I’ve been thinking a lot about fantasies of hyper-ability lately. By “hyper-ability”, I mean superpowers: things you get from gamma rays, vats of toxic chemicals, and super-serum experiments, as well as from monster/transformation stories involving blood infections, like werewolves or vampires. In both cases the human body undergoes some sort of transformation/enhancement—sometimes Captain American pretty; sometimes Hulk or werewolf ugly—to acquire greater physical power.
Interestingly, led by the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 21st century militaristic bent, many or most of the recent stories of superpower acquisition—both in and out of comic book adaptations—have been in the service of developing a super-soldier or super weapon: Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, etc., as well as the “assets” in the Bourne franchise, smaller one-offs like Bloodshot and Hanna, even more recently in the Fast and Furious franchise). Or else they were scientific efforts supported by the military, which the scientists then had to hide from the military to avoid having them weaponized: like Ant Man and the Wasp, Captain Marvel, even some versions of Spiderman (or, really, the spiders that bit him).
Compare this to the wildly uneven DCEU, whose heroes and villains mostly come from elsewhere [Wonder Woman, Superman, Enchantress], acquired skills through hard work [Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, Katana], or met with accidents [The Flash, Cyborg], or “accidents” [Harley Quinn, The Joker]. It’s weird: the DCEU is much “darker”, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of grimdark violence; whereas the MCU is much brighter and more candy-colored—both literally and figuratively. But the MCU is military—or quasi-military, like S.H.I.E.L.D.—driven whereas the DCEU is mystery-and-magic-driven. Huh.
Anyway, what just occurred to me recently is how insanely unrealistic that is: the idea that that many resources would be put towards building a super-soldier. I mean: I don’t believe our society is so lost to militarism that we’ve abandoned the push-me-pull-you of human benefit and insane profits. We’re far too capitalist to ever go there. True militarism gets in the way of profit.
The United States, where these stories originate, has never been loath to sacrifice human bodies, especially the bodies of its young men, in the pursuit of whatever global strategic advantage the war du jour has offered. In the 21st century especially, we’ve shown a love for starting quagmire wars on the backs of lies. During this same period the military industrial complex has metastasized its influence by spreading manufacture of parts and equipment across all fifty states, giving those all-important unionized factory jobs to the voter base in every possible congressional district. This makes it impossible for federal-level legislators of either party to vote for defunding military contracts; they will be punished by having factories withdrawn from their districts.
And yet, with so many bodies involved in the manufacture of military equipment, we still managetounder-supply and under-protect our soldiers, preferring tospend money and resourceson mercenaries who cost us ten times as much. We involve bodies of all kinds in both labor and fighting; we sacrifice bodies of all kinds in labor and in fighting. But what is strengthened is the military-industrial complex itself; not the soldier, and not even, necessarily, the military. What is strengthened is corporate power; the power of money; the power of profit.
One of my favorite Bourne movies, The Bourne Legacy (yes, I know it wasn’t popular and I regret that,) is a favorite bc it locates the Blackbriar program, that Jason Bourne took down, in the context of a larger world of super-soldier programs. In these programs, mad scientists and empathy-stripped intelligence agents experiment with a variety of ways of simultaneously enhancing a body’s ability to wreak violence (and not get caught), while also increasingly controlling the subjects’ minds.
This film, unlike the others, valorizes scientists and their work, while also subjecting their bodies to the same use, abuse, and disposal the super-soldier subjects experience. When the beautiful woman scientist played by Rachel Weisz geeks out about “viral receptor mapping” and “minuscule changes to mitochondrial protein uptake” having massive effects on abilities, she says “it’s the most exciting development in genomic targeting in the history of the science” (and only about fifteen people had to die for it to happen.)
I can’t help listening to that and thinking: why would anyone’s first thought here be “super soldiers!” and not “medical applications!” (not to mention dollar signs)? Surely there’s more money in curing Alzheimer’s than in making soldiers more intelligent! Surely there’s more money in healing injuries and rebuilding atrophy than in bulking up the soldiers we already treat as disposable!
I can’t imagine that pharmaceutical conglomerates wouldn’t be the first to hear about these breakthroughs—government contracts or not—and the first to show up at a STEM grad student’s doorstep with a check and an NDA. Surely, in this country, money talks, and soldiers walk.
And in my beloved urban fantasy genre, particularly in werewolf stories—where there are built-in, just-sitting-there tropes of both endless healing factors, and of pack hierarchies and alphas— there’s a sub-trope of people (well, men) being deliberately turned into werewolves to make them better soldiers. And again my capitalist-raised heart cries out: why wouldn’t the corporations get there first, and offer lycanthropy to the rich to keep them young and healthy forever? Why would this controlled resource be wasted on bodies already deemed disposable?
Perhaps all this thinking is part of my own wish fulfillment: I would hope that if there were a science fictional or fantastical fix for my own disability, it would be available for medical purposes and not military. And maybe it’s part of my own cynicism: even already available fixes are already—still—being kept from disposable bodies for profit’s sake. After all, what’s the purpose of charging $400 for a vial of insulin, but only charging that to people who can’t afford insurance, if lower income people with chronic illness aren’t disposable? What’s the point of creating a “triage” order that shuts disabled people and elders entirely out of the chain of healing for COVID, if such folk are not disposable?
But the bottom line is that, in our fantasies, we see magical and futuristic superpowers being used to enhance bodies—or should I say, “bodyminds”?—for a larger, more noble purpose than merely saving that bodymind. As if salvation is a matter of numbers, and saving one bodymind is meaningless but saving incomprehensible numbers of bodyminds is heroic. Somehow, our imaginations have been co-opted by the military-industrial complex to only be able to conceive of military “defense” applications—“defense” as in “saving”; and nations as people rather than governments—as larger and more noble.
Like, why aren’t we seeing superpowers put in the service of nonprofits, or medical research, or raising foster children, or saving the whales? Why aren’t superpowers used to reverse climate change, put out historical wildfires, dam up broken levees, filter out microplastics, rebuild coral reefs? Why are we—in our best imaginations—giving them to individuals to … kill individuals? Maybe it’s simply because, in the wake of our early 2000s double-war, we learned to valorize soldiers (thank you for your service) rather than question their masters, so giving them … more doesn’t sound strange to us.
Whereas in real life, what is rapidly becoming superpowers—performance enhancing drugs, high-performance prosthetics, hi-tech clothing and shoes, advanced medicine and surgeries, etc. are available only to those who can afford it, and primarily for personal use. In the future, superpowers will only belong to the private citizen. And maybe that’s how we need to start imagining them.
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