Let's Talk About Movies: The Marvel Cinematic Universe And Post-9/11 Allegory

Alo Party Peoples.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a great financial success. None of it's components have failed to make a profit, two of them have made over a billion dollars in total, and they tend to be well received by audiences and critics alike, myself among them. I would say that much of that success is deserved, they have tried something that's never been done before on the scale they've done it. Bringing comic book style continuity to the silver screen, and sowing such disparate genres as cosmic fantasy, spy thrillers, pulp adventures, action-comedy, and soon a space opera together into a whole greater than the sum of it's parts.

Ever since Avengers however, the films have gotten a bit more serious. Iron Man 3 is about Tony Stark dealing with PTSD from his work as one of the first respond-ers to Loki's invasion of New York, characters regularly intone that "New York changed everything", and Stark is hunting the Mandarin, a terrorist mastermind that has designed his public image to be an amalgam of all the things that 21st' Century Americans fear. Captain America: The Winter Soldier deals with how S.H.I.E.L.D, i.e. the U.S. government, responds to Loki's invasion. With a massive military boost in the form of a fleet of weaponized helicarriers, and a secret program designed to monitor the world's communications to find potential threats before they become a problem.

The titular Captain finds himself in the position of exposing said program in a way that destroys the public's trust in SHIELD and gets him declared a traitor. Thor: The Dark World, is a more serious film than it's predecessor, but the allegory doesn't quite extend to it.

Marvel Studios obviously isn't the only entity engaging in this allegory. 2008's The Dark Knight also alluded to the Patriot Act when it's hero wiretapped Gotham's cellphones to find the Joker, 2005's War of The Worlds drew on 9/11 imagery to invoke a feeling of insecure terror in the audience, and last year's Man of Steel depicted the citizens of Metropolis outrunning dust clouds, but made the decision to so with a pre-9/11 approach to destruction. What's my point in writing this? I propose that perhaps enough time has passed since the World Trade Center attacks that it's no longer in poor taste to allude to them.

Granted, part of that feeling has to do with personal experience, I was three when the attacks happened, and thus have no conscious memories of them from the time. I know of them from my family recounting their reactions, and from history class. Maybe I only don't have a gut reaction because I have no real personal connection, but there is an entire generation just entering high school that doesn't have one either.

Either way, I look forward to seeing how the US History curriculum of the 2030's discusses this era.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B