The politics of superheroes: want a map of the debates of the early 21st century? Watch a comic-book movie.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture and Reviews

ON APRIL 28, 200S, Spider-Man, Captain America, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flexed their muscles onstage at the Pentagon. The trio was promoting The New Avengers, a comic book being sent to soldiers around the world. The effort was part of America Supports You, a program that in time would be exposed for misspending its money on self-promotion rather than boosting morale, with at least $9.2 million "inappropriately transferred."

The stench of the scandal stuck to several former Pentagon employees, but the superheroes emerged unscathed. In the January issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, Spidey and Barack Obama teamed up to defeat a supervillain's Inauguration Day plot. At the end, the incoming president called the webslinger "partner" and gave him a friendly fist bump, with nary a reference to Peter Parker's previous work with the Bush administration.

Future historians can offer a more complete account of how costumed crusaders came to dominate Hollywood in the early 21st century. But one factor that has to be acknowledged is the superhero film's philosophical flexibility. As comic-book crimefighters found a mass audience at the multiplex, they displayed an almost unerring ability to invoke important issues without clearly coming down on one side or the other. There are many reasons why Peter Parker's alter ego can both strike poses with Rumsfeld and bump fists with Obama. But surely one of them is that Republicans and Democrats alike see their worldviews reflected onscreen when Spider-Man--and Barman, and Iron Man, and others--battle bad guys.

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A decade ago, most of those Republicans and Democrats wouldn't have cared. In the 1990s, superhero films weren't just fewer. They were aimed, with only a handful of exceptions, at a cult audience.A movie like Mark Dippe's Spawn (1997) might do fairly well commercially, making nearly $55 million at home and over $87 million around the world, but it was easy for the average American not to notice it. Today, by contrast, it's hard to avoid contact with Batman or Spider-Man, or even with more obscure vigilantes, such as the hero of James McTeigue's V for Vendetta (2006).

In three of the last seven years, the most popular picture in America has centered around a superhero. In the other four years, at least one specimen of the genre made the box office top 10. Several of those movies, notably Sam Raimi's Spider-man 2 (2004) and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), have been critical as well as commercial successes, and even widely derided efforts such asAng Lee's Hulk (2003) and Tim Story's Fantastic Four (2005) attracted some highbrow defenders. The trend is mature enough to have unleashed a newwave of hybrids and parodies, from the relationship comedyMy SuperEx-Girlfriend (2006) to the Airplane!-style farce Superhero Movie (2008).A popular 40-minute Internet video, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008), manages to combine the conventions of the superhero film, the romantic comedy, the classical tragedy, the musical, and the vlog.

Not all of these movies are ambivalent about their worldviews. V for Vendetta, for example, turned a politically charged comic with a deliberately enigmatic outlook into a straightforwardly sympathetic tale of a rebellion against a right-wing regime. More often, though, the opposite occurs: A film genre that critics frequently deride for seeing the world in black and white is actually ambiguous about war, privacy, empire, and state power. It took this...