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brainwaneAfter I wrote this review of Manikarnika and this tiny review of, among other things, Victoria & Abdul, I started showing Black Panther to my spouse and I was talking with him about it and about Thor: Ragnarok. And I started wondering aloud why Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok, which are about royalty, actually have reasonably interesting things to say about geopolitics, while Captain America: Civil War tries to and is incoherent.
(Do I actually believe everything I say here? Not 100% sure. Iron Man 3 spoiler ahead.)
First off: it's interesting to think about what it does for a story to have royalty in it. Especially in Asgard and Wakanda, the head of state is also the active commander in chief of the military and, personally, a super warrior, so you get the pleasures of military stories: tradecraft and competence, camaraderie, loyalty, leadership, high stakes/suspense, and how the choice to act violently affects the person making that choice. Even if they're not doing a bunch of explicit and active military stuff, a story about a monarch is inherently high stakes, and preloads the character with a responsibility they're supposed to steward and some people they have work relationships with (advisors, subjects, heads of rival nations) -- PLUS built-in relationships with other people in related jobs, whom they also have family relationships with.
Compare Batman! Bruce Wayne has a family backstory, and he's responsible for a big institution (Wayne Enterprises), and he's taken on responsibility to protect Gotham City, but those are kind of disaggregatable, and none of his colleagues are also his blood family.
And compare the Avengers. They each have families, but they are (mostly) not each other's families. They have taken on responsibility to protect Earth, but how much can we count on The Avengers as an entity to stick around? We expect a country to last for centuries, and we expect a superhero team-up to last a couple years. Part of why Civil War is a mess is that the Avengers are asked to take on an institutional level of responsibility but are not an institution, and institution-building is not as cinematic as explosions. And the Avengers are mostly based in the US and have to coexist with the US military, which a movie audience already has certain expectations of, and Civil War tries to look at that tension without being willing to follow it to its logical conclusion, because massively modifying how the US military works would cause a level of psychological implausibility that does not fit with superhero movie genre expectations.
Using fictional royalty gives an author so much freedom with plot and setting. When your story is about the royal rulers of a fictional country, you can change A LOT about that country (who rules it, what territory they control, what policies they hold, what history gets taught) in the course of one movie, just by creating a psychologically plausible family feud, which is cinematic. If you try to do this in a fictional sovereignty controlled by a representative democracy you may end up with the Star Wars prequels. Or, to some extent, the "if only a regular guy got to be President of the USA!" lookalike switcheroo comedy Dave (1993), which I adore, but which is a fantasy.
And what do I mean by that? I don't just mean "that couldn't happen" -- I mean, in what sense is it taking part of the reader/viewer expectations of the genre of fantasy? Teresa Nielsen Hayden once, in an aside, mentioned "the numinous landscapes and significant personal actions of genre fantasy" -- that rings true to me. For instance, look at Wonder Woman's actions, and her relationship with Themyscira -- and Moana's story, and her relationship with her island and her ocean! And what better position could a person be in, for their actions to be significant and their surroundings to be numinous, than a royal one?
Well, President, kinda, because the White House really does mean something to us, and because -- to a modern US audience at least -- we're used to the post-FDR Presidency, the Imperial Presidency, the executive orders and the hyped-up Secret Service, the pomp and circumstance, the secret wars, greater and greater power with less and less accountability. When the President is a king, "The Prince and the Pauper" fantasies like Dave are one way we can conceive of One Of Us becoming One Of Them.
Captain America: Civil War suffers from trying to work within a 20th century framework where The Sokovian Accords would work alongside NATO, ASEAN, etc. when, to be psychologically accurate in the 21st century, it could follow up on Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier and have governments try to use spies, defense contractors, faked-up threats, blackmail, secret negotiations, etc. to restore a balance of power. Basically treat the Avengers like an international terrorist group.
(Well that got dark.)
What I said about Victoria & Abdul and about Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi was: "both of which seem to think the problem with the British oppression of India is that local subjects were deprived of a wholesome, classy, righteous queen (rather than, say, that Indians were deprived of representative democracy)." And I think that message isn't just about the Raj. I mean, representative democracy is cognitively demanding and there are a million ways it's broken and everyone has to keep making decisions. Wouldn't it be nice for someone else to do it for us??
But -- no. We tried that.
yasaman, basically I am waving my hands around not sure whether I'm full of crap, and would particularly welcome your input here!
(Do I actually believe everything I say here? Not 100% sure. Iron Man 3 spoiler ahead.)
First off: it's interesting to think about what it does for a story to have royalty in it. Especially in Asgard and Wakanda, the head of state is also the active commander in chief of the military and, personally, a super warrior, so you get the pleasures of military stories: tradecraft and competence, camaraderie, loyalty, leadership, high stakes/suspense, and how the choice to act violently affects the person making that choice. Even if they're not doing a bunch of explicit and active military stuff, a story about a monarch is inherently high stakes, and preloads the character with a responsibility they're supposed to steward and some people they have work relationships with (advisors, subjects, heads of rival nations) -- PLUS built-in relationships with other people in related jobs, whom they also have family relationships with.
Compare Batman! Bruce Wayne has a family backstory, and he's responsible for a big institution (Wayne Enterprises), and he's taken on responsibility to protect Gotham City, but those are kind of disaggregatable, and none of his colleagues are also his blood family.
And compare the Avengers. They each have families, but they are (mostly) not each other's families. They have taken on responsibility to protect Earth, but how much can we count on The Avengers as an entity to stick around? We expect a country to last for centuries, and we expect a superhero team-up to last a couple years. Part of why Civil War is a mess is that the Avengers are asked to take on an institutional level of responsibility but are not an institution, and institution-building is not as cinematic as explosions. And the Avengers are mostly based in the US and have to coexist with the US military, which a movie audience already has certain expectations of, and Civil War tries to look at that tension without being willing to follow it to its logical conclusion, because massively modifying how the US military works would cause a level of psychological implausibility that does not fit with superhero movie genre expectations.
Using fictional royalty gives an author so much freedom with plot and setting. When your story is about the royal rulers of a fictional country, you can change A LOT about that country (who rules it, what territory they control, what policies they hold, what history gets taught) in the course of one movie, just by creating a psychologically plausible family feud, which is cinematic. If you try to do this in a fictional sovereignty controlled by a representative democracy you may end up with the Star Wars prequels. Or, to some extent, the "if only a regular guy got to be President of the USA!" lookalike switcheroo comedy Dave (1993), which I adore, but which is a fantasy.
And what do I mean by that? I don't just mean "that couldn't happen" -- I mean, in what sense is it taking part of the reader/viewer expectations of the genre of fantasy? Teresa Nielsen Hayden once, in an aside, mentioned "the numinous landscapes and significant personal actions of genre fantasy" -- that rings true to me. For instance, look at Wonder Woman's actions, and her relationship with Themyscira -- and Moana's story, and her relationship with her island and her ocean! And what better position could a person be in, for their actions to be significant and their surroundings to be numinous, than a royal one?
Well, President, kinda, because the White House really does mean something to us, and because -- to a modern US audience at least -- we're used to the post-FDR Presidency, the Imperial Presidency, the executive orders and the hyped-up Secret Service, the pomp and circumstance, the secret wars, greater and greater power with less and less accountability. When the President is a king, "The Prince and the Pauper" fantasies like Dave are one way we can conceive of One Of Us becoming One Of Them.
Captain America: Civil War suffers from trying to work within a 20th century framework where The Sokovian Accords would work alongside NATO, ASEAN, etc. when, to be psychologically accurate in the 21st century, it could follow up on Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier and have governments try to use spies, defense contractors, faked-up threats, blackmail, secret negotiations, etc. to restore a balance of power. Basically treat the Avengers like an international terrorist group.
(Well that got dark.)
What I said about Victoria & Abdul and about Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi was: "both of which seem to think the problem with the British oppression of India is that local subjects were deprived of a wholesome, classy, righteous queen (rather than, say, that Indians were deprived of representative democracy)." And I think that message isn't just about the Raj. I mean, representative democracy is cognitively demanding and there are a million ways it's broken and everyone has to keep making decisions. Wouldn't it be nice for someone else to do it for us??
But -- no. We tried that.
yasaman, basically I am waving my hands around not sure whether I'm full of crap, and would particularly welcome your input here!
