The new season of Daredevil—the Marvel franchise—came out on Netflix, and guess what I did: I spent the past week lying in bed, binge-watching it. I watched it on my computer screen–the machine going on for so long late into the night that it left a warm spot on my bed. How I loved that warm spot. I would curl up on it and drift off to sleep.
Daredevil is a comic book series that chronicles the escapades of Matthew Murdock—lawyer by day, superhero by night—who patrols Hell’s Kitchen to dole out vigilante justice in a world overrun by violence. Murdock is an extraordinary superhero because he is an ordinary man, and one, in fact, hampered with a disability—blindness. But his disability also gives rise to enhanced sensory perceptions and superior fighting abilities. He can hear heartbeats, the sound of a man breathing in another room. And this makes the young esquire both ordinary and extraordinary, human and relateable.
Daredevil first arrived on the scene in the 60’s, but the comic book enjoyed its greatest revival in the 80’s when comic juggernaut Frank Miller took control of the franchise. The television show recasts Miller’s version of eighties New York—a time of extreme violence–somewhere in the nebulous zone between then and the here-and-now.
The 80’s is significant for the themes of the show: vigilante-ism. This was a time when Bernhard Goetz, a meek mild-mannered subway rider made national news and came to be known as the “subway vigilante” by gunning down four muggers in the rat-infested subways. This is not the slick gentrified New York of Russian Oligarchs and Chinese playboys—the New York that has been polished and spit shined like a pair of banker’s wingtips. This is the New York that is grittier—the New York of white flight and urban decay that spawned vigilante groups like the Guardian Angels: ordinary citizens in red berets who took the law into their own hands.
The show is definitely worth the viewing. There’s a lot of action—a ton of violence. The introduction of the Punisher and Elektra—two other superheroes with their own comic book franchises—means that there’s a lot of guns and stunts and acrobatics and martial arts. Oh yeah, there are ninjas. Did I tell you there are ninjas? A whole lot of them.
My take-away from the show rests on this one interesting issue. You see: Daredevil has this one quirk. He is a vigilante but he is not like Bernhard Goetz: he has a code. That code is to never take a life. And he’s really uptight about it. So he’ll beat the bejeezus out of a ninja but won’t actually follow through and kill him. And he’ll bend over backwards to avoid killing anyone, as if he were some Honest to Goodness Buddhist monk.
Given a choice between saving twenty hostages or saving the world, guess what Daredevil will do. Yup, he’s that shortsighted. He will always go for the idiot choice: saving the people who are immediately before him, the people in need. It’s as if he were Charlie Brown–always running toward that football.
The paradox is that, quite often, this means that a lot of people actually end up dying because Daredevil doesn’t dare kill. Ninjas keep waking up from getting punched and, like characters in a video game, they’re back into play. Or Daredevil will command one of his superhero cronies not to kill some random ninja…that stops them in their tracks…and then the ninja sticks a sword into them.
It makes you get really annoyed at the masked man in the red suit. So much so that I started screaming at Daredevil to stop it already. But at the same time, I wonder if that’s the mad genius of the show: that Daredevil has a clearly defined through-line and this through-line is the source of dynamic tension. The fact that we hate Daredevil because of this very predictable quirk also means that we feel for Daredevil…and some emotion is better than none at all.
What do you think? Is making you hate a main character an important part of engaging an audience? Is wanting to throw things at the computer screen a sign of getting a little too caught up? Have you ever found yourself in a relationship with someone you can’t stand because they exasperate you? Have you ever wanted to leave that person but decided to stay because, you know, at least you’re feeling something…and at least they’re keeping you warm in bed?
You bring up an interesting point, Khanh. I think readers can definitely be interested in, even vested in, the doings of a character they hate. It’s whether that character is really interesting that, in my opinion, matters more. Oh, and you make an interesting point about vigilantism. Even in the late ’70s, in films such as Dirty Harry, you see it cropping up. And certainly it was there in the Goetz case.
Great point, Margot. It makes me think of the figure of Vice, which comes to us through Medieval drama–a character whose entire point is to be terrible, bad, destructive. Shakespeare’s Iago derives from this figure, as does JR from Dallas. Iago is the more interesting character, compared to Othello, because he’s just not bland. But Daredevil is kind of a bland mild-mannered type–a Boy Scout in red tights. This is definitely something I’ll stew on for a bit.