Let’s Talk About ‘The Boys’ Hughie Campbell & His Fragile Masculinity
The Boys is a show that I sometimes worry is too smart for its audience. Much like Rick & Morty and other post-South Park shows that play with the line between centrist cynicism and progressive-ish ideas, there is also this ability to sometimes focus too much on making vile male leads “understandable,” to the point where people don’t get what is being said. Homelander is a rapist, a racist, and every vile thing under the Sun, but due to the great acting of Antony Starr and a somewhat sympathetic origin story, people think he’s just “damaged”—until you get a character like Todd who illustrates the alt-right parallels.
Still, the most frustrating character this season has been Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), who has been taking an experimental version of Compound V that could lead to death. He is taking it in order to gain superpowers and, with it, gains the ability to teleport. He keeps telling his girlfriend Annie January/Starlight that he is doing it to protect her and himself.
Let me start by saying that I understand and have a lot of empathy for Hughie. He held his girlfriend’s hands as she was torn apart by A-Train when he ran through her. It was traumatic, and the amount of survivor’s guilt he is living with must be insurmountable. He joined The Boys in order to fight for humans on (mostly) human terms.
His relationship with Starlight has always been very “Dick Grayson dates Starfire,” but one of the things I liked about him was the way he respected Anne. This season, after finding out that Victoria Neuman is the head-popper, the secret adoptive daughter of Vought CEO Stan Edgar, and that her anti-Vought policies are essentially politically controlled opposition, he reaches out to Butcher to take down Vought using Butcher’s darker methods. The problem is that Butcher has nothing and Hughie has seen, since the beginning, that almost everyone Butcher has been driven to protect has either died, or resents him in some way.
To see Hughie be so painfully insecure with Annie—to lie to her and ignore basic common sense to feed his ego—is … exhausting, as an audience member, especially because he just has so many examples to show that his actions are damned. Teams need a badass normal to keep things going, and Hughie is instead following Butcher into this death spiral. A death spiral fueled by his own insecurity about not being able to protect the women in his life and his girlfriend being stronger than him.
A part of me feels like that is the point. The writers know Hughie is making the wrong choices, and Starlight is supposed to be the voice of the audience. But I have also seen comments that Hughie feels like Starlight’s “pet” and other things that lean totally on his side. People side with a seemingly emasculated man trying to feel powerful, rather than the powerful woman trying to be on the morally righteous side.
When that’s the reality audiences want to see, what does it matter what the writers are trying to say about masculinity?
(featured image: Amazon Studios)
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