Peacemaker. What a Joke.
Alan Moore, writer of foundational superhero stories like Watchmen and Swamp Thing, once said that a good argument could be made for Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and an influence on the capes and masks that now pervade every aspect of pop culture. It’s a criticism often lobbed at the genre as a whole: the argument that superheroes exist largely as a right-wing fantasy of control and authoritarianism – or, at best, as valiant guardians of the status quo. No “superhero” has embodied that fantasy more fully than Peacemaker, a guy whose ideology can aptly be summed up by his own words: “I cherish peace with all of my heart. I don’t care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it”. A century after Birth of a Nation mythologized violence in the name of order, Peacemaker’s eponymous show revisits that same myth, now through irony and self-loathing. It’s a story about what happens when America’s superhero dreams begin to recognize their own moral rot.
Christopher Smith wasn’t always the Peacemaker. Before he donned the toilet-shaped helmet and Dove of Peace, he was a kid growing up in a trailer park with an older brother, Keith. People aren’t born evil; they’re shaped and twisted by the cruel influences around them, and few things were as cruel to Chris as his father Auggie: the leader of a white-nationalist organization, racist, misogynist, everything in between. Auggie is the rot of America personified, a true believer in strength as the true arbiter of right and wrong, with compassion dismissed as weakness. Instead of love, Chris is subjected to Auggie’s Bible of violence, forced into junkyard fights with his brother that eventually trigger seizures and kill him. When Chris grows up to become Peacemaker, it isn’t because of some innate sense of justice, but the logical conclusion of a life dictated by the abuse and hate of his dad. He disguises that hate and calls it patriotism–the red, white, and blue of his costume less a uniform than a wound. It’s an identity that’s eating him alive.
As much as Chris wants to convince himself that what he’s doing is good, that this is what he wants, the truth is that it’s not. When he can’t muster the will to kill a child, he claims it’s because the rifle didn’t have his signature Dove of Peace on it, a ridiculous ritual that barely conceals that he doesn’t have the conviction for his mission. Peacemaker is a contradiction to who Chris really is, from his bisexuality to his love of “devil music”. On the inside, he’s still the boy who listened to hair-metal with his older brother. He’s trapped between the person he was forced to be and the person he can still become, and Peacemaker is about chipping away the shoddy scaffolding of that superhero identity, forcing him to finally come to terms with himself.
The 11th Street Kids offer Chris a way to crawl out from under the weight of the Peacemaker persona. Their kindness, humor, and genuine love for him as a person – a kind of love he’s never experienced – chips away at his armor bit by bit. Most important is his bond with Adebeyo, someone who’s also grown up under a strict parental figure hell-bent on their own vision of a “just” America, the kind of mission that eats a person alive on the inside and destroys everything in its wake. What she shows Chris is that he doesn’t have to live within his father’s shadow – that he can choose to be something different. He doesn’t have to be the Peacemaker to have purpose in life; he can choose to live by something other than dogma.
If the 11th Street Kids are a way for Chris to save himself, the Butterflies are a dark reflection of Peacemaker’s mission: an alien race devoted to controlling humanity “for its own good”, taking over bodies and subjugating individuality. Their leader, Goff, tries to convince Chris to join them, appealing to a shared sense of justice. As she explains, her kind has made a vow to make the choices humanity cannot make for itself, no matter how many lives are lost. They represent peace through domination, safety through obedience. As Goff tells him, Chris is one of them; he just needs to be the Peacemaker. Instead, Chris turns against them. By killing the alien cow that sustains their hive, he symbolically kills the ideology that created him. He forsakes the vow he made as a hurt child trying to make up for the sins that were never his to bear. For the first time, he chooses not duty or ideology, but love. He chooses the lives of his friends over the illusion of saving the world. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “right” decision for humanity. What matters is that it’s the right one for his soul. It means that even the seemingly worst of us are capable of redemption – not through heroism or violence, but by recognizing who we’ve been and what we can become.
Peacemaker isn’t the hard metal power fantasy of an anti-hero doing whatever’s needed in the name of justice. It’s about reckoning with the violence mythologized by Birth of a Nation, the fantasies of control embedded in the superhero myth itself. It’s about a man learning to reject the racist narratives taught to him all his life after confronting the damage they’ve done. It transforms the superhero costume from a badge of glory into a confession of guilt. The Peacemaker is a joke. But Christopher Smith doesn’t have to be.