Advance press about the latest Batman movie was almost uniform in its praise of the film, especially as concerned its technical and psychological realism. Critics considered most of Batman’s equipment pretty feasible this time around, noted how Bruce Wayne’s use of all that bat symbology now links back to a related trauma in his youth, and appreciated the more realistic cityscape against which the central adventures take place.

There’s an additional way in which this collaboration between director Christopher and screenwriter David Goyer seems authentic, and it involves our country’s cultural imagination. Have you wondered why American movies starring force-wielding Jedi, billionaire vigilantes (like Bruce Wayne), and super-powered heroes have experienced such a resurgence in recent years? In addition to more obvious factors informing these successful projects—such as the presence of quality filmmakers and improved special effects—I think these movies’ success has something to do with a growing conviction that an increasingly dangerous and capricious world demands extraordinary kinds of intervention. Just as the anxieties associated with World War II birthed some of our country’s most enduring, fictional champions back in the 1940s (including Superman and Captain America), current fears about America’s vulnerability may be encouraging the recent renaissance of superheroes.

Sure, the more marketable superheroes always possess a humanity and vulnerability with which we can closely identify. In Batman Begins, a young Bruce Wayne learns a common piece of parental advice, that only by falling/failing do we encounter the opportunity of learning “to pick ourselves up.” His second mentor and sparring partner, the mysterious Ra’s Al Ghul, provides similar (but differently directed) advice. He instructs an older Bruce bent on vengeance to subsume his anger over his parents’ death in a greater cause, to realize that true victory over the self-interested self requires the “will to act,” the strength of mind to overcome crippling guilt or regret and take hold of one’s situation. All this, we can recognize and take at face value: the commonalties linking our human condition with that of the superhero provides the hook which pulls our willing imaginations up into the rarified air of fantasy.

It’s the fantastic details themselves that make some of us balk. The more amazing elements lacing such familiar human interest stories just seem too implausible. We relate to the nerdish Peter Parker, but sticking to walls and shooting webs? Come on. The same goes for Luke Skywalker’s telekinesis, Blade’s superhuman speed and strength, and the Batman’s combination of Bruce Lee fighting skills with the wealth and gadgetry of Richie Rich. Besides, we’ve a hardened antipathy to anyone with pretensions to heroism. Our suspicion of the extraordinary is joined by an impulse to deconstruct, new historicize, and psychologize away great feats of courage. If we can generate an explanation for why someone appeared heroic, then we don’t have to take their example to heart, just as we dismiss miracles for which we can suggest a scientific mechanism. I’d argue, however, that there’s an alogical something nestled deeply within us that resonates sympathetically with that paradigm which links the heroic, saving figure with the fantastic—our redemption from danger with the more than human. We want a hero, however unwilling we may be to play one ourselves . . .

Middle-class American society seems habitually complacent about our inanimacy, that is, about doing the bare minimum required by our jobs and families. We care too little to rise to any kind of occasion, to do anything dramatically different or “super.” A polite, lazy habit of deference encourages us to leave the heroics to law enforcement, the military and, well, actors. The farther removed we are from life-and-death crises, the less use we have for hero-types. Unfortunately, it takes a fictional drama soaked in magic (Harry Potter), mutations (X-Men), or monsters (Underworld) for us to even begin to suspect—and then only fleetingly—that the human condition might not be sufficient unto itself, that fallible folk like ourselves might actually require superheroic, even miraculous, intervention.

Fortunately, the God that frees us to develop moral myopia also provides us with curative imaginations. The words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge come to mind:

"' . . .from my early reading of fairy tales and genii etc. etc. my mind had been habituated to the Vast and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.'"