Something has happened. The superhero story is no longer just a genre; it’s a constellation of genres, an entire worldview, a fundamental metaphor. We can now choose from a plethora of options, from action movies about superheroes to superhero comedies, noir superheroes or postcolonial superheroes. In fact, superheroes have become so ubiquitous that the way in which their stories are told is now the most interesting thing about them.
Just why these stories are told is somewhat less surprising. Superheroes generate enormous profits for their owners, who happen to be named Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros, among others. When special effects became good enough – a transformation which occurred, rather appropriately, around the turn of the century – these superheroes, together with heroes from the sci-fi and fantasy realms, became the primary engines of the entertainment industry.
To put it another way, a more American way: superheroes have gone corporate. Even when they are presented as subversive, the reality is that this subversiveness supplies a particular market for precisely defined demographic groups. Superhero stories are thus a valuable indicator of cultural doxa – of several things that we now take for granted, especially when it comes to the deepest, most pervasive, most universal theme of superhero stories: physical difference.
Cultural doxa, or popular opinion, can be expressed in many unexpected ways. The most pervasive superhero stories of all – the numerous films, TV series and other narrative formats that take place within the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU – are surprisingly concerned with their heroes’ relationships to institutional structures. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the rest are, in their various ways, unique superhumans who find themselves united in a quasi-federally protected division by the name of the Avengers. Superhero stories, then, are not only the fantasies about transgression and power that the first glance might lead one to assume; they are also narratives about conformity in the workplace.
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Take, for example, Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey, Jr., in a long series of Marvel films, from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019). A billionaire and playboy, Stark is kidnapped and almost fatally wounded by a group of terrorists but manages to construct a high-tech suit of armour that both keeps him alive and – this is the crucial bit – enables him to carry out work that enormously benefits society. In other words, Iron Man’s is a classic rehabilitation story. Stark is gradually reintegrated back into the society, over time gaining a partner and child, and is able to establish a clearly-defined relationship with society’s authoritative institutions. He becomes, more or less, normalised.
The Avengers, the group Tony Stark helps to create, exists for the purpose of saving the world. But perhaps first and foremost the group is an arena for socialisation and fellowship. The locations that Stark outfits – first in Manhattan and later in rural upstate New York – are reminiscent of our dream images of the Google, Apple, and Facebook campuses in California: playful, well-groomed workplaces where employees participate both in brainstorm sessions and ball games with equal and heroically intense efforts.
The vision of the superhero project that the MCU presents is remarkably conformist, so much so that it has already become the subject of the scathing satire of the TV series The Boys (adapted from the comic book series by Garth Ennis). In this universe, superheroes are explicitly employed by a transnational corporation. The heroes, who are caricatures of Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etc., and who possess corresponding superpowers, are nevertheless no more than spokespeople/models who are constantly subjected to internal administrative processes and rules for communicating with the media.
The Boys, well-written and -produced as it is, highlights something that is actually quite obvious: most superheroes are basically fascists who possess the intrinsic belief that those with great power are always in the right. From a grounded perspective, this makes them extremely scary. The Homelander, the Superman-like character in the series, doesn’t give a damn about normal people. And why should he? He’s not bound by the same limitations as ordinary people, and he’s never been socialised into normal human relationships. And therein lies another premise: physical difference, manifested as superhuman ability, is the trait that fundamentally differentiates superheroes from everyone else. Seen in this light, it is impossible to overlook the deep connection between superheroes and people with physical disabilities.
This correlation is old news and has partially been acknowledged. Not only are there already explicitly disabled superheroes such as Professor X and Daredevil; physical disability also provides an opportunity for the storytellers to humanise that which is superhuman. Without his unique vulnerability to kryptonite, Superman would not be a hero; he would be a god. But this correlation creates a whole cluster of problems, perhaps especially related to values and value setting. In narrative universes in which the themes of physical otherness and superhuman abilities are so explicit, how can we avoid thinking that physical capability is that which makes humans valuable – or not?
American popular culture has always been good at camouflaging both the structures and the ideologies behind individuals. One of the most disturbing consequences of applauding superheroes – even in well-made, funny, and family-friendly films such as Pixar’s The Incredibles – is that in doing so, we are basically applauding the principle that might makes right. One of the recurring themes in the Incredibles universe is that the “supers”, with their innate powers, are, in fact, better than everyone else.
The Boys is one of the series that tackles this problem most directly. It turns the paradigm on its head in two ways: first by configuring its superheroes as lackeys of institutions that everyone hates, namely, big private companies linked to military operations, but also, and perhaps more significantly, by making them contemptuous of physical weakness. A key scene in Season 2 plays on the tension between the corporate and the downright fascist: Homelander is introduced to a blind superhero, meant to join his team as a “diversity” hire. Unable and unwilling to hide his disdain, Homelander kills the other hero on the spot.
In light of the extremist ideological positions intrinsic to the very idea of superheroes, I find the normalising and normality-embracing stories of the MCU series both comforting and a little sad. As a child and wheelchair user, I adored superheroes because they represented absolute freedom. I loved Spider-Man best of all; in those days, in Norway, we called him Edderkoppen, and in our translations he lived in the children’s bookshop on Vibes street in Oslo, the city where I grew up. In his blue and red leotard, he was able to swing elegantly between skyscrapers, and beneath his mask he was, if not a child, at least a teenager, just close enough to my own age to thrill me in a way that differed from when I read about the (slightly) more adult figures of Superman and Batman. Identification and fantasy, nearness and distance. Superheroes existed to broaden the world.
When Spiderman’s story was first made into a proper film, by Sam Raimi in 2001, I was still not too old to be completely carried away at the press screening that I attended in Cinemateket on Dronningensgate. I thought: Finally! They’ve finally done it. The special effects are good enough, the superhero is no longer just a guy in tights, he’s the very idea of free flight. Film has always been about the body’s movement through a room, but an entirely extraordinary kind of breakthrough was required to make these movements shine on the big screen.
Then came the deluge. After more than 20 movies and billions in profit, the MCU is currently on its way into “phase four.” It has become the eternally-churning propeller of the entertainment industry and represents 10 of the 25 highest-grossing films of all time. I’ve got a bit sick of it, if I’m honest. I miss the original, stand-alone hits. But I still watch most of the Marvel flicks; my nostalgia is too great, and the quality of the films, in spite of everything, is pretty high. I watch them, over and over again. And every time, I see new themes emerge. The superhero connection to physical disability is deeper and more fundamental than I ever could have dreamt when I was first intuitively drawn to these stories.
The Dark Knight Rises, the finale of Christopher Nolan’s grim, stylish, and incessantly solemn Batman trilogy, is a dark counterpart to the relative lightness of MCU films. And as a superbly cinematic film, it’s a different and more self-contained antidote to the cranked-out new MCU episodes, drawing clearer parallels to the eternal concern of cinematography: fantastical bodies.
It’s common knowledge that the cultural roots of superheroes lie in the circus. However, less is known or written about the thin and permeable membrane which separates the hero from the monster, or the tension between fascination and our feelings about that which is frightful or monstrous. One working hypothesis: superheroes are quintessential freaks.
The most well-known film by this title, Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), is about a troupe of circus artists with exceptional, aberrant bodies. These are characters who make their living by displaying themselves for money, by generating among their audience that which Aristotle would have identified as fear and pity. Mostly fear, I’d wager. And a great deal of disgust. In the film, however, these characters also form a social community. They exist on the outskirts of society, and they all know it.
The actors in the movie were real circus artists, with completely authentic and, in some cases, utterly extraordinary bodies. In his film, Browning replicates the approach of the circus: He earns money by displaying these deviants in front of the camera. Or he tried to do so, at least; Freaks did not perform well in theatres. I’ll speculate as to why a bit later, but first, the plot: One of the circus artists is a person of short stature. He is in love with one of the other artists, a woman who earns her money by displaying a body that evokes desire rather than disgust. She is not in love with him, but he has money. They marry. She tries to murder him. It doesn’t end well. Especially not for her.
Though exploitative, Freaks has some arguably redeeming aspects to its story. Most importantly, the storytelling doesn’t turn the freaks into stage props: they are people, their lives as thoroughly elaborated as any other characters’. It would be a stretch to call them heroes, but protagonists – we may call them that. And, to a certain extent, the audience is invited to identify with them.
Identification, yes. This is, in fact, the heart of the story. The community of freaks is at first very sceptical of the beautiful woman. They’ve been burned before. But the man of short stature wants to include her, and so she is invited in. As the wine is passed around the table, everyone sings along to a chorus of welcome: Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, one of us, one of us! That’s when the beautiful woman cracks. She is not one of them, and she spits wine into their faces. The ruse is up. She almost managed to trick them, but she couldn’t do it in the end. To live among them while earning money, that was fine, but to admit that she is like them, no, never, not in a million years.
The deviant body is attractive and repulsive at the same time. It can do the impossible – that which the viewer cannot nor even wishes to do. It confirms the viewer’s normalcy by displaying the abnormal, at a safe distance. But too much room for identification can make the display seem unsafe, can bring it too close for comfort. And the era of explicit freakshows was ending. Freaks was Tod Browning’s last film.
And the other nocturnal bat-person, the Dark Knight, conceived in the same decade as Freaks, where do we place him on the spectrum? He’s not repulsive, is he? Okay, so maybe he does look a little like a vampire, but beneath his cape is a perfectly chiselled human body, an exemplary human being, and if he borrows a few tricks from circus acrobats, that hardly makes him a weirdo. He’s a man, and not a freak, go the lyrics to the song about Joe DiMaggio. However, we can spend some time with this question. Because where do we meet Batman in the third and final Nolan film? Well, to begin with, we don’t meet him at all. He’s withdrawn into his gloomy mansion, he lurks around in the shadows, limping, with a cane. We later learn that he has hardly any cartilage left in his knees, that he’s worn out his body in the service of good.
Such dwelling on the damaged body is not unique to this particular Batman film. It’s a motif that has followed his character for a very long time. In some of his incarnations, Batman’s arch nemesis, the Joker, has covered a normal face with clown make-up, but in Tim Burton’s adaptation from 1989, his characteristic grimace is the result of having fallen into a vat of acid. He wears skin-coloured make-up to conceal a chalky-white, inhuman face. In The Dark Knight (2008), the Joker, played by Heath Ledger, has long scars around his mouth, seemingly sliced open with a knife. Viewers are presented with a variety of hypotheses as to how this happened, but ultimately the mystery remains unsolved.
But it isn’t only his enemies’ bodies that are subjected to extraordinary scrutiny. Batman himself is no superhuman; he’s just extremely ripped. But he pulls muscles and gets bruises just like everyone else. Chris Nolan’s camera lingers on Christian Bale’s cuts and injuries – they serve as visual proof of Batman’s pathological heroism, they constitute him as a character. Batman, in this version, is closely aligned with the Christ figure; even if he doesn’t die for our sins, he certainly bleeds for them.
This suffering hero, the hero who is able to tolerate more than we can, who is called into the circus ring to be stretched on the torture rack, is an age-old motif that lives on in modern superhero and action films, not to mention all of Mel Gibson’s work, from the Lethal Weapon quadrilogy via Braveheart to The Passion of the Christ. My point here is that this theme is often downplayed when these films are discussed, and we talk and write instead about how we are collectively drawn to the invincible hero. And I would like to point out that we are not. We are drawn to the hero who can withstand a thrashing.
Maybe this is the reason that we haven’t seen a truly successful adaptation of the Superman films in over 35 years. Superman is in many respects neither a superhero nor an action figure. He is a god. When he suffers, almost exclusively when exposed to kryptonite, he takes on a more human form, but it’s honestly not all that convincing.
Batman, Spider-Man, and most of the Marvel and DC universe figures are fallible heroes. The X-Men fall under this category too. The most extreme of these is Wolverine, whose defining characteristic is that he is always able to tolerate more pain, more of a beating, and always manages to pull himself together in order to go back and get beaten up all over again. Maybe the only good example of a non-masochistic superhero is Iron Man, who has rightly been described as Batman without all the complexes. It is Iron Man’s armour, not the man himself, that gets damaged, and, just like a Formula 1 car, it is repaired after each big fight.
But wait! Tony Stark, Iron Man’s civilian identity, has a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Without it he can’t survive. It is also the source of his superhuman strength. He’s a cyborg! Now, if that’s not freaky, I don’t know what is.
Monsters and freaks have been with humanity since antiquity. They originally served to illustrate the diversity of nature and warn against moral transgressions. It was only in the 19th century, in the last decades before the advent of superhero stories, that monsters lost much of their old cultural significance.
What happened, exactly? Well, we developed statistics, and with statistics the idea of the average person, the typical, the normal person. Medicine and medical science, if not yet possessed of all their curative techniques, developed into institutionalised structures. The state began to take seriously the health of its populace, to expand school systems, tidy the slums, give speeches, ponder methods, expand, govern. Where there was once chaos, now there was order.
And wherever there’s order there will be a deviation from it; wherever there are rules there will be exceptions. It was in the 19th century that the theological explanations for physical abnormalities began to fade, supplanted by clinical medicine. It became less common to believe that children with innate illnesses and injuries were changelings; it was no longer acceptable to offer changelings back to the underworld, which is to say, to leave them in the woods to die. But the moral explanations haven’t quite disappeared just yet. Perhaps we will never be entirely rid of them. There is still shame associated with not being able to work, there is guilt. We suspect that many illnesses and disabilities are at least partly caused by moral choices, either our own or those of our parents.
That makes it deeply comforting to be among the normal. It’s the comfort of being hidden in the darkness of the audience, rather than finding oneself on stage, under the lights, every aspect of one’s physiology and character under the critical gaze. Doing this, taking the stage, is perhaps something one does only if hiding among the normals was never an option in the first place.
Was the entire history of culture up to the 1800s one single long dream from which we only woke after that era ended? Or did we start to doze off again as soon as we had the chance? Film and sleep are related, a correlation that has been noted since the medium first came into being. And in dreamland, categories that we, as rational, adult, wage-earning individuals, take for granted are dissolved.
Superheroes are a childish concern. They are not wage-earning individuals; they beg, Look at me! Look at what I can do! The earlier superheroes, Superman among them, borrowed their graphic expression directly from circus artists. The leotards and bright colours were effective in distinguishing the characters from each other on the page despite poor printing quality, and they also brought to mind the familiar uniforms of strongmen and acrobats. Superheroes and circus artists are two sides of the same coin: both are spectacular manifestations of the variation in human conditions, for the possibilities of human anatomy. They both attract and threaten.
Before superheroes, before the freak show, there was the curiosity Cabinet, the Wunderkammer, featuring every kind of anatomical abnormality under glass: conjoined twins over here, an alligator over there. There was no system to it, no real scientific interest. With the advent of modern medical science, it became less acceptable to put these poor deviations on display. Foucault wrote that the medical gaze is privileged; it may observe and regulate the deviations. But it must only be directed at its objects in the privacy of a closed room. The anatomical theatre is no longer open to the public. The freak show is what remains: the second-to-last bastion of the deviant body as entertainment.
Following the freak show, there are only superheroes and other stylised, harmless monsters. Physical aberrations must be contextualised safely in mythology, in fantasy. Once there, we are permitted to stare for as long as we’d like. It is worthwhile noting that Freaks was not well accepted among the public. It pretty much spelt the end of director Tod Browning’s career, even though, only one year prior, he had celebrated enormous success with a film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Silly man! He tripped on the home stretch; he didn’t grasp that the public wanted its monsters cased in non-realistic packaging. He should have stuck with monsters that clearly belonged to the world of the supernatural, rather than those that trouble the line between us and them. He might have succeeded in making an exceptionally strange Batman adaptation, but unfortunately for him, the first Batman comic wouldn’t be printed until seven years later. Browning vanished down the gap between the freak show and the superfreakshow.
One final observation, a coda: literary scholar Susan Schweick writes in her book The Ugly Laws about the many American cities which, around the previous turn of the century, introduced bans against “deformed” people appearing in public spaces. Such people were a threat to general morality, and it was irrelevant whether they were “authentic freaks” or malingerers. The fact that they were visible at all was the problem. Such people had one permissible place to be and that was in the circus. Soon, the circus was not allowed either; soon, only the institution was permitted. The city streets were meant to be clean and shiny – not dark like Gotham City, but a shining Metropolis. Freaks: thanks, but no thanks!
Superheroes are harmless monsters, spruced-up freaks. To put it another way: They exist in order to inspire. And here they overlap again with those of us who are physically disabled, those of us who exist for the gaze of others. We can be inspirational, too!
No doubt you’re familiar with this image: A young boy in mid-stride, in an arena, above one of two taglines: “What is your excuse?” or “Your excuse is invalid.” The boy has two prostheses from his knees down. And yet, he’s smiling! He’s trying, he’s walking, he’s running, and he doesn’t even have legs. If he can do it, shouldn’t you be able to work a little harder?
The phrase “inspiration porn” was aptly coined by the Australian comedian and disability rights activist Stella Young. She used a wheelchair; she was born a person of short stature. Throughout much of her life, she was more or less applauded just for showing up. The fact that she finished high school or even managed to get around outside was so inspiring that it simply had to be remarked upon, whether by an educational institution or by random passersby.
People with visual disabilities have long been held up as inspiration for others. The most famous example might be Tiny Tim, from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The ailing little son of Bob Cratchit, with his crutch and amiable personality, is everything that the world hopes a worthy wretch might be: innocent, grateful, a good mascot. For years, Jerry Lewis’s fundraising campaign for muscular dystrophy used angelic poster children cast in the mould of Tiny Tim.
But then something happened. Jerry Lewis became a hated figure among many disability rights activists, in part because he so frequently referred to a “half-life” and a tragic fate, and in part because he insisted on an idea of charity that no longer has a place in modern society. Medical research, rehabilitation, wheelchairs, and individual adjustments were no longer benevolent gifts from charitable individuals, but were assumed to be societal obligations.
And yet the figure of the deserving disabled person persists. Not being an object of pity, one must be an object of admiration. Had Dickens written his holiday tale today, Tiny Tim would be up on the gymnastic bars by page three. He would no longer be dependent on charity; now he would only need to believe in himself.
The Paralympic athlete and model Aimee Mullins, who is also well known from multi-artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films, has addressed the faulty assumptions of inspiration porn head on. She has leg prostheses, “12 Pairs of Legs,” to be exact, as she puts it in the title of her most-viewed talk: a pair of high-heeled legs for parties; a set of leopard legs for sprints. Her use of these legs is, indeed, an inspirational sight.
Mullins, however, is careful to point out that she has had access to resources that are available to few others. Someone has to make her legs; someone has to fund their fabrication. And yet the legs never quite stop chafing if she wears them for too long. That’s the thing about porn: we don’t see what happens after the camera has been switched off.
Wilful ignorance is what makes inspiration porn possible, and popular. It is a wilful ignorance about how the body actually functions, about physical vulnerability and physical realities. In 1963, the sociologist Erving Goffman published his book Stigma, which among many other themes described the common view of disability as paradoxical. People with disabilities are often attributed with compensatory, near-mythical characteristics – the most familiar being a blind person’s heightened sensitivity and compensatory other senses. Goffman called these attributed characteristics, including the imagined sixth sense, “desirable, but undesired.”
Though one may toy with the idea of being such an inspiring figure, of revealing all of one’s scars and frailties as a source of motivation to others, at the end of the day we’re happier if we can avoid it. Inspiration porn offers its audience two things: a moment of escapism and a permanent opportunity to reduce societal problems to a simple question about willpower and heroism. Stella Young didn’t view a lack of willpower as her greatest problem; her greatest problem was a lack of ramps.
Superhero movies are, in a way, the ultimate form of inspiration porn. There’s hardly a superhero who hasn’t grown stronger from his or her pain.
Inspiration porn has its own method of assigning value. This system is based on visible frailty. The external, the body, is a symptom of the internal, the soul. Most inspiration porn images that I’ve come across depict wheelchair users or people with prostheses. It makes sense. Pornography is primarily a visual form of expression; why shouldn’t it conflate disability with visible conditions? But inspiration porn is also political. Not only does it evade analysis, but it also removes the opportunity for solidarity. It operates by the principle of trickle-down economics: some people must be lifted all the way up to the top so that those on the very bottom have something to aspire to. It also operates by promoting the idea of a morally balanced universe: no one is given a challenge that she can’t handle. Other peoples’ hardships are, deep down, good for them.
Inspiration porn serves to polarise and alienate. It fetishises victim stories, as long as the victim can tell his story, or have it told, in a captivating way: this terrible thing happened back then, but look at me now!
Inspiration porn offers an aesthetic and a narrative frame for the perfect motivational speech. Of course, it can, after the initial fervour has died down, leave one with a feeling of emptiness. But at least the listener doesn’t have any real obligation to the inspirational object, no more so than a viewer has to a porn star. One only has to close the tab, return to the everyday, confident in the notion that anyone who didn’t quite make it, anyone who failed to smile broadly enough at the camera, or to tolerate adverse conditions and come out stronger on the other side, did not deserve a spot on the podium.
I Live a Life Like Yours by Jan Grue, translated by BL Crook, is published by Pushkin Press
