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?

Spielberg's Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln was my movie selection last night. The screenplay is written by Tony Kushner based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Kushner tells the story of the passage, by a lame duck Congress in January of 1865, of a Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery. And he does it impeccably. Don't believe any of the blather you might hear about the film being too long; it is not. It clocks in at approximately the same time as Zero Dark Thirty, two-and-a-half hours, and it moves along just as briskly (if not more so).

The opening scene has Lincoln, played by the Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis, meeting troops, both black and white, getting ready to march to battle. It's an incredible scene, understated but tense; I even started to tear up. So right away I knew Spielberg, Kushner and Lewis were going to deliver the goods. And they do -- throughout the entire film.

That Argo won Best Picture and not Lincoln speaks poorly of the voting membership of the Academy. On the one hand you have a historical sideshow from the dawn of the age of neoliberalism and neoconservatism theatrically inflated to make us feel warm and fuzzy about the CIA and imperial America; on the other, you have a taut politico-historical drama that shines a light on an amazing moment, a moment that has run through our politics forever after -- the outlawing of slavery. (It's hard not to think of today's GOP House majority when watching Lincoln; then it was the Copperhead Democrats, led by Congressmen Fernando Wood and George H. Pendleton, standing in the path of change. The problem today is that we have no Lincoln in the White House or Thaddeus Stevens in Congress.)

Even if you're not a student of American political historical, Lincoln deserves a screening for the performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and the writing of Tony Kushner.

Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty, the ambitious two hour and 27 minute Kathryn Bigelow film about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, was my choice for a movie last night.

The first thing that has to be said is that Bigelow is taking on a lot here, basically our present history of the last 12 years. Everything changes after 9/11. The film begins with a black screen and audio of  911 calls and news flashes from that morning and then shifts to a spartan interrogation room at a nameless military camp where we see Dan, played excellently by Jason Clarke, administer the water torture to an al-Qaeda-affiliated sad sack while Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, looks on.

Overall the best thing about Zero Dark Thirty is Chastain. The movie is about her character's obsessive pursuit of bin Laden; and except for the end when the Navy SEAL team assassinates bin Laden at Abbottabad, Chastain is almost always on screen. She is terrific, magnetic, stunning -- all the superlatives. She presents Maya tough as nails yet vulnerable and fragile, a lonely hunter. In fact, all the performances are topnotch. Kyle Chandler as the Islamabad CIA Station Chief is super, as is Mark Strong as a high-up CIA bureaucrat.

One problem I have with the movie is the way it condenses time; it creates the impression that Osama was pulling the strings on the myriad post-9/11 terrorist bombings when I don't think this was the case. I understand this is something that Bigelow has to do to keep a narrative spanning a decade moving along at a clip that sustains the interest of her viewers, and I was struck by the number of attacks, successful and botched, I had forgotten about like the summer 2005 London bombings or the 2010 Times Square car bomb plot, but still it feels like a screenwriter's contrivance.

At the end, watching the lengthy SEAL assault on the bin Laden compound under the cover of darkness after one of the stealthy helicopters crashes, I realized that both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo act as an exorcism from the American psyche of Carter's failed Operation Eagle Claw. Reagan likely would have won anyway in 1980 -- the country was headed fast toward the Right -- but the fatally bungled Delta Force rescue attempt of the hostages in Tehran definitely doomed Carter. In Argo, Ben Affleck's film dramatizes a successful Tehran rescue; in Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow dramatizes a successful military helicopter raid, crash and all. After more than thirty years, yes, we might still be wrapped up with Afghanistan and Iran, but look, we're really winners.

Zero Dark Thirty is not a perfect film. It's definitely a good one though, and it might even be great. The final scene is of Maya as the sole passenger on an enormous spotless military transport plane. The camera pulls tight on her face, and she cries. The United States is a hollowed-out power animated by elites. That's the message. Everyone in Zero Dark Thirty is an elite, from the Navy SEAL studs with their beards and keffiyeh to the CIA analysts in their futuristic "Predator Bay." Maya herself is the ultimate elite -- smart, beautiful, focused on her career, feared by the bureaucracy. The only time we really see regular people is when the crying bin Laden children and women appear during the final raid.

Flight + Skyfall + Argo

The last three Saturday evenings I have taken in a big Hollywood movie via Amazon Instant Video. I find that it is a good way to end the week. The three movies the last three Saturday nights are:

1. Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Denzel Washington
2. Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, starring Daniel Craig
3. Argo, directed by and starring Ben Affleck

All three came in at over two hours. Skyfall was so long I had to watch it in two sittings. And during Flight I found myself looking at my watch. The best of these three is definitely Argo, a tribute to CIA honor and integrity that goes a little way towards acknowledging American rot and hubris. It would have been nice to have a nuanced portrayal of an Iranian Islamic revolutionary, but no such luck. All in all though a fine Hollywood film that allows Jimmy Carter to take a little voice-over bow as the credits roll.

I had seen favorable reviews of Skyfall saying that Sam Mendes was taking the Bond franchise to a higher, more emotionally-complicated level. Don't believe it. Daniel Craig is just as flat as he ever is. Javier Bardem is interesting to look at but his villainous character is a joke, straight out of the funny papers. This movie is the worst of the three.

Flight has some good scenes, such as the coked-out, hungover "morning after" opening in the airport hotel. And Denzel, who I always appreciate, is good. But the movie could have done without the whole "whore with the heart of gold" subplot; it would have been more effective had it stayed in Bad Lieutenant mode throughout.

Watching a webcast of the Sweet Spot this past Friday I learned the favorite to win the Oscar for Best Picture is Argo, though A.O. Scott thinks both Amour and Zero Dark Thirty are better choices.