The Case for Matt Murdock
Why does nobody get Daredevil right?
I have an odd thing about Daredevil. He’s probably the superhero I feel the most affinity with—a blind, religious, working class Batman—but his stories never satisfy me. I was eleven when the film came out, and despite everything that’s wrong with it, it’s still my first point of reference. The comic books have disappointed me: much of the time they feel badly written, as if the writers don’t know what makes the character work. The Netflix series is one of the slickest takes, but it struggles for depth or emotional range. (When Matt, bloodied and bruised, says defiantly that New York is his city, it’s unclear what that statement represents.) Unlike Batman, no one seems to know what to do with Daredevil. Try as they might, he always feels more like a set of tropes than a person.
I’ve never seen a story that deconstructs Matt Murdock, the way Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s stories deconstruct them. I’ve never seen a take that examines in depth how his powers relate to his blindness, or how the latter relates to his life; that asks, and then shows us, what being a lawyer and a vigilante means to him; what being a Catholic and the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen means to him. So much of Daredevil just gets taken as read—he simply can do all the things he does, simply is religious, simply was trained in martial arts. His stories leave all the important parts of who he is at the edges, not bothering to ask where they come from, which might be why his origins interest me more than his adult plotlines.
Matt’s backstory is the best thing about the Daredevil movie and the worst thing about the Netflix show. In the series, all we get about how he lost his sight is the first scene, where the young Matt lies in a city street, having apparently been blinded on saving someone from oncoming traffic. The film’s version is far less handwavey—Matt finds his down-and-out father acting as a crime lord’s muscle and runs away, into the path of a chemical spill—but it isn’t a narrative that centres him. The film’s portrayal of Matt and his dad, ‘two fighters on a comeback trail’, is effective, as is Jack Murdock’s guilt about having caused his son’s accident; but the Daredevil origin I want isn’t one in which something toxic simply happens to get spilt. I want what happens to young Matt Murdock to be to do with who he is.
Where to begin with that? For one thing, I don’t think he should be white. A lawyer practising armed vigilantism is a hard premise to explain, but it makes perfect sense if Matt knows the faults of the justice system from experience; if he’s grown up with racist police and white juries, knowing it’s easier for some people to talk their way out of trouble. The Matt Murdock in my head is mixed race, Irish on one side, Afro-Latina on the other, born of two different Catholicisms. Maggie is still absent, and Jack Murdock isn’t always comfortable explaining why his kid doesn’t look like him.
What about the red specs? Only since the movie have Matt’s glasses in the comics (and now the show) been the same colour as Daredevil’s suit. It’s a striking look for the character, but feels in need of some explanation. More blind people wore dark glasses in 1964 than do today, and so to some extent Matt’s shades are a relic of when he first appeared; if he wears them partly as a disguise, advertising his blindness to throw people off the scent, red ones are more likely to be read as a fashion choice. But some disabled people—sight-impaired, autistic, dyslexic—do wear red-tinted specs to enhance contrast and tone down bright lights, and when I thought about Matt’s in that context, something clicked.
I’ve always had problems with Daredevil’s super senses. It seems like it’s only in films that losing one sense amplifies the rest, and in real life, heightened senses can themselves be a disability. His stories don’t really explain the ‘radar sense’ either—like other aspects, it’s just there—but there are blind people who ‘see’ sounds and textures. Here’s my theory about Daredevil’s powers: young Matt Murdock has an acute sensory processing disorder. His sense of balance is so fine that walking without falling is a struggle; speech development takes years longer than for most children, and even then he prefers not to talk. If Jack Murdock had money for doctors, they’d talk speculate about autism and talk about unprecedented synaesthesia. As it is, put Matt in a busy street or crowded room and he’ll curl up like the world’s on fire. When he tries on someone else’s glasses, rose coloured with round frames, Jack sees him change at once, and when he gets his own pair bright days get more bearable. There are still meltdowns, though, when Matt curls up screaming, hands over ears and eyes shut tight. When it happens in front of them, the nuns of Hell’s Kitchen are heard muttering about the devil.
I can’t believe Matt losing his sight is an accident—that there’s just a traffic collision, a forklift truck that hits something near him. Whatever gets into his eyes, someone throws it at him, or else makes him do it himself. Matt’s clutching his glasses when Jack finds him, curled up in a ball and screaming; seeing what’s happened takes him a moment. It’s only when the burns stop hurting that Matt notices his other senses are different, his brain dealing with things coherently for the first time. The sound of the world still looks like fire, but the flames resemble something; he hears the shape of things, feels how fast his dad’s heart beats during hospital visits. No one really knows what’s happening in his head. No one knows why he still wears the glasses, but he likes them.
