The Summer Movie as Democrat Election Parable

The Avengers is a great summer movie. I don't need to elaborate on why, for if you are reading this you likely have already seen it and either do not need or do not want convincing. A.O. Scott, however, even when praising the film for its entertainment value, is queasy about the cold corporate calculation of it all.

“I’m always angry,” [Bruce Banner] says at one point, and while “The Avengers” is hardly worth raging about, its failures are significant and dispiriting. The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre. Mr. Whedon’s playful, democratic pop sensibility is no match for the glowering authoritarianism that now defines Hollywood’s comic-book universe. Some of the rebel spirit of Mr. Whedon’s early projects “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Firefly” and “Serenity” creeps in around the edges but as detail and decoration rather than as the animating ethos. 

“I aim to misbehave,” Malcolm Reynolds famously said in “Serenity.” But for all their maverick swagger, the Avengers are dutiful corporate citizens, serving a conveniently vague set of principles. Are they serving private interests, big government, their own vanity, or what? It hardly matters, because the true guiding spirit of their movie is Loki, who promises to set the human race free from freedom and who can be counted on for a big show wherever he goes. In Germany he compels a crowd to kneel before him in mute, terrified awe, and “The Avengers,” which recently opened there to huge box office returns, expects a similarly submissive audience here at home. The price of entertainment is obedience.

The corporatism goes deeper than cinematic aesthetics. Marvel Comics quite infamously screwed Jack Kirby from receiving proper compensation for co-creating the Avengers and dozens of other iconic characters that Marvel simply would not today exist without. They imposed limits on his rights to his own artwork and have made billions of dollars off his creations. In the months leading up to The Avengers' release there was talk of a boycott on these grounds. The number of people were enlisted to the cause is moot, however, in the face of a $200 million opening weekend that has unstoppably grown the movie Hulk-like into a billion dollar baby.

In a way this reminds me of liberals' moral dilemma when it comes to the question of re-electing Barack Obama. Politically speaking, Obama is The Avengers to liberals: hip, energetic, pushing all the right buttons. He stanched the bleeding of an economy in freefall, saved Detroit, passed Health Care Reform and financial regulation, repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and is the first president to come out in support of gay marriage. He saved the day and looked cool and smart doing it.

Yet his presidency is littered too with illiberal policies that, were they done by a Republican, would have liberals howling: "extrajudicial killings, violating the War Powers Resolution, waging war without Congressional approval, violating the Geneva Conventions, whitewashing torture, warring on whistleblowers," to name a few. The liberal wish list is being dutifully checked, while fundamental issues of the rule of law have been left to atrophy or, worse, have been outright attacked. Like The Avengers, the slick surface sheen obscures a fundamental emptiness.

Tim Brayton, in a positive if weary review, referred to the Marvel mashup as "Transformers: Dark of the Moon for literate people who enjoy wit." Implicit in the complaint is a reluctant defense: "Have you seen the alternative?" With yesterday's release of Battleship, which grafts an alien invasion plot onto the mechanics of a Milton Bradley guessing game, we get a stark view of just how much worse it can be.

So Avengers, so Obama, whose opponent is a man described by his own underling as an Etch-a-Sketch in what was supposed to be a compliment, who once promised to "double Guantanamo," wants to start a war with Iran, and can barely even be bothered with pretending to care about the law. Unlike movies, elections are zero-sum competitions. One of these two will come out victorious, and anyone who votes for a third-party candidate or abstains out of protest would do well to keep that in mind.

The problem remains that the better of the viable options are still far from ideal. The Avengers is ultimately insubstantial, as is Obama's approach to the law. But these choices don't present themselves out of the blue. They are both, in fact, animated by the same thing that drives their vastly inferior competition: corporate cash and popular sentiment. Like the Jack Kirby case, Obama's legacy is handicapped by monied interests. The health care and financial regulation bills both conceded numerous demands in the interest of receiving industry cooperation. When industry sets the terms of regulation, the word has lost all meaning (that the Wall Street-backed Republicans tried to attack the legislation as a giveaway to the financial industry merely demonstrates, again, the debased nature of the choices we have).

A deeper problem still is in fact the feature of democracy, the wisdom of the crowd. Obama is one of our canniest politicians, such that even a humane gesture like supporting gay marriage is calibrated toward pacifying constituencies, garnering votes and donations. That's just the nature of running for office. Yet where is the civil liberties constituency? I'm not even speaking of liberals, but of the broader electorate that any candidate must court in order to win. Will they favor their franchise toward appeals for due process, executive transparency, and an unwinding of the security state--or promises of jobs and protection from whoever may or may not be trying to take away their influential minority's rights? Whether it's Jack Kirby or Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the American public has far less interest in upholding fairness and justice than in self-gratification, particularly when life is so dire already.

Obama was once promised to be transformative. That just as well describes Mitt Romney, both for his ideological shape-shifting, and his policies, which have their cinematic analogue in the  empty-headed mayhem of the Transformers movies. Obama and The Avengers are both compromised, but as a product of the broken systems in which they operate. For all the valid criticisms of them that do exist, one must ever ponder the alternative. Revenge of the Fallen was by all accounts a terrible movie; we don't need to watch it again.