Hail to the King

I watched Aquaman recently and it got me riled up about the way we tell superhero stories.  The thing that gets to me in so many of these stories is the constant reliance on royal entitlement as a moral imperative.  We are asked to believe that the most important thing in the world is people of high birth being in command.  Aquaman ends up being the king of Atlantis.  He isn't the king because he knows what he is doing - he only visited the place for an hour before being declared king.  He knows absolutely nothing about the job, and will certainly be an incompetent ruler.

Aquaman gets to rule because of being born entitled.  Nothing more.

I would prefer a world where rulership by birthright isn't a feature, but I can totally deal with stories that include such structures.  The thing that gets me isn't the existence of dynastic rule, but rather that it is framed as a good thing.  We are asked to believe that all is right in the world so long as the people who had powerful parents get to exercise absolute power over others.  

What I want, in short, is that when someone born to power ends up in charge the movie doesn't try to tell me that it is right and necessary that they do so.

This, I think, is part of why I liked Black Panther so much less than most people.  I am glad that superhero movies got a little bit more diverse in terms of race.  What I can't stand is the pitch that Wakanda is a enlightened society, one which has evolved far beyond the rest of the world, and yet they have a herediary monarchy with a 'battle to the death' element tacked on as their system of government.

In Aquaman at the end we watch the main villain be carted away to a cell.  He is spared because he is royal, someone important.  The tens of thousands of deaths that just happened a moment ago are an afterthought - those people were just peasants, after all.  The important thing is that the rightful king is on the throne, and that all the royal people are alive and well.  Death and suffering among the commoners is just a thing that happens.

It all wouldn't matter much if it was just a movie.  Movies ask me to believe in all kinds of idiocy all the time, that isn't new.  It isn't just a movie though.  Our society is currently a battleground of ideas, and one of those ideas is the idea that rich and powerful people ought to be able to guarantee their children a place in the halls of power.

There are times when this becomes a real problem, like in the case of Justin Trudeau or George W Bush, neither of whom would have been anyone of note if they hadn't been born into powerful families.  It isn't limited to just those most visible cases though.  I have often heard people talk about how taxes ought to be low so that people can give huge amounts of money to their children.  They often pitch it as a moral good to be able to give their kids a hand up, while I see it is the opposite.

Helping kids by teaching them, by supporting them emotionally, by loaning them a vehicle for a move or a place to stay when life gets them down, these are things that we should absolutely give our children.  Millions of dollars?  Hell no.  It is bad enough that people can accumulate enormous wealth themselves, much less pass it down the line.

Political battles between left and right are often about rich vs. poor, dynastic wealth vs. redistribution, iron fisted rule vs. egalitarianism.  This is a real fight we are having right now, and it bothers me to see movies so clearly pitch the idea that the only people who matter are the rich and powerful.

I am okay with movies about the monarchs and gods.  I just don't want the movie to tell me that their position is *right* and *deserved* and that it is my job to die to maintain the status quo.