Secret Avengers #11

I heard sobbing when I got back to my desk after relieving the receptionist for her afternoon break. I poked my head up out of my cubicle and looked around for the source of the sound. It was a young coworker. I assume she had been fighting with her boyfriend again.

It was an appropriate conclusion to a horrendous Friday. Dark and rainy, everyone morose, it is days like these where one comes in close contact with hopelessness. The repetition and exhaustion make it hard to remember to be happy that one is employed.

Earlier that morning, as I was preparing to depart for work, I was thinking about the dire state of world affairs. I wondered what could the 1% and its servants in the political class do to reinvigorate the allegiance of the masses. The system is collapsing and the people know it; a pervasive sense of alienation seems to be an inherent part of present-day society. Either the power elite change things up and figure a way to rekindle hope among the plebeians or the system is going to fracture.

A solution that came to mind is a massive jobs program -- an economic boom that included plentiful employment at significantly higher wages for your average worker. That might do the trick, might cure people of their alienation and still leave the power elite in its high perch.

But then I checked myself. Chances are remote that there will be full employment at wages that wouldn't be immediately gobbled up by rising health-care coinsurance and housing costs.

So back we come to alienation and onrushing system collapse.

One hopeful sign that when the system is overturned the common folk might rise up and meet the challenge is that we seem to have advanced (when I say "we" I mean we plebeians in the capitalist industrial G8 neoliberal core) beyond a simplistic Manichaeism in our popular conceptions of order. We now see that light and dark are not strictly delimited; that they commingle, interact. There is much darkness in light and vice versa.

Case in point, most successful, compelling Hollywood drama no longer presents the United States Government as the "good guys." The films that do, like, for instance, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), are nearly unwatchable. The form is so familiar, so bereft of any mooring in reality other than through past iterations of the genre, that no amount of special effects or star power is going to rehabilitate it.

Rather, today, effective storytelling is dependent upon highlighting the conflicted nature of order. For instance, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) did a tremendous job of depicting USG as a secret criminal enterprise nested within the larger shell of government. I would say that this is a broadly accurate treatment of the U.S. deep state.

A Marvel title that explores the deep state is Secret Avengers, now in its third volume. Written by emerging star Ales Kot with consistently strong art by Michael Walsh and colors by Matthew Wilson, the current story arc juggles a number of interesting ideas: post-structuralism, post-traumatic stress disorder, a sentient black-hole bomb named Vladimir, a mysterious doomsday force called Tlön, a cyber-hallucination reconstruction of Kowloon Walled City, etc.

But the relationship at the story's foundation is longtime Super-villain M.O.D.O.K. and S.H.I.E.L.D. director and Secret Avengers boss Maria Hill.

Maria Hill is Marvel's chief character representing the U.S. deep state. She is very similar to the Jessica Chastain character Maya, the insatiable CIA agent bin Laden hunter, in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) -- a beautiful, highly-motivated elite bureaucrat bent on doing the right thing but who is part of an enormous, morally vacant high-tech machine.

Maria Hill has lured M.O.D.O.K. away from A.I.M. and given him a S.H.I.E.L.D. position to conduct research and assist the Secret Avengers team on the Helicarrier Iliad. Hill uncovers a plot by M.O.D.O.K. to sabotage the Secret Avengers. But, as revealed in Secret Avengers #11 (eight scans can be seen below), M.O.D.O.K., seeing himself in Maria Hill, falls in love with her. The issue ends with M.O.D.O.K. announcing to Agent Coulson and Hawkeye his desire to become an Avenger.

If M.O.D.O.K. can be an Avenger, we are beyond good and evil. Is this what Kot is saying? If we are beyond good and evil, and people understand this, why not discard the old order and reevaluate the system?