Tag Archives: Super Heroes

Rorschach, Abolition, and the Higher Law

HBO’s Watchmen is set in the universe of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel. Moore’s central characters are current and former masked vigilantes, anti-heroes, and psychopaths. While Moore’s masterpiece tackles Cold War paranoia, Damon Lindelöf puts white supremacist violence at the heart of his show. The show opens with the razing of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921. In the graphic novel, Nixon is elected to a third term and the U.S. is on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In the show, the cultural pendulum swings back the other way, as Robert Redford is elected president and institutes a policy of reparations to African Americans for events like the Tulsa Massacre.

In the graphic novel, Walter Kovacs becomes the vigilante Rorschach when he dons his trench coat and mask decorated with the shifting ink blot of a Rorschach test. Rorschach embodies a zealot’s fervor. He wars on crime with Batman’s conviction, but with no compunction about killing. Rorschach believes that drastic action must be taken against evil and immorality. He follows what 19th-century abolitionists called the “higher law.”

Abolitionists had an awkward relationship to the Constitution. The notorious Three-Fifths Compromise enshrined slavery in the nation’s founding charter. From Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward to newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison to Transcendentalist and pond enthusiast Henry David Thoreau, abolitionists turned to the trope of the higher law to escape this bind. According to this idea, God’s law is higher than man’s. While the Constitution might consider slavery legal, God considers it evil. Although we think of them as being “on the right side of history” today, abolitionists were widely considered fanatics in the 1850s.

Perhaps more than any other abolitionist, Rorschach resembles John Brown. In what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown executed five slave holders in Kansas. He also helped fugitive slaves escape to Canada. He felt called by God, like the ancient prophets, to fight the slave power. Leading a small cadre of followers, Brown seized control of the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. After a series of bizarre tactical decisions, his plan to spark a widespread slave uprising failed and Brown was eventually executed for treason. Brown became the ultimate martyr to the abolitionist cause. Unlike more pragmatic figures like Lincoln, John Brown waged a sacred crusade against evil. Brown was uncompromising; he rejected gradualism, pragmatism, and half-measures. He felt justified dispensing with the law to follow the Higher Law.

Like Brown, Rorschach becomes a martyr. Dr. Manhattan disintegrates Rorschach because the latter is determined to reveal to the world that Ozymandias staged an alien attack to end the Cold War by creating a common enemy for humanity to fight. Rorschach would rather die than keep quiet about Ozymandias’s plan.

In “The Abolitionist Imagination,” Andrew Delbanco argues that abolitionism left us a troubling legacy. The trope of the higher law and the abolitionist fervor to defeat evil leaves no room for compromise, negotiation, or gradualism. While the logic of the higher law is inflexible, its content is infinitely flexible. The KKK follow a higher law diametrically opposed to the one cherished by abolitionists, but both groups justify violence for the sake of their cause.

Inspired by Rorschach, the Seventh Kavalry are a fictionalized version of the Klan. The Seventh Kavalry are terrorists who believe they are carrying on Rorschach’s legacy by killing cops. Lindelöf seems to be satirizing misguided fans’ love for Rorschach. This is a world of masks: like super heroes and super villains, the Kavalry are the eerie doppelgangers of the masked cops they fight.

The show’s third episode features a fascinating encounter between Angela Abar, an undercover cop known as Sister Night, who survived an assassination attempt by the Kavalry, and Laurie Blake, who has forsaken her identity as the heroine Silk Specter in favor of becoming an FBI agent on the anti-vigilante task force. Laurie asks Angela, “What’s the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante?” When Angela replies that she doesn’t know, Laurie says, “Me neither.” Laurie has totally disavowed her past as a costumed heroine and now sees masked vigilantes as dangerous, even when their intentions are good.

Racial Passing in Megamind

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The animated film Megamind offers a coded analysis of racial passing, as the clever, but largely unsuccessful, villain, discovers that he is actually better suited to being a hero. While the film conveys a number of themes common to children’s movies, such as the importance of being yourself and the value of friendship, it also serves as a reflection on racial passing.

Racial Passing in American Literature

“Passing” generally refers to the attempt by a person of one race to pose as a member of another. Typically, black figures pass as white. Ellen Craft passed as a white man, with her darker-skinned husband posing as her slave, to escape bondage. The protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man passes as white after witnessing a lynching. In Nella Larsen’s novel Passing Clare Kendry passes as white, marrying a white man who has no idea that she is “black.” Sometimes, however, white people pass as black. Rachel Dolezal, for instance, controversially passed as black while serving as the president of the N.A.A.C.P. In both history and fiction, the issue of passing suggests the fluidity of racial identity which is socially constructed and performed through external signs. Megamind can be read not just as offering a generic message about being yourself, but more specifically as a parable about the temptation to pass.

Megamind as a Re-telling of Superman

An alien from another planet, Megamind has light blue skin. Megamind’s identity as an alien and his phenotypic difference metaphorically liken him to African Americans, especially since all of the film’s other characters are white. His nemesis, Metro Man, possesses roughly the same powers as Superman, but with an all-white costume. Metro Man represents the idealization of whiteness in American society. From childhood, Megamind is forced to occupy the role of villain in relation to Metro Man’s hero, despite signs that he is not suited for it. If Metro Man wears all white, then Megamind must, inevitably, don black. An ingenious inventor, Megamind is much more creative than Metro Man, who relies on his super strength, ability to fly, and laser vision. The hero-villain relation between Metro Man and Megamind reflects the binary opposition between whiteness and blackness, in which white is always superior and black is always inferior. Megamind embraces his assigned role, pitting himself against Metro Man in an ongoing feud. Megamind resembles Lex Luthor, except that he really is not evil. He enjoys puzzles and competition against Metro Man more than he wants to actually hurt anyone.

The film opens with Megamind having captured Roxanne Richie–based on Lois Lane–for the umpteenth time and Metro Man ready to save her. Except this time, Metro Man uses the opportunity to fake his own death. He is tired of being a super hero and wants to become a musician. One can read Metro Man’s decision as a colossal denial of responsibility. Should he not use his powers to continue saving people? Yet, when one interprets Metro Man as embodying the idealization of whiteness, then his decision to abdicate his role as the defender of Metro City seems a salutary attempt to divest himself of the illusory perfection with which his white skin invests him. Metro Man’s retirement from super hero status represents a white man’s resistance to white privilege.

With Metro Man gone, Megamind takes possession of the city. Yet, beyond moving into city hall and stealing some art, his deviousness is quickly exhausted. He simply lacks interest in committing actual evil. The film draws attention to Megamind’s “blackness” through a red and blue poster of Megamind that parodies the Barack Obama Hope poster. The parallel is cemented with the phrase “No You Can’t” under Megamind’s face, parodying Obama’s “Yes We Can” campaign slogan. Megamind is further associated with African American men by the fact that he grows up in prison. An orphan from another planet, Megamind ends up living in jail, taking the bus to school every day. This fanciful arrangement metaphorically captures the situation of millions of black men who are incarcerated at a young age. Megamind’s blue skin and orange jump suit equally brands him as a threat to his nice, white class mates.

Racial Passing and Romantic Relationships

Megamind is in love with Roxanne Richie, but can only spend time with her by adopting the identity of the white, intellectual Bernard. Megamind uses a holo-projecting watch to achieve this illusion. Passing as white allows Megamind to begin dating Roxanne, who is genuinely attracted to his personality when it is cloaked in whiteness. While Megamind uses technology to pass, others do so because their skin is light enough to make their racial identity ambiguous. Megamind’s watch malfunctions, however, during a date with Roxanne. The illusory white image of Bernard disappears and Roxanne finds herself kissing a bald, blue Megamind. She shrieks with alarm, as the film dramatizes the moment of recognition when the white partner first realizes that her partner is only passing for white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEQWFnMGUZ8

In the second half of the film, Megamind and Roxanne get to know each other on more honest terms and renew their romantic relationship. Roxanne gets to know the “real” Megamind, discovering that he is not the villain she thought he was. She helps Megamind stop Titan, an immature and misguided man who is accidentally given Metro Man’s powers.

Megamind resorts to racial passing again, however, in an attempt to stop Titan. Using his watch, Megamind cloaks himself in Metro Man’s image. Posing as Metro Man, Megamind initially scares Titan away, until he perceives that it is only Megamind in disguise. Megamind’s idiosyncratic speech gives him away: he pronounces “Metro City” as “Metrocity” (rhyming with “atrocity”). Megamind’s curious speech patterns–pronouncing “melancholy” as “mell-onk-olly” and “hello” as “oh-lo”–signify the way that minorities often depart from Standard English.

As Megamind passed as the white Bernard to gain Roxanne’s affection, so he passes as the white Metro Man to intimidate Titan. In both cases, however, Megamind’s passing is discovered and he is forced to face the situation in his own skin. The film, therefore, treats passing as an unstable solution to one’s problems, implying that a black person passing for white will inevitably be discovered. Megamind defeats Titan using his own courage and ingenuity, demonstrating that passing is unnecessary.

The film ends with Metro City honoring Megamind for saving them from Titan. Megamind and Roxanne dance to Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” reinforcing the film’s theme of racial passing. In his attempt to remove the pigment from his skin, Michael Jackson embodies the anxieties surrounding passing. The film uses the double meaning of “bad” as evil or cool to humorous effect, as Megamind and Minion argue over what is “good for bad.”

Neo-paganism and the Cult of Technology in Age of Ultron

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Tony Stark practices neo-paganism and the force he worships is technology. Religious systems mediate power relations. Paganism is a religious system which mediates power through specialized knowledge and ritual. It is polytheistic, acknowledging various local deities, such as the god of a particular river or mountain, whose strength is limited and contingent. Unlike in monotheistic religions, pagan deities have a limited sphere of influence. This attitude is recorded in 1 Kings 20, which describes a war between ancient Israelites and Syrians. After losing a battle to the Israelites “the servants of the king of Syria said to him, ‘Their gods are gods of the hills, and so they were stronger than we. But let us fight against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they'” (1 Kings 20:23). The servants of the king of Syria reason, quite correctly according to pagan logic, that the Israelites’ god could not possibly be equally strong in the hills and the plain. According to paganism, the ultimate power in the universe is beyond these local deities–an impersonal force upon which a skilled priest or sorcerer might draw. Paganism is also transactional. Ancient near eastern communities worshiped Baal as a storm god who would bring rain and good harvests if he received the proper sacrifice in the proper way. This is why specialized ritual knowledge is so important: if the sacrifice is not prepared properly, then the god will be angry rather than pleased. Pagan societies grant special status to shamans or priests because of their esoteric ritual knowledge.

As paganism requires precision, so do computer-based technologies. As a small mistake in a ceremony might provoke a god’s wrath, so the wrong key stroke can botch a string of computer code. Improperly regulated electricity can fry circuits. Atmospheric disturbances can disrupt satellite signals. Too much heat can cause servers to melt and systems to crash. Thor prepares us for this concept of neo-paganism based on technology when, in the first Thor movie, he explains to his astrophysicist girlfriend, Jane, that “your ancestors called it ‘magic’ and you call it ‘science,’ but I come from a place where they are one and the same thing.” Science is “magical” because it achieves the seemingly impossible; magic is “scientific” because it is governed by precise laws.

The Cult of Technology

Tony Stark is a priest in the cult of technology. Like any priest, he has specialized knowledge, in this case of mechanical engineering, weapons manufacturing, and computer programming. As paganism promises that the power of the gods can be summoned to enable humans to defeat their enemies, so Tony harnesses the power of technology to defeat his foes. The religious quality of Tony’s faith in technology is signaled early in Avengers: Age of Ultron by a shot of a bumper sticker which says, “Jarvis is my copilot” a parody of the evangelical Christian bumper sticker saying “Jesus is my copilot.” Jarvis, a computer program named after Tony’s father Howard’s butler, represents the remarkable potential of technology. Jarvis implements Tony’s ideas, running endless calculations and simulations to perfect the Iron Man suit and Tony’s other inventions. Tony has faith in Jarvis even when he and the other Avengers fail to defeat Ultron.

In almost every Marvel movie, Tony performs some kind of ritual re-calibration. In Iron Man 2, for instance, Tony creates a new element to power the reactor in his suit by erecting a “prismatic accelerator” consisting of a circular metal coil, a prism, and a laser. While Tony is experimenting rather than performing a previously established ritual, the scene captures the neo-paganism in Tony’s relation to technology: once the proper formula has been enacted, power is received.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvcwPttQsIc

Neo-Paganism in Age of Ultron

In Age of Ultron, Tony and Dr. Banner inadvertently create the villain, Ultron, in their attempt to create an integrated AI system capable of global defense. Ultron becomes a terrorist, however, when he concludes that humanity would be better off dead and that machines are the way of the evolutionary future. After Ultron first goes haywire, Thor blames Tony for playing with forces beyond his comprehension. This is the greatest danger of neo-paganism–unleashing power one cannot control.

Strangely, instead of learning from his apparent mistake–that AI is unpredictable, that something will always go wrong with overly ambitious technologies–Tony doubles-down and convinces Dr. Banner to download Jarvis’s consciousness into the body which Ultron created for himself. Dr. Banner initially suggests they are repeating the same mistake–“this is where it all went wrong”–and Captain America accuses Tony of not knowing what he is doing. Yet, this decision is not merely Tony being stubborn, but touches his fundamental faith in technology. Tony believes his failure was due to a mistaken calibration, as a pagan priest would feel if a ritual were conducted improperly. It would be as inconceivable for Tony to accept that technology could fail completely, that it would be incapable of solving his problem, as it was counter-intuitive for the Syrians to think that the Israelites’ god could defeat their god both in the hills and the plains. Tony’s logic reflects neo-paganism: technology will grant him the power that he needs so long as he performs the correct calculations and calibrations.

The Cult of Technology vs. American Civil Religion

Tony’s seemingly irrational decision, which is perfectly rational following the logic of paganism, leads to one of his many clashes with Captain America. Captain America, of course, is angry because he believes Tony is being reckless and stubborn, but the real conflict between Tony and Cap is religious. If Tony is a neo-pagan worshiper of technology, then Cap embodies American civil religion. While most dictators operate under the premise that “might makes right,” Captain America epitomizes the American ideal that “right makes might”–that good will triumph over evil because it is good. Cap’s courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice, along with his belief in freedom, democracy, truth, and justice encapsulates American ideas of heroism. Captain America was created to fight the Nazis, and his mission reflects the idea derived from the Puritans that America has a special mission in the world. The serum that transformed Steve Rodgers into Captain America not only enhanced his physical strength, but it also multiplied his virtues, making him essentially incorruptible. Tony tells Cap, “I don’t trust a guy without a dark side,” but purity and righteousness are central to American civil religion. Cap will always choose duty over love, as he does in Captain America: The First Avenger when he crashes a bomber into the ice to prevent casualties, even though it means losing Peggy.

A New Pantheon

If Captain America is a kind of saint, the Vision is both literal and figurative deus ex machina: he is a literal “god from the machine” as he emerges from the “regeneration cradle” which Ultron uses to create a body from synthetic organic tissue and vibranium and into which Tony and Dr. Banner download Jarvis. He also serves the typical deus ex machina function by solving a seemingly unsolvable plot problem–how the Avengers will defeat Ultron. The Vision is inexplicably able to lock Ultron out of the internet. Had the Avengers been unable to sever Ultron’s connection to the web, he could have replicated himself infinitely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwoMnuKAnXA

The Vision and Ultron function much like pagan gods, each possessing significant power, but lacking omnipotence. If technology in the abstract is a potentially unlimited source of power, then the Vision is an avatar of that impersonal force. The Vision is identified as divine when, in attempting to describe himself, he says, “I am” before trailing off, an allusion to Yahweh’s self-definition as “I am” to Moses in Exodus 3. Yet, the Vision is neither omniscient nor omnipotent; his power is great, but limited, like Zeus’s or Thor’s.

If the Vision is a just, benevolent deity willing to help humanity and even feels compassion toward Ultron, then Ultron is a wrathful deity intent on destroying humanity. Each of them manifests the power of technology for good and evil. Ultron is fond of quoting the bible and comparing his actions to stories of God’s judgment like Noah’s Flood. Ultron’s desire to destroy the Avengers, particularly his creator Tony, reflects the parricidal conflict in which younger pagan gods overthrow older ones. In Greek mythology, the Titan Kronos overthrew his father Uranus. Kronos was, in turn, overthrown by his son, Zeus. Ultron says, “Everyone creates the thing they dread” and suggests that human life is an agonistic struggle between generations, as people give birth to children “designed to supplant them, to help them end.” Ultron’s ultimate plan is to annihilate humanity by raising a massive hunk of earth into the air and then allowing it to crash back to the surface like a meteor strike. He is attracted to an image of “the world made clean for the new man to rebuild.” Ultron perceives himself as the new god out to destroy the old pantheon–the Avengers. Age of Ultron relies on the idea of neo-paganism in its portrayal of clashes between figures of god-like power.

Christology in Superman Returns and Man of Steel

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In his review of Man of Steel, Wesley Morris quips that Superman “flies for our sins.” Yet, Man of Steel does not offer a Christology based on substitutionary atonement, but rather on moral exemplarism. Superman does not sacrifice his life to save humanity, but rather his heroism is supposed to inspire humanity to live up to his example. In Superman Returns, however, Superman undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection. He sacrifices his life to save humanity, but survives his near-fatal ordeal. Each film has an implicit Christology, as each likens Superman to Jesus in different ways. A “high” Christology emphasizes Jesus’ divinity, whereas a “low” one emphasizes his humanity. Neither film has a purely high or low Christology. Superman Returns has a high Christology by emphasizing Superman’s difference from human beings, but the suggestion that he is the father of Lois’s child emphasizes his similarity to humans. Man of Steel portrays Clark’s ability to blend in with humans and the incredible powers that make him so different. Man of Steel‘s Christology focuses on Superman’s choice to identify with human beings, as the Gospels portray Jesus’ choosing to embrace his Messianic destiny.

Christology and Moral Exemplarism in Man of Steel

Man of Steel establishes numerous parallels between Superman and Jesus. The main events of the film occur when Clark is thirty-three, the same age as Jesus when he was crucified. As God the Father sends God the Son to redeem humanity, so Jor-El sends his son Kal-El to earth. Moreover, “El” is actually one of the Hebrew words for God. The filmmakers emphasize this etymology when Kal-El’s mother, Lara, tells Zod that her son is named “Kal, son of El.” While floating in space above earth, Superman stretches out his arms, resembling Jesus’ pose on the cross. As Jesus was raised by earthly parents–Joseph and Mary–who did not always understand him, so Clark’s human parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, try their best to raise their superhuman son. Jor-El declares to his wife that their son “will be a god” to the people of earth.

Throughout his youth, Clark conceals his powers, although he does use them to save lives. This is the equivalent of the “Messianic Secret”: in the Gospels, Jesus does not reveal that he is the Son of God for the first thirty years of his life. When Zod demands that humanity turn Kal-El over to him Clark goes to a church seeking guidance. With a stained glass image of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane behind him, Clark wrestles with the decision to reveal his powers. As Jesus does not reveal his identity until the right moment, so Clark chooses to reveal his powers only when humanity is in danger.

Both Jesus and Kal-El’s births are miraculous. While Jesus was conceived by the Virgin Mary, Kal-El is “Krypton’s first natural birth in centuries.” Jor-El’s consciousness, downloaded into an ancient Kryptonian vessel that had lain dormant on earth for millennia, tells Clark that on Krypton “Every child was designed to fulfill a predetermined role in our society.” Jor-El and Lara, however, believed that this was a mistake: “What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended for him or her? What if a child aspired to something greater?” Clark embodies Jor-El’s dream of free choice over rigidly proscribed roles achieved through genetic engineering. Jor-El urges his son to bring hope to humanity: “The symbol of the house of El means hope. Embodied within that hope is the fundamental belief in the potential of every person to be a force for good.” Jor-El hopes that his son will inspire humanity to choose good rather than evil. He knows that this will not happen instantaneously. The moral development of humanity will require a process of growth and maturation. Kal-El offers his son this mission: “You will give the people of earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you. They will stumble; they will fall. But, in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”

Superman and Medieval Christology

This closely resembles the logic of the medieval theologian Peter Abelard’s moral influence theory of atonement. Unlike his contemporary Anselm, Abelard did not believe that Jesus’ death on the cross primarily satisfied God’s wrath or redeemed humans from guilt and sin. Abelard did not conceive of the crucifixion as a legal transaction, in which Jesus paid a debt owed by sinners to God. According to Abelard, “what humanity needs is a new motive for action” (Olson 328). Jesus’ heroic self-sacrifice on the cross reveals God’s love for humanity and inspires them to love and obey him in return. For Abelard, the “real atonement takes place within us, not on the cross” (329). As Abelard argued that Jesus’ action showed people how to live in loving obedience to God, so Jor-El believes that Kal-El will become humanity’s great moral exemplar, leading them to new heights of achievement.

As Clark looks down on Lois’s escape pod hurtling toward earth, the holographic projection of Jor-El’s consciousness tells Clark “You can save them all.” Yet, the salvation that Jor-El imagines is not salvation from sin in the traditional sense. This salvation is moral, rather than metaphysical. Jor-El wants Kal-El to save humanity from the mistakes that destroyed Krypton–the squelching of individuality and callous disregard of the environment. The Kryptonians destroyed their planet by recklessly harvesting natural resources, a fate which the film suggests might befall earth if people do not turn toward more sustainable modes of life. Moreover, Zod’s genocidal xenophobia represents an exaggerated version of the racism and ethnic conflict plaguing our world. Zod wants to terra form earth into a new Krypton, sacrificing the human population to recreate his homeworld. Superman can teach humanity to avoid the Kryptonians’ decadence on the one hand and Zod’s fanaticism on the other. He does not offer eternal life, but rather can lead humans to build the perfect society on earth.

Despite these varied ways in which the film highlights the similarities between Jesus and Superman, Jor-El’s vision for his son is not that he sacrifice his life for humanity per se, but that he teach humans how to be better. Man of Steel portrays Superman, not as the Jesus who must die on the cross and be raised from the dead, but as humanity’s ultimate example of goodness. Superman does save the planet from destruction at the hands of the fanatical General Zod, yet the true salvation is the example he sets with his heroism.

Christology in Superman Returns

The implicit Christology of Superman Returns treats Superman as both a moral exemplar and a sacrificial figure. Evoking the Second Coming, the title of Superman Returns sets up the parallel between Jesus and Superman from the beginning. Superman has been absent from earth while traveling to the ruins of Krypton. Irritated with Superman for leaving earth without even saying goodbye, Lois insists that “The world doesn’t need a savior.” Superman counters “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior, but every day I hear people crying for one.”

Even Lex Luthor characterizes Superman as a god, albeit a selfish one. Luthor compares himself to Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus, casting Superman as a selfish Zeus hoarding power instead of sharing it with humanity. Speaking implicitly about Superman, Luthor says, “Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don’t share their power with mankind.”

While it does not develop it to the extent that Man of Steel does, Superman Returns includes the idea of moral exemplarism. Jor-El’s disembodied voice intones, “Even though you have been raised as a human being, you are not one of them. They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.” Jor-El’s word’s reiterate the parallel between him and God the Father, each sending their sons to save humanity. Jor-El speaks of Kal-El as bringing light to show people the way, giving them a moral example.

Unlike in Man of Steel, however, in Superman Returns Superman experiences a symbolic death and resurrection. Superman’s confrontation with Lex Luthor evokes Jesus’ crucifixion. Using crystals stolen from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, Luthor creates a huge and rapidly growing island off the coast of Metropolis. The island is embedded with kryptonite, and when Superman arrives his power begins to wane. As Jesus was beaten and mocked by Roman soldiers before his crucifixion, so Luthor and his henchmen assault the powerless Superman with impunity. As a centurion pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, so Luthor stabs Superman with a kryptonite shard. Unable to remove the kryptonite lodged in his back, Superman sinks into the water until he is rescued by Lois and her fiancé Richard. Superman then flies into the sky, above the clouds. He basks in the sun, recharging his power.

Superman lifts the massive crystalline rock into the air. He carries it through the atmosphere, even though it is laced with kryptonite and draining his powers, eventually launching it into space. Exhausted by the effort, Superman plummets back to earth with his arms outstretched in the pose of Jesus on the cross. He crashes into the planet’s surface, apparently having sacrificed his life to save humanity. Superman is rushed to a hospital where doctors attempt to revive him. Lois visits the unconscious Superman in the hospital. Superman does not revive, like Sleeping Beauty, with Lois’s kiss, but rather disappears later when no one is watching. His empty hospital bed is like the empty tomb Jesus left behind when he was raised from the dead. As Jesus remained dead for three days, so Superman remains unconscious for a period of time before rising.

Superman Returns characterizes its hero as the earth’s badly needed savior, whereas Man of Steel portrays him as a moral exemplar whose mission goes beyond saving the world from danger to leading humanity into a new era of virtue.

Sources:

Olson, Roger E. The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform. InterVarsity Press, 1999.

Nihilism, the Death Drive, and the Joker in The Dark Knight

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In On Evil, Terry Eagleton argues that Freud’s concept of the death drive can be synthesized with traditional theological accounts of evil, particularly those of Augustine and Aquinas, to define evil in terms of death and annihilation. As portrayed in The Dark Knight, the Joker perfectly embodies this theory of evil. The Joker embodies nihilism, chaos, and fear because he has no ordinary motive, such as wealth, power, or revenge. He destroys others for no other reason than his perverse enjoyment.

Nihilism and the Death Drive

At the end of his introduction, Eagleton says, “evil is indeed all about death–but about the death of the evildoer as much as that of those he annihilates” (18). The Joker is obsessed with death, both his own and that of others. During the bank robbery with which The Dark Knight opens, the Joker nonchalantly shoots one of the men he hired to perform the heist. In fact, he gives each member of his crew the order to kill another of the thieves once his role in the robbery is complete. Throughout the film, the Joker kills police officers and gangsters alike, and arranges the assassinations of a judge, the police commissioner, and, of course, Rachel, the mutual love interest of Batman and Harvey Dent.

Beyond his destruction of other human lives, the Joker exemplifies the drive toward his own annihilation. According to Eagleton’s reading of Freud, the death drive is the idea that “human beings unconsciously desire their own destruction. At the core of the self is a drive to absolute nothingness” (108). The Joker exemplifies this kind of nihilism. At Gotham General Hospital, he gives Harvey Dent a gun and presses it against his own head–had Harvey’s coin landed on the other side, he would have pulled the trigger. At the climax of the car chase, the Joker and Batman advance toward each other–Batman on the Bat-cycle and the Joker on foot. Although the Joker has a gun, he does not shoot at Batman. As Batman races toward him, the Joker mutters to himself, “Come on. Come on. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. Come on. Come on hit me. Hit me. Hit me!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGisF2GgKHM

Eagleton says, “The evil are in pain” (103). Three times the Joker asks, “Wanna know how I got these scars?” He tells two different stories–and would have told a third had Batman not interrupted him–about the origin of his gruesome trademark. Neither anecdote the Joker shares about his scars is true, but they both point to the foundational truth that he is a profoundly maimed individual or, as the Joker riffs on a famous Nietzsche quote, “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger.” The Joker’s humanity has been brutally warped by the abuse and suffering–whatever form it actually took–he has undergone.

Eagleton argues that evil, in contrast to the more common wickedness or immorality, is “supremely pointless” (84). Evil has no utilitarian goal; it is irrationally unconcerned with money, sex, and power. It is wicked to kill someone for money, but it is truly evil to kill someone for no reason at all, for the enjoyment of it. Eagleton calls this “obscene enjoyment” (100) as it is the sado-masochistic element of evil. Hence the Joker puts the “laughter” into “slaughter” as is emphasized on the side of his eighteen-wheeler.

Augustine’s Privation Theory of Evil

The classic description of the pointlessness of evil comes from Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine describes stealing pears as the nadir of his sinfulness because he stole them not for the sake of eating them–he threw them away afterward–but simply for the enjoyment of the sinful act of theft itself.

Augustine’s views of evil developed partially in opposition to Manichean dualism. The Manichees believed that the universe was the battleground of Good and Evil, which were equal but opposite cosmic forces. Evil, thus, was its own substance, independent from Good. In the words of Peter Brown’s landmark biography of Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, the Manichees believed that “God was good, totally innocent” and “so convinced were they that evil could not come from a good God, that they believed that it came from an invasion of the good” by a “hostile force of evil, equal in power, eternal, totally separate” (47). For a time, Augustine identified as a Manichee, but once Manichean beliefs proved hollow to him, he abandoned them.

According to Augustine’s later views, as well as those of Aquinas, evil is a “deficiency of being” and a “lack, negation, defectiveness, deprivation” (125) as Eagleton summarizes. Like darkness is a lack of light and hunger is a deprivation of food, evil is fundamentally an absence of the Good. God is the source of all being, all existence; evil is a corruption of the Good, with no independent existence of its own. As the Joker illustrates, the greater the deprivation of the Good, the more twisted and destructive one becomes.

The Joker, the Nazis, and Logistics

The irony of the pointlessness of evil is that the most evil figures, from the Joker to the Nazis, are often capable of incredibly rational thought and organization. Eagleton argues that one of the “most grotesque features of the Nazi death camps was the way in which sober, meticulous, utilitarian measures were pressed into the service of an operation which had no practical point at all” (96-97). The extermination of Jews during the Holocaust had no utilitarian function (in fact, it was anti-utilitarian, as German resources necessary for combating the Allies were wasted killing Jews) but was carried out in the most efficient, utilitarian way.

The same is true for the Joker, who is a logistical genius. Although his murders have no practical purpose other than inspiring panic, he plans them with incredible forethought and the greatest attention to detail. He makes his getaway from the bank in a school bus amidst a line of other school buses; he disguises himself as a nurse to infiltrate Gotham General; he arranges for a burning firetruck to block the path of the police convoy and force it down onto Lower 5th (a.k.a Lower Wacker in Chicago). Knowing that the police will be watching for snipers during the commissioner’s funeral procession, he sets a timer on a window shade overlooking the parade route, so that it flashes open to distract the cops, while he shoots at the mayor from the ground (again in disguise, this time as an officer). He surgically implants a bomb in a criminal’s stomach so that he can detonate it via a cell phone and make his escape from prison. Using masks and fake guns, he dresses hostages up like his own men, while giving his thugs doctors’ lab coats to wear to confuse the police. If he were not a few clowns short of a circus, the Joker could certainly work as the Chief Operating Officer of a major corporation.

In planning a strategy to stop the Joker, Bruce tells Alfred “Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. We just need to figure out what he’s after.” Bruce is correct that most criminals seeks something rational, like money, power, or revenge, but the Joker is no ordinary criminal. As Alfred tells Bruce, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical . . . some men just want to watch the word burn.” In contrast to Gotham’s mobsters, who seek wealth and power, the Joker seeks simply to annihilate everything and everyone. Thus, toward the end of the film, the Joker sets fire to an enormous stack of money and proclaims his superiority over the mob, “All you care about is money. This town deserves a better class of criminal.” The Joker acknowledges that he is a man of simple taste–“dynamite, gunpowder, and gasoline”–those things which burn best. His motto is “everything burns,” which suggests that life is meaningless–the basic claim of nihilism. The Joker’s nihilism is self-fulfilling: if he can cause Gotham to descend into chaos, then he was right all along.

It is out of his own inner lack that the Joker’s violence springs. It is the absence, the “terrible non-being” at his core that drives the Joker to destroy everything around him. Eagleton contends that the “obscene enjoyment of annihilating the Other becomes the only way of convincing yourself that you still exist” (100). The Joker turns his inner feeling of nihilism outward.

Eagleton further argues that in the evil person, the death drive is “turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being. Yet this furious violence involves a kind of lack–an unbearable sense of non-being, which must, so to speak, be taken out on the other” (127). This is why the Joker has “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint,” why he frequently kills even the thugs who work for him, and why he blows up a major hospital.

The characteristics of the evil which the Joker represents is what makes him so difficult for Batman to defeat. In the interrogation scene, which may be the most wrenching moment in the film because it shows Batman at his most vulnerable and humiliated, the Joker mocks Batman, even as Batman slams his fist into the Joker’s head, by saying, “You have nothing to threaten me with. You have nothing to do with all your strength.” Unlike any other villain, Batman ultimately cannot defeat the Joker through force because the Joker cannot be deterred by pain–he relishes it. Because of his nihilism, the Joker does not fear anything. Through a combination of technology, determination, and physical toughness, Batman can crush most opponents into submission, but the Joker will never stop.

Christopher Nolan has given evil a new face for this generation in the Joker. Yet, the evil which the Joker embodies has important precedents in both history and fiction, from Nazism to Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello and the Witches in Macbeth. Iago’s nihilism springs from his irrational desire to engineer Othello’s destruction, while the Witches relish the chaos that results when they give Macbeth their prophecy. In his drive to annihilate Gotham City, the Joker seeks to make the world look like the gaping wound in his own soul.

Sources:

Terry Eagleton. On Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Peter Brown. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Watchmen and the Divine Watchmaker

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In Watchmen, Jon Osterman a.k.a. Dr. Manhattan is Alan Moore’s critique of the idea of a personal God. Far more so than in the film version, the original graphic novel frequently compares Dr. Manhattan to God, yet the overarching effect of this comparison is to suggest that even if God does exist he would be incapable of saving humanity from itself. Dr. Manhattan has various god-like characteristics: he knows the future; his power is unlimited; he can be in two or more places at once; he does not age and apparently will not die; he can rearrange atoms and it is suggested that he can even create life. There is even a panel, toward the end of Watchmen chapter XII, with Dr. Manhattan walking on water. What can we call a being like this other than a god? Yet, despite all of his power, Dr. Manhattan is incapable of ending the misery and suffering of humanity upon which Moore’s dystopian landscape focuses so intently. Dr. Manhattan’s character arc implies that even if God were walking around on earth, literally glowing with unimaginable power, he would still be unable to save the world.

Moore explicitly connects Dr. Manhattan to God in the final panel of Watchmen chapter III. After leaving Earth for Mars, Dr. Manhattan sits on a rock, which looks a bit like a throne, on the red planet. The epigraph for the chapter, from Genesis 18:25, is written below the image: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” The biblical context of the verse is Abraham’s “negotiation” with God about the impending judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah. When God reveals to Abraham that he will destroy these cities for their wickedness, Abraham beseeches God to spare them for the sake of the righteous, including Abraham’s own nephew Lot. Abraham says, “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Using this verse as the chapter’s epigraph, Moore puts Dr. Manhattan in the position of God, as judge over humanity, yet, Dr. Manhattan refuses such a role, leaving Earth for Mars when humans weary him.

Deism in Watchmen

Moore consistently uses Deist imagery to characterize Dr. Manhattan. Deism conceives of God as the Divine Watchmaker: he created the world with the care of a watchmaker designing a beautiful watch, but once it was finished, he merely sat back and admired it for a moment before moving on to other things. According to Deism, God created an orderly world that functions on its own (governed by the laws of nature), but he is not personally involved in the vicissitudes of human life. Deism partly resulted from Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of universal laws of motion. Unlike earlier medieval models of the cosmos, the Newtonian universe is mechanistic, like a finely tuned clock. Once God set it in motion, it simply ticks indefinitely. Before he was transformed into Dr. Manhattan by a lab experiment gone awry, Jon Osterman was a physicist. He becomes a physicist because his father, a watchmaker, insists that he not pursue “an obsolete trade.” Jon, however, is fascinated by the internal mechanism of watches. He enjoys taking them apart and putting them back together again. Even before gaining god-like powers, Jon has the detached temperament of the Deist God, content to toy with the gears of a pocket watch.

Ironically, though others believe him to be a god, Dr. Manhattan is an atheist. After leaving Earth for the solitude of Mars, he muses, “Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there . . . A clock without a craftsman.” In the 19th century, the argument from design was used to support belief in God. If the universe is so intricately crafted, like a fine clock, then surely there must be a clockmaker? Dr. Manhattan, however, accepts the beauty of the universe without assuming that it was created by a divine being. He doubts both the Deist myth of of a divine watchmaker and the Christian claim that the world was created by the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.

At his father’s urging, Jon studies atomic physics. Jon is transformed into Dr. Manhattan when he is accidentally locked into the “intrinsic field” test chamber. The watchmaker motif continues as Jon enters the chamber to retrieve a watch he had fixed for fellow scientist and girlfriend Janey Slater. It appears that Jon is utterly disintegrated, but instead he is transformed into the invincible Dr. Manhattan. Jon learns to reassemble his body as he learned to reassemble the pieces of his father’s pocket watch: “Really, it’s just a question of reassembling the components in the correct sequence.” First, Jon appears as a floating nervous system. Then, a circulatory system. After that, he puts together a “partially muscled skeleton” before he finally reappears in a body that looks essentially human other than the blue glow. The panel depicting Jon’s reappearance in Watchmen chapter IV is reminiscent of Raphael’s depiction of the Transfiguration of Jesus. Dr. Manhattan, floating above the terrified scientists, is surrounded by a halo of light. In the biblical scene, Jesus goes up a mountain with his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John. Jesus “was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matthew 17:1). This is a “proleptic disclosure” of Jesus’ coming post-resurrection glory. It is a foreshadowing of Jesus as he will be when he returns to claim his place on David’s throne in the New Jerusalem, and of the Jesus whom John witnesses, “one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength” (Revelation 1:13-16). In his transformation into Dr. Manhattan, Jon Osterman’s body is permanently transfigured with the same kind of radiant light as Jesus in the Gospel narratives: “Their bleached faces stare up at me, pale and insubstantial in the sudden flare of ultraviolet. Sunburn in November.” Dr. Manhattan, however, does not aspire to be humanity’s savior.

Dr. Manhattan as a Divine Figure

Immediately after Jon’s transformation, people begin to think of him as a god. The Viet Cong who surrender to Dr. Manhattan feel terror “balanced by an almost religious awe.” Janey says, “They say you can do anything, Jon. They say you’re like God now.” Jon replies, “I don’t think there is a God, Janey. If there is, I’m not him.” Jon has no desire to play the role of God, to eradicate evil or create a just society. He soon reveals his defining character trait–detachment. He is so detached that he does not bother to inform his father that he is still alive, after the military notified Mr. Osterman of his son’s “accidental disintegration.” Dr. Manhattan becomes the willing servant of the U.S. government, fighting crime and turning the tide in Vietnam, yet he does so with profound indifference. He says, “The morality of my activities escapes me.” He bears so little empathy that, when he and Laurie return from Mars, he hardly notices that the streets of New York are littered with corpses. Adrian Veidt has killed half of the city’s population, yet far from grieving or even feeling sorrow, Dr. Manhattan is elated that he is temporarily incapable of seeing the future (it is obscured by “tachyon” particles). The opening panels of Watchmen chapter XII show him to be utterly oblivious to the atrocities around him.

The film version of Watchmen depicts Dr. Manhattan as simply not caring that much about humanity, failing to convey that he is incapable of acting decisively to alter the future. Janey is bewildered and outraged, for instance, when Dr. Manhattan does not intervene to save President Kennedy from assassination. Dr. Manhattan explains to Janey, “I can’t prevent the future. To me, it’s already happening.” It is not, as in the film, that Dr. Manhattan is extremely apathetic, but that he actually cannot change the future. This is a direct critique of the Christian concept of Providence, in which God superintends all of human history (“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” Romans 8:28). Dr. Manhattan cannot change the future because he experiences past, present, and future all at once. On Mars, Dr. Manhattan explains to Laurie, “Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time.” The film portrays Dr. Manhattan as a human being who has can see the future but does nothing about it, but the graphic novel attempts to imagine how God must feel, seeing all events–past, present and future–unfolding simultaneously. Dr. Manhattan explains his determinism to Laurie, “Everything is preordained.” When she accuses him of being a “puppet following a script,” he replies, “We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.” The terror of Moore’s dystopian world is not super-villains or nuclear war, but the idea that not even God may be free to save humanity from destruction.

Throughout Watchmen, Moore emphasizes Dr. Manhattan’s utter inability to alter the future in his encounters with the Comedian. Edward Blake a.k.a. the Comedian is half masked superhero half mercenary, fighting for the U.S. in Vietnam. The Comedian intrigues Dr. Manhattan because he is the most “deliberately amoral” human he has ever met. Jon appreciates the Comedian’s amorality because, in his detachment from human life, he has become fully amoral. Whereas the Comedian believes that there can be no meaningful morality in such a bloody, ugly world, Dr. Manhattan is amoral because he sees past, present, and future all at once. Moral frameworks are absurd to Dr. Manhattan because he realizes that everything is predetermined, that choice is an illusion. The Comedian understands the “madness, the pointless butchery” at the heart of the human condition, as exemplified by the war in Vietnam, and he responds with gleeful, violent rage. Dr. Manhattan, too, understands the evil that afflicts human nature, but his perception of time prevents him from feeling any emotion about it at all. Hence, he fights on behalf of the U.S. military, securing a victory over the Viet Cong.

The Comedian impregnates a Vietnamese woman, and when the war ends she urges him to take responsibility for her and their child. When he refuses, the woman slashes his face with a broken glass bottle. The Comedian shoots her without hesitation. Dr. Manhattan observes the whole thing, and even seems upset by it, but does not intervene. In one of his few displays of something approaching compassion, Dr. Manhattan says to the Comedian, “Blake, she was pregnant. You gunned her down.” The Comedian, of course, does not care; he is more annoyed by the wound to his face than the fact that he just murdered his lover and unborn child. Blake replies, “Y’know what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia . . . but you didn’t lift a finger.” Dr. Manhattan is the powerless, all-powerful: he is not bound by any human weakness, yet because of his perception of time he is unable to help even the most innocent victims. Dr. Manhattan’s character suggests that if God exists, then he is, at best, merely a silent, pitying witness of human suffering and, at worst, utterly indifferent to our plight. The Comedian’s final indictment of Dr. Manhattan is “You don’t really give a damn about human beings.” The Deist God truly does not care about humanity. He enjoys the orderly world which he has created, but then moves on, perhaps to create another one.

Dr. Manhattan does come to a belated appreciation of life when Laurie realizes that the Comedian is her father. He realizes that the probability of Laurie’s existing is astronomically small: it not only required a genetic chain generations long, but also Laurie’s mother loving a man who had once tried to rape her. Only when Dr. Manhattan sees life as a “thermodynamic miracle” does he regain enough interest in humanity to return to Earth. Yet, this is not divine love, but rather the fascination of a scientist. Dr. Manhattan is compelled by the sublime, particularly in the very large, like the chasms and mountains of the Martian landscape, and in the very small, like the mysterious patterns of atoms: “I’ve walked across the sun. I’ve seen events so tiny and so fast they hardly can be said to have occurred at all.” Despite his transformation, Dr. Manhattan retains Jon Osterman’s love of exploring how the universe works. Nevertheless, in neither the graphic novel nor the film version of Watchmen is this enough to compel Dr. Manhattan to remain on earth.