They represent instead the underside of public law, the dimension of private support that it requires in order to function effectively as a public institution.Įven the most ethical superheroes occupy a position outside of the order of law simply by virtue of their heightened powers. While they struggle against criminals who break the law, superheroes cannot openly identify themselves with law's public nature. Superheroes, however, are a different type of figure. Being a figure of the law includes implicitly the public avowal of one’s status. Even undercover police officers cease hiding their identity after each assignment, and those who can’t effectively become criminals. Ordinary police officers can avow their identity publicly, and this is what separates them from criminals, who would be in jail if they publicly avowed their criminality. The mask that superheroes wear indicates their complex relation to the law. By skirting or even violating particular laws in order to sustain the order of law, the superhero provides the extra-legal supplement that the law requires in order to deliver justice. Endowed with this ability or skill, the superhero acquires an exceptional relation to the law. According to the scripts' logic, superheroes earn their exceptional status by dint of some extra-human ability or some special skill that others lack. This figure, the superhero, goes where the law can’t go and accomplishes what it can’t accomplish. Under even the most benign historical circumstances, injustice is more powerful than justice, and as a result, justice requires an exceptional figure who operates outside or on the periphery of the law. From the time of Superman’s emergence in the first superhero comic book in 1938, the law's inadequacy has been the genre’s central concern, and this theme has remained constant through the proliferation of superhero films in the 1990s and 2000s. The superhero film and its comic book source contend that the law alone is not a sufficient condition for justice. "The Dark Knight's necessary darkness" text version JUMP CUTĢ009, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
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