Page - 64 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

64 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 59–74 the twentieth century saw destroyed every form of optimism inherited from the age of the enlightenment: the two World Wars transformed rousseau’s hu- man perfectibility into a pitiful utopia. German expressionism and American film noir were among the cinematic outcomes of this new existential pessimism. But even if it is impossible for us to know the reasons for the rise of the cinema of catastrophe, we can try to understand how that cinema suggests, in its own way, the deconstruction of philosophy’s humanist certainties and relaunches necessary arguments related to the problem of evil. the cinema of catastrophe discusses evil, but not in the way the tale (a distant ancestor to the superhero genre) discusses evil, where the intention is to prepare the child for the dangers of adulthood. freeing itself from the conventions of the tale, for better or for worse this cinema addresses the adult, drawing on diverse and complex means to discuss the issue of evil. this last age of comics cannot be dissociated from Christian theodicy, where- by God’s omniscience remains inseparable from his infinite kindness despite the presence of evil in the world. the existence of evil in a world where God’s kind- ness is elevated to the status of absolute continues to haunt Christian thought and, by extension, American literature. the PrOBLeM Of eViL As the COre tOPiC Of the sUPerherO GeNre the question of evil’s existence, or being (or absence of being), is not fortui- tous within a genre’s narrative that works mainly in dichotomist terms and with radical oppositions, borrowing from ancient mythologies as well as Christian iconography. the conventional opposition in the superhero genre sees the birth of the hero naturally followed by the creation of his nemesis – an idea initially illustrated in Spiderman (sam raimi, Us 2002).12 But DC animated movies also explore evil, its existence and the legitimacy of the hero’s actions to put an end to it, in a more subtle manner, behind the veneer of dualist oppositions. the question of evil has political, moral, religious, psychological, and metaphysical implications, some of which are introduced here. Evil is defined as the negation of good. Such negation is found in many con- frontations in comics, the most iconic being the battle between Batman and the Joker. evil is thought of as an absolute, a universal notion generating moral codes shared by many cultures – for example, the sixth Commandment, which forbids the act of killing, draws a line some superheroes choose not to cross. 12 the idea also appears in Unbreakable (M. Night shyamalan, Us 2000). shyamalan’s movie anticipated the commercial domination of the superhero genre over the next decade, while developing, in an almost avant-garde way, a meta-filmic and critical approach to the genre’s syntax. see Pagello 2013, 6–7.