Yet even as the films restore a sense of heroism to a war that has become bureaucratic, they also betray profound anxiety about that war. This emerges through a peculiar feature of the Marvel movies. The heroes confront threats of all sorts, but time and again, they fight their doppelgängers. Iron Man takes on other scientists in metal suits. Ant-Man’s enemy is Yellowjacket, who is, like him, a shrinking technological insectoid. Captain America battles serum-enhanced supersoldiers (“What kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on him to protect his country?” he asks, winking). Often, the heroes simply face their relatives, as when Black Panther fights his cousin, Thor fights his siblings, or Peter Quill, the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, fights his father (while another Guardian, Gamora, fights her sister). The Hulk’s antagonist is the Abomination, a similarly sized creature made with the Hulk’s own blood. And SHIELD, the shadowy governmental organization that runs the Avengers, must face HYDRA, another shadowy governmental organization that has infiltrated it.
What these heroes are fighting, in the end, is themselves. And in doing so, they’re channeling a cultural ambivalence regarding the weapons of today’s wars. Iron Man intervening in global affairs is good, but Iron Monger (the villain of the first film) doing so is bad. The world needs SHIELD but fears HYDRA. It’s as if the films can’t put forth a hero to protect society without immediately imagining how he might threaten it.
Often, the lines blur. “Hey Cap, how do we know the good guys from the bad guys?” one of the Avengers asks, as he tries to sort HYDRA from SHIELD. “If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad,” is Captain America’s less-than-conclusive answer. It’s a quick joke but a meaningful one, because it gets at the central, uncomfortable truth about life in the United States that these movies dance around. The good guys—surveilling everyone’s communications, calling down air strikes, fortifying themselves against the world—look an awful lot like bad guys.
“Are we the good guys? We’re the good guys, right?” one of Ant-Man’s allies nervously asks as they break into a technology firm. The heroes aren’t always sure. Captain America worries that SHIELD, which created the Avengers, has crossed a line—“holding a gun to everyone’s head and calling it protection.” The Avengers start to wonder if they themselves are out of control. “We need to be put in check,” is Tony Stark’s resigned conclusion. He’s got a point, since in the second Avengers film he’d created an artificial intelligence (a “global peacekeeping initiative”) that turned genocidal and destroyed a city. “If we can’t accept limitations,” Tony continues, “then we’re no better than the bad guys.”
Perhaps, but when the State Department insists that the Avengers place themselves under the authority of the United Nations, Captain America refuses. The Avengers may have built a murderbot that nearly eradicated humanity, but the UN is run by politicians, and politicians, Cap insists, have “agendas.”