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Beyond the Law: What is so “Super” About Superheroes and Supervillains?

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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Both the superhero and the supervillain operate outside the law. The former replaces law with a form of substantive justice while the latter seeks to invert or overturn the law in favour of a new grundnorm (or anti grundnorm) that best serves their vision for how society should operate. In this paper I consider what this prefix “super” really means in relation to these two classes, drawing on Nietzsche’s original definition of the ubermensch (superman) and its relationship to legal concepts such as the state of exception, sovereign power and substantive justice. These relationships will be mapped across a number of examples from the Marvel Studios films—paying particular attention to the antagonists in these movies, both the state and the supervillains, arguing that it is these antagonists who are most illustrative of these concepts in play.

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Notes

  1. While outside the remit of this paper it is worth noting that both of the concluding films in Phase 2, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and Ant-Man (2015), continue this trend. The former parallels Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014) in exploring the limitations and dangers of proactive law—in this instance the Ultron global defence program that, upon achieving sentience, determines humanity itself is the problem and seeks to eliminate the species. In the latter, fears around weaponised technology (in this case a miniaturization process), lead inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) to hire ex-con thief Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to steal back his technology. Similarly Phase 3 opens with Captain America: Civil War (2016) a film whose narrative is driven by the state again trying to constrain superheroic independence through the implementation of the ‘Sokovia Accords’, ultimating pitting superhero against superhero. The tensions between what is legal and what is just therefore continue to inform the development of the MCU.

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  1. University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Jason Bainbridge

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  1. Jason Bainbridge
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Bainbridge, J. Beyond the Law: What is so “Super” About Superheroes and Supervillains?. Int J Semiot Law 30, 367–388 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9514-0

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