Midway through 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man is looking for a way to subdue an enraged Hulk after the (then-evil) Scarlet Witch messed with Hulk's mind. The battle pits a giant, robotic suit of armor against a huge monster in a titanic fight across a city center. It's silly stuff, of course, but very, very fun.
And then, in the middle of it, Iron Man drives the Hulk into a massive building under construction, bringing the entire structure crashing to the earth, and director Joss Whedon inserts a moment that makes you gasp. It is almost the spitting image of this famous photograph, with businessmen racing, panicked, from billowing clouds of dust behind them. The photograph, of course, is from September 11, 2001. The businessmen are racing from the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Whedon sets his action continents away from Manhattan, in Africa, and the dust clouds are much closer and more ominous in the film than they were in the photo. Still, the echo is unmistakable.
But in the world of the Avengers, there are few consequences. There's property damage, and PR damage, but no one dies. It's tragedy reimagined as cartoon — a version two steps removed that lets us glance at the real wound in our peripheral vision.
Superhero films are the dominant cinematic force right now. They make money hand over fist, and their releases turn into genuine pop culture events. But we miss their point — we miss the why of them. These films are pop culture's most sustained response to tragedy. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, America turned to superpowered heroes to rewrite that day so that it ended as one where nobody had to die.
Superhero movies, in some ways, aim to turn that day into something out of myth, like the ancients might have recast a real tragedy as an epic tale of heroism. This is one of the ways we process grief — in our tales.
And the further we get into the cinematic superhero era — now almost 15 years long — the more explicit these films get about both their real-world impetus and about the way America responded to that tragedy.
They began, as with America's actual reaction to 9/11, as films about vulnerable individuals finding the strength in themselves to overcome tragedy. Then they became stories about beings and organizations with nearly infinite power that would do whatever necessary to keep the homeland safe. And now, increasingly, they are grappling with the costs of the retribution they've doled out, and the security systems they've built.
First, though, the myths.
The Noah hypothesis
Humans use stories for a lot of reasons, but one of the most prominent, long-lasting ones is to provide moral instruction, a frame of reference for how to understand the world around us.
Talk to any folklorist, and you'll hear dozens of stories that cultures all around the world developed, seemingly independent of one another, from the mythic to the mundane. Nearly every culture on Earth has a story of a cataclysmic flood that wipes all life from the world, saving a small handful of people. Lots of cultures have stories of wild men living in the wilderness, giant and hairy and not quite human. Many, many cultures have versions of the Cinderella story (though it's easier to trace the spread of this particular tale).
There are a bunch of explanations for these common stories, ranging from the literal (all of this really happened) to the conceptual (human beings are fairly alike all over, and we tend to have common fears and desires). In truth, it's probably a mix of both.
You don't have to have a global flood to get to the idea of Noah. All you need is a flood big and deadly enough for people to have heard about it. Similarly, you don't need to have an actual Sasquatch to get Bigfoot myths. You only need to have subconscious remnants of when there were two intelligent humanoid species sharing the same planet, battling for dominance, one slowly getting pushed farther and farther to the edges of the world.
It's impossible to prove any of these theories, of course, and there's substantial evidence against the first one (in that the so-called Black Sea deluge seems unlikely to have happened). But it's fun to imagine our ancestors coming across Neanderthals and not knowing what to make of them, then telling stories about them.
And there's a kind of echo of how major world events twist themselves into new forms, pretzel-like, through our popular culture. We tell these stories, over and over, to ourselves, because we want to rob old tragedies and fears of their power. We want to mute them somehow, to make them less potent in our everyday lives.
Seen through that lens, the superhero boom is about the need for escapism, maybe, and the sheer fun of watching big-screen spectacle done well, to be sure. But it's also about keeping an image of our most recent tragedy where we can't quite see it but where the dim vibrations of its sorrow still reverberate. It's a kind of solemn recollection, buried in the middle of a bunch of popcorn fun.
And the memories are getting more explicit.
The most potent images of 9/11, reimagined as popcorn cinema
The first glimpse most Americans got of director Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man movie came in the summer of 2001. It was a trailer consisting of footage that had been shot just for the trailer, not the film. In it, a team of bank thieves race from the scene of their crime in a helicopter, only to find themselves trapped in a spider's web suspended between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
A few months later, the trailer was pulled, for obvious reasons.
When Spider-Man debuted several months later on Friday, May 3, 2002, it was the sort of box office sensation that comes along all too rarely. It made $114 million at the domestic box office in its first three days of release — shattering the record of $90 million set just a few months earlier by the first Harry Potter film. It kicked off the era of superhero films, which now looks as if it will last roughly until the heat death of the universe.
What's eerie about these films is how many of them have incorporated the most significant images and events of 9/11 into their popcorn movie fun. Age of Ultron is just one of the more recent examples of a trend running more than a decade.
For instance, take 2006's Superman Returns, one of the most poetic and best films of the recent superhero boom. In it, director Bryan Singer points out, frequently, that Superman has been missing for five years. He flew off into space to visit the ruins of Krypton, his shattered home world, and then returned. Singer doesn't make direct note of it, but five years before 2006 was 2001. The implicit point is that the only way September 11 could happen in a world with Superman in it would be if he were somehow missing.
The tone of Superman Returns is at once mournful and joyous. The film is sad that no Superman actually exists and grateful for the idea that humans have invented him to save us from imagined tragedy. It, too, uses the images of 9/11 to add emotional resonance. In one of the film's most potent moments, a man falls from a tall height, the ground rushing toward him. He's a rough echo of 9/11's famous falling man, except Singer flips and skews the angles he shoots from, so our brain expects the opposite to happen.
And it does. This time, Superman is there. This time, the falling man lives.
Superman saves a falling man in Superman Returns. (Warner Brothers)
Art imitating life imitating art
There is, of course, a bit of chicken-and-egg thinking in the idea that the superhero boom was born out of 9/11.
Consider this in terms of the famous idea that the Beatles healed America's psychic wounds by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show a few months after John F. Kennedy's assassination. It's not that tragedy made the band huge. Rock 'n' roll was a major cultural force in the 1960s, and, thus, the Beatles were always going to be huge. But the existence of a tragic event preceding their arrival on American shores made the pure joy of their early singles feel all the more like a necessary corrective. Here was a chance to feel something else for a moment.
Similarly, it's not as if there weren't successful superhero movies in the pre-Spider-Man world. Between 1978 and 1987, four movies about Superman found varying levels of success, just as four films about Batman did between 1989 and 1998. Even in terms of Marvel characters, the vampire hunter Blade's star vehicle took off in 1998, while the X-Men saw their first big film take home significant box office earnings in 2000.
Hollywood had seen several superhero stories rake in cash before 9/11, and that meant more superhero stories would have followed regardless of national events. Spider-Man, a well-made, highly entertaining romp through the urban skyways of New York, likely would have done quite well in a world without terrorist attacks.
But it's also interesting to consider how the filmmakers who make superhero films have increasingly seemed to engage with the events of 9/11 as one of the primary influences behind their storytelling. How could they not? If the most common way to refer to the collapse of the World Trade Center in the news media was as "something out of a movie," then who better to avert such a crisis than a super-strong, super-good being?
At first, the images were more suggestive; they didn't make anything as explicit as Whedon did in Ultron or Singer in Superman Returns. X2 (2003) and Spider-Man 2 (2004), the first two superhero films wholly produced in the post-9/11 world, contain hints of the tragedy, but they never look directly at it. In the first, a superpowered mutant all too easily infiltrates the White House (a major fear at the time, but one that hadn't actually happened), while in the second, Spider-Man does everything he can to save New Yorkers from a horrible subway crash, nearly losing his life in the process. He's handed between passengers on the train, arms stretched wide, Christ-like.
After Peter Parker saves a train full of subway passengers in Spider-Man 2, they hold him atop their heads in a Christ-like pose.
As America's response to terrorism has shifted and mutated, superhero films have shifted and mutated along with it. While the central, city-destroying mayhem of these films remains much the same in the 14 years since the attacks, the depiction of that mayhem has grown more and more sophisticated.
The Dark Knight (2008) addresses nearly every method the Bush administration used to combat terrorism in superhero terms. Iron Man (also 2008) is about a corporate weapons manufacturer who finds his chickens coming home to roost when he is held captive by apparent terrorists in the Middle East (he learns only belatedly how much death his bombs have sown.) In Marvel's early films, the elite military force of S.H.I.E.L.D. was unquestionably good. In later ones, it's been infiltrated by Nazis and must be destroyed.
And look back at that first mega-hit, Spider-Man. It's a film about a boy who lives in New York. It's a film about a boy who gains tremendous power, which he uses without understanding how gravely important it is to not abuse said power. It's a film about a boy who sustains a grievous loss and emerges a little wiser for his troubles. There's a reason this film's impact was seismic. On some subconscious level, it was telling a story every American wanted to hear.
Why we keep going back to the superhero
It's not as if the idea of superhero films being a response to 9/11 (and the post-9/11 policies of the United States) has never come up before. It's often tempting to read popular films and TV shows in ways that play pop psychologist to the nation. America has been thoroughly psychoanalyzed as responding to World War II with lots of stories about men trying to make the best of a series of bad choices (see: the film noir genre in general, many Westerns of the '50s) and to Vietnam with a need for easy moral victories (Rocky, Star Wars).
But there's still something to be said for the persistence of superhero films, and the way they keep returning to this idea of intimate cataclysms, resolved through a small band of heroes saving the day. Many of these films conclude with battles of earth-shaking import that seem to ultimately boil down to one city, where the destruction rains down. There's something so personal about it.
Look at Whedon's first Avengers film, released in 2012. Its concluding battle features a rift opening up in the sky above Manhattan; spaceships carrying alien warriors stream down toward skyscrapers, spreading death and horror.
There's no real reason for the scene to be structured and shot this way, beyond the idea of aliens coming from above. Indeed, most pre-9/11 superhero films featured more earthbound supervillain plots. But it is structured and shot this way. Even though this is a cosmic war, it's staged with the intimacy of a terrorist attack.
Compare that with the other major pop film trend to resonate in the wake of 9/11 — the fantasy epic. Both Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings saw cinematic adaptations skyrocket in the early 2000s, but the fantasy boomlet ultimately fizzled out, under a surge of subpar Narnia and Golden Compass movies. People wanted to see pure good versus pure evil, pitched in outright, massive battle, but only for a little while.
Superhero stories give us a good that is more readily recognizable, more human (in that these are ultimately just human beings with outsize personality traits manifesting as superpowers), while also offering smaller-scale evils. These are not stories of war. They're stories of street fights powerful enough to seem like war. Buildings collapse, but the heroes are supposed to save everybody in them, so that they're empty toys toppling over.
I think this is why there's been such massive outcry against the films that don't keep one eye on the human cost of these battles. Consider 2013's Man of Steel, a Superman film that concludes with a city-leveling battle that seems to feel immense awe in the face of all of those buildings falling over from the battle being waged by near-gods among them. There's little attention paid to anyone who might be inside those buildings, and director Zack Snyder doesn't pause to let us know if they're okay or even if the buildings are occupied. Many found that it resonated a little too closely with the events that superhero films obscure — there was so much suggested death in whole cityscapes crumbling, and many of the shots seemed to directly recall TV news coverage of the 9/11 attacks. (The film's followup — 2016's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — goes to hilarious lengths to explain that the various buildings being destroyed in it are completely empty.)
Wrote veteran comic book writer Mark Waid:
But once more–and this is where I knew we were headed someplace really awful–once more, Superman showed not the slightest split-second of concern for the people around them. Particularly in this last sequence, his utter disregard for the collateral damage was just jaw-dropping as they just kept crashing through buildings full of survivors. I’m not suggesting he stop in the middle of a super-powered brawl to save a kitten from a tree, but even Brandon Routh thought to use his heat vision on the fly to disintegrate deadly falling debris after a sonic boom. From everything shown to us from the moment he put on the suit, Superman rarely if ever bothered to give the safety and welfare of the people around him one bit of thought.
In this way, the films from Marvel Studios have always had a leg up on their competitors. They offer the destruction, but not the death. There are always spectators the heroes drag out of the way. Age of Ultron, in particular, is often shot from the point of view of bystanders and passersby, people who were unlucky enough to wander into this battle. And yet, in every battle, the heroes do their level best to get everybody out, even if it puts them in harm's way.
It's the release valve, the escape clause. We experience the nausea that comes with recognizing the world we live in, where mass death can be strangely intimate, but also the joy of having somebody there to stop it.
Yet even Marvel increasingly embraces the way the superhero echoes have curdled. In 2016's Captain America: Civil War, the Avengers squabble over whether to submit to government oversight. Where once they saved the world, they now are seen as more likely to doom it. Superpower ambivalence — both when it comes to costumed heroes and nation states — is catching.
Lost in ritual
Superhero movies will not be dominant forever. For one thing, Hollywood is overloading on them in the years to come, which is as good a method as any to make viewers sick of them. Age of Ultron's box office, while spectacular, fell short of Avengers' box office in the United States. Somewhere along the way — and probably sooner rather than later — we'll work this particular psychic need out of our systems and move on to the next cinematic trend.
What's more, the movies themselves are growing more and more brazen about confronting the chief reason they became so popular. In addition to the shot of people running from the cloud of rubble described above, Whedon's Age of Ultron (along with the 2014 Marvel release Captain America: The Winter Soldier) is a blistering critique of the NSA security state, of a world where people are trusted to care for themselves so little that they must be always watched (or spied upon) by their betters. Civil War, as mentioned, goes even further.
In Iron Man, the first film from Marvel Studios, Tony Stark tries to change to better himself, to right past sins. But in Age of Ultron, he realizes that nothing he's done has mattered. So scarred is Tony by what happened in the first Avengers, he inadvertently creates even greater horrors out of his own fears. His attempt to bring peace to Earth still creates war. He's still making weapons, everywhere he goes.
Increasingly, superhero films aren't just dealing with the aftereffects of 9/11. They're dealing with America's inability to effectively safeguard itself from everything all of the time. Whatever we're working out through these movies, it's erupting out of the subtext into the text, bit by bit.
Maybe that increasingly confrontational boldness is why we've turned these movies into borderline rituals, like a kind of exposure therapy, where we get greater and greater access to that which we fear.
New superhero tales release around the same times every year (there has been a new superhero movie opening in theaters on the first weekend of May in every year since 2009), and those of us who enjoy them dutifully haul ourselves to the theaters, to see familiar faces and new friends. They've become holidays, in other words, complete with their own continued practices and familiar comforts. They're ways to mark the passing of years and seasons, ways to glimpse, slightly, the things we might otherwise wish to forget, especially as time marches on.
In 2013, when I covered San Diego Comic-Con for Grantland, I wrote a bit about this tendency to attach an almost religious fervor to these sorts of movies.
It’s easy for me to be cynical about all of this. I’m steeped in news of how the entertainment industry works, and I’m increasingly tired of pointless action blockbusters, and I lament the loss of the human amid computerized specters and formulaic screenplays. But I am an agnostic inside the movie church, someone who chooses not to buy into the collective faith generated there by those who believe, all evidence to the contrary, in the possibility of a summer when all the movies, at last, might be good.
I am able to catch better visions of that all-consuming faith a little more with every passing year. Those of us who watch these films have become superhero fundamentalists, of a sort, shuffling in to see what cinematic wonders have been cooked up for us this year. We do our very best to not look too closely at the things flickering in our peripheral vision, the things animating the desire to watch a world where no one need die, because there will always be somebody there to catch you when you fall. The deluge is long past us now, but we still gather around the fire to tell stories, lest we forget.
