Popping Heads, Exploding Bodies: Performance and Authenticity in The Boys

The Boys is a bonkers show. It is a gnarly, no-holds-barred depiction of what would happen if superheroes actually existed in the corporate-dominated world. The show also juggles masterfully between being both a poignant justice journey and a sardonic satire fit for the rampant cynicism of the Social Media Age. I warn the reader that if they wish to go ahead their heads might explode, much like it happens in every other episode in the show. This might seem like a joke, but the barrage of hyperviolent moments in the show (many which include actual heads exploding, sometimes even when performing cunnilingus) actually serve a dual purpose: that of shocking the viewer to the extreme, and also of obliterating the paradigm that most superhero media today needs to be sanitized and PG-13. But The Boys is much more than a superhero satire on steroids, it is also a very fun show that manages to oscillate between moments of bleak hopelessness and genuine affection. This essay is not so much a plot analysis, as much as it is trying to understand what the characters and themes in the show represent along the poles of performance<—>authenticity and guided by the moods of irony<—>earnestness.

Homelander, the show's main antagonist, is also the most loved in the eyes of the people because of his uncanny ability to perform the role of America's savior. He is not so subtly based in political figures across history that ooze what Max Weber denominated as charisma.

A big draw in superhero stories is that they have epic proportions. The heroes are majestic, harbingers of justice, always wearing their mighty uniforms and brandishing their shiny weapons. In this first category then, we can see that most heroes embody earnestness to the extreme, and they tend to also come to embody authenticity as they go through hardships and form their characters. They are defined by their powers and actions, and this is what makes them the pinnacle of authenticity and not all performers. I think that even though I’ve seen people treat the characters of The Boys with the same fervor and adoration than from other superhero media, the series shows that all of this is a bunch of bollocks (people may be ironically stanning Homelander, but we have seen in this blog that the distinction between ironic and unironic is blurry in the Social Media Age). The Boys shows that if any superhero was real, we would be stupid and naïve to adore them while they abuse their powers behind our backs (I guess people already do this with politicians and performers, so it wouldn’t be too far fetched). What the show makes clear, though, is that superheroes are not at all embodiments of authenticity and might, but rather they are cringe performers who fake their uniqueness and manifest the worst human traits possible, such as arrogance, hubris, hate and greed. The hero persona is just a mask that covers all the ugliness and ridiculousness.

"The Seven" which is the most famous and most powerful group of superheroes, controlled by the Vought corporation. From left to right: The Deep, Queen Maeve, Stormfront, Homelander, Starlight, Black Noir and A-Train.

Take the names of the characters for example. They all sound like painfully obvious jokes (The Deep? Black Noir? Starlight? Homelander? And my personal favorite, Soldier Boy?). I know, I know, these all seem like straightforward parodies of your standard hero names, and I’m sure there are people who go crazy trying to find their counterparts in the Marvel or DC universes, seeing how The Boys subverts Superman (Homelander) into a jingoistic motherless psycho, The Flash (A-Train) into the fastest man alive who is unable to run, Wonder Woman (Queen Maeve) into a misanthrope, and Aquaman (The Deep) into a perverted loser. However, I think it’s a bit more than just a parody of specific characters. It is also mocking the whole idea that if superheroes were real they would be these epic good guys with hearts of steel and impeccable morals.

The same goes for their ridiculous, gaudy, exaggerated uniforms. It’s all about that design that will instantly display the lore on their sleeve and sell the most in the Vought-dominated world. Homelander carries an American flag on his back and eagles on his shoulders. The costume is begging to be read as a powerful mythos for this apparently majestic übermensch, but in the context of the show it looks like a childish foible. Lore is one of the most attractive aspects in the comicverse. The possibilities are endless for hero lore, and the deeper one gets the more it seems that there is. In the universe of The Boys all of this is discarded as bullshit. In S1, Annie (Starlight) complains to Queen Maeve how all of her story must have been fabricated. In a characteristic twist of hopefulness in an otherwise dire and pessimistic show, Maeve says that at least the honorable story of her saving an out-of-control bus which Annie shared and admired was true. But these are moments of relief in The Boys, where in most superhero movies they are the standard background for the story mechanism to be able to tick. We can see that all the standard themes and characteristics of hero movies—uniqueness, strength, uniforms, lore—is all inverted from being earnest and inspiring to being fake and disappointing.

The MCU has slightly revised the paradigm of the puffed-chest hero that saves the day by introducing doses of irony that make its flow a bit more humorous and a bit less self-serious. Sure, a lot of superhero media has already toyed with the idea of not taking itself too seriously, but when the MCU does it, it comes across as fake, a calculated move to be able to sell more tickets and provide a bit more fun in otherwise dull and repetitive scripts. The Boys goes much further than any Marvel movie has ever gone in absolutely not taking itself seriously and making this a lot more fun, and sometimes quite shocking as well. I think a good example of this is in episode 1 of season 3, where we see a parody of ant-man, a coked-up asshole who is able to shrink to the size of an insect, entering another man’s beloved member and, after sneezing, completely tearing the man apart from the inside. Sorry for the spoilers, but this brutal, grotesquely painful scene is an early-season reminder that The Boys simply does not give a fuck for keeping it clean and safe. Sure, one might condemn this for pure shock value, and it kinda is, but it is also using irony and humor to undercut some of the brutality of the violence and make us laugh in shock. The Boys is filled with these indelibly diabolical moments, where the gore ends up being equal measures funny and shocking. This is the power of irony in subverting superhero conventions and our expectations.

The standard operation in the The Boys—“business as usual” as the cunning Stan Edgar shows—is one of minute fabrication and performance. Vought, which is the mega-corporation that owns the hero’s images and sells millions of toys and products with the hero names attached to it, is a company that makes it clear that the bottom line is always more important than being good or just. Every time the heroes are in public, they need to be 100% living through their personas, putting on the mask that has been carefully curated to them by the marketing team. All the characters live in a constant ironic state where their mental states are usually the opposite from the surface of their actions and speech. A good example of this is when they discover that Queen Maeve is a lesbian, and try to fabricate a coming out story for her that resonates with the younger audience and can make her ratings go up. It’s all about the numbers. Moments like the one between Annie and Maeve talking about her backstory, where irony is flipped into earnestness, and where performance is flipped into authenticity are very rare, but that only makes them more effective in that world.

The marketing team in the show actually has more decision power than the heroes themselves. They curate the hero's personas so it attracts the most money.

We can constantly see the characters of The Boys working the hardest to be their authentic selves but also being constantly pushed by the rigged structures that only favor fakeness and performance. Homelander and Stormfront represent the extreme of wanting to be authentic in a way that invokes the bastardization of the Nietzschean concept of übermensch by Nazis, translating into people who destroy and kill in the name of purifying humanity from weakness and praise power for power’s sake. An emblematic moment is when Homelander catches a thief with Stormfront and he crushes the bandit’s skull with his bare hands while Stormfront fondles his genitals. It is a visceral, nasty show of brute force that displays how Homelander is more aroused by his unchecked power than anything else.

Most of the characters, especially the heroes in “The Seven”, have moments of existential crises, where they wonder if they are fulfilling their best selves by performing the hero persona all the time. Annie is admitted into “The Seven” as Starlight not because she was earnest and authentic in saying that she wanted to bring good by being a force for change in the hero group, but because the performance of this speech would make for a good story and PR campaign. Even Homelander feels lost and in lack of a mother figure, which explains his obsession with drinking milk, even breast milk. Homelander is also chasing authenticity, in his broken way, but all he was taught was to put on a smile for the public and raise his ratings up. This changes a bit in S3 in interesting ways, but I won’t spoil. The people in the Vought corporation are extremely earnest about being fake and performative, while the heroes cannot help but feel the irony of chasing authenticity in a world that punishes that.

There are a myriad of examples to this effect, and just by watching the show through these lenses people will instantly understand what I am talking about. I will only talk about two more heroes who struggle a lot with these themes of authenticity and fakeness and how this ends up being perceived by the audience. The Deep is one of the first heroes we are introduced to, and we first get the impression that he is powerful and important, as he forces Annie into having sex with him by threatening to kick her out of the group just as she gets in. This introduces one of the prominent themes of the show, which is that feminism only works when it is fake, since structural chauvinism engulf the women’s agency for most of the time. After a couple episodes, Annie gets a bit of justice by kicking The Deep out of the supergroup, and we then start accompanying Deep in his journey of self-exploration and forgiveness guided by the religion (cult) named “Church of the Collective”. Every time we see The Deep trying to come to terms with his horrific acts, we cannot help but feel both anger and pity at this loser. That is because The Deep has convinced himself that he needs to find authenticity, but all for the wrong reasons. Deep only wants to become authentic and forego his toxic traits because he wants back in The Seven, not because he genuinely cares about being a better person. This is why we never root too hard for The Deep to redeem himself.

The story is a bit different with A-Train. We accompany the fastest man alive from winning his nth race for the title of fastest man in the world to having a heart attack that renders him unable to run. All the time we see A-Train search for redemption, we tend to root a bit harder for him. Not because he is a good person, but because it seems that the circumstances of his life have given him a bit of perspective that make him seek less earnest fakeness and more ironic authenticity. Earnest fakeness means that The Deep has the conviction that he is doing everything for the right reasons but it is merely a performance to cover for his lack of principles. Ironic authenticity is embodied by A-train, beacause he is at least honest with himself that he is only doing for the fame and power, which makes him more authentic. This is ironic also, because he recognizes the tinges of fakeness in his character but he is not deceiving himself that he is attempting redemption because he wants to become a better person. The sincerity of intentions makes him more genuine and less performative, he does what he means, as opposed to The Deep, who fakes what he intends all for show.

The universe of The Boys is suffused with metatextuality and self-referential vignettes. Every other episode we get a commercial, a scene from the Dawn of Seven movie franchise, an active shooter drill with Homelander, documentaries from the hero’s lives, music videos, and even an American Ninja Warrior-type reality show spoof. This self-referentiality is by nature sarcastic, parodic and ironic. Every vignette of this type is an obvious jab at American culture. The most obvious one is the active school shooter PSA. In a video that would be shown to schoolchildren that is very bleak yet, sadly, not too far removed from reality, Homelander explains how the afflicted children should wait for the superheroes to save them from the hands of an active shooter, fighting back if possible, even showing the teacher should have a gun at their disposal. It is a piercing satire that carries all the weight that irony has in exposing the flawed ugliness of society.

The show makes it clear that the heroes are mere commodities, much like in the real world. The culture industry dictates every single aspect of their lives. How they ought to behave, to dress, to talk, and which audience they should appeal to. The culture industry is a term that was developed by philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and which explains how in capitalism media is produced for the sake of maximizing profit and nothing else. It is ironic in itself that The Boys is produced by one of the world’s largest megacorporations (Amazon), but the show seems self-aware in that regard. But besides being a parody of capitalist metrics in our hypercommercialized, ultra-consuming world, the show also manages to balance this bleakness with moments of tenderness and care, especially between the anti-heroes, who are the only people we end up genuinely caring about and rooting for (Butcher, Hughie, Mother’s Milk, Kimiko and Frenchie).

"The Boys" in The Boys. A group of brutal, cunning and ruthless criminals that are the most endearing characters, because they are all authentic and only commit bad actions because of their principles, contrary to the superheroes, who do whatever they want and hide behind their powers and masks. Left to right: Frenchie, Kimiko, Butcher, Hughie and Mother's Milk (MM).

This is a show that prides itself in being jarring and oscillating moods. Homelander, who is the show’s main villain, has an uncanny ability to go from a fake, calculated smile, to a psychopathic stare in a matter of milliseconds. The audience also feels this shift constantly, being shocked to the extreme in the moments of violence and a plethora fucked-up moments, as well as feeling hope and rooting for our anti-heroes to take down this cynical ultracorporation once and for all. This might be a good injunction to characterize The Boys as a metamodern show. Metamodernism, as the prefix meta- (after, between, about) indicates, is a way of going beyond the ironic cynicism of postmodernism and moving between both this mood and that of earnest belief that was found more often in Modernism. The metamodern mood is described as a “structure of feeling” which is a term developed by critic Raymond Williams to describe how periods in history and context, mirrored by the art emerging from it, all elicit a certain vibe. The vibe of metamodernism, which is present in The Boys, is one that shifts between being dark, gritty, cynical to being light, hopeful and poignant.

A curious thing I have noticed is that the casting in The Boys also flaunts the convention that superheroes must have superbeauty. Sure, everyone is still very attractive by conventional standards, but there isn’t the distracting beauty of a Chris Evans or a Scarlett Johansson. A great blog post that inspired this thought talks about how in contemporary superhero media every actor cast—including support characters and sidekicks—is a beautiful, sculpturally toned body, displaying their hard-earned muscles; yet no one is horny. Even in this The Boys separates itself from the manicured, highly calculated regimen that makes superhero media of today be obsessed with appearances and less with creating interesting psychological conundrums. Not that this factor matters too much, but I think it shows how MCU and DCEU movies are much more concerned with the surface visuals than with the themes and story, making The Boys a more authentic experience. The MCU makes it seem that superheroes having superbeauty is natural, while thereby showing the contrived performativity that goes behind the scene in turning these actors into paragons of beauty. The Boys on the other hand, is self-aware and shows how all this beauty and muscle-building is pure performance, thereby being more authentic and forthright in its intentions. This is another way in which being ironic and self-aware can defuse some of the pretentiousness of performance for the sake of authenticity and thereby be considered more authentic.

When comparing The Boys to another famous superhero parody, Deadpool, we can instantly see how different they are. Kreuz and Roberts differentiate satire and parody by showing how parody tends more to self-referentiality, making fun of the conventions and themes of a genre, whereas satire tends to be sarcastically critical of events and ideas in the world around us. In this sense, parody is usually looking in and sarcasm looking out. From this characterization it is clear that Deadpool is a lot more parody than satire, whereas The Boys oscillates between the two, but veering more towards satire.

Deadpool is a great, amusing and funny movie, probably one of my favorites for Marvel standards (these are very low in my case, sorry MCU stans). However, Deadpool extracts a lot of its fun from the fact that it inverts superhero conventions on its head, making the anti-hero a foul-mouthed, self-referential jokester. Deadpool thrives on making references to other Marvel movies and ridiculing them, which makes this irony the enemy of self-seriousness and makes us laugh at the conventions we usually consume with earnestness. This shows that a parody like Deadpool for all its “edgy” humor, tends to be very tame, since it upholds the superhero genre through its dialectical parody. We leave Deadpool taking Wolverine less seriously, but also having a bit more respect for him. This is an ironic parody that feeds on the source material but ends up strengthening its mythos.

The Boys is both parody and satire in that it actually blows superhero conventions out of the water, while the same time making incisive commentaries on contemporary culture, capitalism, politics, religion, performative feminism and egalitarianism. When watching The Boys it becomes hard to look at any other superhero media with the same eyes. This is transformative irony, one that alters our perception of the authenticity and earnestness of a genre that has completely saturated media for the last decade.