Thanos Made No Reasonable Points

A post in which I get oddly serious about a film that could easily have been subtitled
"Bruised Bollockman And The Genestealer Infestation"

It's inevitable that after a sci-fi blockbuster movie has been on release for a few days that people are going to start arguing that the bad guy had a point.

Arguments along those lines are not necessarily a bad thing. Ultron, for instance, absolutely had a point, one so strong Age of Ultron had to have him attempt genocide simply to hide the fact that his criticism of the Avengers as enforcers for a grotesque status quo could be safely forgotten.

It doesn't track from this that every villain has at least something of a case, though. This should be obvious enough from the horrifying crypto-fascist (heavy on the fascist, light on the cryto-) defences of the Empire/First Order that keep popping up following the return of Star Wars to our cinemas. And while we might want to quibble over the respective degrees to which they reveal horrifying politics on the part of those making the argument, putting forward the case that Thanos was right is, at least, equally ridiculous as saying maybe the Death Star counts as economic stimulus.

Avengers: Infinity War spoilers below.

So just how bad is the idea of removing half of all sentient life in the universe in order to allow those that remain access to more resources? Let's start with the maths. Earth currently has around 7.6 billion inhabitants. Half of that is 3.8 billion, which was the population of the planet in somewhere around 1972. Even keeping everything else equal (so ignoring, say, the scale of industrial accidents and loss of resources his random removal of almost four thousand million people will have caused), Thanos has turned back the clock less than half a century.

But it wasn't just Earth, of course. It was everywhere. No matter what the current state of population or technology levels, every species just got their numbers halved - including the Asgardians, from what Thor tells the Guardians. That alone should be enough to demonstrate how utterly terrible Thanos' plan is. I'm quite sure there genuinely are people evil enough to argue half a boatload of refugees is less of an intolerable drain on resources than a full one, but the rest of us should be smart enough to spot the villainous stupidity at play there.

This is of course generalisable. Broadly speaking, under the ridiculous simple principles under which Thanos himself is operating, there are three types of population - those small enough that this approach is at best currently unnecessary and at work actively endangering them, those like us for which (again at best) Thanos is merely fighting a delaying action, and those for which their resources are already almost used up, and will therefore not "benefit" even by Thanos' twisted and horrific definition of the term.

None of which is actually the problem. Plenty of people have entirely terrible ideas about how to change the world, and there's no reason not to make them into supervillains so their nonsense can be exposed/ridiculed/punched in the face by Chris Hemsworth. It's not like there's any shortage of real people willing to argue the only way humanity can survive is if we all agree there should just be fewer of us knocking around. Thanos' insistence that it's overpopulation that prevents everyone from having enough to live on is a standard talking point across much of the political spectrum.

And it's a total lie. We don't lack sufficient resources for the world's population because there's too many of us. We don't lack sufficient resources at all.We simply live in a system which refuses to actually distribute the resources we already have. Just as capitalism allows factories to stand idle whilst people are unemployed and other people need what that factory could be making, it allows millions to live on the brink of starvation or past it whilst food rots behind supermarkets. Humanity is already close to providing enough food for the entire planet, and could easily reach and surpass that goal with various tweaks to where we put our efforts. People don't starve because we can't feed them. They starve because our system lets them. In short, as others have already pointed out on Twitter, if capitalism survives Thanos' halving of the population, his grotesque means haven't even achieved his supposedly desirable ends.

Avengers: Infinity War comes so close to actually realising this. It sets up a villain with the literal power over reality itself, and has him murder billions of people instead of just creating more resources. The idea of removing scarcity never occurs to him, it's just something he's hardwired to believe is a universal constant, so utterly inescapable that the murder of uncountable trillions is considered a more sensible response than trying to change the rules. He absolutely has the power to help people directly, rather than concocting some hideous bullshit argument as to why mass death is somehow a tragic necessity if life in general is to continue, but it never occurs to him to use it. The parallels here to capitalism really don't take much teasing out.

But the film doesn't bother to try. And that's my problem. Not that Thanos is a completely unsympathetic villain with a terrible plan. The fact the text doesn't actually take the time to point this out. In fact, it comes uncomfortably close to doing the opposite, by not contesting Thanos' own claim that Gamora's people are actually living in a paradise now fifty percent of them are dead. As a result, Avengers: Infinity War is able to imply that Thanos might actually achieve a desirable outcome, with it only being his approach that can't be justified. "We don't trade lives", as the film's own thematic beat has it. The fact that this sentiment is originally expressed by a character literally named after a country for which capitalism has become a religion, and that it's then reiterated whilst in an African country that has hid from the world for centuries precisely because African lives are just what capitalism keeps trading in order to keep itself afloat, just underlines how totally the film fails to understand its own plot.

This also makes it difficult to believe that the second film might be able to solve these problems. It's simply too focused on the idea that no change is worth enacting if it causes deaths, no matter how many bodies need to be pushed under the status quo's crumbling foundations in order to keep it upright.

So no. What's most notable about Thanos isn't that he wasn't entirely wrong. It's that the film that revolves around his villainy doesn't allow him to be entirely wrong enough.

(As a side note, the fact that so many of the characters who are turned to dust following Thanos' victory are woman and/or people of colour might actually have been thematically appropriate, had Thanos actually coherently been presented as someone willing to end lives rather than admit capitalism is inherently destructive. Of course the sacrifice he demands falls disproportionately on those who aren't white men. So has it ever been.

That said, though, even were the film smart enough to make that work, we'd still be faced with the possibility of the next film being far more crammed with white dudes than this one, especially with Hawkeye and Ant Man liable to stick their fletched/tiny oars in, respectively. It says a great deal about Avengers: Infinity War that, for all that I mostly enjoyed as I was watching it, the only film it actually made me want to see was Captain Marvel.)