The Boys

 Amazon Prime

Imagine the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and in particular the Avengers; a never ending, endlessly heroic soap-opera about heroes who come together, fall apart, fight bad guys, save America, and stand up for something bigger than themselves. Now, imagine that it's all real: that the heroes of the films are superheroes in real life, reenacting real adventures from the real world, and appearing on chat shows, festivals, and crucially on social media. They're not actors; and they don't stop being superheroes when the film finishes. But now let's suppose that outside of the movies, the superheroes are almost without exception corrupt, lecherous, cynical, fascistic and in some cases outright psychopathic. That's more or less the premise of Amazon Prime's adaptation of Garth Ennis's The Boys. Twenty four episodes of superhero deconstruction for a post Avengers generation.

Alan Moore demolished the superhero genre in Watchmen, and we are still living in the ruins. But he really liked the genre: almost the next thing he did was Nineteen Sixty-Three a fanboy love letter to Lee and Kirby. One feels that Garth Ennis never had anything but contempt for superheroes. (Pat Mills had likewise perpetrated a thing called Marshall Law in which a Dredd-a-like wiped out thinly disguised stand-ins for the Marvel and DC roster.) Forty years on, instead of dying out, un-ironic superheroes have moved back into the mainstream. It's possible to exaggerate their cinematic dominance. Of the maybe 40 films that Bristol Everyman has shown so far in 2022, maybe five of them have been about men in tights. Six if you include Elvis. But we're in a world where your Mum and your sister and the editor of the Guardian has heard of the Justice League; which in 1986 we were decidedly not.

But I guess the Boys is not really about superheroes. It doesn't, at any rate, have anything new or interesting to say about them. What if Superman, having ultimate power, was ultimately corrupt? What if Captain America was a fascist? What if Aquaman had sex with octopuses? What if you couldn't teleport or turn invisible without, like Cupid Stunt, taking all your clothes off? 

Jupiter's Legacy, which sadly fizzled out after a very promising start, offered us venial, compromised what-if-there-were-superheroes-in-the-real-world. But they had started out believing in the heroic code. The Utopian is a superhero in a world which doesn't believe in superheroes. Homelander never believed in them to begin with. He's a damaged little boy, the product of a malign super soldier serum, who plays the role of a hero but is a power drunk self obsessed white supremacist. Alan Moore asked us to imagine a Kid Marvelman who, in the absence of any kind of parental authority and with limitless power had turned into a purely satanic force. Homelander has been in that situation for his whole life. There is something of the same madness in their eyes. Moore horrified us with the amount of blood and devastation that a superhero battle would generate; The Boys takes this for granted: treats it, in fact, as a black joke. The cast talk about the amount of time spent in make up being covered with fake viscera. Homelander cuts people in half with his eye beams; another character has the specific power of making people's heads explode. I found the violence less nauseating than in Game of Thrones and the sex less sexy. But there certainly is a hell of a lot of it.

Our focus is on four muggles, who are not actually referred to as The Boys. They have all got very good reasons to hate superheroes. Hughie, the endearingly gormless viewpoint character, sees his girlfriend reduced to a pool of slime before the end of the first pre-cred. A Beverly Hills Cop wannabe with Quicksilver style super-speed inadvertently runs through her. He hooks up with Billy Butcher, a kind of John Constantine figure whose reasons for hating "Supes" emerges gradually through Season One. He is British, but sounds like a Kiwi who had Dick Van Dyke as a dialogue coach. Hughie's attempts to understand and imitate Billy's swearing vocabulary are curiously endearing.

The narrative arc gradually reveals how the "Supes" came to be, and how the Voigt corporation, which manages them, conducts its affairs. The plot is heavily dependent on threats, blackmail, political machinations, and revelations about who is related to whom. In that way, it quite resembles the Netflix Marvel Knights material (Daredevil and Jessica Jones et al) which typically began with a set of mundane and likeable characters and gradually revealed that they were all Ninja, or Special Ops agents. Game of Thrones is the prototype for these binge worthy box-sets so there has to be an awful lot of plotting and double-dealing. There are very many Purloined Letters. (If you continue to threaten me then I will show the world my phone-camera footage of you doing something dreadful; aha but once you have revealed that footage there will be no reason for me not doing something very much more dreadful.) A major focus is Starfire, an initially naive new super-heroine who is sexually assaulted by The Deep (the Aquaman analog) within hours of joining The Seven (the Avengers analog). She ends up dating Hughie, which makes everyone's life three times as complicated. The process of joining the Seven is somewhere between a talent show and reality TV. Everyone is very concerned with public image and social media; odious Voight business people are perpetually looking for ways to spin the super-heroic atrocities as the actions of all-American heroes. Seven Tower is increasingly under the thumb of a completely unhinged Homelander. No-one specifically tells us that it is an analogy for Trump's White House, but it is clearly an analogy for Trump's White House.

I don't quite respond to all Garth Ennis's cynicism, nor his endless attempts to out-do himself on the Yuk Factor. The super-heroic orgy at the beginning of Season Three has to be seen to be believed. But I found the characters, superheroes or not, to be consistently compelling, and the plot revelations to come fast enough to keep me interested but slow enough for me to mostly keep track of what was going on. I consistently wanted Hughie and Starlight not to mess up their lives any further. Homelander is entirely evil and completely without redeeming features, and yet Anthony Starr makes him a plausible human being. He is never merely Lord Voldemort. Alarmingly, some right wing voices on real life social media believe he's the goodie.

But the series is carried by Karl Urban's Billy Butcher. Accent notwithstanding he perfectly embodies the violent, foul-mouthed, cynical bastard who nevertheless loves his friends, his family, and his sense of justice. (He's the guy who played Judge Dredd in the good version of Judge Dredd that never got a sequel. I should have recognised the chin.)

And that's the point, isn't it. Homelander seems to be a hero, but he's really an utter monster. Billy Butcher appears to be a complete bastard, but he's really a true hero. (It's all, as you would expect, in Plato.) 

It is quite fashionable to say that no-one with the power of Superman could really remain good: if such a being really existed he would be evil by definition. Power tends to corrupt, as the fellow said. Which appears to me to miss the point of Superman, and indeed everything else. I shall certainly hang around for Season 4 of the Boys and maybe even read the comic book. But I think that the really radical question to ask is not "What if all superheroes were fascists?" but "What if they weren't?"  

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