OFF-TOPIC (68)
By:
March 10, 2025
Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This session, the latest revolutionary communique for a society of worst-kept secrets…
The same night Trump delivered his first address to Congress since being reelected I was passing it up for the premiere of Daredevil: Born Again; both were returns long in coming, and while the former was a work of fiction from start to finish, the latter marked the beginning of the metaphorical resistance that will pass secretly through pop-culture. In this case, neither one was subtle, and while Trump can be relied on to be what you expect, Born Again claimed its power to disappoint.
The show starts in a dizzying barrage, not of executive orders and outrageous claims but a hurricane of high-speed debris, as “Dex” (aka Bullseye), the seemingly superhuman marksman from Netflix’s Daredevil Season 3 who can turn any object into a deadly projectile, appears out of nowhere to take revenge on Matt Murdock and his partners. Be it carefully laid plotlines or traditional government institutions, what takes lifetimes to build can be torn down swiftly, and after Season 3 put these characters through hell to set them up in the happy-warrior, pop-art state of the 1960s comics, and industry media followed the long soap-opera of whether fan demands to bring back Deborah Ann Wohl and Eldon Hansen as Karen and “Foggy” would be met (and were), Foggy is fridged by Dex in the first few minutes of Episode 1 and Karen has moved to San Francisco a few more after that.
This is not to say it’s all over too soon; Foggy’s bleedout and Karen and Matt’s bellowing anguish takes up six-and-a-half minutes and seems much longer, as if the actors were forced to do analog slo-mo or the director left the camera running at his lunchtime without telling anyone “cut”; this lingers way past self-satire into bathos and should become required viewing in cinema studies classes as an exhibition in ineptitude. Maybe the show is saying something about how we dwell over traumatic shocks we didn’t see coming and can’t move beyond, or commenting on how minutes seem like hours and weeks like months living in a violent, oppressive climate; or maybe just, see above.
It isn’t long until the symbolism strikes much closer to the nose, as repackaged crimelord Wilson Fisk is elected Mayor of New York, and those sworn to protect us (in this case cops and prosecutors) leave their jobs en masse, and were already abdicating their obligations long before as vigilantes took matters into their own hands (get it, get it, get it and get it?). Despite the allusion, the show’s politics are all over the place, or perhaps just stuffed into the same place; the only lens that hardboiled fiction can frame things in is “crime” (not “social justice”), so we see a New York riddled with the carnage familiar from rightwing talking-points, as common people cry out for salvation by a police force simultaneously shown as the self-serving and murderous figures of leftwing paranoia. I guess this reflects the wish to affirm some social order that is (or could be) on your side, and like much storytelling that’s committed to violence as a solution, the show is uncertain what side to take (and limits its own options).
Unresolved contradictions may be the most we can expect; this series was notoriously rethought after six episodes were finished, with some salvaged footage woven into extensive new shoots, and each of the two episodes released so far feels like it was filmed to a script scotch-taped together from strips of several drafts rescued out of a shredder.
This is how we get bland sketched-in banter and unconvincing courtroom jargon an AI could have handled better, next to masterclass scenes like the verbal chess-match between a supposedly-retired Daredevil and a deceptively-redeemed Fisk meeting to size each other up in a diner after the latter’s election (wisely excerpted at length in the trailer and even better in full), and the tense domestic drama of Wilson and his wife (and rival crime-boss) Vanessa in couples counseling (!) — the original Netflix series and several of its counterparts (Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and The Punisher) were rare among action thrillers for their preoccupation with trauma and therapy, and this is one callback to that theme in a show which overall is a shambling shadow of its mature and layered predecessor.
Even the quality of those last two sample scenes is a problem, because, like the media coverage of Election 2024 and the Harris campaign itself, the entire focus is on the badguy; Vincent D’Onofrio’s brilliant semi–hinged performance, like Fisk’s newfound position in power, commands the center of attention. It’s his show, and what attention is left is taken up by the characters on the next level of power down, the “vigilantes” like Daredevil, White Tiger, and the Punisher who Fisk has vowed to put a stop to; these are the ineffectual opposition party holding up little signs, the landowners allowed to vote, the class who, from the beginning of the American popular imagination, do things for us. There is otherwise no “us” in the dynamic, beyond being the ones who are watching this, and I’m not sure the show is drawing the allegory it thinks it is.
To recognize ourselves, we can look close by in the Marvel empire, to the print comics. Marvel’s mutants have long been reliable stand-ins for the oppressed, their abilities a burden of individuality that is no guarantee of a path to power but an invitation of persecution. This has had renewed poignancy in the recent X-Men runs, as real-world trans Americans find themselves criminalized after a period of fitful dawning acceptance and the comics pick up after a five-year storyline in which mutants had a fledgling utopian homeland. This was eventually bested by bigots who rebuilt their power all along, and undermined from the start due to compromises made and secrets kept by the elite duopoly of Xavier and Magneto. Doing your best to develop a next generation (and make sure there even is one) has always been another theme of this franchise, and any of us who have lived through more promising and less hopeful cycles of history can relate to these new stories of those who painfully remember “the future,” and those too young to who are not empowered by its example (but maybe not encumbered by its loss). I’m reading the politically tense X-Men written by Jed McKay, the mournful, psychological Uncanny X-Men written by Gail Simone, the absurdist X-Factor written by Mark Russell, and the fresh, affirmative Exceptional X-Men written by Eve L. Ewing, who is this era’s clearest heir to the buoyant attitude and social consciousness of the classic-Marvel, Stan Lee voice. That book is about young mutants isolated but finding community across the far-from-utopia of Chicago. At one early point, a highschooler stands up for a mutant classmate being bullied, using her own emerging power, an as-yet faulty ability to molecularly pass through solid objects that makes her exclaim afterward “I think I might throw up”; when the classmate, unknown to her ’til then, asks why she spoke out for a stranger, and she replies, “Because… ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” he says, “Okay, now I think I might throw up.” Life goes on.
Though life going on, itself, can be a big problem, depending on what we get too used to. As of last month across all Marvel comics, the super-dictator Doctor Doom has taken over the planet in the “One World Under Doom” storyline, with the instant acquiescence of all international leaders. The transfer of power was peaceful all right, and everyday existence is seamless, to the extent that two members of Doom’s arch-opponents the Fantastic Four, Ben Grimm and Susan Richards, can pop over to New York for a de-stressing day visiting their friend and sometime teammate Jen Walters (aka She-Hulk). Issue #29 of the current Fantastic Four run becomes a kind of manual for coping under creeping dictatorship, with our heroes discussing the legality of Doom’s moves (like annexing countries outside his own, in this case all of them), gaming out how it can eventually fall, and intervening as the violence underlying this new world seeps through the cracks of the imposed normalcy, when they protect some of the people designated as scapegoats Doom is “saving” the majority from (which is a long story in itself — ordinary families infected with vampirism in a previous company-wide event — and stretches the sensitivity level of these fantasy metaphors, but I grant the storytellers some latitude in the shaky territory of trying to stay abstracted). The issue adds to the mantras we can reassure ourselves with — “While Doom has taken over our world and its leaders, he hasn’t taken over its people. Maybe they’ll see through what he’s doing.” — and, people-to-people, offers a new kind of escape, into the reality of each other we can still confirm.
MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2025 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern’s and Paolo Leandri’s comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: FAWLTY TOWERS | KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JACKIE McGEE | NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JOAN SEMMEL | SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRO and THE LEON SUITES | FIVE-O YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JULIA | FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: KIMBA THE WHITE LION | CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: WASHINGTON BULLETS | KLAATU YOU: SILENT RUNNING | CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: QUINTET | TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: HIGHWAY PATROL | #SQUADGOALS: KAMANDI’S FAMILY | QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: LUCKY NUMBER | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JIREL OF JOIRY | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: “Freedom” | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti’s comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam’s posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE