Our culture is entering a unique position where superheroes are omnipresent, and at the same time we're struggling to find our place in a changing world. Superman has always stood for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way", but the definition of all three of those things has started getting fuzzy around the edges. That's why our superheroes have been getting more internally conflicted. At the same time, there's also a need to amp up the excitement surrounding any one particular hero, and this usually comes in the form of greater and greater superpowers -- it's the easiest way to cut through the noise and grab people's attention.
But when a hero's power makes him more and more invulnerable, the conflict similarly has to be increasingly internalized. This thought came to my head when I recently watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. While the experience was enjoyable at the time, I was surprised at how soon the buzz went away. It got me thinking about how "genre fiction" -- and by that I mean everything from sci-fi to fantasy to superheroes -- doesn't really work unless the struggle has some sort of metaphorical aspect to it along with the cool powers and amazing technology.
The thing that was revolutionary about the original Star Trek show was that Gene Roddenberry created little morality plays in each episode. In a 23rd century where racism, class, poverty, and war had been abolished, the alien cultures that the Enterprise crew encountered all obliquely reflected the struggles that Earth of the 1960s was going through.
But there was nothing like that in Into Darkness. The villain, a genetically manipulated human named Khan, lightly skipped around the whole prospect of eugenics ethics that the original series (and subsequent movie) put front and center, and he became merely a pawn in the real villain's plan. Not only that, but most of the fun of the movie seemed designed to be the "ooh, that's different than the original!" game. That's why I think Into Darkness will eventually be regarded as a "good" Trek movie, not a "great" one.
But like I said, it got me thinking... how does this power-vs.-morality idea find its balance? When does it work, and when does it fail? Here are the first four heroes I could think of with near-God-like powers, and how successfully they've all fared:
1. In the most recent Superman film, Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder flipped the script on us: we were given a hero with no weaknesses meeting with moral challenges that most audiences believed that he failed (which, after all is said and done, was maybe the point). Superman used to represent the American ideal, strong to the point of dominating. I'm sure Snyder thought that, in an era where we're questioning America's place in an increasingly egalitarian world, this unsurety about whether we still are (or should be) perpetually on top should be reflected. Clearly, America wasn't ready for such a drastic reinvention of its most enduring avatar.
2. Wolverine (from X-Men): While not having powers as god-like as the others on this list, Wolverine is pretty close to indestructible (remember that his only real superpower is that his body can heal incredibly fast... the addition of his adamantine skeleton and retractable claws are only a scientific exploitation of that), but he has a lot of angst. He's looking for his place in the world, and in this way is like all the other X-men... he's a man, but just different enough to feel like an outsider. This superpower-as-otherness has been used as a metaphor for civil rights, gay rights, and variously as whatever social group is working its way to acceptance in mainstream society (if that term even means anything anymore). This is why it works so well. And now that there are seven movies featuring the character, it's clear that the public identifies with him in some deep way.
3. Neo (from The Matrix): I think everyone agrees that once Neo mastered his powers inside the Matrix, the movie franchise lost its appeal. And it's true: there's no dramatic tension if a hero has basically no limitation on his powers. As time wore on in the trilogy, the only way to make things interesting was to give him more and more powerful (or numerous) adversaries, and think up new ways to delay him while his slightly-less-powerful friends were in danger. It was actually really interesting to observe how moviegoers saw themselves in him when he had a little power, and were almost completely alienated from him when he got a lot.
4. Dr. Manhattan: In the Watchman graphic novel and film (ironically, which was also directed by Zack Snyder), this is a hero who used to be human, but was torn apart by a nuclear blast. He somehow managed to reconstruct himself, and reappeared as a bald, blue humanoid with complete control over time and space. He exists in all moments at once, and can be in multiple places at once (much to the frustration of his girlfriend), but has lost his essential humanity in translation. He's entirely disconnected from earthly life, although he tries to approximate it because he dimly remembers who he used to be. When he's not creating amazing new technologies in his lab, he's endlessly (and often randomly) wandering the Universe, contemplating his existence. He wants to engage with us, but it's like one of us trying to live among ants. In terms of character, there's actually an improvement in the film adaptation, where he sacrifices himself for the good of humanity, (although only figuratively because he's immortal).
With all these characters, as the power embodied in an individual ramps up, the importance of their moral decisions has to do the same, or else there's an imbalance. If popularity with the American public can be an accurate barometer, Wolverine and Dr. Manhattan have got it right, where Neo and Superman (at least in his current incarnation) have not.
It's an old story... the fantastical heroes and villains we see on our screens and read in our literature reflect what we respectively see and fear in ourselves. In past generations, Dracula embodied everything we were afraid of about sex, religion, disease, and mortality (all at once, which is why he's still such a potent character after 150 years). Gojira and all the other giant monsters of the 50s were the nuclear threat incarnate. Batman is our belief in philanthropy and personal power. Iron Man is our faith in technology and capitalism. Spiderman is our adolescent awkwardness, albeit inverted into amazing abilities.
I think this is why superheroes loom so large on our collective creative landscape now, and why they don't seem ready to go away any time soon. But they only hit their stride when they take our internal conflicts and turn them into exterior threats to grapple with. In the past, a superhero was someone who demonstrated how to use power. Now, we're going deeper... not only are we trying figuring out what it means to have power in the first place, we are also examining who it turns us into, and the price we pay for it.
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