Day in the Life of an Idiot

This always happens to me. I finish a book and I go on a self-indulgence binge. I play video games, watch TV, and generally don't do anything resembling "work" for days on end. But my amazing beta reader naomikritzer already got the book back to me, so my vacation is officially over. Tonight it's back to the grindstone, alas. But, I did catch up on all my comics and BSG and managed to see a movie (in the theatre!) so I have a few things to rant/relate/comment on.

One of the things I did was go with my friend Sean M. Murphy to see "Iron Man." Holy sh*t! I have never been a big fan of Iron Man, though I knew some about him from Avengers (new and old). I've always thought he was kind of a non-personality/military industrialist Capitalist running dog, so there was no love lost for me when he became a psuedo-villian in the Civil War storyline. However, this movie made me a fan. Robert Downey, Jr. could not have been more perfectly cast, and he was surprisingly poingnant with all the "heart" metaphor stuff. Pretty deep and metaphorical for a comicbook movie. Plus, of course, I was warned that I needed to stay until the end of the credits, and, boy, am I glad I did. As Sean can attest, I screamed like a fan grrl when I saw Samuel L. Jackson because I knew he was Nick Fury (Ultimates), but when he said, "We need to talk about the Avengers Initative," I nearly wet my pants I was so happy. God is great now that Marvel is in charge of its own movies.

I still need to do some contemplating before I write anything about Bendis' Secret Invasion, however. Lance at Dreamhaven very kindly pulled everything Secret Invasion related for me, so I'm completely up on the story, including the kind of dull primer on Human/Skrull/Kree relations that Bendis gave us with his revisionist history laid out in all its glory.

The reason I need to think about it is this: before we headed out to the movies, I started ranting about Secret Invastion to Sean and he pointed out that my argument might not go over well with WisCON folks because, at its heart, it is a transgender issue. It was this amazing lightbulb momment for me. As some of you may know, Bendis is doing at Marvel what BSG is doing on TV. We're discovering that some of our heroes may have been replaced decades ago by shape-changing Skrull/human clones who have been programmed to believe they are the real heroes. So, like with the Cylons, they've been living AS the heroes, until which time their sleeper trigger is activated.

My inital reaction has been one of betrayal, and I've been struggling with a way to articulate this because it's one of the same snags I have, on ocassion, with Battlestar Galatica. With BSG, however, the idea that the Cylons have been living among us in secret has been set up from the beginning. One of the things that's bugging me about Bendis' stuff is the feeling of whiplash because, while there's been some foreshadowing in recent issues, the heroes whose identity are in question have been key players in some major events (The Death of Captain America, Civil War, House of M, Avengers Disassembled, etc.)

One of the conculsions I've come to is that my sense of betrayal is complicated. It's not just that the heroes/BSG characters were living as something else the entire time, but that the people chosen by the writers of both series have picked characters whose storylines resonated with REAL political events. For instance, on BSG, three out of the four new Cylons were insurgence policy makers. The New Caprica insurgency was clearly a thinly-disgused metaphor for Iraq and our occupation of it. The storyline, clumsy as it was on occassion, forced the viewers to identify with the "other side," the nationalistic rebels trying anything to push the occupying army with superior weaponry/tech out of their homeland. Because this was about America's involvement in Iraq, I felt like those characters (Ty, Tyrol, and Sam) represented *us,* the humans of the storyline.

Similarly, in the Civil War/Death of Captain America storyline, there was a very obvious metaphor for American politics. The Superhero Registration Act smelled a bit like the Patriot Act (surrender freedom for security!) which happened after a horrific attack -- the Samford School disaster -- clearly a 9/11 proxy. The storyline, again sometimes as overt as a 2 X 4, asked readers to identify with BOTH sides of the question of freedom vs. security. The two key personalities in that fight, Captain America and Iron Man, are now potentially Skrull imposters.

My question (to myself but also now to you) is why does it bother me so much that these key players in these American political metaphors have turned out to be distinctly "not us"? Or, at the very least, not who I was originally led to believe they are?