Fiction Friction: The Death of Zeitgeist and the Reflective Superheroes of the Mid-2000s
- cepmurphywrites
- Mar 11
- 15 min read
By Thomas Anderson
Superheroes are a ubiquitous part of modern pop culture. Indeed, some would say a far too ubiquitous one; while original film scripts struggle to be made, Hollywood returns again and again to the old reliable spigot of at least semi-recognisable superhero properties.
Leaving aside the moral questions raised by this status quo, I suspect it would be easy for Kids Today (TM) to have the impression that superheroes have always been so ubiquitous in film and television. After all, they have been around since the 1930s, haven’t they? And while younger viewers are probably not intimately familiar with the earlier superhero films of the 1970s and 80s, they probably have at least a vague awareness of their existence and popularity. Thus, it is easy to construct a historiographic narrative that superhero media has always been hugely popular. In reality, while at least some characters (such as Superman and Batman) have never truly sunk into obscurity in the public mind, the situation is rather more complicated.
The era I specifically want to discuss here is the mid-2000s (which I’m defining, rather broadly, as about 2003-2007) because of the remarkable fact that the very distinct superhero zeitgeist of this period, only about 15-20 years ago, has basically disappeared without trace from our historiographic presentation of the genre. Perhaps this is helped by the fact that this was a transitional period between the dominance of print media and the rise of the internet as the dominant form of discourse, so views of the time may not have survived in print so much as they might have in other times. But I feel this alone cannot exchange the sheer Orwellian scale of which the zeitgeist has been covered over.
Before I go on, I should first establish that, by ‘popular superhero zeitgeist’, I am not talking about what was happening between the pages of actual US comic books. No, when I say ‘popular superhero zeitgeist’ I am talking about how the broader general public, across the Western world and beyond, view superheroes. This is mostly defined by live-action films with some backup by live-action TV. (Animated pieces are rarely relevant, except on a time delay of some years, due to the continuing and robust prejudice that they are for children. Despite the appearance of some groundbreaking superhero animation clearly intended for a wider audience, it does not look like this view is going to be broken among the popular audience anytime soon.)
Having made that definition, I should also provide a small amount of historical background. Traditional US comic book superheroes emerged towards the end of the 1930s and were largely birthed from the existing world of pulp adventure fiction which had grown up in the 1920s and 1930s. Such characters had exciting adventures of derring-do and peril in a serialised magazine format, complete with the same cliffhangers and revelations that would later be replicated in their film-serial counterparts. A good example is Doc Savage, raised by his wealthy father to be trained to perfection in both body and mind, backed up by five sidekicks who are also experts in particular fields of science, engineering and law, and tasked with protecting the innocent and punishing the oppressor.
Savage may sound like more of a prototype for characters like Batman, but in fact it was the Superman writers who ‘borrowed’ liberally from his escapades: Savage is the Man of Bronze, whereas Superman is the Man of Steel, and even more cheekily, Savage had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic before the Superman writers literally just copy-pasted the idea. Batman took more inspiration from the Shadow and in fact, the very first Batman comic story, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate”, is – again – literally just copy-pasted from the Shadow novel “Partners of Peril” from three years earlier. Please spare a thought for those of us who regularly have to lecture students that plagiarism doesn’t pay!
Suffice to say that the US comic book superheroes were popular in the late 1930s and 1940s, many turning into wartime propaganda. The Fleischer brothers made groundbreaking animated adaptations of Superman which were shown ahead of films for many years later: my dad was born nine years after the last cartoon was made but can still quote the opening narration word for word, due to the number of times he saw them before films in the 1960s. Meanwhile, Captain Marvel (as in Shazam), rather cheekily sued at the time as derivative of Superman (pot meet kettle!), was the first superhero to get a live-action film serial, later followed by Batman.
In the 1950s the popularity of superheroes declined in favour of other genres – which represents another example of a flaw in the natural historiographic assumption that superheroes have always been ubiquitous. But the superhero genre came back into popularity in the early 1960s, a period now known as the Silver Age (with the 1930s and 40s as the Golden Age). Comics in this era are often stereotyped now as campy, weird, obsessed with science fiction, and coming with proto-clickbait covers that portrayed their protagonists as doing misleadingly villainous-looking things. All these stereotypes are grounded in some level of truth but can lead to unfair dismissal of comics that were, after all, far, far more popular and best-selling at the time than anything published today. The Silver Age was arguably the last time that one can say that the popular perception of superheroes was in any way influenced by what appeared in the pages of comic books. Indeed, this is probably why so many people (even those now too young to have grown up reading them) still have their perceptions of superheroes defined by Silver Age comic books, and are surprised and often appalled when they see a more recent and grittier portrayal of superheroes.
Despite that, the period also saw Marvel achieve great success with attempts to make superheroes more relatable, such as with the introduction of Spider-Man – an angsty teenager struggling with what to do with his new powers while faced with the real-life problems of a sickly aunt, money issues and pursuing his academic career. (Unfortunately, the popularity of Spider-Man, and the fact that eventually people who can never grow up took over creative control, means that the character has long since become a parodic exaggeration of himself who takes angst to the extreme and is never allowed to be happy or progress his life).
In terms of other media in the 1960s, another very influential expression of Silver Age values was the campy, fun interpretation of Batman by Adam West, mostly on TV although also associated with a single movie. This series would be repeated for many years (I saw it growing up in the 90s) and is likely also largely responsible for the continuing Silver Age perception of superheroes. There were few other superhero films in the decade, and the ones that did exist were often knowingly self-parodic, somewhat presaging the period that will be the later focus of this article.
The 1970s and 1980s reflected broader societal changes in the US from the lost Vietnam War and the rise of black civil rights (and related crusades for social justice). The sanitised world of the Silver Age gave way to what was later described as the Bronze Age, in which the Comics Code was openly defied to depict social issues like drugs, and more ethnic minority superheroes appeared – albeit often in rather stereotypical ways at first, but the intentions were good. The 1970s also saw the release of the Christopher Reeve Superman film in 1978, one of the first archetypal blockbusters along with “Jaws” and “Star Wars”. The film’s tagline, ‘You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly!’ summed up its broader impact. For the first time in a while, people were actually taking superheroes seriously rather than as an inherently campy and self-parodying genre.
While there were not that many other films in the period, there was a growth in influential TV adaptations. Whereas the Adam West Batman had been intentionally campy and comedic, the 1970s would see DC’s Wonder Woman (starring Lynda Carter) and Marvel’s Incredible Hulk (starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno). If the general public of the time ever encountered superheroes in a (somewhat) more serious context, it was probably through one of these two.
The second really big and influential superhero film was Tim Burton’s “Batman” in 1989. Despite being a smash hit, one that married a neo-noir interpretation of the setting of the original 1930s Gotham with the modern dark and gritty interpretation of the Batman setting, it seemed strangely unable to dent the public’s firm conviction that Batman was always Adam West-style shenanigans. (Of course, the mixed messages sent out by there being kids’ toys based on a film involving torture, poison gas and a crazed psychopath did not help). Despite its success and having sequels, this didn’t seem to open the floodgates for many more superhero adaptations – barring a questionable DC adaptation of the obscure “Steel” in 1997.
Unbelievably to a modern eye, Marvel did not attempt any film adaptation before 1998 with one exception – Howard the Duck!
The 90s did see one important live-action superhero TV show, “The New Adventures of Superman” (a.k.a. “Lois and Clark” in the US), which rebuilt the Superman mythos from scratch for those who might have only a passing familiarity with the character. I was impressed with it at the time, trying to marry a fairly serious take on the character with some jokey 90s US sitcom humour. But otherwise, not much came out in the superhero space (there were several influential cartoons but seen only as kids’ media) in the 90s. Remember this when I get to the mid-2000s.
Note that I am not really talking about what was happening in comics themselves any more, which is quite intentional – by this point people had stopped paying attention. The early 90s were noted as the ‘Dark Age’ in which there was an obsession with off-putting and poorly-drawn violence for its own sake and a lack of morality, but – barring exceptions like “Spawn” – this didn’t result in anything emerging into the media sphere that the general public was still experiencing.
The turn of the twenty-first century was a critical period. In 1998 the second Marvel film adaptation came out, adapting the vampire hunter “Blade”. The film was successful in its own right but was not tied to any comic property that would be recognisable to the average viewer, so it’s questionable whether it really counts. 2000 saw the release of “X-Men”, an unambiguous success of a comic adaptation to film. Undoubtedly helped by the acting chops of Patrick Stewart and Iain McKellen, and the discovery of Hugh Jackman to fill the boots of the always-popular Wolverine, “X-Men” made a significant impact on the perceived viability of superhero films. Nonetheless, that film is still clearly made with some of the overarching assumptions of what I might call the pre-2008 period. Everyone wears black leather, and when Wolverine points this out, there’s an in-joke of asking him if he’d prefer yellow spandex (which is, of course, what the comic book character and his animated counterpart wears). This is typical of attitudes of the time, when there seems to be a profound fear that an audience cannot take it seriously unless everything is dark and gloomy and gritty (see also the ‘everything is grey and brown’ video game aesthetic of the mid-2000s). The fact that much of said audience had seen the X-Men cartoon a few years ago, and were upset not to see that technicolour cast here, seemed to be irrelevant.
In 2002 the first live-action Spider-Man film, starring Tobey Maguire, was released. This has much more in common with the 1978 Superman film in terms of being a reconstruction of a character’s backstory and being largely unapologetic about featuring elements that feel taken more directly from the comic. Spider-Man has his iconic blue and red costume (perhaps slightly darkened from its prototype), he works for J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle and JJ is not toned down at all, etc. It was not completely free of some of the attitudes of the time, for example arch-villain the Green Goblin (memorably portrayed by Willem Defoe) having a costume that’s substantially different from the one in the comics, but the film was nonetheless highly successful and spawned two sequels. Much the same was true of the X-Men franchise. 2003 saw the release of film adaptations of “Daredevil” and the Hulk.
Roughly around here is where I want to define the start of the ‘mid-2000s zeitgeist’ as I have described it. This is a period when there was a perception, especially among media creators (not necessarily among the public themselves) that ‘Superheroes are played out. Everyone is sick of superheroes played straight. The only way to do superheroes now is to be deconstructive’. This was the case despite the fact, as I’ve pointed out above, that there had been rather few played-straight superhero adaptations to the present, and even most of those were rather cautious with direct transfers of concepts and depictions (brightly coloured costumes, code names, etc.) from page to screen. Yet it would be a strangely, almost poisonously pervasive attitude up to 2008, as we’ll see.
Possibly part of the reason might be that those creators were more familiar with comic books in their original media form (or other adaptations) and were unaware that the public was largely only paying attention to live-action films (and sometimes live-action TV) so, as far as they were concerned, there hadn’t been that much superhero media made.
Fuel was probably thrown on the fire of this assumption by the fact that many films made at this time did poorly. “Daredevil” was somewhat criticised (though I personally enjoyed it), its spinoff “Elektra” (2005) was panned, as was DC’s “Catwoman” (2004). DC had TV success with “Smallville” throughout this period (2001-2011), a series which I’ve never seen but seemed to do quite well with the apparently rather silly concept of ‘Superman before he was Superman’. Marvel did not delve into TV (other then a short-lived Blade spinoff) but produced two Fantastic Four films, which were played fairly straight but regarded as middling at best. There was also a poorly received “Ghost Rider” adaptation in 2007 and “Constantine”, a rather mangled adaptation of “Hellblazer”, in 2005. Going back to “Hulk” in 2003, director Ang Lee had been deconstructive with his attitudes, presaging this sentiment that straight superhero films were played out.
Now let’s look at examples of this attitude being directly expressed in film and TV in this period. In 2005, a comedy “Spider-Plant Man” was produced to raise money for the UK’s Comic Relief, starring Rowan Atkinson in the lead role: this was a parody of the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man film, mocking its tropes. Notably, Jim Broadbent appears as Batman – clearly Adam West’s Batman, accompanied by Robin – as an antagonist, complaining that nobody cares about him anymore and the public has moved on to Spider-Man (or Spider-Plant Man here). To show he is down on his luck, he now drives a ‘Bat-Clio’ (i.e. a Renault Clio, a cheap small car) instead of the Batmobile. Note that the portrayal of an aged Batman does not seem significantly influenced by the Tim Burton films, showing the enduring influence of the Adam West series. As far as the general British audience (or the people who wrote the skit, at least) are concerned, Batman is from the Sixties and nobody has heard from him since.
One might say that this rapidly looked a strange assumption when “Batman Begins” came out shortly afterwards to critical acclaim. Personally, I have never liked that film and find it massively overrated – which makes it hard to look at objectively, but I think it also made much less impact on general perception of both Batman and superheroes in general than people think. Even if one did accept that there was some impact, however, arguably “Batman Begins” is another example of being unable to portray a superhero entirely straight, with some focus on hyper-realism. In contrast to its two sequels (or the Spider-Man films, for example), even the villain is not a larger-than-life figure.
Regardless, it certainly doesn’t seem to have dented the broader view of superheroes, because this ‘no, all must be deconstructions or parodies’ attitude continued apace. In 2006 DC (ambitiously but confusingly) released “Superman Returns” which attempted to be a continuation of just the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films. Unfortunately, this attempt at playing (fairly) straight was not critically successful, leading the character into the World of Grey and Brown we got with “Man of Steel” and its sequels, but that’s another story.
Meanwhile, 2006 also saw the release of “My Super Ex-Girlfriend”, a deconstructive comedy parody looking at what happens to the superheroine G-Girl’s boyfriend when they acrimoniously break up. 2008 saw “Hancock”, starring Will Smith as a superhero deconstruction where his recklessness and alcoholism undermines his apparent crime fighting. It also featured the release of “Superhero Movie”, the latest in a (mostly correctly) maligned parody series, which mostly focused on spoofing the Maguire Spider-Man and featuring Leslie Nielsen. Note that most of these films also did not have particularly good reviews, but this seems to have done little to dent the conviction that deconstruction and parody was the way to go.
I have actually only listed a few specific examples of superhero parody and deconstruction from this era – there were actually many more, most of them obscure, and lots of examples of the tropes being done in individual episodes of TV series and the like. One of the most influential examples of the zeitgeist, however, must be the 2006 TV series “Heroes” by Tim Kring. In this setting, seemingly random people from all over the world find they have a variety of comic book inspired superpowers, ranging from the ability to time travel to flight to regeneration. Villain Sylar has the ability to ‘understand how things work’, which lets him steal the powers of others – in a process that is fatal to them. Like the sixties Spider-Man comics before it, the series took an approach of “What would it be like for real people to be put in this situation?” and the result was frequently engaging television. And, as a deconstruction, nobody has costumes and few have code names.
Unfortunately, the second season was badly disrupted by a writers’ strike and (in my opinion) it never recovered the magic of the first. This is a shame, because it would have been interesting to see how the series organically evolved as the underlying assumption of its foundation – that the public were not receptive to traditional comic book superheroes and had to have it packaged in a ‘real-life’ drama like hiding a pet dog’s pill in a treat – came crashing down in the late 2000s.
2008 saw the release of two films which began to dissolve the anti-‘straight superhero adaptation’ zeitgeist of the mid-2000s like acid. In the short term, “The Dark Knight” saw more attention, from my perspective drastically outstripping its predecessor “Batman Begins”. Director Christopher Nolan and lead Christian Bale reunited, but this time Batman was faced by a new villain – the Joker as portrayed in a new and chilling way by Heath Ledger. “The Dark Knight” was great cinema and, unlike “Batman Begins”, found a way to portray a genuinely memorable and chilling larger-than-life villain in a hard-reality context. It undoubtedly played a critical role in shifting critical opinion about superhero adaptations. (And yet even then it doesn’t seem to have budged the broader public view of what Batman is, and parents still cheerfully took their kids along to the recent ‘The Batman’ adaptation...)
The other critical release of 2008, overshadowed by “The Dark Knight” in the short term, was “Iron Man”. In hindsight, it is hard to explain (especially to younger people) that before 2008, Iron Man was a very obscure character to anyone who didn’t follow comic books. There had been an animated series in the 90s, but it was nonetheless greatly overshadowed by better-known properties like Spider-Man and the X-Men. The MCU has radically changed the pecking order of superheroes in the public mind, to the point that now we have Spider-Man films in which Peter Parker idolises and looks up to Tony Stark and is defined in relation to him – which would have been completely unimaginable before 2008. But Robert Downey Jr., doubtless helped by his own backstory mirroring that of Tony Stark, captured a perfect balance of situational comedy without self-parody, playing the superhero element entirely straight. He wears an armoured suit of red and gold like his comics counterpart and can have meaningful self-reflection on his position and legacy without letting it dominate the film as a deconstruction.
Thenceforward (is that a word? it is now) the Marvel Cinematic Universe came together with the release of many other films. Not all of them were entirely successful, but enough were to build a critical mass that eventually achieved a franchise juggernaut unlike any other. Even many of the most formerly obscure Marvel characters and teams have had a successful film attached to them. Once Captain America was little known outside the US (and seen as a bit of a joke when people did know about him). Certainly, nobody had ever heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy or Doctor Strange. But now?
Many, for understandable reasons, have mourned the domination of Marvel, seeming to suck all the oxygen out of cinema and sprawl superheroes across media to the point that other genres (especially original concepts) are choked. Nonetheless, I feel this must be measured against the point that, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it was considered increasingly Common Knowledge that cinema was being killed. Cheap DVDs, piracy, streaming, Netflix – how could the cinema compete? I feel that the MCU has had an underrated impact on inculcating a generation into seeing cinema attendance as something special, something to pass on to their own children, and if so, that achievement should be celebrated nonetheless. Not even Covid could kill it.
If you take anything away from this article, let it be a lesson not to let our own historiographic perceptions be driven by the here and now. Normally when such sentiments are expressed, we are talking about the attitudes of the past on far more serious topics. But the prevalence – and former lack of prevalence – of superhero media is an important exemplar. The very fact that we have largely forgotten the mid-2000s zeitgeist, the assumption that nobody would watch a straight superhero adaptation, shows how completely out-of-touch with public opinion that view was. People certainly were willing to watch such films, all they needed was the right one to come along and start the trend.
That should be of some comfort to those who despair of Marvel domination – sooner or later, someone with a vision will come along and reintroduce audiences to another genre we are confidently told, now, belongs solely in the past...
Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
among others.
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