Crisis of meaning, part 4: Daddy issues, father gods

Never trust The Man: When the Big Lie gets too big, is there still room for God?

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | more to come…

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In part 2 of this series, I said that no viewer should be surprised by the revelation in Loki season 1 that the TVA’s narrative about the divine Timekeepers and the Sacred Timeline was a big lie. One reason this is so unsurprising is that the idea of debunking or exposing the powers that be as at least untrustworthy, if not fundamentally compromised or corrupt, is arguably the central idea of the entire MCU. If I had to distill the MCU worldview into a maxim, it would be “Never trust The Man”—and this turns out to have remarkably far-reaching implications.

MCU storytelling is replete with powerful, patriarchal, sometimes godlike establishment figures who misrepresent their true nature or intentions and turn out to be compromised by damaging secrets. A good upper mid-level example is Anthony Hopkins’ Odin of Asgard: both Thor’s literal father and a more or less literal god; ruler of the MCU Asgardians, identified as beings from another dimension in the multiverse. The first Thor movie introduces Odin as a wise, benevolent patriarch and a respectably godlike arbiter of moral worthiness. Later, though, it’s revealed that Odin sits on a throne of lies—in fact, a throne of blood. Giving Thor’s back story an anticolonial twist, 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok (directed by New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi) reveals the truth behind the big lie of Asgard’s founding, which Odin has literally covered up: a violent history of conquest, possibly the equivalent of war crimes or even genocide, culminating in the disappearing and memory-holing of Odin’s one-time war leader, Thor’s bloodthirsty older sister Hela (Cate Blanchett).

That’s just one example. The theme starts in the original Iron Man with Jeff Bridges’s Obadiah Stane, a former colleague of Tony’s late father, Stark Industries founder Howard Stark, and a kind of surrogate father figure to Tony, seemingly the affable and responsible hand at the helm of Stark Industries, in contrast to Tony’s frivolous playboy lifestyle. Stane turns out to be trafficking Stark Industries weapons to terrorists, and in fact is plotting to take Tony out of the picture—which, from one perspective, is why Tony was nearly killed by one of his own weapons. Tony’s actual father Howard wasn’t a lot better. He left his son a legacy of war profiteering, and, like Odin, rewrote his own history, among other things covering up his role in the deportation of an unscrupulous colleague, Anton Venko, whose contribution to Stark Industries’ greatest nonviolent achievement, the arc reactor, was simply erased. When Venko’s son Ivan, aka Whiplash, comes for Tony in Iron Man 2, like Hela in Thor: Ragnarok, he has a grudge against the hero’s dad that’s at least partly legitimate.

Who are you gonna believe: your noble, sainted dad, or this guy?

The same is true of Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Stevens, aka Killmonger, coming for his cousin, the late Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, over the misdeeds and cover-ups of his generally noble royal father, King T’Chaka, whose extreme isolationist secrecy left the rest of Africa to suffer the ravages of colonialism as well as leaving young Erik an orphan on the streets in America. Let’s not omit Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Like King T’Chaka, Fury is basically a good guy, but he does lie to the Avengers about S.H.I.E.L.D. supposedly being involved in clean energy research when they’re really trying to develop super-weapons. Also, Fury’s good intentions notwithstanding, we later learn that S.H.I.E.L.D. itself has been secretly corrupted: infiltrated and subverted by Hydra, a terrorist secret society with Nazi ties. Similar patterns play out in Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, among others. Never trust The Man!

Questioning authority and debunking The Man can be a meaningful project as long as both you and The Man are subject, at least in principle, to something higher than either of you. For example, the head of Stark Industries, the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., and even the king of Wakanda are in principle subject to international law, among other things. Odin, in the first Thor movie, acknowledges a moral law above himself, citing “responsibility, duty, honor” as “virtues to which we must aspire.” Why the Asgardians “must” aspire to these virtues, Odin doesn’t say—and that’s okay. Such moral aspirations, in the language of part 3 of this series, “leave room for God.” Sometimes, though, “room for God” begins to look rather cramped.

In the beginning…

Consider the MCU’s most exalted and overtly theological “Never trust The Man” variation to date: the 2021 film The Eternals, directed by Chloé Zhao and based on one of a number of sprawling mythologies from the fertile mind of comics legend Jack Kirby. The Eternals opens with a literal creation myth directly referencing Genesis 1. “In the beginning,” an opening crawl tells us, before “the dawn of creation, came the Celestials.” Their leader, the “Prime Celestial” Arishem, “created the first sun and bought light into the universe,” just as Genesis depicts God saying “Let there be light” and creating the sun. Already Arishem seems to be elbowing his way into the biblical story and crowding out God.

I’m pretty sure God doesn’t dress like that, either

We then hear about the arrival of the Deviants, “an unnatural species of predator” whose origins are initially unexplained, but whose attacks on intelligent life prompt Arishem to send Eternals—said to be “immortal heroes from the planet Olympia,” with “unyielding faith” in Arishem—to battle the Deviants and defend intelligent life on planets like Earth. This simple narrative provides the Eternals with a clear sense of purpose and mission. Light and life are part of Arishem’s grand design, which they defend against the monstrous Deviants. When it turns out that the Deviants are actually rogue counterparts to the Eternals, in that both of them were created by the Celestials, the parallels to the Christian interpretation of creation and the fall become even closer: the Deviants are like fallen angels and the Eternals are like good angels.

Significantly, the Eternals have names overtly resembling those of gods and heroes of ancient mythology: Angelina Jolie plays Thena (referencing Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war), and there’s an Ikaris, a Sersi, a Gilgamesh, and so forth. The implicit conceit is not that the Eternals are named after mythological gods and heroes, but that, diegetically, it’s the other way around: In this world, the human myths and legends are inspired by the Eternals.

In passing, it seems notable that Kirby, who was Jewish, gave at least two of the Celestials names evocative of Jewish religious language. Echoing the Jewish prayer called the Shema (or Shema Yisrael), from the Hebrew word meaning “hear” or “listen,” there’s a Celestial called Ashema the Listener. Then there’s Arishem, a name vaguely suggestive of Hashem, a Hebrew circumlocution for God literally meaning “the Name.” To be fair to Kirby, Arishem in the comics is just one of a bunch of Celestials and not the primal creator-figure that the movie’s Arishem is. Kirby called him Arishem the Judge; since Ari in Hebrew is short for arieh, meaning “lion,” Arishem could be translated “God’s lion”—not a bad handle for a cosmic judge, if you didn’t want to call him something like “Danishem” (i.e., “God’s judge,” a sense that could also be rendered as “Dani-el,” although the desired Celestial-ly effect is somewhat lacking with “Daniel”).

The MCU retelling, in any case, offers more than a hint that all this business with Celestials and Eternals is the “real” basis, not only of Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian mythology, but also of Judeo-Christian belief. Capping the biblical overtones of the creation myth, the closing titles play over images of other legendary and religious figures, including St. Michael the Archangel, overlaid with stylized visual cues identifying them as Eternals.

St. Michael the fancy robot, defend us in battle

When Eternals debuted, this kind of overt deconstruction of religion was a striking departure for the Disney franchise, which had previously been careful to demythologize its own pulp heritage to avoid religious complications. Thus, for example, in Thor: The Dark World Odin made a point of stating that the Asgardians “are not gods” (a premise echoed by Captain America in The Avengers with his famous line about “only one God”), while in Doctor Strange Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One demystified sorcery as a technique analogous to computer programming. (Pragmatically, these rationalizations could help the movies play not only in the American heartland but also in markets like China and the Middle East.) When DC’s Wonder Woman opened in 2017, it struck a very different note struck with Connie Nielsen’s Hippolyta telling Diana that mankind was created by Zeus “in his image”—language borrowed not from Greek mythology but from Genesis 1, with Zeus in God’s place. Eternals does much the same with Arishem, although it’s worth noting that we aren’t specifically told that Arishem created humanity. Still, if stars are his creation, then so are planets and the elements that make up biological life (we are made of stardust).

When you’re expendable in the grand design

In any case, when the other shoe drops and Arishem’s secrets are revealed, it turns out that, of course, the Eternals’ belief system was one more big lie. Not only are Eternals not immortals from Olympia—they’re just “fancy robots” with fake memories—they aren’t even fighting the Deviants for the sake of defending human life. The Celestials don’t care about intelligent life for its own sake; rather, they create and foster inhabited worlds like Earth as part of their reproductive process. A planet like Earth is essentially a giant egg with an embryonic Celestial at its core—and intelligent species like ours somehow provide the necessary energy for incubation. Thus, when the intelligent population of a world reaches a given threshold, there’s an apocalyptic “emergence,” and the world ends, its purpose fulfilled.

For some of the Eternals, who have grown to care for and admire humans, this nihilistic scenario poses an existential crisis. “I respect your grand design,” Salma Hayek’s Ajak tries to tell Arishem, “but I have noticed something special about this planet…” But Richard Madden’s Ikaris (who overtly resembles Superman, the most iconic and godlike of classic superheroes) maintains that the Eternals “need to trust Arishem’s design for this planet.” The result is a falling-out in which most of the Eternals try to save humanity by preventing the embryonic Eternal from hatching.

When saving Mother Earth necessitates a Celestial abortion

“I thought we were heroes,” Gilgamesh (Don Lee) laments. “Turns out we’re the bad guys.” Sersi (Gemma Chan) agrees: “Every time innocent lives have been sacrificed for the greater good, it turns out to be a mistake.” The thing is, these are the judgments of fancy robots with fake memories, extrapolating from their experiences among creatures that they thought had intrinsic value in their creator’s grand design, but that were always intended to be disposable, along with all life on Earth. As far as Eternals gives us reason to think, “heroes” and “bad guys” are just noises made by biological components in a cosmic hatchery, and our ideas about “the greater good” looks like a kind of category mistake made by a machine that doesn’t know what it’s for.

In a way arguably even more radical than the TVA controlling the path of history—including, for what it’s worth, the role of the Celestials in the origins of life in the universe as we know it—this revelation creates another epistemically perverse situation: a zone of illusion with respect to attempts by Eternals, and by implication humans, to grapple with ideas of meaning and morality. It’s not so much that our judgments are proved wrong as that we simply have no basis for trusting or hoping that they point to anything real. Our lives, our moral choices, feel significant to us, but what possible reason can we have to trust those feelings an index or guide to any kind of moral reality?

Decades of humanistic science fiction have taken for granted that self-aware beings, even androids like Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, must be recognized as having the same moral dignity and personal worth as human beings. But this presupposes that humanity and personhood have dignity and value in the first place—an assumption that Arishem evidently doesn’t share. Who is anyone, human or Eternal, to say that he is wrong, that the system is unjust? “Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me thus?’” (Romans 9:20). Are Sersi and Gilgamesh “right” and Arishem in the “wrong”? By what standard?

Room for God?

It’s entirely possible that Arishem is wrong. What’s certain is that the Celestials are manifestly fallible beings! First they created Deviants to protect intelligent life by targeting predators—but they accidentally made them capable of evolving, and the Deviants switched to preying on humans. Then they made the Eternals specifically to be incapable of evolving—but that, too, didn’t work out, since the Eternals developed the capacity to rebel against Arishem. Most crucially, when confronted with the Eternals’ belief that humans are deserving of life, Arishem vows to judge humanity according to the records of human history in the Eternals’ memories—an acknowledgement that, against all odds, the Eternals could have a point. Could Arishem have designed them with instincts for whatever is really morally true? Could humans have a purpose beyond the Celestial reproductive process?

There may be “room for God” here, if just barely. In part 2 I mentioned that Marvel Comics occasionally feature a more or less supreme being known as the One-Above-All, who is as about close to the religious and philosophical idea of divine ultimate reality as you’re likely to get in popular superhero comics. Whether a divine being of this sort will ever be acknowledged in one of the most lucrative screen franchises of the Walt Disney Company remains to be seen, but even if the One-Above-All does exist in the MCU (or above the MCU, or whatever), the premise of Eternals still confronts us with an unavoidable existential question: Whoever or whatever the One-Above-All may be, what possible access to insight into his nature, his will, his standards, can beings like us hope to possess?

Part 5 coming soon…

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | more to come…