Nature of the Battle

Good Versus Evil. It’s an archetype known so well that it barely evokes anything from that vacuous pit you call a soul despite being a fundamental concept in storytelling, moral development, and basically everything else in life. But it’s precisely because it’s so ingrained that it often fails to inspire.

That’s one of the more interesting parts of the history of comic books. As an art form, they’ve been around for centuries, but even the modern take of serialized, interconnected tales has existed since the 1930s. This offers an intriguing problem worthy of solving: how do you keep the base narrative conflicts fresh after being rehashed over and over again through publishers, characters, and reboots?

The answer, it turns out, is rather simple, though the execution can be quite complex (the recipe for most things worth pursuing). Comics have taken to regularly flaunting and questioning what it means to be good and bad—what it means to be a hero and what it means to succeed—by exploring internal and external struggles simultaneously.

Spoiler alert: this will contain discussions regarding Marvel’s Daredevil and slight tie-ins with some Marvel and DC comic properties and their past stories, so be wary if you haven’t seen the show or read the respective timelines.

If you pay attention to Netflix’s Marvel’s Daredevil, it’s easy to see where showrunner Drew Goddard went for this tack. From the outset, either from prior knowledge or just the way the show presents the two characters, you perceive Matt Murdock as the protagonist and Wilson Fisk as the antagonist.

And why not? One is both a nighttime crime fighter and a defender of smalltime justice and the other is a wealthy, powerful, and pretty unsettling fella that outsources murder. However, they both have the same goal. They both just want to save Hell’s Kitchen, a city ravaged by the fallout from The Avengers‘ climactic alien invasion battle.

It turns out just want to rid their hometown of rampant, deadly crime, but they both go about it in very different ways. It’s all a matter of perspective. To Daredevil, the villain of his quest is the man behind the scheme to kick out tenants, enable a Russian drug ring, and back a human trafficking ring. All of that is straight from the stock list of Bad Guy Hobbies along with The Good Guy’s Guide to Stopping It.

But from Kingpin’s perspective, by reigning in the unregulated nature of the crime he’s inserting his organization into, he’s taking the first step to preventing his city from descending into complete despair. And he’s not wrong. Structure would go along way to stopping innocent people from dying.

If you consider it instead by swapping the tactics of the two men, where Daredevil would use physical intimidation and Kingpin would manipulate a system for regulated coercion—oh wait, those are already both true. You see Daredevil torture a man in his second outing and Fisk run for office, mirroring Murdock’s attorney career and Kingpin’s penchant for excessive pugilism.

Perhaps Murdock’s only saving grace is that he doesn’t willfully kill, but that doesn’t make him any better than Fisk. When he describes his first attempt at vigilante justice, he tells Foggy how he beat a man so bad that that man had to eat from a straw. And Murdock’s response? “I never slept better.” He thrives off of the violence.

But with each time Fisk loses it and beats a henchman down to the ground or something, it is always accompanied by regret and a deep, disturbing sorrow for doing what he considers is necessary. You can tell that Fisk is anchored to a single principle in his choice of cufflinks, a pair worn by his father so he can remember to “not [be] cruel for the sake of cruelty.”

Murdock, however, holds no reservation. It’s debatable if he even holds a glimmer of emotion. He’s stoic and unmoved at Ben’s funeral. He sheds no tears at Elena’s corpse. Only when faced with the realization via Foggy’s discovery of his secret that he’s a cold, mechanized tool in the city’s hands does he finally break.

If so inclined, this freshman saga could easily be aimed at a setup where Murdock is the antagonist and Fisk is the hero. It’s a lesson of objectivity; it doesn’t exist when it comes to heroes. To accomplish any great task against a great foe, you have to be willing to challenge your own preconceptions.

This exercise in trading traditional values comes out fairly well in the new Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer. It, in and of itself, is not a particularly good trailer, but it does force one very particular question from the less comic-inclined. “Why would Batman fight Superman?”

The trailer frames Superman as the villain, even going so far as to include a sound bite regarding “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s more common, however, for Batman to be the villain. Not only that, it’s more interesting that way.

Batman is aggressively doubtful of Superman’s intentions while fearful of what the alien’s existence means for his role in keeping the peace in the world. He seeks out a conflict with Superman to settle up on these—and a few other—questions.

Superman, however, has only ever tried to live by the ethos commanded by his ostensibly altruistic father before sending him to Earth. He wants to save the world because he believes they are a people worth saving, whereas Batman believes they need to be saved from themselves because they are insufferable and ultimately irredeemable.

But the easy way and a possible alternative interpretation is that Batman represents our viewpoint into an unknown and seemingly impossible power, one that actually (and recently) resulted in the near total destruction of several small towns and one big city. This naturally sidles our prejudices up against a villainous Batman.

This is because putting Batman as the antagonist forces our hand into lumping ourselves (by way of Batman representing our Greek choral opinions) into the bad guy camp. Now, instead of outright cheering for justice, it feels far more confused and uneasy and encourages us to empathize with Superman’s seemingly unwanted struggle for peace.

As it turns out, it’s never just Good Versus Evil. It’s more just one person versus another person, either by way of physical struggle, conflict ideologies, or anything else that throws two perspectives into stark relief. It’s the contrast and accompanying viewpoint that makes both good and evil, not any one objective pool.

Marvel’s Daredevil Season 1 Review: Hellishly Good

How can anything good happen in a place called Hell’s Kitchen? It’s a real location, named after the brutality that seems to overflow from its residents and onto its dirty streets. It’s also where Marvel’s Daredevil takes place, Netflix’s latest original series and the next entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and it’s one hell of a trip.

This first season covers he origins of lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) as well as the origins of his alter superhero ego Daredevil. It actually follows the serial format for comic television: we track the present day hero as he develops his chops for taking down bad guys while visiting the past through flashbacks for the foundational backstory.

In Murdock’s case, he saved a man from being hit by a truck back when he was a child, but some of the dangerous substances on the truck burned away his ability to see with his eyes. But through some ways the show explains, he further develops the ability to see a different way—to see a “world on fire”—and uses his remaining heightened senses to fight crime.

The first thing that’s interesting is that this world is canonical to the MCU, taking place roughly 18 months after the events of 2012’s The Avengers. Most of New York is still recovering from “the event,” a softer colloquialism for a mass alien invasion from a floating portal in the sky. In fact, this is how we believably eschew the modern upscale aesthetics of Hell’s Kitchen to the crime-ridden one of the show. The Avengers left a hole in New York, and the filth of drugs and human trafficking have flowed forth to fill it.

It’s fascinating, though, that outside of a few oblique references and Easter Eggs to the films and some potential future developments, Murdock’s escapades are almost wholly self-contained, and for good reason. For all the grandiose explosions and world-ending consequences of the theatrical entries into the canon, Daredevil is infinitely more personal. This is the hearty, intimate endeavor of one man to save his city.

Truthfully, it’s two men trying to save their city. Opposite Cox’s Daredevil is Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, better known as The Kingpin, and he is going about a different tack for redeeming his hometown. Working hand in hand with Russian mobsters, Yukuza, and Chinese gangsters, he is trying to do good through the warped filter of his past.

This is one of the highlights of the show. D’Onofrio is an extremely potent Kingpin. Fisk, as a child, was terribly troubled by his father and further his relationship with his mother, and whenever his actions come to a head as an adult, you can see his history in his eyes. You can see his regret and his conflict constantly percolating just behind those big doughy peepers.

That is until he loses it. And boy does he lose it, and it feels dangerous. Some of his vocal gurglings are questionable, but his explosions of emotion—be it rage or sadness or whatever—are the perfect foil to Cox as Murdock. While Murdock struggles inwardly with his desires to fix the city and his desires to remain a good man, Fisk exposes his inner turmoil rather outwardly.

This makes Cox’s performance as important to the tone and direction of the show as D’Onofrio’s, which you would expect since it’s a series named after his character. And he handles the responsibility with aplomb. Besides capably executing on the physicality of the role (fighting and blindness included), Cox holds a necessary tenderness behind his steely demeanor as both an attorney and a crime fighter.

Most of the supporting cast does just as well including Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page and Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple and Vondie Curtis-Hall as Ben Urich, each one with considerable depth and pesonality. And whether you count James Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore), Fisk’s righthand man, as a supporting role or the primary villain for nearly the first third of the season, he is a commensurate intimidator with Fisk. It’s a solid one-two of villainy, especially when you throw in Vanessa Marianna (Ayelet Zurer) emergent psychosis.

Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is fairly problematic, though. The childhood friend and lawfully employed partner to Murdock, he is right there alongside Daredevil and Kingpin all the way through the season, blissfully unaware of his friend’s nighttime activities. But Henson’s acting is more like constant overacting and the character itself tends to flipflop between being moral and being money-hungry without any consideration. Most of the time he’s annoying and confusing. Other times he’s just taking up space.

There is, however, an admirable and impressive amount of grit to the show. It’s a stark contrast to the rest of Marvel’s offerings, where things only ever get as dark as classic apocalyptic scenarios, but this is about taking the dirt off the streets and rubbing it in your face.

This is exemplified through the excellent production and meaningful directing of the season. There’s a lot to the visual impact of each episode. It’s not just about showing you one talking head after another (though it does indulge in that inevitable trap often) but it’s about filling your head with the idea and suggestions of what is important and what isn’t but showing you some things and simply implying others.

There’s one particular scene early on that features a five-minute, one-take fight scene where Daredevil is trying to rescue a kidnapped child. It is a tiring battle for both him and the audience. This isn’t where Captain American punches a bad guy and proceeds; this is a true slugfest. You can see the methodical nature of Murdock’s combat, assessing and reassessing the tight confines of the hallway while utilizing his abilities to monitor the things beyond sight.

But towards the end, he is worn and exhausted. It’s not even fighting after that long. It’s just desire, and his desire is outmatching the several men he’s dismantling. This culminates in a shot that excludes us from the payoff of the crucible, forcing us to realize this is indeed Murdock’s journey and not ours.

Speaking of the fighting, though, there is a lot of it, and it’s pretty fantastic. Very rarely do you see Daredevil get through encounters as if they were mere scuffles. These are full-on battles, each and every time. Sure, he manages to accomplish some superhuman things, but you feel like he earns each and every victory. And that’s not to mention the moves he does are pretty cool.

The story, unfortunately, isn’t nearly as consistent. The personal threads hold tight and intimate throughout, but the intrigue of the procedural elements involving a menagerie of crime organizations, lessons on the dangers of truth-seeking/journalism, and incontrovertible good Samaritanism waver in and out and all over impotent romances. It’s too many dishes stacked up and almost all tip over and break across the singular goal of taking down Fisk.

Despite that, this is still a good show. Whether you’ve watched the other bits and pieces of the MCU or you’ve read every Marvel comic under the sun, Marel’s Daredevil is a compact, forceful, and dramatic season of television. It is well worth your time.

+ Intimate and personal foils between Fisk and Murdock
+ Plenty of great performances that fit this darker facet of the MCU
+ Directing that has meaning
+ Fighting that feels real and has consequences
– Wavering and confused threads in the last third of the season

Final Score: 9 out of 10