Batman Should Have Died

by Ben Howard

Batman should have died.

I'm not kidding and I don't particularly care if I'm spoiling the ending. Batman should have died at the end of The Dark Knight Rises. It was the only appropriate way for the trilogy to end. Batman sacrificing himself and passing on his legacy to another. 

But of course that's not the way the movie ends. No, instead Batman finds the time in his busy schedule to do a thing to some stuff and dramatically fake his own death. 

Sentiment makes for lazy plot mechanics.

This has become a regular part of all superhero movies. In order to emotionally hook the audience there need to be real stakes, the audience has to believe that the hero is actually in danger. Of course, everyone intellectually knows that you can't kill the hero, so you endanger those close to him. It's why Uncle Ben has to die in Spiderman, why Batman's girlfriend has to die in the Dark Knight, or why Tony Stark's cave friend has to die in Iron Man.

But how much emotional capital does an audience really have invested in a character they've only known for half a movie? Not enough. So you have to kill off the star. You have to make it really hurt. You have to make it real.

So you kill Batman, or Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor Who. And then you figure out a way to bring them back to life.

It's a good story, but it's also cheating because real life doesn't come with a writer's room.


My favorite stories are the ones that end in pain, that embrace it, not because it's beautiful, but because it's real. Friday Night Lights is my favorite sports movie almost entirely because at the end of the movie, they lose. You build up so much emotion waiting for the climactic moment, the redemptive moment and then...you fall just short.

Any Game of Thrones fan can speak to author George R.R. Martin's almost maniacal obsession with killing beloved characters. He's even gone so far as to say that the end of the story will be bittersweet.

It's not that I don't believe in happy endings, it's that I don't believe in endings at all. Real life does not fade to black after the ending, it does not have a lovely epilogue where Harry Potter takes his kids to school, nor does it pan back from a funeral to find the supposedly deceased watching from off in the distance. It just keeps going.

We are tempted to deal with pain indirectly or tangentially, pulling back on the throttle before we get too deep. We're tempted to tell only stories that have endings, and since we can't embrace a sad ending, we get stories that end happily ever after.

That's one of the reasons I'm so drawn to the liturgical traditions of Christianity. The story is one that continually repeats. It goes through the tense darkness of Advent to the pinnacle of Christmas, it descends into the painful remembrance of mortality on Ash Wednesday, the ache of Good Friday and Holy Saturday and the exuberant joy of Easter. 

Yet, there are also plains between these peaks and valleys. Life is not an infinite binary of pleasure and pain. There is also the aptly-named Ordinary Time where things are, well, ordinary.

And this happens over and over and over again. There is no end, no beginning, just a continual roll of ups and downs, valleys and peaks and long ordinary plains.

Endings are overrated, but Batman still should have died.

Peace,
Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

You might also like:  

• The Meaning of the End
• What Nolan's Batman Movies and Jesus Have Taught Me About How to Respond to the Shooting in Aurora
• Jay Bakker Knows Why We Need Batman

On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 23 - On Superheroes

by Ben Howard

Ben, Jesse and Sebastian sit down to discuss superheroes, superhero movies and why we love them so much. We talk about superheroes as salvation figures, whether Superman is Jesus or Moses, how superheroes respond to our desire for control over chaos, and how the ethos behind superheroes presents a negative view of humanity. We also talk about weird stuff like when Superman fought the Ku Klux Klan. Join and enjoy our rambling and kind of ridiculous ravings.

You can download the podcast by clicking here. Or you can subscribe to the podcast by searching "On Pop Theology" in the iTunes music store. If you download the show through iTunes, please be so kind as to rate and review us. We want your feedback and it helps the show to grow. 

Also, remember to "Like" On Pop Theology on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @OnPopTheology for all the updates, posts, and links throughout the week.
Finally, if you'd like to stream the podcast, you can do that here:

Peace,
Ben

If you have any questions, comments, or if you just want to say hi, you can contact us at onpoptheology [at] gmail.com.

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• On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 22 - Jason Collins, Homosexuality, and Christianity
• On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 21 - Doctor Who, The Hunger Games and God w/ Julie Clawson
• On Pop Theology Podcast: Episode 20 - Sex, Violence, and the Gods of Westeros

 

Iron Man and Christian Identity

by Ben Howard 

Superhero stories are inherently stories about identity. They are stories about costumes, masks, secret identities, and alter-egos. They are stories about normal, everyday so-and-so’s, and the occasional abnormal, wealthy so-and-so, who craft a new superhuman persona in order to fight evil, or crime, or maybe just to stave off the darkness within.

Iron Man 3 came out last weekend and it is full of characters in the midst of shifting identities. Tony Stark is battling with his identity as Iron Man, James Rhodes shifts from being War Machine to the Iron Patriot, even Tony’s bodyguard/chauffeur Happy is transitioning into life as the Head of Security at Stark Industries.

These identity crises, especially Tony/Iron Man’s are a fight between the true identity and the identity that gives the character power. Is Tony fundamentally Tony Stark, the engineer who builds things, or is he defined by the suit that gives him his power and his strength, the suit that he designed and is obsessed with perfecting? Which one is real? Which one drives the other? 

This is the central internal fight in superhero movies. Do the power and responsibility that come with the role of hero overwhelm the identity of the human playing the role? Does power overcome self? 

Due to circumstances beyond his control, well, more like adjacent to his control, Tony is left stranded in rural Tennessee without access to a working suit or his high-tech garage-cum-laboratory. In this environment, Tony is forced to confront his co-dependent relationship with his own creation. He is forced to re-imagine himself as a person removed from his identity of power.

Like Iron Man for Tony Stark or Batman for Bruce Wayne, everyone either takes on or is saddled with a label or a role. Labels and roles are loaded with powerful identities that can overwhelm us.

This is not only true for superheroes, but of the more common labels of religion. Labels like Christian, Muslim, and Atheist are useful for purposes of differentiation, but when they mutate into defining identities they can obscure the true humanity of the person behind the label.

When the role of Christian, or Muslim, or whatever religious ideology becomes the primary motivating factor that drives us, when it becomes our most important identity, when it is something we must obsess over and protect, when the label controls us, it becomes a destructive force instead of one useful for good. It allows us to always view the other as other and it allows us to always view ourselves through the lens of a constructed role and in so doing bars us from true self-examination.

Now this is not a condemnation of faith or religion in anyway, it is a condemnation of sectarian, myopic ideology which exists only to further its own existence. The problem isn’t that Tony Stark built Iron Man, who uses the suit to fight the bad guys; it’s that building Iron Man consumed him from the inside out.

Also, the response to this issue means more than changing or disposing of the label. Refusing to say “Christian”, but saying “Christ-follower” instead doesn’t change the power relationship, it merely hides it behind a different moniker. Iron Man is still Iron Man even if he calls himself Man of Iron.

Nor is this a call for pyro-theology that tries to burn down the power structure in its entirety. We don’t need to destroy the power relationship, we merely need to correct it and redirect it.

Roles exist to accentuate our humanity, to enhance it, not to direct or determine it.

One of my good friends once told me that he isn’t trying to be a good Christian; he’s trying to be a good human. That’s the actual point of the Christian faith. That’s the end game, becoming fully-human like we were originally intended to be. I hope that the role of being a Christian, of labeling myself that, helps to accentuate my humanity. I hope it makes me a better human.

But if the label isn’t doing that, if the label becomes an identity of power which distorts and misdirects my humanity, then the label and the role must be deconstructed.

In the end Tony Stark doesn’t abandon his role as Iron Man, he simply deconstructs what it means to be Iron Man. Tony Stark is Tony Stark, and being Iron Man helps him to be a better Tony Stark.

What roles or identities give you power? What roles do you need to deconstruct? Is Iron Man a valid metaphor for Christian identity?

Peace,

Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

You might also like:

• Superman: Our Post-Post 9/11 Hero
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• Ignorance, Cynicism, and Martin Sheen 

Superman: Our Post-Post 9/11 Hero

by Steven Lefebvre 

I defy you to find a person who is more excited about the upcoming Man of Steel movie in June as I am. However, as a youth minister I am finding it difficult to rally my pupils around the release of this movie. In contrast, last summer I spent a week with my teens making a Batman movie in honor of the release of the Dark Knight Rises and it was the most popular idea I have ever had.

I have seen it in the media, I’ve argued with my friends, and I’ve heard it in the groaning of students when I told them we’re going to make a Superman movie this summer. America loves Batman and Superman is too "June Cleaver."

Let me tell you why you loved Batman:

Christopher Nolan’s Batman is a masterpiece of connecting mythology with culture. When the franchise began in 2004 we were living in a post 9-11 world. We didn’t trust anybody. Not Muslims, not the Bush Administrations, not even our own opinions and perspectives. Post modernity was on everyone’s lips. We began unpacking the metanarratives; that is the story behind the story. Everything was up for speculation and evil was everywhere, even within my own soul.

Enter Nolan’s Dark Knight; a story that ultimately discusses that eliminating the evil in this world must begin within. Bruce Wayne conquers his fears and doubts by embracing them. And the ends justify the any means necessary if your heart desires justice and there’s a lunatic threatening to kill everyone (remember that Sonar machine Wayne had built using everyone’s cell phone). In a post 9-11 world we needed a hero to teach us how to deal with all the uncontrollable evils in this world: By being on the side of justice at all costs both in our actions and in our character.

And then last summer someone killed a bunch of people in a theatre in Colorado, coincidentally during the release of Nolan’s final chapter to his Dark Knight trilogy. And I believe we’ve never been the same since. It seems in the last year public mass killings is all the news reports on, just when it gets quiet someone sets off a bomb during the Boston Marathon or shoots some kids in Connecticut.

Our conversation has dramatically shifted from terrorists in the Middle East to terrorists next door, and now we find ourselves in what I am calling the post-post-9-11 era. We’ve shifted from airport security to gun control, racial profiling to background checks.

It’s not so much about what to do about evil in this world, it’s about asking an even bigger question: Is humanity doomed? Are we as a society deteriorating? Do I need to carry weapons on my belt to protect my family and me? Can I trust anybody? Are people good?

The answer I have to all of those questions is: yes.

To quote Fred Rogers: ‘Whenever I saw something scary on the news, my mother would remind to look for the people who are helping. There are always people helping.”

Whether it is underpaid and overly criticized teachers taking bullets for their pupils or people running into the blast site to help, we as the human race have beaten the terrorists simply by way of virtue. 

And this is the overarching story I believe Zach Snyder will tell us in his Superman epic. You see, Superman is a demi-God, his battle isn’t with bullets or being overpowered. Superman’s battle is with humanity as a whole. Are we the kind of people worth saving? Why does Superman with all of his power choose to serve us rather than rule over us? Why in light of all the evil things we do, does Superman race into burning buildings, stop rock slides, and save Lois Lane from a helicopter accident? Because we as human beings are worth saving!

Superman exists to demonstrate to us the good in humanity, something we all need to be reminded of as our 24-hour news cycles perpetuate a lost and broken narrative about all of us.

Superman is the hero of post-post 9-11 America.

Shalom.

Steven is the Director of Youth and Young Adults at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He also rocks a fantastic bow tie. Check out his blog Adventures in Emerging Young Adulthood and follow him on Twitter @stevenlefebvre.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
 
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