Deep into the sodden, beige-steel milieu of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s marquee superhero debut, Black Adam and Hawkman lock eyes in a bombed-out apartment building. The pair are debating the ethics of world-saving—if it is ever okay to take a life while hunting down the primordial evils that haunt the DC universe. Black Adam is about as ancillary as a comic character can be, and Hawkman is somehow even more obscure—so how does director Jaume Collet-Serra attempt to bridge the gap and get us to invest in these minor demigods? Simple; by dusting off ol’ reliable: pure, uncut, capital-“E” edge.
“You call yourself a hero, and yet you’d let these criminals go free,” growls Black Adam (Johnson), parroting a sort of vindictive, Patriot Act philosophy previously reserved for the most cop-indulgent seasons of 24.
“Heroes don’t kill people,” retorts Hawkman, steadily losing ground to Black Adam’s glare.
Black Adam comes face-to-face with his adversary. The music swells, then drops out of the scene completely. “Well, I do.”
The movie-going audience that has soaked in Black Adam since it opened Oct. 21 are likely unfamiliar with the character’s presence within the DC mythos. This has been a consistent problem throughout the superhero boom, as studios quickly ran dry of their headlining agents (Superman, Iron Man, and so on) and have been forced to retreat deep into the back-issues in order to summon up fresh meat at the box office.
Marvel has navigated those problems beautifully; the Guardians of the Galaxy were an anonymous cadre of malcontents before James Gunn blessed them with a vibrant, effervescent charm. Most recently, Marvel has transformed She-Hulk into a household name without missing a beat. I never thought I’d see the day where a Shang-Chi film was tearing up theaters; now there’s a second one in the works.
These films, like most Marvel fare, find success for their obscure heroes through formulaic accessibility. But Black Adam has none of those newcomer-friendly traits—it is devoid of humor, likable heroes, or emotional soft spots. Instead, the character’s whole debut orients around one flimsy theme: Black Adam might kill someone on-camera, which is something that is both against the rules and badass. That’s what we’re meant to believe, anyway. But dangling this carrot is a fundamental misreading of how people have learned to love superheroes over the last two decades, a wrongheaded belief that grit, viscera, and a middle-school toughness are the only ways to juice a flagging brand.
I can’t identify the specific moment in time when edge officially lost its fanbase appeal. It was an overpowering motif in the late-1990s—an age of the band of KoRn and comics artist Todd McFarlane—where the only way to encourage kids to purchase superhero comic books was the promise that the characters within would subvert all of the established idioms of the genre. McFarlane’s Spawn, probably the most iconic character of the period, was a demon from Christian Hell, who loomed on a throne composed of skulls and machine guns. (You get the idea.) Spawn was maybe the hottest commodity in comic stores throughout the decade, selling a ton of issues and starring in his own well-regarded HBO show. For one shining moment, edginess was a proven quantity.
But that relentless, confrontational attitude began to lose steam by the turn of the millennium. As a consumer culture, we started to realize that there was a certain poser-ish quality inherent to the aesthetics of edginess. You saw it in 2007, with the disastrous Spider-Man 3, which attempted to modernize the franchise with a dark, Linkin Park-conjuring veneer. (It didn’t work!) Or what about something even more inexplicably dark, like the 2006 video game Bomberman Act Zero? It attempted to bring everyone’s favorite bulbous, pink-hued Capcom hero into a rain-slicked, blood-and-guts dystopia. (It boasts a stunningly bad 34-percent “positive” average from Metacritic.)
Better yet, consider the ironic reign of Sony’s Spider-Man-adjacent Morbius from earlier this year, which showed up with the same playbook as Black Adam. (Case in point: Jared Leto, who plays the titular anti-hero, locks himself in a hyperbaric chamber filled with swarming, carnivorous bats, in order to attune himself to his newfound vampiric powers.) It generated terrible reviews and a minuscule $163 million at the box office, alongside much online mockery and chatter. If for nothing else, Morbius should be forever remembered as the moment edginess jumped the shark, once and for all.
Marvel recognized this mounting backlash early, and built a pantheon of superheroes united by a diametrically opposing approach. The heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were quickly defined not by their moral gray areas, but by their Reddit-y quips and #relatable personal problems. I am not here to say that formula isn’t wearing thin—have you seen Thor: Love and Thunder? Jesus—but it’s at least more relevant to the culture than where Black Adam currently resides. At this point, there is no better evidence of a production studio that has run out of ideas than centering a film on a man in a cape promising post-9/11 vengeance on his enemies, like a depressing, mealy-mouthed facsimile of the zeitgeist briefly captured by The Dark Knight.
Dwayne Johnson is one of the most charismatic assets available in Hollywood. If you’re choosing to throw him on camera as a terse, grunting cypher for the sort of Blue Lives Matter memes you see on Facebook, then you’ve absolutely bungled the script. Black Adam is upending norms that possess no currency; there isn’t a soul on Earth still capable of being scandalized by a superhero willing to throw a bad guy off a roof. The market share of superhero movies has increased exponentially since the 1990s; Toonami-addled, JNCO-wearing preteens have not been the primary demographic for quite some time.
Still, I’m able to believe that there will be an edge renaissance in the future. There’s still time for the corporate powers-that-be to look back on the aesthetic’s brief reign of dominance, alter the perspective, and pluck the things that work and plume the things that didn’t. After all, Joker came mighty close to nailing the part in 2019, without coming across as either played-out or pastiche. I’d argue that it remains the greatest tribute to edginess ever laid to tape, because director Todd Phillips explicitly shifted the parameters. Joker isn’t about a single psychopath on camera threatening to do the things that Batman wouldn’t—we never needed to be convinced that the world’s most infamous killer clown was capable of murder. No, instead we watched a meta-story focused on those within the flock; how young men might become the sort of edgy malcontents that Joker was marketed toward, because we’re already living in a world where those young men exist.
If we are to get a Black Adam sequel, I hope DC keeps that praxis in mind. It is excruciatingly boring to watch a grim, joyless crusader threaten mortal harm on those around him. What might be less boring is an exploration into how his fans fell in love with him anyways.
