In the anticipation surrounding Netflix’s new Daredevil, fan chatter mingles excitement with some worry about what appears to be a darker, sterner corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While I am sympathetic to those questions, I look back at five decades of the character and can’t shake the conclusion that, as a hero rooted in the conflictual streets of Hell’s Kitchen, wrestling with the abilities and challenges he faces, Daredevil is heroic exactly because he thrives in darkness, because he transforms darkness, because he redeems darkness.
Upon the April 10 debut/deluge of the first season of Daredevil, we will collectively hold all calls from clients, lurk around the Kitchen dressed in underwear, and disappear into darkness for thirteen sleepless hours. Others-better-informed-than-I have studied the tea leaves of teasers and “motion posters,” but I join the chorus of those curiously wondering if the show will wind up as dark as it looks in the previews.
A few reasons to fret this shadow-laden depiction:
(a) the Marvel Cinematic Galaxy has been a Stark contrast to the grimness and griminess of DC’s dark and steely films, a refreshingly sociable assemblage of wry dudes named Chris cracking skulls and jokes Whedonically;
(b) Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s current run on Daredevil (with artists like Paolo Rivera before Samnee) lifted fifty pounds off of Matt Murdock’s countenance, giving the book and its hero the levity and soul readers had been gasping for after the preceding dire decade; and
(c) the prior live-action Daredevil and Elektra movies probably suffered (or suffocated) from being too self-serious, and we’re all jonesing for a street-level segment of Marvel’s live-action universe to stick the landing.
Indeed, the tiny horns, the rooftop vaulting, the sensory resplendence, the fearlessness of Daredevil’s character seems to shout for mirth and carnival. Waid and Samnee, like Kesel and Nord, have swung the character high above the gravity of other significant runs of the comic, back to his soaring and swashbuckling DNA. On the other hand, many devotees identify with Frank Miller’s dark Murdock, or that of Ann Nocenti/John Romita Jr., or Brian Michael Bendis/Alex Maleev, or Ed Brubaker/Michael Lark, or at least forty years of other creators who have poignantly afflicted Murdock to masterful effect. Will the show’s weary and somber grit snuff out the Waid and Samnee wit?
Despite being a fan of playfulness and effervescence in comics, I submit that there’s something about DD, about his origin and his role, about what draws us to him, that inclines his creators and his handlers towards this darkness. Something in his story seems to destine a change within seven issues from a celebratory yellow costume to a sanguinary red, that makes Gene Colan’s 1960’s and 1970’s art inkier the longer he draws the character. Something in the character’s circumstances and condition seems to suggest that maybe Murdock made Miller as much as Miller made Murdock. Daredevil, I’m saying, wants to go dark.
It’s in the city. It’s in the challenge of his abilities. It’s in the darkness that the Man without Fear invites to himself.
Among the Marvel canon, I argue, Daredevil is a train of stories uniquely preoccupied with urban demography, (dis)ability, and darkness, three components intricately linked, three concerns of the Daredevil story that, though each team of creators deals with their tensions differently, all factor into the making of the character. The darkness of Daredevil, I contend, originates in our conflictual sense of his urban context, as well as the contradictions of his abilities and disability, and the meaning of darkness itself.
What I will be watching for as I eagerly down a half-day of Charlie Cox (as Daredevil), Vincent D’Onofrio (as Kingpin— crime lord), and Rosario Dawson (Claire Temple— doctor, I hope) is whether showrunner Steven S. DeKnight and crew explore and exploit these tensions. Who will the city be? How will Daredevil handle his impairment and power? And what are the theatric and thematic purposes of darkness in Matt Murdock’s tale?
These are the dialectics of Daredevil.
Urban Demography: A Dark Daredevil Destabilized by a Conflicted City
Continued below“The right to the city is… far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire.” (David Harvey, geographer.)
The promos indicate that the television Daredevil will retain the comic’s focus on Daredevil’s city setting, Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. I will be curious to see how the people of the city are shown, what role they play in the origin and nature of his heroism, and how they might push him towards the darkness so evident in those promos. Vivid TV renditions of urban surroundings often deal in consequential questions of who does and does not constitute the city, how they struggle and wrestle over defining the city, and how these struggles pull at the protagonists. These demographic tensions, embodied in the people who surround Daredevil and the cityscapes he navigates, have always played a vital role in the Daredevil mythos.
In a universe where cosmic entities eat planets for brunch, is anyone more rooted in a square-mile neighborhood than the horned hero in Hell’s Kitchen? Wikipedia’s Hell’s Kitchen entry even mentions Daredevil in its top-of-page Overview section, so closely associated are Murdock and Midtown West. DD is so completely braised in the primordial stew of the Kitchen that even when he’s elsewhere (i.e., his forays into California), the story arc’s title has to signal the displacement (maybe next arc: “Devil Does Duboce Triangle”? Shout out to Frisco readers!).
It’s not because he’s provincial; his city is the world. 1964, the year Stan Lee and Bill Everett minted our hero from the cauldron of Hell’s Kitchen, was the year of the Civil Rights Act, race riots in Harlem and Philly, and Malcolm X’s “Ballet or Bullet” speech; the Kitty Genovese killing on the streets of Queens that became synonymous with bystander blind-eye; and, less well known, the Urban Mass Transportation Act that helped fund transit systems throughout American cities. The point is, the Manhattan boroughs Stan and Bill and company shuttled through were as fraught as ever with all the foment and intransigence of city life in the latter 20th Century. Hell’s Kitchen teems with urban decay and decadent gentrification, with colorful migration and entrenched inequality, with noble convicts and ignoble stewards. Integral to Matt Murdock becoming Daredevil are the social and economic conditions in which Fogwell’s Gym hides card-playing fight fixers, prizefighting palookas past their prime scrape and scrap to single-parent their sons, and streets bustle so tightly that trucks transporting radioactive materials co-occupy concrete with blind pedestrians. Daredevil lives because Hell’s Kitchen makes him and needs him, even as it swallows him up.
“Urban” has divergent, sometimes contradictory, resonances, actively in play in Daredevil’s making. “Urban” is modern, cosmopolitan, United Nations Plaza, Columbia University, capital and ideology in transit. “Urban” is also poor, huddled masses, immigrants and ghettos, tenements and drug dens. The tension between these two literally neighboring realities was a fixture of the Silver Age Marvel substratum , the landscape against which Stan and Jack and Steve’s magical realist baroque could spin its web. New York has both towers to ascend and alleys to crawl.
This tension in urban life makes DD’s travails take on distinctively sociological meanings for readers. I’m not saying kids picking up newsstand ‘Daredevil’ are reading it for the Marxism of it all. I’m saying that an inalienable part of Daredevil’s appeal is his way of being urban. Ever the people’s champion, Daredevil is ride-or-die with Hell’s Kitchen’s residents, which means he has to take upon himself all those bipolar ambivalences that are native to the density and intensity of urban spaces. That’s why so many of his stories are about the battle for the people’s right to the city, an urban justice through methods fair or foul, whether combating or co-opting Kingpin’s crown or an invisible Hand, whether it’s Nocenti-political, Brubaker-conspiratorial, or Miller-emblematic.
While it’s clear that Daredevil belongs to the Kitchen, readers are always left asking, does the Kitchen belong to Daredevil? The best-told tales of the Man Without Fear are often when he winds up as the Man Without Friends. In Miller and Mazzuchelli’s ‘Born Again,’ a bereft Matt is stricken homeless and friendless. In Bendis and Maleev’s ‘Underboss,’ before he even wakes, he can sense the entire city descending on him, his identity outed. And it’s not just the city that wants to coronate him mayor one minute and cast him out the next. Foggy, defined by his fierce loyalty, winds up fickle. Ben Ulrich is sacred guardian of Matt’s secret, yet sometime betrayer. Even Battlin’ Jack has moral ambivalence retconned into his fatherhood. And Turk, maybe the most devastating caricature of the Kitchen’s tragicomic turpitude, occasionally plays against type and threatens to the level of actual criminal consequence. Don’t even get us started with the love interests. In representing the unquiet urban around him, Daredevil’s supporting cast personifies the irascible nature of the city’s social rhythms, its breakneck pace of moral undulations. With friends like these, who needs super-villains?
Continued belowAs it turns out, Daredevil doesn’t. The character’s early failure to find an opponent worth his mettle (come on, the Matador?) is perhaps a reflection of the fact that his mission isn’t usually to save the world from threats, but to win the soul of the city. Which is why his ideal opposite instantly clicked, once found: not a monstrous Kraken, not a conquering Hitler, but an Al Capone, who used to slip hundred dollar tips to busboys and tip the scales of mayoral elections, who said famously, “what is bootlegging? On a boat, it’s bootlegging. On Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality. I’m a businessman!” (I know, I know. Not really Al Capone, a line from The Untouchables.)
That perfect foil is Kingpin, of course. Wilson Fisk winds up being the chief nemesis because between the polarities of Kingpin and Matt Murdock suspends the character of New York more broadly, and Hell’s Kitchen more acutely. A pressing question of the last half-century has been who holds the power to shape the city? Who will the city trust, fear, and follow? Who will the city be? Is the Kitchen the choirboy martyr or the demonic puppet-master, the hapless urchin or the shrewd godfather (with martial arts expertise, of course)? In fact, Matt has been all of these, whatever the city has needed. Paradigmatically, Kingpin is the city’s crime and corruption, Daredevil its proletarian folk hero and legal defender. But decades of their dance has given them frequent cause to flip roles, or sometimes to accept rapprochement as necessary bedfellows. Nothing stays the same in the city, because as any city institution knows, the second you claim to own the city, the city fights back with fury.
As a result, to be the hero for the city, Daredevil has to become what the city needs. Matt Murdock’s most recent legal work in New York (in Waid-scribed Volume 3, 2011-2014) illustrates it well: unable to lawyer freely with the specter of his other identity as courtroom ammunition, Matt’s partnership with Foggy switches strategy to arming clients to defend themselves in trial. The contradictions are just too severe for Daredevil to retain a coherent selfhood. In the city, you can’t stay both vigilante justice and juridical law at the same time. You try in vain to be both Catholic conscience and devilish dissident. With all of the city’s contradictions, every city-dweller knows that adaptation is survival, and its heroes had better know how to bend and twist the arc of justice. Perhaps Daredevil often goes dark, not because the city is nothing but dark, but because its demands are ruthlessly destabilizing.
I wonder whether the Netflix show’s “supporting cast” of the city will bark back with the same unpredictable multivocality and surplus of human drives that makes Orange is the New Black so revolutionary, even if it must do so with a House of Cards-like narcissism. The casting suggests that the show will take their roles that seriously. And I hope it can eschew the cartoonishness that makes cinematic Gothams so epic but farcical. The real New York has enough life in it all on its own.
(Dis)ability: A Dark Daredevil Mired in Identity Tensions
“Power makes you proud, and power
Comes in many fine forms
Supple and rich as butterfly wings.”
(Laura Hershey, disability rights activist)
Daredevil’s central conceit–that a hero who cannot see also cannot be bound by common fears–has been explored to varying degrees, his abilities subject to the same frequent renovations that have recolored Hulks, re-lit Torches, recombined X-Men. The fact that the radioactive waste (another bonus of street-level superheroes: no pseudoscientific gobbledy-goop needed!) that blinds him also heightens his other senses to seismographic levels has afforded his writers the convenience of sometimes ignoring that Murdock has a significantly life-altering disability. The man can read ink off paper with his fingertips, for Pete’s sake! …Though I’ve always wondered how DD would read, say, the very comic books that contain his story. Or the Daredevil: Road Warrior webcomic.
That kind of speculation just demonstrates the great fun to be had in creatively toying with human limits and capabilities, the Daredevil writer’s prerogative. Isn’t that the fun of superheroes, the what-ifs, and how they would ramify in our world as constructed for “Normals”? But at the same time I indulge such imaginative flights, I wonder if Charles Xavier’s mental transcendence is similarly fun to my buddy with a wheelchair…or if it’s a taunt. Are Daredevil’s acrobatics, preternatural sensitivities, prophetic insight into human hearts… are those also delightful to folks who are blind? Do they identify with a heroic version of their (searching for a non-visually based metaphor… vantage point– er, perspective– er, outlook–) alternative experience? Or does it simply pile on to the insult of a world unaccommodatingly built, where a hero with a disability can’t just be a hero with a disability, sans compensatory array of superpowers?
Continued below
Whether we feel Daredevil is a tribute to or slight against people with disabilities, he certainly inspires the imagination towards what it would be like to perceive the world in a different way. Celebrated Daredevil raconteurs have hatched, jettisoned, and reinvented various graphic ways to depict his sensory powers: Spidey-sense-like sound waves into the head, echolocation through shading and tinting, flavor and smell montages. One way or another, for fifty years, sighted writers of graphic stories have groped searchingly at ways to represent a man not just beset by hindrances, but gloriously blessed with fundamentally differently abled ways of knowing and mastering the built world around him. Just as an astute lawyer might look around and see legal matters everywhere, or a sincerely spiritual person divines moral contradictions with heightened acumen, Daredevil’s sheer-cool-ninjaness is predicated on acuity, processing a vast perceptual landscape, overleaping the distractions and deceptions that might limit those relying on sight. Ironically, capturing the extra-visual powers of a blind hero in the exceedingly visual medium of comics has often been the generative conundrum that makes it interesting to read. In other words, comics has to use the gifts of its medium, as well as surmount its limits, to convey through sight what Daredevil does without sight. This inspires some of the most creative Daredevil comics.
And perhaps we love Daredevil because he uses the gifts of his difference, as well as surmounting its limits, to accomplish the heroic in a world where he is socially constructed as disabled. He is not only powerful in spite of his difference. He’s powerful because of his difference. As a result, what makes Daredevil great is the pride he brandishes in his humble estate, the flouting of expectations and refusal to be merely disabled. He laughs in the face of limitations. He mocks roads and ceilings. He improvises unintended uses for canes and fire escapes. He defies night vision. From issue 1, there is a zeal in his defiance of boundaries of poverty, or bullying, of blindness, of the law, of depression, an irrepressible smirk that is itself a triumph, adding thrills to every flip and punch.
But the question remains: With such aplomb in the face of disability, why does Daredevil often wind up so dark?
My theory? Writers who get in the head of Matt Murdock encounter a mess of contradictions between Daredevil’s audacity from the world he can perceive and conquer, and Matt’s austerity in the identity he has to perform as an attorney and a blind man. Anyone who tries to live for extended time juggling two worlds–one they inhabit with profound clarity and the other cut to social acceptability–knows the tension involved. On one hand, the dual frames of reference make a person stronger, adaptive, sometimes extraordinarily resourceful and resilient. From Karen Page to Kirsten MacDuffie, even those closest to Matt indulge in throwing things at his face to coerce a kinesthetic confession of his daredevilishness, only to discover he’s already sewn his disguise of limitations onto his instincts.
On the other hand, the contradictions and conflicts can overwhelm, like a hundred decibels into a sharpened ear, driving a person towards the edges of dissociation and depression. Playing chicken with those edges is a superhero mainstay, and creators have trouble resisting that temptation with the brash, breathlessly obstreperous Daredevil. How long can you write a character so idealistic, so self-possessed, so able, before the dictates of drama require you to decimate him?
Decimate him they have, and signs suggest that Netflix’s Daredevil will play up these antiphonal notes, the disability and the powers, the strut and the depression. In early runs of Stan Lee-written or -edited Daredevil, the ongoing soap opera of inner turmoil with Karen Page and others involved the typical superhero secret identity dilemma, with the added topping of a reckless costumed act and a mild-mannered person-with-disabilities act. Successive writers, though, would drive the wedge deeper with the leverage of this contradiction, this man operating one half meticulously under the constraints of social shackles, the other half obsessively beyond all human restraints. Before an obsessed Bruce Wayne rode atop a horse, cursing his aged frame, in The Dark Knight Returns, paving the way for a generation of dark heroes, Frank Miller learned to cultivate the high drama of such seething obsessiveness in Matt Murdock. With great power comes great caliginosity. But before turning our attention to the darkness, one more thought about the (dis)ability:
Continued belowPeople who are blind have among the largest unemployment/underemployment statistics of sub-groups of Americans, 70% by some counts. Research suggests this has less to do with their abilities and much more to do with perceptions of their abilities from non-visually-impaired teachers, employers, or peers. Symptomatic of the narrowness of us temporarily able-bodied folks, we are more apt to think up limitations than possibilities when we don’t have the opportunity to get to know blind people. Television has had plenty of blind characters, but rarely a protagonist with the potential to extend our empathic and intellectual reaches about what blind people encounter and accomplish. I’m not saying we have to saddle that obligation on Marvel’s show, but I will be curious watching it whether that opportunity is taken up or wasted.
Darkness: A Hero Who Transforms the Meaning of Dark
“O guiding dark of night!
O dark of night more darling than the dawn!
O night that can unite
A lover and loved one,
Lover and loved one moved in unison.”
(St. John of the Cross, Spanish Catholic mystic, trans. A.Z. Foreman)
Readers might protest, “Okay, okay, maybe Daredevil’s dark because the city this and his abilities that yadda yadda yadda. But how about this, Captain Overthinking It? Maybe Daredevil is dark because dark is cool!”
Yes, dark can be cool. Yes, dark makes the stakes bigger, which, without dimensional incursions and totem-eating frost giants, a street-level superhero needs in order to grab headlines. Yes, dark keeps out the kitsch and the camp that, heaven forfend, might make these comics seem like kids stuff.
I would have been completely on board with the defenders of Daredevil’s darkness… until Waid, two Riveras, and Rodriguez snuck 2011’s “Daredevil” into a Manhattan abbey, stealing a wedding kiss from a mob daughter, tangling up The Spot in his own tricks, and ushering in an new era of Matt Murdock unafraid to smile. The Mark Waid run, now nearing its end, stamped indelibly by Chris Samnee’s emergence from issue 12 and through the latest reboot, appears to have the markings of a watershed. To some extent, it primed the market for Fraction and Aja’s “Hawkeye,” and perhaps presaged a wave of Marvel successes with “Ms. Marvel,” “Squirrel Girl,” and even “Silver Surfer” at its crest. Waid and Samnee’s resuscitation has been so good, in my estimation, that any new renditions have to be asked, “why didn’t you do it this way?” The energy, the exuberance, the Tothfulness, the joy. And lo, some severe darkness too (spoiler warning for Waid’s run in effect for this sentence): Battlin’ Jack’s desecrated bones, Foggy’s cancer, human trafficking! Yet all that darkness, set against the backdrop of Waid’s no-apologies superhero gallantry and whimsy, doesn’t lose its agony or ache.
But perhaps that only reaffirms the notion that Daredevil’s darkness is integral to his narrative. Even a DD who is not exhaustingly plaintive, not inscribed into a sooty concrete jungle, is hard to imagine without some degree of darkness. We can imagine a story of a bombastic Thor, a stout Captain Marvel, a roguish Wolverine, a wolfish Rogue, without necessarily descending into the shadows of personal tragedy, desperate poverty, social misery, corrupt betrayal. It seems harder to picture a Daredevil story unsalted by pain.
Because the theme seems part of the fabric of the character: the darkness is not only the waiting until dawn, not only the foreshadow to the denouement, but the very place where Daredevil finds himself. Example: Miller’s classic “Daredevil” #177, ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread,’ features the conclusion of Stick’s first appearance. Matt has lost his radar sense and sought out his half-David Carradine, half-Burgess Meredith mentor to help him recover it. After three sleepless nights, he is on a rooftop shooting arrows at a target… and dueling with memories: Battlin’ Jack, Hell’s Kitchen bullies, radioactive trucks, and his own personal devil in a boxing ring. To regain his powers, he has to confront his inner demons, overcome fear and anger, and “see” again in the dark of night.
This reversal, the darkness that is the only place you can learn to see, is not unlike the others, the city that makes you lose yourself to find yourself, or the weakness that actually makes you strong. For better or worse, Daredevil has absorbed deeply the lesson of sublimation through self-abnegation, learned from the Catholic nuns. Or is it, learned from the boxing champ? Or is it, learned from the martial arts guru? Or is it, learned from Columbia Law? (Maybe not.) Because he lives in a dark city, because he still sees in what is everyone else’s darkness, no hero works within darkness, no hero transforms darkness and its meaning, quite like Daredevil does.
It is these tensions, Daredevil’s dialectics, that are why he resonates so broadly with our human experience, why he reaches so tangibly into our aspirational cores, why we will walk with him so boldly into darkness. Garbed in red, the most provocative of colors, the character promises to be unsettling, to inflame passions, to incite violence, to disappear us into the darkness.
So I don’t mind that Netflix’s Daredevil is dark. On the contrary, I couldn’t imagine DD without that darkness. I also expect it to be sprinkled with humor and humanity. But what I will be watching for most will be how it manages to be redemptive. For the city’s people. For the full humanity of those called different. For the heroism that finds salvation in the wretched corners, in the rain, in the dark.
