Eugenics in The Guardians of The Galaxy Vl 3
Image; Captured Disney+
The Guardian of the Galaxy series is about a ragtag group of scoundrels ranging from a super-intelligent, trigger-happy raccoon named Rocket (Bradley Cooper) to the smart-talking, rock-loving human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). These beings face up against foes that threaten the stability of the galaxy — all while making nifty quips and doing everything to the beat of a great music playlist.
The series has always been one of the more fun parts of the MCU for me. Set apart from the shenanigans happening on Earth (mostly that is), it has given the series more breathing room to do its own thing while still being within the MCU. It's not strange to see Thanos, Howard the Duck, and other fantastic elements here because we are in space, and the realism of Earth can be set aside.
In the first movie, the Guardians faced off against an emissary of the tyrant Thanos called Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), who wanted to destroy the space-faring civilization, Xander. In the second one, they defeated Quill's dad, Ego (Kurt Russell), a narcissistic space blob who wanted to remake all of creation into himself. The third movie, Volume 3, had a villain equally as destructive but with motivations far more “sensible,” albeit sickeningly so. Like Thanos's ecological Malthusian in the Infinity Saga, our antagonist's actions are rooted in a drive that is sadly all too real: the desire to make all organisms in the universe biologically "perfect."
In other words, our villain is a eugenist — i.e., he believes in the purposeful breeding of "desirable" traits — and that seems like a dastardly motivation worth sinking our teeth into.
MCU eugenics
We first meet The High Evolutionary (played by the exceptional and scene-stealing Chukwudi Iwuji), the movie's primary antagonist, when he is talking down to the High Priestess Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) of a subordinate race he created called The Sovereign. He condescends to his creations, claiming he created them merely as an "aesthetic experiment" and sees no problems in culling their entire civilization.
The High Evolutionary's plan from the beginning to the end of this film is to create a perfect race of beings and place them in a new world called Counter-Earth. He believes he can biogenetically engineer perfection through the scientific method and has created countless "experiments," including one of our protagonists, Rocket, in the process. As he says later in the film to Rocket:
“It’s our sacred mission to take the cacophony of sounds around us and turn it into a song. To take an imperfect clump of biological matter such as you and transform it into something perfect.”
His perspective is not subtle, and — I need to stress this because this view about evolution has been repeated so often that some actually believe it — it's also utter nonsense. There is no such thing as evolutionary perfection. Natural selection — the vehicle that guides what we think of as evolution — is the process of an organism passing genes on to the next generation to adapt to its specific environment. If its genes are "good enough" to do that, they will be passed on — it has nothing to do with what traits are "objectively" better. The belief that certain traits are naturally and absolutely superior is not an objective assessment but a value judgment based on one's own morals.
It's also worth noting that this pursuit of "evolutionary perfection" has been historically used in the real world to justify horrible atrocities in the name of "progress." The Nazis are one such example, as they conceptualized their social problems as being the result of "hereditary factors," justifying the implementation of the holocaust, but we can also point to America's homegrown eugenics movement in the 1900s. White supremacists used the theory to advocate for a belief in scientific racism, likewise claiming that eugenics would "eliminate mental illness, physical disabilities, moral delinquency, crime, and even physical illnesses." It helped lead to the passage of things like miscegenation laws (i.e., banned marriages between white people and Black and Brown people) that had devastating consequences on social minorities in America. To this day, there are still people claiming that eugenics is practical, especially with the emergence of the ability to live-edit human DNA (see eugenics fears around Crispr).
However, it's important to remember that eugenics is only ever viewed as a positive by the individuals with some or all of the allegedly desirable traits — i.e., those at the top of the hierarchy. If something is "desirable," then conversely, something else must be classified as "undesirable." And for those who don't meet the criterion for such desirability, people who are often sick, disabled, or belong to a social minority, then eugenics has been quickly used as an excuse to discard them (as the histories we have already mentioned painfully tell us).
We see this callousness embodied in how the High Evolutionary views Rocket. He was one of the High Evolutionary's many experiments, and when Rocket was no longer deemed useful, he and his friends were discarded. "Look at you," the High Evolutionary mocks to Rocket shortly before giving the order to kill all of the talking raccoon's friends. "As if you were cobbled together by fat-fingered children. How could you be part of a perfect species? You're simply a medley of mistakes we could learn from and apply to creatures that truly mattered." It's a chilling line that you can imagine coming out of the lips of a Nazi eugenist as much as a mad space tyrant.
Yet Rocket, despite coming from the near-bottom of the High Evolutionary's pseudo-scientific hierarchy, has an exceptional brain. He is brilliant, even able to solve a crucial scientific problem that has stumped the High Evolutionary. This brilliance from someone whom our antagonist perceives as inferior further drives the High Evolutionary mad with resentment. He becomes determined to dissect Rocket's brain, convinced that it will allow his experiments (which, again, are sentient creatures) to be genuinely innovative, while, simultaneously being unable to realize that Rocket's existence invalidates his entire ideology of evolutionary perfection.
Despite what the High Evolutionary may claim, the narrative constantly shows us how value can come from anywhere and everywhere. Another example is the Guardian Drax, whom most people on his team undervalue for having "lower-than-normal" intelligence. However, he still has knowledge and skills to bring to the table, such as knowing the Orbose language, a language that the rest of the Guardians are ignorant of and need to know once they reach Counter-Earth. However, no one on his team initially realizes Drax has this skill because they don't bother asking him for his perspective. When you automatically discard people based on preconceived notions, you lose all the skills and insights they might possess.
The Sovereign creation Warlock also falls into this camp. He was meant to be the "apogee" of his people but came out of his cocoon early, a little stunted. The High Evolutionary and even the High Priestess (his mother figure) believe Warlock to be only valid as a blunt instrument, but he is the one to save Quill from certain death at the end of the film.
Simply because someone fails to meet a person's conception of usefulness doesn't mean they can't have value in other ways.
A heroic conclusion
The film ends with a solid refutation of the genetic superiority the High Evolutionary clings to. He is not able to create a perfect utopia with his experiments. There is still crime and poverty on Counter-Earth because his arbitrary traits for perfection are not enough to fix these social problems that are more the purview of politics than genetics. The High Evolutionary appears stuck in an endless cycle where the "perfect" worlds he creates always fail to meet his impossibly high standards. So he razes them to the ground, ignoring that he, as the architect of these "imperfect" places, might be wrong.
As the Guardians blow up his flagship, Rocket decides to rescue not only the sentient lifeforms aboard but also the "pre-evolved" animals. He does this because he was once one of them, a pre-evolved raccoon, and this realization causes him to expand his empathy for all the experiments aboard. Unlike the High Evolutionary's fascistic myth of racial perfection, Rocket decides not to draw lines in the sand over what sentient life is valuable, and what is more heroic than that?