Three Reasons for the Success of the Cinematic Superhero

With the financial success of Man of Steel ($500 Million worldwide and counting) here are three reasons for the enduring appeal of men in tights:    

1.  Audiences love complex narratives, but are unsettled by ambiguous moral frameworks.  Television frequently thrives because of this tension, as the continued success of Breaking Bad proves.  But a two-hour film does not always have the luxury of building that level of three-dimensionality, and so the superheroic mode provides blissful simplification.  One person seeks destruction on a scale that will cost countless lives, the other seeks to prevent it.  The good-guy/bad-guy distinction hasn’t been clearer since the days when the sides wore different colored hats.        

2.  While the protagonists of these stories are well-sculpted, with the charismatic eccentricities and psychological burdens audiences have come to expect from celebrities, unlike real celebrities their failings are only ever part of their explicit journey to the next stage of awesomeness and understanding.  The slings and arrows of moral turpitude pass them by.  In an age of mass adulation and judgment, they sustain a cycle of hero-worship no real person ever could.       

3.  Superheroes are the masters of that greatest of modern phenomena that is itself the specialty of Hollywood: the spectacle.  In an age where a human being can be seen to accomplish anything with the aid of digital effects, superheroes are the only ones who are allowed to do so uninhibited.  The genre resists the rationality of cause and effect as long as dramatic necessity is observed.  The only rule is the rule of cool.          

Is it ironic or is it necessary that in a world dominated by increasing moral and scientific complexity our most iconic fictional heroes should be sustained by naïve dichotomies and powered by wish-fulfillment fantasies?  If we believe Cervantes, then the Golden Age of Spain was marked by an epidemic influx of literature regarding the glorious deeds of knights errant.  Film has finally delivered to us a comparable form of escapism. So my advice for the inevitable inundation of caped crusaders to come is this: be patient.  Give it another decade for the iconography to truly be instilled in us, and then maybe someone will make the film that does for superheroes and some socially relevant, artistically meritorious theme what Django Unchained did for cowboys and racism, or the novel Don Quixote for knight errantry and religion (and Spanish culture, and literature as a whole, etc.).  The artistic burden shouldn’t be beyond a class of people who regularly shatter mountains and defeat armies single-handedly.