In his acclaimed 2002
work ‘On Film’, Stephen Mulhall brought film theory, aesthetics and philosophy
together in order to form a deeply original text that has become a staple of
examining films for their philosophically and socially meaningful residue.
Mulhall isolates film as a mode of philosophy through the category of ‘action’,
as ‘philosophy in action’. In discussion of his project, Mulhall states:
“I do not look to these films as
handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by
philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such
views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in
just the same ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw
material, are not a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical
exercises, philosophy in action – film as philosophising.”
Film is rarely utilised
as a source of philosophical enquiry, something that Mulhall admits, and
television is used even rarer still. Yet through popular film, and now
cinematic television, we get a glimpse of how our public philosophies manifest
themselves into narratives - spread by active, moving, light onto a screen as
if butter slid across a face of toast. On the screen we encounter ourselves,
our norms, our popular narratives, our logics, and our values – all through a
happenstance of light, colour and sound. In this way, film and television has
always held a deep-seated reflective relation to the aesthetic, philosophical,
and even political; useful as a mirror to observe our cultural and
epistemological milieu.
This, for example, has been one of
many of the qualities that make up the project of Slavoj Zizek, one of the most
prominent philosophers of the contemporary era. Zizek exposes film as a
materialised distilled cultural syrup of ‘ideology’, whereby the spectator of a
given popular film may reflectively prod and critique a certain social ‘false unconsciousness’,
in a Marxist-Psychoanalytic frame or tone.[1] Film has always been there
for us to explore philosophical undertones and outputs, allowing us to gaze
onto ourselves and our socio-cultural constructions; this option has just been
rarely executed until the contemporary era.
Part of this may be explained by
the recent synthesis of classical political and social theory with cultural
analysis. One manner in which this synthesis has become typical is through the
framework of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Focussing on exposing
capitalist ideology embedded within the phenomenon of mass-culture, Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer discuss much of modern film as part of the ‘culture
industry’, in which the production of mass-entertainment cannot be separated
from the total socio-political relations of the capitalist mode of production
and how mass-culture in contemporary capitalism goes some way to reproduce the
very ideological conditions for the reproduction of capitalism itself, as
opposed to the enrichment of creativity.[2]
Throughout
their ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, Adorno and Horkheimer utilise
Hollywood film as an exemplar of the culture industry. For instance, they state
that: “Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they
are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the rubbish they
intentionally produce”[3], that film is inherently a
mass-product as the thing itself[4], or to quote a passage:
“The whole world is made to pass through the
filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees
the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter
is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the
producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques
duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail
that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on
the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since
the lightning takeover by the sound film. Real life is becoming indistinguishable
from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves
no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is
unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its
precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces
its victims to equate it directly with reality.”[5]
Indeed, Mulhall’s claim to film as
‘philosophy in action’ would fall into the trap that Adorno and Horkheimer lay
out here; that in film we dupe ourselves into finding within it the discourses
of reality, and ultimately fall prey to the capitalist ideological edifice of
the culture industry.
Nonetheless, as connected to the critique of
film and mass-culture that critical theory broadly provides, to engage with the
discourses that film contribute to – perhaps unconsciously – is not to abandon
critical thinking about film by any stretch. Critical theory, of the manner
that Adorno and Horkheimer provide, allows us to observe the ruminations of
ideology and the manner in which capitalist mass-culture seems to have become
the apotheosis of modernity. This is thus an important framework to cling to if
the aim of enquiry is to dissect and investigate how culture is plugged into
the reproduction of the dominant political-economic system. However, discarding
the manner in which the content of film may inform our understanding of
discourses within reality – something I do not think nor claim that Critical
Theory postulates totally, only inferentially – is akin to throwing the baby
out with the bathwater. Indeed, critical analysis can take place on the contents
of film in order to expose not only its ideological undercurrents, but the
manner in which film acts as a mirror for our mass-political and philosophical dialogues
of the day.
This can be seen even as far as
‘superhero’ culture is concerned. Let us take one illustration in particular,
that of the late Mark Fisher. In his ‘Capitalist Realism’ Fisher highlights
how mass-culture and ideology ultimately limit our very capability to imagine a
life without capitalism, to the point at which any alternative aside from the
capitalist mode of production has become simply unimaginable.[6] Remaining within a
critical tradition, Fisher outlines in his unfinished work ‘Acid Communism’
the nub of the problematique within Critical Theory, and especially
Adorno’s frame, i.e. that “we are invited to endlessly examine the wounds of a
damaged life under capital; the idea of a world beyond capital is despatched
into a utopian beyond. Art only marks our distance from this utopia”.[7] Fisher repudiates the
notion that to engage with contemporary mass-culture, even to amass a body of
critique against the capitalist culture industry, is to somehow be absorbed
into its schema.
Throughout his exceptionally
inciteful body of work, Fisher carefully analyses and investigates
illustrations of mass-culture, art, music and film in order to critically
locate within their contents those intellectual relations to the major
philosophical, political and social dialogues of the time. One such of these illustrations
are his reflections on ‘Batman Begins’ (Nolan, 2005), whereby Fisher
surveys the representation of finance capital, psychoanalytical forms of
paternalism, incoherencies of representing capitalism, postmodern reflexivity,
and the ethics of distinguishing justice from revenge.[8] Fisher not only makes the
case for, but indeed demonstrates in practice, that although film is embedded
into the fabric of capitalist productive and reproductive relations, its
contents may provide some insight reflexively into the intellectual dialogues of
the day, tapping into certain socio-political or even philosophical themes that
lend themselves to critical analysis.
Although
often being cited for its underlying socio-political and philosophical themes,
the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has tended to limit these themes to
undertones, never quite overtly bringing the philosophical dilemmas it plays
out between its lycra wearing characters to the clear surface, but keeping it
present in murky depths alone.[9] The MCU officially came to
the fore with the film ‘Iron Man’(Jon Favreau: 2008), before
disseminating more than twenty other films over the course of three ‘phases’
since, and with a ‘fourth phase’ to have begun by the summer of 2021.
Throughout these twenty-plus films, philosophical and political undertones have
been present, without a doubt. Before going on to discuss Loki, I would
like to give but two illustrations of this.
‘Captain America: Civil War’ (J. Russo and
A. Russo: 2016) saw a feud between the super-group assemblage, ‘The Avengers’, concerning
a conflict of ethical frameworks towards legislative restriction over the
group. Here, Tony Stark (Iron Man) took an increasingly Utilitarian stance
supporting restriction and Steve Rogers (Captain America) a firm deontological
attitude as an extension of his mistrust of government agencies and immovable
will for ‘choice’. The latter is, quite frankly, unsurprising, especially considering
Rogers’ ‘superpower’ is materially and ideologically twofold: (1) in his
physical abilities, and (2) that he is, ontologically, American
values made manifest. Interestingly, arriving in print in 1941, Captain America
gains his superpower status at the precise moment the US entered into the
process of becoming a political superpower itself, illustrating the case as to
how US normative power internationally and Captain America are manifestations
of one and the same phenomenon.
Returning
to the conflict of ethical frameworks in the film, perhaps this could even be
transferred into political theory? Whereby the divide in the super-group
imitates the division between Classical Liberals – pro minimal state and
negative liberty on the one hand, i.e., the American Liberalism of Steve Rogers
– and Modern Liberals on the other - pro state-intervention and positive
liberty, i.e., the late-stage socially liberal capitalism of Tony Stark. Here
we see the ideological, political, and philosophical syrup lying within the
very composition of the film.
Following
this, a second instance whereby certain political and philosophical discourses can
be identified as being engaged with, in this case rather overtly, concerns ‘Avengers:
Infinity War’ (J. Russo and A. Russo: 2018) and ‘Avengers: Endgame’
(J. Russo and A. Russo: 2019). Here, the extra-terrestrial titan ‘Thanos’[10] wishes to use the
omnipotent assemblage of the six ‘infinity-stones’ in order to dissolve half of
all universal life by random choice, ridding it of overpopulation and scarcity
of resources – a fate that led his home planet to its downfall. Naturally, the
task of the limited manmade assemblage - The Avengers - is to prevent this from
happening. Here, there were two major relationships to
philosophical and political discourse that are worth discussion, as an
illustration of the way in which the MCU tap into these wider dialogues.
The first concerns the
ethical relationship between the motivations of Thanos and the argument put
forward concerning overpopulation and food scarcity by the Victorian economist
Thomas Malthus. Malthus claimed that with continued overpopulation comes an
arithmetical ratio of scarcity of produce, and as such war and famine that
becomes an existential hazard for all. Malthus claimed that:
“No possible form of society could
prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind, if
in a state of inequality, and upon all, if all were equal...That population
cannot increase without the means of subsistence is a proposition so evident
that it needs no illustration. That population does invariably increase where
there are the means of subsistence, the history of every people that have ever
existed will abundantly prove. And that the superior power of population cannot
be checked without producing misery or vice, the ample portion of these too
bitter ingredients in the cup of human life and the continuance of the physical
causes that seem to have produced them bear too convincing a testimony.”[11]
This is precisely the ‘misery’ that
Thanos wishes to dispel on a universal level. Whereas Malthus claimed that at a
certain calculatable point the population of society would reap the nocuous
effects of its own growth, leading to scarcity, poverty and mass-death, Thanos
provides the millenarian and missionary antinomian solution to the Malthusian
prediction – that in simply removing half of all universal life, such a
scarcity is avoided and with it the poverty and misery of overpopulation. Needless
to say, there are a number of ethical dilemmas here concerning: (a) the
consequentialist ‘necessity’ of mass-murder so to avoid universal calamity, (b)
the ethics of ‘randomness’, and (c) the ethics connected to the longstanding dialectic
between ‘means’ and ‘ends’, to name but a few.
The utilisation of the infinity
stones taps into the timely literary theological narrative of a subject seeking
to in some way harness the qualities associated with God, a god, a creator-God,
the demiurge, ‘the one’, etc., distinguishing themselves as a fabricated,
rather than natural or organic, theological entity. These theological qualities
are usually considered to be the trinity of: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.
There is an obvious relationship to
theological and philosophical discourse here. This being said, I would rather
direct the reader to a different illustration of the manner in which the MCU may
add to and supplement our discourse, beyond a very usual and recurring
narrative. This narrative, or at least the character arc of most antagonists
that fall prey to a ‘God complex’, can be laid out as such: ‘Person A
seeks to gain the power of a God. Person A gains the power of a God. Person
A is not an organic God and thus falls prey to either: (1) their
misunderstanding of the theological powers they seek, being mortal; (2) their
hubris once receiving those powers. Person A experiences a theological
fall from grace in which their divine status is torn from them, returning them
once again to that of the mere mortal’. This is interesting, but, as I say
above, a connection that seems commonplace across all modes of popular culture.
This theological point aside, the
second manner in which the narrative of Thanos holds a fascinating relationship
to philosophical and political discourse, that is worth discussion, concerns
resistance to Emergency Climate Change measures against those who demand
radical change. In simple terms, Thanos observes and draws consciousness
towards a legitimate concern – the same as Malthus, i.e., overpopulation,
scarcity and the mass-suffering the combination of the two would cause
universally. Thanos provides a radical solution to this issue, one that we can
deem radical as it is to engage with an activity that would begin a new
universal era, changing and challenging our epistemological and normative
frameworks – known within The MCU as ‘the snap’ or ‘the blip’. For all the
ethical questions Thanos poses, The Avenger’s response generates just as many.
Knowing that Thanos’ Malthusianism is more than likely to become a correct
projection in the long-term, what we do not see in Endgame is a
discourse concerning how to avoid the manmade crises of scarcity and
overpopulation once Thanos has been defeated. Indeed, the response to Thanos is
to simply argue that earth will cross that bridge when such a crisis is present.
This,
without a doubt, can be paralleled to some of the dominant attitudes towards
man-made climate change. The environmental crisis that looms in the
not-too-distant future is no longer a scenario up for debate by any scientist
or academic worthy of the name. Although some may consider this a contentious
comment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has consistently
and empirically shown that we live in an anthropocentric geological era in
which our existence is clearly and measurably having an effect on our global
ecology, through a multitude of activities and factors.[12] In the first Working
Group Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, released in
August 2021, it quite clearly states that:
“It is unequivocal that human interference
has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the
atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred…Limiting
human-induced global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative
CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions,
along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions. Strong, rapid
and sustained reductions in CH4 emissions would also limit the
warming effect resulting from declining aerosol pollution…Under these contrasting
scenarios, discernible differences in trends of global surface temperature
would begin to emerge from natural variability within around 20 years, and over
longer time periods for many other climate impact-drivers”.[13]
Indeed, from this report it is now
abundantly clear that manmade effects on climate change pose an existential
threat, and the only manner in which such a threat may be mitigated is if
measures are taken. No, the IPCC is not suggesting genocide. Recommended is
simply a very clear reduction in hydrocarbon emissions to net-zero as quickly
as possible. Nonetheless, this necessity is deemed to be radical because it
would require a shift in the way we practice our daily activity.
In the context surrounding ‘The
Avengers’ series, in the face of the problem Thanos clearly brings to
light, the response is not to defeat Thanos out of the ethical concerns
for his genocidal activity and seek to address his Malthusian concerns
in an increasingly rational, non-genocidal and reasoned manner. Rather, the
decision is only made to engage with the former, to merely ‘cross that bridge’
when the Malthusian point of absolute crisis appears. This would appear to
align itself with a number of US concerns, at least as far as mitigating
climate change is concerned, socially still divided on the extent to which
climate change is manmade, or even if it is to be a topic of concern.[14] Such a position has even
begun to seep into the methodological collection of climate change data itself.
In the very same IPCC Working Group report referenced above, one can observe
that only the North American regions are consistently unable to provide some
mode of agreement on the type of climate change observed, collectively as one
continent of regions, as far as ‘hot extremes’, ‘heavy precipitation’ and
‘agricultural and ecological drought’ are concerned.[15]
In this regard, the MCU provides a
mirror for attitudes towards political and social issues. In this case, we see
two issues and the dominant attitudes towards them, revealing their natural underlying
Americanisation of supposed universal norms. The first concerns the universal
genocide Thanos wishes to undertake. This becomes the chief, dare I even say only,
ethical stance the film takes – that zealous, millenarian and missionary
genocide should be defended against. This, in our liberal era of norms and
values, would be upheld as the moral status quo. The second attitude concerns
the total disregard for the affairs that has led to Thanos’ murderous
rationale, the real crisis that – as Thanos reveals during ‘Avengers:
Infinity War’ on his once thriving yet now deserted and abandoned planet of
Titan – concern the effects of overpopulation and environmental crisis that
lead to extinction. There is little worry for this by any of the characters
during the film, with all epistemological energy focussed on the murderous
logic of Thanos. Ironically,
perhaps Thanos and his ‘children’ constitute the true ‘Extinction Rebellion’ of
the MCU, displaying the presentation of any and all ‘radical solution’ to
Malthusian concerns as being unnecessarily immoral. As we see, the infinity
stones may be able to take individuals out of existence and bring them back,
but could they mitigate crises that are as natural as the fictional stones are?
We shall never know.
Therefore, in summary, the ‘Thanos
narrative’ across two films comments both consciously and unconsciously on the
condition of modern society and its politics. On the one hand connecting to a
Victorian ethical discussion concerning overpopulation and surplus; on the
other revealing dominant cultural and political attitudes towards our own
contemporary planetary ecological crises that can be paralleled to those
mechanising the engines of Thanos’ murderous logic. In this way, the MCU
engages once again with what Mulhall penned as ‘philosophy in action’.
Now we have discussed that film
broadly, and the MCU specifically, engages with philosophical and even
political discourse as ‘philosophy in action’, what I would like to do is to investigate
an exact illustration of precisely this. Of the twenty-six films and sixteen
television programmes Marvel have created to date, ‘Loki’ stands out as
being immediately different to the rest in that it taps into philosophical
discourse rather overtly, featuring the god of mischief undertake a journey
through the very fabric of temporality as a process of confused subjectivation
in which ‘the self’ is encountered in a nomadic, sporadic and dare I even say
schizoanalytic, deleuzoguttarian, form. In this vein, the remainder of this
discussion will focus its attention on a ‘close reading’ of ‘Loki’ and
the differing ways in which it can be interpreted as ‘philosophy in action’.
[1] To explore this, see: Slavoj Zizek
(1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso; The Perverts
Guide to Cinema (2006) [Sydney Film Festival, DVD], Sophie Fiennes (Dir.),
Vienna: Mischief Films, London: Amoeba Films; The Pervert’s Guide to
Ideology (2012) [Toronto International Film Festival, DVD] Sophie Fiennes
(Dir.), New York: Zeitgeist Films, London: P Guide Productions Ltd; Matthew
Flisfeder (2012) The Symbolic, The Sublime and Slavoj Zizek’s Theory of Film,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
[2] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
(2016) Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, pp.120-167; Theodor W.
Adorno (1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture,
London: Routledge.
[3] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
(2016) Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, p. 121.
[4] Theodor W. Adorno (1991) The
Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge, p.
155.
[5] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
(2016) Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, p. 126.
[6] Mark Fisher (2009) Capitalist
Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Winchester: Zero Books.
[7] Mark Fisher (2018) “Acid Communism
(Unfinished Introduction)”, in Darren Ambrose (Ed.), K-Punk: The Collected
and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), London: Repeater
Books, pp.753-770, p. 755.
[8] Mark Fisher (2018) “Gothic
Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins”, in
Darren Ambrose (Ed.), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark
Fisher (2004-2016), London: Repeater Books, pp. 139-146.
[9] For texts that examine this
connection, see: Marc DiPaolo (2011) War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics
and Propaganda in Comics and Film, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company
Inc.; Ramzi Fawaz (2016) The New Mutants: Superheroes and The Radical
Imagination of American Comics, New York: NYU Press; Miriam Kent (2021) Women
in Marvel Films, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Terence McSweeney
(2019) Avengers Assemble!: Critical Perspectives on The Marvel Cinematic
Universe, New York: Columbia University Press; Ross Griffin (2018) Imperial
Benevolence: US Foreign Policy and Popular Culture Since 9/11, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, pp. 168-187; Hagley, Annika, and Michael
Harrison (2014) ‘Fighting the Battles We Never Could: ‘The Avengers’ and Post-September
11 American Political Identities’, PS: Political Science and Politics,
47(1), pp. 120–124.
[10] The coincidental relationship
between ‘Thanos’ and the Greek god or spirit of Death ‘Thanatos’ has not
escaped notice.
[11] Thomas Malthus (1998) [1789] An
Essay on the Principle of Population: as it Affects the Future Improvement of
Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other
Writers, e-book, Originally Printed for London: J. Johnson, London:
Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, p. 11.
[12] For a thorough illustration, see
the most recent IPCC report: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2015) AR5
– Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, Geneva: IPCC.
[13] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (2021) Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis – Summary for
Policymakers, [IPCC AR6 WGI], Working Group I Contribution to the Sixth
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva:
IPCC, pp.5, 36, 40.
[14] Throughout the discourse
surrounding the implementation of a potential ‘Green New Deal’ in the US, the
very notion of the climate emergency was routinely debated, leading to a
divided electorate (often, as per, along partisan lines) on the topic of not
which actions to take so to mitigate crisis, but whether the climate crisis was
itself a “hoax invented by China”, something similar, or not. See: Justin
Worland (July 8th 2019) ‘Donald Trump Called Climate Change a Hoax.
Now He's Awkwardly Boasting About Fighting It’, TIME, https://time.com/5622374/
donald-trump-climate-change-hoax-event/ (Accessed 11th August 2021);
Louise Boyle (6th October 2020) ‘Half of Fox News viewers believe
climate crisis is caused by natural changes, not human activity’, The
Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/fox-news-climate-change-crisis-human-activity-cnn-yale-study-b840211.html
(Accessed 11th August 2021).
[15] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (2021) Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis – Summary for
Policymakers, [IPCC AR6 WGI], Working Group I Contribution to the Sixth
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva:
IPCC, p 12.
Image From: https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/uk/marvel-characters-collage-painting/