When Rebellion—and Martial Law—Are In the Air

Hollywood clearly has Trump’s number

Hollywood—or Disney+ at least—clearly has Trump’s number.

Many readers wondered at the precision with which Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale anticipated Trump’s patriarchal MAGA world. Then, the very year Trump gained the White House, Disney’s Hulu cablecast Atwood’s prescient vision for all to stream.

Not merely a "dystopian" novel, Atwood's is all the more frightening for its realism. Some of us are familiar with Atwood's process in writing The Handmaid's Tale, which she began working on while living in West Berlin in 1984: how she made nothing up, but took only real instances of oppression that she saw in the news or knew of from her studies at Harvard. In an essay published in Lit Hub in 2018, Atwood explains: "The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself."

"Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already," she writes in her Lit Hub piece, "The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."

That period of social chaos has no doubt arrived.

Here, the Canadian author seemed to forecast with the book's publication in 1985, here is where America is headed. Trump 2.0 seems to be bearing her out. Now in its sixth season, heroine June Osborne (Elizabeth Moss) is leading the rebellion against oligarchic Gilead. We watch with bated breath as the final season draws to a close.

At Disney, apparently, rebellion fills the air. Andor is the Star Wars prequel about the early formation of the rebellion against the Empire. The second most expensive series in television history (after Game of Thrones), many call Andor, “Star Wars for grown-ups.” As the rebellion experiences growing pains, the empire seeks to grow. To do so the empire has its eye on planet Ghorman’s rare kalkite, a mineral needed to coat the lens of the future Death Star, a doomsday machine the rebels don’t even know to dread yet. To get the kalkite, the empire has orchestrated a fruitless Ghorman rebellion to give them reason to seize the planet. Martial law is the ready answer to those pesky rebels.

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna)

Progressives who seek to resist Trump 2.0, take note. When a Constitutional conflict arises—as when Trump, legally cornered, refuses a Supreme Court ruling—Trump’s declaration of martial law will surely be his solution.

In the last of season two’s so-far released episodes (nine of twelve), “Welcome to the Rebellion,” Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) addresses the Imperial Senate. The empire’s Fox News-like broadcasters, following the imperial line, have declared the rebels to blame for the massacre on Ghorman. The Ghorman “rebellion or insurgency” and the loss of many an imperial “martyr”—many of them Storm Troopers—is in every senator’s mouth. Senator Mothma, however, rises in the Imperial Senate to say, no, it was an unprovoked genocide by imperial forces. Then she nails not only Emperor Palpatine but Trump and his Big Lie:

The loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever the monster screams the loudest….

The monster we helped create is Emperor Palpatine.

Or, if you will, Trump.

Mothma gets at the heart of our problem—though it’s a heart that is two-chambered. Because truth has died, we are vulnerable to the monster who screams the loudest. That’s one side. The other is that we helped create the monster.

The Star Wars franchise isn’t alone in embracing a rebellious spirit. Marvel’s Daredevil Born Again is about the long battle between the good-hearted Matt Murdoch/Daredevil and New York City underworld kingpin Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). Fisk’s backstory? He’s a patricide. At twelve he killed his father. With a clawed hammer.

In a plot twist perhaps the equal of real estate tycoon Donald Trump becoming president (twice!), Fisk—who’s done a jolt in high-security prison and whose gangster ways are widely known—runs for mayor on an anti-vigilante platform. Apparently, you can shoot someone on 5^th Avenue—or many a dark alley—and not lose a vote. After winning, he proposes A Safer Streets Initiative which city councilors resist: “It’s insane,” one says, ripping dialogue from past New York Times headlines, “It makes ‘Stop and Frisk’ look like daycare.” But Fisk has an opposition research dossier on each of them, as deep as the Russians’ pee-tape on Trump. They cave. The police commissioner? Echoing his act of patricide, Fisk this time caves the man’s head in, barehanded. Members of the boys in blue watch, aghast, but toe the blue line. With that, Mayor Fisk all but openly assumes office as Mayor Kingpin. Like Trump, his reign is gangland-style.

Having orchestrated reasons to declare a state of martial law, Fisk, like Trump a master of media, addresses the city in a video feed:

Good morning. We survived together. As you may know there was an attempt on my life by a vigilante last night and in the act of sabotage our city's power grid was disrupted. Now facing rampant lawlessness, Commissioner Gallo chose to resign, to turn his back on the people of New York. The thin blue line has broken. I will not allow you to live in fear though. I am enacting my Safer Streets Initiative. Effective immediately, all vigilante activity is illegal and will be dealt with accordingly. Curfew is at 8:00 PM. And in the immediate future New York City is under martial law. Now, with the rule of law restored we can go back to our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness together in the finest city in the world.

Never forget. I love New York.

That last bit of pablum is pure Trump.

But the Daredevil season gives the last words to the two vigilantes who are the thorns in Fisk’s side. First Daredevil, who’s committed to not taking lives, in a voiceover intones:

But this is our city, not his, and we can take it back together.

The weak, the strong, all of us.

Resist. Rebel. Rebuild.

Because we are the city without fear.

Then we watch as Punisher, a mayhem machine for whom the end justifies the means, breaks his jailer’s arm to make his break for freedom.

I’m sure the Marvel overlords are rushing to get season three out to small screens. They must love the mayhem Trump causes, more fodder for season three.

There are three more episodes to come in Andor. I for one am dying to see how the rebellion takes shape, just as I can’t wait to see how ours does, too.

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