computer generated polytheism, or, the new protestant work ethic

A change of pace today--I'm going to write about the new Marvel film, The Avengers, directed by Joss Whedon. Let us look at the figures.On opening weekend, the film grossed $220.3 million in U.S. and Canada box offices, making it the most profitable debut of all time by a 50 million dollar margin. As of June 3rd, 2012, the film made $552,950,328. At an estimated $220 million budget, the film ranks #9 for most expensive films of all time unadjusted for inflation (adjusted, it sinks down to position 17). Production budgets don't include permanent investments in computer hardware, e.g. the enormous server farms necessary to render visual data. Stay for the credits, and you will see the names of five hundred computer technicians.

These figures impute a sense of the monumental, gross, weight of fixed capital that give modern day superheroes their semi-theological heft. When we are dealing with productions of this magnitude, productions for which the mathematical sublime is an advertising gimmick, we roll in the thick of it, the It of the world of capital. In the last few years, we have seen a good series of these CGI-based superblockbusters, each attempting to top the other in the counting game. It has become clear that this particular genre of CGI cinema is no longer about producing epic space by means of cinematic illusions, in the style of the old Star Wars films. They are more on the order of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance or Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra, films whose mise-en-scène rests on the creation of elaborate, monumental and monstrous sets that rival their originals (Babylon, the pyramids). Moving up on the family tree, we find a prototype in the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park, a glass building that claimed to have its own atmosphere, and which, like the Eiffel tower, was built for no other reason than to show the civilized world just what capital could do. Contra Lev Manovich's thesis on the plasticity of the pixel, CGI creatures carry a certain substance to them; their very plasticity exhibits, and hides, the immense solid state capabilities of processing hardware (the black boxes into which all data vanishes), the millions of hours of dead labor absorbed by the machine, which then uses its own numerical representation as an advertising ploy. By their very immateriality, visually composted images command a weight in Value, and here I quote Marx: "The commodity form...is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race."

It is certainly not coincidental that the sensory figures produced in the millions of man-hours of digital rendering in the film in discussion are, in so many marvelous ways, Gods. The Avengers is in no way merely allegorical on this point: Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, etc., enter into direct relations with the Gods of Norse legend. The freak accidents of technological civilization: a science experiment went wrong, a product of Army supersoldier testing, a billionaire daredevil technologist, and an underworld spy, are enlisted by the shadowy organization S.H.I.E.L.D., run by Agent Fury, to save the world from the renegade Norse God Loki, who wants to open a portal to earth so he can lead an army of alien to take over the planet.  Fair enough. Loki subscribes to a fairly outdated ideology that freedom is the curse of humankind, from which it must be freed. Human beings are meant to be slaves of one ruler, etc. A genealogy of this villain's character type would lead us back to the doctrines espoused in the Office of War Information's 1942 Manual on Motion Pictures, which essentially establishes the cinematic caricature of the freedom-hating bad guy that holds good from George Cukor's Keeper of the Flame to George W. Bush's post-9/11 address to the nation.  On the other hand, S.H.I.E.L.D's democratic credentials are doubtful given its affiliations with the intelligence underworld, and Agent Fury, if we are to look at his career back to 1940s comic books, exhibits Rambo-like characteristics. The film's particular ambivalence with respect to the democracy-fascism axis posits the coordinates of today's war on terror: shadowy organizations and questionable methods are necessary to confront unpredictable contemporary threats, particularly in a global village, in which, as is mentioned in the film, other planets have come to acknowledge the earth's technological parity, which makes the planet open to interstellar invasions. Experiments with the Tesseract, a blue glowing rock with enormous powers, enter the planet into undecidabilities  interstellar politics.

Parallel to anxieties of global integration and technological critical mass, which allows the earth to "come out" amongst the community of interstellar races and for superheroes to fight on equal terms with Norse Gods, Captain America--the jingoistic do-gooder par excellence--exhibits a particular gaudiness that deserves comment. As Steve Rogers is recalled by Fury back into the service of S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury tells him that they have prepared him his old uniform. Steve asks, aren't the stars and stripes now a bit old-fashioned? Fury replies, perhaps but sometimes we need old-fashioned. And it is true, the Captain continues to be the butt of the film's jokes. He is made fun of for his earnestness by his more cynical teammates. Patriotism is ingenuousness, but it can be put to good use. Isn't this exactly how it works? Then there's a crowning sequence where Loki forces a crowd to kneel before him and begins with his freedom-hater monologue. A man stands up and tells him that there are always men like him and that he will not kneel. The man is old enough to have lived through the War. Loki takes his energy-shooting-staff and fires at the guy, and the man is only saved by Captain America's shield. Oh my!

But perhaps more striking are the ways in which the individual eccentricities of our superheroes are subjected to the broader imperatives of "teamwork" and self-sacrifice. If it is fair to say that the recent Marvel films produce polytheistic mythologies for cultures founded on global information networks, then this film in particular attempts to unite these present-day Gods in a curious, proto-protestant formation. The polytheistic aspect of The Avengers is easy to substantiate. Each member of the defunct "Avengers Program" is functionally immortal, and their enhanced powers represent affective modalities of contemporary life given autonomous appearance: rage (the Hulk), technocracy (Iron Man), underworld cunning (Black Widow), nationalism (Captain America). These all-too-human characteristics raised to a higher power then encounter immortals of a different order; those ancient Gods who are themselves "products of the human brain." Yet the entire panoply is subjected to a higher imperative, and this is brought to attention most in the "development" of Tony Stark's character from a self-interested cocky technologist (who thinks that all problems can be solved) to someone who recognizes the necessity of self-sacrifice, as he flies a nuclear missile into the portal to destroy the alien mothership with no return ticket.