Escapist Media Is Political Now — Deal With It
We don’t deserve to sleep through civics, anymore
I was enjoying Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD last week when it abruptly dropped a political turd in my escapist coffee.
The bad guys capture one of the heroes and torture her, but she doesn’t break. As the bad guys observe the hero through a one-way mirror, they discuss all the horrible things they’d just done — and marvel at her ability to withstand torture.
“Lies,” the bad guy says. “That’s all she gave us. Beaten to within an inch of her life. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Later in the same episode, the villain promises to make society great again.
I rolled my eyes and sighed. I don’t watch Agents of SHIELD for reminders of the current political climate. Quite the opposite. Then, this week, the show doubled down — and I realized it wasn’t going to stop.
What’s more, I realized that not delivering me a constant stream of escapism is a good thing. Even pop art wants us to resist.
Agents of SHIELD is a show I watch to unwind. If you’re unfamiliar, it follows the Marvel Universe’s secret agents as they fight the fascist Hydra organization. It’s a fun show with middling production values and okay stories. High drama, this ain’t.
But I love it, anyway. The bad guys are real bad and the good guys are real good and — after an appropriate amount of tension — good triumphs over evil.
This season it’s doing a lot of sly and not-so-sly commenting on Donald Trump. In the current storyline, a supervillain has trapped the agents in a simulation where Hydra controls the world and all the good guys are either villains or freedom fighters.
The plot of the recent episode has the agents busting into a Hydra television station to shut down a Fox News-style propaganda show. As the good guys break in, the show’s host is behind his desk hitting on his makeup girl. “It’s no bother,” he says. “You need to buy furniture. I know a good place to go.”
This is, of course, an echo of the infamous Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about sexual assault and said he once bagged a married woman by taking her furniture-shopping. Agents of SHIELD pushes the parallel further when protagonist Phil Coulson takes to the airwaves to explain the horrors of Hydra’s propaganda.
“Hydra doesn’t think we’re smart enough to realize when we’re being fed alternative facts to keep us afraid — to keep them in power,” Coulson says. “Remember, there are more of us than there are of them. Now that we know the truth, we have a choice to make. We all have an opportunity to be patriots. Will you take a stand? Are you going to hold them accountable?”
This is not what I watch Agents of SHIELD for. The show’s supposed to be one of my little escape pods. Gravity pulled me back down again this morning when I discovered that The Simpsons had released an animated short commemorating Trump’s first 100 days in office.
This is the way things are now. Good.
I’ve seen an online backlash against political discussions in my writing since the election. Over at War Is Boring, where I write about national security, online commenters often complain that we’re too political.
A small contingent of our readers — and it is a small portion — want us to cover weapons and history from a remove. In their mind, it’s as if the weapons are toys and the history is just a pleasant story we should present without context.
Fuck that. Now more than ever, it’s impossible to be apolitical. Trump represents an unprecedented assault on our system of government and our way of life. We must hammer home, again and again and again, how strange and wrong it all is.
The people who make art in this country — even the disposable pop art — won’t stop doing this and they shouldn’t stop doing this. If I want to escape, I’ll go back to watching Cheers reruns on Netflix.
Admit it — Barack Obama’s presidency lulled the left into complacency. During that time, the right-wing wrote off the left, gerrymandered congressional districts and seized power in local elections across the country. But it was okay. We’d elected the black guy and everything was going to be alright in the end.
We ignored the mounting tension in the Middle East, our many unending wars and Obama’s executive overreach. While we slumbered, the lesser angels of America’s nature took over.
Now the people you pay to entertain you are desperately trying to wake you up. And they’re right to do so. We don’t deserve to sleep through civics anymore. We don’t deserve to enjoy The Simpsons or Agents of SHIELD without thinking about Trump. Not until we fix this.
Expect more of this over the next four years. Even your favorite sitcoms will shock you into remembering that your life, as a citizen, means being politically active. Your favorite cartoons will lampoon Trump and his team again and again until we get the message.
Stay defiant.
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