Some final battles cannot be won without the superhero giving the greatest of sacrifices: their life in exchange for the well-being of those they protect.
Even though, of course, most superheroes won’t die or disappear permanently after a final sacrifice. It’s probably better that we call it a “final“ sacrifice, since the superhero world is full of superheroes (and villains) consistently reborn or mysteriously returned from death.
This season’s Arrow midseason finale is one such event: Oliver Queen/The Arrow (Stephen Amell) was pretty obviously killed by Ra’s al Ghul (Matt Nable), yet the second half of season 3 has found Oliver recovering and returned to Starling City to rejoin his team.
At the end of the Battle of New York in The Avengers (2012), Iron Man chooses to fly an incoming nuclear bomb into the Tesseract portal, nearly sacrificing himself, rather than allow it to explode in Manhattan. Film still from The Avengers. Image source: http://www.rellimzone.com/images/movies/the-avengers-2012-10.jpg
But what’s the point of a final sacrifice if it isn’t actually…final? Doesn’t returning from death undermine the nobility and significance of the superhero giving their life in the first place? I’ve wondered a lot about this conundrum, so I’ll refer you to a post I wrote last September: “They’re alive! (Again!)”: Superheroes, Sci-fi, and Death as Plot Device.
The easy answer to spoiled final sacrifices is commercial – superhero story producers don’t want to eliminate the source of their story (and income), so they find a way (however implausible) to return the superhero to life.
A neat side effect is the development of a body of “magical theory” of sorts: a grab bag of commonly used tricks and explanations for the superhero’s survival of a supposedly final sacrifice. While these facets of superhero stories are heavily on the supernatural end of the spectrum, they do add a magical flavor to crime and action-driven plots.
Furthermore, the ability to return from death – regardless of its being commercial, narrative, or a combination of reasons – connects superheroes to their roots as Greek demi-gods and other semi-divine, super-human beings. If you peek into the history of where the first superhero characters came from (namely ancient myths), maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that final sacrifices are rarely final.
We can still keep the term “final sacrifice,” though, as it connects an instance of supreme self-sacrifice to the Final Battle that requires it.
Next post on Friday 2/27/15. “The Superheroic Journey, Part 8 of 8.” This is it – the Return to Glory, the final stage of our journey through the life of a modern-day film superhero. I’ll also offer some concluding comments on how the various stages of the journey are used together in contemporary film and TV.
Read the previous post, “Part 6: The Final Battle,” or go on to “Part 8: The Return to Glory.”
Time Lords, Superheroes, and Brave New Worlds 