{"id":680,"date":"2021-03-08T12:32:37","date_gmt":"2021-03-08T12:32:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/?p=680"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:17:00","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:17:00","slug":"thanos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2021\/03\/08\/thanos\/","title":{"rendered":"Thanos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the Digestable<\/a> newsletter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been diving into the Marvel Cinematic Universe the past couple of weeks, out of lack of stimulation and procrastination. My friend Richard describes the films as a \u201cconcentrated sugar high:\u201d attractive people in body-hugging outfits and an emotional whiplash of tragedy and comedy all strung together in a series of fast paced fight scenes so mind bending you\u2019re not sure where the CGI begins and the actors end. And then they do the thing at the end of a big fight where they boost the soundtrack volume so high I have to immediately turn my computer\u2019s volume down – just endorphins on endorphins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to talk about one specific character, Thanos, the supervillain of the Avengers crossover series. Stop reading now if you\u2019re spoiler-phobic. Thanos is the last surviving member of the alien race known as \u201cTitans,\u201d who hail from Saturn\u2019s moon. As Thanos explains, the other Titans supposedly succumbed to famine because they refused to implement his plan to avoid planetary starvation. I can definitely see why Thanos wasn\u2019t so popular back home, his plan was a planet-wide cull of half Titan\u2019s population to \u201cconserve resources,\u201d conducted by lottery to ensure fairness. But like any bad politician with fascistic tendencies, Thanos kept shopping his sustainable 50% population reduction around the universe, wiping out exactly half of a bunch of planets and expecting folks to be thankful for their newfound resource abundance. In the plot of the Avengers movies he sets his sight on gathering the magical Infinity Stones which, when used together will allow him to take his 50\/50 plan universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s bad, Thanos is bad, duh. The Avengers crossover movies are so packed with superhero cameos and montages that there can\u2019t be too much of a plot. In the comics Thanos wants to kill half of everybody because he\u2019s in this wild sexual death cult, but the movies substitute Thanos\u2019s complex backstory with a seemingly complex moral standpoint – he\u2019s a genocidal maniac but it\u2019s for the greater good, a.k.a. \u201csustainability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecofascism comes up in this newsletter a lot and yes, Thanos is an ecofascist. Even if his mass death doesn\u2019t fall along lines of race or class, sentencing the entire universe to mass death to realize one man\u2019s environmental model is fascism. It\u2019s important to see Thanos in the context of the 2018-2019 world in which they were written. We find ourselves in a continually worsening environmental crisis and nobody – at least none of the major news networks or our most powerful elected officials – know how to deal with it. You can see the Marvel writers grappling with this in the Avengers franchise, knowing drastic action is needed to save the planet, and grasping at old debunked environmental ideas from the 70\u2019s like Paul Erlich\u2019s neo-Malthusian book The Population Bomb<\/em> <\/a>to conceptualize what that action may be. It\u2019s upsetting but not exactly surprising. These old ideas are still what everyone thinks environmental action looks like – an anti-human movement that demands incredible personal sacrifice, culminating in the denial of reproduction and even human sacrifice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanos frustrates me because his simplified motives paint a simplified idea of environmental thinking. Nobody in the movie tries to sit down with Thanos and discuss with him exactly why his plan won\u2019t work or what other universal food provision strategies exist. If we think of the movie\u2019s characters allegorically, the big bad environmental movement (Thanos), is heroically vanquished through the cooperation of military nationalism (Captain America) and technocratic imperialism (Iron Man). Also is anyone else creeped out by the weird scandanavian white supremacy in the Thor<\/a> franchise?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So to finish things out I\u2019d like to list all my issues with Thanos\u2019s plan to save\/destroy the universe:<\/p>\n\n\n\n