In a much-discussed moment from the trailer of the upcoming third season of The Boys (to be released on June 3), Amazon Prime Video’s hyper-violent TV show about the dark side of superheroes, Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito, beloved bad guy Gus Fring from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) the head of the corrupt Voight Corporation, says, “People love superpowers. But the real superpower isn’t this (makes superhero-like hand gesture). It’s the ability to bend the world to your will.”
There are two crucial aspects to this moment, which end up encapsulating The Boys and other examples of the burgeoning ‘anti-superhero’ subgenre in films and TV these days. The first is the idea of the CEO as supervillain, an increasingly popular trope — look at the Elon Musk-inspired villains in Venom and Space Sweepers, for example. The CEO-villain is a formidable enemy not just because of the vast resources (financial and otherwise) at his disposal, but also because of his otherworldly ruthlessness, his tendency to see millions of lives as acceptable collateral damage in whatever hare-brained evil master plan he has cooked up.
The other aspect, of course, is the overarching allegory that The Boys and other ‘anti-superhero’ shows and films are hinting towards — that DC/Marvel, real-world mega-corporations (satirized by The Boys’ ‘Voight Corporation’, which has a monopoly over the superhero business), are taking over the movie business and will soon replace ‘real cinema’ with a monoculture where just about everything is a superhero story, one way or another (on different occasions, veteran directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have both expressed fears along these lines).
From the HBO show Watchmen (2019) to the Amazon Prime animated series Invincible (2021) to the Netflix movie Thunder Force (2021) and, of course, The Boys, the ‘anti-superhero’ story critiques several key aspects of traditional superhero films. From narrative to stylistic choices, almost everything within these shows and films stands in direct opposition to crowd-pleasing mega-movies like those found in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe).
Superheroes and existentialism
Damen Lindelof’s superb HBO miniseries Watchmen was both a sequel to and a direct adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ eponymous graphic novel from the 1980s, one of the best-known works in this medium. Moore and Gibbons were extremely disinterested in traditional superhero stories and wanted to create a world that depicted the hypocrisies, doublespeak and existentialism surrounding the world of superheroes. One of the starting points of Watchmen is — what really is the true purpose of superheroes? Are they really superior to the rest of us? What impact do their physical and mental abilities have on their characters, on the parts of their brains that make moral decisions in a split-second?
The Boys takes this line of thinking one step forward and pushes the idea that superheroes are an inherently corporatized creation, meant for one thing and one thing only — taking gullible people’s money in exchange for video games and action figures. Take the villain of the show, a Superman-like character called Homelander (Antony Starr) who has the squeaky-clean public image of a serial do-gooder but is actually a violent, cruel and near-invincible sadist who has no compunctions about committing mass murder on Vought Corporation’s behalf.
After the release of the animated spinoff The Boys: Diabolical in March this year, I had interviewed showrunner Simon Racioppa for FirstPost and one of the things I had asked him was how he viewed the origin story of Homelander, which was fleshed out in Diabolical’s last episode.
Racioppa said: “Homelander is obviously kind of a psychopath or a sociopath in The Boys but you don’t just become that or you can’t simply be born that way. There are actions and incidents that lead up to something like that, and being raised by a terrible corporation to be both a weapon and a money-maker, could do that to anybody, I think. So I wanted to introduce the idea that maybe he’s not entirely to blame for the way he is, maybe how he was treated as a child has something to do with it. It’s not necessarily meant to evoke sympathy but to make you understand the reasons.”
The third season sees Homelander at his most existential yet, as he struggles to “find myself, get back in touch with the real me”, as Starr says in the trailer with a straight face. Fans of The Boys will know that before long, Homelander will revert to his homicidal ways, and that’s why this line lands as well as it does.
No-filter ultra-violence
In the classic Anthony Burgess novel and later, Stanley Kubrick movie A Clockwork Orange, the protagonist Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) is a sadistic 15-year-old delinquent who loots, mugs and rapes defenceless strangers for his own pleasure. He and his gang of teenaged hoodlums shock the reader because of their youth — and also the remorseless intensity of their violence, which stands in sharp contrast to their lack of life experience (typically, a lack of remorse or conscience is associated with weather-bitten, cynical old characters, not baby-faced youngsters).
Watchmen, Invincible and The Boys all use ultra-violent scenes in a similar way. All 3 shows have spectacularly violent deaths — bodies splattering into mush as they hit the ground from a great height, people’s faces disintegrating as they’re blasted at close range, Invincible in particular, because it’s an animated show, has that extra leg room to pile on scenes of ever-mounting gore.
Unsurprisingly, Invincible’s villain Omni-Man (played by JK Simmons) is also closely modelled after Superman—an alien who was sent to Earth on a mission, Omni-Man grows to see human beings as a kind of lower grade of existence. He doesn’t exactly hate all of them (he refers to his longtime wife as ‘like a pet’ in one of the show’s most shocking moments), he has a deep-seated disdain that creates a distance between him and the humans he has protected for so long.
The Boys’ ultra-violence is Coen-esque in that it’s almost always also played for laughs. In The Boys: Diabolical for example, there is an entire episode shot in the classic Looney Tunes animation style — only with comically over-the-top, violent deaths happening onscreen every few seconds or so. The dissonance between form and content here is rather the point — it’s a finger-pointing moment directed at the sanitized, PG-13 mainstream superhero movies where even a little onscreen blood makes big news and has fans up in arms (even a traumatic moment like Tony Stark’s death at the end of Avengers: Endgame is noticeably free from blood or gore).
Superheroes and gendered experiences
The Netflix movie Thunder Force was a misfire, in the final equation—the screenplay was too weak to capitalize on the film’s defining conceit. But the premise itself was promising and had a clearly defined point of view — Thunder Force stars Octavia Spencer and Melissa McCarthy as two middle-aged women who invent a way to give themselves superpowers. The film’s critique is pointed towards the fact that in most mainstream superhero movies, women play second fiddle. In superhero movies that are led by women, the lead actress has to be young and conventionally attractive. Spencer and McCarthy’s characters in Thunder Force were bringing attention to the fact that in most DC/Marvel movies, there would be no space for women who looked like them.
The Boys, too, dishes out its own brand of gender-roles critique from the first season itself. Shortly after we meet the newest superhero in the world, Annie January/Starlight (Erin Moriarty), we see her colleague at Voight, The Deep/Kevin Moskowitz (Chace Crawford) blackmailing her into performing oral sex on him (echoing a similar storyline from Watchmen, where the vigilante called The Comedian sexually assaults Silk Spectre, a female colleague). Later, across the course of the first season, we learn how Queen Maeve/Maggie Shaw (Dominique McElligott), a longtime member of the Voight superhero lineup, has become cynical and embittered, thanks to a history of abuse and mistreatment and belittling at the hands of Homelander.
These subplots highlight the male-centric nature of mainstream superhero movies in an efficient, no-nonsense manner. They also tell you about a double standard at the heart of Marvel movies—every actor on display has to be conventionally attractive, especially if they are female. But at the same time, the characters played by these actors must be completely de-sexed. After dozens of movies with no real onscreen physical affection, Marvel finally had its first lovemaking scene last year with The Eternals. But the scene itself wasn’t very well-shot and came across as affectation more than anything else.
In an episode from the third season of The Boys, protagonist Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) is going to inject himself with a superhero serum of sorts, giving him superpowers temporarily (this has been teased repeatedly in past seasons and the trailer finally confirmed it). In the trailer, Billy says he’s “leveling the playing field for once”. In light of the recent Marvel/DC dominance over the silver screen, Butcher’s comment can be applied in the context of the ‘anti-superhero’ genre as a whole: they’re leveling the playing field for every writer, creator or actor frustrated with the templatized nature of the superhero movie.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.
The Boys season 3 will stream from 3rd June on Amazon Prime Video.
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