In part 2 of this series, I said that no viewer should be surprised by the revelation in Loki season 1 that the TVA’s narrative about the divine Timekeepers and the Sacred Timeline was a big lie. One reason this is so unsurprising is that the idea of debunking or exposing the powers that be as at least untrustworthy, if not fundamentally compromised or corrupt, is arguably the central idea of the entire MCU. If I had to distill the MCU worldview into a maxim, it would be “Never trust The Man”—and this turns out to have remarkably far-reaching implications.
MCU storytelling is replete with powerful, patriarchal, sometimes godlike establishment figures who misrepresent their true nature or intentions and turn out to be compromised by damaging secrets. A good upper mid-level example is Anthony Hopkins’ Odin of Asgard: both Thor’s literal father and a more or less literal god; ruler of the MCU Asgardians, identified as beings from another dimension in the multiverse. The first Thor movie introduces Odin as a wise, benevolent patriarch and a respectably godlike arbiter of moral worthiness. Later, though, it’s revealed that Odin sits on a throne of lies—in fact, a throne of blood. Giving Thor’s back story an anticolonial twist, 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok (directed by New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi) reveals the truth behind the big lie of Asgard’s founding, which Odin has literally covered up: a violent history of conquest, possibly the equivalent of war crimes or even genocide, culminating in the disappearing and memory-holing of Odin’s one-time war leader, Thor’s bloodthirsty older sister Hela (Cate Blanchett).
That’s just one example. The theme starts in the original Iron Man with Jeff Bridges’s Obadiah Stane, a former colleague of Tony’s late father, Stark Industries founder Howard Stark, and a kind of surrogate father figure to Tony, seemingly the affable and responsible hand at the helm of Stark Industries, in contrast to Tony’s frivolous playboy lifestyle. Stane turns out to be trafficking Stark Industries weapons to terrorists, and in fact is plotting to take Tony out of the picture—which, from one perspective, is why Tony was nearly killed by one of his own weapons. Tony’s actual father Howard wasn’t a lot better. He left his son a legacy of war profiteering, and, like Odin, rewrote his own history, among other things covering up his role in the deportation of an unscrupulous colleague, Anton Venko, whose contribution to Stark Industries’ greatest nonviolent achievement, the arc reactor, was simply erased. When Venko’s son Ivan, aka Whiplash, comes for Tony in Iron Man 2, like Hela in Thor: Ragnarok, he has a grudge against the hero’s dad that’s at least partly legitimate.
The same is true of Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Stevens, aka Killmonger, coming for his cousin, the late Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, over the misdeeds and cover-ups of his generally noble royal father, King T’Chaka, whose extreme isolationist secrecy left the rest of Africa to suffer the ravages of colonialism as well as leaving young Erik an orphan on the streets in America. Let’s not omit Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Like King T’Chaka, Fury is basically a good guy, but he does lie to the Avengers about S.H.I.E.L.D. supposedly being involved in clean energy research when they’re really trying to develop super-weapons. Also, Fury’s good intentions notwithstanding, we later learn that S.H.I.E.L.D. itself has been secretly corrupted: infiltrated and subverted by Hydra, a terrorist secret society with Nazi ties. Similar patterns play out in Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, among others. Never trust The Man!
Questioning authority and debunking The Man can be a meaningful project as long as both you and The Man are subject, at least in principle, to something higher than either of you. For example, the head of Stark Industries, the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., and even the king of Wakanda are in principle subject to international law, among other things. Odin, in the first Thor movie, acknowledges a moral law above himself, citing “responsibility, duty, honor” as “virtues to which we must aspire.” Why the Asgardians “must” aspire to these virtues, Odin doesn’t say—and that’s okay. Such moral aspirations, in the language of part 3 of this series, “leave room for God.” Sometimes, though, “room for God” begins to look rather cramped.
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