“This Is God’s Plan”: Daredevil’s Descent?
As a teenager, I was a huge John Belushi fan, beginning with Saturday Night Live, of course, and then his series of successful and now iconic films such as National Lampoon’s Animal House and The Blue Brothers.
Few movies for me have been as relentlessly quotable as The Blues Brothers, especially Elwood’s refrain: “We’re on a mission from God”:
Looking back at the film today, this “mission” resonates in ways that could not have been imagined in 1980, unless you continued to deal in fiction. That “mission” and casual exchange between the brothers — Elwood: Illinois Nazis; Jake: I hate Illinois Nazis — are much harder to laugh along with as the U.S. slips further and further into a pit of Christian Nationalism and the rise of neo-Nazi-adjacent white supremacy.
I immediately, however, thought of Elwood’s deadpan refrain when I read the first page of Daredevil 5 v.7:
The opening of issue 5 centers what many feel is the essential tension of Daredevil/Matt Murdock as a superhero — his religious zeal and righteous anger meant “to save the world.”
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