“I had hoped for more from humanity. A little more pride. A little more grace.” -Powers of X #3 by Jonathan Hickman (Xorn)
In general, I try to approach new books, movies, and TV shows with an open mind. For the newest installment in James Gunn’s DCU, Lanterns, it has been a little difficult for me.
Giving writers the benefit of the doubt is an idea I believe in, and I do believe I practice it the majority of the time. I believe that, most of the time, we should allow a story to take its course before we judge it too harshly. For Lanterns I have found this endeavor increasingly difficult. I had qualms before I ever saw the show. I didn’t like the trailers, I don’t like one of the showrunners, and I found the concept of setting a Green Lantern show as a cop drama set almost exclusively on earth to be a little bit unfaithful.
One reason I was hesitant about this show is because I don’t like one of the showrunners, Tom King, a comic book writer for DC. I have found his interpretation of many DC characters to be off over the years and I think he is bad at writing women. He’s also a CIA guy. When asked in an interview with gamesradar.com about serving as a counterterrorism operative in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush and Obama administrations, King said that “it was the greatest honor of my life. I very much enjoyed the job.” I do not believe that we need to admonish every veteran, especially if we don’t know what they did. I do believe in accountability, that while soldiers may also be victims of their governments, we have no obligation to praise military service in pointless and atrocious wars. There is no honor in what the CIA did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I do also believe that sometimes we do need to remove the benefit of the doubt from pieces of fiction. Stories have the potential to do astounding amounts of good, but they also have the capacity to justify the worst of humanity. Think of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, a novel depicting the harsh realities of the meat industry in the early 20th century. This novel brought attention to those harsh realities, and helped lead to the Meat Inspection Act, Pure Drug and Food Act, and the creation of what eventually become the FDA. But also think of Birth of the Nation, a white supremacist propaganda film noted racist Woodrow Wilson loved and screened in the White House. Think also of the tv show 24, which depicted torture as a successful interrogation method. The Bush era conservative establishment loved 24. This was a depiction Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia endorsed, referencing a plot in the show where Jack Bauer, the protagonist, tortures a man for information.
“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer, is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so. Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles.” -Antonin Scalia
It is worth noting that torture has been proven time and time again to be a ineffective interrogation technique, as victims will say anything to stop being tortured. It is also worth noting that Jack Bauer is a fictional character, and torture is always inhumane. Sometimes, as critics and audiences, we need to practice not giving the benefit of the doubt to properly examine any insidious messages a story can disseminate.
(spoilers ahead)
That being said, I should get to what this article is about: I believe that Lanterns is pro-War on Terror propaganda.
Immediately following the second deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, the Oklahoma City bombing, America blamed muslims. CNN blamed muslims. The Oklahoma City bombing was not done by a muslim; it was done by a white man, in fact a white supremacist. The laws passed in its wake did not give the government the same level of authority to prosecute financial supporters of domestic terrorism as it did supporters of foreign terrorism. After 9/11, America invaded country after country to hunt down Al-Queda and any other terrorist group it could in the Middle East and Africa. After the Oklahoma City bombing, we did not go after the white supremacist militias and terrorist groups in this country, even those that the Oklahoma City bomber had connections to, such as the Robert G Millar led militia in Elohim City.
The final nail in the coffin for me was the answer to the show’s first mystery is that the big bad is the only brown character (I use the term because no nationality is given) in a rural white town with an armed-to-the-teeth white militia. To me, making Poorna Jagannathan’s character, Zoe Macon, the villain is a supermassive red flag. She is the outsider, the only brown person in the main cast.
Political theorists have competing definitions for most terms, but working definitions to use so they can have meaningful discussions. Under many definitions of “terrorist” Zoe Macon would fit. Perhaps more importantly, Zoe Macon is who the United States calls a terrorist. She sleeps with John Stewart to gain his trust, she sleeps with Will Macon to gain his trust. She uses the town’s citizens as shields (like Osama Bin Laden), she attacks them en masse to drain Hal Jordan’s powers. Before she targets civilians, she is the enemy of Hal Jordan and John Stewart not based on her actions, but because of who “her people” (the Manhunters) are. She is the exact person the US military and security state claimed to be waging war on. She is the exact person racists and xenophobes claim are infiltrating our community.
“A white man with a flag and a gun, the man who had made America great, was not a terrorist. The 9/11 era said he was a counterterrorist. America had never been the sort of place that would tell him he was anybody else.” -Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman (Chapter 9: The Invisible Enemy)
In Lanterns, the Green Lantern Corps are not peacekeepers, like in the comics. They don’t have to ask for permission to interfere. They are cops, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call them feds. They argue with the sheriff over jurisdiction. They hunt down “illegal aliens” like the ICE agents currently terrorizing our country. Their job is portrayed as necessary.
In episode three, when John Stewart’s superior officer starts to explain who the person he is supposed to assassinate is, he interrupts with “I don’t care about the man, tell me about the mission.” There is no question about whether he should be assassinated, no justification given by the story other than “he launders money.” When Hal Jordan flies in to abduct the man Stewart is supposed to assassinate and “drops him off at Guantanamo”, one of the world’s most infamous prisons is nothing more than a plot device. There is no thought given to whether or not the money launderer should be in Guantanamo or what happened to him after he got dropped there. The only thematic or plot service of Guantanamo Bay is how it inconveniences an American soldier.
When Zoe Macon, the evil Manhunter, is asked why she chose the visage of a brown woman in the pursuit of gaining control of a rural town, under the assumption that it is harder to gain power as a brown woman than a white person in the United States, she gives a great replacement theory-esque speech about how it’s actually easier to gain power in the United States as an outsider. There is no given refutation to this, and the events of the story seem to enforce this worldview; the way the town is so easily controlled by her and the way they are mad at Hal and John instead of Macon after she kills dozens of them. There is no real reason for the heroes to apprehend her until she starts killing the town with orbital lasers, other than the fact that she comes from a species of evil aliens.
One of the main narratives justifying the War on Terror is that terrorist leaders are radicalizing populations in the Middle East to hate America because we are free, and we need to kill them before they kill us. In reality, people hate America because we won’t stop bombing them and overthrowing their governments. I don’t believe targeting civilians is ever justified, but I also don’t see any real distinction between the Al-Qaeda attacks on 9/11 and the hundreds of thousands of people the US military and security state has killed since 9/11. Perhaps, there is a difference in scale. We are not the good guys.
Depiction is not endorsement. I don’t know what the show’s writers and directors think about Guantanamo Bay or ICE. I don’t think that the show’s writers believe that all brown people are terrorists, or that all terrorists are brown people, and they probably don’t believe in great replacement theory. I do believe that while depiction is not the same as endorsement, storytellers have a responsibility to check their own biases, look to see if they push any harmful stereotypes, and to examine what exactly they are saying with their story. I believe this is especially true when your art is consumed by millions of people.
My apologies to anyone reading this who likes the show. I personally know that some of you do, and you do not have to agree with my reading. I am also not saying that everyone or anyone in particular who works on the show agrees with my reading, what a story says is more than authorial intent. I struggled on whether to write this because I try not to shit on other people’s food when they were looking forward to it, especially on the internet.
This is not the only way to interpret the show. I’m sure there is a way to view the already morally gray John Stewart and Hal Jordan as a darker shade of grey. I’m sure there is a way to interpret Zoe Macon as less of a villain, I just don’t see it.
Lanterns is not 24, it is not Call of Duty, and it is not Frank Miller’s Holy Terror. It is not in alignment with Ted Cruz saying that he’d “carpet bomb the Middle East” if he became president. It’s more like The West Wing, which was more about criticizing the methods of war and contemptible ignorance of the Bush administration than it was criticizing the war itself, trying to be self-aware but perpetuating harmful stereotypes, nonetheless. I’m not saying you can’t watch Lanterns. I loved The West Wing as a teenager. Both The West Wing and Lanterns are in the tradition of liberal complicity in the war on terror.
“The folly of the Obama and Biden people, in their unwillingness to confront the rot they presided over, was to think they could continue in constrained form the operations of the War on Terror without fueling the nativist politics of the War on Terror.” -Either Ice Is Abolished or It Will Kill Many More Renee Goods by Spencer Ackerman
I’m not the biggest Green Lantern fan in the world, but I’ve read a fair amount of their stories, and I like what they can and sometimes do represent. In the Green Lanterns, we have the opportunity to see a sort of anti-copaganda, where the peacekeepers need consent from communities to interfere, where their weapons are physically incapable of killing people, where their primary function is not to punish, but to save. Think of Far Sector by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, or the Work Release arc from the Tim Seely run on Green Lanterns. I wrote this essay because I am extremely disappointed that instead of furthering that dream, Lanterns chose to shelve it for this bullshit.
the the extra:
I said that I would wait for the show to finish to write my essay about Lanterns, but I didn’t. Fuck it, I’m mad. I thought we had grown beyond this, but I guess not.
To be try and be more fair, I’ll probably do a follow-up when the show finishes.
As always, feel free to comment.
All of my analysis is possible because of people much smarter than me. As with my first essay, massive amounts of thanks go to Spencer Ackerman. His blog Forever Wars and his book Reign of Terror helped me understand the War on Terror and the Oklahoma City bombing. Y’all should read his stuff.
Thank you to Jacob Geller for his video essays Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything? and Analyzing Every Torture Scene in Call of Duty – All 46 of Them. I would also like to thank Jon Bois for his video essay I WISH EVERYONE ELSE WAS DEAD. For more about West Wing and it’s weird positioning on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I’d recommend the video The West Wing’s argument for bombing civilians by Skip Intro. These three writers, alongside Ackerman, taught me how to analyze this sort of propaganda. They are all also all-around phenomenal writers outside of these mentioned projects.
Song recommendation: Masters of War by Bob Dylan.
ABOLISH ICE, ABOLISH DHS, END THE FOREVER WARS, FREE PALESTINE
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