Secret Invasion’s politics can’t be trusted
26.07.2023 - 19:31
/ polygon.com
/ Nick Fury
There is a moment near the end of the first episode of Marvel’s Secret Invasion TV series that will feel uneasily familiar to politically attuned viewers. In it, a young man walks briskly through a public square in Moscow, a backpack draped over his shoulder. He is an infiltrator, a hidden alien Skrull whose true identity is undetectable to those around him, and his backpack contains a “dirty bomb” capable of causing mass death to those around him. The attack is halted, courtesy of series protagonist Nick Fury, but in the aftermath, a suspect apprehended by authorities shouts, again and again, “I’m an American! I’m an American!” Nobody listens.
Watching that moment play out, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Disney Plus series is out to make a trenchant political critique: that, for perhaps the first time in the decade-plus tenure of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it intends to use the tools of superheroism and science fiction to draw our attention to the overreach of military authority, and the violent suspicion bred by fears of terrorism. Alas, you would be wrong. A few minutes into the following episode, the moment has been largely forgotten, the narrative having moved along to a plot about government officials and SHIELD bigwigs replaced by alien shape-changers in a conspiracy that feels both labyrinthine and inconsequential at the same time.
It is, in fact, altogether puzzling: How can a series rooted in fears of government conspiracy, and the inability to trust or believe our neighbors and compatriots, seemingly have nothing to say about politics or the government at all? How can a story about asylum-seeking refugees driven toward militant violence manage to avoid any actual evocation of either subject at all? Or, to put it more bluntly still, why are the politics of Secret Invasion so hard to trust?
If we want to understand the politics of Secret Invasion, we need to go back to a very different political moment: the latter days of the George W. Bush administration in 2008, when the Secret Invasion comic series took form at Marvel. The early 2000s were a heady time for Marvel Comics. Despite its self-styled reputation as “the world outside your window,” Marvel had for decades engaged with real-world politics only in the most anodyne or else allegorical terms — notable outliers notwithstanding. But the first decade of the new millennium confronted the company with a heady brew of artistic, political, and editorial influences that must have seemed unprecedented. And compounding it was the internal politics of the comic publisher itself, which was climbing out of the twin crises of bankruptcy and cratering sales thanks to the guidance of new editor-in-chief Joe Quesada.
So when it came