Monarchy (and other royalty) in modern (especially superhero) movies

[brainwane]

After 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!

Comments

[seekingferret]

This is really interesting. I think I've told you my basic take on Civil War was that "Everyone needs to be hit on the head with an Enlightenment philosophy textbook. Hard."

The thing about Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok is that they're stories about the legacy of colonialism before they're stories about governance. It's a lazy and ill-thought thing to say, but at a first pass, any problems with these monarchies can be ascribed to colonialism rather than the inherent flaws in the system.

And of course both monarchies and democracies have been historically responsible for colonialist practice, and the history of the Enlightenment is inherently tangled with the history of colonialism. Questions of personhood and who is entitled to the rights of natural law are inherent to the anti-colonialist critique of the Enlightenment.

So I think one of the ways in which Civil War falls down is that it fails to successfully critique the colonialism inherent in a system where a bunch of superpowered people can run around the world imposing justice on people whose rights to autonomy they don't recognize, but what was frustrating about Civil War is how close they came to that critique without reaching it. Lagos is how a story that did end up reaching that conclusion about the Avengers would have started, it just wouldn't end with a bunch of men in suits beating each other up on an airport tarmac over an incoherent legal charter.

I like what you say about representative democracy being cognitively demanding and how that poses unique challenges for the storytelling.

[yasaman]

Ha, my input is basically to dump on CACW. There are plenty of character things I liked about Civil War, but the whole Sokovia Accords thing was such utter nonsense. I agree with you that it would have been a better, more coherent plot and conflict had it followed up on IM3 and CATWS. In general, the Cap vs. Iron Man conflict of who should hold the power, Avengers or governments? is a solid one, one grounded in both character and the plots of their respective movies. The problem is that CACW doesn't substantively engage with it. It instead requires Tony to carry the idiot ball in the plot: why the hell would or should he trust Thaddeus Ross?

The fantasy of the Avengers is exactly what Steve says in CACW: the safest hands are our own. That they are dangerous weapons, but they are heroes, heroes who will not allow themselves to be swayed by corruptible governments or corrupt motivations. How plausible a fantasy this is, in universe, is part of where CACW falls down, because we have NO IDEA how plausible it is or isn't. We know we trust Cap, yeah, but we don't really have much of a sense of how the Avengers work within the geopolitical system, because as you say, institution building isn't sexy cinematic fodder.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think a big part of the failures of CACW can be laid at Age of Ultron's feet, because Age of Ultron was totally fucking incoherent and it messes up the interesting post-CATWS Hydra was everywhere, how do we deal with that story they could have potentially told with Civil War. Because instead of substantively addressing the fallout of that, Civil War was left cleaning up the mess of Age of Ultron. Like, it's LEGIT for the world at large to want to control the Avengers after Tony Stark built a powerful murderbot. The problem re Civil War is: what does this have to do with Steve, or with the Avengers as an institution? AOU was Tony Stark fucking up! The engine of the plot was Tony Stark's Bad Choices! You can't really tell an interesting or coherent story about the Avengers as an institution given that. Whereas you COULD have told an interesting story about the Avengers as an institution if they'd stepped into the power vacuum left after the corruption and destruction of SHIELD.

Of course, there's an interesting subtext there: capitalist billionaires fucking things up with their attempts at making things better, capitalism ruins everything yet again. To bring it back to royalty, a capitalist billionaire has no duty to their people the way a monarch does. A capitalist billionaire's failures are individual, they're rooted in the character's personal flaws that become writ large thanks to their power. To bring it back to your original points about royalty, contrast with the monarchs we see in the MCU, whose failures and conflicts are only partly on an individual level; instead, they're dealing with legacies, with institutional and geopolitical choices their countries have made: Asgard's past imperialism, Wakanda's isolationism.

lol I'm thinking this all through as I'm typing, and I have to say, I think my conclusion is that Tony Stark distorts the MCU with his presence, and with the uneasy way his arcs and storylines intersect with the rest of the MCU. I love the character, but he's kind of sucking up all the oxygen that could give other, bigger stories proper room to breathe. Which, I mean, what's new when it comes to billionaires, amirite?

[ckd]

I think they should have been the Put Tony Stark On A Fucking Short Leash Accords, but that wouldn't have let them keep the movies PG-13 if they said the title more than once (I think).

[owlmoose]

Part of the problem, I think, was their choice to tie Civil War to the Captain America franchise rather to the Avengers. Because you're right -- CACW was essentially a direct sequel to AoU rather than CAWS, and Steve's actions and motivations are almost incidental to the larger story. My initial reaction to CACW was that it was good Avengers movie and a very good Iron Man movie and even a pretty decent Winter Soldier movie, but it didn't really hold up as a Captain America movie. I wonder if we'd think more kindly of it if it had been branded as Avengers: Civil War.

[yasaman]

Also, some of the discussion here might be of interest to you: https://www.metafilter.com/174092/hasnt-even-made-Major-yet

[delight]

I have nothing intelligent to say, but I loved Dave!

[skygiants]

There's a part of me that wants to say part of the problem is just that stories about democracy are so complex and so inherently collective -- it's easy to come up with a simple, satisfying, 1.5 hour plotline about a monarch who can just Do All the Things, we have all those useful one-person-head-of-state tropes to draw on and then all the interesting political complexity we get in something like Black Panther feels like going above and beyond, jumping well past the goalposts.

Whereas to tell a story about democracy, you need to set up all kinds of institutions and protocols and the collisions of a whole lot of significant personalities and plenty of in-story time for everyone to, i.e., sit down and read and react to a several hundred page legal document. Which I think you can do! I haven't seen The West Wing but everybody seems to think that did it! And, personally, I love well-done fantasy and sci-fi about communities and complex organisms -- but jeez, it's hard to build that in an hour and a half. And even harder when your premise is ... bad. (Sorry, Civil War.)