Superheroes Elected Donald Trump
Movies have a weird way of predicting the future — and I’m not talking about how the cool tech from 1970s and ’80s science fiction flicks is now everywhere. It’s deeper and weirder than that. Films have a strange way of not just predicting events … but presaging them.
That’s how I know the superhero movies we love and the lead singer of Nickelback prepared fascism to go mainstream in America. All those awesome Marvel and Batman films had a clear message — it takes strong, capable heroes to save the world.
When Donald Trump told America that he alone could fix a broken political system and end crime, he echoed Steve Rogers in Captain America: Civil War, when Rogers told Tony Stark that the safest hands were his own. In the movies, and in the American psyche, only a strong leader can fix our problems.
The China Syndrome terrified audiences in 1979 with its depiction of hotshot journalists uncovering massive safety concerns at a nuclear power plant that eventually suffers a partial nuclear meltdown. Twelve days after the film’s release, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown.
In December 1997, Wag the Dog told the story of an American president who used a fake war in Albania to distract the public from his sexual advances on an underage Girl Scout. A month later, The Drudge Report broke the story of Pres. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
In the summer of 1998, three days after Clinton testified about his involvement with Lewinsky, he launched Operation Infinite Reach. The strikes targeted Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that the United States suspected of manufacturing chemical weapons.
Throughout the ’90s, movies such as Armageddon, Deep Impact and Independence Day treated audiences to shot after shot of architectural destruction. Buildings collapsed as people fled screaming from massive dust clouds. On Sept. 11, 2001, those nightmares came true.
Which brings me to Nickelback front-man Chad Kroeger.
Sam Raimi’s seminal super-film Spider-Man came out in 2002 and launched a new era of super-powered blockbusters. Without the webhead crawling across the NYC skyline, we wouldn’t have Nolan’s Batman films, Marvel’s megahit movie house and Zack Snyder’s fascist-nightmare D.C. universe.
Spider-Man came out months after 9/11 — an early commercial for the film showed Spidey capturing bad guys in a web he spun between the Twin Towers — and it laid the groundwork for its darker, grittier and more authoritarian peers.
Spider-Man is a fun film and Peter Parker is a populist hero who needs the city of New York as much as the city needs him. But the theme song for the movie is different. It’s a clarion call for heroes to rise up and protect us from a dangerous world. It’s a call for a fascist strongman. Over the next decade, both pop culture and politics would answer that call.
Kroeger — front man for the much-maligned Nickelback — attempted to launch a solo career in 2002 and his first hit was Hero, the title track on the Spider-Man soundtrack. The lyrics are a terrifying portent of the world to come — a world where people demand that a hero save them.
“Someone told me/ Love would all save us/ But, how can that be/ Look what love gave us,” Kroger sings. “A world full of killing/ And blood spilling/ That world never came.”
The song is a strong and obvious rejection of ’60s-era liberal values. A plea to a strongman. We gave peace a chance, he’s saying, and all we got was war and destruction.
“Now that the world isn’t ending,” he sings in the saddest verse of his mediocre pop hit. “It’s love that I’m sending to you/ It isn’t the love of a hero/ And that’s why I fear it won’t do.” Kroeger openly admits that love isn’t good unless it’s the love of a powerful hero.
In times of great crisis, people tend to reach for this. We want easy answers to complicated questions. We want comfort in the face of danger. We want a hero.
In the movies, that person is a superhero. In politics, that person is a fascist.
Superheroes are fascistic by nature. It’s in their DNA. And their similarity to historical strongmen therefore should come as no surprise.
Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. He adopted the name “Stalin” — more or less meaning “steel” — as a nom de guerre during the Russian Revolution. Thus Georgian Ioseb became the Soviet “man of steel” roughly two decades before Superman, the American man of steel, made his comics debut in 1938.
Man of Steel is, of course, the title of director Zack Snyder’s 2013 Superman flick. It’s a movie where the world begs a charismatic alien to take charge of the human race.
“You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards,” Superman’s Kryptonian father tells him. “They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”
The message is clear — only Kal El can help the people overcome adversity. The strong must pave the way for the weak. In Snyder’s films, the people build giant graven images of Superman, blame him when he can’t save them and worship him when he does.
The newest incarnations of Batman are worse. Nolan’s films depicted a billionaire playboy with daddy issues who lurks on the streets of Gotham and beats up the mentally ill. In the world of Batman Begins, we learn that Gotham is broke and only a rich savior can fix it. He’s the only one who understands the system, you see.
When Trump tells Americans he’ll end crime and fix politics, he’s making the same promises Batman does every time he dons his cowl. Snyder’s take on the aging crimefighter in Batman v. Superman shows the dark side of this kind of superheroism.
Ben Affleck’s Batman, weary from two decades fighting crime, has taken extreme measures. The older, more-cynical caped crusader wantonly murders some criminals — and brands the bad guys he does capture. The film implies that angry prisoners murder anyone who shows up in prison with a bat-brand. Snyder’s Batman does more than stop crime, he passes judgement — and the sentence is often death.
Trump wants to bring back waterboarding “and a Hell of a lot worse.” Trump promised to assassinate the families of terrorists, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The president-elect plays to an American audience weaned on superhero fiction and alarmed by the seemingly endless litany of wars and terror in the Middle East. Some of us want a hero to just kill all the bad guys and tell us everything will be okay.
The Marvel movies are better about their fascist tendencies and at least try to address the politics of power. Tony Stark — who’s just a more-fun, less grim Batman — is Trump’s closest super-powered analogue.
Stark spends the bulk of Iron Man 2 fighting government control of his powers, cedes grudging partial control to a friend and only submits to outside checks and balances when his survivor’s guilt gets the best of him.
“I did you a big favor,” Stark tells Congress. “I successfully privatized world peace.”
The Sokovia Accords of Captain America: Civil War is supposed to rein in The Avengers and the other superheroes of the Marvel universe. Rogers, an old hand at fighting fascists, doesn’t realize he’s advocating a strongman position when he fights against the Accords. He rejects the people’s will.
The Accords establish a black-site prison, allow for indefinite detentions without trial and call of for the registration and tracking of anyone with powers. Those in themselves are terrible, totalitarian measures of control — and it’s easy to understand why Cap sees them as an echo of the Nazism he fought against in the ‘40s.
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any check on metahuman power. To say otherwise is mad, but the Marvel universe doesn’t present Rogers’ arguments that way. From the film’s point of view, Cap advocates a might-makes-right philosophy — the philosophy of a fascist.
That’s the world we now live in. A world where Captain fucking America wants to preserve unlimited power in the hands of the few. A world where Steve Rogers’ ideology aligns with that of our frightening new president.
Worse, the alternative — as presented in the Marvel universe — is one that denies basic human rights to a small but frightening subset of the population. Neither option is appealing. In Trump, I fear the United States has chosen both.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama spent the past 16 years radically expanding the powers of the executive branch. The president now controls drones, nuclear weapons and a surveillance apparatus unparalleled in the history of the world. On Jan. 20, 2017, Trump will be the most powerful person in human history.
He will be a superhero.
It is as if American enacted the Sokovia Accords and then elected an aging, cynical Batman to enforce it.
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