Emily VanCamp, Anthony Mackie, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War.Zade Rosenthal
Late last month, Marvel Studios came under fire after the trailer release for their forthcoming psychedelic-superhero picture, Doctor Strange. The issue: British actress Tilda Swinton had been cast as the Ancient One, the mentor to the film's titular surgeon-turned-sorcerer, and a character originally of Tibetan provenance.
It was immediately criticized as another instance of whitewashing. But instead of the usual duh-duh, "who? what? us?!" routine, an explanation was offered that proved weirdly compelling. According to Doctor Strange screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, the switch-up was about not alienating China, whose substantial film-going public regularly bolsters the box office of Hollywood blockbusters, and whose government has occupied the Tibetan region since 1951. As Cargill said, by identifying the character as Tibetan, Marvel ran the risk of "the Chinese government going, 'Hey, you know one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world? We're not going to show your movie because you decided to get political." (Marvel, for its part, released a statement after Cargill's interview, highlighting the studio's "very strong record of diversity" and that it "regularly departs from stereotypes and source material to brings its [Marvel Cinematic Universe] characters to life.")
The perfect irony was that in deliberately avoiding the impulse to "get political," the film became even more political. In attempting to sidestep any spiked subtext by including a Tibetan character, Doctor Strange effectively created an allegory for the ongoing struggle for recognized Tibetan sovereignty, and the erasure of this struggle by Chinese and Western authorities. Heavy stuff for a movie about a wizard who battles an extra-dimensional warlord called Dormammu.
Such heaviness is increasingly becoming the M.O. of the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. These days, it's not enough for a caped crusader to clobber a bad guy, all BIFF! BANG! ZORK! Now such movies need a "message" – about the surveillance state, about the tension between liberty and security, about the nature of power itself. This in itself isn't so galling. After all, cracking the ideological coding of one-or-another innocuous entertainment has long been a favourite pastime of critics and other restless viewers. The issue is the thundering obviousness of such messaging, which tends to slam down harder then Thor's mighty hammer.
With its latest product, Captain America: Civil War, Marvel has produced perhaps its most transparent message movie. Adapted from writer Mark Millar's Civil War comic series, the film sees factions of superheroes (one led by Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man, the other by Chris Evans' Captain America) divided over new legislation that makes superheroes an appendage of the United Nations – like a souped-up peacekeeping operation, government oversight and all.
"This is not one that has a big bad guy from outer space who wants to rain hellfire on everyone," Civil War co-writer Stephen McFeely says in an interview with The Globe. "This is an internal division. This is brother against brother."
McFeely's writing partner, Christopher Markus, maintains that the two "didn't want to write a polemic." And yet Civil War is openly, transparently polemical. Characters speak to each other in the argot of ideology, as if they're constructions of a thought experiment floated in Poli-Sci 101. Of the proposed oversight law, Captain America notes, "If we sign this, we surrender our right to choose." He might as well swap his trademark stars 'n' stripes getup for a "Don't Tread On Me" flag, a copy of Atlas Shrugged and one of those goofy fifes hardcore Tea Party-types flounce around with.
Like the source comics, Civil War's modest twist is reversing what might seem to be the natural ideological polarities. After all, one may expect that Iron Man, an independently wealthy billionaire weapons manufacturer, would rebuff a law that tethers him to a government bureaucracy. Instead, he supports it whole-hog, while Captain America – a patent symbol of American values, to the point of being named "Captain America" – casts himself as the libertarian rebel, a believer not in Big Government, but "in individuals."
"That's always been a concern writing these movies," McFeely says of the Captain America franchise. "For the uninitiated, it's a character that seems like a jingoistic symbol. But the slightly initiated know that that moniker is something he's had to wrestle with."
Of course, while Captain America may not support a specific sitting government, he's no less fierce in his ideological convictions. What's more jingoistic than being so patriotic as to openly defy your own government to act in accordance with deeper-rooted patriotic principles? If anything, it's the very revolutionary spirit that defined America. And it's an idea that plays all too easily into the contemporary divide in American politics, where extreme partisanship see both the Republican and Democratic parties divided in a way they haven't been since, well, the actual Civil War. Indeed, Markus admits that Civil War's narrative of a superhero house divided against itself, "is is chiming with the current bickering" in this, a U.S. election year.
The issue is that it chimes a little too loudly, clanging like the cacophony of fictional metal alloys smashing against each other that soundtracks Civil War's epic, intermittently entertaining, superhero beat-down brawls. The critic Northrop Frye minted the useful literary category of "naive allegory," the kind of story that is "so anxious to make its own allegorical points that it has no real literary or hypothetical centre." Civil War feels similarly anxious and naive. Its political and ideological lines are so clearly drawn that the film often feels like more of a historical document of America's great political schism than a piece of popcorn cinema.
Writing about James Cameron's Avatar a few years back, film scholar Jeffrey Sconce took issue with the film's blatant heavy-handedness in terms of themes and messaging. "For an allegory to be effective," Sconce wrote, "there must remain some sense that it is actually an allegory. Before racing the hare, the tortoise does not stop to opine, 'By participating in this unlikely contest, I hope to teach you some important lessons about hubris, determination, complacency and the work ethic.'"
This is the ultimate failure of movies like Avatar or Civil War. In their broad attempts to feel weighty and allegorical, nothing is actually allegorized. Instead of intersecting, the story and theme mirror one another, in a kind of fretful symmetry. This sort of thematic posturing may seem consequential and important. But it actually gives the viewer less to think about, reducing the potential connections between what's happening on screen and what's really going on. In attempting to make audiences feel smarter, it works to further dumb them down.