Communism and the Fantastic Four Reboot
Can the Hollywood reboot of The Fantastic Four, now in the works, succeed where the original movies failed? It all depends on whether producer Matthew Vaughn and director Josh Trank have the guts to do one thing: To make The Fantastic Four about the family versus communism.
The Fantastic Four was the comic that launched the Marvel Comics revolution back in 1961; it came before The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, and The X-Men. It was also for many years Marvel’s best comic, depicting a family of four members who gain superpowers but still can’t stop acting like a family–i.e. arguing, getting on each others nerves, and resolving conflict with humor and love (the FF was The Incredibles decades before The Incredibles).
Another large part of the success of the FF had to do with the comic’s great menagerie of villains, from the Mole Man to Galactus and Dr. Doom.
Dr. Doom is one of the greatest villains to ever come from the minds of his creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He’s also far and away the most tragically misused in the first two failed Fantastic Four movies. For reasons that remain unclear and are probably inexplicable anyway, they changed Doom’s entire history. In the comic, Victor von Doom is a brilliant scientist and friend of Reed Richards. Doom is interested in science but also craves forbidden knowledge found in the occult. He is conducting a dangerous experiment one day when Richards tells him that his calculations are off. Doom, an egomaniac, dismisses Richards, and the experiment blows up, badly disfiguring Doom. Doom goes nuts and flees into exile, spending years in Tibet where he studies black magic and constructs a suit of armor. He surfaces later as the dictator of Latveria, “a small country not far from communist-occupied eastern Europe.”
This is such a wonderful back story that it is mystifying why the first Fantastic Four films altered it, instead making Doom a simple mad scientist. One of the things that make the first Dr. Doom stories so great is the way writer Stan Lee depicted Doom’s version of communism. Latveria wasn’t just a totalitarian country; it was one where the subjects must always, at all times, appear happy. They walk around the city shopping, raising children, and doing other seemingly normal things, but behind the placid faces is cold fear. Again and again Doom monologues about how all he wants is for his beloved subjects to be happy–and all he asks in return is total blind obedience. In communism, as in other totalitarian systems, the state is supposed to take the place of the family. There’s little doubt that in Latveria there is round the clock child care–if they let families stay together at all–and school textbooks that would embarrass an Iranian Madrassa.
The contrast between Doom and his counterparts in the Fantastic Four offers a profound lesson. The Fantastic Four–Reed Richards, his wife Sue, her brother Johnny Storm, and their friend Ben Grimm–are forever bickering, breaking apart, reforming, and coming to each other’s rescue. They are, like all families, dysfunctional and emotional. They suffer from all the problems that come with freedom, and have a love grounded in freedom that is stronger than anything any government can provide. For Victor von Doom the world was not enough, and when he paid the price for wanting forbidden knowledge, he was forced to create an ersatz family. But they are subjects, not siblings.
Sounds to me like the plot of a pretty cool movie.
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Good thoughts. I wasn’t aware how much the movies adjusted Doom’s backstory.
They had to revamp him, as the old Doom was something that no longer existed. That idea of the despot leader of a feudal Eastern European satellite country of communism is dated, and Doom was always at risk of descending into parody. Ironically, DC seemed to do him better when they made Shazam villain Black Adam into a middle-eastern version of Doom.
I think that they should focus on Franklin Richards, Reed and Sue’s son. While Communism isn’t an issue, family is, and the Incredibles picked up on that aspect of the FF and amplified it into a great movie. The FF is really a unique superteam in the history of comics, and it’s tough to film them. They almost belong to a different era.
Latveria wasn’t a communist country, it was an absolute monarchy. The comics are very clear on this. There’s no party, no legislature, just the will of its ruler, Doom.
Epic fail.
Ah, my friend… don’t you know that in the conservative universe, any form of government they don’t like is therefore communism? Why else would President Obama — who regularly folds like a bad poker hand when at the gaming table with Wall Street — be tarred so frequently with the commie brush?
I guess that is you can contort logic enough to classify Adolf Hitler a socialist (a popular right-wing maneuver), any leap of imagination is possible.
You mean Hitler, the head of the National Socialist German Workers Party?
Yeah, that’s totally different than Stalin.
No, we mean the Hitler who declared that “Marxians have stolen the term [socialism] and confused its meaning” and also said that “Communism is not socialism. Marxism is not socialism.”
We mean the Hitler who rounded up the socialists (as intelligent non-Mark Judge people understand the term) for extermination before he moved on to the Jews.
Yes that’s right — because Hitler used the word “Socialist” in the name of his party, that makes him one. I’ll bet you think that Kraft Singles are genuine cheese, since it says “cheese food” right on the package.
I’m not going to go into a lengthy analysis about why Hitler’s politics were the very antithesis of socialism, though I will mention that he admitted in “Mein Kampf” to choosing his party name in order to confuse members of the German Socialist, Marxist and Communist parties, as well as steal potential members from them. Furthermore, he banned all trade unions, as well as the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky — while refusing to nationalize the nation’s assets, or interfere in any way with the wealth of non-Jewish bankers and industrialists. Finally, socialist theory stood foursquare against anti-semitism, which Marx saw as a means to divide workers and the poor.
If Hitler was a socialist, he wasn’t worth a tinker’s cuss at it.
No matter what you say, Adrian, Hitler was a socialist because it says socialist in Nazi. Bad people are socialists. Hitler was bad. The Swedes are Nazis. Get it?
It all depends on whether producer Matthew Vaughn and director Josh Trank have the guts to do one thing: To make The Fantastic Four about the family versus communism.
Yeah, they should totally do that. They’d have another Zyzzyx Road blockbuster on their hands.
Good article. Actually, there are examples of Dr. Doom’s Latveria alive and well if totally disfunctional — just look at North Korea.
The Fantastic Four’s stable of villains is interesting, because once you get beyond Doom, you get more explicitly Communist foes like the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes, and other enemies that are all about the abnegation of free will (like, for instance, the Puppet Master). Or cosmic-scale threats like Galactus that are menacing because they make us puny humans feel insignificant and unregarded by forces beyond our ken.
If Dr Doom’s Latveria is meant to stand for a Communist regime, the most salient points are probably its false utopianism and the cult of personality around Doom. Otherwise, I don’t think Doom ever even claims Latveria is communist, because he is openly an autocrat: his lie is in claiming that his “enforced monarchy” is only for the people’s good. Unlike a cult leader figure like the Mole Man, Doom backs up his rule not with subtle manipulation but with iron-fisted technological and sorcerous coercion.
I agree Latveria deserves to be included in the next film. I’d love to see a Fantastic Four film that doesn’t shy away from the bizarre, outlandish, (dare I say) fantastic elements of the source material. The Incredibles gave more of a sense of a broader universe of superheroics than any Fantastic Four movie — you would think they were the ones with the comic book legacy going back to Jack Kirby. So bring on Doomstadt! Bring on Castle Doom!