ggg

Homelander demand love and recognition from the very one he desires/wants to destroy and can do it even accidentally. The world is hateful to him, yet there is no other world. His growth would have sounded like: "I know that I can only be feared! But strength is merely a part of me, not my limit…"; and yet he relied on that strength as the last bulwark of reality… the reality of madness. His inability to laugh, his inability to take Madelyn fear as his own (like “It’s I who is afraid of her, I am scared") is a catastrophic failure of self‑knowledge, one that levels all supes with one another. It is always the viewer who laughs, never the hero, because if he were to realise it, he would have stepped out of the game… out of Kripke's game. I find it amusing that long before the finale Kripke and his team deemed Homelander so pitiful. What distinguishes him from The Deep? Nothing but his superior strength. Ah

Strength and violence are tacitly accepted by nearly everyone in the boys as the real way to "solve problems" and it turns out like the only way to cope with complexity (much like nuclear weapons) when Thought has long ceased to solve anything (only algorithm and force remain). Kripke is biting his own tail imagining that he is biting the tail of Trump and despicable militarism? and capitalism itself? But Kripke's victory crowned by the humiliation of Homelander is a soap bubble in the truth. (Butcher's death deserves a separate discussion… what was that, anyway?) The writing team, with a single Paternal gesture (remember that crowbar pressed to the forehead), obliterated all subjectively of the character (see my post "We Lost Homelander"). This led to the collapse of psychic space. As viewers, we were gifted with degradation that is nothing but emptiness. Maybe supes should never represent what we call “human”.

Should we sympathise with Homelander?? Or we should view him as nothing and mock his pitiful situation and pathetic unchanging essence bequeathed to us? There is no answer and never will be; on the surface this would mean the finale succeeded and captures the ambiguity and complexity of moral judgment and attitude much like it was with Walter White. But in reality it is the opposite:

Homelander’s death was nothing but an escape from reflection.

For four seasons we have watched the formation of Homelander’s subjectivity (such as it is, but still subjectivity), his ridiculous and naive attempts to overspend power in a system that forced him to suffer and persecutes him (he suffers like any pathological narcissist or psychotic projecting his massive anger onto the world). He wants to control Vought and as we know the world. He is a product of Vought but also its son who openly asserts his right to paternal authority, while secretly and deeply needing a Mother figure for confirmation of his own existence in the real. It seems to him that by physically getting rid of all "obstacles" including his own vulnerability as the main obstacle, he will gain the freedom to be who he is without the Other. This is, of course, a twisted logic because it leads to psychic collapse. The void becomes unbearable and Madelyn returns in the form of a hallucination. Homelander has no life without such delusions because he is dealing with a void that has even acquired its own symbolic image in the series (the laboratory). Apparently, the writers had no intention of proving the independence of the pathology of narcissism from any circumstances whatsoever, since they showed us the total and violent isolation of a child with superpowers that terrify adults. But why?

a source: Pinterest

For some reason we have seen John in a bad room, and THE blanket 🥺. Are they appealing to our capacity for empathy here? For some reason we’ve gotten to know the conditions under which Homelander’s psyche was formed, that is, it was raped by laboratory experiments including psychological ones. For some reason, we’ve seen the mirror scenes and have been witnesses of his complicated relationships with Ryan. That means we have a wealth of psychological knowledge (a personal history) that according to the «logic» of the End carries no weight, no significance, emotional or otherwise.

All of this prepares us for something that ultimately did not happen: Homelander was not allowed to perform himself completely. They didn’t just take away his powers! (in season 5 he is weaker then ever and that’s nonsense) but they took away his freedom, the freedom to give a symbolic answer to the world that spawned him even if that answer comes in the form of global collapse when the world has to be overtaken by emptiness of narcissistic delirium. He didn’t answer at all. He could have destroyed the planet. We know it’s fiction, not reality, so destroying the planet would have been a metaphor for the collapse of Vought or, to be honest, the fulfillment of Vought’s true desire.

Why make him immortal? Kripke may have wanted to put an end to Vought but he castrated Homelander — not the system - while Vought’s desire will live forever, won’t it? This is Kripke’s unconscious cowardice or simply blindness. Psychosis is the only language Vought understands. Vought is psychotic, and its creation — the most perfect — is also the only weapon against it. Homelander is not stupid enough to stop resisting even if this is a special kind of resistance — affective, even hysterical… but how else do you respond to such a System? Vought was a monster and remains one. Homelander’s psychotic reality did not go beyond the Oval Office. In the end, we get a beaten-to-death Homelander and a void of meaning, as always. Worse: we get the void of death (child’s death?) which is more terrifying and at the same time simpler than any outcome they could have come up with.

It is no coincidence that her eyes are endowed with symbolic meaning in the context of their "complicated, intimate.." bond. It is her eyes that he burns with lasers reaching the brain that manipulated him with such phenomenal skill and power. Madelyn owns his apologies (“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” – three times!), his childish, very innocent smiles, his tears and his orgasmes (infantile sexuality). I'm sure he was afraid of her and felt extremely vulnerable around her. He was only sure of himself when she was wearing a lot of fucking explosives... Yes, she lied to him about his son. I think the reason they hid his son was for fear of repeating the greatest mistake (failure): they raised Homelander in a laboratory. But if we give a family to Ryan, isolate him from everything that can provoke an aggressive response, we will not get a second Homelander. Moreover, Homelander should not be allowed to raise his son like his own kind! That is, we can't let him get close to Ryan. Homelander doesn't "blame" Madelyn for this lie, he doesn't kill her because of it. The more important thing is that he realized that her words like “I love you I swear you means everything to me” or “I’m proud of you…” were “full of shit”. After all, his fundamental desire is to please, to be good enough, yes, you can say he wanted to be loved and this is the most important thing, but It would be more accurate to say that he wants to be lied to. Homelander as he really is (a monster) was created by humans. If people don't lie to him, they will only be afraid. It cannot be otherwise: there is no love for him in the whole human world, there is no acceptance without fear, and fear is something that does not agree with love, the real love does not start with fear. The relationship with Stormfront was a narcissistic extension, very successful though. They were based on his self-image (god and monster), but it did not explore his vulnerable sides, the depths. Madelyn (as a foster mother) was essentially taking care of him, her lies were a balm that tied together the torn parts of his psyche. He could get satisfaction in which his aggressive impulses were not involved, such as in a sex scene with her. This is an illustration of his form of existence that he rejects by killing Madelyn mistaking it for false, for imposed, although it constituted him. Her death is the beginning of his end. His dream of a family was a narcissistic castle where he could hide as was his relationship with Stormfront. And although he has never stopped feeling those vulnerable parts of himself (which reacted especially painfully to Ryan), he has considered them pathetic since her death. He hates himself. It hurts.

Brett Martin:

“He’s an immensely physical actor, almost a clown: sometimes a funny clown; other times a very scary clown indeed. The most memorable Walter White moments could almost take place in a silent film: Walt sitting by his stagnant pool, flicking lit matches onto its surface; Walt watching as Gus Fring slits a henchman’s throat with a box cutter; Walt fixing himself lunch. The man makes a sandwich like Chaplin roller-skated.

“He’s telepathic,” Gilligan says. “I can’t tell you how much dialogue we’ve cut out of this show over the years in the editing room, stuff that we wrote and really liked, that when we got to the editing room and we said to ourselves, ‘You know, we don’t need this line. It’s not necessary, because I see exactly what he’s thinking.’”

That natural style is perfectly in keeping with a show that has always placed the highest value on visual storytelling, that revels in the physical world of significant objects and chemical processes.”