In his 2011 book Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero, legendary comic book writer Grant Morrison posits the idea that technology, desire, and societal conditions would prompt the rise of real-life superheroes. After all, there were already small pockets of folks putting on costumes and patrolling their neighborhoods; add technology and maybe you are getting to something that approximates superpowers (or at least a low-rent Iron Man or something).
The truth, so far, is that superheroics or costumed vigilantism, as we understand them from comic books and their resultant media, are best confined to the page (and yes, this includes most superhero movies but we don’t have several thousand words to explore why). This is demonstrated clearly in the compelling-if-draggy Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero. Jones is one of those homebrew crime fighters, a vigilante who has been patrolling the streets since 2011 and one of the least reliable narrators of his own life this side of Bob Dylan.
Moving forwards and backwards in time, director Bayan Joonam shows us the story of a Black orphan named Ben Fodor (adopted by two white women) who started searching out street criminals around 2011, after a car break-in left him enraged. (He and his adoptive brother also had an MMA career, though when this happens is slightly confusing.) Not unlike Spider-Man, Fodor’s first costume was a ski mask, then he ordered a rubber suit from a costume manufacturer and Phoenix Jones really started busting heads on the cold, rainy streets of Seattle.
Well, sort of. Fodor is a complicated fellow. He has a son whom he adores (I would have given a whole lot to hear from Freedom’s mother at some point), who seems very tolerant of his father’s pastime. Most of his crime fighting seems to consist of breaking up fights (or maybe making them worse?) and yelling at street-level drug dealers, along with a few other masked folks with names like Ghost and Midnight Jack. He gets rid of his secret identity comparatively soon after starting his crime-busting career, unmasking himself in a press conference, a move another vigilante describes as “whoring himself out to the media.”
After a particularly unfortunate crime he couldn’t really have stopped, Fodor’s mood heads into the dumper and his already-extremely-sketch position as a crime fighter (and nuisance to Seattle police) becomes complicated after he gets busted selling a little MDMA to an undercover cop when he is “working security” in a club. Things come to a dramatic head in 2020, where he is faced with the Black Lives Matter movement and resultant riots, a moment where the black and white morality of comic books becomes awfully sticky.
Phoenix Jones is an intermittently fascinating film: Fodor is a hell of a subject. Alternately open and cagey (he insists he was adopted at 11, not before the age of two, as his stepbrother says), Fodor seems gentle one moment and, well, like a guy who puts on a rubber superhero suit the next. Writer Jon Ronson, who spent time with Fodor, and actor Rainn Wilson pop in to provide some larger context (the 2010 feature film movie Super Wilson starred in concerns a guy with a similar MO to Jones’). Perhaps needless to note, the state of Fodor’s mental health seems an open question, and he freely admits that his vocation would be unlikely without a healthy dose of trauma and describes his life as a cautionary tale.
Yes. Yes, it is.
