There are now dueling views on whether or not Thanos is really the villain of Avengers: Infinity War.
On the one hand, Thanos is Trump. What, that wasn’t obvious to you? Over at the Root, Michael Harriot explains that “Avengers: Infinity War is a documentary about the Trump administration and how white people want to run the world. The villain of the movie is an old, wrinkled, powerful villain named Thanos J. Trump who wants all the power of the universe and really loves his daughter even though she is in love with an inadequate doofus.” (I’m pretty sure Harriot is kidding, but there is a whole Thanos-Trump meme out there.) So Thanos is clearly the bad guy.
Unless he isn’t! Because in a neo-Malthusian world, Thanos and his plan to wipe out half the beings in the universe because of overpopulation is, admittedly, a little extreme. And maybe misunderstood. But fundamentally kind of on to something.
No, really. Here’s Slate (of course) arguing that “when Thanos suggests that life has expanded beyond our environment’s ability to sustain it, he kind of has a point.” Here’s Inverse: “His ‘evil’ plan makes a certain amount of rational sense: The greatest enemy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t Thanos; it’s overpopulation that will eventually lead to famine and ruin.” Here’s Forbes tip-toeing up to the line before throwing up their hands and saying It’s complicated!
Here’s Josh Brolin—who plays Thanos it the forkin’ movie—”You want to write him off as insane. And yet what he’s doing makes sense, if you break it down.”
And to be honest, I have a certain weakness for these kinds of arguments, because it is now settled-science that movies often confuse the good guys and the bad guys.
Except that when it comes to Thanos, there’s no real way to make that case. As Sonny Bunch observes, Thanos is more or less a stand in for Paul Ehrlich, and as such, he’s wrong on the real-world merits, obviously. Overpopulation may be a problem for butterfly colonies, but it is not a problem for humanity because, unlike insects, humans have both technology and labor economics. Don’t @ me—just check the scoreboard. We’re now at a point where even the New York Times the rest of the bien pensant world admits that the author of The Population Bomb was fool who caused a great deal of misery.
But strip the real world out of it. Even within the fictionalized world of Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos’ motivation can’t be read as anything other than irrational cruelty. The MCU movies take place inside a reality where the Stark ARC reactor provides nearly unlimited clean energy. There is advanced nanotechnology. Interstellar travel has become a trivial concern for many species. In what political-economic context could these developments coincide with resource shortfalls of food? If you can jump from star to star with a nanotech-driven suit then you can probably grow a whole lot of soybeans. Or turn kelp into a superfood.
But wait—there’s more! So Thanos spends a decade’s worth of movies trying to assemble the Infinity Gauntlet so that he has the power to permanently alter reality so that he can kill half of the universe in order to keep them from starving. Because using the Infinity Gauntlet to double food production would be … too hard?
So no, Thanos isn’t secretly the hero of Avengers: Inifinity War and no, his motivation doesn’t actually make any sense. Obviously, the real hero is Hawkeye, who had the sense to walk away from this mess when he could.
