Still, the Boys is well worth watching. Karl Urban is as good as the ads say, the plot is much better than the comics and goes interesting places by the end, and the political themes are rich. Spoilers below.
With any show that is trying to be so "relevant", and use superheroes as direct analogies for celebrities and athletes and brands, it has to be political. And so we get the question: well are they right-wing, or left-wing? On the right we have... the Punisher and most cop shows. On the left we have... every other superhero show. The Boys straddles a line.
On one hand, the leftie messages are obvious. The bad guy is a corporation who misuses the ideal of superheroes in order to raise stock price. The heroine gets Harvey Weinsteined in the first episode as her introduction to how bad the world of superheroes is. There's a repressed lesbian who is abused by her ex-boyfriend. And there's an extended segment about Christian superheroes and their convention, who are grifting constantly from their desperate and religious fanbase. "Pray the Gay Away" is directly mocked and censured. The scariest character is called Homelander and wears an American flag as his cape.
And yet... it's more conservative than you might think. The entire genre is "working class boys take down effete corporatists with ultraviolence", which is the plot of beloved gorefests from Boondock Saints to Die Hard. That's a fairly right-populist fantasy, at least for film. And the lead heroine is a genuine midwestern Christian gal fighting to keep her dignity, in the face of the "casting couch" and publicists who want her to wear skimpy, revealing costumes under the name of "feminist empowerment." Two male characters are motivated by fridged women. And if the white male characters fail in stereotypical white male ways (for liberal circles), you can't miss that the black character fails in stereotypical black ways.
The #MeToo plot is probably the most interesting and complex here. Again, it starts with a vile scene of exploitation in the first episode, leaving no ambiguity about who is the bad guy, and how powerless women feel. But after that... when she forces corporate PR and HR to finally deal with it... the corporation easily co-ops her struggle, and turns the victim's triumph into a Lifetime movie that makes them even more money than keeping the bad apple (and leaves the heroine feeling used a second time.) And the rapist character goes on to be portrayed as genuinely human and pathetic, having some of the most hilarious scenes of the rest of the series (including a very disturbing scene where he is served his own medicine.) It's just weird and despite multiple episodes about harassment, I could not say where the show stands on it.
So what is the Message here? Well instead of looking for the explicit moral, we should be looking for how this world works, and what that says about how the creators and audience think our world works. And the fundamental engine of what makes this show interesting is the battle between labor and capitalism.
The most interesting tension to watch throughout the show is "who is in charge among the bad guys - the human staffed corporation, or the superpowered costume wearers?" And we get shown examples favoring either perspective throughout, right up until the climax which is WAY more concerned with this dichotomy than with the titular Boys.
And the Vought corporation is capital, with the superheroes themselves being classic labor. Oh sure they may be rich, like baseballs players on strike, but they are still the workers, and reliant on their employer for the means of production (in this case, social media campaigns.) Who is in charge, the labor with superhuman strength, or the capital that is feeding them their billions of dollars in merchandising cuts and CRIMESTAT services and lobbying for friendlier bills? Every scene featuring Madelyn and Homelander is really about a battle for dominance between capital and labor. (And note what I said above, about the corporation coopting the personal struggle of a hero for even more profit.)
And those of you who have seen the end, know that it is about the horrors of one side of the labor/capital divide actually winning.
This also answers the ubiquitous femdom of the series. Frenchie getting his balls grabbed, Popclaw's movies and bedroom homicide, Starlight talking about the trouble of being stronger than her boyfriends, Deep's comeuppance, and of course the main plotline. All of these make this metaphor front and center - which in other cases might just be written off as the director's personal fetish - and match fairly well with the capital/labor relations. The show's metaphor for capital trying to restrain labor is simply female dominance in the bedroom, and that... works until it doesn't, they're saying.
"The heroine gets Harvey Weinsteined in the first episode as her introduction to how bad the world of superheroes is." Given that the reason the casting couch can be a thing is because there are tons of talented and attractive women (and men) competing to be actresses and models, which is a fame-based winner take all industry meaning there are very few slots for a few very highly-paid, high-status winners, so a single director can afford to hire and raise to stardom someone say 5% less talented than the best they could get and thus pick whoever is willing to have sex with them, the idea of *superheroes* working this way is pretty bizarre.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen The Boys but have just checked some plot summaries; is there a superhero licensing system or something that Vought Corporation has a monopoly on?
There are a lot of messed up things about the idea of superheroes but this is very much not on the list for the typical superhero setting. If they wanted to tell a story about how hard it is to break into the superhero industry, that's easy and practically writes itself: it's the start of My Hero Academaia but when he asks All Might if you can be a hero without a quirk, All Might responds "sorry kid, maybe try to get a job at the CDC or something" and flies off, the end.
Yeah it's just a metaphor.
DeleteThough details to complicate: there's clearly tiers of superhero fame, with being in the Seven at the top, and people not favored by the corporation are relegated to patrolling Sandusky, OH. And in fact this particular harasser was lying, and he had no power in this case, and was just relying on his victim's assumptions of "how this worked." So you can work that all into why the licensed superhero system is not full of holes.
But really, it's just a metaphor.
Opinion: It's a bad and in fact counterproductive metaphor because it presents the idea that the casting couch will just inevitably happen in any system where there are glamorous famous people, rather than being the result of a specific set of systemic or economic factors which could be different. Although my main objection of course is just that I'm a worldbuilding nerd and hate metaphors in my serious "realistic" deconstructions unless they also make sense.
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