My Catholicism, which is inherited as opposed to practised, generally speaking, is having a bit of a flare-up. I just completed my third Daredevil marathon and still haven’t yet managed to quell the feeling that something ineffable is happening, even though I can now pretty much recite most of the crucial bits of dialogue. The notion that this TV series is actually a message from some divine alterity keeps clinging to the recesses of my mind. Or maybe that should be my soul. I’m not sure what the God of TV — or, let’s be accurate, of Netflix — is trying to tell me: but at the moment I’ve narrowed it down to the profound (that the devil might very well be a Janus-faced creature, on the one hand unquestionably and horrifically evil, and on the other just a misunderstood Miltonian archangel railing at the oppressive tyranny of his deistic overlord) and to the less profound (that the contours of Charlie Cox’s torso are really quite incredible, given that he claims he never had a gym subscription until a month before filming). Either way, I’m routing out my old rosary beads.
Joking and mild blasphemy aside, Daredevil is a very pleasant surprise as television shows go. These days, we’re inundated with the newsflash that television sets standards against which cinema can only hope to compete, in terms of originality of narrative and sophistication of production. And still, in spite of all this — and call me old-fangled if you must — I’m often reluctant to salivate over a TV series just for being what it is. The format of a television season is an enabler, not an achievement. There are plenty of television series I absolutely adore (Peaky Blinders, Penny Dreadful, Boardwalk Empire), but just because they are quality, slickly-produced television doesn’t mean they satiate a desire for the powers of the big screen.
Daredevil does. Kind of. It has a handle on the cinematic and it deploys the cinematic with incredible, confident sublimity, which is actually very hard to sustain over a thirteen hour narrative. Obviously it might make sense to note its two advantages borrowed from the movies straight off — that it’s a comic book adaptation, and that the particular universe it extends from is none other than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which right now is very busy giving us such small and inconsequential, pared-back indie affairs as Avengers: Age of Ultron and Guardians of the Galaxy. Still, in the same way that James Gunn’s Guardians forfeited the right to borrow all the precedents set by Joss Whedon, Daredevil does very little dealing with its big screen cousins.
Instead, its influences are subtle but potent, and indebted to the legacy of American moviemaking writ large — the Nessun Dorma sequence in the final episode a tribute, in fact, to Francis Ford Coppola. It brings its own intertextual meta-theatrics together by staging a climatic component of the final episode in an abandoned theatre: a huge and gorgeous move of religiously-loaded pageantry, one you can only dislike if you dislike such pageantry in general (in which case, this is not the series for you anyway).
This is, when it comes down to it, one sprawling, epic crime thriller; kind of what you’d get if you put Coppola and Gene Hackman together and told them to come up with an “American Connection” movie circa 1980, updated with iPhones, ninjas, and the ethical conundrums of journalism in the digital blogosphere. Put that way, it sounds eccentrically camp and it might have been, were it not for the genuinely stunning efforts of the production team to knit together a highly complex web of entangled dilemmas: the nature of evil, the efficiency of the law, the ethics of vigilantism, the presence of God in situations of terror and, most importantly, who is the devil and why is he bad?
In other words, it is one of the most challengingly and refreshingly gothic pieces of filmed storytelling to grace either silver or small screen in years: something you may not expect to see from the company that otherwise brings the witticisms of Ant Man and Loki to our screens. Which compliments the Catholic preoccupation, naturally; and also says something about our wider understanding of the gothic’s place in mainstream film and television. Horror movies these days, especially in the vein of the Final Destination or Saw films, will interrogate plenty of questions abstracted from the genre that birthed them, but will tend to obscure their significance with a deluge of blood and gore. Even Penny Dreadful, which does eclipse Daredevil in gothic style — naturally, having borrowed most of its characters from the original late-Romantic and Victorian texts in that genre — does not necessarily eclipse it in gothic content. For everywhere in this series is the threat of the double: from Murdoch versus Fiske (played with inspired thuggish diffidence by Vincent D’Onofrio) to the city at night versus at day, the symbolism of the mirror image, which is potentially one of the most overdone and even cliched of narrative devices across all film and literature, gains in this series from how honest it is about itself.
With its deft handling of magnificent themes, in some ways, Daredevil is a lot like Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. Not just because it paints the seedy corruption of the urban landscape in striking chiaroscuro, or because it tackles how, systematically, a bureaucracy can become poisoned, but because it wrestles an icon through the wringer of human fallibility. Cox is, in some ways, more approachable than Christian Bale has ever been, which makes mush of even diehard Batman fangirls like me. He carries none of the alienating distance that Bale necessarily puts between his character and the audience, because Murdoch is an intelligent street kid, thankfully shy of a genius, with a degree in law that he’s earned from working hard without the most affluent of bank balances. His demons are, at their truest, also shadows of himself; but of all the superhero issues impressed on modern audiences, it is here they strike closest to home.
The actor otherwise most remembered for his turn as the romantic lead in Stardust, and as a suave Irishman with a professional trigger finger in Boardwalk Empire, is able to sink into Murdoch; and not like he’s working against the material he’s given to find an individualising trait to fuse him to the character, the way Bale does with his guttural voice and taciturn surliness. Charlie Cox dances around inside Matt Murdoch as if he were actually a nominally blind ninja with acute Catholic guilt and preternatural hearing abilities all along. But then, why not? There are enough pseudo-Shakespearian soliloquies in this series to push the point home: the gothic survives in even the most unlikely genres, because we’re all secretly Catholics here. Any one of us could be possessed — by God, by the devil — at any time.
