The discussion on-line around Civil War has taken the form of that most American political debate does. It treats the Constitution like scripture, and the 'Founding Fathers' like a group of semi-deities.
Although I'd need more research to say, I think that Americans might have a form of secular worship of their political system, which is ironic given that one of the central ideas of their system is a constant libertarian suspicion of their government! Perhaps the ability to hold those contradictory ideas simultaneously is like, for example, the ability for a Catholic to perceive the Trinity as both three and one at the same time? Religion is full of holy paradoxes.
The fan-based discussion about the series that I've seen didn't boil down to "Are you one Captain America's side or Iron-man's side?" A few people responded that way, but very few. Most took on the political dimensions of the question in a very honest way. What would be more safe? Can we really trust the US government to use Iron-man responsibly as just another piece of military hardware? Etc.
Where that argument gets fuzzy, though, is that realist vs. abstract reading we're talking about in the other message. I think the creators of the story are expecting an abstract reading in which the story is about 'privacy vs. civil liberties,' but the details of the story are so concrete that, to me, it begs for a literal reading, 'vigilantism vs. the police state.'
As for Moore and Miller, Watchmen is definitely all about these kinds of questions. The heroes are forced to either join up with the government or give up their masks in the 1970s (an interesting parallel to the HUAC in which comics themselves were forced to take on self-censorship). Once the US governmentt has control of Dr. Manhattan and The Comedian, they become just more parts of the American arsenal.
The really interesting thing about Watchmen, though, is the strong implication that the way to solve the problem is to just get rid of the superheroes altogether, which is an option that mainstream superhero comics can even contemplate. Civil War will almost undoubtedly end with Cap and Iron Man joining forces to stop some country-wide threat, thus convincing the public that they're necessary, and giving the politicians no motivation to outlaw them. I suspect we'll see a very similar ending to the new Superman film this summer, which brings up some very compelling ideas (Superman returns after four or fives years in space to find that the world has grown out of him, and Lois has a child by another man!), but will probably avoid actually coming to a conclusion by introducing a suitably distracting threat to human life.
There's some fascinating research that's floating around the last Presidential election that shows that when directly confronted with their own mortality, in an advertisement featuring a pack of wolves for example, people stop thinking either collectively or rationally. They start thinking merely of their own survival. Therefore, in a small way, introducing those kinds of threats to characters with whom the audience identifies is a great way of distracting an audience away from an ideological problem that might only be soluble by abandoning the narrative, and this gets back to Moore. He abandoned not the narrative, but the genre. Marvel and DC can't do that. It would be economic suicide; therefore their only option is to bring in a giant threat that will distract us and lead the question essentially unanswered.
Posted by orion at May 13, 2006 3:36 PM