I Hate Guns and Violence, Yet Why Do I Love The Punisher So Much?
Can you justfy a 'hero' who just straight-up murders dudes?
Image via Marvel
If you asked me who my favourite superhero is, I probably wouldn’t say The Punisher, even though he is. That’s partly because he doesn’t actually have superpowers, technically making him not a superhero. But mostly it’s because the character sort of represents everything I hate. He's a murdering, gun-loving, reactionist right-wing psychopath fantasy. But why do I love Punisher comics so much despite this?
The Punisher has been in three failed (but all still kind of dope) movies, but he’s about make his live-action TV debut in the second season of Netflix’s Daredevil, played by The Walking Dead's John Berthnal. For the Marvel neophyte, The Punisher is Frank Castle, a New York war veteran who returns home, only to see his young family killed in the crossfire of a mob hit. Dealing with both the grief and latent PTSD from his time in combat, he takes on the identity of The Punisher, a vigilante with a skull on his chest who just basically goes around murdering criminals.
And there in lies his USP. Spider-man and the X-Men don’t kill bad guys. Neither does Superman (despite what Zack Snyder says). Batman actively hates guns. Even comic heroes who kill like Wolverine feel bad about it. Superheroes are people to look up to. Symbols of hope and goodness. Not The Punisher though. The Punisher thinks the only way of dealing with bad guys is killing them. The typical Punisher story runs like this: A) Find bad guys. B) Shoot the fuck out of them. C) Repeat.
This is, well, not cool. I am very in favour of gun control. I am very against the death penalty. A fair trial is a vital part of the legal system. It’s hard to look at the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan, people killed instantly with guns unproven of anything, and not find a story where The Punisher is the hero a tiny bit distasteful. Whenever someone makes the point of someone killed by police (or in self defence by a citizen) that they 'probably deserved it', they are missing the point — they deserve a fair trial and investigation to prove or disprove their guilt before punishment is carried out. The Punisher is the opposite of all this. He just wants to kill 'em all, there and then. And he's meant to be the hero of most of his stories.
But actually, it’s The Punisher comics of the late 80s and 90s that I really love. They are like the greatest low-budget VHS action movies you’ve never seen. They are dumb, predictable and so entertaining, always featuring some sort of madness, like Frank Castle getting attacked by mafiasos while at the dentist, or stabbing a guy to death with Christmas decorations, or taking on an entire Middle Eastern army by himself, or even hijacking a space shuttle to chase a guy into space. They are basically Chuck Norris movies, and with that comes all the iffy politics. Criminals are never anything mindless scum that deserve to die. Stories were often ripped from ‘today’s headlines’, which meant that we got quite a few horribly stereotyped Arabs and the like. Even when it tried to be socially conscious, we got the infamous storyline where Frank Castle got turned into a black guy (yes, really), and teamed up with Luke Cage.
Part of why I love those is irony, and making fun of them, obviously. But much as I object to the concept of The Punisher, it’s easy to understand the attraction, if you’ve ever been the victim of a crime, or hell, just open any newspaper and read about the horrible things people do every day. But it’s more than that. Art and storytelling should allow you see things from a different viewpoint to your own, even if you would never agree with it. The idea of The Punisher is something I find fascinating. To see things so clearly and defined. To think that the solution world’s ills can be solved so simply, and in that way only, and to give up your whole life to do it. A real life Frank Castle like Bernherd Goetz would be, and was the worst thing in the world. But he makes a brilliant comic book character.
Plus there was that one time when he was stuck in a zoo with no ammo so he punched a polar bear in the face and got him to attack the mafia guys that were chasing him.
Season 2 of Daredevil is available on Netflix from March 18.