Airplane Movies

When I am strapped into a metal machine screaming through the sky tens of thousands of feet above the earth, I make a point of subjecting myself to movies that I would normally never watch. I think of it as trying to understand something about the Zeitgeist. This means that I have watched more Avengers films than I care to admit.

Does it help me in my efforts to understand the American psyche after more than a decade of living abroad? I am unsure. But lately, I’ve found myself returning to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and the villains of that film—the secretive conspiratorial sect of HYDRA, which originated among America’s Nazi enemies in World War II, infiltrated the U.S. national security establishment, and survived into the present day. HYDRA reemerges in this film as the Winter Soldier, the personification of America’s Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, whom our hero Captain America must fight.

This all seems strangely relevant now, as the U.S. president openly praises Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and the richest man in the world gives a Nazi salute during the U.S. presidential inauguration festivities. More and more, the word “fascism” is employed to describe the current state of affairs in the U.S. executive branch.

The fear of infiltration by fascist elements has long been a dramatic staple in American culture, echoing through decades of films, plays, and books. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier there are clear echoes of Cold War tropes, both historical and fictional: the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and terror of Manchurian candidates. The film blends all these stories together, with the Winter Soldier as a Cold War relic resuscitated by HYDRA, the Nazi spy organization long in hibernation deep within the U.S. government.

And yet, the villains in the film express no specific political or ideological goals. What does HYDRA want? What will world domination mean for them? And what does it say about America that a completely amorphous Nazi organization could go undetected in the highest institutions of the land for so long, and recruit so many top-ranking officials? This remarkable state of affairs, too, goes unremarked.

Is HYDRA after, say, white supremacy? Do they believe in some kind of grand civilizational project? No. They’re just…the “fascist” enemy. And on reflection, that’s how Nazism and fascism are dramatized, allegorically or historically, in Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the like. To be sure, the emotional core of these films is in their heroes’ motivations, rather than those of the villains. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the virtuous hero’s principles and fortitude undergo complicated tests, giving him for example the opportunity to rebel against authority in the form of his boss, Nick Fury; later, he will show mercy to an old friend who’s been brainwashed against him by the enemy.  

Even so…what is it that would drive CIA agents to convert to the enemy ideology, here? Are they racists? Eugenicists? Are they just very into snakes? That is never made clear. HYDRA is just a historical bugbear, emptied of meaning, presented as categorical evil in the synthesis of America’s two great historical enemies, Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Yet strangely enough, as we see from present times, the villain of HYDRA is real! (And, no, I don’t mean Flaming Hydra. On the contrary. Hail Flaming Hydra!) 

Right-wing conspiracy theorists have been railing on about the “Deep State,” QAnon, Pizzagate, and the like for years, a long series of fantastical collective delusions embraced in the odd corners of the internet. Today, something like the Deep State actually exists, in the form of a far-right government department named after Shiba Inu memes, in which one of the most prominent figures is known by the name “Big Balls” (following an undercurrent of lewdness in American politics as old as “Deep Throat,” the most famous whistleblower in American history). The exact people who were always railing against the Deep State became something like the Deep State themselves.

Over the course of his career Trump changed his party affiliation many times, including eight years as a registered Democrat, and Musk has claimed to have voted Democrat as well, yet we’ve seen them both transform into bona fide fascists over the last few years. But I wouldn’t say that they’re the leaders of a fascist movement, exactly, even though they are respectively the leader of the most powerful nation, and the richest man, on earth; it seems more that they are emanations of an incoherent power-seeking blob not unlike HYDRA. To think, they were ranting on about Washington as “the Blob” or as “the Swamp.” Now they are the swamp.

How did they end up there? Musk and Trump, it seems, arrived at fascism through a sense of disenfranchisement. Despite their wealth, power, and fame, it’s often been remarked that they’ve felt excluded, that they were the butt of jokes.

Since they never reached the level of adulation they wanted, never felt like the cool kids, they went more and more down the path of the Internet edgelord. Embracing the icons of fascism and Nazism that were rejected by mainstream society, until, all of a sudden, they had doubled down so many times that they really were Nazis. The aesthetics of fascism, stripped of specific politics, eventually led to the embrace of actual fascist politics.

Images of fascism in American pop culture—Star Wars, Raiders, The Handmaid’s Tale, or what have you—say very little about the origins, politics, or aims of fascism as a historical process; it’s reduced to a certain iconography of stern, unsmiling people in dark, menacing robes, with a fondness for sharp angular shapes in their architecture. (Andor is something of an outlier in this regard.) That’s probably why this meme about Star Wars has become so popular in the last two months—even the throwaway suggestion of economics and geopolitics in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is seen as somehow prescient.

If anything, absolute evil somehow came to be framed as simply the naked desire for power at all costs. You can see this in the way movie villains came to just crave world domination. Why? What did they want with that? Did they have some kind of grand project to change it? Elevate a certain race to mastery? To purge other races? To erase class distinctions?

No, they just simply wanted world domination, that’s all. As society became more and more aware of the ecological crisis, you would see more eco-terrorists as villains. They are the question to which our heroes must supply the answers in the form of their own powers and sacrifices, demonstrating their superior political and moral convictions. Films like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cabaret, Minority Report, Casablanca, etc., demonstrate again and again the defense of individual freedom and rights against authoritarian domination; or the principle of democracy over autocracy; or again, the principle of fairness over the brutality of “might is right.” Empathy, self-sacrifice, and sharing, over “the triumph of the will.”

But these narratives still leave the bad guys’ real motivations in an unsatisfyingly indistinct state. That is, what is most dangerous about this new fascism is precisely that it is swamp-like and blob-like—it did not originate with Trump or Musk and it will continue to blob on in an inchoate manner after them. If we’ve gotten into dangerously murky territory, in every sense of the word, we’re still going to be in the Swamp long after they’re gone. 

This was probably what Walter Benjamin meant when he described fascism as the “aestheticization of politics”. The aesthetics still led to what, in the end, became a legible set of politics. The political kernel was still there. In response, Benjamin called for opposing that with the “politicization of aesthetics.” After all, there is no such thing as aesthetic representation that is not political—even a Captain America movie still embodies a certain set of discrete politics. 

I can’t fight off the fascist tide by writing reviews of Marvel movies. There may even have been too much of that in recent years, with the retreat of the Left into cultural and artistic spheres and away from direct action. But we need to think about the ways in which politics has always been around us, to reflect on what it was that led us here.