Defining Post-9/11 American Morality in Comic Book Films: A Critical Discourse Analysis.

The morality play of America in the 1950’s and early ‘60’s was the Western. The protagonist of almost every Western was the strong white man, whose apotheosis was found in the person of John Wayne – although Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, or Jimmy Stewart could create variations on this same character. This man carried a gun, was often a lawman or soldier, spoke directly and to the point, and dispensed justice with very little compunction about the violence inherent in his lifestyle. His enemies were outlaws or Indians, and their intentions were simple: pillage and plunder. This prototypical American hero protected women and the innocent, brooked no aspersions on his honor, and fought the forces of lawlessness for the good of his fledging republic. He was the embodiment of the American hero, and self-doubt weighed seldom upon his conscience.

Of course, Watergate, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and a host of other social turbulences in the late 1960’s changed America’s simplistic post-WWII perspective about morality. The straightforward hero embodied by John Wayne was slowly replaced by the morally ambiguous heroes of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, and the amoral antiheroes of films like The Godfather and Taxi Driver and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. However, the end of the Cold War, the advent of the computer age, and most significantly the events of 9/11/2001 and the War on Terror have now reshaped American morality once again, refining, re-defining, and complicating our sense of ethics, propriety, Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. And in no other modern or popular art form is the moral dilemma of the American people more resonant than in comic book films.

Comic books, of course, carry with them the stigma of childishness. Since they contain pictures and their text is often simplistic, the keepers of the canon have (wrongly) identified comic books as children’s literature. The nominative adjective “comic” indicates a light-heartedness of spirit which might preclude contemplation of the weightier matters of human existence. Indeed, while the tragedies of earlier literature seemed to examine the fundamental questions of humanity (the nature of mortality, man’s search for meaning, “Alas, poor Yorrick. I knew him, Horatio”) the classical comedies seemed primarily concerned with romance and the eternal hilarity of human relationships. However, when one more closely examines films based upon comic books, we see that the deeper thematic structure is much more closely related to the classical tragedy, rather than comedy. Replacing John Wayne and the cowboy hero, the new apotheoses of Americana are the characters of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman, and others. These characters’ films create a vivid and complex tableau which symbolizes the modern American social and political psyche in a post-9/11 world. More so than any other genre in modern American film, it is the comic book blockbuster which most accurately reflects the American embodiment of moral responsibility at the beginning of the 21st century.

(If I may be allowed a small digression, I’d like to address the some of the other films which are currently attempting – unsuccessfully! – to discuss American morality today. There are many weighty and overtly didactic films which have attempted, in recent years, to give an “accurate” depiction of America and its socio-political quandary in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror. Films such as In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition, and a host of other lesser known movies have attempted to deal literally with the War on Terror and tend to depict America in a negative light. Andrew Klavan, commenting in the 7-25-2008 Wall Street Journal, skewered these films nicely: "[T]ime after time, left-wing films about the war on terror --films like 'In The Valley of Elah', 'Rendition' and 'Redacted' – which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe" (Klavan, 2008). While Klavan seems to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in the lack of success of these “left-wing” films, he does make an interesting point: Americans are roundly rejecting films which suggest that Americans are on a plane of moral equivalence with the groups of people who identify with Osama Bin Laden. I find it ironic that comic books and comic book films are accused of being overly simplistic; after all, what argument could be more simplistic than “Well, sometimes you do bad things, too!” Unfortunately, that seems to be the sum totality of the arguments presented by films such as Redacted and the others mentioned above. Comic book films actually tend to take a much more nuanced and thoughtful approach to the idea of conflict between persons or nations, as will be discussed later.

Also, I would like to note that I am not going to discuss ALL comic book films. While the films which will be discussed in this essay are thematically complex and act as a sort of mirror on American society, many other comic book films are exactly what they are accused of being: pedestrian, overly-simplistic, special-effects driven melees with two-dimensional villains and one-dimensional heroes. I would hold up The Punisher, Daredevil, The Fantastic Four, and others as examples of this sort of film-making. Hollywood executives, in their rush to capitalize on the popularity of the comic book genre, have neglected the complexity of character and theme which was so compelling in films like Batman Begins or Spider-Man. Interestingly enough, morally over-simplistic films seem to do almost as badly at the box-office as the politically-charged films mentioned by Klavan. Neither sort of film seems to resonate with the American public like those discussed below.)