On Amazon’s “The Boys,” the Only Supervillain is Capitalism

Its second season drives one point home harder than a speedboat t-boning a whale: when everything is a product, everyone gets consumed.

The Boys is technically a “superhero show.” Sure. But at its core, it would be downright crass to suggest that the Amazon original is really about superpowered costumed blokes at all.

Based on Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s brutal, merciless, and wickedly funny graphic novel series, The Boys exposes just how quaint and whitewashed the Marvel Cinematic Universe treatment of the superhumans-are-real conceit always was.

In this unendingly nihilistic world, crazed ultra-baddies aren’t the enemy; they, like all “supes” under the sun, are created not by gods or radioactive spiders, but by corporatism run amok.

And if that sounds more plausibly scary than a giant purple thumb building a damn rock collection, it’s because it is.

Capitalism being the only supervillain in this timeline, the show is ultimately a painfully human one purpose-built for our national moment. Perhaps it’s the only one wily and cynical enough to be so.

Plus, a guy almost gets choked by a giant penis. So there’s something for everybody.

It’s easy to hate “The Seven,” an Avengers knockoff presented as a bulwark for liberty and freedom, as they’re quickly revealed as a crass marketing exercise painstakingly managed by the monolithic Vought Corporation — which also happens to have created every last supe on earth using a proprietary chemical injection. Indeed, the concepts of liberty and freedom themselves, as well as racial justice, feminism, and LGBT civil rights, are hereby simply soulless commodities to be packaged and sold for profit.

That’s downright infuriating to the fierce, uncompromising Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the weak of body, strong of heart Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), our titular Boys who have each suffered terrible loss thanks to Vought and their supes. These two are more than fitting as Marxist revolutionaries in this war against a predatory, apocalyptic consumerism, and with each Vought transgression, an any-means-necessary approach grows increasingly palatable.

As with Season 1, Butcher, Hughie, and their ragtag crew of ne’er-do-wells have their sights set on the leader of the Seven, Homelander (Antony Starr), an amoral Superman/Captain America with enough mommy issues to fund a psych ward. This time around, however, the smiling, sadistic blonde is even more dangerous after becoming not just radicalized, but literally seduced by Seven newcomer Stormfront (Aya Cash, troll-tastic), a full-on lady nazi straight out of an 8Chan white genocide shitposter wet dream. The key here, though, is that Stormfront is no Trojan horse: A superpowered, ultra-nationalistic fascist is not a threat to Vought, but rather the inevitable end point of their hyper-corporatization, their reductive corruption of every last element of culture into a consumer product.

Stormfront is not merely the logical next step; the feverish braying of fascism was the template all along.

“The myth of superheroes themselves — though often created by young Jewish writers in the ’30s and ’40s — doesn’t really apply as cleanly today, because there’s these undeniable fascist underpinnings to it. They’re there to protect white, patriotic America,” showrunner Eric Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter. “Taken straight, that’s where it starts to become fascist. Superheroes are inherently MAGA.”

Something, something, something, Übermensch.

If you merely pine for the escapism of an edgy, intense genre piece punctuated with slicing black comedy, The Boys can still do the trick, but the real strength of this latest eight-episode batch is the fact that it’s so profoundly awash in ideology. In addition to Stormfront’s subtlety-free representation of the ongoing white supremacist indoctrination of middle America in the social media age, the Seven and Vought are fitting stand-ins for a moneyed ruling class that incubates (literally and figuratively) global crises rather than preventing them, all due to their regulation being effectively impossible. Rather than keeping us safe, their pursuit is power for the sake of power — and, of course, profit.

And if that means creating superpowered terrorists in order to weaponize patriotism itself and pivot into becoming, say, the world’s largest defense contractor, so be it. No level of collateral damage constitutes a dealbreaker.

The profit motive is unavoidably poignant. Female protagonist Annie January (Erin Moriarty), an All-American gal from the heartland who joins the Seven as the teeth-gnashingly wholesome Starlight, learns that her own mother agreed to have her injected with Vought’s super serum “Compound V” as an infant in exchange for compensation. From birth, she’s denied sovereignty over her own body. Before she gets a chance to save a single life, she’s already been reduced to an object.

We learn that the outrageous flavor of Stage Mom that raised her is all too common; newborn babies are commodified by the Vought leviathan with full permission from greedy, selfish parents. It’s a cycle that self-replicates like a virus.

Notably, The Boys is substantial enough to be read viably through the lens of not just economic class — Stormfront wants to use Compound V to create a new bourgeoisie of supes subservient to the Seven in order to carry out a white supremacist RaHoWa, if you want to go there — but also race, gender, body image, and sexuality. Starlight is hazed into performing oral sex as part of her induction into the Seven. Her increasingly wavering Christian chastity is hijacked as a marketing tool while she’s simultaneously sexualized with a revealing costume. Speed demon A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), the Seven’s only identifiably Black member, is forced out as Homelander is overtaken by Stormfront’s white supremacist boogaloo fantasy. When Homelander sneeringly outs Seven co-leader Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott, a burnt-out, scowling Wonder Woman) as LGBT, Vought re-brands her as “Brave Maeve” in order to sell… *checks notes* rainbow veggie burgers?!?

Adds showrunner Kripke in Amazon’s post-show talkback series, Prime Rewind: Inside The Boys: “So much of this show is just a rampage of toxic masculinity.” Left unchecked, fascism is once again the utterly logical end result.

As she’s blackmailed into submission by Homelander’s repeated threats against her romantic partner, Maeve levels with Starlight that “Nothing ever changes or gets better and I’m tired.” She’s downright war-torn from years of gaslighting and abuse under Vought’s thumb, and with her authentic person almost entirely replaced by a PR-crafted persona, there’s not enough humanity left in her for a fight. After all, traits and values — even civil rights and human dignity — are to be hocked as lunchboxes. They are only meant to exist in literal marketplaces; not the marketplace of ideas. And certainly not as fuel for a revolution by the oppressed.

This is by design. When you’re the product, you get consumed.

It’s instructive to think of this show as the Game of Thrones to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Lord of the Rings, as it ditches high fantasy’s overly convenient good vs. evil dichotomy for an inherently unjust world of bloody chaos in which anyone’s head can explode at any time. More importantly, while Thrones often wowed with CGI showpieces and hellfire fairly raining down from the sky, its weightiest moments were borne out of all-too-human struggles with identity, social hierarchy, and politics. The name of the Game, as it were.

It shouldn’t take an election year and a rising storm of white supremacist violence for a visceral television series to drag these ideological themes bleeding and screaming into the foreground. But the demoralizing realities of 2020 undeniably set a special kind of stage for Season 2 of The Boys, a show that inoculates us for the infinite void by laughing through tears, enlivened by the taste of its own blood.

As Billy Butcher would say, If there’s some geezer up in heaven with a big white beard, he’s a world heavyweight c-word. But even the bruising vigilante would have to crack a smile knowing that despite it all, there might just still be a future worth fighting for.