Super Heroes as the 1%
By: Christopher Laine
Tags: Superheroes, Equality, Movies, TV Series, Humor

Super Heroes as the 1%

Supers look an awful lot like the ultra-rich

I just got through a massive binge watch of most every super hero movie and TV show I could find.

It was fun, in a time-wasting sort of way. I’d seen pretty much all of them before, but it was nice to double back and rewatch them (well, some of them, anyway. In case anyone is at all wondering: Green Lantern is worse than you remember it. Learn from my mistake).

At the start of this super watch-a-thon, I’d briefly considered going back as far as the 40s and 50s, to the likes of the original Superman, Buck Rogers, the Lone Ranger, what have you. I got through a couple episodes of each and bowed out. There’s only so much “Truth, Justice and the American Way” one can take before one starts to get stabby. I was eye-rolling so often I started to get vertigo.

So I decided I’d start with the 60s and 70s stuff: Batman, Wonder Woman, the Six Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Woman, the Greatest American Hero, to name a few. These were entertaining, if not just a little bit saccharine and predictable. But again, the nostalgic charms of anything can be tested by tired third season writing. By the time Steve Austin met Bigfoot, and the Greatest American Hero went to a Dungeons and Dragons game, I was white-knuckling it.

I then shuffled my way into the late 80s / early 90s Batman movies (Oy! There’s only so much camp acting and Danny Elfman music one brother can take), watched some of the lesser-known movies of that time period (I remember the Rocketeer and Spawn being a LOT better than that. I still love Tank Girl), and then carried on watching all the stuff from the last 20 years, which is a lot.

(Aside: If they try to reboot Spiderman one more frickin’ time, I’m going to lose it)

Yeah, it was a LOT of binge-watching, letmetellyou. I figure this little ‘project’ of mine took about a year in total. I regret only some of it, mostly related to not stocking up on booze before diving into Lois and Clark.

But I powered through (pun sort of intended), and night after night watched this or that super person foil criminals or save this or that nation / world from this or that evil. I’ll be blunt: As time wore on, I started getting a little weird. After a point, I figured my eyes had gained some kind of superpowers by osmosis. I found myself making heroic, uplifting speeches at work when we were about to slip on a deadline. I pondered important questions like whether Superman needed Kryptonian toilet paper, or why Gotham is overrun in violent crime, murderous gangs and psychopaths, but nobody ever swears.

Now, maybe it was all this rewatching of these movies and TV shows back-to-back that I started to pick up on something which had never dawned on me before. I was partway through season 2 of Arrow when it hit me. There was something decidedly off about the lifestyles of these supers — all of them — something which was being repeated to me again and again with each movie and TV show. There was an underlying motif to it all, something about the superhero lifestyle which struck me as completely out of touch with my own.

Okay, sure. They have super powers and I don’t. Point taken. But it was more than that. What I noticed was that supers live lives that look an awful lot like those of rich people. Really rich people.

Let me take you through it.

Good one, Batman, you rich puke

Ultra Rich Supers: Who Needs Powers When You’ve Got the Bucks to Back You?

Let’s start with the ultra rich supers.

There are any number of super heroes on screen who are filthy rich. Scrooge McDuck rich. Arrow, Batman, Black Panther, Iron Man, Iron Fist, Ozymandius (from Watchmen), Professor X, Thor (we never see it, but he’s King of Asgard. The guy is definitely bankrolling raven pennies or something). This is just to name a few. All of them are absolutely loaded.

Billionaire playboys or royalty by day, and crime-fighting vigilantes by night, these supers have so much green that the idea of a regular day-to-day life never crosses their radar.

They don’t have time for the likes of commuting or paying their rent. They have the kind of dosh which affords them plenty of time and resource to spend their time involved in the things which are above the rest of us. Fighting super villains, taking on rogue nation-states, fighting the criminal underbelly of society. All of this is made possible only by their insane wealth.

In fact, most of these ‘supers’ aren’t really all that super at all. Arrow, Batman, Iron Man, Black Panther. These guys are super primarily because they’re rich. Some krav maga or archery skills aside, these are ‘superheroes’ whose powers extend directly from their nigh-endless cash: Military grade gadgets, super vehicles, body armour and surveillance equipment. These are the supers who use their 1% riches to save the unwashed masses by any means necessary.

Got enough green? Then you too can take the law into your own hands. Your money and the things which it buys you makes you above the rest of the rabble, a billionaire in a combat suit and utility belt and an overinflated sense of your importance in the universe. You can go nuts, and nothing will ever come back to haunt you. Your power (read money) sets you apart.

Super Heroes with Day Jobs: Don’t These People Ever Pay Their Bills?

So let’s get into the supers who don’t have the big bucks on their side. From Spiderman to Superman to Luke Cage to Daredevil to Jessica Jones, these are the kinds of super heroes who (according to their backstories) are just like you and me. They have jobs. They live ordinary lives among ordinary people, except when the call of super destiny must be answered.

That’s what they sell us, but look a little closer. Sure, Luke Cage has a job, but he’s almost never at it. He works as a clean-up guy in a barbershop, a minimum wage job at best, paid under the table, and yet somehow the guy never seems to have a financial problem of any sort.

Daredevil’s alter ego Matt Murdock is a lawyer, but that only seems to take up about 20% of his time. The rest of the time he’s skulking around the city trying to get a lead on whoever he’s chasing. Most of his cases are pro bono for the poor and downtrodden of Hell’s Kitchen, and yet he’s got this insanely swank (and by Manhattan rent price, expensive) loft, though apparently the guy is broke and not working through most of the series.

Spacious Hell’s Kitchen Loft, Plenty of Natural light, the perfect HQ for a broke blind superhero

Peter Parker is still selling his photos to the Daily Bugle, but how much money could he actually make doing that? J Jonah Jameson throws him a couple hundred bucks here or there, and yet Peter Parker is going to an upscale New York university?! Apparently Spiderman’s greatest super power is dodging student loan payments.

Jessica Jones seems to be one of the few supers who actually does her job as a PI. She is out there on the hustle for her clients, but even still, she turns down more paid work than she takes, and yet she always has money for booze and internet access.

Most of these ‘ordinary folk’ supers seem to do less work over the course of a movie or series than most of us do on a Saturday afternoon. They leave work early, or never turn up. They wander around, investigating, talking to this or that witness or cop or criminal or whoever, skulk down back alleys, meet conspicuously in diners or bars, and so on.

All this freedom from the responsibilities of average day-to-day life smacks of (dare I say) privilege, a life which does not need to play by the ordinary constraints the rest of us face. In ways that matter, the rules don’t apply to our superheroes. The rest of the human race has to deal with the 9–5 grind, pay our bills, obey the law, manage the quagmire of ins and outs which post-modern society throws at us daily just to survive.

Our supers are above this. They are painted again and again as unaffected and unbound by the issues of survival and accountability.

Supers and the Law: Power Is A Perpetual Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

On the topic of accountability, with very, very few exceptions, super heroes do a lot of illegal crap, and nary a one has ever faced jail time.

Uncounted destructive street battles, city blocks turned to smoking rubble, an endless litany of collateral damage — particularly human — and nothing ever comes of it.

Governments and police are either powerless to apply laws to these ‘super’ vigilantes, or are complicit in a system which allows supers to do as they like.

There are far too many scenes of cops looking the other way or letting a super go for ‘the greater good’ to be ignored.

And as for personal responsibility? Hell, no one gets sued, and if they do, it never goes anywhere. Supers just carry on doing whatever they like, and the fact of their power means they never need to care.

Apparently, some people can do whatever the hell they like, and in the end only ever face a slap on the wrist for all their misdeeds and mishaps.

Funny as this scene might be (and yeah, it is pretty funny), the fact that Tony Stark is able to not only hack government systems, but then flagrantly insult those at the peaks of the US government without so much as a how-do-you-do says it all. The rule of law just doesn’t apply in the same way to supers as it does to everyone else.

Supers as the 1%: A myth about wealth and power which we can’t help repeating

Sure, I get it. These are fantasy shows or movies about super heroes. Who wants to see the Dark Knight late on his power bill or Captain America doing his taxes? That’s not why we watch superheroes. We want action, we want bolts of energy from their hands, or jet packs or ninja moves.

I understand that escapism better than anyone (I just spent a year rewatching superhero media. I think we can all agree my escapism dial goes to 11). It’s awesome for what it is: a form of wish fulfillment in which we could be super, and untouched by the banality and boundaries of our ordinary lives.

But for all of that, I can’t help noticing that we keep creating these images, and in doing so, keep up a deeply-ingrained fallacy that the few have every right to live in elitist power and privilege. We keep reinforcing this idea that there are some among us who are so rich, so powerful, that they are unbound by the rules which apply to 99% of us. Their money, their gadgets, their nigh endless freedom gives them the ability to live in a world above the rest of us, to take it upon themselves to arbitrarily make decisions which affect everyone, sometimes in very tragic and destructive ways.

Supers — like the 1% —have been placed in a vaunted bubble above the rest of us. They are unscathed by the grime and sweat of life, and from this high height, they are able to wield power which is, in and of itself, too much for any egalitarian and democratic society.

The 1% are, in many ways, these self-same untouchable supers. In the end, the kind of money these people have is nothing but raw power. Power to do as one likes, power to hold sway over the lives and destinies of everyone else, power to free oneself of responsibility, and thus never have to be held accountable for any of it.

As regular guy Uncle Ben once said to Peter Parker