A silly-deranged mirror for our silly-deranged times, it offers what-if pleasures of an authoritarian America; its true villain is the abstract ideal of capitalism that wields all tools
“The ‘superhero dream’ is a dangerous thing, because essentially it’s fascism,” said Alan Moore, the great graphic novelist. Eric Kripke, American writer and creator of The Boys, would agree with Moore, one is inclined to assume. Since the pilot aired in 2019, The Boys — its Season 4 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video — has asked of us a simple enough question: how would it be if our beloved superheroes (‘supes,’ in Boyspeak) existed not in an ideal world where tech billionaires are genuinely altruistic and the most powerful being on Earth is content with a simple journalist’s life, but in a world very much like our own? The real one, you know, where shareholders profit is the only thing truly sacrosanct, where everything is up for commodification, and the recognition of people as heroes or villains is based only on who controls the narrative. The many answers to this question have kept us entertained over the last three seasons, and now, with the show’s latest fare, it looks like we are hurtling towards the ‘final solution’.
The season starts with Homelander (Antony Starr), on trial for murdering a man in full public view, and a Presidential election about to be certified on January 6 (wink, wink). Our eponymous heroes, the Boys, once again have the CIA-approved mission of controlling, or at least containing, supes like Victoria Neuman, the Vice President-elect who would inherit the country if the President-elect were to die somehow, say by getting his head popped. Also thrown in the mix are new characters like Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), the smartest person on Earth whom Homelander enlists in his quest to subvert America’s democracy, and Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a conspiracy theorist who feels very much like a supe-variant of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
While there is some amount of repetition in the tropes and a few sequences that try too hard to top the raunch and gore benchmarks set by previous seasons, I liked the fact that The Boys has stayed true to the satirical spirit that makes it a silly-deranged mirror for our silly-deranged times. In fact, that may be the whole reason, I have realised, why I love this show when there are other subtler, soberer stories, like The Man in the High Caste or (my favourite) The Plot Against America, that also offer the what-if pleasures of an authoritarian America.
How system makes a joke out of common man’s moral compass
Just like the world of The Boys, the world around us, at least the one that Millennials like me inherited, doesn’t feel serious even when it is at its most evil. It’s cynical, it’s tropey, it’s horrible like the 12th movie in a Marvel franchise, but never serious. Daily news is a montage of gallows humour. Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. There are no black-and-white binaries anymore for our disillusioned selves, only a technicolour mush fed into our heads in a relentless drip of marketing, advertising, PR communication, and propaganda, manufactured and consumed not just by corporate interests but individuals who are unable to distinguish themselves from corporate interests.
The best thing about The Boys is that despite surface appearances, Homelander is not the primary antagonist here. He is just another tool, someone born in a lab, and raised to be a psychopath. In fact, he kills some of the people who raised him (gore galore) in a misguided attempt to face his past this season. But these people, the scientists and child psychologists, also are tools, just like him. The true villain of the show, as in the real world, is neither a purple space giant nor a superman-gone-rogue, but the abstract ideal of capitalism that wields all tools, small and large. It’s this system in which the Homelander and the Boys are mere cogs, it’s the house that always wins, that places maximisation of profit over everything else, twists every ideology in the balance sheet’s service, and makes a joke out of the common man’s moral compass.
It’s interesting how this faux-dichotomy or the “sameness of opposing sides” plays out in the arc of Billy Butcher (Karl Utvan), leader of The Boys and Homelander’s arch-nemesis. Ethically and personally opposed to the unjust rule of the powerful over the powerless, Butcher has always been someone with an end-justifies-the-means worldview, and towards the end of this season, we see him become exactly what he hates.
The Parallel Realities
It becomes clear that no matter what side one is on, violence cannot be the answer if they are to avoid a devolving series of pyrrhic victories. As Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), the lone and largely ineffectual voice of reason in the show, says in the season finale, “What’s insane is that our solution to every problem is murder.” Since it’s The Boys, this epiphany is obviously followed soon by another murder, and a rather important one that shows how it’s not just one ideological side that’s capable of dehumanising the Other.
Season 4 of The Boys aired in the middle of a real Presidential campaign in the USA. The finale, in fact, was initially titled “Assassination Run” and featured an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the President-elect. The bizarrely close way this show runs in parallel to reality can be gauged from the fact that it was renamed “Season Four Finale”, following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump five days prior to the episode’s release.
The next season is going to be The Boys’ final run and it will expectedly begin with a narcissistic strongman occupying the Oval Office. Will it release in a world similarly shaped by the events of these last few months? Also, even if it doesn’t, even if the American’s don’t let the strongman lead them again, would his alternative really be so different? We’ll see all that next season…erm…next year, I suppose.
