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[personal profile] swan_tower

There are many things I liked about Captain America: Civil War, but probably the best aspect of the whole movie is the fact that I keep thinking about it, and about the arguments it presents. Just the other night I got into a discussion about it again, which prompted me to dust off this half-finished entry and post it.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, first: from what little we know about the Sokovia Accords, it sounds like they’re a steaming pile of badly-thought-out crap. (Not to mention wildly unrealistic in so, so many ways; as one of my friends pointed out, the most implausible thing in this film isn’t super soldier serum or Iron Man’s suit or anything like that, but the idea that the Accords could spring into being so quickly, with so many countries on board, without three years of very public argument first.) So when I say I’m increasingly sympathetic to Tony’s side of the argument, I don’t mean its specific manifestation — nor his INCREDIBLY naive brush-off that “laws can be amended” after the fact — but rather the underlying principle that some kind of oversight and accountability is needed.

Because the more I think about the underlying principles on Steve’s side, the more they bother me.

I understand his starting point. He accepted oversight and followed orders; the organization giving those orders turned out to be a Hydra sock-puppet. Now he’s exceedingly leery of the potential for corruption — or even just so much bureaucratic red tape that nothing winds up getting done. And he’s presumably reluctant to sign a legal document saying he’ll follow orders when he already knows he’ll break his word the moment he feels his own moral compass requires him to do so. That part, I understand and sympathize with.

But here’s the thing. It sounds like he wants all the freedom of a private citizen to do what he wants . . . without any of the consequences of acting as a private citizen. Soldiers don’t get personally sued when they destroy people’s cars and houses or civic infrastructure; private individuals do. Is Steve prepared to pay restitution for all the damage he causes? (Or are the insurance companies supposed to classify him as an act of God, no different from a tornado or a hailstorm?) Would Steve accept it as just and fair if the Nigerian government arrested him for entering the country illegally? It sure didn’t sound like the Avengers came in through the Lagos airport and declared the purpose of their trip to officials there. Based on what we’ve seen, it looks like Steve wants all the upside, none of the downside, to acting wholly on his own.

And this gets especially troubling when you drill down into him acting that way in other countries. I’m sure he thinks that petitioning the Nigerian government for permission to chase Rumlow there would eat up too much precious time — and what if they refused permission? Does he trust them to deal with the problem themselves? No, of course not — Steve gives the strong impression of not trusting anybody else to deal with the problem, be they Nigerian or German or American. To him, it’s a moral question: will he stand by while there’s danger, just because a government told him not to get involved? Of course he won’t. And this is the part in my mental argument with him where I started saying, “right, I forgot that you slept through the end of the colonial era. Let me assemble a postcolonial reading list for you about the host of problems inherent in that kind of paternalistic ‘I know better than you do and will ride roughshod over your self-determination for your own good’ attitude.”

Captain America is, for better or for worse, the embodiment of the United States’ ideals circa 1942. Which means that along with the Boy Scout nobility, there’s also a streak of paternalism a mile wide.

Mind you, Tony’s side of the argument is also massively flawed. Taken to its extreme, it would recreate the dynamics of the Winter Soldier: that guy went where he was told and killed who his bosses wanted him to, without question, without exercising his own ethical judgment. And anything done by multinational committee will inherently fail to have the kind of flexibility and quick reaction time that’s needed for the kind of work the Avengers are expected to do. The politics of it would be a nightmare, you know that some countries will get the upper hand and this will exacerbate tensions between them and the rest of the world, and the potential for a re-creation of Steve’s Hydra problem is huge. Plus, how are they going to handle people who opt out of the program? What’s going to govern the use of their powers — or do the authors of the Accords intend to forbid that use, without government approval? That’s a civil rights nightmare right there.

But in the end, I come around to the side that says, there needs to be supervision and accountability. It’s all well and good that Steve feels bad when he fails to save people, but he wreaks a lot of havoc in the course of trying, and feeling bad about it doesn’t make the people he damages whole. (If memory serves, almost all of the destruction at the airport is caused by Steve’s allies, until Vision slices the top of that tower off: I doubt that was a narrative accident.) Is setting up that supervision and accountability going to be difficult? Hell yes. But there has to be some, because otherwise . . .

. . . well, otherwise we wind up with a larger-scale version of the problems we have right now with police violence. Which is a separate post, but I’ll see if I can’t get that one done soon.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Date: 2016-07-19 08:23 pm (UTC)
onyxlynx: The words "Onyx" and "Lynx" with x superimposed (Default)
From: [personal profile] onyxlynx
Huh.

Based on what we’ve seen, it looks like Steve wants all the upside, none of the downside, to acting wholly on his own.

Entirely aside from the fact that this attitude is one of the things that gets up my nose about U.S. Libertarians, I think you may be on to something with this analysis.

Date: 2016-07-19 06:33 pm (UTC)
thornsilver: (cheburashka)
From: [personal profile] thornsilver
I actually started out with the idea that there needs to be accountability. It is just that this movie did not present the alternative any better. And then the whole Tony thing totally went off the rails, we had that weird official who laughs at the idea of the trial, and it rapidly becomes very difficult to side with "oversite needed" sentiment.

Date: 2016-07-19 07:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] swan-tower.livejournal.com
Yeah, like I said, the specific manifestation of Tony's side of the argument is seriously flawed. But I still support the underlying idea -- which is more than I can really say for Steve's side. The narrative would need to show me that he accepts personal, material responsibility for what he's doing before I could give a thumbs-up to him acting as a private individual.

Date: 2016-07-19 08:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] abigail-n.livejournal.com
I've been thinking a lot about the connections between how superhero stories depict the use of unaccountable power, and the stories of police brutality and abuse of power that are getting a lot more attention these days. It seems to me that superhero stories work hard to create villains that are immediately killable and situations where using excessive force is totally justified. Which is fine in fiction, but then I hear people talk about the murders of black people, or police violence against peaceful protesters, and it's the same language and the same justifications.

Date: 2016-07-19 08:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] swan-tower.livejournal.com
I don't think it's an accident that we're seeing more superhero movies talk about that kind of thing. The conversations haven't gotten very far yet, but they're starting: witness, for example, Black Panther choosing to bring the villain in at the end of Civil War instead of killing him in revenge.

Date: 2016-07-20 06:55 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] abigail-n.livejournal.com
I'm not sure these conversations are moving in the right direction, though. Black Panther's arc in Civil War is great, but it's also a movie that tries to whitewash a lot of its characters' crimes. The way it presents Tony's guilt, for example, is telling. It tells us that he's being held responsible for collateral damage in Avengers missions, something that he's only partly responsible for. No one - not even the people who know about it - ever points out that he's the one who created Ultron in the first place, and thus caused all those deaths. Or Wanda, who we're asked to see as an innocent who is being persecuted because she's different, not because she's a terrorist and a murderer. Or, for that matter, the implicit assumption that there's something wrong with wanting Bucky to stand trial for all the murders he committed - just because he has a killer insanity defense doesn't mean he shouldn't make it in court.

Date: 2016-07-19 09:11 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mindstalk.livejournal.com
I thought superhero stories, at least in the comics, were famous for "no kill". Even to the point of dangerous supercriminals popping out of Arkham Asylum repeatedly.

Of course they're also a world where you can punch people out without worrying about concussions or other brain damage, but that's most of fiction...
Edited Date: 2016-07-19 09:12 pm (UTC)

Date: 2016-07-19 09:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] swan-tower.livejournal.com
No killing definitely used to be a thing (heck, even Captain America, fighting during WWII, apparently didn't kill?), but I think that was partly a consequence of the Comics Code pushing writers to make their work "kid-friendly" after people started panicking about those comics Corrupting Today's Youth. Now that we're not so worried about it, you're getting a bigger mix of approaches -- and in the movies, yyyyyyyeah, not so much with the avoidance of killing.

Date: 2016-07-19 10:33 pm (UTC)
ckd: small blue foam shark (Default)
From: [personal profile] ckd
Or, as in the Arkham City game...play as Batman, beat people unconscious and leave them lying in the street in a snowstorm. Of course they won't die of hypothermia!

Date: 2016-07-20 06:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] abigail-n.livejournal.com
As you say, there's a lot of handwaving involved in the comics' no-kill ethos - and apart from that, it's often the case that the hero will adamantly refuse to kill the villain, even though realistically he's probably killed dozens of his nameless henchmen to get to him.

But in the film and TV adaptations, I'm seeing even less commitment than that. The Flash had Barry kill two of his opponents this past season - in both cases, it wasn't a matter of killing in the heat of battle; he lured these people to their deaths, which is murder by any standard. And then there was the whole bit about one of his allies killing a prisoner in Barry's secret prison (the existence of which is, obviously, a whole other can of worms). There was absolutely no discussion of Barry's responsibility for what was basically a cell death. When I mentioned this to someone online, they pointed out that the dead guy was a really bad person. True, but I'm sure similar justifications were made by the killers of Freddie Grey and Sandra Bland.

Date: 2016-07-20 12:54 am (UTC)
marycatelli: (Default)
From: [personal profile] marycatelli
One thing that generally marks out the superhero genre -- besides random grab-bag origins, brightly colored costumes, and code-names -- is a complete refusal to logically work out what would be the effects of superpowers on the world.

Date: 2016-07-29 03:26 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sedesdraconis.livejournal.com
One of the things that was very interesting about Civil War was the way it made Age of Ultron better in retrospect because of the theme and variation that was going on. In Age of Ultron, Stark's mistakes didn't tear the team apart, because no one relied on him to keep them together. But in Civil War, Roger's mistakes can and do tear the team apart.

And in many ways his mistakes are all tied to his reactive nature. Captain America is symbolized by a shield. He protects the defenseless, he doesn't start fights, and that's what makes him special. But he also doesn't try to head off problems before they become disasters, he just deals with the disasters. If he had gone out and found Bucky between Winter Soldier and now, things would have been better; if he had told Stark about his parents under calmer circumstances instead of hoping it never became a crisis, things would have been better. And he doesn't think lack of oversight has become a crisis yet, so he doesn't see the need to address it.

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