911, Superheroes, and Civil War


 


i still haven't read Marvel Comics' Civil War, but friends have been so kind as to run down the plot for me--if not in all the detail necessary for a real critique. Nonetheless, what I now know bothers me. And thinking about it has led me to some conclusions that go beyond just 'it sucks'--to a few things about comics, and even to how we view ourselves these days.

In rough outline, a battle with a super-villain goes bad, and lots of civilians get killed. As a result of this, the government demands that all superheroes be registered. Captain America becomes the leader of the heroes against registration, and Iron Man and Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four line up for registration. And, i guess because it's Marvel Comics, it turns into a shooting, zapping, throwing-people-through-walls war.

Reacting as a fanboy, I immediately think of the Mutant Registration Act storyline when I was writing the Defenders (which then included the Angel, Beast, and Iceman of the X-Men.) Not very innovative. And there was Henry Peter Gyrich, the H.R. Haldeman-like government liaison from the Jim Shooter era of the Avengers, Mark Gruenwald's Captain America storyline in which the government demanded the costume and shield back because they owned the copyright(!)--going back to Justice League of America #19 , where the JLA is banned from using their super-powers on Earth by the UN. This thing has whiskers longer than mine.

I have no idea of the details of how it is set up, so I may be talking through my hat here--but 1) it seems to equate the United States with the World. Following one metaphor or another, superheroes could easily relocate either to the Cayman Islands or to Canada. Countries would be falling over themselves to host superheroes, as the balance of power would shift radically away from the United States. And 2) as is the case in every single one of these stories, the problem of the supervillains is conveniently ignored. Either a) the supervillains are behind it, or b) all of the big powerful menaces are vacationing in Tahiti, all expenses paid by Writers' Fiat Airways. (Need I say that even the delightful Incredibles movie had this problem? Who was dealing with the giant robots while the heroes were handling insurance claims?)

But to turn the fanboy down a notch, it's disappointing that a situation with such big, complicated issues of American constitutional law, International politics, ethics, and morality should be used as flashpots and strobes for a superhero fight. Compared to the decades long X-Men storylines, with Sentenils and the Freedon Force and that big invented country full of mutants and the highly ambiguous position of Magneto, this seems, from this distance, to be pat and unexplored.

(I'll mention my one contribution to the mutant question: I wrote an issue of the Defenders in which I created a radical student group called MONSTER--for Mutants Only Need Sensitivity, Tolerance, and Equal Rights, because I was tired of only having mobs of mutant-haters brandishing their pitchforks and torches. I wanted to make the picture a little more complex by adding some dirty stinking radical hippies on the other side. Although it didn't catch on in my time, I was pleased to see (by Googling) that somebody picked it up later .)

It's pretty clear that Marvel has patterned this on 9/11 and the aftermath that led us to the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, Guantanamo--and Iraq and Abu Ghraib. And using a superhero registration act as a metaphor for that is a perfectly decent metaphor--and the split between Iron Man and Captain America as an analogue to the Red-Blue split in America, a fine idea in principle. In fact I found the overall conception admirable and not a little gutsy.

The problem, as I see it, is how they go about it.

It starts, for me, with this question: did 9/11 occur on Marvel-Earth?

Utilizing my fundamental theorem of superhero comics, that whatever fantasy or SF elements are in the heroes' foreground, the background is always everyday reality--I'm certain that it did. But if it did, then a) it shattered something important about superheroes in general; and b) having a metaphor coexisting with the real thing is extremely messy and clumsy.

When our society goes through a major crisis, when (in comics terms) something happens in the background that is outrageous enough to feel like a foreground event, the frame shatters. Something has to give. It was that way in World War II with Superman: at first, they had Supes going to work on the Japs and the Ratzis--but then realized that it was all wrong, and pulled back. World War II was an essential part of the current culture--overwhelmingly so--but the war had to keep occurring exactly as it did in reality. If you took the story seriously, Superman would have ended the war in three days--and that could not happen. So, except for symbolic covers, World War II became invisible in Superman comics.

In the same way, it's vital for the background that 9/11 occurred--and it had to have happened exactly the way it did in real life. No avengers Quinjet or the Thing lifting up tons of rubble: it had to be just as great a tragedy as in real life, or nothing in the background rings true.
But it shatters the foreground/background frame. If no superheroes prevented or even diminished 9/11, why not?For once the background really needs the foreground's help and, of course, it can't--and so everything begins to feel a little more like a lie.

But if you then stage a bogus 9/11 analogue, and base the whole uproar over the fact that ordinary people got killed (due to, it's made to seem, the actions of superheroes)--how does that square with the massive tragedy where superheroes were absent? And, worse, how does 9/11 rank as the most awful thing ever when Manhattan has been lifted away in a big bubble, had the gates of Hell open up by the Empire State Building, been invaded and occupied by the armies of Atlantis, had Galactus set up shop in midtown more than once, and so on and so on? How should 9/11 rank against all of that?

9/11 shoved the background into the foreground, and all the contradictions and absurdities come forth. The people in Civil War who rise up and demand superhero registration are acting like Americans in the real world post 9/11. But would people living in a world with super-powerful beings since World War II react that way? Would the government act like 'the only remaining superpower in the world' if, literally, it wasn't? Would, in fact, the government want to regulate superheroes if that would mean assuming responsibility for combatting supervillains?

The function of the real-world background of superhero comics is to make people feel comfortable with the fantastic characters in the foreground. We relax and laugh with minor pleasure when a Martian in a green cape sits watching Dave Letterman, or when a seven foot tall woman who can juggle bulldozers switches on her iPod to listen to the White Stripes. But when that background itself ceases to be comfortable, things are broken.

What I'm saying is not that Marvel handled Civil War badly: I still haven't read it. But I am saying that it's a no-win proposition from the start: the things which would make the story work logically and do justice to the complexities involved are just the things that will break the superhero framework. Either a deep examination of what everyday life would be on Marvel Earth, with its proof of the supernatural, its awareness of galactic empires, its hellish insecurity and the reduced confidence in things like military power and the privileged position of humanity--or a detailed examination of the constitutional aspects of a Superhero Registration Act (Would Captain america, with no super powers, be a superhero if he fought in jeans and a T-Shirt--or a nice Armani suit? Is calling up demons subject to license--but calling up angels not?) , and the fierce judicial and legislative battles that would inevitably entail--both would muck the story up, either with the over-detailedor the ridiculous.

Superheroes are meant to fire our imagination (the imagination of the heart as well as the brain), but not supposed to calm our fears, or reassure us. Like the preferable Newt told us in James Cameron's Aliens "She's not scared because she's just a piece of plastic." Superheroes, I think, don't really have anything to tell us about 9/11, except in the most abstract terms. Fireman and policemen--and politicians wrapping their arms around them--do. Even working a 9/11 metaphor into the superhero universe is a problematic, because the quintessential fact of 9/11 is that there are no superheroes--just us. And there are times we're called upon to do the jobs of superheroes--sometimes without even a shield. Try to put that, for real, into the Marvel Universe, and the Avengers and Captain America dissolve into puffs of logic, and the doors shut.

So should Civil War not have been done? Not done the way it was done? I don't really know. One good thing is that, like in The Truman Show , it's good to row your boat up against the horizon and touch the painted backdrop. (I always thought that the scene was Peter Weir putting in an echo of C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader , myself.) There's nothing like coming up against limits to make you aware of what you're doing. And the Marvel Universe is remarkably resilient: unworkable notions are soon sedimented and fossilized by new depositions of continuity, and the good stuff constantly comes back from the dead by a wonderful array of cheap tricks.

But there's another reason why this unread Civil War might be a good thing. From where I sit, America reacted to 9-11, especially after the shock wore off, as if the 9/11 attacks were the end of the world, and so horrible and unthinkable that it justified absolutely any action we took, and that we should be given the privileged positions of nervous invalids. We arrogated ourselves privileges that no other nation could have--like waging pre-emptive war, like secret prisons, like torture--because we'd been attacked! It didn't matter that London had had IRA bombs going off in downtown for decades, that Russia immediately prior to 9/11 had apartment buildings destroyed by bombs, that to the rest of the world, terrorism was nothing new. But not to us! Not on AMERICAN SOIL!
In this we were helped along by unethical politicians and their toady media, beating the big bass war drum, by jingo! But so much of America has stayed scared, and defensively scared, of the Dreadful Thing That Happened. (Fortunately, by the polls, that's down to 30%.) But still, that feeling of america as Privileged Victim still prevails.
Not that Marvel Comics actually reach all that many people any more, but by using that PV status as an excuse for drastic overreaction and abandonment of principle, and seeing it contrast with the attitude that prevails in the Marvel Comics foreground, that it might prod people to abandon the OMG OMG OMG American attitude and assume the attitude the rest of the world has.
In the Live Journal entry I linked to previously , one of the commenters summed up that attitude beautifully and succinctly, by quoting Dennis Leary: "The world is a dangerous place. Get a fucking helmet."
Amen, sez I.

Posted: Wednesday - March 21, 2007 at 07:34 PM        

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