Ennnggghh. It's not like the Pentagon fully-funds these movies. Avengers, for example, lost its partnership and was finished just fine. The Pentagon entertainment liason's offerings are a lot closer to a small tax break than an insidious double-think propaganda machine. https://twitter.com/TheLitCritGuy/status/1337411314214440960

And like, S.H.I.E.L.D. is portrayed as ethically dubious and easily infiltrated by fascists, in no small part because it has its own fascist tendencies. S.H.I.E.L.D. betrays its heroes and loses its way when it builds a global information surveillance network. Apologia?

The two Ant-Men are 1) a scientist who told the military-industrial complex to fuck right off, and 2) a single-father felon with no options left to re-enter society but crime.

Black Panther is pretty unflinching about colonialism.

Steve Rogers is duped by propaganda in First Avenger, and begins to see it by the end of the film. He is utterly disillusioned by it in Winter Soldier, and is himself an ex-pat in the Infinity War movies.

None of that is to say they're great revolutionary works of art, they are of course not. They are corporate pop, candy for the heart and mind, and of course they round-off these edges. (And frankly, they round-off way more edges for China than they do for the Pentagon.)

But 1960's and 70's Marvel comics rounded-off those edges too... and the messages came thru. *They worked like myths* codifying understanding about the world around us.

Like, in the first few years of his blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates filtered almost everything thru an X-Men prism.

Whatever concessions these movies have made for some jeeps and airplanes to film are, like, small script notes compared to the moralities of these films; themes that are very much about courage, ethics, integrity, found-family, equality, and compassion.

But again, the explosion of backlash this week isn't really about any of this. As someone who 20 years ago had a grognard soul in his 18 year-old body... I recognize this.

It's resentment because the monoculture isn't centering them, how they think it should be.

Their ideas about popular art, what would make great popular art, have been tested in the public square of the imagination, and those ideas have not taken.

As someone who still whispers "rock n roll will never die..." to his mirrored reflection, I sympathize. Fin.