Nostalgia and Nationalism: Breaking Down Marvel's Shortcomings
Even the Defense Department has its grip on America’s largest franchise.
Aina Marzia
Raking in over $2.8 billion, Avengers: Endgame became the world’s highest-grossing blockbuster of 2019, solidifying Marvel as a mainstream beacon for American superhero culture. Shortly after the movie hit theaters, however, viewers criticized a scene near the end, in which Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is saved by five women superheroes. That scene, meant to give audiences a positive illustration of “girl power,” fell short — many felt like the heroes’ brief appearance, for the sole purpose of coming to Spider-Man’s aid, was a performative addition included for cheap “feminist cred.”
A conversation about the presentation and tokenism of women in Marvel films blew up on social media, becoming the catalyst for The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the latest book from Lilly J. Goren, a professor of political science at Carroll University, and Nicholas Carnes, a public policy professor at Duke University. The anthology is an extensive analysis of the politically charged narratives in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’s written and researched with the help of over 25 contributors, tackling issues surrounding heteronormativity, environmentalism, imperialism, racial justice and LGBTQ+ portrayals in America’s largest entertainment franchise.
I sat down with Goren to discuss Marvel’s use of nostalgia to push nationalism, the Defense Department’s involvement in movie scripts, representation of female heroes and the lessons viewers can draw from the films.
Aina Marzia: This book is really all-encompassing and tackles some of the most pressing societal dilemmas of our time through the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). What prompted this idea?
Lilly J. Goren: Avengers: Endgame made over a billion dollars in five days, which is very rare. So the fact that this movie opened globally and crossed that line, with that particular scene towards the end, has now become a kind of standard for blockbuster openings. So the book came out of that conversation with a bunch of political scientists who sort of said, “Hey, who wants to write about politics in the MCU?” And we did. A second volume is already under contract with the University Press of Kansas.
That’s amazing. These movies move fast and there’s so much to talk about in every film. Marvel has become somewhat of a beacon of Americanism. How do the films provide commentary on American life?
Goren: I wouldn’t necessarily say the MCU is saying “this is what America is.” Nick [Carnes]‘s chapter in the book, where he and his graduate students analyze every presentation of the U.S. government in Marvel, comes out as kind of a wash in the end. Half the time the United States government is presented negatively, and half the time it’s presented more positively.
The special law enforcement, or S.H.I.E.L.D., comes up a lot in the book, especially their relations between the people and military force. We also know that Marvel Studios maintains relationships with the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. Is this something that might be apparent to a first-time viewer?
Goren: I don’t know that the Department of Defense funded the films that use their equipment in them, but the Defense Department does have a standard about allowing productions to use Defense Department equipment, and that is that they get to say yes or no on the scripts. A number of the Avengers films, mostly the ones that used Defense Department equipment, had to go through that process. But, again, the Defense Department did not necessarily say yes to all of the movies, and some of the movies didn’t work with the Defense Department to present some of the military equipment they were using.
Talking about specific superheroes and the way that they’re represented in the film — from Doctor Strange to Spider-Man — are these heroes working with the systems in place, or against them? And how positively are these systems reflected in the MCU?
Goren: I think that what you see, particularly in Captain America: Civil War, is the dispute over whether a governmental entity can manage, or should manage, superheroes — who, by their very nature, are extra-governmental and, in a real sense, vigilantes. So the problem with superheroes is that they are not democratically elected. They have extraordinary powers and they generally do their job to try to stabilize or reestablish a society or societal norms. There is this perpetual question embedded in superhero narratives. Batman — who is not part of the MCU — is the most acute example of this understanding of being a vigilante who is called on by the structures of local government, that being Gotham City. The issues around superheroes are that they are, in fact, deciding what they think is just and working on behalf of it, and there isn’t necessarily a check on that.
Let’s talk about your chapter “Nostalgia, Nationalism and Marvel Superheroics.” Does Marvel strengthen nationalism?
Goren: I think that nostalgia and nationalism are, in many ways, woven together within the MCU. It’s not necessarily our nationalism; as I say in the chapter itself, when you’re talking about the MCU, part of what you’re talking about is reestablishing whatever the disturbed order was, which is generally the narrative of any superhero movie, that there’s a “baddie” who comes along and upsets the current status quo, and so the superhero comes in to reestablish it. It’s the re-establishment of order in places like Asgard following the “Thanos snap,” the reestablishing of half of the universe that was snapped into oblivion or death. What you have is a sort of reference to this kind of nationalism, which is, “I want what was there before, back again.”
That is essentially the narrative across pretty much all of these films and the productions — as well as in a lot of places, the television series as well — and that’s connected to this concept of nostalgia, which is, “I want what I had before, even if I’m not necessarily always sure what that was, but it was better before.” That’s what I was looking at in my chapter — how these threads tie into superhero narratives and reestablish the status quo.
You characterize some of the MCU’s philosophy as conservative as well, how their movies don’t provide representations of progressive life. Going into identity, is that a big part of the MCU and how it gets “political”?
Goren: We trace this throughout this book and the next one, but there is an evolution that we see in terms of the MCU productions and artifacts that move beyond the straight, white, American character of Tony Stark or Captain America. You do start to have some different representation in terms of Captain Marvel or Black Panther, and now that the MCU is under the Disney umbrella, the Disney approach to narrative is also fairly conservative, which is to not ruffle too many feathers and make something that is as broadly appealing to ticket buyers as possible. As you’ve also seen, I haven’t charted this, but it has seemed to become more sexless as it’s gone on and become more endemic to Disney.
Part three of the book tackles identity questions. What is the importance of good representation in entertainment?
Goren: All entertainment has political dimensions. We’re not necessarily talking about campaigns and voters. We’re talking about the narrative, the message that is coming through those artifacts. On the most basic level, we talk about identities in an imaginary space. People buying tickets and going to the movies or watching them on television see themselves represented in these spaces, so that they are more included than excluded.
At the same time, what are the narratives themselves saying? One of the points that I make in the next book is that pretty much all of the female superheroes we see, from Captain Marvel to Sersi in Eternals, to Kamala Khan in Ms. Marvel, all of them, all of these female characters who have superpowers, often don’t know the full extent of their superpowers and they find out while they’re fighting a baddie, whereas the male characters almost always have a very linear experience, gaining their superpowers, understanding them and then moving forward. You might have more representation of women or people of color, but at the same time, their narratives are not necessarily giving them equal space and capacity.
Right, and these storylines vary by character. In the first part of the book, you talk about origin stories and the representation of heroes, in Phase One and Phase Two of the MCU, through a white savior motif. Is that still evident in the newer films, or has it reformed over time?
Goren: I think there are some different presentations of heroics. You do have somebody like Sersi in Eternals, who is presented as a much different character. She is the center of her powers, and her origin story is much different than that of Tony Stark or Captain America. I would say the same thing with Captain Marvel, Kamala Khan or America Chavez, who are supposedly the center of their stories. In Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, you have America Chavez, which is supposedly her origin story, but we still don’t have the background to what gave her the superpower she has, because it was a blink and you missed it. Whereas you have a much more extensive understanding of Captain America.
We’ve been talking about the representation within the white-centric perception of these superheroes, but a lot of these films are about foreign relations. In Doctor Strange, we see the representation of Asians, and in Iron Man, a lot of the Middle East. What does that representation look like?
Goren: Matthew Longo’s chapter looks into that in terms of Doctor Strange. There was a lot of criticism of Doctor Strange when it first came out because the Ancient One, is, in fact, Asian, and she’s played by Tilda Swinton, a lovely Scottish actress who is white. I think that there have been different presentations of non-white and non-Western individuals, but I also think there are constraining narratives in terms of gender, particularly when we look at the Scarlet Witch, not only in her evolution in Phases One through Three, but also when we move into WandaVision and then Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where her entire motivation is about her children. It’s very maternal, and that is what the movie is about, how her grief over not being able to be with her children makes her nuts. This is, in a way, a weird throwback concept to mothering, maternity and gender in lots of different ways. I think that the Iron Man films are not only kind of denigrating Middle Eastern individuals and concepts of who is in the Middle East and what they’re up to. But the early Iron Man films were incredibly misogynistic.
There is a lot to be said about power disparities, and I want to end on a question that you guys actually wrote about in your book: “What lessons are this entertainment juggernaut teaching audiences about politics, society, power, gender and inequality?”
Goren: Well, I think there are a variety of different lessons that are being communicated. We have more images and more people who are amazingly strong and fabulous, but there are still tensions in these stories. I don’t think there is a single lesson that the MCU is teaching. Because these films and television shows are such moneymakers, it’s necessary to draw attention to what they are saying and doing to see what is being communicated by disparate directors, disparate actors and disparate writers.
Aina Marzia is a student at Princeton University studying Anthropology, Law, Politics and Economics. As an independent journalist covering intersectional politics, her work has been featured in Al Jazeera English, Slate, Teen Vogue, The American Prospect, Grist, The Daily Beast, The Nation, Dazed, Ms. Magazine, YES! Magazine, NPR, Yahoo, Business Insider, i-D, VICE, Talking Points Memo, The New Arab, The New Republic and more.
