WE LOST HOMELANDER
Should we sympathise with Homelander?? Or we should view him as nothing and mock his pitiful situation and pathetic unchanging essence bequeathed to us? There is no answer and never will be; on the surface this would mean the finale succeeded and captures the ambiguity and complexity of moral judgment and attitude much like it was with Walter White. But in reality it is the opposite:
Homelander’s death was nothing but an escape from reflection.
For four seasons we have watched the formation of Homelander’s subjectivity (such as it is, but still subjectivity), his ridiculous and naive attempts to overspend power in a system that forced him to suffer and persecutes him (he suffers like any pathological narcissist or psychotic projecting his massive anger onto the world). He wants to control Vought and as we know the world. He is a product of Vought but also its son who openly asserts his right to paternal authority, while secretly and deeply needing a Mother figure for confirmation of his own existence in the real. It seems to him that by physically getting rid of all "obstacles" including his own vulnerability as the main obstacle, he will gain the freedom to be who he is without the Other. This is, of course, a twisted logic because it leads to psychic collapse. The void becomes unbearable and Madelyn returns in the form of a hallucination. Homelander has no life without such delusions because he is dealing with a void that has even acquired its own symbolic image in the series (the laboratory). Apparently, the writers had no intention of proving the independence of the pathology of narcissism from any circumstances whatsoever, since they showed us the total and violent isolation of a child with superpowers that terrify adults. But why?
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For some reason we have seen John in a bad room, and THE blanket 🥺. Are they appealing to our capacity for empathy here? For some reason we’ve gotten to know the conditions under which Homelander’s psyche was formed, that is, it was raped by laboratory experiments including psychological ones. For some reason, we’ve seen the mirror scenes and have been witnesses of his complicated relationships with Ryan. That means we have a wealth of psychological knowledge (a personal history) that according to the «logic» of the End carries no weight, no significance, emotional or otherwise.
All of this prepares us for something that ultimately did not happen: Homelander was not allowed to perform himself completely. They didn’t just take away his powers! (in season 5 he is weaker then ever and that’s nonsense) but they took away his freedom, the freedom to give a symbolic answer to the world that spawned him even if that answer comes in the form of global collapse when the world has to be overtaken by emptiness of narcissistic delirium. He didn’t answer at all. He could have destroyed the planet. We know it’s fiction, not reality, so destroying the planet would have been a metaphor for the collapse of Vought or, to be honest, the fulfillment of Vought’s true desire.
Why make him immortal? Kripke may have wanted to put an end to Vought but he castrated Homelander — not the system - while Vought’s desire will live forever, won’t it? This is Kripke’s unconscious cowardice or simply blindness. Psychosis is the only language Vought understands. Vought is psychotic, and its creation — the most perfect — is also the only weapon against it. Homelander is not stupid enough to stop resisting even if this is a special kind of resistance — affective, even hysterical… but how else do you respond to such a System? Vought was a monster and remains one. Homelander’s psychotic reality did not go beyond the Oval Office. In the end, we get a beaten-to-death Homelander and a void of meaning, as always. Worse: we get the void of death (child’s death?) which is more terrifying and at the same time simpler than any outcome they could have come up with.
Goodbye, Homie