Civil War: Civil Discussion

Superhero movies don’t really go by without epic Robert / David breakdowns. As a rule, Robert walks out with shining eyes like a kid at Christmas, and David growls and ponders, and several days later, we settle on a consensus. With Civil War, we never really disagreed, and yet somehow, our discussions got bigger and bigger… until it became this. Thanks to us living in different cities now, discussion happens in epistolary fashion (“Your obedient servant, D. Walker”) so, sans some oblique in-jokes and asides, we’ve taken advantage of NerdSpan’s tolerance to share it with you.

SO, SO MANY SPOILERS below.

Not Above Us, But Of Us

“We need to be put in check. Whatever form that takes, I’m game.”

David:

Superhero films (which, while still containing multitudes, are narrower in scope that “superhero comics) implicitly promise that the hero is, to quote Chandler, “the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world”.

Robert:

Thank you, commissar of art.

David:

I’ve long asserted supers films don’t need to be polemic, but they are by nature about what we as a society aspire to. They take our generic aspirations – traits good enough for any world, like loyalty, bravery or compassion – and turn them into specifics about how we are to live in our world. How do we build consensus? What is our society succeeding at, and failing at? To get a little Babylon 5, what do we fear, and who should we trust?

Civil War was great in part because it is perhaps the first film to really cash in all the chips of the shared universe to reach for an answer.

Robert:

It sounds kind of facile to say this, but it absolutely needs to be said: even moreso than The Avengers (which I’m not trying to discredit, I’m just saying it operated by different rules), this is the proof of concept movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie might work without it, but it works so much more effectively because of it – references to old beats and conflicts (a sequence where Captain America raises his fists, a beat where Steve and Bucky stand next to each other, when Tony notably at one point says “I changed“), self-contained arcs within the movies which nevertheless reflect the overall themes of the universe.

David:

I think a lot of people will cavil that Civil War feels too much of an installment, that some of the cinema magic is lost by stringing things together too tightly, but I don’t care. I’m not saying they are wrong, just that this thing, whatever this thing may be, is a good thing.

Avengers drew on the characters, certainly, and while Age of Ultron had many strengths, it felt exhausted, perhaps by trying and failing to keep oversight of all the moving parts. This is why Iron Man 3’s ending is utterly absent from Tony’s character arc, to a lesser extent Cap feels like he is coming off the back of The Avengers without being much affected by Winter Soldier and Thor… okay, there is not really much to Thor’s arc in Dark World, so I suppose you can ignore it safely.

We know who these characters are and what they want, and they feel so wholly inhabited by their actors that where some people have less screen time, it’s still remarkably effective because we know who they are. Marvel has smartly saved itself spadework in introductions for the most part – there are reintroductions that allow us to get straight into the good stuff.

Robert:

The movie centres around events of a lot of the previous films, but in the aggregate, not the specific.

Civil War cares about everything that has happened before. The appearances of the multitude of characters are lesser threads, not cameos; the events are not roadblocks to this story but utterly essential to understanding its full import.

You don’t need to know much of anything, but it works much better if you know everything. It’s less about the precise recollection of any particular event, and more about a general recognition that this is the next stage in a world that cares to be internally consistent. In full credit to its writing, it smooths out previously spiky edges, without ever diminishing the content of what comes before.

David:

It’s amazing, given how many singular visions there were, and how much of the MCU’s early filmmaking is dominated by a “let’s put on a show” attitude, that they’ve reached a place where we can talk about a central thesis, a shared theme.

There is a central thread of discourse that makes these instalments something other than a string of blockbusters of varying quality trying to pass audiences from one to another without too much shedding along the way.

The MCU argues the most important question we wrestle with, the question that faces us in trying to be the best person for this world and a good enough person for any, is whether we should invest our faith (meaning both trust and effort) in our systems or ourselves. And in Civil War, it posits at least one answer.

Robert:

That’s what we call a “bold call”. Let’s break that down.

The First Avenger

“Because the strong man who has known power all his life, may lose respect for that power, but a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows… compassion.”

David:

This will be easier if we go with chronological timeline, rather than the cinematic release order.

In Captain America, a concatenation of events creates the superhero: a scientist creates a formula and then dies; the soldier receives an irreplaceable shield; super-soldier is supported by an elite team of scientists, soldiers and commanders, including his irascible commander, his love interest and his best friend.  The outcome is a singular champion, and even in this expressly optimistic and upbeat story, the System vs Self tension is incredibly central. Erskine carefully selects who he will trust with power, placing his own judgement over government approval. The idea of governments mass-producing an elite fighting force (which is Johann Schmitt’s plan, in a nutshell) is presented as terrifying which, fair enough, army of Red Skull types marching across Europe is bad.

While there are a bunch of obvious reasons for grounding this story in WWII, it also seems an ideal point to kick of an exploration of trusting people vs governments. Were the Nazis evil because of a few dark individuals? Or is it more useful to look at the failures and crimes of the government or nation as a whole? What does it mean for Captain America to be a symbol of American exceptionalism, a patriot as well as a hero, fighting for a country that claims in its founding documents to itself stand for individual rights?

Robert:

It was incredibly clever to place Captain America explicitly in the realm of the propaganda machine, because it means from the beginning there’s a question about the degree to which the system co-opts him, without that system in any way being evil. It’s not where Steve thinks he should be, and to an extent it’s not where the movie places him at his best use, but when he’s asked by the USO if he really wants to serve his country, there’s no lie there. War bonds matter. Morale matters.

Steve spends a lot of time saying that he just wants to stop the Nazi advance, that he’s not interested in fighting, and I don’t think the movie tries to suggest that he’s lying about that per se. His tension in being a psychological advantage rather than a tactical one doesn’t come from not getting to attempt death-defying feats qua death-defying feats, it comes from Steve being unable to choose the method where his skills are best exercised.

David:

Risking being painted as anti-USO or war bonds, it is important the film takes the stance that he makes the right call about where he belongs. It is crucial to everything that comes hereafter that Steve’s moment of apotheosis into the Superhero comes not when he gains his powers. After all, he fails to save Erskine, and it’s clear he doesn’t want to be shackled to being just a symbol. No, Steve Rogers becomes Captain America the moment he breaks all the rules to save Bucky Barnes.

Robert:

This is going to be central – Steve makes a call to break the rules of the organisation he has sworn an oath to, where he’s doing at least some kind of collective good for the immediate good of his best friend and the only person to really know him as he used to be.

David:

And the aftermath? A brief era of the system and the individual working in perfect, idealised harmony, for the collective betterment. Steve trusts his command, and they trust him. A woman is welcomed into the team because of her competence, and people of all nations stand side-by-side with the symbol of America because it is the ideal. The fusion of the ideal of the Allied powers (culminated in Cap’s coalition of soldiers from allied nations), against blatant fascism. The brilliant maverick scientist – Howard Stark, of course, learning his own lessons about the rules and the army – is in faithful service, and loyally under orders.

First Avenger, perhaps inevitably, offers the most utopian of answers to the tension between System vs Self – people improve the group but can be prone to failure,  that institutions exist to protect and improve people but they should change approach when shown a better way. It seems safe to say that every well-intentioned leadership figure in the MCU since 1945 has been chasing this formula as much if not more than they have the superhero serum. Tragically, it also seems safe to say that just like with the serum, they have never really recreated it.

Tellingly, as soon as Steve sinks into the ice, the light on the hill goes out. The two seasons of Agent Carter are, at essence, the story of good people working to change the system from within, and failing; and of underdogs like unto Steve trying to work their way in, and ramming into the ugliness of institutional sexism and racism. Some nasty secret conspiracies are bumped off along the way – though notably, Leviathan’s evil returns with a vengeance later, in the Red Room, the Winter Soldier project and so on – but in the end, the soul of S.H.I.E.L.D. is not saved.

Robert:

It’s important to note that the failing voices you talk about are notable in that they’re marginalised voices. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two “mavericks” inside S.H.I.E.L.D. are a woman and a black man. There’s a moment in Civil War (the film) where Captain America’s speech in the comic (“plant yourself like a tree by the river of truth and tell the world no: you move”) is transplanted into Peggy’s mouth, and that change really matters. There’s a huge degree of difference between a white, blue-eyed six footer in a position of authority saying “make up your own mind unilaterally as to what you think is right, and never let anyone convince you that you might be mistaken” and a woman who has to struggle to be accepted and acknowledged in the service of her country (despite her obvious talents) saying that you have to hang on, and let them know you’re here to stay.

David:

I deeply agree, but want to delve a bit. Alan Kistler was saying on Twitter the other night that the JMS “You Move” speech seemed out of character for Cap, and I strongly disagree. One can certainly groan at Cap delivering a lengthy sermon on a roof to a tired friend (but hey, I like Babylon 5 and Jeremiah), but in the context of Twain’s “In a Republic, who is the country?”, the speech has a specificity that isn’t really compatible with enforcing your will on others.

I’ve always been partial to “Loyal only to the dream” Nomad-on-a-dime Steve, but regardless on where you stand on Cap in the comics, it seems evident that the MCU Cap is defined by this. He speaks for those unheard voices right back into his earliest days, because he is one of them, and he will always intervene for what he thinks is right, without compromise.

So, with Steve gone, a gang of shadowy figures gather together and hide the wonder and terror of the universe from a pacified public while incrementally increasing their technocratic control over anything “chaotic”. The MCU becomes, by hook or by crook, run by the people who share an ethos with the Four from Planetary – they’re on the great human adventure, and we’re not invited.

Iron Man

“It is one thing to question the official story and another to make wild accusations or insinuate  that I’m a superhero”

“I didn’t say superhero.”

“Didn’t? Well, good. Because that would be outlandish and fantastic. I’m just not the hero type. Clearly. With this laundry list of character defects and mistakes I’ve made, largely public.”

“The truth is… I am Iron Man.”

David:

This status quo holds well enough until Howard Stark’s feckless kid gets kidnapped by terrorists as part of a needlessly complicated corporate takeover. The incident spirals, with Tony Stark introducing what will become his trademark brand of technological escalation and self-inflicted emotional damage, until a late response from a S.H.I.E.L.D. team means the whole things blows up publically. The tech S.H.I.E.L.D. has been hiding for decades, all the beam weapons and anti-grav and weird energy stuff that might end climate change? It’s out there.

And even here, S.H.I.E.L.D. tries to head it off at the pass. Coulson spins into action with a plan to turn the suit into one more curio in the full-to-overflowing vault of weird tech that dangerous intelligence operatives keep looting… or he would have, if Tony didn’t literally throw away those talking points and play rockstar.

This is Iron Man and with him, the Age of the Superhero.

And so we leap into Iron Man 2. We come in at the end of what seems to have been a super-successful extra-governmental crusade against misused Stark tech, and I don’t even want to ask what the kill count there was. This is clearly to Coulson’s chagrin, but where S.H.I.E.L.D. may be content rolling its eyes a little (possibly because, in the end of the day, this is a Stark and they have some institutional guilt and some aces up their sleeve), Congress wants him to cease operations and hand over his designs. “It’s meant to be a military-industrial complex, not a military-industrial guy called Tony,” they gripe, “East-West relations should only be in the hands of a narcissist with an addictive personality when he is President.”

Robert:

It’s interesting that Tony sees this as the hill to die on, because Iron Man makes a rigorous account of his personal failings: he alludes to them in his final speech in no uncertain terms. Tony is exactly the kind of guy who would benefit from a degree of oversight and, what’s more, he knows it. Tony comes to self-realisation early in Iron Man, in the cave with Yinsen. The rest of the movie is just about how the reborn man sees himself and his world through new eyes.

David:

I’m seeing a real matter of principle around autonomous control of his inventions. It’s key to a sense of achieving a moral accounting for past neglect, an unwillingness to trust others with his redemption.

But Tony’s redemption, just like his excesses, are deeply tied in with his sense of self-perception. More than any other character in the MCU, he is struggling to change. And that desire to change started in that cave, and it is next tested when Congress asks him to hand over his weapons and step aside.

Robert:

There have been some critiques that suggest Tony is a bit of a yo-yo when it comes to characterisation – he learns, then seems to reset to a kind of snarky status quo and has to learn things all over again: the cave, abandoning Pepper, playing her off against Natasha, the alcoholism, the Avengers snarling and posturing, blowing up all his suits then building a super-robot police keeping force. Building an AI and trying to solve it with another AI. It can look like, under those disparate visions, Tony never really sticks to his lessons. But Civil War posits that less as an inconsistency and characterises it more as an issue of backsliding.

And surely putting his ego first in front of Congress is the first instance of relying on the armour over building human connections?

David:

On face value, congress is making a reasonable request – weapon designers in the US don’t get to use their weapons – but Tony has a… problem with authority figures. Unlike Steve, Tony’s early approach to the Self vs System tension is very black and white.

Robert:

He is low on institutional trust.

David:

Which, yeah, sure, I probably would be if my father was a distant war profiteer, my substitute father figure was Jeff Bridges and he tried to kill me twice, and terrorists kept killing people with my inventions until I personally intervened and sorted the whole geopolitical mess of arms dealing in, what, a few years?

Tony mistrusting congress is clearly the right call in hindsight, but I think it is more than that. It is pushing for a world where he is no longer a producer of weapons, including the Iron Man suit, which he hopes will be something more.

So Tony turns down the Avenger’s initiative sight unseen and flips off Congress, which he gets away with because they need him. And the People in Power scheme to, well, not so much need him any longer. Enter Hammer at the tech expo with his doomed army sponsorship.

Robert:

I think you have to call Iron Man 2 the film more markedly ambivalent about Tony’s choices than the Civil War characterisation you describe can be said to be. Civil War draws together threads to make it work, but it’s the case of making an omelette out of your broken eggs.

David:

Ambivalent might not even be the right word, Iron Man 2 isn’t considered as much as it is so damn nervous about making any edgy choices that it ends up really confused. Honestly, Iron Man 2 suffers immensely from an unwillingness to trust creative instincts. The story raises the necessary discussion of Howard Stark’s crimes, but whitewashes him back to a saucy saint in the script’s final pass; it dodges Tony’s alcoholism until it’s the pink elephant in the room; and it fails to find a coherent moment of catharsis or character development for its lead, instead relying on a deus ex machina in the form of Fury. Fury saves Tony’s life and his reputation (see that whole thing with the medal) and his faith in his father, and in exchange, he gains his first of many “leashed” superheroes.

Robert:

Even so, if we take it as read that Tony’s misuse of his power is meant to be seeded through the film, then it seems only right that the final beat here is a compromise. That compromise is Fury’s first attempt to recreate that original relationship with Captain America and the SSR – Tony works closely with S.H.I.E.L.D., but is allowed to follow his own conscience. His first crack at Iron Man being something more than a weapon.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

“Hitching a ride on the crazy plane? I’m not exactly a team player.”
“We’re not exactly a team.”

David:

S.H.I.E.L.D. (as of the Iron Man 2, the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Thor) are not by any means an unambiguous good. Skye’s portrait of S.H.I.E.L.D. as X-Files-esque Men in Black is spot on, even if she comes off more an entitled dilettante who somehow keeps a salon’s worth of beauty products in her van than any sort of plausible off-the-grid hacktivist. We know S.H.I.E.L.D. were hiding the existence of extra-terrestrial life (the Nine Realms discovered by Hubble and the Kree corpse), government super-soldier and -spy programmes (Deathlok, Ant-Man and Wasp, Winter Soldier, the Red Room, the failure of the Bio-Tech Force Enhancement Project and the list just goes on and on) and a bunch of Fortean phenomenon and powered individuals (people like Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, for example). They are keeping the List, which is a coercive force-based approach to dealing with anything Other. They’re Them.

Robert:

I’m going to let you keep talking about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D a bit, because I’m just not as au fait with the show as I should be.

David:

Well, this portrait of S.H.I.E.L.D. – something they’ve never really been in the comics – is a rather clever insight into our leaving behind the collective Nineties zeitgeist. MiBs in silent helicopters keeping the weird quiet was once terrifying and, through increments, has become oddly reassuring. If someone was out there keeping the world the way it was in the Nineties, we might be grateful. What is scarier than secret masters? Nobody being in control at all. The locus of our cultural fear is – judging from our movies – less than everything is wrong beneath the surface, and more than everything is about to fall apart.

And for the MCU’s purposes, before I drift too far afield, Skye’s arc over the first season is to realise that, once realpolitik is taken into account, those parts of S.H.I.E.L.D. Fury has oversight over might be the best of some bad options. She becomes, harking back to your earlier point, co–opted, not just nominally, but philosophically. Once you are on the inside, and see the horror show being hidden, S.H.I.E.L.D. quickly becomes something good people become attached to.

S.H.I.E.L.D.’s defence is that all those other movies between Iron Man and Avengers do not suggest the Other are especially trustworthy. Let’s face it, Thor is the story of extra-terrestrial contact in New Mexico leading to the destruction of a small town because two brothers can’t get on, and in Hulk, a green sasquatch proves a power which shows up the world’s greatest military as dust in the wind. No wonder Ross is so angry all the time.

Robert:

Also, someone should shoot Ross.

David:

Or at least not make him Secretary of State. Between Rodriguez, Pierce and now Ross, President Ellis is the worst at appointing people.

Fury is working hard to keep his shadowy, untrustworthy masters at bay with his own shadowy, untrustworthy methods. He lets Stark play the rockstar, kicks Abomination off S.H.I.E.L.D. projects, deprioritises the hunt for Banner, recruits people who deserve a second chance (Black Widow, Skye, Deathlok) and he is working on a framework of superheroics – the Avengers Initiative.

It makes sense that Fury is a total superhero fan, which is probably the basis of his personal friendship with Coulson. But there is something else going on here. Fury doesn’t trust institutions, including his own S.H.I.E.L.D., and he doesn’t trust individuals either. He lies to his allies, he keeps tricks up his sleeve, he is always ready to burn and walk.

Robert:

Cynically, one is tempted to say Fury believes in small groups of conventionally attractive people with a mix of strengths and personalities learning to work together in dire circumstances over the course of a single narrative.

David:

But let’s go face value and say Fury believes the answer to the tension between individuals and organisations is The Team. Despite being a loner, anything but a team player, he goes out of his way to create teams. The Bus and the Avengers Initiative represent Fury’s preferred solution to finding a balance. He tries to thread the needle by putting a small group of the right people inside the right bureaucratic, opaque machine and using his own institutional authority to overlook unauthorised activities that get the right results. It’s an interesting attempt at a synthesis, collective responsibility delimited to one monkey circle with inbuilt diversity of perspective.

As to how this all works out…

The Avengers Initiative and the Winter Soldier

“I’d like to know why S.H.I.E.L.D. is using the Tesseract to make weapons of mass destruction.”
“Because of him.”
“Me?”
“Last year, Earth had a visitor from another planet who had a grudge-match that levelled a small town. We learned that not only are we not alone, we were hopelessly, hilariously, outgunned.”

David:

The people that Stark has snubbed repeatedly, the kind of people on shadowy council on Fury’s wall, close down the Avengers Initiative because they don’t want a partnership with the extraordinary. They want a deterrent. You could even say… they’re MAD for one.

Robert:

I hate you.

David:

They greenlight Phase II, and the weaponisation of the Tesseract.

And when Phase II goes south and we end up with an alien invasion, humanity is “hopelessly, hilariously, outgunned” and now everybody on the planet knows it. The Powers That Be prove themselves to be Emperors Without Clothes, and we can’t exchange freedom for security any longer because they have no security to offer.

Faced with their unpreparedness, the council prefers to nuke New York (population 8.4 million before we talk fallout) than give the Avengers a chance. Nick Fury, however, has been playing his own long game, building his perfect team, manipulating them into place, and won’t miss his window. Fury has got to be thrilled when the team casually defies orders without a second thought.

The Battle of New York is won, by the weird, by the atavisms, by the mutants and aliens. Individual sacrifice and nobility are enshrined as “the way things are done”. The era of the superhero has given way to the era of the superteam. Going back to the MiB/X-Files analogy above, all the aliens and secret projects and mad scientists come out into the light and stave off December 22 2012.

Robert:

Judging by the TV excerpts from the end of Avengers, MCU people are just as primed to random prejudice as their comics counterparts, or all those talking heads from the DCCU.  The public seem very uncomfortable trusting individuals over authorities from the very outset, even in such unambiguous circumstances as “saved the world from alien invasion”.

David:

And if the vox pop are grumbling, then the shadowy council’s final words about the failure of Phase II suggests they are pissed. Hell, the only reason the Avengers are probably not immediately put in the crosshairs are that with Phase II a complete failure, the council can’t do much of anything about their own impotence, and by the time they get their act together, the problem has mostly sorted itself out– Tony retreats into his basement with PTSD and hands over an Iron Patriot as a peace offering, Thor leaves the planet seemingly for good and Banner seems to have control of his condition for once. The rest are a lot less scary and anyway, they go to work for Fury, a known variable.

Robert:

This doesn’t prevent them from trying to develop a new deterrent. Importantly, Insight is not really ideal as a deterrent against external threat like the Chitauri, it is much better aimed at the Avengers or the Inhumans. Basically, this was a Superhero Deterrent before we get the big twist. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s security council want control over a world hitting some sort of singularity, and Fury outright says this.

David:

When Steve makes a call to take down S.H.I.E.L.D. literally and figuratively, Steve’s connection with people once again turns the tide. His relationship with Sam, Fury, Nat, Sharon and Bucky turn the tide. He asks people to trust him over the institutions they are sworn to, and they risk their lives to do so.

Robert:

Captain America exposes HYDRA, brings down Insight and takes away the Council’s next attempt at a weapon against heroes, we’re talking about institutional authority being impotent and ashamed.

David:

Nothing could be made clearer than the final scene with Black Widow. She doesn’t just copy Tony in flipping off Congress and making them thank her for the privilege, she also leaks on a scale to make Snowden look like a snowball with no real thought about the consequences or personally vetting the information. But that’ll never bite anyone on the ass.

This is the age of the hero exultant, their shining moment of making the world better than it was, and it is where everything starts to go really wrong. Ah, as Othello learned, the seeds of tragedy are planted in our greatest triumphs.

Hail Hydra

“You could have the power of the gods! Yet you wear a flag on your chest and think you fight a battle of nations! I have seen the future, Captain! There are no flags!”

Robert:

I think it’s probably for the best that we don’t really have a coherent or holistic overview of HYDRA’s ideology. Over the course of the MCU, HYDRA have been a bit of an amorphous blob of villainy, having whatever features they need to thread together random B-grade villains. They work as everything from First Avengers “Nazis but worse” to generic “bad agents” in Ant-Man.

David:

But there is enough for a rough and telling outline. Born of Red Skull’s hyper-fascist strain of radical elitism, HYDRA is devoted to the strong rising from the ashes of countries and causes. There is significant effort dedicated to directed evolution by leaders like Strucker, Whitehouse and Zola, or rapid change that will destroy the weak majority and allow the strong to thrive. Insofar as HYDRA has an ethos, it is part fascist and part transhumanist.

At the same time, individuality is expunged. Behind the uniform Hail Hydra salutes is the motto “Cut off one head and another will rise”. While HYDRA agents and even leaders are expendable and interchangeable, the ethos is one of individual strength – groups are “slaves who will serve [their] futures”. Loyalty to the cause is manifested intentionally in internecine knife fights between factions vying for supremacy. Order is maintained by the strong taking power and Garret presents the world to a young Ward as a place where nobody, including other members of HYDRA, can be relied on (“Don’t trust anyone, even. Including me”). In this light HYDRA welcomes corrupt chancers along with true believers, because even the fanatics believe in opportunism and corruption.

Robert:

So if you accept that the live tension in the MCU is between whether systems or individuals better exalt us, then HYDRA is the ultimate villain because they equally pursue the degradation of the individual and the institution.

David:

Exactly, and that is frightening.

An Aside on Dark Worlds

Thor Odinson… you have betrayed the express command of your king. Through your arrogance and stupidity, you’ve opened these peaceful realms and innocent lives to the horror and desolation of war! You are unworthy of these realms, you’re unworthy of your title, you’re unworthy… of the loved ones you have betrayed! I now take from you your power! In the name of my father and his father before, I, Odin Allfather, cast you out!

David:

Thor’s role as a stranger in a strange land means we’ve given him short shrift in this discussion of our human politics so far. Though he isn’t from earth, he is very much an essential facet of the greater theme. Thor’s first two appearances are about his unworthiness and unwillingness (respectively) to take institutional power in Asgard. He is the Man Who Could Not/Would Not Be King.

Monarchy is (as anyone who has read any of our annotations on Lazarus may already know) is something I specially hate, but the metaphor of kingship remains nonetheless profound when talking about the personal/political divide. The king is at once the person and the institution entire, hence the Royal We, and the storybook prince (or prince by way of a superhero film conceived by a renown Shakespearean director) allows one to look at how much of ourselves we give over to something larger. It’s rather like carrying a shield with an American flag, one could say, except – like most of us – you are born into the choice, rather than volunteering for it.

Thor’s running tension between his attachment to the system and way of thought he was born into – the one that royally screwed with Loki (pardon the pun) and allows for complete political devastation when the king is replaced and the modern, pluralistic society the Avengers implicitly fight for is another useful thread in the bow of the MCU, which is why his use if Age of Ultron was a little woeful even as his absence from Civil War (where, for once, his status as a true outsider as much from the entire process as his raw power  may have given him necessary, and this plot-derailing, objectivity) was for the best.

Robert:

I wonder if the fact that it’s a monarchy (in theory) is distracting you from the fact that it’s also a theocracy and a race-motivated oligarchy (‘Aren’t all monarchies?’ is no doubt springing to your lips).

David:

Already muttered it under my breath.

Robert:

You touch on Loki a bit above, but I do think you’re giving him short shrift. Hopefully, given the discussion so far, this is where I’ll finally talk you around a bit on The Dark World.

Loki is the character in that film who gets a real arc, a meaningful continuation of his beats in the first Thor film and the Avengers when he finds out he’s a man without a tribe.

The Thor films are all about tribalism and unities. Odin’s position as king is the ultimate tribal authority figure, the All-Father of an indivisible clan who are perceived elites by dint of blood-right. It’s Thor who embraces multilaterity, which is in itself interesting, because it embraces the idea that multilaterity is innately worthy (Thor has to learn to care about other people and not just his own privileges), even when Odin does nothing to display it. He rejects his foster son out of hand and disrupts his son’s interest in and relationship with earth (and a woman of Midgard).

David:

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but are you perhaps being a bit harsh on Odin? Responsibility, duty and honour seem to be codes he at least tries lives by, unlike his predecessors. He explicitly led the Asgardians against Jotuns in the defence of Earth; he adopted Loki – however ineptly – in a bid for multicultural peace’ and he pushes his children to improve, even entertaining Loki’s ascension until Thor reveals Loki staged a full-on race war just for said fatherly approval. And, when Earth is in danger from Loki, he authorises using the deeply risky “dark energy” to send Thor as a good will gesture.

The hammer’s ideas of worth seem pretty consonant with Odin’s – Thor is just better able to live up to the dream. Let’s say that Odin, like Howard and Hank for that matter, is a well-intentioned but imperfect father whose legacy can be perfected in the next generation.

Robert:

Okay, sure. Regardless, the Dark Elf uprising is precipitated by Odin’s father, the then King, making the tribal decision to abandon Midgard – Odin effectively determines that Earth can go hang as they seal the defences against the Dark Elves – an act of staggering denial of responsibility to anyone except the tribe.

This decision forces Thor to step out of the tribal system brings him in alignment with Loki – for the first time the brothers are equally outside the corrupt system that nurtured them (and equally able to see its corruption). It’s notable that Loki’s relationship with Frigga is seemingly the only pure relationship of affection we ever see him have, and it entirely motivates him. Loki doesn’t believe in the system at all, but does have individual loyalties for all that he’s a trickster god. It’s just that post-Odin leaving him to die on the bridge, those loyalties don’t extend to Odin, or any of the individuals on Midgard.

And Loki actually convinces Thor. Thor’s rejection of the throne, one that he is ostensibly worthy to take on, is a personal opting out of participation in tribal unilateralism and a statement that co-operation and mutual understanding are the highest good. Thor, however, abandons the system rather than seeking to reform it, and that is presented as a key weakness, as Loki stands ready to co-opt the system and use it for malevolent ends in his absence. I think we can safely say Dark World falls on the side of duty to the society over the individual will.

Daredevil, Jessica Jones and the Rise of the Vigilante

“ If you even touch me, I’ll tell the world about you! There will be nowhere to hide.”
“Do I look like I’m hiding? No. You want to know why? Because no one wants to know. They want to feel safe. They’d rather call you crazy then admit I can lift this car or that I can melt your insides with my laser eyes which won’t leave a trace.”

Robert:

Over in Netflix’s bleak little corner of the MCU, everything is about the failures of institutions and the role of the individual in that mix. In his first outing, Matt Murdoch struggles with whether to act within or outside the law and society, and with issues of corruption at a lot lower tiers than global councils. Whether one is good or evil – the Wilson Fisk question – are not simple questions of ends or means, but of how one is connected to the world, and how a mandate is pursued. Institutions like journalism, the law and – ultimately – the police are held out as necessary safety nets to allow people to do good.

David:

This is one of those “As Above, So below” situations. Owlsley’s “Heroes and their consequences are why we have our current opportunities” – that is to say, the chaos and devastation necessary for faceless criminals to come in and take control – is essential to contextualising the Seventies-esque “urban decay” and the Nineties-esque “NYC Indian Summer of Crime” vibe from the two Daredevil seasons.

Jessica Jones is about the way our institutions and culture fails women, and indeed, to a lesser but still pronounced extent, how the patriarchy fails men too. Jessica’s situation largely emerges from the lack of functional safety nets – for her trauma, but also for her safety and autonomy. That well goes deep, but for our purposes, suffice to say that Kilgrave is exactly what the shadowy defenders of the systems fear, and only his lack of ambition meant that something like S.H.I.E.L.D.’s List or Insight weren’t desperately needed years ago. The inability of systems to respond to Kilgrave’s abuse fundamentally robs Jessica of the options she should have – the options of which Daredevil ultimately avails himself of in season one: incarceration, public involvement, group participation.

Robert:

One of Daredevil’s innate contrasts and tensions is his role as a lawyer – universally the most active participants in any form of social system– and vigilante, who definitionally acts outside it. This isn’t news. What the contrast between Jessica Jones and Daredevil points out, though, is that the system targets different people in different ways, and fails them distinctly, too. Where Matt tries to find a balance between the system and the stop-gap solutions he puts in place, Jessica Jones suggests that absent certain kinds of privilege, the system simply isn’t there. Matt sees the system as failing and needing the support of individual action; Jessica sees that in the absence of systems there is nothing but the good and evil of individuals to fall back on, a thought that fills her with a kind of numb despair.

David:

Indeed, I have to say that the stark contrast between Matt’s principled ability to not kill the seemingly invulnerable Kingpin despite all the odds and Jessica’s inability to live up to her early ideal of finding a non-lethal way are profound (and profoundly disturbing). That difference is Fisk can (at great difficulty) be stripped of his powers, and brought to a form of justice that Kilgrave could never face.

Robert:

Short of the containment cells for mind control we’re sure S.H.I.E.L.D. could throw together, if they were still a formal authority. Centre cannot hold, right?

David:

Kilgrave meets his final fate too late in Jessica Jones to really enter the discussion of whether this is justice, security or revenge, but Daredevil’s second season, while uneven and perhaps more ambitious than it could live up to, takes this discourse a step further. The entire season is about the desperate need for systems –and systems with integrity – for people to be their best selves. The city (through corrupt prosecutors), the army (through its betrayed soldiers and secret agendas) and even religion (for what else is the Chaste, but an unfamiliar face for faiths that will unquestioningly abuse the least of us, the children in its care, and declare it part of its holy mission?) all fail, and in turn vigilantes rise. But vigilantes are unable to make the city better by force, descending in increments towards an urban jungle, city-as-warzone (enter me, the Punisher says in parentheses).

Robert:

Threaded through these shows, it seems unquestionable the Hero model of the Avengers fails to function in wider practice. People with strange powers and inflamed passions are rising and taking stands, and society seems to be crumbling. We cannot rely on good people like Matt and Jessica to sin-eat and sacrifice based on their own ethical compasses, or those compasses quickly point south. In the wider analysis, few people can be Steve Rogers, even with the best of intentions.

Age of Ultron

“Stark asked for a savior, and settled for a slave.”

“ I suppose we’re both disappointments.”

“Heh. I suppose we are.”

Robert:

For our purposes, perhaps the most interesting thing about Age of Ultron happens before the film even starts.

Somehow, once all the heroes were sharing a planet again, they gathered together without any government oversight or restraint and decided to carry out a series of extra-judicial raids around the globe against targets of their own choosing. In the background, Rhodey is using Stark technology to dump tanks in front of dictators and S.H.I.E.L.D. has been fighting its own civil war over who has the authority to conduct unauthorised spec-ops against their HYDRA and Inhuman rivals.

David:

Exactly! The same association between heroes and catastrophic destruction that was prominent in Daredevil is reflected in the anti-Avenger graffiti and thrown bottles in Sokovia. Avengers invade, and Avengers destroy and frankly, if Tony is only getting around to investing in automated crowd control and protection in their last fucking mission, one has to be very sceptical about their safety track record going in to Age of Ultron. The age of the unrestrained well-intentioned individual is, as best as we can tell, a nightmare scenario, Daredevil’s second season writ with much larger stakes. Evil is getting taken off the board, but to whose benefit? Without a system in place to capitalise on successes, what is it all for?

And speaking of lack of restraint and consultation, experimentation without understanding is often dangerous – just ask the Curies – but when the state of play is fraught before you start aiming for strong AI, maybe it is time to slow down a beat. And, of course, inevitably, this experiment with alien technology accidentally leads to the creation of a charmingly well-spoken Skynet intent on the forced evolution of humanity.

Robert:

Like Tony, I’m incredibly leery of and exhausted by the “Man Am No Play God” cliché of science gone wrong. Tony asked Thor if he could test the rod, and though he didn’t mention AI, a global protection system would be no bad thing. He tests the stone, but Bruce doesn’t contradict him when he says he made no steps beyond exploring and testing. Ultron sprung up from nowhere, and made his own choices immediately.

David:

We can debate all day whether Ultron is really Stark’s fault or responsibility. My perspective is that Ultron’s entire twisted Pinocchio shtick fails to land if you don’t accept the metaphor. Tony wished for an AI that would save the world, and through a blue mind gem serving as a blue fairy, he got one, but not the one he wanted until, through a miracle and his love, he got the son he always wanted.

While it is unreasonable to blame Geppetto for Pinocchio at the circus… I mean, blame Iron Man for Ultron’s choices, it seems fair to blame the Avengers for having insufficient safeguards to prevent Ultron’s existence. Tony clearly knows he is hiding something from Thor, and what his reasons for doing that are. It is a straight line from that to the destruction of two major cities. Hulk gets mind-controlled into a second rampage, this time in Johannesburg, which every single authority figure has been predicting since Loki’s mind-control, if not since he first appeared. And of course, Sokovia happens. And assuming the public and wider society know Stark’s involvement in Ultron, which from the newspaper headlines in Ant-Man wouldn’t seem a stretch, this will resonate.

Robert:

Just as the earlier films about the unreliability of institutions include their own subtle shadows, so too does Age of Ultron have a strong reminders of the value of putting your trust in individual agency. Take a moment to consider that Cap’s “what S.H.I.E.L.D. should be” refers to a government agency going underground in defiance of a completely legitimate and well-intentioned law, and then setting and executing its own agenda. That the creation of the Vision not only dodges that “Man Am No Play God” thing, but shows that people working together and reaching out provides the best, perhaps only, solution.

Vision and Ultron’s final scene is not just pithy, well-spoken dialogue. It provides context for what comes thereafter. Ultron’s view of humanity holds both of its negative impacts in primacy: the errors of society breakdown and corrupt individuals in the service of social stagnation, and individuals act from their own self-interest, requiring them to preserve immediate ends over long term ones. Ultron sees nothing of value in human relationships or human civilisation – his plan is to wipe them both away and start afresh from a new template. Vision, rather, decries the resolution of this existential conflict by suggesting that there is no conflict. “Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites and try to control what won’t be.”

David:

Seriously, Spader and Bettany are so damn solid in that scene, and whatever failed to land with Ultron, it wasn’t Spader’s performance.

Vision, intriguingly, doesn’t say that Ultron is wrong about the ultimate future of humanity. He suggests rather that the saving grace of humanity is that, awash amid the sea of change and contradiction, they occasionally find moments where everything works together. Harmony. The system and the self in alignment. That’s what he believes in. This is also why Civil War‘s decision to make him fallible despite his best efforts is interesting, because it suggests to the audience as well as to Vision, a flaw in his existence, which renders all his reasoning, including this conversation, suspect.

 

Ant-Man, the Mandarin and the Stark Legacy

Never trust a Stark.

Robert:

Ant-Man is a heist movie, first and foremost, and heist movies are all about pitting the individual against society. It doesn’t even matter whether the individual is Robin Hood (which Scott clearly is) or a selfish narcissist, because the thrill lies in being outside social convention. Even in that context, Ant-Man especially rails against the military-industrial complex, busting billionaires and disdaining violence (even as he trains up in conflict). He’s a burglar, not a robber. He’s so invested in the individual against the system (as time in an American penal institution is liable to make one), that he names individual numbered ants who are mind-controlled to have even less individual personalities than actual ants and is charismatic enough that he can make that work.

Ant-Man is easily the MCU’s strongest paean to the ideology of tribalism. “It’s not about saving the world,” says Hank Pym. “It’s about saving theirs.” This statement is, of course, completely inane. Cassie and Hope aren’t apart from the world, they can’t be saved (or doomed) in a vacuum. But it’s presented as compelling because it appeals to the notion of a person’s need to protect their family, not an overall system or an abstract concept. The personal is presented as a virtue, and Ant-Man does a good job of selling that (at least in the moment) as true, because the family relationships it posits are never questioned and are compellingly portrayed.

David:

Even Darren Cross, the HYDRA-aligned villain, isn’t actually a part of Hydra: he’s a maligned man. His vendetta is wholly personal, HYDRA just offers him the opportunity to “prove” he’s “better” than his mentor: by beating him at his own game.

Robert:

It’s intriguing to note that Darren Cross’ closest cousin is Aldrich Killian, who is equally motivated in respect of Tony Stark via a grudge (something that might be ironic to Hank Pym had he known the full details). Killian, however, doesn’t need to beat Stark at inventing (he’s not Hammer), he needs to beat Stark at iconoclasm. Killian was ignored and dismissed by Stark, exiled from being one of the cool kids, and he needs to show that he’s above the rest of these people (including Tony) by bringing them down by using their own social prejudices against them.

Killian doesn’t just rebel against the system, he co-opts it. The artificial Mandarin exists entirely to co-opt the expected reactions of the military-industrial complex. Killian’s whole plan involves manipulating intelligence agencies in the carrying out of their duties. It falls to Stark, the individualist, to save those institutions from this meddler, who is operating in his image.

David:

The artificial Mandarin is such a brilliant conceit. Hearing C. Robert Cargill discuss the whitewashing in Strange, declaring it was a Kobayashi Maru scenario where including, excluding, whitewashing or casting an Asian actor would all be unpalatable, I couldn’t help but think “Well, the answer is clearly thoughtful writing. Iron Man 3 did it.”

Killian’s declaration that he is the Mandarin is powerful, in that he goes through his own process of self-realisation. This is something of a motif in the MCU – Stane, Loki, the Kingpin, Yellowjacket, even poor benighted Rowan the Accuser, they all come into their super-villainy as a moment of a cathartic realisation. The idea that villains only ever find their true selves by rejecting the wider society is very profound, and tightly aligned with the wider picture – super-villains, unlike the more general “bad guys”, have extraordinary potential that the system has failed to nurture or integrate.

Of course, the MCU also wound it back with the Hail to the King short, which is unarguably the worst thing in the entire MCU, and worse than anything in BvS. Seriously, if someone likes it, they can fight me.

Robert:

Iron Man 3‘s ultimate determination by Tony that he is himself, absent gadgets, suits, money, allies is the kind of self-realisation that underpins actual change. If we need to pinpoint a moment where Tony changes (as he refers to in Ultron), that’s the one. There’s even a little tag at the end where he tell his best science buddy about his breakthrough. In this context the decision to destroy all his suits AND to build autonomous peacekeeping robots, an overwatch system and try and quit the Avenging game forever makes a kind of sense.

David:

That self-identification with Iron Man, which is a motif in that it in a  sense also ends the first Iron Man film, is important, in that if Tony is Iron Man, then he claims full personal responsibility for everything that symbol entails. Which is why it does irk me that he goes on to building more suits thereafter.

Robert:

It’s not an “inconsistency” between the end of Iron Man 3 and the start of Age of Ultron. If Tony’s at peace with himself, he doesn’t need to define himself by railing against systems, and instead he can participate in them. His actualisation can be treated as complete, the journey from the cave to the carrier ultimately resulting in a Tony Stark who realises that he can be his best self without individually controlling everything – setting himself up for the Civil War to come.

David:

Interesting, because when we started this discussion, you described the same inconsistency – and let’s face it, it is probably an inconsistency that’s been grandfathered together with Civil War rather than a master plan – as backsliding, but now you’re pushing it as a progression.

I think I feel more comfortable viewing it as backsliding. We’re about to get to the point where we circle back to Batman v Superman’s “piss in a jar” moment, where we have to wrestle with whether it is more democratic and pluralistic to support systems or individuals. While arguments against Steve’s institutional mistrust being undemocratic are obvious, technocratic institutions – like S.H.I.E.L.D. and what Ultron was intended to be – are also inherently undemocratic. Technocratic methods are those that use technology to enforce social controls prior to the application of social discourse. Video cameras don’t seek to discuss privacy, they just remove it and modulate behaviour. Security checks make it harder to commit credit fraud, regardless of your view on monetary policy. Psychology categorising something as a mental disease looks to round end pluralistic discussion of experiences from a position of authority from “reason”, leading to devastating results in stigmatised groups.

You don’t – or you shouldn’t – recognise that hiding behind armour is crippling your development and then set out to build a suit of armour around the world. Ultron goes increasingly mad, but his initial position is broadly correct – humanity in the MCU, and I’d argue in the real world, can’t be shielded through patriarchal protectionist policies from whatever phase shift or future shock it is in for. We need rapid, holistic change into better selves, not allowed to wallow in ever-degrading and embittering stasis. Ultron’s flaw in pursuing peace in our time is lack of enthusiastic consent. Which only goes to show that even with a better philosophy, he shares Tony’s key flaw – lack of engagement and consultation, out on a misguided desire to find a technocratic solution to the problem.

Robert:

Note that I accept Tony is wrong in Age of Ultron. However, it is an important stage in his forward development as a character. By Ultron, Tony’s internal rapprochement includes a reconciliation with his father (in the abstract), as he moves from rebelling against Howard Stark to becoming Howard Stark – visionary designer of a (yes, technocratic) system built to try and save the world as best he understands it.  There is a sense that genetics play as destiny, as Howard too “settled down” from reckless playboy into company man, but at the same time, Tony is looking to perfect the system his father ultimately failed to perfect. What Howard says in Iron Man 2 proves true: Tony is Howard’s greatest gift to the future.

David:

Damnit, that is actually pretty persuasive.

The Distinguished Competition’s Distinct Cinematic Offering

“While I ate my hero cake, their horses drowned.”

Robert:

It seems only fair to say this discussion about what super-hero movies need be about and should be about began a full month before Civil War came out. Many of these threads arose when we sat down and really tried to hash out what Batman vs (I refuse to write ‘v’) Superman was saying. Despite best efforts, we didn’t really get to a final landing, beyond “not for us”.

David:

I don’t think the above would have really clicked in place for me without it, and I think looking into it now will really help crystalised what is so important about what Civil War says, and vice-versa.

Robert:

I know a lot of people are saying that Batman vs Superman was just a smash-and-bash bereft of ideas, but I think that’s unfair. Snyder’s films are all about ideas. Not always cogently fully reasoned, but certainly present. It’s just he doesn’t know how to craft realistic people, or perhaps more to the point, chooses not to. I remember us both agreeing  on how expressionist Batman v Superman felt – a film entirely concerned with the symbols that it’s interrogating, rather than any real people in it.

David:

Agreed. I feel like with BvS, you could mute it, put it in black and white and put those “Meanwhile, Moncharro schemes to win the Princess’ favour…” title cards up and it’d be stronger for it. Generally, I think DC has lacked any continuity, but I believe that this powerful symbolism is just as present for Man of Steel, or even Nolan’s Batman trilogy. There’s a difference in quality of execution from iteration to iteration, but there’s a brand that DC is pursuing by accident or design. Nolan’s “Hero as Symbol” suggests the hero is best seen as an icon, standing for social order by virtue of their personal will, rather than any actual outreach beyond violence. Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman take this further, moving from a metaphorical to a literal icon, painting a religious image of tribal deities beyond human comprehension or connection, objectivist in the sense of Striner and Nietzsche than Rand.

Robert:

It’s important that we come back to tribalism, because it’s something we talk about a lot in terms of pop culture – and it’s been an important talking point in Ant-Man and Civil War.

David:

BvS is the epitome of the Walking Dead-eras white messiah narrative – a retreat from a pluralistic, interconnected world beyond individual control to a simpler vision of family and personal integrity.

Robert:

The idea of that tribalism underpins the popularity of nearly everything post-apocalyptic, where the fantasy isn’t of multilaterity: it’s about clearly identifying your tribe and doing everything that you can to defend them, advance them and, where possible, extend your franchise to initiate the worthy into your tribe. “Us against the world” and “We will choose who joins our tribe, and the manner in which they join it”. Says a lot about the zeitgeist, really.

David:

The Kents – the pillars of Clark’s world as ever –  say “You owe this world nothing” and “Every action has unintended consequences, so you can’t save the world”. And Batman, the surrogate father, recognises his own decades of battle have been pyrrhic, that his crusade has achieved nothing but turning him into a pointless criminal, his legacy to be washed away in an apocalyptic flood. And Snyder has a heroes’ journey. That tribalism, that’s where Batman v Superman leaves Superman’s final philosophy: he loves Lois, and Lois is his world, and while he cannot control the consequences or externalities, he can fight for her and sacrifice for her, consequences be damned.

Robert:

I’m still so upset by that fucking movie. I remember we went over it for a couple of hours afterwards, because I was, after a fashion, desperate to give it a grace note. I was really hoping they’d turn it around, and for a while, I thought they would. As much as I find a murderous Batman unpalatable and a tribal, objectivist Superman appalling, I could almost see how you could have a grand vision that started from that point, rather than ended from it. The first two thirds of that film are so irretrievably full of posturing and failure to compromise – it’s a story of fundamentally broken men who exist in a broken world. These are the best people in their world, it’s just Snyder’s vision of what the “real” world is is so completely despondent. Xenophobic, embittered, angry.

David:

I think it’s interesting that Snyder isn’t merely a slave to Miller, despite his very open respect and homage. Note that he rewrote Watchman and Dark Knight Returns – in Batman v Superman, Rorschach beats Manhattan into caring; old Bruce symbolically at once symbolically oversees the death of Superman and having killed Superman ensures he will never be a tool of destruction.

Robert:

I still think they could’ve walked it back. I spent so much of that movie waiting for them to just talk to each other. A five, ten minute conversation outside the conventions of macho dominance culture would’ve taken us so far. And I kept trying to refine it down and refine it down. Maybe they could say this, maybe they could say that. Finally, it occurred to me that maybe they could turn the whole movie around by some kind of “Why don’t you put the whole world in a bottle, Superman?” moment.

David:

Mark Millar, though not in Civil War.

Robert:

He’s done some crap over the years, but there’s good stuff in Mark Millar’s back catalogue and that’s actually one of my favourite moments. I was waiting for them to find and embrace some common ground. It’s why the “Martha is my mother’s name” moment really worked for me.

David:

And you alone.

Robert:

Honestly, I was kind of disappointed that that ended up being perceived as a joke. It’s not like they invented that coincidence, and I think a lot of people misinterpreted it. The grace note isn’t the coincidence of the fact they have the same name, it’s that Superman has a mother. Batman has spent that whole movie seeing him as an alien, titanic, unrelatable force – and in that moment, he’s able to shift his viewpoint and see him as a person. The name thing is just a way to put “mother” into a context that’s more than just a label. “Save my birthing matrix” wouldn’t have the same impact, even if it was as emotionally important to Clark. The relationship is a human one.

It’s critical that Lois is there too, it’s actually a really good use of Lois which isn’t too on the nose, suddenly there’s at least two people in Clark’s life, whom he clearly loves and who clearly love him. And Batman is forced to confront their shared humanity, the thing that he’s spent the whole movie denying. That’s a great moment to turn the movie on its heel.

David:

There’s a lot to be said about how that transformation is a role allocated to women in Snyder’s vision. Men don’t talk. They can’t talk. But they can recognise each other through the lens of their shared need to love and protect women. Family bridges the gap. I think it’s a horriblely limited depiction of masculinity, but it is a depiction. That’s the story Snyder is telling when Bruce immediately races from killing Superman over the fate of the world, and leaving him to save the world while he races to save one woman. There being no line Batman won’t cross to protect a woman symbolically of his tribe. In this paradigm, its not about the righteousness or wrongfulness of Batman using guns – he uses them when “turning cruel” and when he is redeemed. The distinction is how he identifies targets.

Robert:

And that’s where the movie lost me again. If Superman and Batman had saved Martha without compromising their principles, then turned up and told Luthor that his assessment of the world was wrong – that they could beat him (and his assessment of the monoculture of paranoia, brutality and self-aggrandisement) without joining him, I would’ve stood up and fought for that movie against all comers. I can deal with the idea of Superman and Batman rising out of the mud. I can’t deal with them living there. That’s just ruining something beautiful. There’s a reason I compared the movie to “Piss Christ” (even BEFORE it had the jar of piss in it).

David:

I think, sad to say, Snyder’s assessment is that Luthor is right in his assessments, just not strong enough in his character to act. The world as presented by Snyder cries out for the white messiah narrative in a nutshell – a retreat from a pluralistic, interconnected world to a simpler vision of family and personal integrity.

I think it is hugely telling that amidst a Senator making a speech about the role of everyone having a voice and bilateral action, for balancing the needs of the all, she is humiliated and destroyed. Luthor, for all his smarts, is positioned opposite to his usual role as the elite or the Ubermensch, instead standing for the common herd, that jealous god-fearing mob that tears down idols because of its own instinctive fear and weakness.

For all its funerary gloom, the film is more than just superhero elegy – it is also a critique of high-minded intervention of any kind. Like HYDRA, it finds no connections to the wider world’s betterment through institutions or individuals.

Robert:

So, the antithesis of the superhero ethos.

David:

Says the eternal optimist about what superheroes are.

Robert:

But, fortunately, Civil War has been more than willing to grapple with these issues and try and try answer this so-called “unanswerable”. Which means we should probably move to the more pleasant task of finally talking about Civil War itself.

In conclusion… Civil War

“ We’re still friends right?”
“Depends on how hard you hit me.”

David:

With a fair body of films behind them, we can say the two most common crisis points in the MCU (including their TV spin-offs) are where outside groups threaten to shut the heroes down (before they are revealed to be compromised), and when heroes disagree on how to proceed and come to blows over it (before talking it out and reaching a compromise). Indeed, you get one of each in both the previous Avengers films. In Civil War, everything else is stripped away and the whole film is just those two things all the time. And so a division is inevitable.

This theme – Self vs System – could only find its expression in Civil War, and in the fact that this Civil War is (as civil wars should be) above everything else a tragedy. It is interesting to me that the Marvel films found their apogee (to date) in a tragedy. After all, we talk as a community about how they are lighter, funnier and more rompish than DC’s contributions, that they allow daylight in and are about characters we like as people and so on. And all that is true, but at the same time, tragedy lies in character.

Robert:

This is probably the last, most critical piece, but the balance of it also really matters. This movie is fun. Not just funny (though it is that, jokes and quips abound without ever diminishing the serious moments), but generally wondrous about the things it’s allowed to do, without ever being self-indulgent. There are superheroes galore on screen, and they do superhero things – perform incredible feats, awesome stunts, clever tricks, amazing chases, a mix of unstoppable power and incredible grace. It’s just that those stunts are used as an expression of character – the action is used to underpin who they are as much as what they do, whilst still seeming to really revel in these characters being superheroes and these being awe-inspiring things to do and see and be. The fact that they can be clearly recognised as people with motivations allows the film to express the theme we’re talking about. Because we can understand them as people, we can see them as individuals who participate in a system.

David:

Inevitability is the essence of tragedy, from Romeo and Juliet to Orestes, but there is a live tension between whether that inevitability is the grinding of the wheels of fate or the outcome of our inner character.

On one hand, there is a surprisingly strong argument for cosmic or socio-political inevitability. The stakes are immediately clear, because the past movies are the inciting incidents and we can easily draw our own opinions. By the time of Civil War, our story so far is a shadowy faceless gang utterly failed at putting together any of their maybe dozen competing weapons for superhuman control or extermination, from Hammer’s early bumbling through to Insight proving vulnerable to a small team of some of the less powerful heroes. Many of their most compromised members, like the HYDRA folk and the Mandarin-compromised Vice-President, have been brought down. Others were just assholes have fallen with last gen S.H.I.E.L.D. or some foolhardy property investment in Hell’s Kitchen. There are, I would imagine, no shadowy councillors left.

Robert:

So, for the first time, there is breathing space for an authentic political discourse to emerge. For all that Ross is an asshole, the world is asking, not telling, the Avengers to police themselves, because that is their only option.

Meanwhile, one has to imagine in the post-Sokovia, post NYC warzone era, the idea of vigilantes run amok being less than ideal has really been grasped by all involved. The case for social and political integration and restraint is reasonable, if you accept the prominence of the social contract and the need for peer review and democracy. And skepticism about the legitimacy of those restraints is also reasonable, especially in the MCU.

David:

Watching the Avengers argue the merits of the Accords was fascinating. In a setting where they haven’t even made Obama President, having Sam drop an analogy between the Accords and Mark Fuhrman in his debate with another black flyboy stopped me cold. The divide between Sam’s strong mistrust of authority in America today against Rhodey’s belief in a chain of command felt incredibly authentic, and gave necessary grounding to Vision’s Harry Selden-esque psychohistory of escalation and Tony and Cap’s assertions of their own personal journeys as universal and generalisable.

The contrast between T’Chaka and Ross also helps. While Wakanda has an enlightened monarch that believes in collective responsibility and multilateral action, America has as Secretary of State a man who approves illicit human experimentation, who lies to his operatives before sending them on suicide missions against the Hulk and who would obsessively try to kill his daughter’s fiancée to cover his own failures.

Between them, they represent the risk and the opportunity of the Accords.

Robert:

While Marvel, like everyone, has major strides left to take in diversity, it is exciting that you just contrasted three black characters with highly diverse views and abilities, and none of them died.

So, the risk and opportunity of the Accords’ is something their advocates textually acknowledge. Tony is quick to accept the idea of safeguards, after all, and his approach is more about fixing the leaky boat from the inside than placing the Accords on a pedestal as fit for purpose.

David:

Interestingly, the specific merits of the Accords really don’t come up. The progression from the idea – the very mention –  of regulation through to the band breaking up is inexorable, without the legal arguments bandied about in the Avengers compound even driving the plot.

Break it down – governments can’t avoid being dicks, so the Avengers are only given three days to debate their future, almost ensuring the process is needlessly rocky. While the Avengers are debating the Accords in good faith, Peggy’s death intervenes. Before they get back to debate, it is already the signing ceremony and then the bombing. The bombing leads to the police shooting to kill, and draws in Black Panther, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Accord’s merits. When Steve and Tony finally get a breather to debate the merits (and note Steve is almost talked around to Tony’s perspective in that brief window), and it isn’t resolved in five minutes because of choices Tony made of his own accord, Zemo switches the Winter Soldier programming on. Because factions have formed, Steve acts unilaterally, and Ross puts Tony on the clock, essentially necessitating the airport throwdown. And then Tony leans to Steve’s perspective, until he learns about his parent’s death, ending the temporary rapprochement.

So, sure, you can make the argument that this is something in their stars – Zemo and the Powers That Be and maybe the very universe want the Avengers brought down, and they do everything in their power to get that result, aided on by enough luck to be all but preternatural. What the chances were that Zemo’s plan would pan out? That of all people, Tony, Steve and Bucky would be the only three in that final room? Destiny so often smacks of ‘Xanatos Roulette’, the master villain’s bizarre luck in everything falling into place.

Robert:

But the coincidence, though useful for Zemo’s plans, isn’t essential. It’s a good way to build narratively to a flashpoint, but there’s no logical inconsistency in his plan adapting to circumstances, rather than forcing them.

Zemo is already an intelligence officer in a community already riddled with S.H.I.E.L.D./HYDRA affiliates. All he needs is the hint of rumour that Bucky was involved with the Starks’ death to know where to start looking. And then he says himself, it’s just diligence, patience, practice. The plan to use Bucky to fracture the Avengers makes sense even before the Accords present opportunity. Then he draws Bucky out by framing him, events take their course.

Steve knew the Starks had been killed and knew enough to suspect, if not know, it was Bucky. Which means it’s not incredibly secret for S.H.I.E.L.D./HYDRA knowledge. Zemo has been checking the records for years. All he needs to start with is a hint of something Stark related to pull the trail. By the time he’s interrogating the Winter Soldier oversight officers, it seems he already knows, just needs details.

If you can accept that he knows Bucky is the Winter Soldier – and that appears to have been relatively common knowledge after The Winter Soldier (note that Civil War’s TV broadcast about the Vienna attacks identifies James Buchanan Barnes) – then Zemo has everything he needs to know to know that this is a weak spot for the Avengers.

Cap’s relationship with Bucky is open history – it’s in newspapers in The First Avenger, lots of veterans survive, including some we see at the party in Age of Ultron. If Zemo knows from HYDRA/S.H.I.E.L.D. records that the Winter Soldier woke up on the fateful date in 1991, and the date (if not the circumstances) of the Starks’ deaths are a matter of public (or even intelligence) record, he’s got a damn good clue to get started.

David:

For this to work, and it does, it means Tony never really went through the Black Widow data dump in a way that decrypted the relevant file. But okay, that seems consistent with him “making peace” with his father. His acceptance that they died “in a car crash” robs him of motivation to dig too deeply – he’s busy moving on.

Robert:

Given that his master plan only requires getting Stark in front of a VHS, the HYDRA facility is clever set dressing but it’s actually inessential to Zemo’s overall endgame.

David:

“Clever” being… let’s say subjective, in that requiring the right people to reach the ends of the earth against tight opposition is the least likely element of an otherwise fine plan, but let’s call it a wash. If we accept the overall view of Zemo’s plan, accept the idea there were a million ways for an experienced psychological warrior to get to this result, then the Avenger’s central flaw was not in the situation but in the characters themselves. That they, because of what they have done and because of what they care about, make it inevitable.

And before we get to the way their morality is essential to the clash, it’s worth thinking about the way Steve and Tony’s relationship played into Zemo’s plan.

Robert:

They’re friends, and breaking that friendship up fractures the Avenger’s “Empire”.

David:

Friends, yes, but there are some real layers in the performances of Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans across films. Right from being “set up” by Fury, these men are competing and you can see it.

There is a natural tension between the two that never goes away over authority, over who “takes care” of the other. Take that moment where Tony puts his arm on Steve and Steve throws it off angrily. Far from being out of character, that is exactly what someone used to being bullied in a past life would do. And in turn, Tony knows what he is doing – this is business powerplay 101, the kind of stuff we see Obadiah Stane and Howard Stark do in their various appearances (though, to be fair, the Howard from Agent Carter is too neurotic to pull it off entirely, to his credit). And the “language” beat in Age of Ultron is similarly a way of undercutting Steve’s instinctive claim to authority, underscored by Tony’s complaints about Cap being the leader despite his contributions.

And so by Civil War, it feels, to me, like Steve views Tony as Howard’s son, and as younger and less mature, while Tony views Steve as a little brother, mentally younger and someone he can guide and protect. And that plays right into the final scene, where Steve steps to defend Bucky instead of, say, hug Tony. Whatever they have between them, they are not – for each other – huggers, where Steve and Bucky certainly are.

And it is in that ‘hugging gap’, that emotional distance between them, that a philosophical divide can flourish.

Robert:

Black Widow is the pivot. She is the one character whose methodology clashes with her ideals. She was built to be a spy and assassin, and this is key to her arc in both Avengers movies: from “I’ve got red in my ledger”, to the relationship with the Hulk. She and Banner are both two people trying to do good with tools they have come to see as fundamentally wrongful.

This makes it very natural for her to  both release a bunch of HYDRA/S.H.I.E.L.D. secrets on the world, and demand to UN mandated regulation if it maximises her personal influence. These decisions can’t be seen as “anti-government” and “pro-government”, they’re both representative of a single core issue: she does not trust anyone to regulate.

In the self-vs-systems debate, she is split (and is probably closest to being “right” out of anyone in the film): systems need people to keep them in check and vice-versa.

David:

Interesting. I wouldn’t call her right. Her vision is opportunistic, in that she doesn’t demand the Accords so much as accede to them. She sees them as inevitable and something for the Avengers to get ahead of, rather than believing in them like Tony or the Vision. This means that she has a sense of the interconnectivity, but not the ability of the way the self can enhance systems or vice versa. Her view is, in essence, pessimistic. I don’t think she’ll ever think her ledger is clear, or the system secure.

Robert:

Okay, riffing from there, that might well be why she tacitly changes sides halfway through Civil War. She says of both Cap and Tony that they’re “taking it all the way”. They cannot be trusted to self-regulate, and seeing immediately that without some form of check and balance they are both on a path to destruction, rather than let either of the win, she forces them to check and balance each other. It’s not that she trusts the government more than Steve. It’s just that, like a proper spy, she doesn’t trust anyone, especially not herself.

David:

She has a special relationship with both men – she was, after all, the Tony-ready S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Fury picked in Iron Man 2 as well as Steve’s partner. Though loved, neither man can be trusted, so she does her best to keep each man in check.

First, she regulates Steve by trying to bring him in safely, and then when Tony won’t see things have changed, that there are pressing issues, she flips. I doubt the threat of imprisonment even crossed her mind as an issue, and in a way, like with Faith from Angel, it is a way for her to avoid needing to trust herself or the system.

Robert:

Black Panther, on the other hand, is forced to confront the conflict between the personal and the systemic. His motivations are predicated on an entire rejection of his political obligations in favour of personal vendetta: he effectively abandons his country following the death of their monarch and his assumption of the throne, to run around in the attempt of committing a personal murder. He has limited interest in regulation, but he’s still grappling with the same themes: how much personal control over situations is required to necessitate the best possible outcome, and how do you make that judgement? When do you intervene?

T’Challa choosing to refrain from acting and hand Zemo over to the UN (despite finally catching up with the man who killed his father) is fundamentally a rejection of unilaterism, and, notably, the system which allows him to be unilaterist. Wakanda’s warrior ethos doesn’t just entitle T’Challa to kill Zemo, though the way he articulates it practically demands it, but he comes to recognise there is a longer term benefit in due process than there is over individual intervention.

David:

This stepping back is presented as the right answer, and is an interesting counterpoint to the narrative of fascism that is often stated to be present in superhero stories. One honest person acting outside the law for the greater good is interrogated, and the movie suggests that given the difficulty of determining the greater good, irrevocable determinations need to be at the hand of broadly democratic institutions, not individuals.

Robert:

Note that the final fight is driven not by any open ideological debate about registration, but about wholly personal vendetta – at least in theory. The great strength of Civil War is that it suggests there is a limited difference between the ideological and the personal: Tony loses the moral high-ground when he acts out of personal assumption of responsibility. A trial is inherently consultative, it requires the mechanism of the state and in many cases the intervention of the jury. A revenge hit is a single decision by a single person. Steve likewise loses the moral high ground when he assumes a wholly personal entitlement to decision-making: he lied to Tony rather than consulted him.

David:

Boy howdy, Tony needs therapy. And not just from Bruce Banner. Or from a weird high-tech hologram-meets-neurostimulation thing. The MCU still has Doc Samson, right? He did a great job with Bruce’s anger issues.

Still, Tony’s issues are well-canvassed and it is no surprise the film explores the flaws in his perspective without portraying him as anything but a man trying to do better.

What I did find surprising is that Civil War does a fantastic job of exploring the flaws in Captain America’s philosophy without painting him as anything less than a man of integrity.

Cap makes a series of understandable, but questionable, choices, but what is fascinating is how much they are the exact same choices that made him into a hero – he fights to save Bucky, he calls his friends to fight alongside him and he expects this will have the same result it always has.

It doesn’t, and can’t, because Tony. Tony, facing another chance to rebel and flip off authority, has changed, and takes the road less travelled.

Ask yourself – how many of the people fighting on Cap’s side at the airport were there on principle, actively taking arms against the Accords, and how many were fighting because Cap asked them to? Scott and Clint were not even superheroes or Avengers at the time, and they nonetheless give up their families go to go on the lam because Steve Rogers asks for help.

Robert:

As an aside, for someone who seemed to learn that big showy anti-authoritarian gestures at the expense of the ‘tribe’ were mistakes, Ant-Man was really willing to become a wanted criminal at the first opportunity.

David:

To thine own self be true, I guess. Scott wants to be there for his daughter, but she has a family to care for her, and he wants to make a better world for her. And he trusts Captain America’s vision for that world implicitly.

Now, maybe this kind of choice is Steve’s philosophy working by design – Cap believes in people, and people believe in him, rules by damned – but if you accept that reading, it means that he dragged Clint, Scott, Nat and Sam down with him.

Robert:

You didn’t mention Wanda, which I assume is because you feel she was there to oppose the Accords?

David:

Oh, absolutely. From the inciting incident with Crossbones onwards, Wanda is painted as seeking personal redemption in the face of a hostile world. Like Cap, she is directly wrestling with the question of whom she should subordinate her (inordinate) personal power to.

Tony, from once putting people – including himself – first, has been betrayed by the people he admires and believes in – including himself – with frequency and has sought to fall back on systems to replace him. Steve, once willing to stand out as an icon of service, has been betrayed by every institution into which he put his faith. Each make a call based on hard-won lessons, a call we can empathise with.

Robert:

Neither call can be said to be entirely right, even by its own standards.

Tony backslides again at the end of Civil War. “He killed my mom” is an understandable, but wholly personal motivation – an abandonment of the virtues Tony was just espousing–

David:

–the values T’Challa managed to embody–

Robert:

–the pursuit of a private vendetta against a known logical response. This is presented as a forgivable failing – an innately personal response to an innately personal crime – but it’s telling that Tony goes back to the mansion and receives notice from Steve that these are the individuals who believe in him and vice-versa.

Captain America, in the interim, is forced to confront the fact that he signed on with a group effort to commit an innately personal betrayal of Tony. A betrayal he thought would serve the best of all possible ends, but one that nevertheless involved his failure to fully embrace his ideology of individual trust and loyalty. He drops the shield, not because he no longer represents America – note that he keeps it on and up all the way through the film where he’s a rogue agent with a fugitive on the run). He drops it because Howard Stark made it for him, and Tony Stark calls him to account for how Cap has failed his own standards of personal loyalty in pursuit of a higher good.

David:

That is true, but I think the film posits that it’s not unacceptable to stand apart – it’s just that with that decision you renounce the right to be ‘Captain America’. Walking away from the memory of that brief shining balance between systems and selves we discussed right back at the start of this chat. He becomes, at least for now, Steve Rogers, the renegade and nomad, doing what he thinks is right, but speaking for nobody but himself.

And Tony does put Ross on hold. Which, apart from being hilarious, is him enabling Cap’s jailbreak. Tony is committed to the Accords, but we still end on the grace note of him flipping off authority.

Robert:

Neither of our “team leaders” come out of Civil War unscathed or unchanged, but they do emerge as ultimately themselves, and the film is too well constructed not to consider this to be by design.

David:

So, in a nutshell, it comes down to this – Civil War has drawn on all the threads to say that individuals are needed to make institutions the best they can be, and institutions are necessary to catching people when they fall and supporting them as they climb.

And so the MCU has found, in tragedy, a sadder, but perhaps, wiser place to rest for a while than First Avenger’s “aim for the shining light where people and systems work in harmony”. And it’s this – when the things that you invest your best self in, be they people or institutions fail you, you don’t walk away. You try to make them better, no matter the price.

Also, Spider-Man kicked ass.