The potential moral heft of such stories depends on the reality that the misdeeds of establishment figures, potentates and even godlike beings can be judged by higher standards. ![]() (I consider Thor: Ragnarok morally vacuous storytelling, but not because of its anticolonial vibe.) Revelations of Asgard’s shameful founding have topical resonance in our day, with civil and ecclesiastical authorities being called to account for their complicity in what have been called genocidal acts against Indigenous Americans. The Winter Soldier’s “Who watches the watchmen?” theme - unaccountable government agencies amassing too much power over the lives of citizens - evokes real-world political concerns such as the excesses of the Patriot Act. These are storytelling choices with moral and thematic potential. (Wakanda’s historic isolationism in the face of African suffering and turmoil is a further stain on its legacy.) Odin and T’Chaka were largely depicted as benevolent rulers, but their regimes papered over their leaders’ unacknowledged crimes: Odin’s campaigns of genocide and murderous conquest T’Chaka’s cover-up of the killing of his radicalized brother N’Jobu and the abandonment of N’Jobu’s young son, the future Killmonger. itself was secretly rotten from within, infiltrated and subverted by Hydra, a terrorist secret society with Nazi ties. Taking this tainted legacy to a new level, Tony’s surrogate father figure Obadiah Stane sold weapons to terrorists.īehind Nick Fury’s dissembling about S.H.I.E.L.D.’s super-weapons program, among other things, may have been humane motives, but S.H.I.E.L.D. Howard left his son a legacy of war profiteering, and the way he dispatched his unscrupulous colleague Anton Venko - who helped invent Stark Industries’ greatest nonviolent achievement, the arc reactor - was ruthless at best, and had grave consequences for both men’s sons, especially Venko’s. “Let’s just say the greater good has rarely outweighed my own self-interest,” Howard Stark himself eventually admitted to Tony in a poignant, time-bending final encounter. Even if The Man himself is more sympathetic than not, the institution, legacy, program or domain he represents is fundamentally compromised or corrupt. Always, though, The Man has damaging secrets, misrepresents his true intentions, and can’t be trusted, at least not completely. Incarnations of The Man vary from one MCU movie to another in terms of how sympathetic or compromised he is. In The Eternals, The Man is something more exalted still - and this has unavoidable existential and dramatic consequences. Sometimes Dad is a literal higher power, a being of quasi-divine status, like Odin of Asgard, Ego the Celestial (father of Star-Lord), or the immortal Wenwu (father of Shang-Chi). ![]() This archetype can be broadly called “The Man” or “the Powers that Be.” Always a powerful, patriarchal establishment figure, like Obadiah Stane, Nick Fury or Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford’s character in Captain America: The Winter Soldier), The Man is often the protagonist’s actual father, like Howard Stark or Black Panther’s father T’Chaka. He’s a culmination of an archetype running through Marvel movies from the beginning: an apotheosis of the MCU’s most consistent idea, if not their only idea. At least one of the non-Deviant antagonists is officially a spoiler, but you’ll probably spot the other one out of the gate if you’ve been paying attention. Jordan’s incandescent Killmonger, among maybe one or two others who stand out amid a deep bench of forgettable mediocrities like Malekith and Taskmaster - but even the best of the rest have, so far, been one-and-done baddies of the week.Įternals - a sweeping ensemble origin story spanning thousands of years of human history and introducing a record-breaking 10 new costumed heroes at one go - adds a number of new forgettable antagonists, primarily the mindless monstrosities called Deviants. After more than a dozen years and some 25 films featuring dozens of superheroes, the MCU has produced just two memorable, enduring antagonists: Tom Hiddleston’s mercurial Loki and Josh Brolin’s emo nihilist Thanos. ![]() One of the most enduring raps on the Marvel Cinematic Universe is its villain problem. Note: This article contains Eternals spoilers. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” (C.S. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. If you see through everything then everything is transparent. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. “You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever.
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