Peacemaker vs. the Boys

Which Patriarch Shall Reign Supreme?!

Superheroes are muscle-y ubermen who solve their problems by grabbing hold of them and punching them through a wall. The ideal manly man is a hyperbolically violent dude bristling with physical chiseled perfection and a swaggering smile. Superheroes are toxic masculinity on steroids, and/or rocketed from Krypton.

Over the years scads of superhero creators, from Alan Moore to Robert Kirkman, have noticed that superheroes are a festering bolus of curdled gender assumptions and Freudian revenge fantasies. James Gunn’s Peacemaker season 1 and Eric Kripke’s The Boys season 3 are two recent narratives to take a super brickbat to the tropes of super masculinity. Gunn tries to take down toxicity by murdering the evil father. Kripke, in contrast, explains (with a significant amount of sex and gore) why Oedipal slaughter just makes that evil father get up and piss down someone else’s throat.

Peacemaker is unusually violent, sexual, and satirical for a mainstream superhero show. But it also manages to follow the standard beats of personal growth and empowerment that Gunn honed during his time in the MCU. Chris Smith (John Cena) starts out as a rude, sexist, violent bro who is proud of his talents for murder and emotional inaccessibility. Fresh out of prison, he’s recruited to a black ops team fighting aliens. The agents all think (accurately) that he’s an incompetent dangerous douchebag, and he for his part mistrusts and bullies them.

Over the course of the season’s eight episodes, though, we learn of Chris’ tragic backstory. His father Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick) is a white supremacist supervillain who encouraged Chris to fight and murder, resulting in the death of Chris’ beloved brother at Chris' own hands.

Chris slowly confronts his trauma, allowing him to forswear his worst self . He also forms friendships with his coworkers, especially Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), the daughter of his cynical manipulative boss, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis.) The climax of Chris’ journey away from toxic masculinity occurs when he literally shoots his father in the head.

Gunn is careful to make Chris' father completely unsympathetic and irredeemable. Auggie never offers Chris a hint of love and interrupts his constant bullying and abuse only to spew vile racist and sexist slurs. More nuanced portraits of abusers generally acknowledge that they can be charming and alternate violence with apologies and affection. Chris says he loves his father, but we never are given any indication why he would. This lowers the stakes of the final conflict, and ultimately makes the murder feel somewhat hollow. It’s more like shooting a monster than a dad.

We have some comparison there, because Chris also shoots a lot of monsters. The main plot of the series is an invasion-of-the-body-snatchers riff; the black ops group is fighting off-world “butterflies” who swoop into people’s orifices, kill them, and take over their bodies.

Killing butterflies is early on established as morally good. Chris objects to murdering children for the cause but agrees that he has no such worries about murdering aliens in the bodies of children. Over the series, we learn that the butterflies have individual personalities and goals, and that their ultimate aim is to save the earth from environmental catastrophe. Chris even develops a fairly friendly relationship with the queen butterfly. But the ethics of murdering them are never revisited, and in fact their genocide is treated as a triumph which brings the black ops team together as a happy family.

Mass murder of immigrant environmentalists allows the vigilante gun-fetishist to overcome his history of white supremacy and get in touch with his feelings. There’s something wrong with that equation.

What’s wrong is Oedipus—which is to say, fantasizing about murdering your father and seizing his power is part of patriarchy’s toxic dynamic, not an alternative to it. We’re supposed to see Chris grow and become a more whole, less hateful person. But he does that by murdering his genocidal father, and then becoming him, actualizing the genocide of alien others that his father was never able to accomplish. We’re supposed to see this transformation as a triumph. But it looks an awful lot like the same toxic masculinity as ever.

Season three of The Boys is also about a son fighting his father. But conflict here isn’t framed as a way to overcome toxic dynamics. It’s a way to reproduce them. Abusive white male patriarchy is a system not an interpersonal confrontation. And you can’t get out of that system by murdering your way to the top of it.

The Boys’ third season has a considerably more complicated narrative than Peacemaker. But the most relevant storyline involves the return of Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), a Captain America analogue who comes back to the US after decades as a prisoner in Russia.

Soldier Boy has a reputation as a heroic soldier and brave fighter for freedom. In fact, most of his military exploits are myths; he’s a selfish, violent, extremely powerful asshole, who tormented and abused his own teammates so viciously that they colluded to help the Russians kidnap him.

He’s also, he learns, the source of the genetic material that created The Boys chief antagonist, the much-celebrated, secretly psychopathic Superman-analog Homelander (Antony Starr).

With Peacemaker and his dad, it’s clear who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. In The Boys, things are a lot more complicated. Soldier Boy beats one of his teammates, Black Noir, almost to death because Noir gets a film gig, and Soldier Boy is determined to be the only super movie star in the group. He viciously murders former girlfriends with no compunction. He lies about his military exploits; he shoots nuns. Onscreen he does much worse than Auggie Smith ever does.

But Soldier Boy is also in a lot of ways sympathetic. His time in Russia has left him with severe PTSD, and Ackles shows the character struggling to reconcile his weakness, his trauma, and his blackouts with his own invulnerable self-image. His own father was abusive and mocked him even after he got superpowers for being a “disappointment.” That inflects his reaction to news that he has a (sort of) son of his own in Homelander. He wants to be a better father than his own was, even as he has no model for fatherhood other than abuse.

Similarly, Homelander is both thoroughly awful and very sympathetic. His performance of toxic masculinity is inventive, vicious, and unrelenting. He revels in demonstrating his power and superiority by bullying and torturing those around him, mocking their imperfections and forcing them to debase themselves.

He taunts A-Train (Jessie Usher), a speedster with a heart condition, for gaining weight, telling him he’s embarrassed to be on the same team with someone so disgustingly out of shape. He forces the Deep (Chace Crawford), who can speak to fish and is an environmentalist of sorts, to eat one of his octopus friends live in front of his wife. He tries to force Starlight (Erin Moriarty) to participate in a sexualized dance number on his television show. And of course he horribly murders people who cross him. He’s a gaping hole of self-doubt, and he fills it up by using violence and cruelty to diminish everyone else. (The Trump parallel is very much intentional.)

The self-doubt makes Homelander a brutal monster. But it also makes him pitiful; despite yourself you feel sorry for him. He was raised by scientists in a test-tube; he has no family and no loved ones. When he finds people to care for, he latches onto them with frightening, disturbing intensity. He spends season 3 searching for Ryan Butcher (Cameron Crovetti), the child of a woman he raped. The boy is the one person Homelander treats with kindness. And when Homelander finds out Soldier Boy is his father, he is exuberant, terrified, and hopeful. He even introduces Soldier Boy to his grandson Ryan. The mass murdering psychopath wants to be part of one big, intergenerational super-family, ruling the earth together nd murdering everyone who gets in their way.

In Peacemaker, there’s an evil father and a bullied child, and the second can defeat the first by shooting him. In The Boys, though, every man is both father and son, both bully and bullied. Those identities aren’t absolutes; they’re potentials. The rage of being harmed and wounded powers the toxic fantasy, and the toxic actuality, of violence. The violence, in turn, precludes love and intimacy, opening up a chasm of woundedness and need. Homelander isn’t turning into Soldier Boy; Soldier Boy didn’t used to be Homelander. They’re the same dual person at the same time. It doesn’t matter which one beats the other; the patriarch is the patriarch. James Gunn thinks you can root for the good genocider. Kripke knows better.

There are ways out of toxic masculinity in The Boys; they just don’t involve killing your father to gain his power. Hughie (Jack Quaid), Starlight’s boyfriend, starts the series feeling sorry for himself because he’s not a toxic manly man who can save his stronger sweetie. He discovers a compound that gives him temporary super powers and shoots up because it makes him feel like one of the hurters rather than one of the people who gets hurt. In the final battle, he’s tempted to inject himself, risking brain damage. But instead, he flips on all the lights in the place, which supercharges Starlight’s abilities. He self-actualizes, not by killing the father, but by glorifying and uplifting the woman he loves.

The Wonder Woman analog Maeve (Dominique McElligott) offers another option. Homelander dated and abused Maeve for years; she loathes him and is determined to kill him. The narrative doesn’t blame her for that; Homelander needs to be stopped, and Maeve certainly deserves her revenge. But when push comes to shove, and she has to choose between saving her friends and finishing Homelander off, she chooses the first. She loses an eye (shades of Oedipus) and gets depowered. But she also gets to let go of her anger and have a happily ever after with her long-time girlfriend.

The Boys isn’t advocating pacifism, and it’s all for punching Nazis as long as there are Nazis standing. But the show understands that violence as a masculine strategy for self-fulfillment has real limits. The master’s tools can be useful sometimes. But if you’re going to build something new you probably want to see if you can find some different instruments. And you also need to hand those instruments out to some people who aren’t white men.

Peacemaker isn’t totally oblivious to that lesson either. The story of Chris and his father is mirrored in the story of Adebayo and her demanding, cynical, amoral mother. Amanda Waller pushes Adebayo to spy on and betray her coworkers. At the end of the show, Adebayo confesses, apologizes, and exposes her mother publicly, putting an end to the cruel Suicide Squad superprisoner exploitation program which had used and almost killed Chris. It’s an alternative, less violent vision of overcoming abusive parents, one that emphasizes honesty and accountability rather than murder.

If Adebayo were the main character in Peacemaker, it would be a very different show. But even superhero narratives that critique toxic masculinity are reliant on toxic masculinity for many of their genre pleasures. A mini-series about a Black lesbian nonviolently negotiating her relationship with her difficult mother is no longer a conventional superhero show. Some weak bullied someone has to kill that evil father and take his place, or what are you even tuning is for?

The Boys is well aware of this dynamice. That's why at the end of season 3, weak, frightened, scared, traumatized Ryan watches his dad reduce someone to a bubbling pile of singed flesh. His eyes light up like he's watching a superhero televison show as he realizes that that power, that masculinity, that toxic stew, is a potential for him as well. Homelander’s son may grow up to burn Homelander down. But patriarchy is more resistant than any one superbody. Its power is that it grows stronger when you murder it.

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James Gunn’s Superman is out this week, and there’s been a lot of talk about the film’s politics and how intentionally Gunn is rebuking Trump. I thought it was a good time to reup this piece from my Patreon about Gunn’s earlier politicized take on superheroes.