Another day, another politically-oriented post on my supposedly apolitical blog! It seems like only yesterday I was blogging about what the message of The Incredibles was...or was not. Here, as with there, I'm going to blog about something that touches a bit on politics, but I'm not going to express any specific opinion on the related controversy. Rather, I'm going to explain why there's a big contradiction in these stories, explain why I think it's a problem for their expressed purposes, state my theory of why these stories keep doing this, and finally provide a number of alternative ideas. First, though, a video from PBS explaining superhero ethics and a common alternative:
Expressing a comprehensible opinion on who is actually right is beyond the scope of this blog, but let's address one big elephant in the room: There are a lot of people who operate like the strawmen these stories frequently disparage, and aren't seen as monstrous for it. I won't begrudge anyone for personally having a Kantian policy against killing, but it has been the case throughout history that military and often even police forces operate on the idea that if you don't kill some people, they're going to kill you or some other people you care about, which often means your civilians. That is a consistent part of civil service, and again, many people see these civil servants as heroes. Certainly, there are times when one's own police and the military go too far, but very few Americans would actually accuse their troops of being no better than the Nazis just because the US troops took up arms and were willing to shoot the Nazis dead. American cops slip up at times, but they've shot dead a whole lot less civilians than other civilians have. They try to find other solutions, but they're open to killing criminals if it seems the only way to stop a greater loss from occurring.
Expanding on the above, it is important to recall that cops are also present in many superhero stories. Batman himself deals plenty with Commissioner Gordon. These cops aren't exactly effective on their own, but as usual, they are willing to kill to halt criminals. Batman almost always chews out his allies who don't share his ethics, but somehow he has no problem with the cops not sharing them! (I know what you're probably going to say to explain it, and keep reading; we'll get there.)
This contradiction is extended even further in the TV show, The Flash. I used to like the show, but the more I watched, the more I was convinced that its writing process consisted largely of coming up with a new excuse to have Grant Gustin get emo, or failing that, picking out an old one they hoped enough time had passed for people to have forgotten it. That, however, was not what made me drop the show; rather it was the aforementioned Kantian preaching despite a huge contradiction. Barry "The Flash" Allen is one of the most preachy Kantian superheroes in recent memory, and yet he doesn't just work with the cops. His stepfather is a cop, his wife is the daughter of that stepfather, and finally, he's a cop! True; he only works in the forensics department, but it still is him working with an organization that sanctions the use of lethal force. In real life, people who have a moral opposition to all killing, such as various religious sects, abstain from working in such organizations, and can obtain exemptions from military service; Barry's dual-role, meanwhile, makes him seem like a big hypocrite demanding of his fellow heroes a sort of morality that his own line of work doesn't abide by. Thus, the show is full of all sorts of weird contradictory events like the Season 3 finale, where he sticks quiverlingly to his refusal to kill a villain, who then tries to kill him, only for his wife Iris to grab a gun and kill the villain. Come Season 4, Flash still hasn't abandoned his policy--but he doesn't ever take his wife to task for that, either. He'll shove his morality down other heroes' throats, but not his own wife's, for whatever reason. I can name several reasons, but none really lessen my view that Barry is a hypocrite.
Now to get to the most likely explanation people would give for why superheroes can abide by Kantian morality, demand it of potential superhero allies, yet be fine with working with police forces who don't: As vigilantes, superheroes feel like they're on legal thin ice as it is, and thus need to exercise some restraint, deferring to the law to make the final judgement on the fate of the villains they help the law to apprehend. This is a decent justification, but it's not usually the one superheroes give; instead going into a predictable speech about falling to the level of villains, without much quantification of what determines the level of villains and how, and of course, with no criticism of the police for being willing to kill. Still, I have an answer to that legal explanation, but first let's talk a bit more about police.
As noted, many police have the right to kill in order to halt a crime, when there seems no other way to incapacitate the criminal. This is quite different, however, from being allowed to kill someone who has been incapacitated and detained non-lethally. After a criminal has already been stopped, the legal question is what can be done to punish the criminal for the crime. The death penalty--often euphemistically referred to as capital punishment--is still around in much of the world, but is rather uncommon in democracies. As is true with any real-world political controversies, I'm not going to take a side here, save for noting that states that don't have capital punishment haven't seen a collapse of law and order, as confinement is effective in those states. Also, even in states that have capital punishment, it's still for the judicial part of law-enforcement to decide on it, not the people carrying guns in the field.
However, here we find the final issue plaguing superhero ethics: The legal system in their world does not work. This holds true whether you favor the death penalty or incarceration; thanks to a combination of corruption and incompetence, police in these worlds fail to do either. Villains keep escaping and keep killing innocents. It would be possible for me to admire a superhero with a code against killing villains, if only the canon that hero was placed in didn't constantly imply that nothing else will really solve the problem, but since it's not, the heroes come off, at best, as not fully comprehending their situation, and at worst, as sanctimonious hypocrites who care more about their own self-esteem than the public good. Quite an awkward position for writers to put their supposed moral exemplars in, but I think I know why, and it's possibly the most common one-word explanation for odd things ever: Money.
Before going on here, a characteristic personal disclaimer: I hate that the words "comic books" or "comics" are commonly used to describe any and all stories that are advanced by illustrated panels. I hate it because it misrepresents every story done by that medium as akin to the humor-centric strips associated with newspapers, for which when the word "comic" was applied, had nothing to do with their pictorial medium and everything to do with their humorous genre. Medium and genre are not the same thing and claiming such understates the variety of stories a medium can tell. It would be one thing to use this term if, much like "villain", its original (quite politically-incorrect) meaning was now extinct, but as "comic" still implies humor in most other modern uses, such as with a person who performs humorous monologues on a stage, the ambiguity still troubles pictorial stories. While "graphic novel" is commonly used as a substitute for longer stories of other genres, it seems more fitting for those works released in their entirety at once, such as V For Vendetta; therefor, for the purposes of this essay and the works specific to it, I will call them "Serial Epics", or SEs for short.
Why this obsessive drive to define a subset of literature? It pertains much more to the financial problem plaguing these stories than any other term previously available. The "epic" part simply refers to the superhero aspect, but it's the term "serial" that deserves a closer look; it implies that a story is told in a series of installments. You may notice that the pictorial medium wasn't referenced in my new term for this genre, since as the aforementioned The Flash TV show attests, such is not the only medium to tell superhero stories; nevertheless, originating in the pictorial medium certainly helped establish tropes common to it. These superheroes got their start in magazines that typically began episodic but eventually turned to telling ongoing stories, building up a cast of memorable characters and utilizing cliffhangers to prompt people to buy the next issue, or even subscribe to the series and get each new issue mailed to them. When people kept reading and buying in order to learn what would happen next, presumably the creators of these things soon realized a dirty little secret: If the story never ends, then neither will the profits! Thus the worst possible combination of superhero operations and legal operations to keep villains down and out once they're defeated, because so they suppose, we will never get tired of seeing Batman fight the Joker.
Lest people think I'm being presumptuous, blaming one trope on a devious business policy, rest assured there are many more tropes to blame on this, such as Comic Book [sic] Time, wherein many characters cannot age. In order to facilitate this, among other things, their origin story will constantly be retconned to a more and more recent date; it is particularly noticeable with Iron Man, since this requires setting his origin story in a new war each time. Then there's the pesky issue of death; while most superheroes don't kill, plenty of other people in their worlds do! This should mean that soon enough, fan favorites will end up dead and mourned--not! Myriad contrivances will instead be used to bring them back!
Except when they can't be. All of those people the Joker slaughters because nobody can manage to stop him permanently; they stay dead, but readers don't care about their lives, so to the crows with them! Really, there's no apparent low these writers won't sink to in order to preserve their precious status quo; don't get daring and make a character step out of his iconic loserdom to marry his crush, become successful and reveal his identity, or soon by some contrivance a tragedy will happen and he'll make a deal with the devil to revert him back to formula!
If it isn't clear yet, I'm irritated by far more than just the codes of ethics these heroes abide by, which as noted above, wouldn't be a problem in other cases. The formula running these sorts of stories, and the cliches it has spawned, are all obnoxious. In a cruel twist of fate, these cliches are perfectly positioned to irritate the very audiences their cliffhangers are manufactured to keep on board. Sleazy business produces low-quality literature, and I could tolerate this if only they limited their stories to entertaining pow-wham-kazow fluff, but all of the vacuous moral grandstanding makes it utterly intolerable to me. If you're going to lecture us, expect some of us to raise our hands for questions or comments!
However, I don't want to make it sound as if I demand these stories become a specific thing; just that I want them to stop being the same thing they've been for far too long. There's plenty wiggle-room to get us out of this rut in the realm of ethics alone, and here are just a few possibilities:
1) Superheroes resolve to kill villains in some cases. Not just people like Deadpool and the Punisher, who get a rush out of doing it; people who greatly regret it but come to the unhappy conclusion that it's the only option, and that sleeping less soundly at night is their burden to bare for the sake of the innocents they saved by killing a killer.
2) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but instead the law enforcement becomes effective at keeping them permanently neutralized. New villains arise if the plot needs to keep going.
3) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they stop preaching about it. No more strawmen to set up and attack with non-arguments, while events imply the strawmen right.
4) Superheroes still don't kill villains, but they come to the realization that incapacitating them and passing them on to the police isn't enough. Maybe have Batman start to make an active effort to improve Gotham Police Department, or maybe he and his closer allies, of which he now has many, can start their own jail. Superheroes, with their prodigious talents and abilities, should be able to make a good, permanent difference in the world, even if the devious status-quo-defending writers don't let them yet.
Of course, by now the "side" effect of such innovative writing should be obvious: The stories would probably have an ending. This might sound depressing to people who still want experience more stories from these characters--every once in a while, they manage to turn out something mostly new! However, don't forget that continuity itself is constantly changing, starting and stopping in these franchises. Retcons get introduced all the time; effectively and sometimes officially swapping out an old canon for a new one. Alternate universes are legion, both within the original magazine format of SEs and in the many other media that carry adaptations. So here's a thought; if continuities aren't going to last anyway, why not give them a good ending before they go out? The ending doesn't have to be Batman killing the Joker, but maybe it could be some other thing happening to finally neutralize the Joker, which lets Batman move on to other things. Why not give the current Iron Man the chance to invent something great and world-changing before he's thrown out in favor of a new Iron Man who starts in whatever war is going on now?
I think I've made my case here: I like endings. Maybe not final endings, but definitive places wherein at least one of a hero's stated goals is unambiguously accomplished. How it's accomplished is a matter of great flexibility, but it should be accomplished, and I am confident superhero media can be better at that than it has been. If I'm to support these characters, they have to have realistic mindsets about how to take up the cause of justice.
Meanwhile, there are other prominent bits of literature I can also attack for never reaching they tease, and those who know me well can guess what's next on that chopping block...
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