Marvel wants to tell stories about American hegemony but can’t quite bring itself to do so.
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s most famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” the city of Omelas is perfect for 99.99999999999999 percent of its citizens. There is ample leisure time and an abundance of everything anyone could need. Life is comfortable and good for everyone, not just a privileged few.
But there is one citizen for whom Omelas is a hell: a small child, kept in a basement and endlessly tortured. Le Guin never explains how this arrangement came to be, because her story is intended not as a world-building exercise but as a mirror. Even in the best, most just societies in human history, whole swaths of human beings have been treated horribly in order to create a better society. Every utopia is also a dystopia if you look at it from the right angle, and vice versa.
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” stuck in my head as I watched Marvel’s Black Panther, the superhero super-studio’s latest film, which premiered to monster box office and wild critical acclaim. The world of Wakanda, a fictional African nation that is the world’s most technologically advanced but also quite possibly the world’s most secretive, is a bright, gleaming utopia for its citizens, who live in a society where easy access to the metal vibranium means the kind of post-scarcity society that science fiction writers have been dreaming about for decades.
Black Panther is a joyous game changer for Marvel
But Black Panther keys in on the darker underbelly of Wakanda in ways that might not be immediately obvious from the gleaming edifices of its capital city. In order to have such lavish prosperity, Wakandans have had to ignore the suffering of black people all over the world, particularly in the United States. They’ve had to sit by and allow the slave trade and colonialism to happen when they might have stopped either via a show of military might or even a more active diplomatic role. And that’s to say nothing of how the country remains a monarchy, where citizens’ happiness is directly dependent on the benevolence of the king.
This skepticism about Wakanda is both Black Panther’s greatest strength and, ultimately, the reason its climactic battle lets down the rest of the movie just a little bit. But it’s also part and parcel of Marvel’s recent slate of movies, which has been interested, more than ever, in the idea that American hegemony and military power maybe isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be — even as every movie seems to conclude with a big shrug. “Well?” the films seem to ask. “What else are you gonna do?”
Marvel’s complicated history with power
In 2015, I wrote about how the first two “phases” (the term Marvel uses for what are effectively “seasons” of its movies, with each new Avengers film serving roughly as a finale to the given phase) of Marvel’s movies were obsessed with rewriting the events of September 11, even as they increasingly seemed skeptical of the response to that attack:
Superhero films are the dominant cinematic force right now. They make money hand over fist, and their releases turn into genuine pop culture events. But we miss their point — we miss the why of them. These films are pop culture’s most sustained response to tragedy. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, America turned to superpowered heroes to rewrite that day so that it ended as one where nobody had to die.
Superhero movies, in some ways, aim to turn that day into something out of myth, like the ancients might have recast a real tragedy as an epic tale of heroism. This is one of the ways we process grief — in our tales. And the further we get into the cinematic superhero era — now almost 15 years long — the more explicit these films get about both their real-world impetus and about the way America responded to that tragedy.
They began, as with America’s actual reaction to 9/11, as films about vulnerable individuals finding the strength in themselves to overcome tragedy. Then they became stories about beings and organizations with nearly infinite power that would do whatever necessary to keep the homeland safe. And now, increasingly, they are grappling with the costs of the retribution they’ve doled out, and the security systems they’ve built.
It’s that last sentence that’s key. The deeper Marvel gets into “phase three” — which consists of Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok, and Black Panther, with four more movies to come in 2018 and 2019 — the more complicated its relationship to power becomes, but only up to a point.
Civil War questions the utility of superheroes when the damage they cause can be so much worse than a villain’s initial attack, while both Ragnarok and Black Panther are interested in the legacy of Western colonialism. Guardians 2 is about how abusive family dynamics play out in larger arenas, and Homecoming is kinda, sorta interested in economic inequality. I would argue every single one of these movies loses its nerve when it comes to truly exploring these thematic questions, but that they’re even interested in asking those questions is a big step up from a lot of superhero cinema.
The very idea of a superhero, someone whose very being is just better than everybody else, carries certain fascistic overtones. After all, in a world with superpowered humans and other creatures, might literally could make right. The best superhero stories, consequently, are aware of this troubling undertone and either examine it or deconstruct it in interesting ways.
Spider-Man, famously, learns that with great power comes great responsibility, that just because you can use your power to do whatever you want, you probably shouldn’t, and the best stories about Wonder Woman are often about how she uses her powers to attempt to inspire humanity to be its best self. (The 2017 film Wonder Woman mostly adheres to this structure, which is why it works even when it shouldn’t.)
In the deconstructionist corner are works like the comic Watchmen or even the Pixar film The Incredibles. The former asks what kind of psychological trauma you’d have to experience to think putting on a costume and beating people up is the way to live your life; the latter flirts with objectivism in its insistence that everybody is special but some people are more special than others. (The Incredibles remains the best superhero movie, but it’s constantly about two adaptation choices away from becoming a straightforward rendition of Atlas Shrugged — for kids!)
Probably the most famous deconstructionist superhero movie is 2008’s The Dark Knight, which earnestly considers all of the above questions and more in a mostly “realistic” Gotham City, where Batman and the Joker duel, in a way that feels eerily prescient in 2018. (The Joker’s “some people just want to watch the world burn” philosophy increasingly feels like one that far too many adhere to.) But Warner Bros., the studio that made that movie, conflated its darkness with its thematic complexity, leading it down a path that culminated in 2017’s bombastically terrible Justice League.
But another superhero movie was a smash hit in 2008: Iron Man, the beginning of Marvel’s entire cinematic universe and a movie about a man who realizes that his power has been used toward evil ends, so he decides to start using it toward good ones. It’s a slightly more morally complex story than that, but only slightly, and it established a template for Marvel going forward: nod toward moral complexity but understand that at the end of the day, the good guys are the protagonists. And if you’re an American, well, you’re one of the good guys. Lucky you.
