Netflix Daredevil Analysis—The Dual Self

By Xoic · Jun 17, 2024 · ·
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    The Dual Self
    At the simplest level a superhero is two different people because they have a secret self (the superhero). They live as an ordinary human being, and also as a crusader for justice who has special abilities.

    In the eighties, like many aspects of superhero comics, this idea got upgraded. I don’t know where it first happened, but I noticed it in the Tim Burton Batman movies—the idea of Bruce Wayne and Batman being two different people had become more complex and psychological. It applied also to The Joker and Catwoman, but in somewhat different ways. Catwoman was like Batman, in that she became a different person when she put on the costume. The Joker was transformed when he fell into a big vat of green goo, and he was then permanently the Joker, a psychopathic maniac with a distorted face. I recall in one scene he put on face makeup to make it look flesh colored again so he could pretend to still be the man he had been before the accident. So being his former self, the normal human dude, was a performance, a fake.

    And technically that’s also what it was when Batman became Bruce Wayne and when Catwoman put on her secretary outfit and became Selena Kyle again. They had all been fundamentally transformed into monsters (hey, it was a Tim Burton movie! Batman was just a good-guy monster). But there was a big deal made in the movies about their duality—each one was actually two different characters. In fact there was a lot of interplay (and foreplay) going on between Bruce Wayne and Selena Kyle where they both needed to change into their super-costumes and go fight (or perpetuate) some crime. And then, all costumed up, they'd also meet on rooftops and engage in some super-foreplay, not recognizing each other. Fun stuff.

    This reflects the idea of a superhero as a fantasy where an ordinary person stuck in the drab world of social reality can have special abilities beyond the human. Some of them can fly, or have great strength and toughness, plus all manner of other weird abilities. But this idea has become so much more nuanced now in Daredevil and to a lesser extent in the other Netflix Marvel shows, that it forced me to think deeply into this strange paradigm. What I’m discovering in Netflix Daredevil is something different than I’ve seen previously. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done, just that I haven’t seen it. So now allow me to present my thoughts on the various ways in which superheroes and supervillains (or supermonsters in some cases) show this duality—

    Like everything in superhero comics, it was done very simplistically in the beginning—back in the early thirties when Superman first put on the red cape and threw a car at some crook. I used to watch a channel called Comic Book Historians, and they go into a lot of detail about the history of the characters and the stories. I used to wonder, if the Superhero comics were being made concurrent with the Golden Age of magazine illustration, why did they have such relatively poor art and low-grade storytelling? It turns out it’s because the comics (especially the superhero comics) were considered a sort of ghettoized art form. The good artists and writers were working for the magazines, so it was complete amateurs doing the comic book stuff. Meanwhile there were some excellent artists doing certain newpapar strips, like Hal Foster on Prince Valiant. But superhero comics were a subgenre unto themselves, and there would be no college-trained artists or writers in the field until somewhere in the Sixties, probably starting with Neal Adams. Until that point it was just a bunch of fans who had learned to draw or write on their own and hadn’t taken it to professional stadards. Even the great Jack Kirby started out as a total amateur in the thirties or forties and gradually got better, but he never had any formal training. If he did his work would have looked very different.

    I’m not sure where or when professionalism arrived in comic book writing, but I noticed some seismic changes in the early Eighties, beginning with The Uncanny X Men, with Chris Clarement writing and John Byrne and Terry Austin drawing. The characters and storylines took a quantum leap forward. It started to happen on other titles too shortly after. One of the guys who stepped in and changed things was Frank Miller, who both pencilled and scripted much of his work, and who did a highly esteemed run on Daredevil in which he fundamentally reinvigorated what was at the time a failing series and revamped the characters. The Netflix show is based largely on his innovations (almost entirely, but with a lot of small changes thrown in). I have the entire run in the form of a slipcased set of trade paperbacks, but I haven’t read the whole thing. Hey, my interest in comics was mostly for the art. For the purposes of doing this writeup I have now read the first trade paperback in the set, called The Man Without Fear, and I’ve found some very interesting things.

    I can’t seem to stop myself from going into the whole history rather than just talking about the dualistic characters. Maybe I need to extract some of this and make an intro? We’ll see. For now I’m just going to keep on. It’s often when I’m rambling like this that I stumble onto the best ideas.

    It’s hard to pin down exactly who introduced what innovations, and from here on out I’ll stop trying. I will say right here though that the two biggest and best innovations Miller brought to the table were Film Noir and what I call The Spartan Code. As part of my preparation for this writeup I read an interview with Miller and his inker Klaus Jansen, and an article called Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, both of which are included in the Companion book in the Daredevil set.

    Frank said one of the things that makes him different from most comic book creators is that many of them have little to no interest in anything outside of comics, but he lost interest in superhero comics for a long time. His big interests during that time included film noir, hardboiled detective fiction, crime fiction, police procedurals, and the Spartans. As for comics, he did keep reading some, but no superhero stuff. Instead it was some of the EC stuff (I forget what exactly, but it was along the lines of crime war and horror), and The Spirit by Will Eisner. All of these influences played heavily into what he would do in his comic book work.

Comments

  1. Xoic
    [​IMG]
    The Spirit by Will Eisner
    I want to take a slight detour here because this is an incredibly important influence on Frank Miller and on his Daredevil. The Spirit began as a newspaper comic strip, I think in the 40's, written and drawn by a hugely talented man named Will Eisner, who has had an immense influence on comic book art. It's very Film Noir or hardboiled, set in New York city, with the protagonist being a private eye who wears a mask. Frank Miller has a deep reverence and devotion to the title, the character, and the creator Will Eisner. I remember reading an interview with the two of them somewhere where he gushed with praise for him, and Eisner was also very repesctful of Miller's work, but at one point the subject was broached that Miller had asked several times to be the person to continue the series after Eisner's death, and Eisner said no, he simply isn't the right person for that. Because he would have Spartanized the Spirit and made him way too tough and hardass, like he does every main character.​

    My personal belief is that when he saw the extremely creative way Eisner was handling the Spirit, he based his own often very cartoonish drawing style and imaginative writing process on it, only he added in his reverence of the Spartans as well, and that's where he came up with his particular brand of over-the-top pulp-style noir badassery, which is probably best displayed in Sin City. Miller worked directly with Robert Rodriguez in making his Sin City comic book into a movie, and that, as far as I'm concerned, is the best thing Miller has been associated with. The Netflix Daredevil series coming in a close second. But after the success of the Sin City movie, Miller tried his hand at directing, used the very innovative visual effects pioneered in the Sin City movie by Rodriguez' team, and made a Spirit movie that proves Eisner was right—he ruined the character of The Spirit. The guy is supposed to be light-hearted and whimsical, even though he gets dragged through hell at times, but Miller took him way over the top and made things way too gruelling and intense.
  2. Xoic
    Duality, Part Two
    There have always been different types of character duality in the superhero comics. At the most obvious level there are the characters that physically transform like The Hulk—a quiet mild-mannered scientist who becomes a huge green rage monster when he gets angry (you wouldn't like him then). Stan Lee said when he came up with the idea it was based on both The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Frankenstein. There are many more like this that physically transform, such as Colossus of the X Men, Ant Man/Giant Man, and many more. The ones I’ve mentioned change back and forth to their human forms, some at will, some only when the moon is full. Oh no, that’s something else. I mean out of their control. Then there are the ones who remain physically the same but just put on a costume and their other personality, like Batman, Catwoman, etc. Daredevil is of this type. So is Wilson Fisk/The Kingpin, though he doesn’t change into a costume. You‘ve also got Tony Stark/Iron Man, though his personality is always the same, plus his powers come entirely from the costume, which he built himself using his genius. So it’s a reflection of his inner self really.

    The Punisher is of a different type. It took me a while to figure him out, and I didn’t manage to do so until I started thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yeah, she’s a superhero. Interestingly the name of the show (her name) includes the duality. She’s a Buffy, who just wants to be a normal high-school girl, go on dates, find a boyfriend, and hang out with her friends, but she’s also a Vampire Slayer. And if you recall from my writeup on that show, becoming the Vampire Slayer was a metaphor for growing up. She couldn’t switch back and forth between these two personalities, it was more of a long process of growing from one into the other, and it was permanent. The Punsiher is in this category, but in his case there was no growing—instead it happened suddenly when his family was killed. He had been a loving family man and a war hero, but in that formative event he became nothing but a vengeance monster. He still looks completely human, but all his kind loving qualities are lost now, replaced only with rage and the relentless desire for vengeance. Almost a Hulk transformation, but with no physical change, and it’s permanent.

    I’m sure there are many more, but that’s enough. Now I want to talk more specifically about a couple of the Daredevil characters from the Netflix show. Oh, I forgot Spiderman! Hold on, that’s a big one, I need to do it real quick. He illustrates an important aspect of the change. Once bitten by the radioactive spider, he always has the abilities now—he’s like a super-acrobat who can climb walls and swing around the city on webs, but his personality is different too. He’s a wise-cracking smartass and comedian. Peter Parker isn’t like that. Obviously, as with the physical abilities, he could be if he wanted to, but he has to limit himself when he’s Peter Parker or people will know something’s up, because he was always a quiet shy boy. So his transformation, like Superman’s, is entirely voluntary and involves pretending to be an ordinay human being. They both have to dress the part and also play it to the hilt. It would be difficult if you’re that strong or acrobatic to pretend to be so limited.
  3. Xoic
    And this applies as well to Daredevil. When he got the toxic goop in his face it not only took his eyesight, it also super-enhanced all his other senses (something that’s supposed to happen anyway when a person goes blind, the vision area of the cortex gets re-mapped to function with hearing and maybe a few other senses, so they really do become enhanced). He’s actually a lot more limited than Clark Kent, because he has to always pretend to be handicapped. Imagine having to tap around with a cane and pretend not to know what’s going on around you when in reality you know it all a lot better than any of the normies. How humiliating and depressing!

    This all still relates to the basic fantasy of having a special hidden self that nobody else knows about, that you can become when you need to. Which I think relates strongly to the mythical ideas of having two sets of parents—the mortal human ones and a pair of divine parents in whatever immortal realm exists in your paradigm. Mount Olympus or what have you. Because if you have divine or immortal parents, then that means you’re immortal or divine yourself, though you have to pretend to be completley mortal. This was the life of many mythological heroes and beings. In fact generally the heroes were the offspring of a mortal with a god.
  4. Xoic
    The superhero stories reflect the reality that we’re all unique individuals with our own special abilities and potentials, and that we use them for our own purposes, some in positive ways and some in self-centered ways that are harmful to other people. This is a far cry from the usual huffy derision some people will hurl at you—“Oh, superhero stories are just ridiculous fantasies of having superpowers and fighting all the time!” Well sure, you can look at it that way, but that’s pretty reductivist and harsh. Why choose to miss all the rest of it? And only see it in such negative terms? It just seems to be the way unimaginative people like to see things (and incidentally it denigrates and almost criminalizes imagination). “Hey, you! Get your head out of the stupid clouds and just buckle down and do practical work! Make something useful of yourself!”

    I want to amend that a little. This just occurred to me. How to word it? It isn't just that the 'practical-minded' (unimaginative) people are wrong—actually as I've said above they're not wrong. Superhero comics actually do play into fantasies of having some power and being able to leap around or fly, and to escape the drab world of social bullshit. The problem is that the so-called 'practical-minded' people take it way to literally, and refuse to see the rest of the stuff I mentioned. They refuse to see it metaphorically, which is the same problem with the way modern people understand religion and the spiritual. So maybe it's more a problem of literal-mindedness than anything else. A lack of understanding of metaphor and symbol.
  5. Xoic
    Duality in Daredevil (getting specific now)

    Miller said in the interview that he sees Matt and Daredevil as two distinctly different sides of one person.

    At the beginning of the storyline The Man Without Fear there’s an extended section showing Matt as a child, before he was blinded. His dad is a prizefighter called Battlin’ Jack Murdock. He doesn’t win often, but he’s incredibly tough—a trait he passed on to his son, along with the ability to take immense amounts of punishment. And drink immense amounts of alcohol, though Mattie didn’t take to that. His dad was also devoutly Catholic. He always tells his son that he wants him to grow up very different from himself, to make something of himself. To go to college and become a doctor or lawyer. To never fight. So Matt represses that whole side of his personality. He gets called a chicken and bullied a lot in the tough Hell‘s Kitchen neighborhood, but he never fights or even talks back, he just represses all the anger and his own natural abilities and toughness.

    I forget what the actual inciting incident was, but at one point Mattie put on a ski mask and stole the night stick of the local beat cop. Nobody knew who he was, but he became a hero among all the neighborhood kids—the same ones who bullied him and thought him a coward and weakling. And he really loved the feeling, of being able to whizz around so fast on the skateboard, the freedom of it, and of being able to break his strict discipline and let the repressed side of his personality come out and play. It was like he became somebody else, somebody badass and powerful. Exactly the opposite of what his dad demanded he become.

    This split continued as he grew.

    He now had two distinct personalities—one he wore when he was Mattie, and the secret one that only came out when he wore the mask and could do all the things he usually wasn’t allowed to.​
  6. Xoic
    Then came the accident. He ran out into the street to push a blind man out of the way of an out-of-control truck and drums of toxic green goop fell off it and got all over him. It took his sight but enhanced his other senses, and there was no mention of it that I’ve seen, but I’m assuming it also somewhat turbo-charged his natural strength, toughness and acrobatic ability. Why not, it plays right into the psychological complex of his split personality.

    After he had been blind for a while he started to notice his enhanced abilities, but he mainly just felt sorry for himself and felt like a failure and a miserable wretch, until an old blind man named Stick showed up one day and started training him. I couldn’t find an explanation of why, but Stick seemed to have many of the same abilites Matt did—super-enhanced senses and such. Somehow even though he was blind he could shoot a bow and arrow and hit a bullseye on a faraway target. The guy was merciless and drove Mattie like a madman, but it worked. After many absolute failures, Matt began to be able to hit the target himself and was eventually hitting the bullsyeye evey time. Hah! I wonder if there’s some symbolism there, considering one of his later adversaries will be called Bullseye, and be able to throw things with insane accuracy? Probably, and I think Bullseye was created by Miller.
  7. Xoic
    In one episode of the Netflix show (I don’t remember if this happened in the comics or not), Stick did a big speech about what badasses the Spartans were. They seemed to be his inspiration and idols. Their code was so uncompromising and hardass, they lived in complete asceticism (with no comforts at all) and deliberately endured all manner of pain and discomfort to prepare themselves to be the most badass warriors in the ancient world.

    When Matt brought Stick into his New York studio apartment (when Matt was an adult and was already Daredevil) Stick told him he needs to ditch all the soft stuff (couches, easy chairs, hot and cold running water, electricity, etc) and have nothing whatsoever to do with women (except as one-night sexual partners) or friends. All of these things compromise the super-hardass Spartan code that Stick lives by.

    This makes Stick one of the contrast characters to Matt/Daredevil. Contrast isn’t exactly the right word. It isn’t just that they’re different, but that Daredevil is split between wanting to be more like Stick, but at the same time his Matt side refuses to give up the soft things, the friends, and the possibility of a woman in his life. Matt and DD are always struggling against each other like that, and it’s shown in many brilliant ways, often through contrast with other characters, or sometimes by his visits to his Catholic priest, who serves as a voice of reason and moderation. Sort of a better mentor than either Stick or Matt’s dad, though he doesn’t always do what the priest tells him he should.

    The relationship between Matt and Daredevil is somewhat complex. They really are two different sides of his personality that pull in opposite directions, and sometimes one refuses to do what the other wants. But neither side is completely right or wrong, they both contain vital and necessary aspects of himself and they need to struggle at times with morality, or even fight for control. I suppose Daredevil is Matt’s repressed shadow side. Yeah, actually that works just about perfectly.
  8. Xoic
    Both The Punisher and Elektra were added to allow Daredevil to dialogue/argue/interact with characters who either represent or oppose his own stance on certain important topics. Matt is very controlled, disciplined, and mature. He's an upstanding lawyer, who feels deeply for the rights of victims and for those of falsely accused suspects, and believes that convicts should be given a second chance, unless of course they’re violent repeat offenders (who actually have already been given a second chance and failed the test). All of that is Matt Murdock—but Daredevil is in many ways his opposite. I never picked up on this from the show, and possibly wouldn’t have from the comics either, except that it was explained in the interview—

    Matt is essentially an angel, and Daredevil is a devil, with a devil-may-care attitude.

    He leaps around on rooftops and flips over flagpoles, he beats the crap out of bad guys, and he flouts the law as a masked vigilante. Not highly disciplined or mature things to do. Not only that, but he basically fights against the criminals that as a public defender he represents in court. That’s if they’re really bad guys. If they’re innocent then he wouldn’t encounter them in the mask.

    In the show he and Foggy have a lot of discussions/arguments about their different views concerning the law and the rights of victims etc. In fact it seems to me Foggy is very much a materialist and Matt an idealist. Foggy is always concerned about the office equipment, money, etc, while Matt seems only concerned about civil rights and doing what’s right. Foggy often lamented not sticking with the huge law firm where they interned, which was completely corrupt but where they would have made great money and had all kinds of benefits and great facilities. And free bagles every morning.
  9. Xoic
    I just realized, this is the opposite of the Buffy dynamic, where Buffy is her immature self and the Slayer her mature self. It's reversed here—Matt the lawyer is mature and properly behaved, while Daredevil is his own inner child, running wild and kicking ass.
  10. Xoic
    The Kingpin is basically Matt, but as a sociopath who kills mercilessly and brutally. He fights the same way Daredevil does, brutal and relentless, just physically beating people, but he doesn’t stop until they’re dead. In fact the Kingpin has his two sides—this is articulated clearly by Madame Gao at one point. She says you can’t be two opposite things—the city’s guardian and also its crime lord (she uses different terms). He needs to decide which it is. Each is a totally different spirit moving in a different direction. He’ll be torn in half if he tries to keep being both. There isn't a visual indicator of when Wilson Fisk becomes the Kingpin—it's marked more by his change in behavior and usually also in the music, which becomes frantic and intense. His face becomes a mask of childish rage and he just starts destroying, with no thought whatsoever involved. He's driven entirely by his intense emotions when he's The Kingpin. So yeah, similar to Matt—his 'supervillain' side is his shadow—his immature Id. In fact just like with Matt, we're shown the events in little Willie's childhood that caused his personality to split in two, and it heavily involved his father (in a very different way).
  11. Xoic
    Elektra is like Daredevil’s wild side intensified to the point that she doesn’t care at all about morality or ideals or anything. She represents the wild things Daredevil can do—leaping across rooftops in the dark of night, fighting, flipping around, etc. Miller feels all that is important to the kids or the young men who read the books, it allows them to imagine they’re doing those things. So he created this wild woman, Matt’s opposite number. She appeals to Daredevil but terrifies disciplined cautious Matt. She has her other, more mature and controlled side too. I'm not sure about how or how frequently she changes between the two. Foggy remembers her from college (they all went to Columbia together) when she was a beautiful, reserved, wealthy debutante and didn't have a wild side, or at least she didn't let it show then.


    When the sunglasses are off he's Daredevil, once they go back on he's cautions careful Matt.
  12. Xoic
    Once I realized how deep this split personality device goes, I started noticing it applies to several of the other charaters, though apparently in somewhat different ways. To a very limited extent even Karen has a night-side to her character, simply because she killed Wesley and had to carry that secret for a time without telling anybody.


    It made her a vigilante and forced her to try to keep her two personalities separate. She never put on a mask and went jumping and flipping across rooftops, but I think it probably helped her to empathize more with vigilantes and killers like the Punisher and Daredevil. I didn’t think of that until just now, so don’t hold me to it. I’d need to go back and watch the whole series again to check, and I don’t feel up to that right now. It would definitley solidify or dispell some of my impressions though, and if I wanted to really call this an analysis I’d want to do it at some point. As it stands I consider it about a half-baked analysis, just exploring certain aspects of the show and the comic series.
  13. Xoic
    I actually forced myself to sit through the entire first (only) season of The Defenders, and that was a massive chore—it has almost none of the excellence of Daredevil and Jessica Jones, though right at the very beginning I did notice that Iron Fist has a similar split personality, and that when he’s fully dressed he seems to be Danny Rand, and when you can see the big chest tattoo he’s Iron Fist. He alternately says “I am the immortal Iron Fist, defender of K’un Lun” and “I’m Danny Rand.” So he definitely has a complex going on. In fact that’s what stood out to me as I watched his series a few years ago, he has apparently both mommy and daddy issues, and never gets over them, through both seasons of his own show plus a season of The Defenders. He seems to have never advanced at all toward learning how to use his Iron Fist skills, and people keep telling him he’s no more than a little boy who knows nothing and has no discipline. It was mostly just silly and embarrassing. I bought an Iron Fist trade paperback a few years ago because I liked the artist, and I read enough to see that he had exactly those problems even there, so it wasn’t just in the shows. His issues seem to be baked into his own comic series. Sheesh. What was fun though was seing him and Luke Cage as the Unstoppable Force and the Immovable Object. He’s the only guy who was ever able to hurt Luke just by punching him.

    It just hit me (pun unintended)—I wonder if as Iron Fist he’s disciplined and has no parental issues? I don’t think I can force myself to watch his show again. I wanted to like it, but his acting is atrocious and his fighting skills leave a lot to be desired, plus the daddy issues were hard to take for so long. It would be one thing if he got over them or made some progress toward it, but no. Nothing. I could watch it all day though for Colleen Wing.
  14. Xoic
    The Deep Interconnectedness of the Ideas
    I officially give up on trying to separate this into categories, it refuses to allow that. I know, I did create some category titles, but the ideas are deeply interconnected, and separating them into sections would break that connection. So I’ll continue to just ramble.

    The Spartan Code is deeply connected with the familiar old comic book idea that

    a superhero must keep his real identity secret or his foes will go after him through his loved ones.

    It’s such a familiar old trope, and sometimes seems dumb, but it is an absolute reality. I don’t mean just for costumed crimefighters, but for anybody who tries to bring the evil to justice (Or should that be the other way around?). If you try to stand up against the unjust in today’s world you’re liable to get doxxed and cancelled or worse. People have definitely had their children or their wives or husbands attacked. It’s always been true, going all the way back I’m sure, especially when the powerful and the evil are important public figures, like politicians and the like.
  15. Xoic
    This is what Wilson Fisk is all about. His criminal oganization quite deliberately goes after the loved ones of their enemies. They do it countless times throughout the show. And if it isn’t clear who the enemy is, then they bend every effort toward finding out. This is exactly why it’s so important that nobody know who Daredevil is. The Punisher solves that problem by adhering to the Spartan code—no loved ones in his life. They’ve all already been killed. So the bad guys kinda screwed themselves on that one—now he doesn’t even need to hide who he is. But of course he is known to hang out with Karen and the two lawyers of Hell’s Kitchen—Nelson and Murdock. That puts them in great danger, though it might not be much skin off his back should anything bad happen to any of them. His heart is almost as hardened as Stick’s (suddenly I’m picturing Stick’s heart being made of actual wood).

    Here’s the real kicker. After showing many times that this is the modus operandi of Fisk and his organization of thugs, it’s used against him. His beloved Vanessa is threatened. It makes him realize how vulnerable he is, because the general public knows who she is and how much she means to him.

    Also, in a scne from Season 2 where Matt Murdock visits the big guy in prison to talk, Matt makes the mistake of saying something (I don’t remember what) about Vanessa, and suddenly Wilson Fisk is no longer himself. In a heartbeat he’s The Kingpin (Daredevil’s enemy, not Matt Murdock’s). He goes berserk as he tends to do when he’s angry, reaches across the table, and picks Murdock up by his head (if I remember right) and starts slamming it hard against the thick steel table. Somehow Matt keeps his composure enough to realize he can’t flip and jump around and do Daredevil things, because then Fisk and the other people (Fisk’s men) will know he’s Daredevil, and they’ll go after him through Karen and Foggy. It’s brilliant really. At first I didn’t get that, my immediate thought was “Why doesn’t he do some Daredevil shit, he could get out of that easily!” and then it dawned on me. Ah, yes, The secret identity must remain secret, at all costs, or more than himself will be hurt.


    Right at the end of the clip, when the Kingpin says "Let's do this again sometime"—Oh, you will, but next time you won't be tangling with Matt Murdock. It's going to be Daredevil, and he can kick your ass. ​
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