". . . at the Q and A, they always asked me what my wish was, and I always said, 'To save the world.' And the judges just chuckled like it was cute. But it wasn't a joke to me. Since when did 'hopeful' and 'naive' become the same thing? I mean, why would you get into this business if not to save the world? That's all I have ever wanted. And that's why I've always wanted to be in The Seven."
--Starlight, The Boys (season one, episode one)
"Fuck this world for confusing nice with good."
--Stormfront, The Boys (season two, episode two)
The Boys takes on quite a wide range of issues across its two current seasons. Its satire targets the characters of DC's Justice League, the dismissal of the cultural problems megacorporations create or exploit, evangelical Christianity with its utter shallowness and irrationalism, and more. Season two even specifically alludes to Joss Whedon's Justice League film being inferior to Zack Snyder's originally planned version, so there are plenty of parallels to developments in the world's actual entertainment industry as well as to popular philosophical ideas. Like Watchmen before it, The Boys is still first and foremost a deconstruction of what is now one of the most popular genres of multimedia entertainment in all of present history, but there is far more depth than this as it points to various issues that even now grip the modern age.
Two main factions are the focus of the show. On one hand, it follows an organization called Vought that features selfish, abusive "heroes" that include The Seven, a team satirically resembling the Justice League: Homelander is a corrupt Superman figure, Queen Maeve is a somewhat apathetic Wonder Woman figure, and so on. On the other hand, it also follows a handful of individuals led by William Butcher who are infuriated with Vought for its murders and other abuses of power. Both groups, ironically, are mostly full of people driven by allegiance either to moral ideas embraced due to the subjectivity of conscience or to utilitarian effectiveness at the expense of moral concerns. The backgrounds of various characters sometimes connect them with ideas that are often misrepresented or used for personal gain rather than philosophical awareness--but that are not destructive or verifiably false in themselves.
Homelander, like season one's newcomer to The Seven Starlight, has ties to conservative Christian circles that outwardly associate him with what amounts to contemporary evangelicalism. It would be odd for someone like myself to not address the way that evangelicalism is presented--as a philosophy that aims for the most surface level understanding of Biblical morality and appeals to the assumptions its adherents are committed to regardless of validity or verifiability--in a philosophical assessment of the series. Season one does practically mock evangelical fitheism and conservstism, and as a rationalist and Christian, I want evangelicalism to be mocked to the point of acknowledging how stupid evangelicals and evangelical ideas are. There is almost nothing at all in evangelicalism that represents Biblical theology and broader and more foundational philosophical concepts accurately. The more a person understands and cares about logic and the Bible (as well as science, but science has a wholly lesser philosophical status than reason), the less evangelical they will be. In one sense, it is only fitting that William Butcher's response to the evangelical nonsense of season one is equally emotionalistic, shallow, and irrationalistic.
Of course, as any intelligent viewer realizes, Butcher's atheism is literally just an appeal to emotion based on his subjective dislike of the state of the world and his confusion of the basic concept of a deity for a being that has predestined all events that occur. In other words, it is just the so-called problem of evil in all of its emotionalistic lack of philosophical glory. Things have befallen him that he dislikes, and he assumes that God does not or cannot exist without distinguishing between an amoral deity and one with a moral nature--and he also assumes that morality must be as he wants it to be, or else he would never think something is evil just because it harms him or offends his conscience. Then there is his total selfishness and willingness to brutalize others, which reveal him for the pathetic hypocrite that he is. He is actually quite similar to Homelander, whom he despises, and yet Homelander has ties to something that could be lived out benevolently, unlike Butcher.
Homelander's ties to a misrepresentation of Christianity are not his only affiliation with distorted ideas, since he appeals to patriotism quite regularly across both seasons (patriotism is philosophically pointless but still morally neutral/amoral on its own even if it is almost never lived out in rational or just ways). He is not even the only member of the Seven that is affiliated with something neutral or positive. In fact, Stormfront, of all people, is associated with something philosophically valid in its entirety, pragmatically beneficial, and Biblically just. Stormfront is (or at least initially pretends to be) a genuine feminist: a gender egalitarian who directly, unhesitatingly denounces an attempt to gain publicity by acting like women are more competent than men. This is extremely ironic given that she is violently racist against non-whites to the point of assaulting and murdering them for the color of their skin.
Stormfront is a grand example of just how confused or hypocritical almost every main character in the world of The Seven is. There are no true heroes in the entire show except perhaps Starlight and her eventual boyfriend. The Boys portrays the typical person with or without great social power or superpowers as they are--slaves to personal desires and arbitrary worldviews which they use to manipulate other people, all as they object to being manipulated by other egoists and irrationalists at the very same time. No superhuman power will make someone rational and just, and no lack of physical strength makes someone intellectually and morally insignificant. The Boys stands alongside Game of Thrones as a collective work that portrays the world as it is when individuals let their whims and preferences guide their actions and worldviews.
No comments:
Post a Comment