Hegelian Tragedy for The Homelander

The following is a philosophical analysis in the pop-culture space. I like the overall concept and I might write a couple more in the future. Enjoy! 

Amazon Prime’s The Boys has become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon – it came out towards the end of a long-running global Marvel fever in 2019, and completely flipped their altruistic (admittedly well-worn) formula on its head. With the fourth season currently underway, we have had enough time to see the birth and evolution of arguably one of the most terrifying villain characters in recent television history: the Homelander.

I do not want to focus on the technical aspects of writing a good villain, nor do I care much about the in-universe canon elements – believe me, there are experts on the Internet who could do a much better job writing about that than me. However, on trying to analyze Homelander’s psyche, I have come to realize a particularly interesting perspective to do exactly that, and it comes from classical German philosophy: Hegel’s phenomenology, and more specifically his Master-Slave Dialectic.

In this post, I will try to put the significant philosophical ideas of the dialectic as best as I can understand them, and discuss the Homelander’s character alongside it, with the aim of portraying him as a classic example of the (unfortunate?) master in Hegel’s dialectic.

We start with Hegel’s basic phenomenology, a branch of philosophy he developed early on in his life. His work went on to influence important figures such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. He published the “Phenomenology of Spirit” in 1781 as an ambitious re-thinking of metaphysics in the form of a journey that takes the reader from the lowest levels of human consciousness to an end-point of ‘Absolute Knowing’, discussing deeply existential ideas about certainty, perception, and human interaction along the way. It has been interpreted in several different ways by different people, making it difficult to explain its overall intention. For our purposes, in terms of pure philosophical argument, it places emphasis on the human as a real, physical, historical animal, thrown into the real, physical world with the aim of deciphering it, and thus discovering their own consciousness as a part of it and in relation to it. Doing this conceptually entails the grating patience and effort to break down not only our idea of what it means for something to ‘exist’, but also how we define our own existence, more broadly, the idea of the ‘truth-in-itself’: Hegel’s ‘Geist’.

A big part of the self-introspection in Hegel’s mission is discussed via the nuance between ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-consciousness’, and the master-slave dialectic is ultimately a personification of what happens when two self-consciousnesses meet each other. Before that, we must understand that, for a Hegelian, to be ‘conscious’ of an external object means to identify it as a collection of ‘thing-ness’ attributes (e.g. the ‘cold-ness’ of a refrigerator, etc.). Since this is defined entirely in terms of our perception, everything that exists must be perceived. By extension, all that exists only exists through perception; if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, the tree might as well not exist to a classic Hegelian! Of course, this seems bold without the slow elevation of the abstraction inherent in re-framing the world via ‘thing-in-itself’ in, but it makes sense an extremist logical end-point to this sort of argument.

Now, the flip-side to this perceived existence arises when a person, a possessor of self-consciousness, encounters not an object, but another person who also possesses self-consciousness. Since existence is now defined as a primarily dependent property (i.e., perception), the possessor of self-consciousness must depend on ‘the other’ to acquire a sense of self-certainty; he must gain the acknowledgement of the other person that they exist – they need to be recognized. When we come across an object, we gain self-certainty by proving mastery over it – we turn a tree into paper for writing, we negate its natural existence to satisfy our desires. Similarly, two people engage in a struggle of recognition in this way, and Hegel says that this struggle historically results in one person winning over the other and gaining that self-certainty to satisfy their self-consciousness, while the other becomes a bondsman to the victor and surrenders their idea of self-consciousness in fear of their life.

Does this sound familiar? A possessor of self-consciousness with a nearly obsessive need for recognition, ultimately imposing their mastery onto the entire world? Only in the case of Homelander, the victor is a super-powered Frankenstein-like creation of the world itself, one which eventually slips out of control to succumb to the inevitable human desires of acknowledgment. The turning point of this awakening is very clear: the iconic “I’m Better” speech in Season 3, Episode 2:

“I don't make mistakes, I'm not like the rest of you, I'm stronger, I'm smarter, I'm better, I AM BETTER. I'm not some weak-kneed fucking crybaby that goes around fucking apologizing all the time and why the fuck would you want me to be? All my life people have tried to control me, rich people, powerful people, tried to muzzle me, cancel me, keep me impotent and obedient like I'm a fucking puppet. And you know what it worked, Because I allowed it to work … I am done being persecuted for my strength, You should be thanking Christ that I am who I am, because you need me, you need me to save you, You Do, I am the only one who possibly can. You're not the real heroes, I am the real hero, I am the real hero”

Something interesting happens here – Homelander goes from being a slave bound to Vought International, to letting his desire for freedom overtake him, and declaring his intent to enter the historic Hegelian struggle for validating his self-consciousness. This may seem weird to say, considering that he is, after all, a superhero – he has always had the physical power to destroy and conquer not only the masses, but the billionaires who created him and his image. However, the bonds of his slavery were contingent on mental conditioning – he was brainwashed into believing that his purpose was to obey his superiors, to be a puppet for the corporate and political elites. Every single action was to be based on an external agenda, never questioning those actions on the basis of personal motivations or desires – those were never meant to exist in the first place. However, it is not that easy to wash away such fundamental human objectives, and it is the failure of this brainwashing which motivates Homelander to realize the cruelty he was subjected to in his past, to villainize those who created him, and to masochistically engage in violence and political control.

We know how powerful he is, we know his manipulative capabilities, and we know that he will always get what he wants. However, amidst all the fear and helplessness that his world feels whenever he appears, the Homelander manages to elicit another emotion in my eyes, the distanced observer – pity. How? Perhaps you have felt the same, but it is a bit difficult to explain. This brings us to the titular realization of this analysis – Homelander follows the archetype of the master just as Hegel classically describes, and it turns out that it is… a pretty tragic role to play.

The twist in Hegel’s dialectic occurs gradually, a bit after one person has established themselves as the master and subordinated the other to slavery. The master, having attained his validation, sees themselves as a God with nothing more to conquer. Therefore, the master misses out on a critical realization needed to reach a higher level of consciousness – the finiteness of his being. The slave, on the other hand, “… being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change around Into the real and true independence.” (Hegel, p.407)

Are you beginning to see the problem for the master here? There is a grander loss buried in the subtext of the master, and a grander victory buried in that of the slave. Moreover, the master slowly realizes that he is completely reliant on the slave both for his sense-certainty as well his products; there is no chance of self-reflection through labor.

Let us bring this into Homelander’s situation. What happens when a God-like being inevitably follows the course of human nature, and is eventually met with the master’s sinking realization? This is the philosophical struggle within Homelander: a massive disparity between the realizable power to establish mastery, and an absence of the understanding of true consciousness itself.

The dynamic of the slave plays out pretty straightforwardly in The Boys’ universe: the public masses are useless in Homelander’s eyes, but they are important to keep alive and in his favor because their votes decide everything. The people hold the power deemed necessary by Homelander’s puppeteers, and this is why we see him attempting to portray a publicizable persona in the first place. It is hard to imagine any of it mattering to him personally at all. What is interesting to see is Homelander’s confession of his situation as the master. In Season 4 Ep. 1, his conversation with Sister Sage, a political savant who he goes on recruit, serves this exact purpose (emphasis mine):

God, I’ve spent my life scaling to the peak of-of Vought.

It’s all I ever wanted. And-and… now that I have it…

[Sage] You’re still not happy?

I save people, they cheer. I fucking kill people, they cheer.

It’s meaningless.

Humans are nothing. They’re less than nothing.

They’re just toys for my amusement.

And yet they control everything.

It’s unnatural.

What kind of legacy am I gonna leave to my son?

A shithole country in a shithole world?

Or something better?

There we go. Homelander knows the futility in his position, and only he can truly understand it: a God at the mercy of the inconsequential speck. Even with the literal power to fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes and destroy them in an instant, the best he can do is quietly enter a convoluted system to gain their control. He knows he is reliant on them for his power, and the idea of a super-powered entity meticulously dealing with the hubris of human politics is textbook absurdity. One could argue that that is the point of the show: to present the idea that politics is a black-hole that even super-powers cannot elude.

Whichever way one may choose to interpret it, it is easy to see that there’s a lot more to Homelander’s character development than meets the eye, and I found it interesting that his character reads as a caricature of the tragic master in Hegel’s age-old philosophy.

Thank you so much for reading! Hope you all enjoyed it. See you for the next post about whatever I choose to write!

SOURCES:

• Hegel Explained: The Master-Slave Dialectic (an excellent explanation of the dialetic from one of my favorite philosophy youtube channels)
• Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic: the search for self-consciousness
• The Boys script snippets from wherever I could find on the Internet