In a recurring dream that dogged my childhood, I took a flying leap into the air and glided a few feet above the ground. As I recall, excitement never quite rose to exhilaration. My floating body moved at a steady height and pace. I didn’t soar into the clouds or careen wildly around rooftops at high speed. I just coasted along until sleep pulled me into the next bizarre scenario.
Why couldn’t my elementary-aged imagination escape the troposphere or break the sound barrier like the tricolored champions then flying out of comic books and onto the silver screen? Were my escapades’ limits the product of inadequate creativity, or was my subconscious—or perhaps my Creator—trying to tell me something?
Whatever your response, conscious or unconscious, to the abundance of superheroes at today’s multiplex, this class of story continues to offer something relatively unique. When we choose to confront the “arresting strangeness” that J. R. R. Tolkien locates in the Secondary Worlds of fantasy, we sometimes glimpse that Evangelium which he finds in exemplars of the genre—a transcendent joy that denies “universal final defeat.”
Today’s creative revisioning of those epic warriors of ancient myth presents modern viewers with at least two options. In the first, the extraordinary actions of characters who suspend nature’s laws offer an occasion to revel in both power and its willing surrender. The heroes put their lives on the line to deliver the endangered, swooping in to rescue victims of malevolence and restoring equilibrium by dint of expert timing and judicious force. We might join them in our imaginations, jeopardizing our safety to save commuters barreling toward a fiery death, preventing tragedy by flying round the world so fast we reverse time, or giving our lives to resurrect the dead.
Spy flicks and war films offer other opportunities to identify with selfless heroism. The superpowered hero, however, adds something more to the equation. Incredible abilities recall biblical incidents, miracles both local and large-scale. Shaping weather like Thor and Storm recalls the parting of the Red Sea (Ex. 14:19–31) and Jesus’ calming of a tempest (Mark 4:35–41), while the healing powers of Arion and Halo echo the Messiah’s erasures of disability and revivification of the dead. When a particularly dramatic rescue manages to illustrate that ultimate fusion of love and surrender (John 15:13), the parallel grows still stronger.
Alternatively, marvelous recovery invites us to associate with the rescued, with the hapless pedestrian saved from a falling building or the oblivious child protected from a speeding bullet. As the most rigorous workouts, healthy diets, and curated personal calendars cannot forestall mortality indefinitely, stories putting human finitude in grand terms provide useful reminders. Physical peril mirrors spiritual vulnerability.
There’s at least one other path through certain superhero movies, one easier to walk when the tales’ exceptional heroes are not superpowered. Without impervious skin, laser-shooting eyes, or the ability to walk through walls, superheroes grow much more relatable, representing something more than themselves. The superpowered Wonder Woman is less an Amazon than she is herself, a swift and strong warrior whose might is matched only by compassion. Batman, on the other hand, relies as much on an underworld reputation as an inhuman monster as he does technology and fighting skill, and Iron Man’s connection to the military-industrial complex he helped revolutionize magnifies the threat he poses to miscreants.
Why We Need Wonder Woman
Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World concerns itself with the passing of the baton from the former sort of hero to the latter. It’s a transition from demigod to mortal man, seven films and one TV show in the making.
From the moment Steve Rogers appears beside his future replacement, their differences could not be more obvious. Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014) opens with Sam Wilson in a morning run around DC’s National Mall, his pace obliterated by the current Captain America’s dizzying velocity as he laps Sam repeatedly. As Sam later explains, now outfitted in superhero garb as the Falcon, “Don’t look at me. I do what he does, just slower.” The heroes’ fast friendship and mutual courage do help them take down the bad guys, but the Falcon’s mechanical pinions can be pulled, eliminating his advantage over a normal adversary.
Sam loses his wings again in the series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), a few episodes after he’s relinquished the shield bequeathed him by Steve. Unable to shake the feeling “that it’s someone else’s,” Sam gives up the symbol publicly. Admitting its power, he refuses to believe anyone except Steve deserves to use it. The first supersoldier’s relentless grit while still a scrawny recruit, later magnified by “super serum” and coupled with an unwavering commitment to freedom, has made Steve an icon to many—a godlike figure incapable of wrong.
Sam maintains for far too long that since he cannot be the Steve Rogers, he has no right to wear his sigil or bear his shield. What others see as an honor, Sam considers an impossible standard, a burden he lacks the strength to carry.
It takes someone else stepping into Steve’s buccaneer-boots role for Sam to reevaluate his decision. Like the Galatians Paul berates for distorting the gospel (Gal 1:6–9), the decorated soldier crowned as the next Captain America betrays the principles he’s intended to personify. He sullies the well-known symbol of freedom quite literally, staining it with the blood of a man he kills in an act of rage. Confronted with atrocity, things finally click for Sam. He picks up the shield, slips on a mended pair of wings, and dives into a new film.
Captain America: Brave New World has little to do with the Aldous Huxley novel that gave it its name (besides briefly exploring the allure of medicating emotion), nor does it deliver as incisive a social critique as the three Captain America films that preceded it. It does, however, offer observations surprisingly congruent with a Christian ethic.
No Hero But Christ
Sam uses the shield as effectively as Steve ever did, a mélange of balletic moves and kickboxing techniques helping him propel the disk to devastating effect. It is not, however, the application of force which ultimately wins the day. Sam’s first appearance 11 years earlier introduced him as a grief counselor for military veterans, a former Air Force pilot whose experience with loss granted him insight into others’ trauma. He demonstrated that same understanding at the end of his TV series when he encouraged a friend to actively serve the needy instead of merely pummeling villains and chided a senator for deploying easy labels like terrorist and thug that justify violence in the face of great need.
In his latest cinematic outing, the true climax occurs when the fighting ceases, Sam’s wings broken (again) and his body battered in a way Steve’s never was. In this moment of weakness, he talks down his adversary by lifting him up—reminding him that he can become the better man he seeks to be by stepping back from violence instead of pressing the attack. Sam models a love for his enemy that successfully (and quite literally) transforms the opposition, solidifying his new status as a symbol whose power rests not in any supernatural talents of his own but in the values for which he stands. As his friend Bucky observes, where Steve’s larger-than-life stature “gave people something to believe in,” Sam, a Black, working-class man who carries the hopes of the marginalized, “gives them something to aspire to.”
He doesn’t need superpowers to impact the world. He doesn’t even need to fly. Perhaps God was teaching me in my childhood dream that I don’t need to either. Living in this life as I’m being pulled toward the next, my current role—suspended between two worlds—is to soldier onward at a steady pace (2 Tim. 2:3–4), to never stop moving (Heb. 12:1). Equipped with my own symbol of freedom (Matt. 16:24) and carrying a shield of faith in someone far greater than myself (Eph. 6:16), I seek to remain what Christ named me: an image bearer (2 Cor. 3:18).
Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”
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