“Into the Forever and Beautiful Sky”: Confronting Animal Brutality in a Galaxy of Limitless Capitalism

Andrea Jain asks, What happens when we show a film that pays worshipful attention to animal welfare to a Marvel Studios-sized audience? How does capitalism colonize the popular imagination, religious and otherwise? Lifting up the Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 as her primary artifact, Jain uses the film to illustrate how capitalists sell animal ethics and why consumers buy it, arguing that confrontations with animal brutality get contained within and subsumed by capitalist realism, that is, a framework in which capitalism is deemed limitless and without viable alternatives, and gun capitalism, that is, the material and cultural condition of being flooded with guns, which are mass produced and sold as consumer products.

The Doll Lecture on Religion and Money was established in 2007 by Henry C. Doll ’58 and his family. It reflects the family’s longstanding interest in the subject of philanthropy and its relationship with religion.