Thoughts from Frank Miller, Guillermo del Toro, and Zack Snyder:
Frank Miller (born January 27, 1957) is an American writer, artist, and film director best known for his dark comic book stories and graphic novels such as Ronin, Daredevil: Born Again, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, and 300. He also directed the film version of The Spirit, shared directing duties with Robert Rodriguez on Sin City and produced the film 300.
Maybe one reason we can all relate to superheroes in these depressed times is that this year’s batch has had to deal with a lot more shit, and it’s turned them into assholes. Hancock’s a drunk, Tony Stark’s a war-profiteer, and Bruce Wayne’s a rich jerk. Wouldn’t you be messed up if you were fighting, respectively, L.A. crime, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda in clown makeup?
Hellboy’s inner demon is that he’s an outer demon. O.K., that’s not quite as easy to relate to, but he’s nonetheless an irritable, cynical hero, and audiences like that. “We are drawn to more ambiguous superheroes,” says director Guillermo del Toro, who brought the same cinematic intelligence to Hellboy II that he did to his Academy-tickling, magic-realist masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006. “I think that Brian Singer’s Superman proved to be perhaps too good for this world. Too clean.”
“When you look back at the time Superman was born, it was portraying, quite essentially, the ethos of the time,” del Toro adds. “When you see the recombinant DNA of the superheroes when they were reinvented in the highly dubious 80s, by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, they are virulent testaments to the neo-fascism and consumerism of a sheepish society.”
Neo-fascism is a post–World War II ideology that includes significant elements of fascism. The term neo-fascist may apply to groups that express a specific admiration for Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, may also be called Neo-Nazis, and Italian Fascism or any other fascist leader/state. Neo-fascism usually includes palingenetic ultranationalism, populism, anti-immigration policies or, where relevant, nativism, anti-communism, and opposition to the parliamentary system and liberal democracy. Allegations that a group is neo-fascist may be hotly contested, especially if the term is used as a political epithet. Some post–World War II regimes have been described as neo-fascist due to their authoritarian nature, and sometimes due to their fascination with fascist ideology and rituals.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-fascism
“Every great civilization has its superheroes,” says Miller. “America is just a much, much younger civilization… You couldn’t find a better version, in America, of the Pantheon of ancient Greece [than superheroes],” which could be why they’re such an enduring draw.
That may sound like comic-book-nerd hyperbole, but the comparison with Greek mythology is actually relevant, to a point. For one thing, to the ancients, preposterous tales of heroic feats were not to be taken literally. “It’s not that they were ‘believed,’” says Harvard Classics Professor Gregory Nagy. “That is a Christian concept. Rather, myths about heroes were accepted as valid narratives about moral truths that helped explain life.”
But, Nagy says, “although American stories about superheroes share some of the patterns that are typical of ancient Greek myths about heroes”—the hero’s trials, for example, or the quest for cosmic balance—“myth was organically tied to ritual in the ancient Greek world, whereas the storytelling about heroes in a modern context has nothing to do with ritual.” Unless you count the ritual sacrificing of Sour Patch Kids.
