*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Matthew
When having a conversation or a discussion, or trying to convince somebody of something, eventually it’s good to stop laying out point after point after counterpoint after “well, but maybe what about this other point?” And maybe I’m gonna contradict myself with another point. But here’s a tangent, and here’s a tangent. Eventually it’s good to try and put some kind of period at the end of the sentence.
We’re definitely not gonna do that, but we’re kind of gonna try. I have been running the Superhero Ethics podcast for now more than 400 episodes. Paul was with me at the beginning. Paul is with me now at the end, the end of a chapter, the end of this version of the conversation. I don’t know what the future of Superhero Ethics is gonna be, but I know that we’ve chosen this time to say, let’s hit pause and reflect. And today we’re gonna just reflect on the show itself and try to come up with some ideas of what we have learned, and how this has changed how we look at superhero stories and all the related stories that are connected to that. And so starting today, we’re gonna look back and think about how this changes how we look at movies and TV shows about heroes, about science fiction, about fantasy, about anything that is interested in the idea that there’s something bad in the world, and people who have power are gonna try to change it.
And how does that reflect our own world? And once we’ve wrapped this episode up, we’re gonna look at a whole bunch of specific heroes and villains and stories like that. We’re gonna do Marvel’s Civil War, although we’re not just gonna do the Team Tony, Team Cap stuff. If you’ve heard us, we both sort of feel like it’s a great movie, but once the Sokovia Accords are written and are so bad, the questions kind of fade away. We’re gonna talk about the questions we would have liked that movie to explore more. But today we’re really gonna be building the framework for all that.
We did something kind of similar not that long ago with episode 400 and looking back. Today is gonna be more about this whole idea of what it means to look at these movies and then try to compare them to real life, or try to draw lessons from real life, or the reverse, try to say what the way these movies are being told tells us about real life, the good and the bad. And so, Paul, let me give you a chance to start. I know you have always had an interesting perspective on all this, because you’re part of a podcast called Superhero Ethics.
You don’t really like the term ethics, you don’t really like the term morals. But obviously, I think you have strong feelings on the ways in which people with great power can use that power to effect change in the world, and what that should or should not inform us about how those things happen in the real world. Talk more about that. Especially after doing this process a bunch of times, where do you land on the relevance of superhero stories for our own world?
Paul
Yeah, so you said where there’s something bad in the world, and then people with power, or some amount of power, or powers, right, are trying to change that. And I would say to me, the bad in the world is more something that that character perceives as very much bad, right? Something that that character wants to change. And the screenwriters, or whoever’s involved in the story creation, hope that we as an audience feel the same, I think most of the time, right?
And sometimes we don’t, and that makes for very awkward viewing, right? And I think we’re gonna get into heroes and anti-heroes and villains and anti-villains, right? But all of those things, I think, kind of take place within the audience perspective and the character perspective, and then whether there’s a story perspective that they’re trying to present. A lot of times the stories that I do like do have a presumed “this is bad,” and then somebody who’s good is gonna come along and try and change it, right?
Against seemingly impossible odds, but, you know, the title character will probably get it done, right? And I enjoy that kind of story. I love that kind of story, especially when the thing that is put forth to be bad is like the Empire in Star Wars, right? Or some MCU villains. Other MCU villains, you know, we’re probably gonna be like, well, maybe they were right, right?
But I like that kind of story too, right? Like, there’s Endgame, where Thanos is bad at math. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense. He just doesn’t understand exponential growth, or whatever. Or just, if you have that much power, you could just fundamentally change the way things work, right?
Matthew
Double the amount of protein in corn, you know? Like, right, exactly.
Paul
Just, you know, magic rice, whatever it is. And then you’ve got Killmonger, right? Who I think I would classify as an anti-villain. And we can get into those. I’ve got some kind of brief definitions of these. And I like both. I like watching movies where the villain kind of has an interesting point, or the antagonist has an interesting point. I like watching movies or shows where the protagonists are flawed in certain ways, or using questionable methods, or sometimes getting off track, like we sometimes do when we’re podcasting. Never. But I also love the kind of black-and-white stories where it’s just like, yeah, this person’s horrible, they’re just trying to murder everybody, and somebody’s trying to stop that. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that kind of story. So I think there’s room for some variety in the types of stories. And as far as what they can tell us about the real world, I don’t know. I feel like I never really love stories that are trying too hard to make a point.
That’s something that irks me most of the time. But if you can either make a point, or more importantly to me, just raise interesting questions that cause people to think in the course of telling a great story, then I think that can be something really cool.
Matthew
So yeah, there’s a bunch I wanna respond to, but I’ll start with that one point, because I’ve often said about religion… and I don’t even remember at this point if I’m paraphrasing something a professor said and completely plagiarizing it, or if this is my own thought built on things, but certainly other people have said similar things. It’s the idea that people go to religion when they have deep questions, and religion’s at its worst when it just gives them the answers. The best kind of religion is where it forces you to think more about the question. And I often point to the fact that Jesus teaches in parables, and people ask him questions and he gives them a story instead. And by no means is that just Christianity. Rabbinical texts have been doing that, Islamic texts have been doing that, a lot of Buddhist stories. A lot of religions, I think, have some kind of element of that, of the mystery and all. And I think similarly about media, in that there are times when a story is making a point that I really agree with, and that I would think more people want to hear, and I’m glad for that. But it’s certainly gonna get over the top, it’s certainly gonna get preachy. And I think you’re right that sometimes there’s kind of a dual thing, where the story is saying, look, a lot of people in society accept that A is true. We’re gonna try and tell you that A isn’t true, but we’re not gonna say if B is therefore true or C is therefore true. We’re gonna say, let’s knock over this sacred cow and leave some real questions about what comes in its wake.
Paul
And why do cows always get it?
Matthew
I mean, they must be sacred. But I want to go a step further. I want to talk about the history of this a little bit, and then suggest a framework. I think one of the things that makes this whole thing interesting is that even just in the time that you and I have been recording, but certainly in the time since you and I first started watching this stuff as kids, blah blah blah, many years ago, and even more so in the time since superhero comics and stories have been out, the way we think about those questions has changed pretty dramatically. A lot of the superhero characters that we talk about were created at a time when, first by social convention and then, at least in the United States, by law, the idea of what is or isn’t good or bad was not allowed to be questioned. It was just very clear: there’s an objective bad in the world, it looks like everything that isn’t white Anglo-Saxon America, and therefore it has to be fought.
And you can push on that in little bits and ways, but the Hays Code was pretty clear. Criminals are bad, they’re not supposed to be sympathetic. Cops are good, they’re not supposed to be corrupt, et cetera.
Paul
Can you clarify “we” a little bit?
Matthew
So this is a comment that we go through a lot. When I say “we” in that context… which sentence did I use “we” in?
Paul
Basically, the way that we view heroes and stories and whatever.
Matthew
It’s a language thing that I probably should be more careful of, you’re correct. In that setting, what I mean is the kind of overall cultural, generally accepted thought process. Yeah, for sure, there’s no such thing as unithought. There’s always people pushing against it. Generally, I think Paul and I are probably gonna be on their side. But for a long time you couldn’t write stories about certain things and have them be approved by the Hays Code. And it wasn’t quite the same as the anti-communist witch hunts in Hollywood, but it was kind of similar, in terms of you couldn’t get a job, you couldn’t get published.
Paul
And it’s all censorship.
Matthew
And it is an attempt to claim that there is a universal understanding of good and bad. And I think one of the most interesting things that’s happened with stories over the last 50 years, but especially in the last 10 or 15 on screen, is that we’re getting much more of a questioning of that. Much more of a “what if Magneto really has a point?” What if someone like Killmonger really is pointing out some problems with what’s happening in Wakanda? And so you start to get stories where the villain has a good point, but their methods are wrong, or where the villain is angry and is going too far with their anger, but we can have sympathy for their anger, and stuff like that.
And I still love… there’s something fun about watching Lex Luthor played by Gene Hackman chew scenery right, left, and center, and watching Superman stop him. But there’s also something really great about things that really make you think more. And so maybe that’s one part of the framework that I’ve come out of this with: with any character, I want to look at three things. The first is, how do they perceive the things that are good or bad? What are they using to judge that, and how much do I agree or disagree with the lens that they’re bringing to that?
Second is, what’s the solution they want? And then third is, what’s the means by which they want to go about that solution? And I think the characters that are really interesting are ones where I might agree with them on one of those, but disagree on one or two of the others.
Paul
Yeah, absolutely. And no, I don’t have anything to add. I mean, I’m gonna agree with that. Yeah. I think that kind of takes us into the hero-villain dichotomy, and then the idea of an anti-hero or an anti-villain. And I have some short definitions that are all very gendered, because, as you alluded to, once upon a time, all the heroes were male, pretty much. So a hero in a classic sense, I think, is a good guy who’s also a good man, kind of, right? And I’d say an anti-hero is more like a bad boy who’s…
Matthew
Can you give examples as we go?
Paul
Sure. Yeah, I mean, so Superman, right, is just the obvious hero. And Bruce Wayne can be more of a hero or can be more of an anti-hero, depending, right? I’m trying to think of a… there’s so many anti-hero characters these days, it’s almost hard to pick one.
Matthew
I would say the Punisher, very often to me, can at times become almost villainous, but it’s like, we don’t really love the way he’s doing things, but we understand that he’s doing it for good and justice and all that kind of thing.
Paul
Right. Exactly, yeah. And the Punisher sprang to mind, and I think that’s a complicated case where the idea of audience buy-in is an interesting question. And sometimes a show or movie can deliberately play with these, and sometimes it can kind of happen accidentally. And then a villain’s just a bad guy who’s a bad man, basically, right? Like the Joker, right? Or Lex Luthor most of the time. Maybe sometimes Lex Luthor has a point, but most of the time he just wants money and power for the sake of it, and just does whatever to achieve it. And then one of the more interesting terms, I think, that is not super clear all the time is anti-villain. Which to me could be the anti-hero in the story if the perspectives were flipped.
Yeah. So basically, an anti-hero who’s the antagonist rather than the protagonist. And that can be Magneto, right? That can be… nobody else is springing to mind. I mean, that can be Anakin Skywalker or Darth Vader, when you look at things from a certain point of view.
So yeah, whether somebody’s a good character, I think, is one of the components, and their methods are another of the components, and then what are they trying to do, and do we support that? And I thought of Karli, right? Was it Karli? From The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Matthew
Oh, yeah, yeah. The Flag Smashers.
Paul
The Flag Smashers, yeah. I thought she was very much an anti-villain, where I was just like, yes, yes, do that. Oh, but maybe not that way. And it felt almost like they deliberately wanted to make sure that she went over a certain line. And then Walker, or whatever, is kind of an anti-hero, but also he’s kind of a villain and an antagonist, and it’s complicated. I think a show like that really did a good job of playing with the different sides of the coin. And Sam Wilson, meanwhile, is just a hero, right?
He’s just trying to be a hero. He’s a good guy who’s just trying to be the good guy. But it’s complicated, right? It’s not always obvious. Sometimes it’s really obvious, and this comes up a lot in politics, I think. Sometimes it’s really obvious what’s wrong, right?
But it’s not necessarily obvious how to fix it, or whether it can be fixed, right? And so I think that’s where you get a lot of things like, okay, well, everybody agrees that economic problems are bad, and people not being able to afford rent and food and medical care, that’s not good. But some people want to do certain social programs that they believe will help, and then other people are like, let’s blame X, Y, or Z group. And sometimes there’s not a really good solution to fixing things. And the nice thing about a lot of movies is that there is, but then sometimes there’s not, right? Sometimes the conclusion is, well, the heroes tried as hard as they could, or the anti-heroes or whoever, and the problem proved to be intractable. Or sometimes there’s just failure.
Matthew
No, I think that’s true. I think a lot of what you’re getting at there becomes really relevant when we’re asking how these stories help to inform our own lives, or how we see things. And for me, one of the things that I’ve most gotten out of this whole process is thinking a lot about, when I have sympathy for one side in a story but not the other, how much of that is because I’ve been able to see things through their perspective and not the others’. Because, like you just said with the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, if you go back and listen to our episodes about it, we were both pretty frustrated with that story, in part because it felt like it wasn’t that the Flag Smashers had a coherent idea that led them to do things that were pretty villainous, but that the writers, halfway through writing it, realized, wait, we have to make them more villainous so that we can have a big, satisfying action sequence where our heroes fight them. And a lot of times you’ll see one character break away from the bad group, and we get to really feel sympathy for them, because we’re like, okay, yeah, they were part of the bad group, but look at all these bad things that happened to them. But we don’t ask that about the others. And so here I’ll talk about one of my favorite characters, who I think really got badly treated by the writers, and I do think this was a major problem with him: Finn in the newest Star Wars movies, the sequels. Because here you have a stormtrooper who says, look, I didn’t want to be a stormtrooper.
I didn’t sign up because I thought this new version of the fascist Empire was good. I was kidnapped as a child. I was raised in this, like all of the others. And so I’ve never known… no one even gave me a name, let alone told me that I should have some moral agency. And so immediately you’re like, oh yeah, Finn, no, you’re great, you’re cool, you’re not a villain. Now let’s go slaughter thousands of other soldiers who had your exact same background.
Paul
Yeah. And have you go “woo-hoo,” or whatever kind of ridiculous Star Wars thing.
Matthew
And then you give us someone like Captain Phasma, who clearly does have moral agency and clearly does love the New Order and all this. What was it, the First Order? Thank you. And then the Final Order. I couldn’t even remember.
Paul
I’m like, New Order, that’s… and I’m pretty sure…
Matthew
But yeah, and I get that, because again, in Star Wars, you can’t have that much moral complexity and also have us blowing up all sorts of things. As the movie Clerks showed, that makes it a lot more complicated. I watched a video this morning, a TikTok that was like, hey, wait a minute, weren’t there a lot of enslaved sex workers in Jabba’s Palace? Weren’t some of them probably on that pleasure barge that Luke blew up? And other people were like, no, no, they all escaped. If you magnify this one pixel a thousand percent, you can see that it’s an escape pod.
Paul
Yeah, yeah. Leia was the enslaved sex worker on the barge, and the other ones were back at the palace. You don’t bring all of your enslaved sex workers to an execution.
Matthew
Clearly, that’s just not how it’s done. But yeah, anyway, I think that’s one of the things that I’ve come to think about the most. Any time I’m looking at a story where I’m like, okay, these are the bad guys, these are the good guys… let me think. An anti-hero story is almost always based around the idea that we have some sympathy for why this person is doing the bad things that they’re doing, and we give them a chance to recognize that maybe they’re mistaken, or that they’ve overblown a fear, or something like that. And it kind of makes me wonder, how often are the people we think of as villains people who never got that chance?
Paul
Yeah, I mean, all the time. And a lot of times they’re just not even characters, right? There’s nothing there. And I know you wanted to talk about The Wire at some point, and maybe at some point we will in more depth, but The Wire and Andor actually are the two shows that I think of as most giving some element of… I’m tempted to say humanity, because that’s the word one would use, but it’s a little weird in Star Wars. And it’s not my favorite word anyway, but you know what people mean when they say humanity… to the largest swath of characters. There’s so few characters in The Wire that don’t feel like they have personhood. Right. Maybe that’s a better word. And some of them have some agency, and some of them don’t have much agency because of their circumstances. But there’s something there. They give something to each character to make them a person. And I feel like Andor does the same, where there are not a lot of extras, essentially, in terms of characters that maybe even have lines. This is the opposite of Revenge of the Sith, basically, where I remember we talked about it, and we were like, Grievous having that throat-clearing thing felt like the only attribute that any character had beyond their role in the story, where there was a thing about them.
And nobody else had any things about them. It was just, this is what they’re doing in the story, which I think is the opposite of a show like The Wire or Andor. And most shows lie somewhere in the middle. But in order to give the audience a chance, or to even just encourage the audience to see someone as a person, you have to show them as a person. And sometimes that can be demonstrating their circumstances, or some sort of deep quandary that they’re in, and then you understand their actions on a very direct level. And sometimes it’s just making them a person and making them feel real, and then you can relate to it and be like, yeah, I could see why somebody in that circumstance would do such and such.
Matthew
There’s a picture that I think about a lot. It’s clearly old-timey, and if you know much about fashion, you can probably tell it is German people in the early 1940s having a picnic. And it just looks like a bunch of people, probably from an office somewhere, having a picnic and doing the most relatable thing. And it’s the staff of Auschwitz, or some concentration camp. And I remember it being, you know, just like… there’s a part of…
Paul
The mundanity of evil, or something like that.
Matthew
But it’s because I want to believe that, no, if you are evil enough to participate in something so horrible, you must kick puppies. You must pull the wings off of flies. You must be the kind of person who would hate a picnic. But that’s not the thing. And I think one of the first critiques that gets leveled at this kind of analysis we’re doing, and that I think is so disingenuous, is the “oh, well, you’re saying we should sympathize with them.” And to me, one of the things that I love so much about The Wire and about Andor and stuff like that is that it really says you can humanize people who are in horrible institutions, and… I don’t want to say dehumanize, because this is also humanizing… but you can show the bad sides, show the dirty sides, show the morally repugnant sides of people who are involved in causes that we think of as right and good and just. And neither one is saying, so therefore everyone in that cause is good, or everyone in that cause is bad. It’s saying people are in these organizations, and some people are pretty decent, and some people suck. And most people are probably somewhere in the middle. And most people, when they’re doing what we might look at as terrible things, probably have a way that they justify it to themselves. And we can sympathize with that.
We can call them hypocrites and liars to themselves, but mustache twirlers are fun, and for the most part they really don’t exist in the real world.
Paul
Yeah, for the most part. I guess for the most part. Yeah. I mean, there are people who just want to kill other people, right? And there are people who just want power for the sake of power. I mean, every person is a person.
Right. And everybody’s story has more to it. And yeah, I do think what you’re talking about is people being very disingenuous, but I think some of it comes from not wanting to confront the fact that one’s enemies are people who aren’t all bad all the time, right? And then the leap, the insane leap, that once you try to understand someone, and maybe even have some sympathy for some aspect of their being, you are therefore somehow signing off on or condoning their actions. I watched a Murder, She Wrote last night where the killer, and I won’t say who it is in case anybody wants to go back and watch a show from 40 years ago without spoilers, but basically the killer turned out to be a friend of one of the main side characters. And after they got caught, they said to their friend, I’m surprised to see you here. And the friend is like, well, I don’t condone your actions. I don’t think it was okay. Someone was doing something bad and you killed them, and I don’t think their blackmail justifies your murder, but I’m your friend, and I think you could use one right now. It’s the idea of basically being able to separate individual actions from the totality of a person. And sometimes I do think the totality of harmful actions gets to a level of Hitler, or some other lesser people who have propagated evil throughout the planet. But by and large, any individual, even when they’re part of something horrible… even frickin’ Hitler was a person. And I don’t know, maybe if he was just a better artist, the world would have been a better place.
Matthew
I mean, one of people’s favorite comparisons to draw as an illustration of this is that if you go simply by how they treated their friends and lovers, if you compare FDR, Churchill, and Hitler, Hitler is far better of a person than the other two, you know?
Paul
Right, yeah, yeah. And he was vegetarian. Like, you gotta murder millions of people for me to be like, all right, that’s not enough. But yeah, exactly. And I think the idea of this decent versus terrible… people do things, and their actions are going to be interpreted as good, bad, or whatever. And you could say something is objectively harmful, like, say, killing someone, right? But who that someone is, depending on your point of view, that might be like, oh, good, yeah, they got Bin Laden, or whatever. And I remember even then being like, yeah, I don’t know, he obviously did terrible stuff, not a fan of the guy, but I don’t know, whatever.
I don’t know. I cheered when Sheldon Adelson died, and Scalia, and I remember people being like, oh, blah blah blah. I’m like, no, fuck those guys. But that’s the thing. That’s perspective, right? And yeah, I think that’s so true.
Matthew
And I want to talk about this on both the hero and the villain side. Let’s stick on the villain side for a second. For me, one of the things I have most recognized during this process is why I think it is so important that most villains, and I’m not saying all, I think a mustache twirler can be fun sometimes, be somewhat relatable in some way, or at least sympathetic, or even just that we can understand how they got to where they are. I think a lot of the problems I see in our world come from people thinking that the world is divided into good people and bad people, and that because they know they’re not bad people, they don’t have to worry about themselves.
And for me, and I’m gonna make kind of a political point here, but I’m trying to make this more as an illustration than just “let me talk about politics,” where I see this the most is when we talk about gun control. Because you hear all the time people saying, no, no, no, guns don’t harm people, bad people harm people with guns, and so good people need guns to stop bad people with guns. And it’s a very clear moral calculus. There’s a lot of people who will tell you that they know they will never do a bad thing with a gun, and an individual saying that, okay, fine, but we know in the aggregate that is simply not true. Huge numbers of gun crimes are committed by people who everyone in their lives would have said was a good person who was probably safe to have a gun. And then they come home and find their partner in bed with someone, or they get really drunk, or they leave the gun out and someone uses it, and something terrible happens. And the Joker idea that we’re all just one bad day away from a moral failing… I don’t go quite as far as the Joker does, but it turns out that a lot of people, on their very worst day, might have a very bad instinct to do something very bad in a moment. And if you have easy access to a chance to do something really terrible, not everyone by any means, but some number of people will do something terrible with that.
And we can argue about… I’m not saying what should legally happen because of that. But I’m saying, similarly, I think when people talk about good immigrants and bad immigrants, or, well, Christians are fine, but Muslims are bad, whatever, any of this kind of grouping nonsense, it comes down to some sense of: there are bad people, and I know I’m not one of them, so I don’t have to examine my own moral actions. And I think that’s why I really love stories about characters who you start out really sympathizing with, and then they start to go a little too far, and you start to go a little too far with them. And hopefully you’re able to ask yourself, would I have been able to stop myself before this character did? I want to think I would, but maybe… To me, the best examples are the ones that shake you a little bit. And as bad as I think a lot of the execution of Revenge of the Sith was, if you put it to people: if you were, as you see it, not respected and treated badly by this institution, and were basically being groomed by someone else who was the one person promising they would listen to you when no one else would, and then you thought the people you love most in the universe were gonna die and you couldn’t stop it, would you do anything to protect them?
That’s a legit question. I think it’s a great question. I think a lot of people would easily say, oh no, I would never do what Anakin did. I don’t know if that’s true, though. I think a lot of us in that situation would really find ourselves struggling with it.
And to me, more than anything, that’s why the villain stories that I gravitate to, the ones I think are the most important at least, are the ones that do challenge us, that do push us on: are we certain that we would know where the moral line is and not cross it?
Paul
Yeah, and I mean, I don’t even really believe in the word.
Matthew
Well, yeah, and the minute I said that, I was like… ethics, or a few things, right?
Paul
But no, I mean, to translate it into my own language, I would say the courage of one’s convictions, essentially, right? Or the will to do the thing that you would want to have done, as opposed to maybe the thing that you might want to do in the moment. And that’s a big thing. And there’s things where I don’t like the idea of telling someone “you can’t know this,” right? Because I feel like that’s very presumptuous. There’s things where I feel like I’m very certain that in a given circumstance I know what I would do. But maybe instead of saying you can’t know what you would or wouldn’t do, maybe more of a softer statement, one that doesn’t make as good a quote, is: have caution about how much conviction you have in really knowing what you’d do in circumstances that you’ve never been close to, right? If you’ve been in a particular type of circumstance and there’s a similar thing, you likely have a better idea of how you would respond in that situation. Whereas it’s not even just a given thing on a given day. It’s if your whole life is different, in a way that’s unrecognizable, that you can only imagine, right?
People say you can’t even imagine. You can. You can imagine anything, right? But that doesn’t mean you imagine it accurately. And one of my least favorite phrases is “check your privilege,” but the underlying idea that I think is useful is: don’t make big assumptions about what someone else’s life is like when you haven’t experienced anything like what their experience is like. Everybody has their own experience, right?
And so to be presumptuous about how you would have responded in another situation, I think, is highly problematic. And one of my favorite baseball… it’s not a quote, but it’s something I heard that Roger Clemens, a legendary player who didn’t make the Hall of Fame because of drugs, said about Dwight Gooden, a legendary baseball player who didn’t make the Hall of Fame, maybe partially because of drugs. Different ones, right? Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs, presumably. I think there’s pretty good evidence. But when asked about Dwight Gooden’s struggles with recreational drugs, my understanding is his response was something like, well, I didn’t live the life he lived. I can’t say what I would have done in that spot, and I can’t judge him for whatever his actions were. I think looking back, a lot of people look at Gooden’s drug use and are kind of like, well, he was more the victim of whatever was going on, the pressures and whatever. Even at the time, I was like, why is this such a bad thing? My friends’ parents and my relatives used drugs or whatever, so whatever. But just that idea that someone else is going through their own thing, and you just don’t know what that’s like, right? You haven’t been through the same thing as that person. I think stories can show us, give us a window into what that might be like. But that’s not the same thing. And I think you’re right.
Matthew
And I really like the way you’ve complicated what I was saying and added an important layer. I think you’re right that we can have some certainty about things. I think that a lot of people, myself included, can sometimes have more certainty than we probably should.
But then you’re right, the other part of it is not just saying, okay, I know I would not make that choice, but then asking yourself, what are the reasons why I know I would not make that choice? What are the things that give me that stability and that security? And what if I didn’t have those?
If I hadn’t had the lessons I got, or the privileges I had, or whatever that might be. And I think that’s a really important emotional exercise, because I think that’s so often… I hate Clemens. Clemens is a Yankee, Clemens is like…
Paul
Yeah, yeah, no, no, no. He’s a villain from a Mets perspective.
Matthew
But in that regard, he’s doing something that so few people are able to do, because he’s saying, look… They were probably the two best, just in terms of pure pitching talent. I think the two best, if not two of the top five. And to me, Gooden’s absolutely number one, and it’s a question whether Clemens is number two or three or four, whatever. But one of them came from a middle-class white suburb in Texas, and one of them came from a poor Black neighborhood in Florida. For Clemens, I’m sure maybe he had opportunities to do different drugs and stuff like that, but he hadn’t grown up in a community where that was common in some ways. For Dwight, it was his childhood friends, some of whom had become very involved in drug culture, dealing, or things like that. And I don’t want to blame that, because I’d rather blame the fact that he was a 19-year-old kid put into amazing superstardom with none of the kind of support and structure that we often think about.
I blame that much more than where he comes from. But I just love that Clemens could acknowledge that: I didn’t have the challenges that he did, of people telling him, oh, you’re not being true to your roots, or whatever it is. And I think that actually allows me to segue into the other side of what I want to talk about here. The other kind of stories that I really love are not just the ones that make us sympathetic to villains, but the ones that raise questions about who is part of the heroic side. And I love that you brought up Andor, because I want to talk about the journey from A New Hope to Andor. A New Hope, the first of the Star Wars movies, is a great movie.
I love it. It’s why I’m a Star Wars fan. It is probably my favorite movie of all time, because I just have so much nostalgia, and it shaped me in so many ways. But it is one of the clearest about moral good and evil. We don’t even get any of the problems of, can Vader become a hero? It is just: Vader is evil, the Empire’s evil, the Rebellion is good and right. Tarkin’s evil.
And so growing up, that’s the idea I had of rebellion: we are good and true and noble, and we would never cheat and do awful things. We fight honorably and all this kind of bullshit. And then we start to problematize that idea. And to me, I think of Rogue One and Andor as very much of a piece. Rogue One starts the conversation, and then Andor says, no, no, no, we’re gonna get into it.
Yeah, and Rogue One starts with, and I know I’ve said this before, but I think it’s so important, one of our major heroes shooting his friend in the back for nothing the guy did wrong, except that he would help get him caught. And it’s like, wait a minute. So you’re telling me that if he doesn’t shoot him in the back, he gets caught, the Rebellion never gets those plans, and the Death Star is never blown up? What? And then you get to Andor, and it’s like, oh, there are people who are part of the rebellion because the rebellion is stealing things, and they like stealing things and they want money.
Paul
Yeah. And it starts with Andor shooting someone in the face, just so he doesn’t get caught. But this is just for personal reasons. This isn’t some revolutionary… whatever, rebellion.
Matthew
Exactly.
Paul
And he’s just like, oh, if I don’t shoot this guy, I’m probably gonna be in trouble.
Matthew
And the guy is not great. He’s kind of a corrupt cop. But still, the guy’s not a threat in any way.
Paul
Yeah. But he goes from the guy who shoots the guy for his own personal reasons to the guy who shoots the guy for the bigger reason.
Matthew
And that’s kind of the journey. And along the way, he meets, as I said, people who are in the rebellion because they’re thieves, and people who get what they need by holding a gun to a kid’s head. And they have people in their group who say, look, I know I’m a moral monster. I’m never gonna see the sunrise. The incredible speech by Luthen about all these terrible things that he’s willing to do because he thinks the cause is justified. And again, I don’t want to get too much into the politics of this specific situation, but I cannot help but hold all of that in my head as I look at October 7th. As I look at what I, as someone very much outside of the perspective of Palestine and Israel, see as a pretty legitimate cause, fighting for freedom, fighting for an end of apartheid, and what strikes me as a pretty horrific way of doing that. And I like that Andor wasn’t clearly saying Luthen is right, or that someone else is right. It’s saying these are hard questions, and for people who aren’t fighting for their freedom every day to sit back and morally judge how you fight for freedom… not that you should like it, but it’s a lot harder than you might think it is. And again, there’s so much complexity to Israel-Palestine.
I’m not trying to get into that. I’m just using that as one example, and I think you can use many others. Part of what inspired this, I was doing some research, and the people who were fighting against South African apartheid killed a lot of people, some of whom had nothing to do with apartheid, and held a lot of signs saying kill all the white people. Native Americans fighting back against the destruction of their land and their cultures and their genocide killed an awful lot of women and children. Why do we say women and children? What is the moral… My point is just that I really appreciate that these stories are pushing us to say that even people in causes where we think the cause itself is right and just and true aren’t always gonna fight in ways that keep their hands clean. The idea that they fight in ways that keep their hands clean is just nonsense, and maybe our stories should accept that.
Paul
I’d push back a little bit on “nonsense,” but I feel you, basically. I don’t feel the way you do, I think, in having a preference for this sort of story, right? But I appreciate their existence. And I want both, kind of, right?
Matthew
Yeah, and I’d say I don’t want every story to be that. I’m saying I appreciate a world where both exist, rather than a world where it’s just one.
Paul
For sure. 100%. Yeah. No, we need both, I think. For me, something like watching A New Hope, it’s a feel-good story. And sometimes that’s just what you need, or that’s what I need. Like yesterday, I had a really, really rough poker session.
And then I go on Discord in my study group, and somebody just posts this hilarious thing. It’s like a 10-second video, and it just made my day. And I’m like, okay, I can just come back to this and watch these 10 seconds whenever I’m feeling bummed about poker, or whatever. It’s like after going to see the Bodies exhibit for yoga teacher training, which was really creepy, and I don’t support it, I don’t think. I don’t know, there’s a whole thing there. But the teacher was like, some people have really strong feelings viewing all these bodies. They’re dead human bodies, right?
Pieces of them. And she said, go home and look at puppies and cats on the internet. Seriously, it causes things to happen in your brain that will make you feel better. People joke about cat videos or whatever, but they actually do things for your brain that are positive.
Matthew
Right, we need it sometimes.
Paul
Exactly. Right. And you don’t want to be on the dopamine cycle of addiction or whatever, probably, but it’s got its place, right? I don’t want to say it’s there for a reason, but it serves a function. And so I feel like the uplifting “the heroes are the good guys, and we can just be fully behind what’s going on without having to have all these questions”… I think there are days for that, and I think there’s a place for movies like that. But I also think there’s a place for shows like Andor, where it’s a good reminder to not try to always see the world like it’s A New Hope, right? And I don’t want to get really into the Israel-Palestine thing too deeply either, but as an outside observer who watches very little news but just has a vague notion of what goes on, it strikes me how many people seem to not actually view it as a legitimately complicated situation. Whatever side you’re on, just acknowledging, yeah, this is actually a difficult situation, doesn’t mean condoning the actions of the other side at all, right? You could say Germany was in a real bad spot before World War II because of the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations and whatever, and that doesn’t mean you’re saying therefore Nazi Germany was okay, right? That’s not the same thing. And going back to the idea… I remember you mentioned some prison guards on Orange Is the New Black, right?
Which, actually, I had yoga teacher training with one of the actresses in Orange Is the New Black. Anyway, people were complaining that it humanized that character, who’s a villain in the story. I mean, it’s a bad guy. I didn’t watch it, but the idea that you can’t give that person a story without somehow saying, oh, therefore what they did is okay… it’s like, no. You can relate to someone, you can be like, I understand you as a person, and I have some sympathy for aspects of your being, but I also hold your actions in complete contempt and condemn them. You can do both, and I think people have a very hard time doing that. And I do think that shows and movies and any kind of fiction that present characters who do things where some people in the audience are going to think, oh, that’s a horrible thing to do, but also present that person as a person, I think that is a positive thing to do, in that it leads people to try to understand other people, right? And even if they’re your enemy, even if you’re opposed to what they’re trying to do, that understanding, first of all, just improves your understanding of reality, but also: know thy enemy, right?
Matthew
I love what you brought up, because you reminded me of a connection I wanted to make before, which is that in some ways I think the Anakin story is not just about what you would do in this situation, as much as it’s, would you be able to resist the manipulation that Anakin surrenders to? I like to think that I would never in a million years support a demagogue like Trump or like Hitler or any of those, and I’m fairly confident I never would. I’ve also never truly known what hunger is like. I have been poor in ways where I always knew that if I could just swallow my pride and call up my dad, I’d probably be okay.
Paul
It’s like the difference between broke and poor.
Matthew
And I’ve never been… And so you look at something like that and say, yes, the fact that a whole bunch of Germans willingly chose the Nazis is horrible and bad. I guess here I’m gonna shift a bit, but to me it’s a main part of the focus. I think the reason I care about these things… I was thinking about this a lot in terms of death penalty cases, and the whole thing with Lindsay Clancy, the mother who killed her children, and was she insane or not. So often, I think, the conversations, and the conversations in superhero movies a lot, are about justice: these people did a bad thing, and therefore they should be punished and they should suffer. And then the question comes, okay, but why did they go do the bad thing? And it’s almost like the more you can sympathize with why they did the bad thing, the less they should suffer. And I get that direction, but to me the whole question is nonsense, because I don’t think we should be thinking about how much they should suffer. I think we should be thinking about how we make sure that they don’t do that again, but also that someone else doesn’t do that again. And so my concern about a Lindsay Clancy isn’t what degree of hate we should have for this person. It’s, what were the structures that, if they had been stronger, might have stopped this thing? It’s not that I want to blame the Jedi for Anakin’s fall. It’s that I want to say, what could the Jedi have done differently so that when Palpatine came along, Anakin could say, no, you’re ridiculous.
I’m not gonna fall for this. What could the Allies have done after World War I that would have dealt with the horrible effects of that war without putting Germany in a situation where, when someone came along and said, look, you have these horrible problems happening, it’s all their fault, the Jews, let’s go get them, so many people were like, yeah, let’s do it? Which again doesn’t justify the horrific hate and antisemitism and violence. But it says, if you don’t make people super vulnerable to manipulation, then maybe the manipulators won’t win. And that’s good.
Paul
Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I will wholeheartedly support your use of “nonsense” in that context. Yeah. So I think justice is a super problematic word. I mean, it’s just made up, it’s a social construction. Everybody’s sense of it is gonna be different.
And to me, it’s kind of the problem I have with the word ethics. It’s the same idea of trying to pretend there’s some objective truth there, which I know a lot of people believe there is. I don’t. Maybe at times I have. I know part of the question here, at some point, is gonna be what you asked maybe in episode 400: what’s changed in my thinking through the course of all this? I think just an increased clarity, and an understanding that I really don’t believe that there is any kind of objective idea of morals, ethics, justice. These are just things that people make up. But at the same time, there is a very strong subjective sense.
And when people call it objective, I think it’s basically trying to find a group of people who all agree on the same values, or whatever, right? And for me, I just know where I fall. And I’ve always had that sense. If I look back, I think a lot of that had to do with how I grew up and the circumstances around me, and really being supported in finding my own sense of what I thought was good and bad, right and wrong, or whatever. But also having very nurturing, kind people that I was surrounded by, and having a very positive environment, even though a lot of negative things happened in my life. My dad died when I was eight. That was terrible. That’s tragedy. But the support that I felt from my extended family, from friends, having a bunch of bonus moms, basically… I always just wish everybody could have something like that. Not in terms of the same exact upbringing, but just that level of support, and the kind of encouragement of, no, you figure out what you think is best, but also, isn’t it kind of better if we’re all friendly and try to help each other and are cooperative? And just, I don’t know, whatever.
Matthew
Yeah, no, I hear that. And it’s something I do still wrestle with, because I kind of feel like there is, for me, an objective good or bad, which is basically selfishness versus community. But the minute I say that, I think about all the examples where people who just want to do something good for themselves are yelled at for being selfish. And guess what? Most of the time it’s people who don’t look like me. “Do the thing for the good of the community, not for your own selfish needs.” Guess what? That hits women in general a lot harder than men. That hits harder in different cultures and stuff like that. And yeah, to me, just killing people, that’s just not good, you know.
Paul
But yeah, yeah. Less of that would be great. Globally.
Matthew
And here, to me, is maybe gonna be my closing thing: the reason why I kept thinking about The Wire as the show that I wanted us to look at. One possibility is we might wind up doing a new podcast that’s an episode-by-episode rewatch of The Wire, or a character-by-character analysis of The Wire, something like that.
I have no idea. Because it’s a great project, but it’s a lot of time. But the thing that I like most about The Wire, and again, spoilers for a show that’s pretty old, but if you haven’t watched it, it is phenomenal, is that it really focuses on the idea that the problem isn’t individuals, the problem is systems. And one of the debates that I think gets misunderstood way too often is the critique that people make of cops, the idea of ACAB, all cops are bastards, and stuff like that. And I do subscribe to those ideas in a lot of ways, but I feel like I do it in the way of The Wire, where The Wire is saying there are cops who are just shitty people, and there are cops who are fundamentally good people who want to do good in the world, but they’re also cops. And being cops, being part of this fundamentally broken institution, makes them bastards and makes them part of doing incredible harm. But the same thing is also true of all these other institutions that are just as broken. So much of the story is about people trying to do the right thing within these institutions and getting smacked down really hard.
And one thing I love is that for almost every cop, you can find someone analogous in the drug gangs who’s basically in the same position. Someone who is just doing whatever they can to get by, and someone else who just can’t deal with authority and wants to do it their own way, and someone who is just trying to take care of their own and be a good person. Every one of these people exists on both sides of that good-evil, law-crime dichotomy. And that’s what makes the show so brilliant. To me, that show more than anything has changed my understanding of the idea of good and bad and heroes and villains, because the show just kind of obliterates all those notions and says, look, these are all just people in broken systems.
Paul
Yeah, and I guess I would disagree that it’s the systems, not the individuals. I think it’s both. And I think you do see throughout the course of the show that different individuals deal with the systems that they’re either stuck in, or that they’ve chosen to be a part of, in different ways. But the systems are maybe the driver of the larger problems, and the systems make it very difficult for any individual to say, okay, I’m gonna come along and make positive change. The system doesn’t let them, basically, right?
Matthew
Yeah, no, I think that’s a good point. Well, I’m really excited to do this. Just as kind of a closing thing, we’re gonna sit down and really think about it. The first one we’re gonna do is Civil War, but really from the perspective of everything before the Sokovia Accords get written. Basically, all the questions before the Sokovia Accords themselves get written: this event happened in Lagos, these people died. What happens next? What oversight should or should there not be over a group of heroes who have these powers and are using them for good? That’s one of the things we’re gonna talk about. Batman is absolutely gonna be one of them, probably the last one. But just offhand, Paul, are there any particular characters or storylines that you’re particularly excited to look at?
Paul
No, but I did have two things, tiny little points here. And one of them maybe is a character to look at.
I don’t know, it would be tough because I didn’t watch the whole series. But when you’re talking about Anakin and that one bad day, and what really is more of a trip into villainhood, right, in Revenge of the Sith, which I found unsatisfying… I know some people love it, that’s great, enjoy it. But for me, it was built up so much, and it didn’t deliver, and that was frustrating. The Clone Wars did give us something nicer, we kind of got more there, I think. But another villain who was a hero, or viewed as a hero, where maybe the audience didn’t quite follow along as quickly with how much terrible stuff she was doing, is Daenerys in Game of Thrones. And I think that’s a very interesting trip from being perceived as a hero to being just a villain, right?
Or maybe an anti-villain, depending, right? And I didn’t read all the books and I didn’t watch the whole series. I saw the beginning, I saw the end, and I kind of know the gist of what happened in the middle. I think obviously a lot of people were also disappointed with the pacing, I guess, of her perceived transformation. I would argue she’s doing a lot of horrible stuff for a lot of the time. So I think she, or even someone else from Game of Thrones, would be interesting, even though that’s not a series that I love. And then just another note, when you were talking about the Nazis having a picnic or whatever, I thought of The Man in the High Castle, which I think is actually another show that… it was so mirthless, it was a really hard watch. But there was a point where I’m like, wait, wait, am I rooting for Hitler to not get shot here? What’s going on? They really tried to make every character feel like a person. But also, the only ones who ever had any fun and could laugh and make jokes were the Nazis, in their personal lives. And they’re just in this idyllic Long Island, it looks like they’re in the Hamptons or something, and everybody else is miserable. And it was like, huh, yeah.
Matthew
Yeah, and you’re right. I mean, The Wire is one of the… I don’t think there has been a show that more consistently makes me sad and frustrated with the world, and not hopeless, but something akin to it. It’s also a really funny show. The characters are funny.
Paul
Oh, yeah.
Matthew
And sometimes it’s the writing of a funny situation for the audience, but sometimes it’s like, look, when people work together, they tell jokes to each other, whether that’s people hanging out on the street corner selling drugs, or people riding around in a police car trying to catch them, or people on the docks. They’re funny. The characters are funny. And you’re right, I think that’s very true. And yeah, Daenerys, I think, would be an interesting character, because it’s one where I think the elements in front of and behind the camera become so important, both of them. As someone who is a book reader first, her fall is very telegraphed in the books. In the books you see times where she’s using her incredible power to do things that we think are good, freeing slaves, but she’s doing it from a perspective of: I have been put on this earth to do what is right and good and true, because I am good and right and true, and anyone who gets in my way is therefore wrong and must die. That’s like, ooh, that’s a bit scary.
And something I think is one of those brilliant bits of storytelling that didn’t really translate well to TV is: I’ve now freed all the slaves. What do I do now? How do I build an economic system? And you want to say that’s ridiculous, but look at the American South and how Black people have been treated in the 150 years since slavery ended. We didn’t really have a good system. They went to Jim Crow and sharecropping and all this stuff pretty damn quick. Daenerys is pushed on the idea of, you overthrew evil, but how do you build good? How many people thought Saddam Hussein was awful and terrible? I’ll raise my hand. How many people would have thought, in a vacuum, overthrowing Saddam Hussein? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. But we had no idea what to replace him with, and everything looked terrible afterwards, which maybe makes you think twice about overthrowing someone without any idea of that. That’s Daenerys’ story. But I also just want to say, on the behind-the-camera part of it, I think it is also impossible to divorce all the people who are upset about what happened to her from the fact that she’s really the only empowered female character in the show. And in the books to some extent, but especially in the show, because some of the other strong women characters get cut out of the show. And so now you’re not just asking, wait, did Daenerys have to become evil, or whatever she becomes, but why did the one strong woman character have to have that?
Paul
I mean, you got Arya too, right? But yeah, point taken.
Matthew
So yeah, I think that she could be another fascinating character to look at.
Paul
Yeah. And when you brought up that power vacuum thing, my mind shoots to Zaheer from The Legend of Korra. The Henry Rollins character, the anarchist, who’s like, yeah, I’m just gonna bump off the clearly awful head of this kingdom, and then you’re free. It’s like, yeah, I mean, cool. But also, that’s the only TikTok I’ve ever really wanted to make.
I want to take that scene where he suffocates her and put the music to it, “Take My Breath Away,” or whatever. Anybody’s free to use that idea. I’m not gonna make any TikToks. All right.
Matthew
Okay. On that note, I think we’ll wrap up. But yeah, we’re looking forward to it. Audience, if you have some suggestions, we’re gonna be doing this over a couple months, so let us know who they should be. And we’ll look forward to having all that conversation with you.
Until then, thank you so much for listening. Please tell other people about this so we can get some people in. May the Force be with you. Oh, sorry.
