A few thoughts in no certain order on Captain Marvel (2019)
I had actually planned to NOT see Captain Marvel. I had no interest in it whatsoever. I was actually only at the theater to see and review the much more interesting sounding movie Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy (2019). But a technical problem with the projector made so I couldn’t see it. The theater manager apologized and encouraged me and my youngest son to see any other movie in the theater. Captain Marvel was about to start so we agreed to check it out. I psyched myself up for strong doses of the gospels of feminism, the neo-marxist version of “social justice,” and technological humanism / transhumanism. Perhaps having low expectations for it helped me to somehow enjoy this movie way more than I expected. Or perhaps I’m just so desensitized to neo-marxism now that it didn’t bother me as much as it should. This will not be a carefully thought-out and polished review. It’s really more of a collection of a few comments that I scribbled down as thoughts and feelings were evoked through the movie. And I’m just going to quickly type it out in one draft because otherwise it’ll just sit on my hard drive unfinished and unread.
BMI / Neuralink
The film starts with confusion and clues which are slowly resolved through the remainder of the movie. The first question and clue I noticed was a small piece of glowing tech behind the protagonist’s left ear. What shall we call her? Carol, aka Captain Marvel. The filmmakers clearly wanted us to see it. At first, I wondered if was a brain-to-machine interface tied in with her brainstem. That got my interest because I am fascinated with the human brain, computer technology, totalitarian-authoritarian technocracy, and concerned about the future intersection of these three things. I wondered if they’d glorify the brain-to-machine-interface (BMI) like the James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) movie did with the “queue,” the biological-neurological braid that the Na’vi on planet Pandora all have which allows them to connect intimately on a neural level (“tsaheylu”) to one another, to the animals they mount, to energy networks of plants, and to the collective consciousness of the Na’vi whose bodies have decayed into the soil and whose souls have been uploaded into the collective soul of the biosphere. Or would they go with the Matrix movie (1999) route where the BMI was more of a method of control of the serfs by the overlords? The Skrull (the green-skinned aliens) who captured Carol didn’t use the tech to hack her mind—they just had energy flowing to and from her temples. Also, Carol didn’t seem to need to plug any cables into it (wireless perhaps?) when she was interfacing with “the Supreme Intelligence” (an artificial intelligence demigod). The idea of God as a superior Artilect caught my interest too. Towards the end of the movie, Carol realizes the behind-the-ear-tech is a device which has been holding her potential back and has allowed the Kree (the blue-skinned aliens) to control and enslave her. So I suppose it is safe to call it a BMI. And I was pleased to see that they went with the Matrix route this time and depicted the BMI as an object of social control. The use of technologies (not the least of which would be film) to condition our thinking is an old story that goes back before writing to the storytelling of bards around campfires, I suspect. The mind-hacking done by the Kree on Carol is somewhat analogous to what films and music and “television programming” is. The ever-growing magic of CGI in movies like Captain Marvel—the magic that made the Marvel movies successful–remind me that the ability of the mind to distinguish between our real reality and the computer-generated realities are blurring more and more. Some say that the images of airplanes smashing into the twin towers—images which changed the history of the world—were CGI. I’m not an animator so I don’t have a good basis for judging whether that’s true or not. Regardless, we certainly live in a time where CGI certainly can be used to convince us that we have seen things that didn’t actually happen. The option for mass manipulation of seeing-and-believing exists. Even if it hasn’t been used to influence public policy yet, it almost certainly will. The apps on our smart phones and other devices has already become a good analog of a BMI. But with the founding of the Neuralink company by Elon Musk in 2016, with the long-term goal of achieving “symbiosis with artificial intelligence” offers plenty of concerns to plan for. So, in one sense, this movie is sort of anti-transhumanism, anti-posthumanism, and anti-technocratic. Sort of. Sort of not. Of course, in another way, it is totally pro-transhumanism. It seems to be against enslavement by artilects and against mind-control, at least. That’s on the plus side of my ledger.
Putting the Fiction in Science Fiction
Nick Fury took part in the autopsy of one of the Skrull aliens and said it was not a carbon-based life-form, was based on some element that is not catalogued on our periodic table, and that these Skrulls can shape-shift on the DNA level—which is of course a carbon-based chain of amino acids. All this is utter nonsense. Life can only be carbon-based. No, seriously. (See https://youtu.be/VoI2ms5UHWg?t=435) Carbon (with 6 protons) works great. Silicon (with 14 protons, and sitting below carbon in the periodic table) isn’t going to work. Germanium isn’t going to work either. An element that is not on our periodic table would be an element that has more than 103 protons. Yeah. right. Good luck building an organic molecule out of that! This to me is even more ludicrous than the comic relief in the movie involving the flerken.
The idea that planet earth (or “C-53”) is a lame planet and that there are many planets out there which are inhabitable for Skrulls and Kree and all the other hundreds of alien races out there is also absolute nonsense. Read Hugh Ross’s book Improbable Planet and read Gonzales and Richards book The Privileged Planet (also on Netflix, I think). (Also here: https://youtu.be/QmIc42oRjm8.)
Cultural Marxism?
The animation was impressive. The time travel to the 1995s was also kind of fun to see. I can’t remember any of the jokes being actually funny. But the story kept my interest. I found myself wanting to see how the confusion and clues resolved. After they resolved, I can’t say I was all that impressed. But sometimes the journey is good even if the destination is not memorable? I appreciated the idea of soldiers questioning the wars they are involved in, realizing that they were fighting an unjust war, and having the courage to leave the wrong side and help protect the victims of genocide. My only concern here is that cultural Marxists refocused their ire from Germany to the United States after WWII ended. Meanwhile the international Marxists proceeded to murder and starve far, far more millions of people than the Nazis ever did, and way, way more than the USA did. Modern Marxism likes to attack whoever has power as the oppressor. While the USA is certainly guilty of countless sins and injustices throughout the world, and does seem like an empire (with 800 military bases all over the world), and while the USA needs to be held in check by people who “speak truth to power,” it’s not cool to think that the USA is so much like the Kree (“submit or be bombed and destroyed”) and therefore needs to be fought against in a Marxist guerilla revolution. Sure, there are some major similarities to the Kree which need to be repented of. Bombing countries like Yemen and Syria and Libya for reasons that have nothing to do with just war theory is a great example of something the USA needs to stop doing. But when you compare the American “empire” with the empire that international Marxism was building, the American empire starts to look awfully good by comparison. Marxism is helpful for pointing out hypocrisy and some areas for improvement but it’s not helpful for solving any of the problems. Captain Marvel does have some Marxist overtones that I detect but it isn’t dripping with it nearly so heavily as I expected. But it, like so many other sci-fi movies that contrast dystopias with utopias, can lend itself well to the Marxist conditioning. It’s like the Star Wars dynamic. Back in the 1970 and early 1980s, “the Empire” was understood by most as national socialism and/or international socialism. Now, however, the Empire (or whatever the name of the aggressive, big, bad guys is) tends to serve as a symbol in our culture as that of the United States or of Western Civilization. The rebels used to be seen as the freedom-fighters along the Jeffersonian lines. Today the rebels tend to be seen as Marxist revolutionaries who seek freedom from one oppression and don’t yet know that they’re bringing in a much worse oppression. [You can read more of my thoughts about neo-marxism at http://normangeisler.com/marxism-2/.]
Humanism (and Transhumanism)
Carol is depicted as a very determined, brave, stubborn, wont-quit sort of person from her childhood onward. She can go toe-to-toe with the boys and can out-boy the boys. She has some internal strength which proves to be her real strength. The antagonists say, “Without us you’re only human,” to her and that seems to be the apex of the movie. Carol is human. But human is strong. Humans (including strong women) can compete with technologically superior (and morally inferior) aliens like the Kree. She is indomitable. Knock her down and she gets back up, fights on, and prevails. This part didn’t strike me as particularly feminist. Like I said, maybe I’m just too desensitized to it now to be objective about it. But to me this seemed more like humanism. Moreover, it seemed more like essentialistic humanism than existentialistic humanism: Carol isn’t defining herself by what she does; she does the awesome things she does because she is human. And to be human is to have a great potential. (And since we are made in the image of God, according to Hebrew prophetic tradition, we should have great potential, I’d say.) Of course, it helps to be irradiated by a mysterious tesseract cube thing to amplify that human greatness to the point where star ships cannot stand against Carol’s fury. But she was already great on the inside before she got that power, they suggest. Removing the BMI chip is like pulling off the boxing gloves. Their tech was hindering her and holding her back. She was Samson with his hair cut. And then she was radiant, glowing, powerful—like the transfiguration of Jesus. Then she goes Messianic and saves planet earth and saves the Krull refugees too. All quite impressive. This transhumanism seems to be based not so much on human minds building technology and applying it to ourselves, turning ourselves into half-human-half-machine-more-than-human superhumans/metahumans/transhumans; it is instead more about mystical, mysterious, powerful energy foci (in the convenient form of crystals or cubes) unleashing and amplifying the human greatness that is already inside of us—or at least a few of us… or at least one of us. And in some way this transhumanism variation is at odds with technological based transhumanism. But then really at its core (pun intended), what is technology but the harnessing of nature? So maybe the division is a moot point. As for me an my house, my faith is invested not in human technology as the ultimate means of salvation from our biggest problems (sin and death) but in the future resurrection of the body by a divine technology we know almost nothing about presently.
Girl Power!
I didn’t find Carol Danvers / Vers / Brie Larson to be a particularly believable or compelling superhuman. Chris Hemsworth as Thor does a much better job of making superhero silliness seem almost believable. I’m fully expecting Carol to be the main character who will defeat Thanos in the next movie, unless Marvel learns something from all the negative reviews that Captain Marvel got. I’m sure that women can fly F-15 aircraft as well or perhaps even better than men can. That didn’t bother me so much as it seems quite feasible. When I generalize about the neurological differences between women and men, I tend to think that women generally can multi-task better than most men (I’m sure there are exceptions) and that men generally can focus more monomaniacally than most women (again, I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions). Fact checking… ok, right. So don’t argue with me–argue with the data.
Assuming those generalizations are generally true, I admire the ability to multi-task more than the ability to focus on just one thing. That to me is a super-power that I don’t have much of. And it is a super-power my wife (and several other mothers I am acquainted with) most definitely have. I tend to think that this makes women’s brains more impressive and superior to men’s brains. It’s like me having trouble juggling two objects while my wife can juggle thirteen and still say, “What’s wrong with you and your sons?” But I think it is good that men can focus to a fault. That often can be a good thing too. So I don’t want to get too carried away with the inferior versus superior dichotomy. Marrying a man and a woman together can make for a very good pairing of specializations—and never a dull moment for either. Perhaps a man might be a little better suited for a one-on-one dogfight in his F-15 fighter jet and perhaps a woman might be better suited for taking on ten fighter jets at the same time? I think this is a superpower.
But what is the real super power women have which men don’t have? It’s something that was obvious to all ten billion or so humans throughout human history up to around 1960 AD: Women can bear children. We somehow manage to forget that today since contraception, abortifacients, schools, and daycare facilities make it so women can choose to pursue careers instead of being what they were designed to be: Mothers. In the ancient Attic dialect of Greek, a woman was a γυνή. That the word from which we get the root of the word gynecology. The etymological root of γυνή is probably γίνομαι, which means “to come into being, to become, to make happen.” Most of the other Indo-European languages probably have the same awe-for-women built into their words for woman/wife. While women can’t do it without a small amount of help from their husbands, women do most of the work of making children—small beings such as you and I were not too long ago—come into being. Wow. I’m a bit of an armchair philosopher who has been trying to wrap his mind around being/existence for a few years. (Plug for Etienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers.) The idea that women are the primary “instrumental cause” for people coming into being could be the most amazing fact of human existence. And that superior brain that women have—that brain that can multitask. That makes them better suited (again, speaking in generalities here) for the most challenging and most crucial tasks of all: raising children. Kids need dads too, of course. But the most important person in the formative years of our lives is always our mother. Mothering the most important job in the world.
Heap ire upon me for being “old fashioned” or “patriarchal” if you must. But as Western Civilization transitions from twilight to dark of night, it will be clear that it will be the peoples who hold the bearing of children in high esteem who will conquer those who do not. The math is simple. Peoples who marry and bear several children per family will inherit the earth while those who avoid marriage, or put marriage off, and bear zero, one, or two children, are choosing extinction.
Copyright © 2019 Christopher Travis Haun – All Rights Reserved
Author: C.T. Haun
Posted: March 18 2019
Last updated: March 18 2019
Status: First draft, unedited, spontaneous, finished.
