Avengers: Infinity War - a cultural inquiry

Avengers: Infinity War is on the whole pretty rousing entertainment.  But it's also troubling. 

Black Panther established a precedent of audiences finding sympathetic villains in the Avengers movies.  It drew on Black Lives Matter, and really by drawing on that alone it convinces audiences that the villain wasn't just a villain, but maybe just someone who had the right idea but made bad choices out of it.  Well, no.  That was a convoluted villain with a convoluted connection to Black Lives Matter.

And that's what Thanos in Infinity War represents, too.  Troublingly so.  Thanos is motivated to mass murder in the belief that in reducing the population he can give survivors better opportunities.  This is clearly insane, but audiences are not reacting to this as if it's insane.  Because it's not so far from what a lot of people are arguing in the real world.

When it was Hitler advocating a "master race," it wasn't just pure Germans for a pure Germany he was talking about.  He scapegoated Jews and gypsies and actively set about exterminating them, and if he'd stuck only to that he probably would've had a Germany in a better economic position, which was ostensibly all he wanted.  Thanos may not propound eugenics, but...even Americans were, before WWII.  And there are many movements today that sound equally rational as pre-WWII eugenics.  Politics today has stymied any ability to talk rationally about such issues.  That's what Infinity War is talking about when Iron Man is made aware that the threat of Thanos is more important than whatever might have happened between him and Captain America (as depicted in Captain America: Civil War). 

It's a message that many people watching Infinity War will probably not even think about, because there's still a deep riff in society that neither side seems at all interested in repairing, and no one seems aware is far more trivial than real threats in a real world.  It's worth noting, again, that Hitler was a real threat in a real world, and yet his ideas about eugenics really did exist in pre-WWII America.  The fact that we don't talk about that is almost more troubling than Hitler himself, but not more troubling than the fact that it took so long for Americans to declare war on him, which only happened after the Japanese (note: not Germans) bombed Pearl Harbor.  We had good economic reason to be hesitant, but we were also hesitant to enter WWI, before the Great Depression.  And as it turned out, WWII was very, very good for the economy.  FDR gets a lot of credit for his New Deal ideas, but really, it was WWII that gave Americans new standing, both in the world at large but also at home.  It was turned into politics.  It always turn into partisan politics, despite the fact that such things only ever get everyone into trouble, and often far too long in that trouble to be able to address real problems.

So above everything else, Infinity War is really an attempt at a rallying cry against such nonsense, and that's the best thing about it, and probably the thing that will be least talked about it in the years and decades to come.  And that's what's wrong, and not just with Thanos.