THE NOTICE
If you try to watch The Boys, a series broadcast since the end of July on the Amazon Prime platform, you will find the essential stories of superheroes. Body-hugging suits, capes and extraordinary abilities such as making yourself invisible or flying: on paper, everything is there. No need to look further for the taste of Marvel or other DC Comics. As the names of its producers, Evan Goldberg ( SuperGrave, Sausage Party ) and Seth Rogen ( SuperGrave still, 40-year-old virgin, Our worst neighbors ) suggest, The Boys does in the trash parodic.
Two new throws in the big bath
The story is, first of all, two little new naive and full of hope. On my right, the young Starlight, who knows how to control electricity, tries to integrate the very closed circle of "Seven", the seven most respected superheroes of America. After a job interview, it is accepted in the very closed circle. Which is revealed in the first minutes to be a real basket of crabs.
To my left, Hugh Campbell, told Hughie, shy and clumsy computer salesman, that his father still feeds pizza rolls in front of the TV and that his girlfriend, Robin, tries desperately to move a little. One day, she suggests that they move in together. Hand in hand on the street, they kiss ... until a super fast superhero, one of the "Seven", literally crosses Robin, leaving Hughie alone in a bloodbath with his trauma and a bit of resentment. The meeting of the young man borrowed with the mysterious Billy Butcher, founder of the club "Boys" and determined to take revenge on superheroes, offers him an opportunity to seek justice.
Superheroes in capitalist sauce
Following the trajectories of the two young men, The Boys engaged in a conscientious enterprise of demolishing idols. Here, the superheroes are not white knights but the employees of a multinational, Vought, vice-presided with an iron hand by the relentless Madelyn Stillwell. Constantly surrounded by marketing teams quick to balance the best-oiled storytelling, these "Seven" are much more interested in their end-of-year bonus than in saving the planet.
Rescue that has also been phagocyted by the vicissitudes of the modern world: no matter what the interventions as they are broadcast live on social networks, whatever the commitments as long as they allow the action of Vought to climb the stock market. The icing on the cake, these super-heroes are far from irreproachable: between the invisible who takes the opportunity to spy on girls in the toilet, the Man-Fish, a kind of discount Aquaman, which violates women and the Protector, halfway between Superman and Captain America, who has not settled his Oedipal complexes, there is not much to save among the saviors of humanity.
Dark states of America
But the strength of The Boys is precisely to go beyond the inversion, finally classic, between the good guys and the bad guys. Beyond, too, parody, often sign of the breathlessness of a genre rather than its renewal, as was shown in Deadpool film. All stories of superheroes serve to talk about something else, to convey a vision of America. What works full in The Boys: more than the dark side of the heroes, it is the failures of a whole society that feed the series.
This is how The Boys is interested in the conspiracy, puritanism and hypocrisy that is raging in the American countryside, or the security obsessions of a nation that has never recovered from September 11, 2001. Above all, the series contains a thorough reflection on celebrity. It is necessary to see the Protector walking on a stage of concert under the cheers, myth created from scratch by a multinational and his communication teams. Halfway between political figures, divine creatures and rockstars, these acclaimed superheroes may not be as dangerous as the jubilant crowd at their feet.