord knows kids like Henry need a hero.  Courageous, self-sacrificing people, setting examples for all of us.  Everybody loves a hero.  People line up for them.  Cheer them.  Scream their names.  And years later, they'll tell how they stood in the rain for hours, just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them to hold on, a second longer.  I believe there's a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady, and give up the thing we want the most, even our dreams."

Once upon a time, the Christian tradition teemed with accounts of Jesus, the angels, apostles, and saints.  They offered a promise of a perfect justice, even if we didn't understand it.  The atrocities of the 20th Century led many people to lose faith in the perfect justice promised by that tradition.  If God could not withstand the onslaught, then how could mere humans, however super, have any chance in the struggle for justice and freedom?

Whether out of desperation or optimism, people began to entertain the possibility that they could fashion some system of justice to replace the discredited system of Divine justice.   The superhero represents our confidence that ordinary humans can prevail in the pursuit of justice, even if justice is flawed.  In the ancient texts, the God of the Hebrews established the principle that the weak and powerless among us need to be defended, and that worldly power needs to be checked, and humbled.  In the modern world, we remind ourselves over and over through our superhero stories that this ancient principle of justice still binds us.  Superhero stories spring from our optimistic ideals, and our belief that we have the goodness within us to do the job once left to God. 

Superheroes have some abilities that are more than human.  Their abilities make them super, which is what attracts our imagination and curiosity.  But that is not what makes them heroes.  They embody the best of what it means to be human: kindness, fairness, goodness, and willingness to care for the well-being of others.  For that, they win our affection.