The TV Show ‘Loki’ Gets Fascism All Wrong
Image: Marca; edited via LunaPic
Loki was a show that tried to cover a lot of things in its six-episode run-time: as with any Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) property, it continued the larger cinematic narrative, specifically the fallout following the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019); it introduced the concept of multiverses; forecasted our next big bad; on top of having a philosophical conversation about if free will even exist alongside nonlinear time. There is a ton to parse, here and not all of these concepts play nicely with one another.
Underneath all of this bluster, however, there is a rather interesting conversation about fascism. The main protagonist interacts with a fascist empire that arguably transcends the enemies of the previous films. We are given a rather visceral example of what fascism can look like, at least initially — something that should be applauded in any film representation when done right.
Unfortunately, Loki very problematically has constructed a narrative where fascism is needed to protect the universe from an even larger threat. This creates a story that undercuts its original premise and leaves the audience with an empathetic portrayal of fascism.
Loki is a show about the titular God of Mischief, on the run from a temporal time agency known as the Time Variance Authority (TVA), which is trying to create “order” across the timeline. The show immediately follows the events of Avengers: End Game, where a version of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in 2012 escapes the clutches of the Avengers and teleports away with the Tesseract.
This version of Loki is quickly captured by the TVA, who label him a “variant” to the “Sacred Timeline” (his teleportation was not “supposed” to happen). They threaten to “prune” him from existence if he does not help time agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) track down another, deadlier Loki (Sophia Di Martino) killing time agents across history. This setup leads to many fun shenanigans across time and space, but it also sets up a dynamic where we have a fascist organization employing a fascist to preserve themselves.
Before we go into that contentious claim, a quick aside on fascism, some will erroneously declare that fascism was a political movement that started and ended in the early 20th century. Fascism, however, has evolved over the decades to incorporate different rhetoric and iconography. These movements are varied, but they are generally united in an ideology centered around nationalism and authoritarianism. As fascist scholar Robert Paxton writes in his book Anatomy of Fascism (2004):
“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
The Wikipedia-version of that mouthful of words is a nationalistic regime using extreme violence in the name of stopping some threat to kill others and expand their territorial holdings.
In the show Loki, our protagonist, definitely starts out as a leader with fascist aspirations. This version of Loki just finished trying to take over all of humanity in the film Avengers (2012). He is definitely driven by what scholar Umberto Eco describes in their essay Ur-Fascism (1995) as contempt for the weak. Loki believes that sentient human beings are incapable of making correct decisions and that a strong leader like himself is needed to make society right. “The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom, “ he tells agent Mobius. “For nearly every living thing, choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret. There’s a fork in every road, yet the wrong path always taken….”
This sets up an interesting dynamic because Loki is powerless in the high-tech city that the TVA is located inside. We are briefly led to believe that this will be a story of deradicalization as Mobius forces Loki to realize that his worldview is wrong. That deradicalization does happen, but mainly in spite of the TVA rather than because of it. We quickly learn that the TVA is also a fascist-seeming organization, almost a totalitarian one, for it exerts control over nearly all aspects of life. Unlike Loki, though, they are so successful that they actually conquered all of space and time, even if most people are not aware of it.
The TVA is an authoritarian organization steeped in almost religious fervor. It is allegedly ruled by three mythical timekeepers who are immortalized through dogma. The entire hierarchy of this organization flows in one direction, and followers have an unshakeable belief in the mission they serve. “I’m just lucky,” Mobius tells Loki, “that the chaos I emerged into gave me all this…My own glorious purpose. Cause the TVA is my life, and it's real because I believe it's real.” Members of the TVA are true believers. They believe that variants pose a threat that will destroy the sacred timeline, and that they are justified in resorting to drastic methods to preserve their temporal empire (i.e., pruning and resetting).
Members of the TVA are driven by what Umberto Eco would call a “fear of difference.” Their entire organization was created to protect the sacred timeline from any changes whatsoever. They prune all deviations without hesitation. Members of the TVA possess an intense xenophobia for these deviations, which they derogatorily refer to as “variants.” Trials are arranged for variants, but these are sham trials — the accused are not even aware of their offenses until moments before their slated executions.
In fact, the TVA maps over to most of Eco’s famous fourteen points in his essay Ur-Fascism. Members of the TVA are such steadfast traditionalists that they are literally devoted to making sure no changes to the timeline ever happen (i.e., a rejection of modernity). A constant sense of threat governs their lives as they send their soldiers to stop variants that allegedly pose an existential threat to all of reality (i.e., obsession with a plot and life is permanent warfare). They also speak in euphemisms that mask the horrors of what they do on a daily basis: killing someone is referred to as “pruning,” and genociding a timeline is labeled “resetting” it (i.e., Newspeak based off of George Orwell's novel 1984).
Yet, the TVA doesn’t map on to all of Eco’s points. While there are some areas of fascism that the show depicts with pitch-perfect clarity, others are sorely lacking. This absence represents a core problem with how the show treats fascism overall — mostly as an aesthetic divorced from the reality of how fascism actually develops and maintains itself.
The thing about fascism is that it involves buy-in. This blog has referred to it as a “group sport” before because it takes active support from a sizeable portion of the population to pull off. Eco described how fascism relies on an appeal to a collective frustration, usually a frustrated middle class. These are people who do not like their position in life and are urged by the fascist regime to blame a scapegoat that is perceived as powerful but also weak enough to overcome (e.g., the Jews during the Third Reich).
In the show Loki, however, members of the TVA do not hate variants due to some misdirected class, ethnic, or racial resentment. They believe the Time Keepers created them to perform this sole purpose and have unquestioning loyalty in their mission to uphold the sacred timeline. This hatred is logical from their point of view. The TVA is a sort of prefab fascism where a divine power was able to construct it from whole-cloth without having to do any of the manipulation and propaganda that involves bringing over converts to your side.
This setup becomes even more difficult to swallow once we learn that TVA agents were not created by the Time Keepers like we initially thought, but are actually the very variants they fight against. The entire organization was built upon a deception, where thousands of people were “tricked” into being fascists. We can see how this story beat problematically divorces the agents of the TVA from their sickening actions. It’s similar to the myth that the German people were not aware of the horrors that occurred in the concentration camps or that Southerners were oblivious to how slavery operated. It removes their complicity so that we, as the audience, can feel better when they do a turn in the final act.
The revelation that TVA agents are variants in the show leads to a domino effect of dissent once members learn the truth. People like agent Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) almost immediately defect, abandoning eons of propaganda in a very short period of time. “That’s not going to work out the way you think it is,” Mobius tells TVA High Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) when she tries to call guards to her office, indicating that the truth was enough to cause an open revolt among the rank-and-file of the organization.
The only person who remains loyal seems to be Renslayer, telling Mobius in a final confrontation: “I couldn’t let you get in the way of our mission. It can’t have been for nothing. That’s why I had to prune you.” We are supposed to view Renslayer as a bitter holdout, but in real life, most people under fascism act a lot more like Renslayer when exposed to the truth than Mobius and Hunter B-15. We know enough about human psychology at this point to be painfully aware of how set-in people’s ideologies can become. Germans in the Third Reich did not revolt against their government as the truth of the camps disseminated across society. Many supporters of Donald Trump did not abandon him as he mismanaged the response to a pandemic so badly that hundreds of thousands of people died. Fascism as an ideology has a way of distorting the worldview of supporters so much that they ignore reality — you cannot truth bomb your way out of it.
Worse, the show's narrative is constructed in such a way that the fascism of the TVA is portrayed as almost necessary. In another surprise twist, we learn that there aren’t three Time Keepers at all, but one person who sealed this timeline to stave off an interdimensional war from his other variants. This man, referred to as He Who Remains, tells Loki and another Loki variant named Sylvie that they cannot kill him off or it will lead to an incalculable amount of destruction:
“…You came to kill the devil, right? Well, guess what? I keep you safe. And if you think I’m evil, well, just wait till you meet my variants. And that’s the gambit. Stifling order or cataclysmic chaos. You may hate the dictator, but something far worse is gonna fill that void if you depose of him. I’ve lived a million lifetimes. I’ve gone through every scenario. This is the only way. The TVA, it works.”
It’s floated by Sylvie, who has spent her entire life running away from the TVA, that He Who Remains might be lying, but her well-warranted skepticism is proved unfounded. The last scene of the show is of our Loki in another timeline staring at an imposing statue of a He Who Remains variant (probably Kang the Conqueror), setting up this big bad for a future movie. The mechanics of this universe seem to imply that the fascism of He Who Remains was better than the total war that this new invader will bring.
This final twist is frustrating because, despite what the show is trying to claim, we have no idea if this future suffering will be worse than the countless genocides this current regime has already perpetrated. Eons of reset timelines have caused the deaths of an unknowable number of people, and it’s hard to compare that fate with the unknowable number of deaths this invader will bring about. You can’t really compare two limitless infinities. It’s an artificial Catch-22 that exists for no other reason other than to heighten suspense, and as a result, we end up feeling sympathy for the decisions of a malicious fascist.
This judgment call makes a mediocre portrayal of fascism into one that is quite frustrating. When the rules of your story — something that is made up — validate the oppression of an entire plane of reality, it’s fair to scrutinize those creative decisions.
Loki was advertised as a fun romp. There was an expectation that it would be in the vein of Thor Ragnorack (2017) or Ant-Man (2015). No one was expecting a story about fascism and free will, and that ambition is admirable, even if the end product was not very coherent. The fact that the series decided to tackle something darker and edgier was not inherently problematic, but it's very clear that its initial premise of variants struggling against a fascist empire was swept away in the last couple of episodes so that they could set up the franchise’s big bad.
We ended up with a very distorted portrayal of fascism, one where it's depicted as simultaneously both bad and necessary. We are not supposed to like the antics of He Who Remains and Renslayer’s fascism, but in much the same way fans applauded Thanos for his Malthusian ecoterrorism, we understand that there is a cold logic to it that we can empathize with.
It is “rational” fascism.
Fascism, however, is not “logical.” It is often incoherent, defying the utilitarian logic that He Who Remains allegedly represents. Germans did not scapegoat Jews, and Trump supporters did not scapegoat immigrants because such decisions were rational responses to the wealth inequality and white supremacy plaguing their respective countries. They were misdirected resentments egged on by nationalistic and authoritarian movements. Our media does us a disservice when it suggests otherwise. It’s very unsettling that Loki created a narrative that centers on a fascist organization, and yet has that fascism be justified by the “plot.”
Less cowardly media would be willing to tell the viewer that He Who Remains was lying. It would validate Sylvie's well-earned skepticism in the fascist organization that has been hunting her (and murdering countless others) for her entire life, but that would make the fascist sympathizers in the audience uncomfortable.
What does that say about our media when that is considered middle ground?