let's be super villains

Feednet is a quarterly-ish news roundup on technology, community organizing. Read old versions here.

Notes on Feednet: Let's Be Supervillains

I’ve been watching a lot of dystopian movies with my roommates.  V for Vendetta, The Hunger Games: most dystopian movies, even the ones that are allegorical or have allusions to the current politic, feel kind of dated in 2020.  This is all well worn territory: dystopia was passe years ago.  Where is the fiction at this point?

If you want to see an unbelievable hellscape can’t you just… get on Twitter?

Watching these movies doesn’t make me feel anything -- maybe a numbed sense of dread, similar to the one that I feel when I turn on the news.

The most noticeable thing about watching these movies is how normal what’s happening (and the characters’ reactions to what’s happening) seem -- the surveillance, the repression, the barely contained trauma responses.

I remember watching the second Hunger Games when it came out thinking “What is wrong with Katniss?”

Watching the same scenes last week I felt more like “Why does Katniss tolerate these naive idealists?”

What feels most dated is how each film’s Revolution (when it eventually comes to pass) seems to just… happen. Crowds gather, ideas spread, riots tear apart the fascist government without much effort or energy or organizing on the part of the protagonists.

You could go all Lenin on me here with “well what we see in 2020 shows this is true -- history is a cycle, nothing happens for years then everything happens in a week.”

And anyone who has felt like they’re not “doing enough” for uprising throughout the years can testify to the way that a revolution can happen easily without one or two people’s participation in it.

But if fiction is a reflection of our own lives + the conflict within them, with values superimposed over the reflection whether we like it or not, the dystopian genre is pretty unfulfilling for prison abolitionists.

George RR Martin wrote his whole ass bummer fantasy book series as an answer to the question “What does it mean that Aragon governed well for 150 years? What does that even look like?

A secondary question to the Hunger Games, or any sort of vaguely insurrectionist popular media: Who built your movement and how?

This brings up a whole boring chain of inquiry, something like “What were your meetings like? How did you fundraise? Who was in charge of snack logistics?”

But at the heart of it, what I want to know is: how did you live with yourself in between the days where everything happened?

Luckily, I think there’s a whole genre of fiction characters that better encapsulate how to live through our daily mundane apocalypses.

Instead of paying attention to boring grim dark superheroes* or having our trauma mirrored by dystopian fantasy revolutionaries, maybe the key to living better under fascism is following the lead of supervillains.

This is nothing new.  Villains are always racially coded, queer coded, trans coded, etc.

Smarter people than me have written about the ways that villains reflect what society is afraid of. Poison Ivy is a literal ecoterrorist which is kind of funny and on the nose until you read about the way the British government persecuted the Animal Liberation Front. Every Disney villain is gay. But beyond critique of the dominant culture, their stories give insight into how to live with joy in a time of chaos.

Emma Goldman spent her whole life caught between two skeins. I had to look the word “skein” up because I didn’t get politicized in a 19th century mill, but apparently this is a wool thing.

In her autobiography Goldman writes that she always felt torn between devoting her whole soul to the fight against injustice + for anarchy and leaving some room in her life for joy, tawdry polyamorous romances (implied), and parties.

This tension is where her famous “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution” quote came from, encapsulating the internal struggle that she dealt with her entire life.

The only solution she found was to try to make room for both, seeing the joy in the struggle and the political struggle she saw in experiencing joy.

No one demonstrates successfully navigating these two skeins better in popular culture than super villains.

For super villains, there is no single moment of revolution, and it’s unlikely that they would be the Mockingjay of any revolution anyway.

In between the days when everything happens, they run out of money. They have theories and perspectives denied by everyone around them. They team up + build coalitions that work until they don’t anymore. Many of them are basically doing the only thing worth doing: trying something over and over again that seems impossible, towards a better world.

They laugh at inappropriate moments and in inappropriate ways. They live with integrity, embrace their flaws, and do exactly what they want to be doing.

To paraphrase Mariame Kaba, they’re fully embracing “Try Everything 2020”.

Besides Emma Goldman, who is a super villain you admire, and why?

- H

*If you do want to pay attention to superheroes, you should watch the new Watchmen.