Are superheroes American imperialists?

Did you know that the US military are active investors and agents of commercial media and entertainment? Whether it’s video games, music videos, or blockbuster movies, since the 1960s, the US Department of Defence (DOD) and its various subsidiaries have been directly involved in the production and dissemination of media and entertainment to a global audience. This phenomenon is known as the Military-Entertainment complex. The crux of the military-entertainment complex is the spread of pro-American military narratives in popular media that are facilitated by the US government. Since the cold-war era, the US government have been linked to major Hollywood production companies, for example, Walt Disney was an FBI informant where he handed over suspected communists in exchange for access to FBI headquarters to film (Olla 2021). This indirect, and overtime more overt involvement of the government in popular media is a form of soft-power that is imposed on the average American and global consumer. Soft-power is defined as modes of shaping perceptions and ideologies about a certain state and its politics, one very dominant mode being cultural influences via media and entertainment. There are seven main reasons that a government will engage in entertainment: (1) recruitment; (2) public relations; (3) normalise state action; (4) enhance their socio-political relevance; (5) compete for resources; (6) educate viewers; and (7) affect perceptions of international audiences (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 19-25).

One example of a figure in American hegemonic presence in global commercial media is the figure of the superhero. The superhero is not a figure that is unique to Hollywood, however the global commercial success of American superhero movies and tv shows is a multi-billion-dollar industry, which is currently predominantly occupied by DC and Marvel. Marvel Studios in particular has created the most profitable movie franchise of all time. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is a franchise universe of selected series of superhero movies produced by Marvel Studios under the parent company of the Walt Disney Company. The commercial success lies heavily on the “epic affective experiences” of battle sequences and triumph that are far detached from reality (Lenoir and Caldwell 2018, 19). The DOD, a significant benefactor to these movies, has been involved in the processes of script review, production, casting of extras, facilities, and much more across various MCU movies and television shows (Fox 2021). Since the conception of the MCU, the Marvel Studios-DOD partnership has been promoting strong American militarist narratives, especially when depicting political conflicts, the role and responsibility of the superhero, and the idea of the ends justifying the means. The Marvel movies that have direct DOD intervention are Iron Man 1 (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014), Hulk (2003), and Captain Marvel (2019).

Superhero movies and the military-entertainment complex are part of a wider influence in shaping an international moral economy that fuels American exceptionalism and moral righteousness. Since the end of World War II, the American narrative for engaging in a war has been defensive in nature because of the imminent threats to global stability of democracies. Self-defence is the easiest morally acceptable cause for going to war, especially if you want to claim the war is just. After the 9/11 attacks, the average citizen is directed to be in a state of fear and ready to defend. When this state of fear is paired with the rise of the superhero genre in popular media, the hunger for a powerful, mythical, virtuous saviour against terror is fed to the public. Marvel superheroes, specifically because of their box office success on a global level that is unmatched by any other superhero franchise, is particularly significant in shaping public opinion towards American military action. Institutions of power, like the DOD, “use moral rhetoric to mobilize the public, and that reframing policies in terms of specific moral foundations can alter constituencies of support, moral frames may be one technique decision makers can employ to mobilize support for their desired foreign policy options” (Kertzer, et al. 2014). Thus, Marvel has been a culturally significant force in driving public support for and against security forces, on the domestic and international level. As figures that bridge reality and fiction, “the superhero follows the tradition of the Hollywood Western to represent ‘dimensions of an American self-understanding of great relevance to the question of the nature of the political in the American imaginary” (Philips 2022). This paper argues that by embodying morals of just war, the superhero in DOD-assisted Marvel movies becomes a vessel of American imperialist ideology toward humanitarian military intervention, shaping a moral economy that favours American exceptionalism and moral superiority for peace.

THE VICTIM AND THE SAVIOUR COMPLEX

Superhero movies are able to create, maintain, and feed fantasies of grandeur and power of the individual guided by a morally-driven mission toward peace and justice for the vulnerable. These fantasies were always prevalent amongst American consumers, but were especially needed after the 9/11 attacks, when superhero movies became the nation’s vision for responding to global threats that reinforce prevailing moral superiority of the US since their revolution (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 7). Interestingly though, the US is portrayed “both as its global leader and also as the world’s primary victim of acts of violence” in Marvel movies (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 9). By placing themselves in the role of the victim and also the protector, any act of violence through the superhero or military is morally righteous since it is “wholly defensive” and the “violence always originates with the enemy” (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 8). The second victim in the superhero narrative is the innocent civilian on foreign soil. The characterisation of foreign populations as victims that need to be saved from their own oppressive forces is a narrative that was largely present in post 9/11 US foreign policy action, especially used as justification for the war on terror.

Let’s take Iron Man 1 to think through the characterisation of the US as both dominator and victim, and the enemy as threatening and defenceless. This film launched the MCU. The story begins with Tony Stark, a young, playboy weapons developer (i.e., the epitome of the military-industrial complex) who is in Afghanistan and attacked by a rebel militant group. He is held captive by the militants until he builds them a missile which they will use against the local Afghan people. During his captivity he builds an armed iron suit which he uses to escape and go back to the US, and commits to no weapons development after finding out his company has been secretly selling weapons to the militants. The enemy­, a developer within Stark’s company, with the labour of the rebel group, creates his own suit for an ultimate showdown which Iron Man wins. Who is the victim in this story? Stark first. The Afghan people second. Who is the saviour? Stark as Iron Man. It is no surprise that a movie depicting a capitalist benefactor of weapons saves himself and the defenceless Afghan people from the highly intelligent and dangerous terrorists (who were emboldened by said capitalist benefactor—just without his knowledge) is supported by the DOD. Specifically, the US Air Force supported the development and research of the script, costumes, filming locations, access to equipment, usage of military facilities, and even extras to play militants for both sides (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 56). The primary reason the DOD cited was to “encourage military recruitment” as the movie makes armed forces “look like rockstars” (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 57). Although the movie was released in 2008, the script and production had been in works since 2004, as public support for the Iraq invasion started to waver. The DOD’s suggestions to the storyline were intentional to sway public opinion about the US’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. The movie’s appropriate response to a terror threat is violence, especially if the threat is brutalising innocent civilians unprovoked. It was key for the script to depict the terrorists as highly intelligent and capable to justify a mass scale defensive attack, otherwise the American positionality as a victim wouldn’t be believable (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 57). The unprovoked nature of the threat is also essential, as the Pearl Harbour and 9/11 attacks are described as completely unwarranted, thus the appropriate response is a highly technical and militarised attack that is in self-defence, and therefore morally justifiable. Although the movie has critiques of the government, Stark makes “references to ‘peace’ and ‘freedom,’ while profiteering from the war in Afghanistan,” but he is a good, well-intentioned war profiteer unlike the antagonist within his company (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 59-60).  

Furthermore, the development of the armed suit in Iron Man was key in building support for the DOD’s projects in developing super-soldiers in reality. Military funded “cyborg soldier research and development projects” by MIT and UC Berkley called the ‘Future Force Warrior’ was set to be released in 2010, but never did due to failed performance, and eventually abandoned in 2019 (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 59). The attempt to create such Iron-Man-like suits around the same time Iron Man 2 was set to release, is a clear indicator of the DOD utilising superhero movies to not only gain support for their military projects, but use these movies to encourage scientific innovation for military purposes, so that the American hyper-weaponised and unimaginably powerful fantasy can become a reality. Victimhood is weaponised to position the American capitalist superhero as the protector, and if the public believes that an existential threat exists, all their taxpaying money can go to not only developing military projects similar to science-fiction, but also to continue producing superhero movies that work hand-in-hand. Feeding a moral economy bolsters the actual US economy. The US is then characterised as the only nation that is able to play the protector and hold the ultimate moral authority to intervene since it is always defensive. As Andrew Fiala highlights, “faith in American exceptionalism is self-serving […] as we reap the benefits of military power (some call it imperial power) we pretend that our military power is based on justice and not on self-interest” (Fiala 2007, 70). The victim-to-hero arc connects existing political action with malleable mainstream public opinion.

THE VILLAIN AND THE FEAR OF IMMINENT THREATS

Aggressive prevention is based on the notion that there is an imminent threat which needs to be met with a response that is proportional to the damage it is capable of inflicting. The issue though, is that there are no set definitions of what is imminent and proportional, it is based purely on interpretation. While talking about Iraq after 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defence said “we cannot wait until the threat is imminent… Anyone who believes that we can wait until we have certain knowledge that attacks are imminent has failed to connect the dots that led to September 11” (Fiala 2007, 82). Waiting for a threat to become imminent is committing “suicide” considering that terrorists are “enemies of civilization” as a whole, so, since the threat is existential even before it becomes imminent, the response needs to be as severe (Fiala 2007, 85). Asad points out however, “terrorism is not primarily about the people and objects attacked; it is about the construction of ‘threat’, the identification of its source, and the response that is appropriate to it” (Asad 2010). The justification for just war in response to a terror threat is that terrorism is never necessary, but just war is, so not only do combatants have to follow moral rules while engaging in war, but humanitarian missions are conducted through military intervention under the umbrella principle of responsibility to protect (Asad 2010). In movies post 9/11, “superheroes live in the world of the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay, where rights and laws can be suspended indefinitely in service of security against any threat” (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 81). Superheroes as characters are imperfect, but more morally virtuous than the enemy, thus anything they do to remove the threat is on the side of virtue, a line of reasoning that the Bush administration and even the Obama administration continued to embody in their discourse of aggressive prevention as a necessity.

Wanda Maximoff in Captain America: Winter Soldier and Killmonger in Black Panther are two interesting points of contrast in the portrayal of a villain/antagonist in a DOD-funded movie versus a non-DOD funded movie. The villains and antagonists in Marvel movies are explicitly depicted to have been created by the consequences of American institutions in action. Wanda and her brother Pietro are introduced as refugees that were sold to Hydra, a Nazi scientific research organisation, to be experimented on and become super-weapons. They became refugees because Tony Stark’s weapons destroyed their city and killed their parents, breeding hatred for Stark and everything his company stood for, supporting Hydra’s agenda. Captain America, a super-soldier of pure moral virtue created during the second world war, and his team made up of Sam Wilson, an American military official with an armed suit, and Black Widow, a former Russian spy turned S.H.I.E.L.D. spy (an American humanitarian armed organisation), spend majority of the movie fighting Wanda and her brother while empathising with their situation. Eventually, Wanda realises that what Stark’s weapons did to her family and country does not represent what S.H.I.E.L.D. as an entity fight for. Believing in their morals, despite watching her brother get killed as collateral damage in battle, she joins Captain America and his team to be on the right side of history. There are several points of American propaganda written into the character arc of Wanda. Firstly, Wanda and her brother are portrayed as innocent children that were victimised as collateral damage by American warfare, and later brutally exploited by a fascist terror organisation. Although Wanda is one of the most powerful characters in the entire MCU simply because of her powers, she is still portrayed as in need of saving from the terrorists—similar to Iron Man and the Afghan rebels—even though the conditions that led to her to be captured was American military intervention. There is a clear sanitization of American caused collateral damage, because what really matters is that they were doing it for the right reasons, and the real enemy are the Nazi’s and their experimentation.

Secondly, she is being fought against as the immediate threat, but the real fight is against the institutions that made her into what she is, the threat they cannot wait for to become imminent. Captain America’s goal, as the literal stand-in for American moralised military ideology, is to court her onto their side, so her powers can be used for the greater good of humanity, even though this side is what destroyed her home and killed every member of her family. But through the influence of Black Widow, the viewer is led to believe that any innocent victim of war can be brought over to the morally righteous side as they are far more benevolent than ‘the other’, whoever it may be. The entire story arc is very Cold-War-esque in its depiction of moral scientific experimentation in building super-soldiers, where for America it is ethical and necessary, but for the Soviets or Nazi Germany it is not. The depersonalisation of military experimentation to create human-weapons alienates the viewer from the real impact of collateral damage in exercising these human-weapons, overemphasising intention rather than impact. Both sides can be equally damaging, but the point of differentiation is the just cause. The ‘cleansed’ or sanitized version of the war is a technique that DOD-sponsored movies have adopted in order to “maximize [a] war’s capacity to be consumed” which not only removes the suffering of the civilians, but also “render soldier’s deaths, and even their serious injuries, invisible” (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 39). At the end of the movie, the moral and ethical code by which S.H.I.E.L.D., and in essence the American military, operates should be strong enough that everyone should root for them and join their side, regardless of the collateral damage. Ethically, the public is directed into believing that civilian casualty is necessary to stop a terrorist organisation because their terror is not necessary.

In contrast, Killmonger in Black Panther, a non-DOD supported movie, is a villain that the audience believes to be the true hero of the story. Wakanda is depicted as a highly technologically rich nation with scientific innovation unimaginable to the CIA. T’Challa, the protagonist and heir to the throne after his father was killed in a UN attack by terrorists, emphasises the practice of non-violence and maintaining neutrality. The scientific innovation of Wakanda supports an impoverished predominantly Black neighbourhood in the US, where Killmonger witnessed his father, the King’s brother, get killed. The only thing that makes him the villain/antagonist in the story is that he wants to use the innovative weapons of Wakanda that have been kept hidden from the world, to liberate Black people globally, and take his place as king. Non-violent T’Challa is designed as the hero since non-violence and platitude is expected of the Black person if they wish to be seen as peaceful. The CIA, upon finding out about Wakanda’s technological capacity, encourages T’Challa to collaborate on weapons development and stop Killmonger from providing Wakandan weapons to Black people globally, perpetuating a narrative that “if Black Americans could get access to weapons, they’d be as violent towards the world as white Americans have been” and that although Killmonger’s goals might be moralistic, it’s “too violent and risky” (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 260). Racialised acceptance and non-acceptance of violence is the main point of difference between the comic versions of Marvel heroes, versus the cinematised versions, which largely has to do with the fact that “in the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous, except when it comes to Blacks,” especially in the socio-political context post-9/11 and Black Lives Matter (Philips 2022).

Although the narrative premise is consistent with portrayal of villains in other DOD-supported Marvel movies, the main difference is the extent to which anti-establishment narratives are explored in the script. The ability for majority of the audience to root for Killmonger, as shown in trending hashtags like “#teamkillmonger” or influential critics writing critical pieces in support of Killmonger as the true hero is emblematic of a much more nuanced narrative of morality and just cause for engaging in violence and warfare. There is higher levels of empathy and personalisation of injured bodies, death, and destruction into the story to humanise the consequence of war and encourage non-violence, in comparison to other marvel movies. In fact, in an analysis of acts of violence in superhero movies by Marvel and DC, “protagonist characters performed significantly more acts of violence compared to antagonist characters” diluting the argument that the good characters are less violent than the villains (Muller Jr., et al. 2020). What the DOD does not want in their sponsored movies, even if there are anti-establishment narratives present, is the line between which side is morally virtuous to be so blurry that the audience is left confused who to root for and whether the threat is valid. Public opinion must be on the side that paints the US military—or the state (in the case of Wakanda)—as the ultimate protector and moral authority that is on the right side of history. Even if they engage in war, there is just cause because it is defensive. This explains why later in the MCU, as characters like Captain America and Iron Man become more complex in their positionality as hero or antagonist, like in Captain America: Civil War, the DOD has pulled out their support (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 82). However, the DOD’s active engagement in building these hero and villain characters during the initial movies is essential in forming logics of appropriateness in morally driven armed action against an adversary, revving up public support for American military action abroad.

THE SUPERHERO AND THE PRIVILEGE OF VIOLENCE

The superhero figure is key in shaping positive attitudes toward just moral cause in young children, and the wider public, especially when it comes to violence. During their conception as comic book characters, the opportunity for social commentary in a highly nuanced, interrogative manner is much higher, where superheroes are active political figures for the communities they represent, interacting with the government, civil society, individual citizens, law, and private corporations. The Marvel superhero movies tend to maintain a PG-13 rating and the DOD cites the ability for families to watch these movies as a significant reasoning for their edits and investment in these films, so that they are not so violent that parents feel uncomfortable, but moral enough that children view them as role-models (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 49). However, “the prevalence of negative themes, especially acts of violence, outweighed positive themes” in a statistical analysis (Muller Jr., et al. 2020). The overemphasis of negative themes and violence in these films is normalised in children and adolescents as actions of the ‘good guys,’ creating no problems to maintain family-friendly ratings as they promote prosocial values. Just wars in DOD-sponsored Marvel movies are “clean wars” (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 41).  The blood the heroes hold in their hands are washed away with narrative manipulation, thus “the boundaries of violence in the American imaginary are more porous than they are in the American polity” and “their stories communicate much about how the politics of violence are interpreted and rationalized in the public sphere” (Philips 2022).

The White male privilege embodied by the Marvel superheroes is arguably the primary factor for their violence to be widely accepted as morally right and legitimate. The ability for individuals like Iron Man and Captain America to engage in violence that is deemed legitimate even if they operate sometimes against the interests of the state is what can be called “the privilege of violence” (Philips 2022). Defined as the ability to use violence as a tool for heroism in a political system and structure that privileges them based on their gender and their race. Furthermore, “privileged violence identifies not only who can use violence but also how they can do so in ways that will be recognized as legitimate” (Philips 2022). The villains and antagonists of the superhero movies use similar modes of violence as identified in the previous section, however, it is the heroes’ racial and gender characterisation which is significant in establishing legitimacy and morality behind the intention of exercising that violence. A major point of criticism for the cinematised version of these superheroes is the erasure of the plurality of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality of many superheroes across the Marvel franchise, converting them into a white, male, cisgendered, and heterosexual imaginary (Philips 2022). As the newer phases of the MCU have been established, long after the DOD suspended their sponsorships, have the other characterisations been explored further, but the initial choices still play a significant role in visualising moral violence as White. A lot of this ideation of White, virtuous violence stems from American exceptionalism since the American revolution, which was predicated on ideas of a divine mission for America, which Bush and his administration constantly refers to throughout the Iraq invasion (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 18). This ideation enables a space for mythical imagination of American saviours to be bigger and grander than the state, to have an allure that can draw awe and inspiration from across the world.

The last movie to be supported by the DOD is Captain Marvel, which takes the mythical American military saviour character that is basically a God (but a woman!), into serving as a recruitment tool for the US Air Force. This film was the first after a few years of a fragile Marvel-DOD relationship due to heavier anti-establishment narratives in the MCU. The film played a crucial role in setting up support for the US Space Force, which operationalised shortly after the film’s release (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 128). The story of Captain Marvel follows Air Force colonel Carol Danvers who is discovered by an alien species after an aircrash during a rescue mission in an experimental aircraft. She becomes a part of the alien military while Earth is caught in the middle of a space war between alien planets. After a lot of complex unearthing of alien-human history with the military, Danvers becomes one of the most powerful superheroes in the MCU, spending most of her time defending the innocent across the universe. She essentially becomes a God, with her origin being military, US and alien. While in the other DOD-Marvel movies moral superiority was the predominant theme for war, in Captain Marvel, American imperialist and exceptionalist ideology takes precedence. Being one of the strongest DOD-Marvel partnered superhero movie, “Captain Marvel and its links to the US Air Force helped solidify, more than other film, the image of space as the latest territory in military expansion” (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 161). The mythological, exceptional ideation of an American military supreme power not just on the planet, but across the universe, found the perfect breeding ground in the film, feeding the commercial desire for spectacle in battle. The spectacle of war with heavy CGI, beyond human possibility, is a tool of depersonalisation and maximising consumption of war.  

Captain Marvel also became a White liberal feminist icon. Danver’s story “represents generations of real women who broke through barriers to serve their nation in air, space, and cyber space” serving as inspiration for a new generation of patriotic women that were disenfranchised by the hypermasculinity of the US military (Jenkins and Secker 2021, 164). Called the ‘Captain Marvel effect,’ the US Air Force Academy saw the highest number of female applicants in five years, after an exhaustive marketing campaign that capitalised on the inspiration this film served. The US Air Force produced an ad called the “Origin Story” which “used the ‘Captain Marvel’ framework to present real female airmen who ‘all got their start somewhere’” (Pawlyk 2020). What makes Danvers different than Wanda, if they are both super-soldiers powered by alien experimentation and are more powerful than any of the male superheroes in the MCU? It is based on how the resource for violence, i.e. the alien material, is used to create the hero/villain, and who is behind that hero/villain construction, if we circle back to Asad and Philips. Wanda, although White, was created by a fascist military scientific exploration facility, whereas Danvers was created by the US military scientific exploration facility. The former was created to destroy the universe (i.e. America), the latter to defend the universe (literally). Wanda as a civilian in an authoritarian state has less privilege to exercise her violence than Danvers, from the land of the free and who is a military officer and has more legitimacy in practicing violence. The extrapolation of the US to the universe is key in identifying the American exceptionalism present in these DOD-superhero narratives, where the potential for destruction that threatens the US is equivalent to civilization as a whole, therefore the US must (and can) defend the universe. So, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a conduit for American expansionist ideology.

CONCLUSION

Superheroes are political characters of privilege and power that have strong identity-based stories to build moral relationships with the consumer. Heroes and villains engage state power and institutions to spread narratives of moral action, creating a moral economy that favours US imperialist and military agendas. In this essay, I have discussed five of the six DOD-Marvel partnered movies. Hulk (2003) was not discussed because this movie is not part of the MCU, which is my main focus in this paper. The five MCU movies are visual and narrative representations of a universal moral mission of pre-emptive defence against global imminent threats that is led by US imperialist ideology and armed forces. The “myth” of the just war is very easily believable when facts are simplified and there is an overemphasis on the positive intentions while alienating the negative consequences. Shared national ideologies are dependent on shared communities. In times of global crises that is created and worsened by American foreign interests, “myths of patriotic idealism compel us to ignore the limits and fears of flesh and blood. We want to identify with the community and feel a part of the group, and this identification leads to believe that the state is justified” (Fiala 2007, 60).

It is no coincidence that a new era of patriotism has dominated mainstream media at the same time as the rise of the superhero genre in the film and television industry. Superhero stories are designed to be avenues of establishment commentary, which when combined with commercial and military interests, become vehicles of war profiteering and military recruitment. “Wars are marketed and sold by using ideas such as ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’ in a one-sided and politically charged way,” and the platform to do so with the largest global reach is the MCU (Fiala 2007, 24). Pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong for example, “regularly incorporate superhero imagery and rhetoric in their slogans, posters, and banners” and “‘foreign superheroes such as Batman and Iron Man’ are used as ‘devices of visual mobilization, dissent, and counterhegemonic resistance’” (Costello and Worcester 2014). Believing the ‘universal’ mission for freedom and justice, social movements across the world use the symbols and narratives of Marvel superheroes to carry their message and reach a global audience that understand the mission within this moral economy. Conversely, these symbols of justice can be weaponised by establishment forces, like entire police departments during the Black Lives Matter movement that used the symbol of The Punisher (2017) to champion their Blue Lives Matter slogan to challenge ‘hegemony’ of national scrutinization of police forces (Philips 2022). Public opinion is a crucial factor in pressuring state institutions to take action against crimes against humanity, human rights issues, and international law. Via the military-entertainment complex, the DOD-Marvel partnership, and in extension superhero movies in general, are essential in shaping the moral economy around the practice of humanitarian military intervention predicated on universalized morals of just cause which favours American cultural hegemony and imperial ideology.

 Disclaimer: This work is original and the property of Aroni Sarkar. It is not authorised for any use, copies or dissemination.

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