[COLUMN] From Hoppers to Daredevil: Born Again, Modern Pop Culture Struggles with the Problem of Evil | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for a host of relatively recent pop culture, including the Pixar movie Hoppers, the second season of Daredevil: Born Again, the fourth season of The Boys and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Also older spoilers for Tim Burton’s two Batman movies. Consider yourself warned!

This is perhaps something of an understatement, but popular culture is in a very strange place in terms of meeting this particular moment. It really seems like contemporary film and television has no idea how to actually confront the notion of evil in the world.

Hoppers is a pretty good recent example of this. The new animated family friendly Pixar movie focuses on a young environmental activist Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) who lives in a city called Beaverton and who is attempting to protect local wildlife from destruction at the hands of Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm), who is intent on tearing down the wilderness to make room for a new (and seemingly rather pointless) freeway.

Mabel uses advanced technology to place herself in the body of a beaver and to infiltrate the local animal kingdom. This community of dispossessed animals is led by King George (Bobby Moynihan), a kind but ineffectual beaver who seems content to let his community collapse in slow motion as they are herded into smaller and more tightly confined areas. King George is unwilling to stand up for his subjects. He means well, but he lacks any will to take direct action.

Hoppers makes it clear quite early on that Generazzo is a complete monster. The freeway doesn’t go anywhere. He is building on protected land. He refuses to engage with protesters like Mabel in good faith. When he is prohibited from building on a natural habitat by law, he uses advanced radiophonic technology to herd the animals into more restricted spaces. When Mabel destroys one of Generazzo’s speakers to allow the animals return to their natural habitat, Generazzo responds by having four more installed.

Hoppers follows the standard logic of Disney movies, where the viewer is invited to understand the anthropomorphized animals as fully-formed individuals who deserve respect and autonomy. Generazzo is clearly being built up as a classic Disney villain, a character who refuses to engage in reasoned debate, who cannot be trusted, and who will escalate. He is very similar to Gaston (Richard White) in Beauty and the Beast or Clayton (Brian Blessed) in Tarzan.

The narrative arc of Hoppers seems like it should be fairly straightforward. In standard Disney movie logic, King George would learn that there comes a point where one must stand up to evil and Generazzo’s steadfast refusal to change and desire to wipe out an entire population would lead to a satisfying death after falling from a great height due, which would be nobody’s fault but his own. A large incomplete section of freeway literally dangles over the movie, waiting to come into play.

Instead, Hoppers takes a weird turn. Despite Generazzo’s generally escalating awfulness, the film refuses to countenance any punishment for the character. Instead of Mabel teaching King George to stand up for himself, King George instils in Mabel the importance of hoping against hope that eventually the people trying to exterminate an entire population will eventually reveal themselves to be decent people. Until then, the weak are meat and the strong will eat. That is just the order of things. “Pond rules,” as King George observes.

Of course, Generazzo does eventually come around, but the film makes it clear this is after the heroes have sworn not to do anything to stop him. However, there is a very pointed double-standard within Hoppers about the characters that it is okay to kill. Despite the fact that the film invites the audience to see the animal characters as living individuals, Mabel’s squashing of the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep) is treated like a joke.

When the Insect Queen’s son, Titus (Dave Franco), threatens to use Generazzo’s audio technology against humans, he is also killed off as a punchline, swallowed by the Amphibian King (Steve Purcell). There is a real sense within Hoppers that some lives matter and some lives don’t. The wealthy and corrupt politician destroying an eco-system is untouchable. However, the moment that any dispossessed group makes an effort to strike back, they become fair game.

There is an obvious contemporary parallel at play here, the tale of a massively corrupt political leader who rejects norms and oversight and who is causing untold damage to the natural environment and who it seems cannot be stopped by any due process. Donald Trump is America’s first reality television president, and it makes sense that he casts a long shadow over contemporary pop culture. He is inescapable, a center of gravity that seems to pull everything towards himself.

In this context, it is worth acknowledging that contemporary pop culture has taken a larger pivot in a sharply conservative direction. To focus on Pixar, the studio recently cut a transgender character from their television series Win or Lose and trimmed queer themes from their recent film Elio. These large companies are clearly terrified of potentially provoking a right-wing backlash, and that is reflected in their output. While these films and shows can recognize predation, they cannot imagine resisting it.

To be fair, there is this recurring tension in a lot of recent children’s films. There is a sense that those who exist as prey have no choice but to live comfortably with their would-be predators and simply hope that they will not be eaten. Zootopia is built around the assumption that being suspicious of literal carnivores amounts to racial profiling, while the climax of The Wild Robot finds predators and prey huddled together in a shared shelter to brave the winter.

Of course, these are animated films aimed at children. While it has some limitations when pushed to these sorts of extremes, there is an understandable impulse to teach children the importance of believing in the basic goodness of other people. However, there is a sense that adult-centric pop culture is navigating a similar sort of existential crisis, presenting heroes who are unable to actually confront evil in the world and so resort to believing against all reason in the kindness of monsters.

The second season of Daredevil: Born Again is another show that exists in the shadow of Donald Trump. The series is very loosely adapted from Chip Zdarksy and Marco Checchetto’s Devil’s Reign, a comic even more overtly about the Trump era. New York businessman (and criminal) Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) has ascended to high political office, engaging in massive corruption and turning the system against his political and business rivals.

Fisk deputizes the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, populated by disgraced police officers, to operate as his private militia. “There’ll be no body cams, no due process, no warrants,” Fisk promises his followers. These goons mask their faces. They separate families. They disproportionately target characters of color. They operate a private dungeon where the prisoners are held without trial, locked in cages and denied access to basic legal aid. It’s hard to read outside the context of this moment.

The production team have been quite candid about the contemporary resonance of Born Again. Head director Aaron Moorhead has described the second season specifically as “a resistance tale.” Although understandably cagey about speaking to it directly, interviews around the launch of the second season conceded that showrunner Dario Scardapane “acknowledges the inevitable comparisons to Donald Trump and ICE.”

However, throughout the season, there is a real question about what the characters can do when faced with an enemy like Wilson Fisk, a man so protected by the system that there is no legal way to bring him down. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) spend a significant portion of the season arguing whether the use of lethal force is justifiable in stopping Fisk’s reign of terror across New York City.

“Murder is not how we win this,” Matt insists, evoking the spirit of their dead friend Franklin ‘Foggy’ Nelson (Elden Henson). “Does killing Fisk bring Foggy back? Would he have wanted that?” Karen responds by pointing out that Vanessa Fisk (Ayelet Zurer), who ordered Foggy’s murder, has faced no consequences. “Vanessa killed Foggy and nothing happened,” she sighs. “It just feels like we are up against so much.” Matt protests, “We still have a system that is not entirely broken.”

The problem is that Born Again doesn’t seem to entirely agree with Matt. At the climax of the season, Matt exposes Fisk’s criminal enterprises by unmasking himself as the vigilante Daredevil. This effectively plunges New York into a state of anarchy and civil war as Fisk and his supporters refuse to relinquish power. Eventually, New Yorkers manage to breach Fisk’s inner sanctum, with Matt chagrining in after them. ”You’re better than this!” Matt insists as the crowd bays for blood.

As with Disney villains like Gaston or Clayton, these sorts of stories used to have a clear way of offering audience catharsis. Tim Burton’s Batman ends with the death of the Joker (Jack Nicholson), while Batman Returns ends with the death of the Penguin (Danny DeVito). Batman Returns even acknowledges that Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), its Donald Trump stand-in, is too dangerous to let live, so burns him alive. The Marvel Cinematic Universe regularly killed off villains like Obidiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) and Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford).

Obviously, those films are products of a different time. The failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July 2024 seems to have had a chilling effect. It happened quite quickly. “Assassination Run”, the fourth season finale of The Boys that was released that week and featured the attempted assassination of President Robert Singer (Jim Beaver) and the actual assassination of Vice-President Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), had its title dropped and had title card added. That failed attempt seems to have made the possibility of killing off these characters like Fisk or Generazzo, even in fiction, impossible.

So in Born Again, the question lingers over how to remove Fisk from power if he is unwilling to surrender and there is no legal apparatus strong enough to remove him. Born Again ends with Matt offering Fisk amnesty, couched in the language of Matt’s Catholicism. “What about grace?” Matt asks. “No, no, no, no,” Fisk protests. “You are not allowed to offer that to me.” Still, Fisk accepts the hero’s grace. The season ends with Fisk leaving New York, retiring to live on a beach somewhere.

It’s not a particularly satisfying conclusion for largely the same reason that the ending of Hoppers is frustrating. Confronted with crime, corruption, oppression and authoritarianism, Born Again seems to acknowledge the limitations of the truth and the system to dislodge such monsters. With those concessions made, the heroes are left with no other options that to rely on the grace and magnanimity of the foes who wish them dead.

Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Wake Up Dead Man ends on a similar beat, with the gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) solving the central mystery but trusting on the grace of the perpetrator Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close) to turn herself in. As in Born Again, this choice is framed in explicitly religious terms, a leap of faith to offer “grace” to a party who almost certainly does not deserve it. In both Born Again and Wake Up Dead Man, the grace is accepted.

There is a real and palpable sense of mainstream popular culture struggling with the challenge of constructing satisfying tales of good triumphing over evil that resonate in this particular moment. The villains of these stories are perhaps too close to real-life political figures for these tales to afford audiences the catharsis of a permanent solution, but the stories themselves struggle to provide any other resolution that feels convincing in the context of the present.

In the end, it feels like all that these stories can offer by way of reassurance that good will triumph over evil is akin to religious faith.