Superhero films might be a strange place to look for the answers to theological questions. But if Christian theological debates no longer grip the population at large, we find some part of our particular postmodern theology—the religion of a society that fundamentally does not believe—in the films that put their heroes halfway between gods and men. Superhero films thus raise, albeit in a distorted way, moral questions: what would constrain us morally if our powers were much greater than those of the human?
Superhero films are often decried as fascist or proto-fascist, with the strongman (or strongwoman) superhero quelling social unrest and restoring law and order through the use of superior and often spectacular force. Indeed, the supposedly fascist implications of Superman are regularly satirized within comic books and elsewhere, not least in the graphic novel (and later film and TV series) Watchmen. More recently, Amazon’s TV series The Boys sees Superman transmuted into the pathological Übermensch Homelander, too powerful to have to play by the rules. But except for Homelander and his ilk’s complete disregard for the codes that constrain the less powerful, the superhero as restorer offers little in the way of interesting moral dilemmas: the straightlaced crime-fighter simply deploys superpowers in the maintenance of the status quo, an ultra-efficient and morally untroubled cop.
Another, and potentially more interesting, strain of superhero morality lies in the questions that superheroes are forced to face in relation not to the men beneath them but the gods above. Rebellion against the gods has been a theme of Western literature from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and continues into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Superhero films array their heroes not against the singular God of the Abrahamic religions but against an older, wider cast of (mainly European) gods. In Thor: Love and Thunder , we find Christian Bale playing supervillain Gorr, the “god butcher” whose mission is to destroy all the gods (in revenge for their allowing his daughter to die at the start of the film). Thor and the other superheroes are then cast in the role of the traditionalists, attempting more or less to allow the continuation of the hierarchy in which they as demi-gods or superheroes stand above the human. Although Thor himself is prepared to land a blow on Zeus, Gorr eventually pulls back from his mission of god-killing and chooses the narratively far safer option of resurrecting his daughter. Gorr’s journey, though, does raise one of the central moral questions of the superhero film: if we could kill gods, why shouldn’t we?
Gorr’s journey, though, does raise one of the central moral questions of the superhero film: if we could kill gods, why shouldn’t we?
The ultimate paradox that superhero films come up against when they situate their protagonists against gods is that to show a hero—that is, a human—actually killing God is impossible. First, it is culturally impossible: paradoxically, we cannot keep God dead as a society if we don’t continue to believe in God. We might put it this way: it takes a religious man to kill a God, and we don’t have enough of those to get the job done. If the English bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century saw in the beheading of Charles I the symbolic destruction of God (in the sense of the rejection by a rising class of the divine right of the monarch as the basis of his power), then it took a religious man such as Oliver Cromwell (accurately characterized by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill as “God’s Englishman”) to carry it out. Second, it is politically impossible: to kill God, even symbolically, would require us to assume godlike authority and ultimate accountability for human history and progress. This responsibility—despite being one that we collectively have—is a heavy one, weighted with the burden of our shared freedom to create or to destroy the world. In this sense, Nietzsche was premature in his diagnosis of God being dead precisely because the necessary movement to take God’s place has not yet been completed.
Nietzsche was premature in his diagnosis of God being dead precisely because the necessary movement to take God’s place has not yet been completed.
Accordingly, we are far more likely to find superhero films to have potential god-killers as antagonists rather than their heroes. James Gunn’s latest contribution to the MCU, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (2023), has as its villain the “High Evolutionary” (played by Chukwudi Iwuji), a being who directs evolution in a quest to produce beings fit to colonize a planet and create a perfect society. When one of his minions implores Iwuji’s character to “Stop for God’s sake”, he retorts “There is no God! That’s why I stepped in”. The High Evolutionary, then, is the sort of God-killer that represents the furthest a superhero film can go in replacing God: a Darwinist stand-in who looks to perform the minimal godly task of nudging the process of natural selection in the right direction. For the time being at least, our potential godliness as humans is too bright a light to face directly. Perhaps this is why Prometheus needed chaining to the rock for helping us make a start towards it. Superhero films are forced to ask the question of what it would be like if we recognized and accepted our power—if in killing gods, we became gods. The answer they generally offer is that men who think of themselves as gods will, with all that power, become evil; what separates heroes from villains in the cosmology of the superhero film is that the hero refuses to use their power to accept the mantle of potential godliness, while the villains hubristically do attempt to become omnipotent.
It is almost certain that the age of the superhero film has started to come to an end; most analysts start this period with 2008’s Iron Man and The Dark Knight and see its end (or the beginning of its end) in 2023’s relative lack of box office success. If Hegel was right that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the coming of the dusk, then maybe the meaning of superhero films is ever clearer now. It is just possible that future cultural historians will see things more clearly, and be able confidently to assert that these films really were what they are now starting to appear to be: the symptoms of an America grappling with the moral implications of its potential godlike power and disavowing it just as it starts to wane.
