Good isn't boring

Why we don't need to darken heroic characters to make them interesting. [Link]

“Captain America is only interesting if he’s a prick,” declared a recent article on Vulture.com, inspiring so many angry Marvel fan rebuttals that it probably qualified as outright click bait.

Of course, the idea of Captain America as “boring” has already been debunked by the $580 million his new movie just made at the box office. What we’re really talking about here isn’t Captain America as a character, but the way we react to blockbuster movie protagonists who aren’t morally ambiguous antiheroes.

In the 21st century, this kind of pure-hearted, optimistic hero is too often seen as childish and shallow, hence why so many people perceive Cap to be a stodgy do-gooder. The assumption is that in order to modernize an old-fashioned hero into a “serious” character, he needs to get darker. In other words, the infamous gritty reboot.

No matter how much time the Captain America films spend on real-world topics like PTSD and surveillance culture, in many people’s eyes they will never be truly respectable until the lead character starts acting like an asshole.

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is the ultimate example of the gritty superhero reboot. By hiring a respected director of psychological thrillers, Warner Brothers made it very clear that they were steering clear of the cartoonishness that drove the Batman franchise into the ground with the widely derided Batman & Robin. But despite Nolan’s lack of affection for the cheesier aspects of the superhero genre, the Dark Knight trilogy is really no less comic book-ish than its more brightly colored counterparts.

Nolan’s Batmobile might be a military all-terrain vehicle instead of a sports car with fins, but that doesn’t make the Joker or the Scarecrow any more plausible as real-world villains. All three Dark Knightmovies still require the same suspension of disbelief as any other movie about a guy who fights crime in an ankle-length cape and bat mask. However, with their storylines focusing on police corruption and urban terrorism, they were seen as being far more “serious” than other superhero movies, and therefore, they must be better. Critics agreed that finally, here were some superhero movies that non-geeky, non-frivolous adults could enjoy.

This false connection between gritty realism and literary quality is a common theme in the way we interpret popular fiction, but it’s particularly noticeable in the superhero genre, where “realism” is always going to be a matter of opinion.

And

At the most basic level, a “dark” or “gritty” narrative is about putting the hero in a place where they have to make a difficult choice. In the recent Batman and Superman movies, that  “hard choice” has generally been to do something bad, which is then interpreted as being more mature and realistic because real life is about compromise. Meanwhile in Marvel Studios movies, the opposite is almost always the case.

Tony Stark realises the impact of being a weapons manufacturer, and faces up to the consequences. Thor only regains his powers after performing an act of pure self-sacrifice. Captain America spurs on a Snowden-esque leak that trusts the public to pass judgement on corruption within his own intelligence agency—the polar opposite of Bruce Wayne’s attitude toward civilians in The Dark Knight Rises, in which the citizens of Gotham are infantilized to the point of being completely helpless until Batman shows up to save the day. In fact, the surveillance system Bruce Wayne uses to search for criminals in Gotham City is not so very different from the one Captain America just destroyed in The Winter Soldier.

This Marvel/DC division is even more evident when you compare the final battle scenes in Avengers and Man of Steel. Both involve an alien attack on a U.S. city, but Superman and the Avengers react in very different ways. Superman spends 20 minutes beating Zod to a pulp and razing various skyscrapers in the process, culminating in the infamous scene where he snaps Zod’s neck. The Avengers, on the other hand, prioritize civilian survival above the ultimate goal of defeating Loki, with half the battle focusing on getting pedestrians to safety and restricting the battle to a few city blocks. Both scenes involve making a difficult moral and tactical choice in the heat of battle, but Superman goes for the “dark” option while the Avengers focus on minimizing civilian casualties.