echo The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen first made his mark in the debut of a comic co-developed by Stan Lee and artist Bill Everett in the 1960s. Earlier conceptualizations of the vigilante had his costume in bright colors – yellow, black and red reminiscent of acrobatic attire – and it largely had the significance of being quite literally cut from his father’s boxing robes. However, Daredevil existed as a niche for the most part. It was not until Frank Miller’s run of the comics that the character was reinvented in an extraordinary way. His defining of the genre was foundational for much of the mythos, and was integral in cementing Daredevil as he is known to this day.
So when Netflix premiered Daredevil as a television series in 2015, it came with many of the elements that were refreshingly distinct in the superhero genre. It shied away from the standard template of universe-altering stakes and ‘virtuous’ heroes, choosing instead to explore facets of the real world and the internal struggle that everyone falls victim to. It interleaved ethical complexities into the human condition, and the result was a rich tapestry of storytelling that dared to cross the line very few would.
Daredevil (Season 1, Episode 2 – Cut Man)
Right off the bat, the series does a marvellous job in setting up the stakes. It’s gritty, sharp, and packs an emotional punch from the very first scene. And while the audience is left reeling, it follows up with another devastating right-hook – every scene thereafter is carried by such a raw sense of vulnerability, daring you to wear those same shoes, and posing the question of whether you’d have done the same. Yes, you think. Then you watch the consequences play out. The cost hammered in. And you are forced to redefine what doing the ‘right thing’ entails.
The dual identity of Matthew Murdock as a blind lawyer by day and vigilante by night is the central core of the show. The actor Charlie Cox masterfully portrays his character as a result of that dichotomy – painting the picture of a man who thrives within the extremes and contradictions, but ultimately forced to live at an impasse. It’s that collision between moral righteousness and savage retribution, a fractured psyche caught within the push-and-pull of an intersection where the lines don’t meet.
Daredevil thrives in the visual grimness of flickering bulbs and a city teetering in the dark – in the crevasses of rain-slicked rooftops and peeling hallways, overcast by the silhouette of a church steeple where the Devil perches, a solitary figure of the night. The fight choreography is as laden with gravitas as the narrative it drives. It’s brutal and unyielding, yet utterly realistic as it etches exhaustion into every blow.
Intriguingly, it is also made evident Matt Murdock spectacularly lacks any qualms of getting his hands dirty. Whilst the superhero genre tends to bring up the dilemma of moral righteousness, Daredevil dispels that notion to instead exercise cold practicality. He won’t cross his self-imposed ‘no-killing’ rule but anything else is fair game. For instance, by the second episode itself, he’ll have dropped a fire extinguisher on a man from several floors up and proceeded to torture him in order to learn the location of a trafficked child – going so far as to dig a blade under his captive’s eye and into the trigeminal nerve. The gamble pays off. It’s a bold move for Marvel.
Daredevil (Season 1, Episode 10 – Nelson v. Murdock)
Justice is blind. The allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems stem from Greco-Roman origins. It’s a powerful image – Lady Justice clad in a blindfold, sword and scale in hand, a vision symbolic of human ordinance. It’s a comparison the show doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of, pairing poignancy, significance and clever wit in complement to the character of Matt Murdock. But where there is poise and impartiality to one, there are bruises, blood and harrowingly human subjectivity to the other. The ideal is removed. Reality remains, widowed.
Daredevil perfectly illustrates a broader conflict here – the tenuous line between justice and vengeance, and the faith in a system of equity that is inherently unjust. In this scenario, what is the ‘correct’ course of action? Inarguably, the legal system itself continues to be corrupted by those in power. Abuse of influence, wealth and resources relentlessly tip the scales, pitting grains of sand against windmills. But as Matt himself would later claim, bittersweet, the court is the closest to justice any of us will ever get.
The catharsis of any story is in the emotional release. The psychological driving force behind our love of superheroes lies therein three parts – escapism, power fantasies and the human need for heroes. Feelings, thought patterns, belief systems and viewpoints connect a person to the hero they identify the strongest with. Superman is a symbol of hope and justice, created by Siegel and Schuster in the midst of the Great Depression and the looming threat of World War II. Batman is resilience, flesh and blood, self-appointed protector of the night.
Daredevil embodies the cracks in the human psyche, cracks in the legal system. There is a resonance to his struggle as it relates back to us. Matt Murdock is a character simultaneously living in every stage of grief at once, repeatedly responding to loss the only way he knows how – with the anger that runs hot inside of him and his knuckles bruised and bloody. If the language the world spoke was violence, would you not speak the same? An argument can be placed that whilst justice is fair, revenge perpetuates the cycle. But define ‘fair’. It has never been a guaranteed paragon.
There is a quote in the show that is both foundational and beloved to Matt Murdock – Thurgood Marshall states, “We must dissent from indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away.” The story twists this value in beautifully, creating one of the most compelling arguments for vigilantism.
Daredevil (Season 1, Episode 7 – Stick)
The same accident that took Matt’s sight also heightened the rest of his senses to extraordinary levels. Micro-changes in temperature and vibrations fluctuate around him, mixing overlays of smells and sounds to form an ‘impressionistic painting’ – a world on fire. He does not have earth-shattering power. But he hears everything, from the cacophony of prayers echoing against church walls to the cries of children in the night. He is urged by the notion of action, unable to stand idly by.
At the same time, he must act in the capacity of a lawyer. It is clear he views the calling as irrevocable as the suit he dons in the dark. He knows that he is a cog in an imperfect system. He is acutely aware of the flaws, yet he places his belief in it. Then the trigger point is provoked by an injustice he does everything right to rectify and still fails – there is a little girl down the block being abused, and he cannot be impervious to her pain. It spurs him to take justice into his own hands.
However, it should be kept in mind that this is hardly his only motivation. There is a nearly glacial depth to the layers that make up Matt Murdock. This is where the two halves of his identities collide, a mirror maze of antagonistic truths that is internalized. He abides by the law. He breaks it. He thrives in courtroom poise and elocution. He gets blood on his hands. He is firm in his Catholic faith. He takes the Devil’s mantle. He will not kill. He will break bones. He is gentle. He is angry. He seeks the ideal of justice. He revels in violence.
One thing Daredevil does exceptionally well is the realistic ramifications of its hero’s actions. It makes no secret of the toll Matt’s double life demands of him, and showcases the complexity behind the decisions he makes in pursuit of vigilantism. Balance is not easy. He prioritizes one over the other and on more than a single occasion, ends up pushing away much of his support system. Between the lying, bouts of guilt and distraction, he is left in a precarious state. He sacrifices Matt Murdock for the Devil. Then vice versa. Either scenario does not leave him in an optimistic place.
Daredevil (Season 3, Episode 7 – Aftermath)
In a sense, part of the appeal is that Daredevil is not untouchable. He is vulnerable and flawed, striving to conquer the darkness of both the city and himself, and he does not always remain unscathed. He is human, and it is in human nature to fall, to break, to weep, to hurt, to bleed, but above all, to get back up again. Victory etches more than its fair share of scars. The odds are pitted against him. This is a man who has long since hit rock bottom, picked up a shovel, and rather impossibly continued digging. However his strength is exemplified by the resilience he portrays – quietly relentless, no matter how many emotionally or physically devastating hits he takes.
Another fascinating aspect is the ethical code Matt forms in response to his suppressed emotions and unresolved trauma. There’s something undeniably tragic about the near inescapability of his fate – the memory of his grandmother’s words delineating him, careful of the Murdock boys. They’ve got the Devil in ‘em. It is in his fierce desire for righteous justice. It is in the violence of his father in the boxing ring. It is the savagery hibernating in his own blood. The moment he gives in, he lets the Devil out. Amplified with the cascade of events in his life, he settles on a grim, unflinching acceptance of what he believes already exists inside of him – the creature scratching to get free.
Viewing his actions as compulsion – that dependence on putting on the mask, scouring the night to validate his calling – can curiously enough be described as a form of addiction. He repeats the pattern even as it interferes catastrophically with his civilian life, engaging in behavior that rewards that ‘high’, despite the substantial harm it causes him and the others around. Twice he tries to set aside the suit, but ends up experiencing what is remarkably similar to withdrawal symptoms. The tragedy is that he can’t stop. It is a part of his disposition intrinsically and utterly tied into identity.
Daredevil (Season 3, Episode 2 – Please)
Synchronously, Matt is wholly aware of the right and wrong nature of his actions. The exquisite twist is that he is soberly resigned to the matter of getting his hands dirty because he views passivity as a far worse sin. Therefore he dissents from indifference and apathy. It is significant that he sought forgiveness, not penance, long before he ever trespassed in the night. The grey shades are such an unapologetic tenet of his character. This is the distinction of Daredevil – his altruistic motivations are not synonymous with leniency.
A warning counselled by Father Lantom, a priest and confidante who is aware of Matt’s alter-identity, is that another man’s evil does not make you good. It begs the famous philosophical question of whether the ends justify the means, and carries the case of deontology v. utilitarianism into the proverbial court. There is a line that Matt stubbornly refuses to cross and similar to Batman, he harbours a staunch no-kill policy. Enter the Punisher.
Daredevil (Season 2, Episode 9 – Seven Minutes in Heaven)
Frank Castle is the devastating promise of who Matt can rapidly devolve into, once there is enough of a push. No polish. No hesitation. He embodies the fantasy of raw base instinct – doling out justice in a gruesomely permanent manner, a balm to the catastrophic wrong he suffered with the slaughter of his family. He is a soldier, triggered into retribution and enforcing his conviction of a perverse duty. The second season does a phenomenal job in crafting Castle as a narrative foil, thinning the divide between both vigilantes and explicitly provoking a clash between ideologies.
You hit ‘em and they get back up. I hit ‘em and they stay down. Second chances are held in vastly different regards by Daredevil and the Punisher – Matt has to have faith in redemption, while Frank cannot risk another chance for the perpetrator to hurt more people. They are alike and oppositionally polar in this respect. Matt enacts the authority of judge and jury. Frank simply adds the role of executioner to his resume.
It is refreshing that neither harbour delusion to the truth of their own fundamental character. During the Punisher’s infamous trial, Frank explodes and tears down his own defense when his actions are twisted to sound as instability and a response to the trauma he was subjected to. He remains damn well aware of what he did. He parallels Matt in the surrender towards darker instincts, but he does not want any tandem to his footsteps. This is his burden. His coping mechanism. A world operating on his logic is not what he truly wants. When Matt suggests breaking his own ethics, just once, Frank vehemently rebukes it.
The Punisher is intrinsically the creation of a system rife with fallibility. He exemplifies the extremity of taking the law into one’s own hands, and in doing so becomes susceptible to making some of the same mistakes the judicial enforcement system does – divorcing from impartiality and serving disproportionate brutality in the guise of justice. He is right about one thing though, and that is the factor of institutional corruption. DC addresses this issue similarly in Batman, except that there is greater frustration over the tackling of the latter.
Perhaps the reason for little leeway in the comparison between Matt Murdock and Bruce Wayne is a result of the positional power each occupies. In both his civilian and vigilante life, Batman commands a considerable amount of resources and influence. In a sense, his affluence marks him as a part of that system – or at the very least, raises the threshold of his culpability. There is no definitive end to the cycle of pain and violence under his rule. Arkham remains a revolving door. Does his abidance of procedure in a defiantly flawed system make him equally complicit?
Just a tangential observation: Red Hood is cathartic, not as a result of the Punisher-type fantasy he fulfills, but because he is the screaming voice of victimized bones brought back to life. The dead that does not stay that way. Jason Todd comes back wrong into a world that is wrong, unavenged and remembered in a false light, so he cuts a bloody swathe to expose the wound inside and force the living to look at him. He is the mistake that refuses to stay buried. He is the corpse you look into the desecrated eyes of. He is the explicit consequence of Batman’s choices.
Daredevil (Season 1, Episode 3 – Rabbit in a Snowstorm)
Likewise, the brawl of philosophical beliefs and world views in Daredevil is hardly limited to a handful of characters. Every shade of personal conviction and value is anatomized. Foggy Nelson steadfastly acts in a moral, law-abiding capacity. Karen Page personifies tenacity and the voracity for truth above all else. Ray Nadeem pivotally condemns himself with the price of doing the right thing. At the same time, a powerful contender to the depth of Matt’s complexity is undoubtedly Wilson Fisk.
There is a strangely sympathetic air to Fisk’s plight even in the role of antagonist. He functions in a monstrous capability, but his speech and responses are oddly undercut by human magnitude. He seeks control from the shadows until the moment he steps into the light – as he often proclaims, a ‘changed man’ after meeting his beloved Vanessa. A strange parallel exists in the mechanisms of how they justify inflicting pain. Fisk believes himself utilitarian, that he only does what is necessary to achieve his vision of the greater good. He sees himself as a savior, one who does not enjoy brutality but simply does what must be. He is, ironically, blind to his own chilling cruelty and self-serving nature.
By contrast, Matt readily admits gratification over hurting those he views as ‘deserving’ of his anger. It is the inversion of pragmatism set against moral sadism, and the show is taut with the flux of these two characters colliding spectacularly. Justification is rampant on both ends and the fact that the term ‘dance with the Devil’ applies simultaneously is an apt reminder of the gripping entanglement. The psychological chess match of their relationship is the narrative focal point, and strikingly drives the point of the antithetical roles Fisk and Matt serve.
Daredevil (Season 3, Episode 1 – Resurrection)
Matt Murdock’s arc is furthermore synchronized with key principles of his Catholic faith. It is a nuanced depiction that is beautifully fleshed out – profound, complex, painful and rewarding in its own right. It is the grounding lens in which Matt questions the nature of sin, violence and redemption. And to a degree, Daredevil does personify certain Christian motifs in the manifestation of compassion, justice and the fight against evil. Nevertheless, it does not shy away from the hard questions – for instance, the show deliberates, why does God let bad things happen to good people?
Faith and hope can be difficult to keep in a damaged world. In Matt’s perspective, his enhanced senses are a calling from God. He hears every prayer and plea, and starts to believe that it is his divine purpose to answer these cries. There is nearly a biblical overlay to the message of doing the right thing in times of evil. But then Matt eventually asks why God also put the devil in him, in his heart, in his soul, clawing to be let out. To some, this is not an unfamiliar turmoil.
The church is not filled with saints. Every single one of us is inherently broken and falls short of the mark. It is the desire to continually pursue the grace of God that characterizes faith. Matt exemplifies this in the organic struggle of his belief. The start of the third season was rather heavy-handed with the imagery of Lazarus even as the circumstances appeared anything but – his body and spirit was broken, and for all intents and purposes, ‘Matt Murdock’ was dead. With his senses impaired, grieving a devastating loss, he turns away from God. He is acerbic as he recounts the story of Job, projecting himself into the proverb he believes is of a loyal servant abandoned by the God he loved.
Disoriented by a profound sense of betrayal, he promises, I’d rather die as the devil than live as Matt Murdock. The resignation and condensation of his identity solely into what he does in the dark becomes a catalyst for his bleaker instincts to take reign. He faces his own powerlessness. He believes that his sacrifices have been in vain. It is the season where he is at his worst, the bedrock of his identity dislodged, as loose as handfuls of grave soil over shaking ground. The most lost and isolated he has ever been. But he ultimately does fulfill a rebirth. He does not let his enemy – Fisk, in this case – define or take away who he is.
Daredevil (Season 3, Episode 10 – Karen)
A fundamental choice is set out before him at the end – to choose mercy and stand by his faith in God and the system, or reject both and kill Fisk. At the edge of the precipice, his crisis of identity culminates in tortured fury as he stops just short of crossing the line. He reaffirms who he is. He reconstructs the crumbled bricks of his faith and regains peace. And finally, he echoes a sentiment that is one of the most breathtaking quotes of the series – God’s plan is like a beautiful tapestry. The tragedy of being human is that we only get to see it from the back… we only get a hint of the true beauty that would be revealed if we could see the whole pattern on the other side as God does.
There is a masterful brushstroke of thematic richness to all these layers incorporated into the show, from comics to camera, that makes a lasting impact. Netflix’s Daredevil essentially captures the core elements of what the original writers envisioned – gritty, potent and wholly emphatic in regards to the human condition. It conclusively raises an extraordinary bar in the superhero genre, delivering on something truly special from start to finish.
Written By: Trishta
