The mythos of modern superheroes
Superman, from the variant cover of Action Comics Vol. 1 #976, published 2017.
By Andy Scott and Jeff Schimel
University of Alberta. March 31, 2021
In November of 1992 one of the greatest American icons of all time died tragically. His murder was covered widely in newspapers and on television sets around the world. While some wept, others refused to believe that he was really dead. For weeks, conspiracy theories ran rampant with many claiming his death was merely a publicity stunt and that he would be back next week or next month. This American hero, they claimed, was too virtuous, too popular, too profitable to be dead. In January, images of his friends and family mourning at his funeral emerged.
Then, in October of 1993, the incredible happened and Superman came back from the dead to the surprise of pretty much no one. Since his first flirtation with death, The Man of Steel has died more than a dozen times on the comic book page, and each time, not unlike Jesus’s supposed resurrection from his tomb, he has returned as formidable and righteous as ever. But Superman is not alone in this feat – almost the entire pantheon of superheroes has died at some point in their career only to be resurrected. In addition, the endless reboots of popular heroes keep them ageless and relevant; Superman, for example, has been reinvented for each decade since he stopped fighting Nazism during the second great war.
Are superheroes the new gods?
This is the mythos of modern superheroes: they are fundamentally good, powerful, and immortal. Is this also the allure of superheroes? Do they allow us to fantasize that perhaps we too can be good, powerful, and immortal? Or, at minimum, that there are all-powerful beings watching over us and protecting us; that our world is at its core orderly rather than chaotic, good rather than bad. Such fantasy is certainly fleeting, but perhaps seeing Batman overthrow the chaos-causing Joker, or Superman trounce the murderous Lex Luthor on the big screen provides us with just a glimmer of order in the face of meaninglessness, or a momentary hope that we too might escape our mortality or have it delayed by some power greater than ourselves. This, of course, has historically been the business of religion throughout human history.
Clockwise from bottom: Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021); Ernest Becker’s Birth and Death of Meaning (1971); and the Russo brothers’ Avengers: Endgame (2019).
According to Ernest Becker (1971), a cultural anthropologist and important figure in the history of existential psychology, one of the key drivers of religious belief is that it provides a comforting supernatural structure to the universe – it organizes the world into good and evil and lays out a path on which we should travel to achieve the good life and afterlife. Without some cultural worldview performing this organizing function, says Becker, people would be incapacitated by the anxiety and confusion of being thrust into a meaningless existence in which we are destined to die after a few decades of paying off a mortgage on a house several miles from the cemetery where our dumb, lifeless body will lay until it (and the house) deteriorates and disappears forever.
From this perspective, it is interesting that the exponential rise in popularity of the superhero seems to coincide with the historically unprecedented decrease in religiosity that has been occurring over the past century. As religious devotion has waned in the West, superheroes have seeped into nearly all aspects of our culture and become a multibillion-dollar industry comprised of comic books, video games, toys, underwear, and, most recently, several of the most successful films in history including one of the highest grossing films of all time, Avengers: Endgame, which made 2.8 billion dollars at the box office.
Research on religiosity, death anxiety, and the appeal of superheroes
Is it possible that, for some, this new pop culture polytheism of superheroes and supervillains is serving as a sort of surrogate pseudo-religion during a societal shift away from the organized religions of our parents and grandparents?
We set out to explore this question using the tools of existential psychology – which uses the scientific method to explore how people deal with the existential realities of life (e.g., death and meaninglessness). As a first step, we conducted two correlational studies to see if superhero fandom was related to religiosity and death anxiety and, if so—how? The results of our first two studies indicated that religious individuals with high levels of trait death anxiety reported being bigger superhero fans. These initial findings suggested that superheroes may be especially appealing for those with pre-existing inclinations toward the supernatural but for whom these beliefs are no longer sufficiently managing their existential anxieties. In other words, people whose religious inclinations were doing a poor job of mitigating death anxiety seemed to be reassuring themselves that death, suffering, and meaninglessness can be overcome by grabbing some comfort popcorn and catching the latest Avengers movie.
Still, religion is a complicated construct and there are still many questions surrounding when and how it helps us to manage death anxiety. However, previous research (see Vail et al., 2019) suggests that it is likely the belief in the supernatural (souls, gods, an afterlife) that gives religious people respite from anxieties about death. We wondered if it is people who maintain a religious identity, but struggle to believe in the supernatural elements, who might manage death concerns by turning to superheroes as a supplemental source of the supernatural.
Participants who were raised religious, but then became less religious, responded to a death reminder with increased interest in superhero culture.
To examine that possibility, we made use of a classic research paradigm in existential psychology, called the mortality salience experimental manipulation. In this technique, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions; in the baseline/control condition, participants were asked to think and write about some control topic (in this case physical pain); but in the target condition, participants were asked to think/write about their own death. Then, we asked participants how interested they are in superhero culture. Results showed that only religious people who had started to doubt their belief in the supernatural were more interested in superhero culture after writing about death. Thus, it appears that superheroes might be especially appealing to people whose pre-existing religious beliefs have become inadequate in protecting them from existential concerns.
In our final two studies, we wanted to more explicitly test the idea that superheroes are particularly appealing among people who have begun to question their religious convictions. In one study, we found that people who reported growing up religious but then later experienced a decline in religious belief responded to a death reminder with increased interest in superhero films. Interestingly, this pattern was not observed among people who grew up religious and stayed religious — these individuals actually showed significantly less interest in superheroes after a death reminder — nor among people who grew up non-religious. In the other study, we similarly found that people who had been born and raised religious but experienced a decline in religious belief reported being bigger superhero fans if they had lost a close loved one in the past two years. That is, a real-world existential stressor increased this subset of the population’s interest in superheroes, presumably because they no longer had a religious structure to fulfill the spiritual-existential needs that arise when a loved one dies.
Understanding the appeal of the modern superhero
“Part of the journey is the end” - Iron Man (Tony Stark)
Taken together, these studies suggest that in addition to their pure entertainment value, the phenomenal rise in popularity of superheroes over the past eight decades could be attributable, in part, to something more deeply rooted in the human need for existential security. Superheroes seem tailor-made for this purpose. The DC and Marvel universes depict worlds similar to our own but with localized sources of chaos and evil (villains) and countering forces for good that virtually always win out (superheroes). Tellingly, the creators of Superman drew inspiration from Hercules, Samson, and other classical and biblical figures. Thor was lifted straight out of Norse mythology and dropped onto the comic book page (see Fingeroth, 2004). And like the gods that came before them, superheroes show us what is good and honorable and worth fighting for.
If they really have filled the shoes of recent and ancient gods, part of their success could be due to the fact that Superhero fantasies allow people to feel some implicit connection to the supernatural without having to overtly endorse the outmoded supernatural beliefs of religion. Importantly, the supernatural powers of superheroes are almost always secularly plausible fictions with heroes being aliens from other worlds (e.g., Superman, Thor, The Green Lantern) or people who gained their powers from scientific accidents and experiments (e.g., Captain America, The Hulk, Spider-Man). In other words, consuming superhero media might let us reap the existential benefits of supernaturalism without having to do any psychological work to reduce the dissonance that comes with lending credence to the incredible.
Of course, questions remain as to why superhero films appeal to the formerly religious, but research in existential psychology allows us to begin to explore these big questions in interesting and provocative ways. So, while we cannot say for certain that superheroes have replaced the old gods, it is at least fun to think about, and perhaps the next time you’re feeling down about the finality of death, or about having been thrust into a meaningless existence without your consent, you can try streaming a few episodes of The Spectacular Spider-Man or flying around as Iron Man in virtual reality to see if you feel any better about your place in the universe.
Additional reading
Excellent treatments of the potential existential functions of superhero fandom can be found in the book Superman on the Couch by Danny Fingeroth (2004) and in the chapter The Birth and Death of the Superhero Film by Sander Koole and his colleagues (2013).
Andy Scott is a masters student research at the University of Alberta. His work is focused on experimental existential social psychology, with a focus on religious belief and other features of popular cultural worldviews.
Jeff Schimel is a professor at the University of Alberta. His research has examined the existential psychological function of cultural worldviews and self-esteem (i.e., the belief that one is meeting cultural standards of value and is therefore a valuable contributor to a meaningful view of reality). Based on the work of existential theorists, he has conducted a number of different studies showing that brief (even subliminal) reminders of death (vs. other aversive topics) increase people's favorability toward ideas that support (vs. oppose) their worldview and motivate people to behave in ways that maximize self-esteem. On a more positive note, his work also finds that people show less hostility toward outgroup members in response to death reminders if people embrace cultural values of kindness and tolerance.