OK, let’s step aside from politics and religion (mostly) for a moment and talk about comic book superheroes and Doctor Who. Because we can.
Like most people who are fans of comics and/or Joss Whedon, I’m geekily excited about the Avengers movie coming out this summer.
I was never more than an occasional reader of the Avengers comics, but those characters made an impressive appearance in one of my all-time favorite comic book stories — the 1986 Daredevil “Born Again” series by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli.
That series was a brilliant bit of noir-ish storytelling, with Matt Murdock falling to pieces as the Kingpin — a crime lord with no super powers — slowly took away or destroyed every part of his life. The big final showdown involved the Kingpin losing all restraint and sending a psychotic killer after Murdock with automatic weapons and a helicopter gunship, wreaking havoc and mass-destruction in the middle of Manhattan.
And that’s when, “Out of nowhere they appear.” The Avengers show up and take charge and you suddenly remembered that in the Manhattan of the Marvel comics universe there aren’t just heroes, but super-heroes.
As I said, I’m looking forward to the Avengers movie. I’m sure it will be great fun to see such a talented cast exploring the characters and camaraderie of this super-powered team as they battle against super-powered villains like the Marvel-universe version of Loki (and, possibly, the Red Skull). Plus I think Whedon’s dialogue as spoken by Robert Downey Jr. promises to be enormously entertaining.
But the kind of comic-book superhero movie I’d like to see would be one that captures the awe that poor Ben Urich shares with the reader as he narrates those panels shown above. I haven’t seen the recent Captain America or Thor movies, but I doubt they convey the essence of those two heroes any better than that single page by Mazzucchelli. By showing us how they appear through another character’s eyes, Miller and Mazzucchelli allow us to see what familiarity had worn away.
One perennial trouble with superhero stories is that they turn into an arms race. The more powerful the hero, the more powerful the villains need to be to provide a credible challenge. This is part of why I’ve always found characters like Daredevil and Batman more interesting than Thor or Superman.
One way around this arms-race problem is to move the superhero to the periphery of the story — to allow your superheroes to be superheroes, but not to make them your superprotagonists. Make the story about someone else, someone more human and not quite so unstoppably powerful and invulnerable. The trick is to find a way of doing that without reducing the superheroes themselves to a tacked-on deus-ex-machina role.
Two of my favorite episodes of TV shows managed to do this, and I think they point to two different approaches — either one of which might work to give us a superhero movie quite unlike the summer blockbusters we’ve been seeing.
The first example I’m thinking of is the Doctor Who episode “Blink.” If you’re a Doctor Who fan, then I’m sure you’ve seen it. If you’re not a fan, then I can’t think of a better introduction to the show than this episode, even though the Doctor himself appears only as a peripheral character. Moffat turns the usual story around. Instead of a story about the hero racing to the rescue to save some random damsel in distress, the random damsel, Sally Sparrow, turns out to be the one who rescues the hero. The story is told through her eyes, allowing viewers to see the familiar hero with a fresh perspective.
Darin Morgan did something similar in a classic episode of the X Files spin-off Millennium called “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me.” The show’s main character, Frank Black, barely appears in that episode, which focuses on four grumpy old demons telling stories in a coffee shop. When Frank Black does appear, briefly, in each of their stories, he is seen as they see him and, again, viewers are given a fresh perspective and new insight into a familiar hero. Morgan turns the usual story around by showing us the hero through the eyes of the villains.
Both of those approaches might serve as a model for a superhero movie that wanted to be something other than an explosion-y summer blockbuster that ratchets up the arms race between superheroes and super villains.
Again, I’ve never been a big fan of Superman. His almost limitless power creates an obstacle that proves too great for many writers to overcome. Ultimately, there’s only so much kryptonite to go around. But what would it mean to tell a story set in Metropolis, but not centered around Superman, or Lois Lane, or the Daily Planet? What would it mean to turn the story around, to move Superman to the periphery and put a fresh perspective at the center of the story?
That would raise another problem, I think, but it’s a good problem — or, rather, it’s a problem that ought to provide grist for a good story. This problem, which is always lurking somewhere in the background of every Superman story, is more or less the same as one of the central puzzles of theology: the problem of evil.
Think of it in terms of Ben Parker’s famous advice for his nephew: “With great power comes great responsibility.” If that was true for Spiderman, who has “great power,” what does it mean for Superman, who has nearly limitless power? It seems to follow that with nearly limitless power comes nearly limitless responsibility.
One night in Metropolis there’s an accident. A drunk driver strikes and kills a pedestrian, a newlywed as it turns out. These things happen all the time in big cities. But they don’t happen all the time in this city. In Metropolis, most of the time — but not all of the time — Superman flies in to carry off the car, or carry off the pedestrian, or both, and save the day.
But not all the time. And not this time. This time he was off with the Justice League, or he was spooning with Lois or he was battling Lex Luthor or he was asleep or … he wasn’t there, is the point. And because he wasn’t there when he was needed, someone died, leaving behind a spouse who carries an aching resentment for the drunk driver and an even greater, more painful resentment for the city’s red-caped hero. Where was he? Why did he allow that to happen?
If this were a Golden Age comic book story, this grieving spouse would go mad and turn to a life of crime, vowing to destroy Superman. But I don’t want to turn this grieving spouse into a super-villain. I want to see what she will do if she finds herself in the same situation as Sally Sparrow, having to risk her life to save this alien hero.
That’s the Superman movie I want to see.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to Whedon’s explosion-y summer blockbuster, and I’m hoping that Darren Franich gets his wish to see Ryan Gosling play Matt Murdock in the rumored Daredevil: Born Again movie.
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