I go to Hong Kong, far from dense jurisdiction.
In a memorable scene from The Dark Knight,
the mob is arguing about what to do about the police trying to seize all of their money,
as well as the threat of Batman.
Lau comes up with this plan to have the mob give him all
of the money so that he can travel to Hong Kong
because the Chinese will never extranet a national putting
him beyond the reach of the Gotham police.
But then the Joker says.
An ad for the televisions, so-called plan.
Batman has no jurisdiction.
The Joker's prediction turns out to be accurate.
The Gotham City Police Department can't arrest Lau when he's in China,
but Batman can do whatever he wants.
In having no official jurisdiction,
batman has jurisdiction everywhere.
It's pretty clear to me that the scene is making
a statement about Bush-era Foreign Policy.
That's a bog-standard reading of that movie.
The film constructs the scenario where Batman needs to rendition someone from
another country in order to keep Gotham/America safe,
a scenario that comments on the Bush administration's use of that technique.
It asks the audience to question how far a
reach the American government should have in world affairs.
It's saying, maybe doing things by the book isn't enough,
and we need someone to go beyond what we consider ethical to get the job done,
yada, yada, yada.
There's a similar thing going on in
the recently released Falcon and The Winter Soldier TV series.
Take it easy. You might want to fight Bucky before you tangle with The Dora Milaje.
The Dora Milaje don't have jurisdiction here.
For the first time ever,
I went a little bit viral on Twitter.
Now I'm going to do what any self-respecting YouTuber would do in this moment,
and that's make an entire video explaining in
detail what was more or less self-evident in a single sentence,
because you've got to monetize those hot takes.
But in all seriousness,
the reason I want to do this is that the tweet got to dip a toe into
some complex ideas surrounding
American imperialism that could use a little more explanation.
With all of that in mind,
the most important thing I want you to take away from
this video is that you should be following me on Twitter.
In episode 4 of the show,
three different factions are arguing over what will happen to Baron Zemo.
Eam and Bucky had been using Zemo to
help with their current investigation, but John Walker,
who was recently anointed as the new Captain America,
wants to have him arrested while The Dora Milaje,
the elite warriors of Wakanda,
want to take him into their own custody.
All of these factions converge on an apartment in Latvia,
which is when this exchange happens.
The Dora Milaje have jurisdiction here.
The Dora Milaje have jurisdiction whenever The Dora Milaje find themselves to be.
Five different thoughts hit your brain at once.
The first of which is, do you have jurisdiction here, Captain America?
The answer is,
yes, technically, I suppose.
At this point of the story,
the world is reeling from a few extremely disruptive events.
Five years earlier, half of the human population disappeared in a puff
of smoke and were then magically popped back into existence.
This has led to all sorts of
bureaucratic and humanitarian nightmares that this show is exploring the Followed up.
Lots of people lost their homes or were stranded and countries they didn't belong to,
or had to prove they weren't dead.
Sam can't get a loan for a business because he hasn't had
any income for five years because he didn't exist.
There are huge refugee camps filled with people affected by all of this,
which are managed by the Global Repatriation Council, the GRC.
The stated purpose of the GRC is extensively to get everything sorted,
get it all back the way it was before anything happened.
It's an international organization and has given wide-reaching powers
across the globe that are only ever vaguely defined in the show.
But what we know is that new Captain America here
isn't just representing the American government,
he's an agent of the GRC,
which means that yes,
the text justifies why he has jurisdiction when he is standing in Latvia.
The thing is though,
this character is wearing the American flag.
Everything he does is going to carry
political weight and say something about the United States,
not just some fictional organization that doesn't have a real-world parallel.
John Walker is characterized in such a way that it really wouldn't
matter to him if he didn't have legal jurisdiction to be here,
he's going to do whatever he feels like at the time.
This very episode ends with him murdering an unarmed man in the street.
From that perspective, the critique of American foreign policy is pretty clear.
It doesn't matter whether America has jurisdiction or not.
America's jurisdiction is everywhere.
In how to hide an empire,
a history of the greater United States,
Daniel Immerwahr takes a look at the various parts of
the world that America has conquered or acquired in some way,
but which for whatever reason,
were never fully incorporated into
the Republic on equal footing as the 50 states themselves.
For Immerwahr, the existence of these places defines America as an empire.
Other empires have no issue identifying themselves as empires,
but it is important to America that it never calls itself one explicitly.
Empires have always been the enemy.
America has fought empires throughout its history,
and its most popular fictional universe is all about defeating an empire.
America self identifies as a republic,
which is supposed to be morally superior to an empire.
In a republic, the people are supposed to be free and enfranchised.
They have some mechanism to shape their own government rather than simply being ruled.
But that's never really been true for all of America,
like Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines,
all of which have occupied ill-defined positions
within the American empire at different points of history.
Controlled by America, but not fully part of it.
The reason for their exclusion is clear.
Excluding them maintained white supremacy in the country,
barring millions of non-white people from having voting rights.
For much of its history, America was obsessed with expansion,
but there was a shift in how America handled overseas expansion after World War II.
Former colonies like the Philippines were granted independence and
the occupation of some countries like Japan didn't lead to colonization.
But America never really left those places, either.
Rather than trying to control them outright or annexing them,
America began maintaining a network of military bases across the globe,
which is why Immerwahr has described America as a pointillist empire.
As in, if you tried to draw a map of the country,
you'd see the familiar shape of the 50 states and
then a series of smaller and smaller dots.
In this video by Johnny Harris,
where he tries to map every known US military base,
despite the relatively tiny size,
America exerts enormous military and economic influence almost
everywhere through these bases and far beyond the capabilities of any other country.
Britain and France have some 13 overseas bases between them.
Russia has nine in various other countries have one.
In all, there are probably 30 overseas bases owned by non-US countries.
The United States, by contrast,
has roughly 800 plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites.
Dozens of countries host US bases,
those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them.
The greater United States,
in other words, is everyone's backyard.
America's presence in these places hasn't been unanimously welcome to either.
There have been numerous protests.
Their presence is not benign.
They are a key part of America's global power.
With all of that, let's look back at our friend, John Walker.
Rather than justifying his presence here,
it is precisely because Captain America has legal jurisdiction here,
that strikes at a problematic truth in the real-world,
and it should make us question why?
From what power is that kind of decision reached?
Why is it given to an American?
In what ways is this coerced because of America's military predominance?
The moment flies by so quickly and yet it feels so
natural and obvious that he has the power of the law on his side,
which is exactly why the moment should cause reflection.
Why have we passively accepted it as natural?
It's also what gives The Dora Milaje's rhetoric such but.
The Dora Milaje don't have jurisdiction here.
The Dora Milaje
Jurisdiction wherever the Dora Milaje find themselves to be.
Because why shouldn't America's hegemony be challenged?
Why are you the only one that gets to play at being world police?
It's also not just the scene that is hinting at a critique of American imperialism,
but John Walker's entire conception as a character.
His purpose in the story is to make Sam and the audience question
what they believe the symbol of Captain America and by extension,
America in general are supposed to stand for.
Steve Rogers was always presented as the moral center of the Marvel Universe.
When he made a decision,
the story always considered it morally correct.
He stands in for everything that America as a country aspires to be,
the values it says it wants to uphold.
John Walker is a mockery of this.
Someone who looks the part but is driven by ego
and the desire to dominate more than by the desire to protect.
He's short-tempered, self-righteous, and needlessly violent.
His presence in the story asks the audience to
reflect on America's place on the world stage.
This is a somewhat surprising turn for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
A couple of years ago, I made a video looking at
the cozy relationship the MCU has had with the Pentagon.
Essentially, if you want to make a movie that features the American military in any way,
then the Pentagon gets to have final say on the script or you have
to make the movie without access to their official uniforms and equipment.
This operates as a soft sensor on the movies Hollywood can
produce and the critiques it can make about American foreign policy and the military.
It also means that a lot of movies have functioned as recruitment ads.
They are, among other things, military propaganda.
Since Falcon and the Winter Soldier begins with
a scene heavily featuring the American military,
it's likely the scripts passed through the lens of the Pentagon.
I can't say that for certain as I don't have a primary source for that at the moment.
But given what I know about how these things work,
I can say that it's likely the case.
On the face of it, it's somewhat surprising to have
American world policing be lightly critique like this in a Marvel story.
At the same time, perhaps it's also the reason behind
John Walker's extremely rushed redemption arc that has him clipping with the heroes,
not two episodes after the murders a guy in the street while the world watches, see.
I'd be extremely curious to know whether his arc was in any way
shaped by the Pentagon or if his arc is meant as a critique of the Pentagon.
The fact that he faces minimal consequences for murdering someone in another country.
To me, this raises an interesting question about how these stories handle their politics.
For that, we've got to talk a little bit about
Karli Morgenthau and Marvel's new villain problem.
A few years ago, one of the most common criticisms against
Marvel movies was that they had lack luster villains.
Many of them were uncharismatic and forgettable.
But in the last few years,
Marvel has a new villainous archetype,
the leftist terrorist Legend of Korra esque villain.
This is going to be my most self-referential video ever.
Back in the ancient times,
I made this video praising a particular aspect of the show,
The Legend of Korra,
which I have since soured on to a degree,
the basic idea was that the villains are well-written because they
have coherent ideologies that the hero has to learn from.
In doing so, the world changes and becomes a better place.
Amon is a fraud,
but his fight for people without magical abilities to have
political power leads to them being enfranchised in the following seasons.
For example, Marvel has started writing characters like this in Spider-Man: Homecoming,
Adrian Toomes is a blue color salvage worker who is
right to be angry at the rich and powerful people of the world.
Killmonger in Black Panther is a black liberationist who wants to empower the oppressed.
Now Karli Morgenthau is an anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist revolutionary.
The issue with some of these characters is that the stories don't
find ways to question whether their ideas are wrong.
Instead, the villains are automatically wrong because they embrace violence.
They just love killing people.
There's still people in there.
This is the only language these people understand
They're all this guy from Rick and Morty.
I will kill anyone anywhere, children,
animals, old people doesn't matter. I just love killing.
Killmonger is Marvel's best version of this trope for a few reasons.
First, in Black Panther,
their protagonist actually believes in something tangible.
He believes in the traditions of Wakanda and Killmonger challenges those beliefs.
All of you are wrong
This isn't the case in Falcon and the Winter Soldier,
where Sam doesn't really have beliefs as far as the main political conflict goes,
not any beliefs that are unique.
His arc is an internal one about living up to the mantle of Captain America.
But it isn't like you represents one ideology,
whereas Karli represents another.
Then they take the best ideas of both to come up with something new.
Instead, Sam just knows that violence is bad,
so he has to stop the bad guys with violent.
I agree with your fight.
I just can't give it the way you'll fight it.
At the end of each of these stories,
the hero embraces the villains ideology just without the killing part.
But in Black Panther, the heroes actually did have something practical to do about
the problems posed by the movie and commit descending aid to other countries.
In Falcon and the Winter Soldier,
it's some West Wing style nonsense about giving
a speech so good that it will shame the powerful into
utterly abandoning the thing that benefits them and somehow
solve the problem without any need for further pressure.
Sam tells the elites of the world to do better and then he goes and
barbecues while all of the problems in the story are left to linger unanswered.
The show has this very muddled conclusion
that seems to do the very opposite of what it wanted to say.
The ideologies and practices that the story implicitly condemns like
imperialism are in the end treated as harmless and welcomed back into the fold.
Meanwhile, the ideas the story explicitly agrees with are
presented as irrationally violent for most of the time that they are on screen.
Then when their ideas are embraced,
the show ends before depicting the positives of that ideology
and letting the extremist version of it linger longer in the viewers memory.
This is why I'm a little tired of this particular formula.
It's not that it's bad exactly.
I've just seen it one too many times and I don't find it very interesting
if the only lesson to be learned is violence bad actually.
We know violence is bad.
The political conflicts and stories like this can be more nuanced than that.
Maybe we should stop tarring and feathering the very policies we
want to see in the world in giving us stories that justify an action.
If nothing else, I just want you to remember that you should be
following me on twitter.com @SageHyden.