After a tough few years of critical and commercial flops, Marvel is pulling out the spandex-covered big guns in a bid to reassert itself as top dog of the multiplex. This year, we are getting a new iteration of Marvel's first family in Fantastic Four: First Steps, a cross-over team of some beloved second-tier characters in Thunderbolts*, and Anthony Mackie as the new face of Captain America in Captain America: Brave New World.
Unfortunately, things have not been smooth for the film so far, and Marvel has been twisting itself in knots to make it as safe a bet as possible. This has included countless title changes- including ditching “New World Order” to avoid connections with deep state conspiracies- and reshoots in the wake of audience testing that are rumoured to have fundamentally changed the film. More recently, Mackie has had to backtrack on comments that “Captain America represents a lot of different things, and I don't think the term ‘America' should be one of those”. However, he is absolutely right. Captain America should represent something fresh and different to jolt him and the MCU back to life. The first port of call for this should be ditching his and Marvel Studio's symbiotic relationship with the American military.
It is no secret that Hollywood is intimately connected with America's most powerful and militaristic institutions. In November 2001, George Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove convened the nation's biggest studio heads to demand a unified response to 9/11 and leaked memos from the FBI revealed they exploited media coverage as “Most people form their opinion of the FBI from pop culture, not a two-minute news story”. In their words, “If we don't tell our story, then fools will gladly tell it for us.” Meanwhile, the Department of Defense (DOD) has long traded resources and personnel on films for final script approval. The Navy's involvement in the first Top Gun allegedly increased recruitment by 500%, and journalist Tom Secker has been uncovering this relationship for years.
Marvel has been a prolific partner for the DOD as early as its first film, Iron Man. They were granted advice on dialogue and wardrobe, alongside filming rights on Edwards Airforce Base and access to 150 military extras and vehicles, including F-22 raptors. In return, the DOD became closely involved in the script, whose finished product was very different from an earlier 2004 draft. That draft included Tony Stark squaring off against his father Howard, who was plotting with Justin Hammer, later the villain of Iron Man II, to assassinate the President and install his more hawkish vice to increase their weapons sales. The script even had Tony declaring, “Better weaponry isn't going to restore order anywhere”. In the finished film, he instead brags that “I've successfully privatised world peace”. Other changes included making Tony's best-friend James Rhodes a Colonel to increase Iron Man's connection to the military, and removing a line of dialogue in which a soldier said he would “kill himself” for Tony's opportunities in life. The DOD's project manager on the film, Captain Christian Hodge, was in the end delighted with how it made the army look “like rock stars”.
More recently, the team behind Captain Marvel collaborated closely with the U.S. Air Force. This included filming on the Nellis and Edwards Airforce Bases, emphasising Carol Danvers' fighter pilot background and removing any reference to NASA from her origin story, and having star Brie Larson train with female fighter pilot Jeannie Leavitt. When it came to marketing, Larson debuted Captain Marvel's first trailer at the Air Space and Museum, flyovers took place at its world premiere, and an Origin Story promotional campaign, which contained the line “Every superhero has an origin story…For us, it was the US Air Force.” This all helped female recruitment drives immensely. However, even more surprisingly, it was done to establish a military foothold in space. Before the development of Captain Marvel, studio executives were invited to meet General Steven Kwast who informed them their films should “look to include American values and American points of view in space…[including] capitalism and the idealism of the American dream…because that's really where the future of humanity lies.”
The DOD has not been involved in every Marvel project. During The Avengers, it even withdrew support when Marvel declined requests that S.H.E.I.L.D.- the espionage organisation headed by Nick Fury- explicitly report to the Pentagon. However, the Fordist nature of Marvel productions means the military's influence can be felt across its overarching narrative and the story templates which bind the franchise. This includes presenting militarisation as a path to diplomacy, portraying superhero violence as a defensive act, propagating notions of clean wars with few civilian casualties, and securing the status quo by the end of almost every film. There are, of course, countless moral questions to be asked about such blatant militarisation in the world's most successful film series. However, on a baser level, it also hems in the storytelling which Marvel can tell. Often flattening out potentially daring or inventive narrative threads in the name of ideological consensus.
This is clearest with Steve Rogers, whose debut film in Captain America: The First Avenger was unsurprisingly supported by the DOD since he epitomises the “values of today's American Soldier”. In reality, he epitomises the values the military wants to present to reinforce claims to American exceptionalism. This includes harkening back to a WWII vision about the fight for freedom and embodying America's claims to moral superiority through his unshakeable ethics and perfect physique. Even his choice of weapon in the Shield manifests the notion that American violence is a defensive act. None of this is to knock Chris Evans' performance. On the contrary, it is to his credit that he made such a reactionary, wide-eyed, idealist so compelling for so long. However, it is this Americanised idealism which has drawn Marvel into its current creative cul-de-sac.
The style of serialised storytelling which Marvel relies upon eventually needs genuinely subversive and oppositional material to stay engaging and fresh. There must be new challenges, new threats, new dilemmas, and crucially, new perspectives. However, Marvel continues to contort everything into the same safe tropes. Take Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a film which aped the paranoia-filled, counter-establishment stylings of 1970s thrillers like Three Days of Condor. It even used a storyline about surveillance capitalism ripped straight from the headlines about Edward Snowden. Yet, despite nominally positioning Rogers against the state, things are resolved by dusting off his old star-spangled patriotism- he literally breaks out his WWII from the Smithsonian- and delivering a rousing speech which implies a continued benevolence at the heart of American institutions despite their failings. It is telling that this film also qualified for DOD support.
Likewise, its sequel, Captain America: Civil War, began by scrutinising the humanitarian consequence of violence but ended on a point of consensus about the right of superheroes (i.e. America) to act unilaterally without international oversight. Even the original story for Captain Marvel was conceived out of writer Nicole Perlman's disillusionment when her husband, a chemical weapons officer, discovered there were no chemical weapons in Iraq. Yet, Marvel still subsumed this into a sanitized endorsement of the military.
Of course, not all of Marvel's creative problems can be attributed to the Department of Defense. However, working with them has kept Marvel in a sandbox of safe storylines which are wearing a bit thin. To keep audiences captivated in a now 17-year-long storyline, Marvel films are going to have to take risks, challenge notions of what a superhero represents, and do things truly unexpected. Anthony Mackie is prepared to acknowledge this. The only question is whether Marvel is ready to break ranks.
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