It appears there are going to be many attempts to project modern political debates onto the new Marvel superhero movie, Captain America: Civil War. Already, the Daily Beast’s Nick Schager has kicked things off by contending that the film is a “conservative manifesto.”
Schager makes a good case, but he’s not quite right. Civil War is not so much a right-wing rallying cry as a thought-provoking examination of power, authority, and who watches the watchmen that doesn’t fit comfortably on either side of the partisan divide.
The first thing to keep in mind is Stephen Gutowski’s point that comic-book universes operate according to their own, alternate moral logic. In some ways, the world depicted in Marvel’s superhero films is like our own; it has an American president, a United Nations, terrorist groups, and 9/11-like attacks. (The two most recent DC movies make the link explicit with collapsing skyscrapers and clouds of dust filling city streets.)
But in the Marvel world, the most devastating recent attack on New York wasn’t 9/11 but an alien invasion. About a year or two after the invasion, three flying aircraft carriers crashed into the Potomac River and demolished the headquarters of an international spy agency modeled after the CIA, which had been infiltrated to the core by a neo-Nazi cult. About a year or two after that, an entire tiny Balkan country rose up into the sky and was obliterated.
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In other words, the Marvel Universe routinely faces threats even more dire than al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Boko Haram. In any given year, it could be destroyed by aliens, a neo-Nazi cult, or a sentient computer-robot. And its governments inevitably prove almost entirely helpless in the face of these threats; if they weren’t, after all, there’d be no need for superhero vigilantes.
Schager argues, accurately, that in the debate about whether superheroes need to register and accept government authority, Civil War’s creators have their collective thumb on the scale for one side:
As with its predecessor, Civil War wants to paint both sides of its politicized argument as reasonable (if only because those stances are taken by its two most popular characters). And yet here, that line-straddling feels strained to the point of disingenuousness.
Convinced that the American superpower has reaped more bad than good, and thus must be checked by both the government and the U.N., Iron Man — no matter his love of weaponized suits of armor — comes to embody the more self-critical, dove-ish, nanny state–advocating Left. Meanwhile, Cap’s opposition to imperious federal oversight, and his belief that he knows best and should be allowed to act accordingly in whatever international jurisdiction he sees fit, marks him as a figure of the Right — replete with a sidekick, Falcon (Anthony Mackie), who performs both surveillance and tactical strikes with his own personal aerial drone.
(Which president dramatically expanded drone strikes? Was it a Republican who filibustered to force the government to pledge that it would never drone-strike an American citizen on American soil without a trial? Just checking.)
#share#The perspective of Iron Man and his allies in this movie — that the Avengers are just too powerful to operate outside the law, with no authority or accountability — makes perfect sense in a world where the Hulk can destroy a big chunk of Johannesburg, South Africa, before the story’s climax. We, the audience, like seeing huge battles in superhero movies; we wouldn’t spend two hours watching Tony Stark filling out patent applications for his inventions. But people living in such a universe would be terrified and vehemently opposed to giant superhero battles, and would likely support any effort to prevent them.
Comic-book universes operate according to their own, alternate moral logic.
Apply the Avengers rules to our real world: Would we like to see Seal Team Six or Delta Force operating independently from the United States government, going around killing anyone they like without any oversight? It works in fiction, but it would probably make for a more dangerous world — if for no other reason than it bets everything on the moral compass of those unrestrained free-range killers. As long as they’re cutting down al-Qaeda members, we’ll cheer them on. But what happens when they target the wrong person, or some innocent civilians die in the crossfire?
The right to keep and bear arms, the right to defend one’s home when invaded, wariness of the United Nations and international organizations having authority over American use of force — these are all conservative values and concepts. But you have to really squint to see an argument for those values in a movie where the plot revolves around whether a notorious assassin who’s been brainwashed should be held accountable for his killings.
Schager contends that Captain America wins the civil war of the movie’s title, but that’s far from clear; the final post-credit scene suggests that Cap has acquiesced to the goal Iron Man sought all along. The red-white-and-blue protagonist spends much of the movie struggling mightily to ensure his old friend Bucky, brainwashed into becoming the assassin Winter Soldier, will be kept out of prison . . . and then he turns around and agrees to confine Bucky in some sort of cryogenic suspension. Cap distrusted his friend’s imprisonment by the United Nations, but he nods approvingly as the nation of Wakanda puts him in a deep freeze.
To his credit, Schager seems to recognize the narrative contradictions that undermine his point. “Civil War,” he writes, “is thematically too all-over-the-place to be reduced to facile political equations (Captain America does not equal Trump; Iron Man is not a proxy for Hillary Clinton).” Such is the danger awaiting anyone who would attempt to read politics into a superhero movie. Luckily, Civil War is entertaining enough to be enjoyed on its own terms, as a momentary escape from one troubled reality into another. For most viewers, that ought to be enough.
— Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent for National Review.