Robert Downey Jr's Back At Marvel So Let's Discuss The MAGA Politics Of Doctor Doom
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The big reveal at last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con is that Robert Downey Jr. is returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, the Oscar-wining actor isn’t playing Iron Man again. Instead he’s donning a very different suit of armor as Doctor Doom, the main antagonist for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
The fifth Avengers movie was originally titled Kang Dynasty but Marvel recently fired Kang actor Jonathan Majors for very compelling reasons: Majors was found guilty in a domestic violence case, and Kang’s big-screen debut, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was a critical and commercial disappointment with too long a title. That’s worth a serious pivot.
Yes, there is obvious irony that Downey is replacing Majors as the next Marvel Big Bad. Downey was convicted on drug and weapons charges in 1999 and after parole violations, he was sentenced to three years in prison. (California Gov. Jerry Brown would later pardon Downey in 2015, perhaps assuming he really was an Avenger.) Iron Man director Jon Favreau took a risk with Downey that paid off for everyone involved. Majors avoided jail time, but it’s still wise for Marvel to cut ties with an unrepentant abuser. That’s too much “method” acting for a supervillain role.
Doom is my favorite Marvel character, so this casting news offers me the perfect excuse to discuss the geopolitics of a Fantastic Four story from 1982.
Doom the strongman leader
Some quick background: Victor Von Doom is the monarch of Latveria, a fictional European nation. He grew up in the margins of society as a member of the Romani people. (The comics at the time used the term “gypsy,” which is considered a slur these days. Even by the 1980s, “gypsies” in fiction were depicted as extras from a Universal horror movie.) His mother was also a witch. He had a challenging upbringing.
After he becomes Doctor Doom (without obtaining a doctorate), he overthrows the existing Latverian leadership and crowns himself king. This was usually considered a bad thing, because Doom is an insane megalomaniac bent on world domination. In 1978’s Fantastic Four 200, Doom is deposed and the Latverian people finally liberated. The seemingly noble Prince Zorba assumes the throne and promises democratic elections. Re-reading the story, I couldn’t help but feel the 2020 election vibes.
However, writer/artist John Byrne would turn these events on their head during his run on the series. In 1982’s Fantastic Four No. 246, Doom kidnaps “the accursed foursome” and transports them to Latveria, where in a shocking cliffhanger, he reveals that his beloved nation has gone to hell in his absence.
“When Victor Von Doom ruled here, Latveria was the richest, most prosperous nation in all Europe,” Doom declares like Donald Trump at one of his hate rallies. “No man or woman was without employment. No child went to bed hungry. Until Zorba’s followers stirred up discontent in factions of the populace, there was no crime, no civil strife. Look upon my native country now outlanders. Look, and tell me what you see!”
It’s true that Latveria is in bad shape. The Fantastic Four clearly didn’t leave the post-Doom regime with any sort of Marshall Plan. However, Doom was a dictator — notice how he claims there was “no crime, no civil strife.” Those are the hallmarks of a police state. As Ben Grimm observes in the following issue, despite Latveria’s bleak condition, “at least its people are free.”
Reed Richards agrees that the Latverian people “are well served to be rid of your iron fist over their heads each day.” Doom is wounded: “What great ills did I ever bring to my beloved people? I demanded of them only that they be obedient and happy.”
The Fantastic Four are stunned when a Latverian woman appears happy to see Doom, who she willingly and adoringly calls “Master.” Reed wisely advises against trusting too much in a sample of one here. After all, there are parts of America where the residents delight in the presence of convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump. However, the majority of America is glad he’s gone.
Doom’s MAGA-like supporter reveals that life was a paradise under Doom’s rule, and Zorba’s liberal policies have, well, doomed them all: “Zorba promised that after free elections, we would be even happier. So we all believed, until our foolish dreams were cruelly shattered. Zorba revoked the Master’s laws but also the threat of the Master’s punishments. Where once we had known safety in our homes and peace in the soothing darkness of the evening, now we knew fear and the nameless horrors which stalk the night. Latveria was re-learning crime.”
It’s a particularly authoritarian viewpoint that without the threat of punishment, otherwise peaceful people would devolve into rapists and murders, seemingly overnight. Of course, this is what too many people believe happened in U.S. cities that dared elect progressive prosecutors. The MAGA lady touches upon the more likely root cause of increased crime and violence when she says that Latveria “began to know poverty and hunger. Prices rose without reason and stocks were depleted without replacement.”
Zorba’s failings as a leader aren’t a failure of democracy itself, and the answer to Latveria’s problems isn’t democratic backsliding. Yet, the Fantastic Four soon accept the flawed premise that Latveria was better off as a dictatorship. Byrne depicts Zorba as a broken man, who responds to the people’s discontent like a petty tyrant. He imposes martial law and cancels the free elections he’d promised. He assigns a secret police to stifle dissent. Minor infractions such as violating curfew is now subject to summary execution.
Zorba laments that the ingrates don’t now how good they have it. “Have I not brought them the freedom that they craved?” (His people live under martial law.) “Doom is gone yet their actions force me to bring upon their heads punishment more terrible than any he ever conceived!”
A Latverian colonel tells Zorba that perhaps Doom “better understood the psychology of the masses.” The colonel claims that Doom rarely punished anyone. The threat of his punishment was sufficient to maintain order. That seems questionable. No society has built a rack just for deterrence. Folks wind up in the rack.
Zorba flips out and tries to murder his own people with killer robots. The Fantastic Four grudgingly align themselves with Doom, who kills Zorba and returns triumphantly to the throne. Doom plans to restore Latveria to its former glory and get back to his ultimate goal of destroying the Fantastic Four. He’s a great multitasker.
A superhero comic isn’t a documentary, but the Fantastic Four’s actions have bothered me ever since I read this as a kid. Even if they agreed that Doom was Latveria’s best option among two competing psychotics, they are still just four cosmic-ray powered Americans not the U.S. Congress or the president. They don’t have the authority to directly intervene in a foreign nation’s internal politics. I’m not naive about U.S. foreign policy. Our government has kept dictators in power so their nations wouldn’t become rogue states, but while this is perhaps a callous consideration, America is undeniably better off if Latveria collapses under Zorba’s unstable rule. Doom claims that before he took control Latveria was a “pitiful joke of country” that “would have been swallowed by the communist lands that surround our hills.” Soviet expansion was still considered a major threat in the 1980s but is that really the worst outcome, considering that Doom is a power-mad despot? He casually declares that his Latveria “might one day have ruled the world.” Doom’s feud with the Fantastic Four wasn’t a private matter, either. He frequently attacked the United States when trying to bump them off, and he’d do so again in their next encounter.
Still, Byrne’s depiction of Doom as a noble homicidal maniac is why the character resonates with me. (I still find myself asserting that I have “no use for petty falsehoods. What is a paltry mistruth in the grand arena within which my life is played?”) Like both Lucifer and Tony Stark, Doom’s fatal flaw is vanity and pride. Although, unlike Donald Trump, he actually has some positive traits: He’s brilliant, cunning, and resourceful. Downey Jr. can sell all this even if he never removes Doom’s mask. Now, let’s just hope J.D. Vance goes the way of the MCU’s Kang.
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You will see the kind of nostalgia for dictatorship shown in that comic in the former Yugoslavia- perhaps less so now than in the nineties or early thousands where a state holding onto the name still existed-but it exists. There's still graffiti praising Tito around the countries that used to make it up, for instance.
One of the things I think needs to be understood more in countries like the US (especially) but also the UK and other democracies is that strongman leaders, dictators and illiberal, repressive regimes do actually have appeal that can be understood. It's not a mystery why these people can get into power, and it's not a mystery how they can remain there. "Freedom" is great, if you have enough to eat and a home. Flag waving is one of the many reasons people like that strongman who can make their country something that, on the surface at least, somewhere the world respects.
The family lore is that Tito was after my great grandfather, who had fought against him in the war (he was a monarchist) and was, according to family lore, a big man in the local anticommunists in Kosovo. Tito was known to send assassins around the world to hunt down enemies of his regime, and he ran at least one prison camp off the coast of Croatia where people were basically left to die. By the end of her life, though, my grandma- the daughter of that great grandfather- was harking back to the golden age of Tito and wishing he would come back.
I was entirely unaware of this arc in FF. It's true that I largely ignored FF even though I was a comics nerd and a Marvel nerd at that. And it's true that I loved Byrne for his X-Men work. But FF had always turned me off.
I don't want to retcon myself as perfectly noble and not having bought in to sexism and racism of the end-70s when I first discovered comic books. I didn't reject whiteness or masculinity. But... I was called to identify with the outsiders, and the FF were not that. Captain America was the insider jock, and though he himself was always looking out for the little guy, he reminded me too much of the people who loathed and bullied me. Wolverine didn't speak to me because he seemed (at the time I encountered him) like someone that the insiders wanted as an insider, but he chose not to join them. Thor was a quintessential insider, but I liked him because I'd been reading mythology since I was 5 or 6. (Hamilton over Bullfinch, obviously.) In my eyes, he also got a boost from the Beta Ray Bill saga where he gets some outsider experience.
It was Black Panther, Cloak & Dagger some of the X-Men, most of the New Mutants, some of the PowerMan/Luke Cage stories -- these were the characters that spoke to me.
So even when Byrne went to FF, I didn't follow. I did read the issue where the mind-controlled Sue Storm trashed the other 3. (Spiking her force field to maximum surface area to stress the limits of Reed's stretching power and knock him out of the fight was, I thought, a particularly nice touch.) But on the whole... not my thing.
It's interesting to read about this now and speculate how I might have felt reading it at 11 years old. I suspect it wouldn't have resonated much b/c it would have simply challenged my ability to wilfully believe in the world and its characters. It seems quite Reaganite. While I wasn't anti-Reagan in 1982 (though ask me again in 84/85), that was more a lack of thinking about this than it was agreement with (or even grudging acceptance of) his worldview. Honestly, it makes me wonder about Byrne's politics (of which I know nothing).
Since I was already not that into FF, had I read this at the time (at a friend's house or having been given the issue(s), or however) I think my most likely response would have just been to put down the book as not making sense to me and without characters that emotionally resonated.
Anyway, thank you for an interesting side trip, SER. Like you, I'm curious as to how this will all play out on the big screen.