Our super-rich superheroes
Over the past few years, reams of digital ink have been spilled over the question of representation in superhero movies and TV, which have become Hollywood’s paradigm genre of the 21rst century. The silver-screened superhero has been predominately not just a straight white man, and usually a square-jawed Anglo-Saxon at that. Other than their fantastic powers, they may as well be clones. With the recent releases of Wonder Woman and Black Panther, some have proclaimed a new era of superhuman diversity. Yes, now we have female superheroes, black superheroes, maybe if we cross our fingers and toes a queer superhero, but there is still a conspicuous lack of poor superheroes.
In fact, the most disproportionately represented group among Marvel and DC heroes are not white men but the wealthy. There are of course the billionaires: Iron Man, Batman, Mr. Fantastic, and even second-tier heroes like Iron Fist and Green Arrow all have their fortunes to fund their costumed crusading. Superman and Supergirl have a lucrative staff jobs in print media, while the Hulk is a lauded scientist. Black Panther inherited a damn country. Even in allegedly gritty series, the heroes come from upper middle-class professions: Daredevil is a lawyer, and Black Lightning is a school principal.
The only superheroes who fall outside the charmed circle of wealth are the teenagers (although even Spiderman works as a newspaper photographer) and the various demigods and space pirates who seem to exist outside of economic logic entirety. (Does Captain America pay rent? How does Wonder Woman afford her various museum-related capers?) There are no single mothers who fight crime in between shifts at Chili’s, no truckers who leave a trail of justice in their wake. For a generation of viewers accustomed to precarious work, perhaps the biggest fantasy of superhero movies is that work and money are reliable things that can be put aside without much thought.
There are reasonable explanations for this. These characters were created in the middle of the 20th century, where celebrating the wealthy was a key element of anti-Communism (this is particularly evident in the early Iron Man stories.) Inherited wealth is a way to explain the hero’s endless assortment of gadgets, while jobs like journalism and law are handy for providing plot hooks. The need for a world-saving adventure in every Marvel or DC movie doesn’t leave much time for background detail like where the funding for the X-Men’s mansion comes from. And besides which (I can hear someone saying), these stories are for escapism, and no one wants to be reminded of the dreariness of their actual job.
However, this focus on the wealthy is something of a recent invention for the Hollywood action movie. In the era where Westerns predominated, cowboy heroes were by definition working-class, often without anything to their name besides a six-shooter and a horse. In the 1980s, action heroes were typically either cops portrayed as put-upon proletarians or everymen like John McClane and Death Wish’s Paul Kersey. It is only in the new millennium that Hollywood doesn’t even bother to dress up its millionaire actors in working-class drag.
My argument here is not that class should be simply added to the diversity checklist by which Hollywood film universes are increasingly judged. Indeed, for all the very real good that representation-focused critique has done, it is very hard to adapt to the category of wealth. You can put black, female, or disabled people behind or in front of the camera of a Marvel movie. (And such things can be very inspiring to people from groups which haven’t seen themselves represented in such a way before.) But, by definition, you will never see a poor person directing or starring in a Marvel movie: by the time their first day on set concluded, they would have become a rich person. Is it any wonder that the writers of superhero movies and TV, typically Hollywood veterans like Jon Favreau or Zack Snyder, present the world as a place where no one has to worry about money very much?
While a working-class superhero would certainly create a useful flash of recognition for the many who live paycheck to paycheck, it would also be essentially deceitful. For one thing, we shouldn’t forget that Hollywood is an immensely unequal system designed to turn our emotional affections into yet-greater wealth for mogul producers and multimedia conglomerates. Even the most progressive blockbuster materially contributes to financial inequality.
On top of the realities that attend every Hollywood production, the prevalence of rich heroes suggests the elitism at the core of the superhero concept. Superheroes, by virtue of inherited wealth literal or metaphorical, are all-powerful people who through their superior judgement and morality can fix society if only they can transcend the petty necessities of the law. Is it any wonder that people compare Elon Musk to Tony Stark? Can it possibly be a coincidence that tales of virtuous vigilantes, often tied to major corporations or the US military, flood the box office during an era where the real-world equivalent of said corporations and military have abandoned even the pretense of adhering to the rule of law? The aristocratic nature of the superhero genre should lead us to fight not just for new heroes, but new types of stories, and new ways of telling them.
