The Underground (Super)Man
Superheroes are easy to critique, especially the superheroes of yore. The common Marxist complaint that these characters are the blinkered defenders of an unfair, capitalist status quo (with protecting property and money as the prime objectives) is valid, even as it has been incorporated into the more self-aware superhero revamps from the 1980s and later. But it does not tell the whole story. In this chapter, we have seen what haunts the modern superhero. More often than not, the superhero breaks or bends the law in the name of achieving justice. Not only does this undermine institutions (or presume that the institutions have already been undermined), but it can put an ethical, psychological, and political strain on the individual superhero and the entire superhero concept. The Bendis-era Daredevil forces us to confront the essential conundrum of most superheroes: in maintaining their secret identities, they are not only protecting their loved ones and avoiding legal and extralegal persecution. They are constant, habitual liars.
Men (and it's usually men) who conceal their secrets behind masks are a puzzling choice for a supposedly uncomplicated American hero. Even setting aside the glaring negative example of the Ku Klux Klan, secret identities and double lives are an odd fit with America's Protestant (if not Puritan) morality, which may be one of the reasons they are irresistible for a kind of storytelling that turns ethical breaches and moral compromise into compelling plots. Mystery and detective readers love stories of double lives; soap opera and melodrama thrive on them. Prestige dramas and cable television about anti-heroes turned double lives and secret identities into their master trope: Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie, Dexter,The Americans, and Mad Men, just to name the most obvious examples. These stories are appealing because of how fundamentally their protagonists violate one of the primary demands that a (secularized) Protestant culture places on individuals: that they live a life of integrity. By "integrity" I mean not simply virtue, but consistency--you are the same man at work and at home, in public and in private. Failures of integrity, particularly when they can be parsed as hypocrisy, are the engine of public scandal.
Yeah, like that’s gonna last
Until recently, however, superheroes had gotten a free pass. They had all the narrative complications of a double life without suffering the opprobrium of moral scolds. At its worst, secret identities were a logistical difficulty rather than an ethical dilemma (let alone failing). Again, this makes sense for a genre developed primarily for children and adolescents: secret identities embody and understandable kind of wish fulfillment, and the escapist stories that depend on them were not interested in the deceptive hero's comeuppance.
When the comics push harder at the secret identity concept, they end up highlighting the contradictions inherent in the superhero concept. Bendis' "Deny! Deny! Deny!" is a particularly shocking response to Daredevil's unmasking, but it also reveals what is virtually the only way the genre ultimately addresses the issue. [10]. Again and again, the revelation is magically undone, and the superhero goes back into hiding (Daredevil, Spider-Man, Captain America (the first time), Superman (twice)). The stories we've examined in this chapter show a fascinating reflex on the part of the outed hero (or antihero): often, they retreat underground (Batman, the Foolkiller). They cannot function in public as integral, authentic selves, so their personal lives (their secret, true identities) must be sacrificed.
Note
[1] There are exceptions of course. Though Iron Man's identity had been revealed more than once, the last time ("Embeddied, Part One," Civil War Front Line 1, by Paul Jenkins, Ramon Bachs, and John Lucas, August 2006) has remained in force ever since, probably because the public acknowledgment fits Tony Stark's arrogant persona, and also to remain consistent with the films. She-Hulk's secret identity barely survives the first volume of her series; one of the things that makes her refreshing is that being a hulk allows her to express herself more fully that she can as a human. Her cousin, Bruce Banner, also cannot maintain his secret for all that long, which adds to the drama of his inability to settle in any one place and avoid persecution. Captain America has functioned without a secret identity for years, which works for the opposite reason: it is consistent with his persona as a straightforward, honest broker and fundamentally earnest person.
Next: Chapter 4: Crisis and Event, or, Punching Reality in the Face