writewhatistrue, in response to your excellent post about religion in the media, I have wracked my brain trying to come up with some recent film or television that doesn't fall under the stereotypes you listed and I find the closest examples I’ve found are all in recent superhero media.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Daredevil, in which the main character’s Catholic faith is an essential part of his character and his decisions--I have yet to actually watch it, but most of the people I’ve seen praising it are themselves Catholic, which seems to be a good sign.
While Man of Steel does not explicitly deal with religion, there’s a very clear and intentional thread of Christian imagery connecting Clark with Jesus in terms of Messianic significance, cumulating in a scene where he talks to a priest under a stained glass window of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. (Whether this connection was altogether satisfactory as a device is questionable; at no point is it taken to its logical conclusion--self-sacrifice for the good of humanity--and the fact that WB marketed the movie to Christian groups from the outset makes me a little cynical about their motives for its inclusion; still, there it is.)
And of course, The Avengers contains the beautiful bit of banter in which Captain America, heading out to confront Thor and Loki, replies to an objection that he can’t fight them because “they’re basically gods” by shooting back, “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.” It’s only a fleeting moment--if it were cut it wouldn’t affect anything--but what makes it satisfying is that it works on multiple levels. It’s at once a classic superhero one-liner and a characteristic perspective for Cap to take as a soldier from the World War II era. Yet it’s not a joke about how old-fashioned Steve is--as it might well have been in the hands of another filmmaker--but a confrontation of a modern point of view with an older one, in which it’s clear that the older perspective still has legitimacy and power.
I can’t say why it’s the superhero films that seem most of all to gravitate toward these themes. It could be that the endowment of ordinary man with superhuman powers implicitly invites such connections. But I think it’s still more likely that these sources--sources we’ve all grown up with--cling to an ideal of heroism which has long since been disposed of by other genres as irrelevant, an ideal in which the innocent must be protected, in which human life, even the villain’s life, is sacred (remember Superman’s longstanding vow--how outmoded it seems now--never to kill?), in which self-denial for the sake of the world has a glory of its own even when it’s messy and potentially fatal. This is the backbone of the superhero genre, and without its existence--even if only as a point of reference--the whole skeleton collapses. If the Marvel movies appear to be outstripping their darker, grittier DC counterparts by a mile and a half, I think it’s because they better encompass what C.S. Lewis, referring to youthful soldiers on the battlefield, called “a kind of gaity and wholeheartedness” which was, to him, “the natural accompaniment of courage.”
