Are superhero films the westerns of the new millennium?

In today's New York Times, A. O. Scott wonders whether the superhero genre—which has spawned five blockbusters so far this year—has almost run its course. And what with Seth Rogen, of all people, slotted to star as the Green Hornet in 2010, and the big screen adaptation of The Watchmen—the trailer of which I barely understood—set to open next year, he may be right.

I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that “Iron Man,” “Hancock” and “Dark Knight” together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline. In their very different ways, these films discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists.

To tell the truth, in watching "The Dark Knight," I pitied Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, because it really seemed that any sequel, and there will undoubtedly be a sequel, to the film would be completely inadequate in comparison.

Scott's solution to the problem is to urge the genre to move away from the visual and into the moral. The endless cavalcade of action set pieces is tiring, he says, but what is more tiring is how stuffed each film is with themes and ideas that are superficially exposed but never sufficiently treated.

Instead the disappointment comes from the way the picture spells out lofty,serious themes and then ... spells them out again. What kind of hero do we need? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? How much autonomy should we sacrifice in the name of security? Is the taking of innocent life ever justified? These are all fascinating, even urgent questions, but stating them, as nearly every character in “The Dark Knight” does, sooner of later, is not the same as exploring them.

And yet stating such themes is as far as the current wave of superhero movies seems able or willing to go. The westerns of the 1940s and ’50s, obsessed with similar themes, were somehow able, at their best, as in John Ford’s “Searchers” and Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo,” to find ambiguities and tensions buried in their own rigid paradigms.

The difference between a classic western shown on AMC and films like the "Searchers" or "Unforgiven" lies in ability of the latter to understand the "rules" of their "game" to such a degree that, like jazz musicians, they find spaces for improvization and exploration. They understand convention—indeed, they have to know the conventions of the genre far more thoroughly than pictures that repeat them by rote—but are not bound slavishly to it.

And they can go deeper than other films because the vocabulary of the genre enables them to invite audiences to treat complex and often controversial problems. During the Iraq War, for instance, the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica turned around the problem of suicide bombers and insurgency. Can superhero films, which are now almost as ubiquitous as westerns and space operas, manage the same transition?