Are superheroes really champions of right-wing individualism, the Donald Trumps of the movie theatre? Die Hard director John McTiernan seems to think so, and has come out swinging in an interview with French movie magazine Premiere, declaring “These are films made by fascists”, and pointing the finger of accusation firmly in the direction of recent Marvel smash Captain America: Civil War. (Yes, I’m aware John McTiernan is the guy who directed one of the most macho Hollywood action movies of all time. We’ll get to that later.)
“Captain America,” McTiernan says, presumably spitting out the syllables like a sour grape. “The cult of American hyper-masculinity is one of the worst things that has happened in the world during the last 50 years. Hundreds of thousands of people died because of this stupid illusion. So how is it possible to watch a movie called Captain America?”
McTiernan has a point. As political sciences professor Annika Hagley wrote so eloquently for The Guardian back in March, the vigilantism that runs through many comic book movies often looks a lot like the authoritarian rhetoric of knuckleheaded rightwing politics. Both stem from a distrust of democratic authorities, a sense that it is better for the individual to stand up and be counted, especially if he or she is gifted with godlike powers (or in Trump’s case, believes he is).
It’s fascinating to read comic book movies in this way. There’s no doubt that unearthing real-life politics in popcorn material adds salt to the cultural soup and has helped elevate a genre that once knew only black and white – good and evil – to new heights of colourful complexity. But we should also bear in mind that an action movie without any individual acts of heroism would often be a very dull thing indeed.
It therefore benefits comic book movies, and indeed all action flicks, to set up dynamics whereby individual heroes are forced into action by the failure of the powers that be to get their act together. Take the new Ghostbusters movie, featuring a New York mayoral office that comically buries its head in the sand when confronted by an army of the undead marching along Fifth Avenue. Or the most recent James Bond instalment, Spectre, which imagined the rather less hilarious infiltration of Britain’s secret services by an evil, ruthless pseudo-corporate cabal. In both instances it was incumbent on the heroes to save the day by operating outside the usual democratically enforced systems for keeping the peace.
The irony here is that McTiernan’s chief gift to Hollywood, white vest-sporting blue-collar cop John McClane, is a key example of the trope. In Die Hard, our hero is forced to mount a one-man battle against the evil Hans Gruber and his team of armed robbers because of the ineptitude of the authorities. The FBI wants to settle the siege of Nakatomi corporation HQ by sending in helicopter gunships, even though this would lead to the deaths of hostages. McClane, a New York cop who has no legal jurisdiction in Los Angeles, manages to defuse the situation all by himself without any collateral damage. Even the media are portrayed as scumbags: a TV report reveals the identity of our hero’s wife to Gruber and his crew, which almost results in her death. If Donald Trump has a favourite movie character, it is probably McClane, not Captain America.
Which brings us to Steve Rogers. Clearly McTiernan doesn’t know his comic book history very well, because while numerous American foreign policy interventions over the past century may have been shameful in nature, the Captain America has remained largely blameless.
In the McCarthyite 1950s, he battled communist scum in the pages of Marvel precursor Atlas Comics. But later writers were so mortified by their industry’s complicity in one of America’s more shameful periods of history that they retconned this version as a psychotic, reactionary impostor.
Neither is the Captain America we see in Marvel’s movies ever presented as a Comedian-style patriotic brute, fighting battles against foreign scumbags in the name of American might. The only time we’ve seen Rogers engaged in war was in his first adventure, Captain America: The First Avenger, which smartly drew on the superhero’s roots as a symbol of second world war resistance to the Nazis. Surely McTiernan can’t have a problem with that?
Rogers has stood up to the authorities, of course, and pursued his own course of action outside of official sanction. This is the key plot device of Captain America: Civil War. But his anti-establishment fervour has been fostered by the discovery that the government organisation he’s been working for since emerging from 65 years of hibernation was taken over by the very Nazi scum Rogers once fought so hard to take down.
Maybe McTiernan should try actually watching some of this superhero stuff. He might learn a thing or two, not to mention spot a little of his own work holding up the architecture.
