What is a superhero to the highest office in the land? Like any valuable resource or popular icon, they’re a threat or a tool—and while the individualism of vigilantes grants them a complicated relationship with systematized power, the “Big Two” comic publishers have a history of dropping real-world Presidents into their self-knowing (but also self-mythologizing) superhero runs. It’s an attempt to contextualize the importance of characters in an imagined but parallel world. Dropping a presidential cameo can mark the character’s place in history, ironically undermine the President’s authority, and—by occupying the same dramatic space as a superhero—detach them from reality. Especially when adapted to film, these presidential portrayals point to a genre insecure about its treatment of power, inconsistently depicting the highest office in the land as a site of tension without acknowledging the similar contradictions baked into the heroes around it.
It’s much easier to draw a real-life President than make them agree to a live-action cameo, so movies born of comic books tend to invent one that fits the demands of their story. Yet including even an imagined President poses a hard question: Does the leader of mundane institutional powers hold more authority than an abnormal, implausibly strong individual? This can be resolved with collaborative heroism, deepened by ideological conflict, or hand-waved away to assure audiences of our hero’s respectability. But attempting to align superheroes with the government brushes up against other questions that blockbusters are even less equipped to answer—at least, not without turning a superhero into an agent of the state, or a President into a Red Hulk.
In Captain America: Brave New World, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford, replacing the late William Hurt) has been elected President on a platform of “Together.” It’s a platitude that nevertheless implies a helpfully vague Other that his constituents can be together against. What scant insight we get into Ross’ administration shows that he’s conscious of image and legacy—the perception of his health, his temper, and his ability to close a landmark resource extraction treaty for a mummified adamantium Celestial. Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) has an even stronger case for obsessing over legacy, picking up Steve Rogers’ (Chris Evans) mantle while also considering the responsibility of a non-supersoldier Black man being America’s flagship hero.
Produced and released in a time of unparalleled political partisanship, Brave New World’s story of a rational, empathetic superhero deescalating an out-of-control, monstrous President is grounded in the type of surface-level liberalism that marks the outer limit of the social critique that Marvel is willing to make. Superhero films can only present problems that their heroes can solve, so any political conflict has to be based on clear divisions and outward aggression. If a superhero goes head-to-head with a President, then he is in direct conflict with the literal leader and not the government itself—it’s far easier to combat a single bad man than the systemic power that protects him from accountability or consequences. In the end, Sam calms Ross, who agrees to a jail sentence, containing the threat of a monstrous President in a neat manner that feels completely false.
It’s telling that the biggest threat a President has posed to an Avenger has been when he turns into a raging red monster rather than abusing his sweeping governmental powers. The latter approach would of course reveal inequalities and contradictions within the Marvel universe—Why are superheroes so well-funded? Why is their judgment always trustworthy?—that would only gum up the MCU’s perpetual output machine. After going head-to-head with Ross/Red Hulk, Sam has proved himself a stronger and more capable leader, and the story reveals itself as a game of one-upmanship rather than a sincere dig into the MCU’s political landscape.
Brave New World’s clumsy treatment of Cap at the White House is the culmination of years of mishandling presidential storylines. But whether it’s Howard Stark and Phastos working on the atomic bomb (separately?) for Truman or the Winter Soldier assassinating JFK, the weaving of Marvel backstory with real history only serves to highlight someone’s comparative power. The films put reality and fiction on an equal plane to emphasize not just how powerful and clandestine the characters (often villains) are, but how inadequate the government was at protecting themselves from infiltration and manipulation. The result is a universe where the integrity of the government is often implicitly questioned, and where only the superpowered good guys can be trusted to save us.
The thing is, Ross did try to rein in superheroes with the Sokovia Accords back when he was Secretary Of State in Captain America: Civil War. After Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) caused civilian casualties, Ross pushed for U.N. oversight; feeling guilty about his own inadvertent casualties, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) supported the proposed regulations, while Steve Rogers maintained that superhero judgment was accountability enough. Civil War was a major crossover event, one that suggested Marvel’s Phase 3 would be increasingly skeptical of the expanding reach of the Avengers—alas, Marvel couldn’t even commit to this angle for a single film. The Cap/Iron Man feud quickly refocuses on the liberty of an almost-deprogrammed Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who assassinated Stark’s parents, and the superhero accountability question is revealed as a pretext to justify a marketable hero vs. hero showdown. The Sokovia Accords aren’t mentioned again until She-Hulk reveals that they were repealed.
This touches on the crux of the superhero-President dynamic: Superhero movies are not interested in challenging or limiting the power of their heroes, meaning that their politicians are dramatically designed to be disconnected, to never have a permanent impact on the story—they can either be well-intentioned but helpless, or actively malicious but short-sighted. Presidents are defined by their relationship to the superhero rather than the American public, because these films never ask us to care about anyone more than the hero and their immediate circle.
The second a superhero movie attempts to bring the President into the heat of the action, it reveals contradictions it’s unwilling to confront. If a film wants to comment on misuses of power, it needs to have a firm grip on the political nature of their superpowered characters. Superhero films, notably Marvel superhero films, have a queasy relationship with imperialism and military fetishism, an issue that’s only gotten worse with the growing number of private militias, intelligence taskforces, and privately funded compounds that populate the franchise installments. Superhero films ask the audience to believe in a character’s ability more than their interiority, but political thrillers depend on assessing someone’s judgment in using their power over other people. Directing the latter at the President but not the privately funded, weapons-grade Avengers is an empty exercise.
The MCU’s ambitions to ape the conspiracy-laden loneliness that defines post-Watergate political thrillers are scuppered by the flashy action and clear morals required by blockbusters. The three fictional Presidents in the MCU—Iron Man 3’s President Ellis (William Sadler), Secret Invasion’s President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney), and President Ross—are subject to betrayal and manipulation, damaging the integrity of their administration while their counterparts Tony Stark, Nick Fury, and Sam Wilson remain morally intact. Ellis is betrayed by his VP (Miguel Ferrer—what an election ticket!) and almost executed on live TV; Ritson is manipulated by shape-shifting Skrulls and pushed towards a vehement anti-alien platform; Ross is poisoned over seven years to turn into a Red Hulk at an inconvenient moment.
Ellis’ kidnapping at least fits him into an established form for movie Presidents. He’s a ’90s blockbuster MacGuffin, a symbolic entity who exists merely to be protected. That works in an action-comedy, but it gets tricky when the same franchise decides to care all of a sudden about the friction between superheroes and government reach.
The intrigue surrounding Ritson and Ross has a single directive: topple their authority so they get out of the way of the only people who matter. Becoming too racist against aliens or turning into a Red Hulk could let these movies address how superpowers have become the only meaningful way to influence world events. But the MCU only distrusts the U.S. government because it’s the position the films have to take in order to avoid undermining their own intellectual properties. Captain America must defeat anyone in his path, so films like Brave New World gesture towards a presidential critique that’s intentionally weightless and one-sided. That way the superheroes never have to assess how they wield power.
But that doesn’t mean Marvel characters haven’t been able to engage with this office on the big screen. The X-Men franchise has most successfully interrogated the tension between the President (or, what the President represents) and the interests of superheroes, because these films have the clearest understanding of power across the genre. Institutional dehumanization is a core theme of Fox’s X-Men films—the conflict between Charles Xavier’s non-violent haven for at-risk mutants and Magneto’s radical Brotherhood of Mutants adds fuel to the government’s fear of losing control. These films draw many key historical movements for inspiration (sometimes, in brashly poor taste), including civil and gay rights movements and the Holocaust, and in First Class and Days Of Future Past, the historical influences are textually explicit. The Cuban Missile Crisis and an attempted presidential assassination serve as climaxes for films concerned with the necessity of deescalation.
The X-Men films are not subtle, but they have a robust foundation: superpowers mark you as an Other, and the President cannot be depended on to save the marginalized. There is a somber, anxious conviction held by the Presidents of X2, The Last Stand, and Dark Phoenix that mutant power is a subversive and unchecked force that could undermine them, even if Stryker, Magneto, and the D’Bari are more direct antagonists.
This aspect of the X-Men films works because the characters’ relationship to government power defines how they move through the world; it works because they are relatively contained properties with clear objectives that are willing to question the altruistic, unimpeachable nature of superheroes. In order to make a superhero movie about systems, the agency and morality of superheroes needs to be compromised by the government—to a machine like the MCU, that isn’t a lucrative option.
At the close of Brave New World, Ross sits in a floating jail cell, locked away out of sight, and there is no sense that the MCU order has been truly shaken. These films are not interested in exploring what it means for government power to coexist with superhuman ability, because showing systemic imbalances and abuses of power wouldn’t just paint their Presidents in a bad light, but their heroes too. There is only one kind of bad guy allowed here, and it’s the kind that can be defeated through CGI set pieces.
This means Marvel’s Presidents are forcibly cast in the same inconsequential mold as the sci-fi techies, evil wizards, and vengeful aliens—formidable for a moment, but not an existential threat. But unlike those other foes, a corrupt President is familiar to an audience, and these blockbuster depictions don’t hold water. These are enemies who belong to a system, and until Marvel cares to demonstrate that its heroes belong to one too, then we won’t recognize its society—and those who lead it—as anything like our own.
