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Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Today we’re continuing our wrap-up, taking all the things we’ve discussed over the years and applying them to specific stories and characters. And we’re going to start that off by looking at one of our favorite stories to reference, but one that we’ve never really done a full deep dive on, and that’s Marvel’s Civil War, Captain America: Civil War. But here’s the thing. Paul and I have both talked about how the movie starts with some really interesting questions, and then pretty quickly becomes “let’s just have everybody punch each other.” And it does give us some of the best action scenes we’ve ever seen in the MCU, and they’re awesome. And the later issues around Steve’s loyalty to Bucky, and Tony’s loyalty to his parents and his desire for vengeance, and the way Zemo is able to play into all of that, and where T’Challa falls in the middle of all that, all of that makes for a great movie. But I think it never really gets at the central question that Civil War is supposed to be about, which is this idea that you’ve got superheroes, they’re doing good things in the world as they understand it, and as it seems most of the world understands it. But sometimes bad things happen. And should there be oversight? Should there be accountability? And if so, to whom? Even I, a person who is the most on team oversight and accountability, would pretty quickly say the Sokovia Accords suck. That’s not worth defending. For me, the moment I’ve always been most interested in is that fight in Lagos. Crossbones is setting off this big bomb, Scarlet Witch contains it, shoots him up into the air, and it explodes and winds up taking out a floor of a big office building in Lagos, where it turns out there are a lot of Wakandan students. And their deaths are a big part of what starts off the question. So I want to actually just stay right in that moment and ask you, Paul, someone who I know is really on Cap’s side for the most part about the lack of oversight from others, with I think good reason. I think Cap especially has seen just how bad oversight can be. The Lagos incident has happened. What are your thoughts on what kind of response there should or shouldn’t be?
Paul
I guess I never really believe in “should.” You know what I mean? I believe in everyone having their own perspective and their own agenda. And I don’t believe in justice as this objective concept.
Matthew
Right. Yeah, I’d agree with that.
Paul
And I think it’s also important, when we’re talking about people with powers, to differentiate people with powers from people with power that is based on access to resources. Scarlet Witch can do stuff. Captain America can do stuff. Tony Stark can do stuff in terms of inventing things, but a lot of his power actually comes from money, right? It comes from access to resources, which is something that society or the government kind of determines, to what level individuals can have access to resources. Now, I know Cap and Scarlet Witch were both created either by a government or by some rogue agency or whatever, right? But the idea being, once those people have those powers, that’s a part of their being. And saying, “Oh, you can or can’t do such and such because you have these powers,” I think is very different from saying, “Okay, the power that you have based on your access to resources needs to be somehow limited.” Right? So I think in a way…
Matthew
Yeah, let me make sure we’re on the same page about that, because I think I would agree with you there. What you’re talking about is people who have powers fundamentally outside not only what someone has right now in our own world, but what, with what we know about science, someone could conceivably have in our own world.
Paul
Superpowers.
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. In the way that I would say Batman and Iron Man are superheroes, but they are not superpowered people. Their power comes from technology and also from a lot of training, but Bruce Wayne doesn’t become a superhuman-level martial artist. He just becomes an incredibly good one. And so if I can give another example of what you’re talking about, I think we can all agree that a person wearing glasses that somehow gave them the ability to see the other side of playing cards, thus allowing them to know what the opponent was holding or know what the dealer’s next card was going to be, and thus cheat, that’s not okay.
Paul
Probably more okay against the dealer, because they’re trying to cheat you, but not against the other players.
Matthew
Sure, sure. A dealer in blackjack or something. But a person who just has a mutant ability to see through cards, yes, we still wouldn’t want them cheating. But saying that person is banned from a casino in the way that the glasses are banned from a casino is a very different issue, because now you’re talking about a person who has this ability that they didn’t choose. What ability does that give the rest of us to limit their rights to do things everyone else can do? Is that… am I kind of starting on the right page?
Paul
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I could go down a long trail of Phil Ivey and edge sorting and getting sued by, I think, Borgata, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff in actual gambling of people using not technology, just natural ability, being able to see differences in the cards, so essentially the deck’s marked. But yeah, I do think that’s the gist of it: somebody using their own abilities, like card counting in blackjack, right? That’s just paying attention and having the mental wherewithal to actually know what’s going on in terms of strategy, and how many cards of this type or the other have come through. But you compare that to having some mechanical device that can somehow see through the cards or know what’s coming, and it’s definitely a different sort of thing, in my opinion, right? And so I think how you’re gonna regulate both, they probably need to be approached differently. So whatever Sokovia Accords should be there, instead of the ones as written, I think should recognize the difference between someone like Punisher, right, who’s basically just a dude doing stuff that’s outside the law, someone like Tony Stark, who’s doing stuff where I’m not sure how the law relates to it, but who is obviously using a lot of material resources that not everybody has access to, and that certainly could be regulated without feeling like you’re infringing on who he is as a person, and then someone like Wanda, who’s using the abilities that are now a part of who she is, right? And so I think that’s complicated. And in terms of getting to your actual question of what should happen, I think…
Matthew
Well, actually, can I say one more thing on what you’ve said? Because I hadn’t thought of this before, but I think this is actually a good starting place that maybe we’re both gonna agree on. I think the first thing I would say about where the Sokovia Accords start off wrong from the very beginning is that they’re trying to legally regulate who people are rather than the actions they take. Because the fact is, if that person who can see the back of a playing card just doesn’t like poker and never plays poker in their life, no one should care that they have that ability. And I think no one should say that person has to be registered with the government so the Las Vegas government always knows where they are. But you could have some level of, “Hey, you have this ability to do this thing that would break the rules of these games, and we don’t want you to do that. If we catch you using that ability, we’re gonna have some questions.” Again, it’s hard to figure out, but at least we can say maybe the regulation has to start with “Are you using your powers in a way that we have concerns about?” rather than “Just you existing is something we have the right to regulate.” Is that a fair way to think of starting out?
Paul
Yeah, for sure. And I still have issues with the idea of saying, “Oh no, you can’t go and use these powers in these games.” But I have fewer issues with it than with saying, “We have to go proactively tag everybody who could potentially do such and such.”
Matthew
Yeah, for sure. For sure.
Paul
I think ultimately, once you live in a world where certain powers exist, you just probably shouldn’t offer certain games, right? Things like the Olympics get very complicated. And in our world, the idea of performance-enhancing drugs, I’m not against them. I’m actually against regulation, because I think it’s not okay to tell people what they can and can’t put in their bodies, and thus whether they can or can’t compete. I know that’s a very niche opinion, right? But the idea there is essentially, you have to be a certain sort of human, a natural human or whatever, in order to compete. That would be kind of what you would do, right? If you’re in a world where people have these extraordinary powers, where is the line between somebody who’s just trained themselves to the peak of natural human ability and somebody who has some outlier gene, like a mutant?
Matthew
I mean, I think a very good example is Michael Phelps. I don’t want to take anything away from him. He obviously trained and worked to become an incredible swimmer. He also is quite literally a genetic mutation.
Paul
I mean, lots of us are. Everybody’s a little different.
Matthew
Yeah, yeah. But he has specific genetic things that allowed his lungs to process oxygen in a different way than most other people do, and it allows him to hold his breath for a lot longer without the same pain it can cause other people. And that turns out to be really useful when you’re swimming with your face underwater. So yeah, I think you’re right. We can get into all kinds of things there. So with that, though, let’s go back to Lagos and Scarlet Witch, because I think there’s a specific thing happening here that is where the public interest comes in. Here’s where I think you’re right that Captain America and Scarlet Witch and Thor and people like that have abilities, so we’re not just talking about the things they do. But what they are doing is a thing that, in most of our societies… they are using violence to prevent things that they think should be prevented, or sometimes to make things happen that they think should be made to happen, because they think the result would be very bad otherwise. That is an action that most governments reserve for specifically appointed government bodies, such as armies or police or federal bureaus, whatever it is. If you’ve listened to any of my episodes, I would be the first to say, as I’m sure Paul would agree, that we’re not saying governments are right and everything they do is good and proper, and there’s no abuse of those powers. But part of why I like the story so much is because I think it raises questions about when people have these powers and they’re going to use them for their understanding of what is good. It feels like there are two fundamental questions here that the public, who they are in theory doing these things for, might have some input on. One of which is: how do you define what is the good thing that needs to happen? And the second one being: what methods are you using, what level of collateral damage are you allowing, and how do we all feel about that, as potential collateral damage? Do you think that’s a fair way of framing the questions we’re talking about here?
Paul
Yeah, I think so. And I guess my whole inherent distrust of the idea of such regulation or legislation, or however you go about it, is a fundamental distrust of the institutions that are trying to do it, and of the idea that governments have the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. I just don’t believe that, right? I think if that’s your starting point, if you do believe in that, it makes all the sense in the world to say we’ve got to essentially regulate the use of force, right? And I’m not entirely against having a system that creates some sort of repercussions for somebody who uses force in a destructive way, right? But I’m inherently suspicious of those systems and don’t feel like there’s some objective truth that supports them or their power. I think it’s just the power that’s given to them by the people who don’t overthrow them, essentially, right? In a democracy, ostensibly it’s the people voting for them, but ultimately any power structure exists because it’s not overthrown. People don’t stop it from existing, right? And so I think it’s entirely reasonable for each individual power structure that has its own interest, right? So like Nigeria, for Lagos, and Wakanda, for their citizens who were there and who died, and then by extension the United Nations, or whatever it is in the MCU, to say, “Well, we want to do something about this, because something happened,” right? What’s completely absent in the movie is any sense of an investigation into what happened, right? There’s just a conclusion drawn: “Oh, this was their fault, this was the outcome.” And no, okay, but what was the alternative? Were these actions reasonable? Was it intentional, like, “Oh, we’ll kill those people instead of these people,” or was it, “We’re trying to get whatever it is away from people and just didn’t succeed”? If Tony had grabbed the nuke that was headed for Manhattan and ended up steering it to Newark, or Hoboken or something, and then it blew up a bunch of people there, that would kind of be the same.
Matthew
Right. We could say it killed less people, especially if it’s…
Paul
Right, it killed fewer people. Maybe it killed people in New Jersey instead of in New York, but the governor of New Jersey would be like, “Hey!” And meanwhile, the mayor of New York might be like, “Hey, celebration.” And anybody driving in New York would be pretty happy, because they’d be like, “Okay, good, fewer New Jersey drivers.” But there’s a bunch of interested parties, and I don’t think there’s one “these are the people who should have the say,” right? The people who are most affected, they’re dead, right? They’re gone already. Then there’s their family, and then I guess the country they’re from, or their friends and coworkers and whatever, right? And then there’s the place where it happened, also. So I feel like everybody should have some sort of say in what they want done, but I just don’t think there’s a clean “Oh yeah, this is clearly the answer.” To me, it’s more like there are different parties who want to do it this way or that way. And in a way, I kind of think the way things went makes some sense, where governments essentially were like, “Well, we don’t like this, so we’re gonna try and stop it.” And then some of the people who were involved in it were like, “Okay, that makes sense, that’s fine. We’ll kind of go along with that, because we don’t really see a better alternative.” And then others were like, “No, we are who we are. We’re doing things that we believe are for the good, making the world the way we want it to be, right? Essentially stopping people from doing harm. And we’re just gonna keep doing that, and you can chase us, whatever, but we’re superheroes, so we’ll be okay.” And yeah, to me there are these different factions that want different things, and I don’t see a clear “this is what should happen” answer. I’m curious to hear your take on it, though, because I know we’ve talked about this a lot, but haven’t really landed on a “this is what to do.”
Matthew
I appreciate that, and I’m gonna build towards that, because I can’t say, “Here’s the easy answer.” But I certainly think, and this is where the Cap line comes in, about how when everyone else says you should move, you plant yourself like a tree and say, “No, you move.” That line is scary. And also where he says we can take care of our own, we can deal with what happened with Scarlet Witch and stuff like that. You’re right that they are fundamentally different on a number of levels, but I think we can’t escape the idea that on some level the Avengers are a metaphor for the police or armies or the military or things like that. And for me, the thing that has been shown again and again and again is that groups like that are really quite bad at holding themselves accountable, for very obvious reasons, and not all of them malicious or evil. There is by definition a lack of objectivity, in the same way that there probably is a lack of objectivity on the part of the victims of those things.
Paul
For sure.
Matthew
I’m really glad you brought up Punisher, because to me, Punisher is a great example of someone who I think would make the exact same case that Steve Rogers makes: “I know what is right, I know which drug dealers need to die, I get to decide that I’m gonna kill the people I need to kill.” And my sense is that, at least in some versions of the stories, and tell me if I’m wrong, you would probably disagree with him, or say that he maybe is not the best judge of that. Is that a fair statement?
Paul
Yeah, for sure. And even, spoilers for the comic book version of Civil War, he joins Team Cap, and they’re all kind of like, “We don’t…” and then he does some stuff, and they’re like, “No, go away. You’re not…” Yeah, that’s bad for the brand.
Matthew
And it’s good that they still have that kind of internal accountability. I’d rather it be more like, “No, no, stay here so we can help, don’t just go off on your own.” But yeah, I don’t really get it, obviously. But to me, that’s where I always want to fall, because I think the thing you hit on that’s most important to me is the investigation. And I think we can’t talk about this in this day and age without talking about it in terms of ICE and cops and all this kind of stuff. I was having a conversation with someone who is more right-wing than I am, but who I know is kind of in the middle and doesn’t just want to have a Twitter battle, but wants to engage in real conversation, and so is willing to talk with me. Someone I know through poker, funnily enough. And they were saying, “Why is it that you presume that the cops are always guilty?” And what I said was, “You’re right that we shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be that way.” It’s that I have lost the ability… there have been so many incidents by now where not only did it turn out to be brutality, but the cops lied about it, and they covered it up, and they did everything they could to make the victim look like someone who wouldn’t be a victim, and it turned out they were wrong, that I don’t give cops the benefit of the doubt anymore. And that’s even more so with ICE. They have lost that ability. And so to me, that’s why I want there to be independent investigations. And from everything I have seen, in most of the situations where ICE has killed people, it does seem pretty clear that they shouldn’t have done that. Was I actually at the scene? Can I tell you with a hundred percent certainty that that’s true? No. But I can’t…
Paul
Well, because they shouldn’t even exist.
Matthew
Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, in terms of the concrete details of the situation, once you’re there, right, whether it makes sense, fine. But my point is that I want there to be an investigation, and I absolutely don’t want it to be by ICE, and I don’t want it to be by someone who is invested in ICE looking good. And especially, to pull it back to this, there are a lot of times where we’re trying to argue about what should have happened based on a set of facts, but we might disagree about the facts. So, I rewatched that scene a couple times. Let me give you my proposal of the facts as I understand them, and if we can agree on some set, we can work with that.
Paul
Okay, these are the results of your investigation.
Matthew
Exactly.
Paul
Okay, very good, very good.
Matthew
Crossbones is about to set off this bomb in a very crowded space. There are going to be a lot of deaths, including some of the people who Scarlet Witch is… I mean, Cap is probably gonna die.
Paul
Potentially, yeah. I mean, his resistance to damage is completely unknown. Superhero plot armor, but yeah.
Matthew
So there’s that threat, but also just a large number of innocent people. Scarlet Witch acts in the moment to try and prevent that, and raises Crossbones up into the air, where he explodes. And here’s the piece of evidence I fall on the hardest in terms of what I’m about to say next. All we see is an explosion in a building. We don’t see anything about who’s in the building or not, but you see this look of shock and horror on her face. So what that tells me is she didn’t make an intentional calculus, either incorrectly thinking, “Oh, that building is empty, so it’s safe,” or saying, “Even if there are some people in that building, it’s better than this crowd.” She basically was in a place of, “Anything is better than this crowd, I’m gonna get it away. Oh shit, did I just do something bad?”
Paul
Yeah. “Not this crowd. Oh crap, not over there either.”
Matthew
So we agree on that general idea of probably what happened?
Paul
Yeah. Essentially, there’s five people on this track of the trolley, and you’re like, “Well, I’ll switch it,” and it’s like, “Oh, that wasn’t better.” Or maybe it was better, but it wasn’t good. Yeah, I agree. That’s my interpretation of the scene. I haven’t rewatched it recently, but every time I’ve seen it, my impression has always been that she’s trying to contain the explosion and keep it away from the mass of people she knows are right there. And in so doing, something goes wrong and it ends up blowing up another group of people, which is either a larger or smaller group of people. I mean…
Matthew
Yeah. But definitely not on purpose. And we’re told that I think it’s like 17 people are killed.
Paul
Yeah, that probably saved a lot of lives.
Matthew
Yeah, I think it’s quite likely that it’s a three-figure number of deaths if it happens on the ground there. So I guess to me, there are two things I would want to push for. One is, again, that accountability, an outside group that steps in. But even there, it’s not because I want to say, “So therefore, should Scarlet Witch go to jail,” or something stupid like that. I’m generally against the whole penal system, because to me, again, the point is it’s not about justice and punishing, especially when someone’s trying to do the right thing. It’s about how we prevent this in the future. And here again I’m falling a lot on what I want in the military and the police, but I think it’s fair to want it in the Avengers: that’s the point at which I would want an outside group to say, “Okay, let’s talk about how she was trained.” Because again, to use the police example, in theory at least, you don’t allow people to be a police officer until they’ve had some training. And part of that training…
Paul
Well, they do. Absolutely. I mean, they have some training, but it’s ridiculously easy.
Matthew
And I’m one of the people who’s like, you should need a four-year degree from a police academy, not a six-week degree.
Paul
Sure, yeah. In Germany, it’s like three years. In the US, it’s like a few months or something.
Matthew
But at least you should have the ability to hit the broad side of a barn with a pistol. Some level of shooting practice is probably needed. Or to know what… and more importantly, to have de-escalation.
Paul
De-escalation.
Matthew
But also an idea of, “Okay, if there’s a bystander ten feet away, maybe it’s safe to take the shot. If the bystander is two feet away, it’s not.” I don’t know what those numbers are. I’m pulling them out of my ass. But there’s some level of “here is where the rules of engagement say you can safely fire.” And I think it’s fair to say… I mean, Scarlet Witch says, I think, that this is one of her first missions. And so I think a discussion of, “Hey, how much was she trained for what to do in a situation where a bomb might be about to go off and you’ve got to put it somewhere else?” And I think the answer would probably be that she wasn’t trained for that. And so if the answer is just, “Cool, let’s not do that anymore. Let’s have some more conversations about what all your power sets are and what could go wrong with them. We want to know that you’re thinking about that, and training people to try to minimize what can go wrong in that kind of a situation.”
Paul
Yeah, on the one hand, I totally think that’s reasonable from a certain point of view. It’s definitely better than whatever the Sokovia Accords are. I also kind of think some of those situations are like, something is happening, and there’s no other system in place to do anything about it. And so saying, “Oh wait, you have to go train three years before you participate in trying to stop the next alien invasion,” is a little bit like, okay, the aliens are gonna work on their side of the thing. I think with something like the Crossbones thing… was that still Hydra-related?
Matthew
I think it was Hydra-connected in some way, or just Crossbones out on his own.
Paul
Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s post-Hydra, right? But you can kind of say, okay, well, maybe that’s not the thing to just be all hands on deck, “I don’t care what your training is, every 12-year-old go grab a gun and try and fight the aliens.” Like in Jericho, there’s a thing where it’s every 16 and up. It’s like, yeah, you don’t have to be 18 to try and save your town. Spoilers for Jericho. But I do think the idea of having some kind of institutional body or whatever that’s like, “We need to know what all of your powers are…” I don’t know. It’s kind of like one of those negotiating things where you have point A and point Z, and the compromise means never having to say you’re happy.
Matthew
Right. Right. Both sides get like 60% of what they want.
Paul
Exactly. Yeah. Or you’re trying to get 60%, and either you get 50 or you get 40, or you get 60 or whatever, and it’s trying to see where the overlap is, where it’s like, “Okay, we can live with that kind of thing.” And so I think that’s what never happened in the movie Civil War. There was no negotiation, there was no “we’re going to try to…” And that’s where I do think Cap is wrong in the movie, right? To not even be like, “Okay, what exactly do these say, and is there any middle ground where we could meet?” Having said that, him having just gone through the whole Winter Soldier thing, and having been part of saving the Earth a couple times, although one of those was kind of Tony’s bad, I think it’s also like, why would you trust any of these institutions? But in a fundamental sense, I do think if an institution is going to have that much power, it needs to be beholden to the people in some way, right? And I think one of our Earth problems is every government is an oligarchy. It just always is. That’s how they all end up, one way or another, and to varying degrees, right? We can complain about that in the United States while also acknowledging, okay, it is actually worse in some other places, right? It is further in that direction, and there are places where there’s maybe one person who has an enormous amount of power, and then the people around them also have a considerable amount of power. In the United States, I think it’s worse than most people think it is or want to accept that it is, but I also think sometimes the differences between different places can be understated.
Matthew
And I think there are also places where it is just completely upfront that the oligarchs are gonna do whatever the hell they want, and everyone else can go sit and spin. The United States, I think, and we’re learning this at this very moment, is a place where that potential was always there, but there were all these gentleman’s agreements of “We just don’t do it that way,” that we’re gonna at least have this veneer of playing nice and trying to work with each other and acting like we’re trying to help everybody in the country. And then along comes someone like Trump who breaks all of that, and there isn’t any actual way to… It’s interesting, the metaphor hadn’t really occurred to me, but it actually really works. Cap’s idea, and a lot of the “trust us to do it right,” is based on the right people making the right decisions. So was our government. It’s based on the idea that when a president gets truly out of control, Congress will be willing to put aside partisanship to step forward and do the right thing. And that’s not a completely ridiculous idea, because it did happen, and that’s how Nixon was forced to step down. But we’ve also seen that it’s not by any means guaranteed, and other times it doesn’t happen, and that’s where we are now.
Paul
Exactly, exactly. And so to me, it always comes down to this: someone wants to do a thing, and somebody else doesn’t want them to do that thing, and then it’s like, okay, are you going to stop them or are you not going to stop them? And are other people gonna help you stop them, or are people gonna help the person do the thing? The Avengers are mostly trying to stop some people from doing some things, and then there are other people who want to stop them from doing that, unless they’re gonna say, “Oh okay, this is one of the things you can stop,” or “You can only do it this way and that way, or only if I direct you,” or whatever. And so ultimately, like so many things, it kind of just comes down to who gets the power, right? And I don’t think there’s a good answer for that. The people with the power get the power, and the people have a lot of power when acting in concert, right? But it’s hard to get people to act in concert, and not everybody agrees.
Matthew
I think that’s part of why the two of them being on the teams they’re on is so interesting. Because if you ask me, can Cap specifically… do we trust him to make the decisions about how to use his own power? I’m gonna say, yeah, I do, especially after the way he’s been tested, first by Nick Fury and then by S.H.I.E.L.D. becoming Hydra and all that. But we’ve been talking specifically about the incident in Lagos, and part of it, from Tony’s perspective, and I think from the governments’, they call them the Sokovia Accords in part because the events in Sokovia are also very relevant there.
Paul
Yeah, true.
Matthew
And I think that’s a part where Tony is kind of like a Punisher, but instead of it being about the goals, it’s about the methods. Because Tony fundamentally believes, in a way I think most people do, “Oh shit, aliens are out there and they might want to invade. That’s really bad. So there are very few limits on what we should at least consider in order to protect ourselves from that.” Except what happens when the proposed cure is worse than the problem, which is exactly what happens with Ultron. And I remember you and I had a discussion about this at some point, where it’s not that Cap shouldn’t trust Cap, it’s that Cap shouldn’t trust Tony. And Tony knows that. Tony’s the one who’s like, “I want them to hold me accountable.”
Paul
Yeah, for sure. I think Tony is right to believe that Tony needs oversight, and Cap is right to believe that Cap doesn’t need oversight. And so that’s sort of where I end up. It kind of just makes sense in the end that Tony and whoever wants to go with him are like, “Okay, we’re just gonna follow what the government’s doing, and that’s fine, because we believe we need oversight.” At least Tony does, right? And the rest are like, maybe we do too. And then on the other side, you’ve got people who are like, “No, I trust myself. I don’t trust the government to do it,” and then are like, “Okay, well, we’re gonna be our own oversight,” right? And so it kind of is like, yeah, pick a team, and most people probably ended up on the right team. Should Ant-Man really be going around doing what the government tells him to do? I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem like that guy. So it kind of lands where it makes sense: Rhodey and Tony, and Natasha too, right? I think it makes sense, her being like, to an extent, “Well, I don’t know.”
Matthew
Well, I mean, I think, A, because it is her personal freedoms that are being restricted. And I think that is one more moment where I disagree with Cap, where I do think keeping her off the field while we at least figure this out and talk about it a little more doesn’t seem like a horrible idea to me. But I agree that maybe Tony should have talked about it with others, rather than just… you know, you don’t have to make the decision with Vision. Oh, with Wanda.
Paul
Oh, yeah, no, no, I meant Natasha. I’m talking about Widow.
Matthew
That’s what I was gonna say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scarlet Witch, Black Widow.
Paul
Right.
Matthew
Let me shift it, though, because there is a different fictional world where there is one person who knows the powers of every superpowered person there is and has a contingency plan ready to go to stop them. At times that person works with the leader of a quasi-governmental organization, but at times he has just appointed himself as the one who’s gonna keep everyone accountable. And you can hear when Paul realized that I’m talking about Batman, who in the Justice League show, and I think there are some comics that also do this, basically figures out, “Okay, I mostly trust Superman, but I’m gonna have some kryptonite just in case.” And then he has the equivalent of kryptonite for every single superpowered person. And sometimes he works with Amanda Waller and her organization, but for the most part, he’s like, “No one elected me. I’m just gonna hold everybody accountable.” Now, it’s super badass that he does it, and it makes for a great story. But how do you feel about that in terms of the questions we’re talking about?
Paul
Well, I mean, you know why it makes sense.
Matthew
I’m Batman.
Paul
Exactly. Yeah. Probably could have gone a little deeper on that. But yeah, you kind of stepped on the punchline. But yeah, basically, it’s either you trust yourself or you don’t, right? And either you trust that person, you choose to trust that person, or you don’t. And there’s a whole Justice League movie built around that premise, where somebody else gets hold of all of Batman’s plans and then deploys them against the rest of the Justice League. And at the end, everybody’s like, “How could you do this, Bruce? How could you make all these contingency plans for what happens if all of us go rogue?” And he’s like, “Somebody needs to, right? I don’t trust Amanda Waller to do it. I need to have my own plan.” And they’re like, “Well, what about you? Do you have a plan for you?” He’s like, “Yeah, I do. It’s all of you.” Because you guys are gonna hold me accountable, and I’m gonna hold all of you accountable, and basically have the off switch, essentially, right? So yeah, I think it makes sense.
Matthew
And I think it mostly does. I think what I’d want, though, is that one more scene of them saying, “Okay, well, if you are going to hold the thing that can stop all the rest of us, because only you can be trusted with it, then you have to make sure no one else can get to it, and you failed in that. And so we’re gonna have at least a discussion about how we can help you make it a lot more secure,” or whatever, something like that.
Paul
Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t know. Supervillains gonna supervillain.
Matthew
I mean, true, but that might be an argument against putting all that stuff together in one place. I guess my point is I feel like whatever individual or body decides they’re the one who can do it, they then have all the responsibilities that go along with that.
Paul
Sure, and whatever happens, that’s on them. But also, things go wrong. There’s no “we’re going to make a foolproof plan.” And if there is, then there’s no story there.
Matthew
You’ll note that we’re not really talking about what is or isn’t a moral failing of either Cap or Tony once the Sokovia Accords are introduced, because I think we would both agree that at that point, it’s not about what the characters would most naturally do. It’s about the fact that the writers have this crazy idea that it’s not gonna make millions and millions of dollars to have these characters sit around in boardrooms discussing ethics, and that instead they should blow things up. I don’t know where they got that crazy idea. I think Civil War: The Boardroom would make billions, but you know.
Paul
I mean, it would have sold at least like 10 tickets.
Matthew
Yeah, I would have gone ten times. Then I would have brought 10 other viewers. You would have gone at least once, maybe twice. I mean, actually, even I would probably wait till it’s on DVD, because without the explosions, it’s not worth the movie theater.
Paul
See, I’ve never really felt that way. I always find it interesting when people talk about big action-y movies being better in the theater or whatever. I get it, I understand why people think that, but any movie in the theater to me is just a very different experience from a movie at home. Now I just watch them at home, but there’s something about the theater… I never felt like, “Oh, I need to go see that movie in the theater because it’s a big action thing, and this one is just people talking.” The whole feel of the movie is different.
Matthew
I think here’s what I would say. This is a tangent, but we’re kind of wrapped up on some level on the other stuff, and this is something I feel very deeply about. It’s not that I think a talky movie is terrible in the movie theater, or is just as good on TV. In an ideal world, I would see every movie in the theater all the time. I would love that. For me, it’s more the combination of my own life getting busy, and my own bladder making three hours in a theater without moving hard, and my back making three hours in a movie theater seat not the most fun, plus parking, plus how expensive movies have gotten, plus now babysitting and daycare. Going to the movies is a pretty big investment of time and energy and physical stuff.
Paul
I feel you.
Matthew
And I tend to see the big-budget action-y comic book movies there as the only ones that are worth it, in part because I do think all movies are maybe better on the big screen, but with those particular kinds of things, the loud noise pushing you back into your seat and all that is a little bit more so in the theater. They’re overwhelmingly built for it. But also, it’s so they don’t get spoiled. And I hate that. I can’t wait three months for the new Spider-Man movie to come out on streaming.
Paul
Oh yeah, I hear you. When the third one, whatever the heck the third one was, No Way Home? Is that the third Spider-Man of the newer ones? Okay. Whenever that came out, I remember I totally avoided spoilers for months and months and months. And then literally the night before I watched it on streaming, some YouTube commercial came on and spoiled who was in it or whatever. I was like, “God, so close.” If I’d just stayed off YouTube for one more day.
Matthew
That’s the worst.
Paul
And then I saw the movie and I was like, eh, it’s kind of an underwhelming cameo, but whatever.
Matthew
That’s fair.
Paul
But I could see how, in the theater, people are like, “Oh, it’s so-and-so!” And at home, I’m like, “Yeah.” One note on just the three-hour movie thing. I remember I saw The Batman for the first time, the Pattinson and Matt Reeves one, I think, and I thought it was really good. I wasn’t even that psyched to see it. I was like, “Okay, they made another one.” I’ve seen the best Batman movies already. Do we need another one? I was having Batman fatigue. And I watched it, and like 10 minutes in, I was feeling kind of hypnotized by this movie. It really grabbed me. And it was three hours long, and I was at home, and I just paused it when I needed to pause it, and unpaused it when I was ready. And I remember your first impression of it, I think, was very different, and we talked about it, and when I thought about it, I was like, you know what? I didn’t really feel like it was too long. I understand that feeling, right? But I feel like all the acts actually made sense. I probably would have done without the car chase. I think originally they wanted it to just be the Batcycle instead of the Batmobile, and they were like, “Well, but then how are we gonna sell Batmobiles if we don’t have it in the movie?” Okay, fine. But I was like, how could you do that to people? You’re gonna make them sit in the theater for three hours? Come on, have an intermission or something. That’s a long time to make people sit in a theater. And I tend to think 90 to 100 minutes is the perfect movie length most of the time, which they rarely hit these days.
Matthew
No, I agree. Once I watched the movie again on streaming, on my TV, where I could pause, go to the bathroom, stand up and stretch my back and keep watching… really, at this point that’s the limiting factor for me. After three hours in a movie chair, I’m gonna have trouble standing up at the end and not be happy.
Paul
Yeah, yeah. When I play poker, I have a timer set for 20 minutes, like a kitchen timer, and every 20 minutes I stand up, I stretch for like 10 seconds, and then I sit back down. And since then I haven’t really had back problems. Before then, my back had really been bothering me playing.
Matthew
That’s smart. And you generally can’t do that in a movie theater. They get a little annoyed.
Paul
Right. Yeah, I mean, you’d have to go to the 10 a.m. showing.
Matthew
Pulling it back to the original question, though, and we’re just about gonna wrap up, I guess the one last thing I would say on that is that for me, part of the fun of the story is that you do trust Bruce and you do trust Cap and stuff like that. And I think this is where you and I differ, and I think there’s nothing wrong with that. You have a much more individualistic focus. I’m much more community focused, and at the end of the day, what I want is not governmental authority. I want bottom-up, community-organizing-style things.
Paul
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matthew
I think part of it’s because of precedent. For example, let’s say there’s no Sokovia Accords, but there’s Cap. What happens when he says, “I want to step down and go back in time and live out the life I wanted to have with my best girl who’s waiting for me for a dance,” and all that? Is Tony now in charge? Is Sam Wilson? I trust Sam Wilson a lot more than Tony.
Paul
Yeah, well, Tony’s dead. Spoilers.
Matthew
Spoilers. But yeah, Sam Wilson’s in charge, I guess, right? Or when Batman… Dick Grayson’s pretty awesome. I don’t know if I trust him with quite all of that in the same way I trust Batman. I guess that’s just the thing. To me, the individual having the control makes a lot of sense, but it’s also really, really fragile.
Paul
I agree. And thinking about it, if we take it to real-world examples, if I think about most of the vigilante justice type stuff that’s happened in the United States, not a lot of it’s good, right? I’m sure there are things I don’t know about, but when you think about vigilante justice in the South, that’s what they thought they were doing when they were lynching Black folks. That’s what they thought they were doing when they were murdering Native Americans out west. None of that was good.
Matthew
I do have a counterexample. I’m gonna use a counterexample, but then I think it’s part of the proof of the problem with the precedent. Because I think the greatest act of American vigilantism, perhaps not named Luigi, is John Brown.
Paul
Yeah, I was gonna say, my great, great…
Matthew
I mean, you have more of that. True. But I stepped on the Batman line, so I’d step on this line too.
Paul
Yeah, yeah. Two for two.
Matthew
John Brown was like, “Look, the government does not recognize that people are people, and that’s awful. And the government is allowing people to be murdered and people to be treated terribly. And I am going to do violence against those people who are treating these people terribly.” I’m 100% in support of that. And you know who uses the exact same language and points to John Brown? The people who blow up abortion clinics. Because their starting point is that fetuses are people and no one else thinks so. And if that idea is true, then they are doing exactly what John Brown did. So that’s the thing.
Paul
But that’s the thing. Ultimately, it’s what do you value? What do you believe? And then you act in favor of that. And whether you’re the hero or the villain or the anti-hero or the anti-villain depends on the perspective of someone else who’s deciding: do I agree with your ends? Do I agree with your means? Right? Or do I agree with your means within the context of the 1850s United States? Yeah, I don’t see a lot of better options there, right? But there are plenty of contexts where it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you have other ways of going about this. And it’s not just John Brown. I was going to get to that. Captain John Brown, and General Harriet Tubman. He called her the general, right? And what she was doing was also illegal, but clearly, by any reasonable standard, of course you should do that. But at the time, the government and people were like, “Oh, well, that’s theft. You’re stealing property.” It’s like, no, it’s liberating humans from captivity.
Matthew
One of my favorite speeches, and in the Civil War documentary they have Morgan Freeman read it, so it’s just so powerful, is a speech Frederick Douglass gave where he says, “I stand here as a thief. I stole myself from my owner.” It’s just such a great way of thinking about it. And the last thing I’ll throw in before I let you have any closing remarks: we talked about precedent, and I think it’s important to think about what I was saying about the unspoken rules we have in the United States with the presidency, which Trump then abused so much. That goes back to George Washington. And he is over-heroized eight million ways from Sunday. The man was a slave owner. He was horrible in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of the warfare, especially against the Native Americans, that was terrible. But there’s one thing I will give him credit for, and also where I think there’s a danger: it sets the precedent. They gave him fairly unlimited power, including the whole thing of only running twice. That’s nowhere in the Constitution for 200 more years. He just said, “You know what, I’ve been president twice. I’m gonna set down this power and give it to someone else.” It was entirely possible he would have been made president for life. It’s entirely possible that he would have said, “My son should be the next president,” and everyone would have been like, “Yeah, sure.” Wait, what generation of George Washington would we be on now? Did he have a kid?
Paul
Right, right, right. George V. Wait, was it George the Fifth, or was it George the Third that we were rebelling against? One George for another. I mean, I think some people wanted a king, right? That was a thing.
Matthew
Yeah. John Adams thought the president should be referred to as “Your Excellency.”
Paul
Right, right, right. And I’d object to “Mr. President.” I’m like, how about just George? Or Georgie? But yeah, to me, that is maybe the best thing George Washington did, not running for a third term, right? And basically being like, “Yeah, the president shouldn’t be president indefinitely.” And then people respected that for a long time, right? And now here we are. I mean, I know FDR did it.
Matthew
And maybe FDR was like, “No, no, look, we’re in the middle of this war, we can’t switch horses,” and you’re like, sort of, okay, okay.
Paul
“Let me lock up a bunch of Japanese Americans,” but still be remembered by lefties as a great president.
Matthew
Exactly. So yeah, anyway, all that to say, I think you’re right, there is no easy solution, and we’re not coming away with one. But it seems we’re both on the same page: some degree of acknowledgment that Lagos could have gone better and that it needs to be looked at, but who should actually be in control of that is the thorniest question.
Paul
Yeah, for sure. And it makes sense to me for multiple people or multiple groups to each have their own say, and not to necessarily have one overriding “Oh, well, this is clearly who gets to say,” right? And I think my main point is you need an investigation of some sort, some search for objectivity in something that is inherently subjective. Because if people can’t agree on the facts, how on earth can people agree on how to proceed? And I think that’s a pretty big problem in our own world.
Matthew
Yeah. Yeah. How did we do with COVID, when half of people just deny science?
Paul
Exactly.
Matthew
And on that cheery note, I think that’s a good place to wrap up. We will keep coming to you with these. Please write in and let us know what else you want to hear us talk about like this. I think we’re gonna end things… probably Batman will be the last one we talk about, although we’ve also talked about him so much by then that it might not be necessary.
Paul
Yeah, we might be like, “Oh, we’re good.”
Matthew
I think the last episode of this chapter is really gonna be about the question at the heart of Superhero Ethics: are superhero movies a worthwhile place to look for ethical, philosophical, moral conversations? Does it work? Does it not? Should they be? Should they not be? All that. So write in, let us know what you think. Paul, where can people find more of your stuff?
Paul
ZenMadman.com, and sooner or later some YouTube channels. But yeah, I have a newsletter called Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, and you can subscribe to it and get it every Friday, or you can just read it on the site.
Matthew
Or you can buy a book that has a number of the articles in it, as well as some poker hand analysis.
Paul
And you can buy that book and support the podcast and get a good discount. Three for three, even more times than I’ve said “I’m Batman.” Oh, except now I’ve said “I’m Batman” three times. Now I’ve said “I’m Batman” four times.
Matthew
And you can… anyway, yeah, buy the book, click the link, do the things, subscribe, follow, tell all your friends about it. I’m Batman.
Paul
No, I’m Batman.
Matthew
You’re the Penguin. Wak wak.
Paul
We did this. This was a whole thing.
