In Defense of Navel-Gazing: A (Comprehensive?) Daredevil: Born Again Review
When I fell for Daredevil, I fell hard.
How could a cape-and-tights show make me feel this way? How could a character pulled from the melodrama of a â60s comic book speak to me like this? Hold the mirror up to nature and display the torture and human complexity of our own worldâin one populated by giant green monsters and magicians?
As fun as comic book media often is, Netflixâs Daredevil was different. Beautifully intelligent prestige television, in the lineage of The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. It was a drama and tragedy in the classical tradition. It touched me and said: âThe world is wild and beautiful, there is goodness and sorrow and pain and courage. That is what we owe each other. That is what we owe ourselves.â
After four years of cancellation (and a tumultuous creative overhaul), the Big Mouse brought on Dario Scardapane and tasked him with bringing Daredevil back. Like most, I was equal parts excited and apprehensive. Could Disney recapture that lightning in a bottle? Could they, like the ninjas of The Hand, resurrect this thing that meant so much to so many?Â
Well, resurrect it they did. And yetâlike Elektraâthe show came back wrong.
To be clear, Daredevil: Born Again is not a bad show. In fact, I even think itâs a good show. It sits with the best Marvel TV that Disney+ has to offer. But, in billing itself as a continuation of the Netflix show, Born Again invites comparisons to the originalâand therefore must be judged on a Daredevil-specific scale. And on this scale, the dropoff in quality is not just noticeable, but quite stark.
In an interview with SFX, just before Born Again aired, Scardapane made a comment that immediately sounded alarm bells. âThere is⌠a lot less navel-gazing than before,â he said of Born Again. âI just didnât want to hear characters grousing about their lot in life.â Born Again, he explained, would eschew the ânavel-gazingâ that represented the original âat its worst.â
I wasnât the only one with hackles raised at this comment. Countless threads and forums dissected the interview. Navel-gazing? we asked. You mean, interiority? Character study? Strong dialogue that reveals our own fears? The philosophical and spiritual discussions that defined the original show and built beautifully human and complex superheroes? That navel-gazing?
Surely it was a one-off comment, poorly worded, right?Â
Well, here we are, two seasons into the show. And, in the Born Again season 2 companion podcastâmore than a year after his original commentâScardapane has dug in his heels, using the term ânavel-gazingâ once again to dismissively comment on Matt Murdockâs role within the Daredevil world (13:35).
Unfortunately for all of us who love Daredevil, this contempt for the originalâfor what set it apartâis the driving creative philosophy behind Scardapaneâs Daredevil: Born Again.
Navel-GazingâGod Forbid Anyone Have Feelings
Our introduction to Matt Murdock in Netflix Daredevil is one of the strongest scenes in television. He sits in a softly lit confessional and tells us about his father. Soft-spoken, he reveals his deep-seated fears and the sins he cannot give up. The show takes its time, giving us three minutes for a single speech. Three minutes for a moment that could easily have been thirty seconds or less. It moves slowly, letting the audience sink into Mattâs psyche; we understand his vulnerability and his fear, and we understand how violence has woven into his soul. In three long minutesâall focused on his steady monologuingâwe come to understand Matt in a way no comic book show has ever done so well.
Navel-gazing, as Scardapane would put it.
This navel-gazingâwhich sets the pattern for the entire showâgives the story stakes and makes us care. It sets up a slow, steady pace which gives the show a uniquely intelligent feel. There is room to breathe; room for weight to collect, for audiences to understand and care. The deliberate pace invites the audiences into Daredevilâs world.Â
By contrast, Born Again moves at a constant breakneck speed. Its first scene, for example, is emblematic of the showâs pacing problems. No room for navel-gazing here! In only fifteen minutes, the audience is pulled through a series of flashing camera shots, rushed dialogue, several character introductions, a frantic fight scene, and the rushed (see also: cheap) death scene of a main character. All of this in fifteen minutes! Then, without giving the audience time to grieve, time to breathe, the show jumps forward a year in time and dives straight into the plot.
While this might have been attributed to the creative overhaul, the fact remains that season 2 continues at this breakneck pace. Scenes run short, jumping back to back into plot points with no room for reactions or downtime. Character-building momentsâlike Matt reacting to Karenâs arrest, or reuniting with Kirstin McDuffieâhave been cut entirely. Scenes feel rushed and weightless, and there is no time to build emotional stakes.
All to make room for action sequences and âhypeâ moments.Â
Action is the creed of Born Again: action above all else. To give the show its due, the results are spectacular fight scenes and breathtaking cinematic moments. But this action comes at the cost of interiority.
InteriorityâWho Are These People?
In prose writing, interiorityâa personâs inner world, the landscape of their thoughts and emotionsâis done through narration. Thereâs a lot of leeway in this; prose writers have a lot of open space to paint the emotional landscape of a character. Scriptwriters, on the other hand, have to be a lot more creative. They have to externalize a characterâs interiority. They can do this through speech, through the reactions of other actors, and through metaphor (using aesthetic filmmaking techniques). The audience, in other words, must see and hear it for that sense of interiority to come through.
Netflix Daredevil did this extremely well; there were quite a few monologues and dialogues that, in addition to being almost poetic (a beautiful thing in a comic book show, poesy) beautifully illustrated the characterâs inner world. Sometimes the actors would say exactly what was on a characterâs mind; sometimes they would deliberately leave things out and the score, cinematography, and other actors would fill in the space. For example, the moody billboard lighting in Mattâs apartment: it suggests a colorful, ever-shifting, uniquely beautiful view of the worldâan atmospheric way of âseeingâ for a man who can see nothing.Â
Or, if we want to look at a dialogue example, take the scene with Matt and Karen in episode 1. Matt takes off his glassesâsuggesting his instinctive vulnerability toward Karenâand tells her about his blindness, ending by telling her that heâd âgive anything to see the sky one more time.â And in the following beat, Charlie Cox and Deborah Ann Woll are quiet for a moment, giving the scene and the moment time to breathe. They react off each other, and in this quiet moment, their interior feelings are illustrated. The writers and showrunners gave Daredevil the time and space it neededâall for navel-gazing.
But who needs that, right?
Born Again, though, leaves no room for interiority. There is simply no time; most scenes move too quickly for us to get a bead on exactly what a character is thinking. Instead, characters have dialogue that serves the plot first and foremost. In the interest of efficiency, word economy, and action, the show focuses on the external world of the plot, and leaves us with little to no character study.Â
There are exceptions to this, of course. Daniel Blake, for example, has a rich inner life that we see transform over the course of this show. Wilson Fiskâs inner grief for Vanessa is palpable in each moment heâs on screen. And Benjamin Poindexter stands out as the highlight of the show, with his inner motivations driving his character and pulling the audience deep into his psyche. However, they are exceptions that prove the rule. And nowhere is the lack of interiority as egregious as it is with the showâs protagonistâMatthew Murdock.Â
For the titular superhero, Matt has had very little screentime. He is onscreen an average of 22% of the time, with the lowest episode percentage at 16%. This seems to be a reaction to season 1 critiques: most agreed that the side characters were very underdeveloped. But rather than lengthening the episodes or paring the focus down to a few key characters, Scardapane overcorrected hard. The end result is a seasonâa season where Daredevil makes the most important choice of his lifeâwith very little Matt Murdock.
But his screentime isnât the only absence weâre dealing with here. There is also an absence of what makes Matt Murdock Matt Murdock. As a character, the Matt we knew from the Netflix days is nearly gone, replaced with an icon. A symbol or image, the emblem of Daredevil, without the well-rounded humanity weâre so used to.
Both Matt Murdock and Daredevil have become mythologized; they are larger-than life, almost flanderized versions of themselves. Without the time for navel-gazing, there is no time for Matt Murdock. There is so little subtlety left; his leadership, his religion, his savior complex all feel largely aesthetic, rather than chapters in a complex character study. Scardapane seems more interested in the iconography of Daredevil as a figure than in the psychological and spiritual conditions of superheroism.
The limited screentime and lack of interiority lead to a wide psychic distance between Matt and the audience. In fact, if I hadnât come into the show already in love with Matt Murdock as a character, I donât know that Iâd care much about him at all. The writers just didnât put in the necessary work to invest us in their own protagonist.Â
What Exactly Is Born Again?
Ultimately, Born Again cannot decide what kind of show it wants to be. Is it a new show, practically divorced from the original? Or is it a direct continuation and spiritual successor? Stylistically and aesthetically, itâs new. Tonally, itâs trying to be both, and comes off as mismatched. The writing style seems to mimic the Netflix show while fundamentally misunderstanding what made it great.
Born Again relies on nostalgia bait, while selectively revising and ignoring the continuity. Character traitsâlike Foggyâs desire for money, and Mattâs (somewhat self-righteous) fixation with morality over legalityâare retconned for the sake of plot convenience. Characters like Matt and Karen have changed and grown from Netflixâs Daredevil, but Born Again is uninterested in showing us how they got there. Born Again invites comparison to the original all while failing to include the special ingredient that set Daredevil apart. The ingredient that Scardapane so contemptuously referred to as ânavel-gazing.â
Netflix Daredevil elevated the superhero genre into something thoughtful, exploratory, and artistic. Its fingerprints can be seen in a lot of superhero media since then, like The Batman, Moon Knight, and The Penguin. But the show that should have followed most closely in that legacy, Daredevil: Born Again, has fallen back into the pool of average (albeit fun) cape shows. It has lost what made Daredevil so special.
In rejecting navel-gazing, Dario Scardapane has rejected the very soul of Daredevil.
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