I have long struggled with my addiction to Twitter. I gave it up for Lent, then was right back on the thing as soon as it was "allowed" again. I spend approximately two minutes (not exaggerating) a day on Facebook and multiple hours--spread throughout the day--on the bird-platform. I've talked about it before, so I don't need to rehash old statements. The long and the short of it (#shakespeareiseverywhere) is that I prefer that social media to the Book of Faces.
One of the reasons that I like Twitter so much is that it gives me a chance to read from a lot of unexpected sources and get insights into what a lot of people are talking about. I've purged my follow list a couple of times, trying each time to focus more on what I really want out of the platform: Information regarding agents, writers, and goings-on in the world of my interests (teaching and publication and comic books and video games and Shakespeare and…and…). I do a poor- to fair job parsing down the accounts, then tend to accumulate more and more until I need to winnow again. It seems that time is upon me again. What's happening is kind of inside baseball (to use a phrase I know exists but doesn't make any sense to me), but the basic thrust is this: Comic book and book publishing are getting their turns in the sunlight, and it isn't a pretty sight. I don't buy a lot of comics these days--I don't buy a lot of anything, thanks to Ms. Rona--so I don't know exactly who's doing what and how they're abusing their power. However, this site helps put a finger on the reckoning that's going on. It isn't just comic books, either: The reason that I even found the aforelinked website is because a writer named Myke Cole and his friend (and fellow writer) Sam Sykes both are dealing with allegations of misconduct and abuse. I say allegations, but Myke Cole, during the heat of the #MeToo movement, wrote about it in February 2018--and it seems like he hadn't changed his attitudes or behaviors. I don't know the details of the newest stuff, but both he and Sam Sykes have been called out as perpetrators of sexual harassment. I own one book each from the two men, though I've never read them. (I'm a fan of ebooks in principle, though I tend to prefer non-fiction on my ereader, and since both of the purchases were electronic, well…) Their main interest to me was watching them banter across the internet in some decidedly hilarious interactions. Cole had a lot of worthwhile things to say about the recent protests, about how white supremacy usurps and twists historical concepts to serve their purposes, and the need for police defunding and abolition. Sykes had a number of insightful threads about the creative and writing process, and he was a great amplifier for artists whose work he liked. As far as I knew, they were just normal creatives on Twitter with books for sale. I guess I was right: They were "normal". And that's the problem. It's not hard (like, really not hard at all) to recognize that all people deserve to be treated as human, that their consent and preferences be taken into account when interacting with them, and that they should never be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Women in particular (and by that, of course, I include transwomen--because they're women, obvs--and non-binary people who rely on female designations for whatever reason) are human beings with equal rights, boundaries, and personal agency. Yet women in particular end up becoming targets of sexual harassment (and worse) far too often. Men, too, are put into compromised positions by others in power. It is an abhorrent reality that too many people face. The #MeToo movement helped show us how pervasive sexual misconduct (to put a too-polite word on the behavior) is within American society. Misogyny in any form ought to be anathema to, well, everyone. It has no place in our world. …except that it's here. It doesn't deserve to be here. It's like the divine right of kings: At best a relic of an antiquated age that needs no renaissance, at worst a tool that some may seek to remain in power for whatever personal gain they hope to achieve. (And lest you think that there aren't a lot of people who wish for a king in America, you perhaps haven't been paying attention to the loudest and most ardent followers of President Trump.) Misogyny (and its less-frequently seen sibling, misandry) shouldn't be in the world, yet it is. And we have to do something about it. No cancer is cured without intervention; no malady of humankind will go away without confrontation. There are lots of complexities in this issue, but the part that is most salient, I think, is a recognition of power. As cis-het White males who've been published, both Cole and Sykes are in positions that create a power imbalance. Power imbalances are inherent in our system--parent/child, teacher/student, politician/voter (in theory), employer/employee--and the differences in power positions is the area in which abuses are most likely to occur. The idea that an abuser can do heinous things and get away with it is one of the ways that these power imbalances become more and more entrenched. In the case of two published and visible (comparatively) writers, there's an additional power dynamic that a non-writer may not immediately see: Envy. I can't speak for other creative enterprises (though I imagine it's pretty similar), but in the writing community, aspiring writers are the most vocal and eager component of a fanbase. Book signings are often scenes of long lines of would-be writers hoping to get a bit of the signee's luck to rub off on them. The reason is pretty simple: It is extremely hard to break into writing. It's even harder to make a career out of it. And it's next to impossible to gain a wide readership. The competition is omnipresent and fierce. Going to a writer's conference is going into a place where the air has been replaced with desperation. Aspirants are desperate to learn something that will get them on the other side of the panel--to have "made it" and to be the one dispensing advice rather than writing it down. Published authors are desperate to keep their success going--to shill their books to the attendees and hope that the can earn out sometime in the near future. Editors are desperate to find someone whose work will provide a stable residual income for them; agents are desperate to strike a partnership with someone whose writing they love. Despite the fact that everyone is desperate, there are different degrees here. Power is strongest in the editors. They tend to be the ones acquiring the new talent, going to bat for the new books and new authors. This means that the editors have additional leverage over people who are desperate, and that increased power can far too often translate into heinous abuses. (A non-writing example would have to be Harvey Weinstein, who doesn't need any more thought spared to him.) Though neither Cole nor Sykes is an editor, they're both guys who "made it". They're one step closer to the dream. That means that people who might not normally accept an off-color or sexually suggestive remark will give a partial laugh and half-smile when it comes from an author that they like, or an agent they're thinking of querying. Richard Paul Evens learned the hard way that giving an unsolicited hug to fans can cross a line he didn't realize was there--and he did it, as the article says, probably "thousands of times". Were there thousands of victims? No. But there were some, and they were victimized because of the power imbalance. (Another example of this, though its effects are more diffuse: J.K. Rowling, despite having a lot of progressive concepts and values in her books, is a TERF, and she's recently come under fire for comments that dismiss transwomen. In this case, her power is less personal--she has an immense influence in the writing world, despite the fact that she isn't writing nearly as much as she has in the past--and it has turned into a flashpoint for a number of fans. So while you couldn't say that a specific person is harmed by Rowling's statements in the same way that the victims of Cole's or Sykes' behavior have been, there's still a kind of abuse that's happening here.) The results of these allegations have come rapidly. Cole has removed himself from Twitter for the foreseeable future; Sykes is insisting that victims continue to speak out. Everyone responds to this situation in slightly different ways. In my case, I remain in an uncomfortable crux that I've been in for many years now: What to do with the fact that human beings are behind so many of the things that I love. This isn't to dismiss the negative things that come from the embedded misogyny and racism that has built the world I live in. Being human means making mistakes, of course, but that doesn't mean that success should be deprived you because of those mistakes--but neither does it mean that second (or third or tenth) chances should be afforded, either. In some cases, it's a matter of reception. Milton and Shakespeare are near and dear to my heart and they're also emblematic of the Dead White Male that dominates the English departments. Eve in Paradise Lost moves between shockingly original and disappointingly dismissed. Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is a portrait of Stockholm Syndrome and one of the great tragedies in the canon, despite being a comedy. How can I maintain my feminist credentials, as it were, when embracing these two anti-women writers? Neither Milton nor Shakespeare can be "cancelled"--their presence in the world of letters is settled, at least during my lifetime. Their works are crucial to our modern identities, regardless of whether or not we recognize it. And I can't very well stop buying Milton or Shakespeare--they aren't getting royalties, and voting with my wallet will do nothing to their reputation. If economics is the barometer, the Bard and the prophet-bard are safe from reprisal. But what about Rowling, Cole, Sykes, or any other number of "problematic" authors who've done/said something that shows a sinister side to them that I can't agree with? My dollars will support Orson Scott Card if I buy his book, which means that I continue to empower a known- and proud homophobe. Is buying another round of butterbeer at Universal Studios only prolonging how long Rowling will be visible, pertinent, and capable of spreading her misconceptions about women? Now that I've purchased their books, is my continued non-reading of Cole and Sykes a way of boycotting them? And how is that different than the fact that I haven't gotten around to reading their books in the first place? These kinds of questions have been on my mind, as I said before, for years. And while I may have given examples that don't resonate with you. Maybe there are other views that these people espouse that you fundamentally disagree with--like Cole's calls to abolish the police. So you're okay with seeing his career end (will it, though?) or go on an unexpected and prolonged hiatus. You now will no longer buy books from a guy you weren't planning on buying from anyway. Have you done something to him? A creative's life is one of perpetual rejection (most of it's hidden, as authors don't stalk bookstores and feel personally offended when every patron who walked past her book on the aisle leaves without even picking up the book), so are you doing anything by boycotting his books? People talk about voting with their wallets all of the time--I used the phrase myself in the course of this essay--but I don't think it's quite as clear cut as we'd like to assume. After all, you may be able to buy a book from Rowling or Card or Sykes or Cole, but you could just as easily buy a book from Okorafor or Kuang or Chu or Kowal. All of these authors write in the same science fiction/fantasy genre, so why not pick one of these "less problematic" writers? Except you can't go to Hogwarts with Kuang and Okorfor's version of Ender is a Black girl named Binti, and does Kowal have as much fantasy violence in her books? In other words, you normally can't read one person's book and get the same story from a different author. So if Hogwarts means something important to me, something crucial, then I can't just go anywhere else. See? It's complicated… Or maybe it isn't. What's the difference between writers anyway? If you don't like one person's story, buy someone else's. Write your own books (which only makes sense to anyone who's never tried to write a book before). Don't do research into the humans who make your art. Don't expect them to abide by your own morals. Only buy from those who share your morals. Only retread what you've seen before, keeping your diet safe and vanilla, hypoallergenic and without surprises. Refrain from interpreting, interpolating, or interrogating the books you read--it's just fiction, it's just a story. No need to put anything else into it. I don't know how to square this circle. I bring it up from time to time in an attempt to get my feelings figured out, but it always slips free. I don't want to support people who've done harmful things. I don't want to give a pass to creators whose content I like simply because I like what they've made. I also have to acknowledge that someone has a problem with everything that I like for a whole host of reasons, so I have to understand what my own lines in the sand are…and what that says about me. Lastly, what this whole sordid tale exposes to me is the reality that I, too, have made mistakes. Never have I knowingly acted in a way that was intended to be inappropriate or harassing, sexually or otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been the reason someone felt unsafe or that I had ulterior motives in what I said or did. I know that there have been times--I can think of a couple--where brave women told me that what I was doing was making them uncomfortable. I immediately apologized and changed my behavior and that was the end of it. How many times have I inadvertently "shot mine arrow o'er the house, / And hurt my brother" (Hamlet 5.2) or sister? Lots of questions, I fear. And, as it happens so often for me, precious few answers. Despite the flaws, I really enjoyed Endgame back when I saw it in April. Ever since I saw it, I felt like 1) I wanted to watch it after a refresher viewing of the previous movies, and 2) I wanted to see it with my boys.
The second impulse came (in part) because of what happened when I was at Infinity War, which, if you still haven't seen it, I'm going to be rather spoiling the film for a quick sec. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, the Snappening transpires, which totally shocked me because I had been so well conditioned by Marvel movies to see the heroes pull off the big win at the end of it all (additionally, I purposefully don't pay attention to announced movies as much as possible, preferring to be surprised by when they show up, rather than anticipating them). The ending to that movie is powerful, raw, and surprising. Gayle and I sat in the theater, waiting for the end of the credits (again, conditioned), only to hear the heart-rending wailing of a kid a few rows in front of us. He had just seen some of his most beloved heroes get dissolved in front of his eyes. Methinks the price of that family's tickets will increase with therapy bills later on. I didn't want that to happen; I didn't want my youngest (he's six at the moment), who has seen some Marvel movies, jump ahead to Infinity War and see so many characters get Snapped. That was not a parental-trial I wanted to face. So I decided that we would get around to rewatching all of the Marvel movies together as a family--yes, there's some uncomfortable content, and I'm not going to sweat that too much (I saw Batman Returns in the theater--you know, the one with the Penguine trying to bite a guy's nose off? Yeah, that one--and I'm only slightly permanently scarred)--before I hit Endgame again. Then my kids would have a fuller experience with the emotions that the film is playing with. It's not quite the same with being in the moment, I know--there's a full third of my life in which Marvel movies have been made. Considering how I was very much the stereotypical nerd who yearned to see his favorite characters on the silver screen someday, the Marvel films really have been emotionally significant to me. I can't recapture that: My kids grow up in a Marvel-dominated world (and hurrah for that, says I). But I think this process will be worthwhile anyway. We've already knocked back Iron Man, Thor, Iron Man 2, and since I rewatched The Incredible Hulk only a few months ago, we're considering that one complete. That meant that, before Amazon Prime loses all of the Marvel movies to Disney+, I decided to watch Captain America: The First Avenger last night. And by saying that, I have now taken about 500 words to get to this particular point: I am still conflicted about that movie. There are a lot of things about the Marvel movies that are rightly criticized: The music is forgettable (good while you're in it, I suppose, but essentially without the ear-worm stylings of earlier superhero movies (think the John Williams Superman theme, or Danny Elfman's Batman theme, for example)), the colors are sometimes a touch bland, the character arcs are familiar, they always end with a swarm battle, the girlfriends are immaterial to most of the heroes…all of these are valid points, and there are some more, too. One of the more subtle critiques--and one that really just gnaws at me--is that it's a much more progressive world. I mean, don't get me wrong: I love the fact that Agent Carter and a couple of nameless (essentially; I didn't catch them, at least) Black guys are brought into Captain America's squad after he busts his best friend out of Hydra prison. I wish that Bucky had been Black just to drive that home a bit more: In this version of history, they weren't Buffalo Soldiers or a segregated unit like the 442nd Infantry Regiment. They have a San Diego-born Asian-American, a Brit, a guy I'm assuming is Irish, as well as a couple of White guys and the Black guys. We don't spend a lot of time in their presence, so we never get attached to them, but seeing that kind of rich diversity that America can have (if we let it) is awesome to see on the screen. So what's the problem? It's not historically accurate--and what I mean by that isn't "I want my superhero movie to only feature White people 'cuz that's what history says and the source material" kind of argument. It's the same problem as having Captain America focus on defeating Hydra instead of Hitler: The real-world, real-history problems were deep, damaging, and destructive, but the film vaults over them without so much as a hesitation. The Holocaust is pretty much one of the most wicked things that happened in Europe--World War II was pretty much one of the most wicked of things to have happened to the planet. No one walked away without sin. Our institutionalized racism was horrendous--so bad, in fact, that the Nazis used our racism as propaganda to try to influence Black soldiers to defect--and America is the only country in the world to drop two nuclear bombs on civilian populations. It isn't like we walked away from that conflict without some heavy stains on our souls. But the version of America that Steve Rogers represents isn't the one that we have. Maybe that's the biggest part that bothers me: He has a vision and understanding of America that we never got, though many of us believe it is the same one. There's nothing wrong with having a story with an alternate-timeline of how American history went. That's not the issue: It's the way that it feels like it's supposed to be interchangeable with our own timeline. I plan on talking to my kids about this very thing, especially since my oldest is studying The Hiding Place right now, so he's becoming exposed to the real terrors of that time period. This matters to me because so much of how we view the world is filtered by the media we consume. While I do think America was a force for good during World War II, I don't want my kids to think that Rogers' America is our America. Additionally, it still bothers me to think about how Captain America--the paragon and quintessence of Americanism--is used to charge a dumpy little fortress in the Alps when he could have been helping push through the German lines at Bastogne or liberating parts of France. The timeline of the movie, to me at least, was a bit murky. Obviously, it was post D-Day when Rogers arrives in Europe, but where he is and when is incomplete. I mean, when he attacks the Hydra headquarters, he literally rides his motorcycle in, as if it's just a matter of using the 1940s version of MapQuest to figure out the best route in. I know that there are a lot of cuts that a movie like this has to take in order to 1) hit the two-hour run-time, and 2) keep it simple enough to tell the portion of the bigger story (how Captain America came to be and ended up in the 21st century), so there had to be concessions. Nevertheless, I feel like their version of the war doesn't really show the sacrifice, danger, death, and suffering that transpired in the war. Nothing really shows that to me quite as strongly as the shift from Hitler to Hydra. Honestly, the easiest way for me to swallow what happens in Captain America: The First Avenger is to assume that the Holocaust doesn't happen in this timeline. I know that America didn't get involved in Europe because we wanted to stop a genocide. But by the time (again, it's not perfectly clear) Rogers was blocking blue disintegration blasts with his vibranium shield, the crimes of the Nazis was no longer whispers and rumors: We had been liberating camps as we marched eastward, and the Russians (non-entities in this film, which is not unusual for World War II narratives; why should we credit our future enemies with their due? They were communists, after all) had been doing the same as they raced toward Berlin. Steve's fixation on Hydra--which is flimsily cast as being even worse than the Nazis, though it's only through some hasty dialogue--honestly feels out of sync if there are death camps dotted throughout Europe. Look, he even thinks about diving into the water to save that young scamp during the foot-chase scene ("I can swim! Go get him!" the kid tells him). Are we seriously going to say that he understands the Hydra threat to be so large--this mystical, quasi-magical weaponization of Norse deities' power--that people being burned alive in ovens is immaterial to him? I'm not saying that I want Hydra to be more wicked than Nazis. That would require a lot of uncomfortable decisions that wouldn't make sense in the alternate-world that the Marvel movies work in. Instead, I wish that the Nazis were also considered a threat…maybe the threat of the story, only learning about Red Skull and the tesseract in the final moments. The thing is, masked soldiers who do a double-arm salute instead of the blonde-haired, blue eyed brownshirts doing a single-arm Nazi salute really doesn't feel like a legitimate threat to me. I feel like Hydra's dangerous because the movie says they are, while the historian in me is reminding me of all of the horrible things that happened to those who fought against the real-life villains. For me, it's a bridge-too-far to pretend like there was anything worse than Nazism's ideologies that were motivating the violence of the Second World War. I can't turn off my visceral reaction to that time period long enough to let a garishly-dressed supersoldier kill (and, boy, does Rogers do a lot of killing) his way through these faceless spearcarriers without feeling like something is really missing. "But, wait. Don't you love Wonder Woman? Isn't that doing the same thing, but during World War I?" Yes. Good question. And that has been grist for a lot of thinking on that front, too. In fact, I felt so strongly about how Wonder Woman treated the Great War that I took my son to see Wonder Woman as a way of getting him exposed to World War I. So, what's the difference? On the surface, it's basically the same story, isn't it? Superpowered person ends up in the theater of war and, through heroic efforts and immense self-sacrifice, manages to keep a plane loaded with deadly, world-ending weapons from being released, all while defeating an antagonist who isn't actually concerned with the historical motivations for why the war is being fought. But Wonder Woman does a lot of things differently. First of all, they picked a less-popular war (what a world we live in where wars have anything representing popularity), one that wasn't as pre-loaded in the minds of Americans. The 101st Armistice Day was observed just a couple of weeks ago, but what was the experience like for Americans--here and over there--during that time a century back? Do we remember any of the soldiers who survived the Great War--or are they only significant in the way that they came into play during the Second World War? How many battles can the average American name that happened during World War I? How many battles did the Americans fight in during World War I? These are massive gaps in our collective memories, and as a result, it allows a fictional version of the war to fit inside the superhero paradigm better. Having Diana Prince in this less familiar conflict allows the film's incongruities (like, how the H did they get close enough to the bad guys' headquarters that Diana could go incognito in a stunning blue dress without being noticed?) to be easier to swallow. More than that, however, is the trench scene. Not only is there the symbolism (which I absolutely love) of Wonder Woman being the only person who can get across No Man's Land, but there's an intimacy with the violence that makes it feel more significant. That is, Wonder Woman has to navigate the trenches, where we see the suffering of soldiers wounded, horses drowning in the mud (about 8 million pack animals served during World War I; the screams of dying men were echoed by equine death-throes), and families displaced by the violence of the war. All in about ten or fifteen minutes of screen time, we get a strong sense of the cost of the war, the effect it has on those surviving it, and the traumas it inflicts. Remember the sniper guy's PTSD being so bad that he becomes a liability? Shell-shock was a real problem, one that many--if not most, to one degree or another--soldiers experienced. In other words, Wonder Woman treats the war as a war--albeit a PG-13 version (which is fine; not everything needs to be Saving Private Ryan level of graphicness)--and allows there to be cost, danger, violence, and stakes. Wonder Woman has its own flaws--the third act is, in retrospect, a fairly large stumble--but in the area where it feels most important (to me), it really succeeds: It makes me feel like this is a real war in which Diana Prince is committed to doing her best to help end it. Captain America feels like Rogers is taking out some bad guys in a foreign country, a la the beginning of Black Panther. Couple final thoughts: All of that being said, I still really, really like the film version of Steve Rogers. The comic book version never really clicked with me--as a kid, the Man Out of Time trope wasn't very interesting (I don't know if I'm that way still; I haven't thought about it) and his costume always struck me as ridiculous. However, Chris Evans' work with the character is really enjoyable. Yeah, his pre-serum body is a bit distracting, but I positively love what they did with the character. He's committed, self-sacrificing, brave, and unwilling to compromise in the areas where conviction matters most. He's simply fantastic. In a lot of ways, Captain America: The First Avenger is less useful as an origin story, and more valuable as a character study of what makes Rogers so intriguing. Lastly: Watching Captain America and thinking about Wonder Woman and the portrayal of those films makes me--once again--deeply consider what I'm doing with my War Golem book. I've mentioned it on occasion before (like right here), but in case you've forgotten, I wrote a novel where a World War I-inspired war is fought, but with gigantic golems as an additional part of the war. If you take the dragons from Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern and their relationship with their riders, the scale of Michael Bay's Transformers, and dropped them into trench warfare, you have a sense of what I'm going for in the story. It has always gnawed at me that I chose to write a book (two, technically, though I haven't looked at the sequel since I wrote it) that uses the real-life suffering of men and women in order to tell an adventure tale. I don't normally watch war movies, as I take issue with the idea of profiting off of the death and misery of some of the worst moments in modern human history. I know that some people view them as homages and demonstrations of appreciation, and I don't disagree with that. However, as I mentioned earlier, the media we consume gives us our lenses, and viewing the wars the way that Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk do tends to push the narrative into a "my side is the heroic side; the other side is the evil side" kind of thinking. After all, there are only a couple of hours to tell the story, so shortcuts are required. But if a person watches Hacksaw Ridge (which I haven't seen, so I'm guessing here) and thinks, "Man, the Pacific War was crazy. Look how many people died! It was so bloody!", then the film has failed. Any story of Desmond Doss, I would argue, that doesn't inspire the audience to rethink what it means to serve a country and fight in a war is a failed telling of that man's story. (Again, I haven't seen it; I can almost guarantee, however, that some people left with those sentiments I just mentioned.) I haven't been able to come up with a way of squaring this circle. As I mentioned in my linked essay, I really do like War Golem. I think it's a pretty good book. Because it's a fantasy, I don't have to worry about things like the Armenian genocide or the British blockade that starved millions of Germans--I can have a Captain America style world where the terror is in the trenches alone. But I'm trying to make it feel like Wonder Woman in terms of giving the reader a sense of the trauma and fear, the worry and pain that war of that type creates. Is that enough? Is that what it takes to make a story with real-life suffering as its cornerstone? Care, consideration, and respect? I don't know. I really don't. But I wish I did. NO SPOILERS: Captain Marvel is great. So is Captain Marvel. (See why it's so important to italicize the titles of books, plays, albums, and movies, kids? It makes a difference.) Of the two origin stories of people named "Captain" that take place in the past, I liked it much more than Captain America: The First Avenger. I've liked Carol Danvers' character for a couple of years--she showed up in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 back in the early days of the PlayStation 3 and then made a strong showing in the mid '10s that made me aware of her. No, that's not to hipster brag, but instead to put out there that, in terms of high-powered female characters in the Marvel universe, she's a good choice.* SOME SPOILERS: One of the things that I love about the MCU is how they're willing to do deep-cuts in a way that appeal to the mass audiences and still give a strong verve that shows their roots: Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty out there--I hadn't heard of them until the movie was released--and they're now major fan favorites. Captain Marvel is, I think, in a similar vein. The movie's premise--taking place in 1995 as it does--was a fun departure. We've had Captain America: The First Avenger happening in 1945, and a couple of parts from the two Guardians movies transpiring in 1985 (-ish? I haven't watched them in a long time, so there might be a more specific date that I could look up but I won't; and if Ant-Man happens earlier, I wouldn't know, as it's the only duology of the MCU that I haven't seen). Otherwise, the MCU dabbles in the not-too-distant future (considering the level of technology, maybe it's just safer to say that it's an alternate present). For Captain Marvel, the nods, flashbacks, and shorthands utilized were adroit and enjoyable. What better way for us to know that the story is happening, not at the same time as Infinity War, but before it, than to have the heroine crash through the ceiling of a Blockbuster? (And, hilariously, pick up a copy of The Right Stuff?) Gayle and I both really enjoyed it, as the music was almost all (quite deliberately, I'm sure) selected from popular songs from the decade made by female artists. There was some Nirvana and R.E.M. that I noticed, but, for the most part, it was number one jams from Garbage, Hole, and No Doubt that were rocking the soundtrack. The NIN shirt, flannel, and cut jeans looked perfect on Brie Larson, the actress playing the captain, and the technology references and jokes landed well for me. Another aspect of the production that was really appreciated was the respect that the camera had for the character. The camera never lingers on lady parts, all of which are logically protected (considering the role that Danvers has to play throughout the film). Additionally, Carol Danvers was never sexualized nor objectified. She didn't look unattractive or frumpy, but she wasn't being glamorized or catwalked either. I love Gal Gadot's work as Wonder Woman, and that character deserves to be heartbreakingly gorgeous in basically everything she does, so the fact that Marvel (both the studio and the character…and the movie, I guess, which makes the italics thing kind of tricky at this point) goes in a more practical direction is a good way to demarcate difference.** There probably was a lot of pressure to live up to Wonder Woman's success, and I think that it was wise to find the variety that they did. Plot wise, it had a fairly predictable "reveal" of the real baddie, but there were a couple of surprises that worked well for me. I walked in with the idea that the Skrull would definitely be super evil--Secret Invasion and all that--so the change in their behavior partway through caught me off-guard. It filled in some gaps--why Captain Marvel wasn't around before the Avengers Initiative got off the ground, for example, or how she could have survived the Snappening--and, in typical Marvel tradition, strongly sets up and supports the next chunk of the story. Some people dislike the way that these "B-story" characters end up being ancillary and stepping stones to the bigger dangers, but it doesn't bother me. Captain Marvel has a great story that has a lot of focus on her growing as a person, making her own decisions and going her own way--which is what I wanted out of the movie. That there are other components that are building up the broader MCU doesn't detract from that, to me. Admittedly, I'm the target audience for this sort of thing. I may not be as well-read in the comic book lore as I would like, but I've read enough Captain Marvel comics to know this movie was on brand for the character and her place in the world. So maybe I'm able to intuit certain story elements that wouldn't be as easy for a more casual moviegoer to appreciate. But, hey, I'm not them. A couple of things about Captain Marvel's strength: I think it's safe to say that she is, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at least, the strongest hero, and second strongest (to Thanos only) character of them all. The comics have different ways of depicting power (in the comics, for example, Wonder Woman lifted a planet; in the movie, she struggled with a tank), so from what I can tell, Captain Marvel could lay down Hulk in a single punch. Movie Wonder Woman and movie Captain Marvel wouldn't be much of a fight: Marvel would wipe the floor with the Amazon princess. But that's not really germane--"Which one's stronger?" isn't a very interesting analysis. What's significant is how both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are--and are not--particularly feminist. There are lots of ways that feminism enhance and improve texts, and the one area that they almost always force writers of fantasy and science fiction (myself very firmly in this camp) into new narrative directions is that feminism encourages "strong female characters". The issue with this--and, again, one that both of these films struggle to understand--is that a "feminist" movie*** isn't about "ra-ra-girl power! Yay!" but instead looking at the resolution of the conflict in ways that are inherently more feminine. So while Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel easily pass the Bechdel test (which, everyone should always remember when this test is invoked, doesn't point toward quality of the film, but rather a very low bar of required content), both characters use violence and anger as their tools to solve the crises. There's nothing wrong with a woman being angry, of course: She has emotions. They ought to be used in various ways. But how do both women stop the Big Baddie™ at the ends of their roads? Anger and violence…the same thing that everyone else uses. Strong female characters aren't actually about strength qua strength--they aren't dudes with boobs. There are different, acceptable ways that they manage conflict which don't require fists. The mercy extended their adversaries in both films points toward that realization, but the mercy can only be extended because of the raw power that each woman has over their opponents. Peter Parker "defeats" Sandman at the end of Spider-Man 3 (a flawed movie, of course, but it gets this part right) not through punching him, exploding him, or sucking him into a Dustvac (as he does in an early comic), but by forgiving him. That's the kind of thing that I need to practice doing, as my physique does not lend itself to fighting off intergalactic hordes. This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of progressive work inside of both films. They're interested in making the characters thoughtful, flawed, nuanced, and capable of fixing the mistakes that they make. That's good writing; that's good character development. That's what makes a "strong female character": Not how much she can dead lift or how many punches she can take, but how willing she is to own up to her mistakes and confront those who have treated her unjustly. The frustrating dilemma about this genre is that, formula- and expectation wise, we audience members expect a cool fight in the third act, some spectacle-filled clash between superpowers. If Captain Marvel didn't blow some stuff up with her energy blasts, we would feel frustrated. (Think, for example, about how one of the big criticisms about Superman Returns was that there wasn't enough action--hence the hiring of Zack Snyder for Man of Steel--though Superman Returns has a lot of other problems in it, too.) So finding a way for the character's strength, rather than her arm's strength, to be the thing which solves the problem is hard to do with all of the genre expectations. I don't blame Wonder Woman nor Captain Marvel for failing to find the perfect way to do that. I love the fact that both of them show mercy on the antagonists, even though it wasn't an easy thing to do. That's a step in the right direction. I wonder if there's any way to really square this circle, now that I think on it. Anyway, the movie is great. I really liked it, and though I don't have the same love for Carol Danvers as I do Diana Prince, Captain Marvel is certainly up there as one of the better Marvel movies.**** --- * I personally would have preferred She-Hulk, but there's already a green-skinned woman in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and that might be crossing the beams a bit too much. I couldn't get a solid answer about future projects from the internet--a lot of speculation, but maybe I just missed the accurate information? Anyway, I don't have a huge catalogue of She-Hulk titles, but John Byrne's run was meta and tons of fun. If Marvel wanted to have a go with Marvel-exclusive fourth-wall breaking in the PG-13 realm, they could copy themselves (to an extent, I guess?) by having her be comedic in the same vein as Deadpool. But, considering how much hate manbabies have over female-led comic book movies, having a She-Hulk film that's cutting a little too close to Deadpool's territory may not be the best move, especially if there isn't anything really fresh to add to the whole thing. I'm digressing a lot in this footnote. Okay, I'll stop. ** In the comics, Captain Marvel's switch from the black one-piece swimming suit and thigh-high boots (see below) to the blue, gold, and red motif was one that got fans rumbling. While I personally wish they'd kept the sash--for no reason other than that I love sashes on characters, for some reason…long headbands, too…and capes--the comic moved into this slightly more armored version of the character quite a while ago. It's an excellent move, honestly, because it translates onto the screen much better than the domino-mask-and-evening-gloves look, and makes it more believable that she's a warrior out to stop a war than it would if she instead looked like she'd just come from a Baywatch audition. *** In some definitions. Feminism is a large community, and not without its own self-contradictions. I acknowledge that.
**** Geez, four asterisks? There's gotta be a better way to handle multiple footnotes. Anyway, I brought you down here again because I think the idea of ranking the different films is kind of stupid, despite what I said above. The Marvel Formula © ®™ is operating on essentially every level in almost every movie. While some are more or less forgettable, they all have a particular tone or feeling to them. It ends up being more about what suits someone's fancy than anything else. And my fancy on this one? Why do I still like Wonder Woman despite the rocky third act? Because there was so much riding on Wonder Woman doing well, resonating with audiences, and believing in itself. There's more to watching a movie than simply the images on the screen. The baggage, expectations, assumptions, and histories of everyone who walks into the cinema are different. That variety is important; it shapes the experience. (Remind me to tell you about my viewing of Iron Man 3 to expand on that.) For all its quality and, in some areas, superior execution, Captain Marvel can't be, can never be, what Wonder Woman was when it came out. Diana Prince had to pave a path that Carol Danvers could only follow in. The need for a female-led superhero movie to be a commercial and critical success was palpable when it came out. Despite the intense injustice of having so much ride on Wonder Woman (especially when duds like Batman v. Superman didn't destroy the careers of those attached to it), Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins pulled off a necessary story. The real life narrative about whose stories deserve to be told is as crucial to a movie as the movie is, sometimes. (Black Panther is another great example of this.) Because Wonder Woman came first, because it earned the emotional power that the No Man's Land sequence created, because it paved the way, Wonder Woman will always be the "superior" of the two films, despite having more problems with it than Captain Marvel did. Okay. I'm actually done now. Thanks for sticking around to the after credits. To celebrate our fourteenth anniversary, Gayle and I went to see the new movie, Venom. While there were some problems with it--as with any movie, I suppose--I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would.
Oh, and should this matter to you, I'm going to throw out a spoiler warning, as I'm talking about the movie as a whole and I'm not planning on being judicious about how I talk plot points. Part of what worked for me was turning Eddie Brock into a genuinely sympathetic character. Tom Hardy did a great job of being a pathetic loser whose hard luck had happened in large part because he did the right thing. And though the movie seems to want to say more about people who are downtrodden for doing right, the fact that Brock ends up getting superpowers somewhat undoes the criticism of a system that allows for billionaires to flex their muscles to the destruction of the "little people" who make up the world. And maybe that's what I liked about this movie. Eddie Brock tips more toward the Deadpool side of the spectrum of seriousness in superhero movies--Venom isn't trying to lampoon or satirize superhero films, but it is more than willing to point out how crazy the whole premise is. The incredulity of Eddie Brock before he bonds with the symbiote mirrors a real world response, complete with him saying things like, "This is crazy," or summing up the story thus far with a tone of disbelief. It helped make the film lighter on its feet than, say, Justice League, whose attempt at humor was…unusual, to say the least. Both films deal with dark concepts and ideas, but Venom needed the humor to keep us from feeling like this world was unremittingly dark. Justice League (from what I can remember of it) didn't manage to balance that tonal dissonance, giving a sense of funny-part/serious-part/funny-part as if the different emotions are segments to pass through. The biggest question I had going into a movie about my favorite brain-eating symbiote was, "How are they going to pull this off without Spider-Man?" In the comics--and in the forgettable Spider-Man 3--Venom's motivation comes entirely from the way both Eddie Brock and the alien symbiote are spurned and "ruined" by Spider-Man. The particular powerset and costume design are Spider-Man inspired (though we later find out that the symbiotes--a species called the Klyntar--all have the creepy eyed thing going for them, as well as the teeth/tongue combo). To make Venom his own character without the wall-crawler seemed…unruly. And, yes, the purist in me disliked the take. But I had to put my preferences to one side. They were clearly paying homage to the source material--in this case, a run of comics called Venom: Lethal Protector. I've read the trade paperback of it a dozen or so times, as it was one of my favorites as a kid. In it, Spider-Man heads out to San Francisco to try to track down Eddie Brock, only to discover that his symbiote's spawn had been removed from him and given to five volunteers. These volunteers bond with new symbiotes and attack Spider-Man, stopping only when they get their symbiotes blasted to dust by an age acceleration device (comics are weird, by the way). They don't even stick around long enough to get names. However, according to my research--and quite unsurprisingly--even though the symbiotes were dissolved and the headquarters where they were left behind detonated, the five volunteers managed to survive and keep their symbiotes. So that way more comics about symbiotes could abound. I've lost the thread of most of the comics that I read when I was in high school, so I don't know all the ins-and-outs of symbiote lore (though I recently learned that Knull is the god of the Klyntars, which is…cool? I guess?). Nevertheless, they always tie back to Venom who then ties back to Spider-Man. They made a few wise decisions when making this story their own. One, they made sure that Venom didn't have the iconic spider on his chest. I was saddened by that, but it makes sense: There was no reason for that part of the costume to transfer over. So though I missed seeing the splash of white across the broad, black chest, it was a good choice. They also gave us San Francisco as the backdrop, which fits in with Brock's comic past--at least, from the source material they were using. From what I can recall, only two other superhero movies in the recent past (Hulk and X-Men 3) have taken place in San Francisco, and since the place has such a distinct visual style, it was fun to see the chaos of a superpowered being wreaking havoc in a new city. (At one point during the Clone Saga of Spider-Man, one of Peter Parker's clones ends up in Salt Lake City. Maybe one day we'll have a superhero battle here in SL,UT?) The film was pretty violent and it had quite a few swear words--clearly aiming for the PG-13 rating--but it was remarkably bloodless for a creature who likes to eat human brains (and everything that surrounds them). One of the aspects that stands out about Carnage and Venom has always been their brutal ferocity. The novels I read are particularly violent, complete with dismemberments and gruesome deaths on all sorts of levels. The filmmakers decided to tone down the consequences of that kind of violence, giving us the stereotypical flying-bodies-crashing-glass-and-no-real-repercussions type of "action" that is a hallmark of PG-13 superhero films. Despite not being explicitly gruesome, there's enough frightening images that I was glad I didn't bring my kids along with. The music was forgettable or bad, I felt--loud, brassy exclamation marks aren't my favorite musical genre--and the special effects are what one would expect from a movie like this. Tom Hardy's acting was very enjoyable, and the interplay between him and his symbiote was a lot of fun. I genuinely felt bad for the guy as his life dissolved, and his decision to become a "hero" of sorts comes out of the fact that, though he doesn't want to care about others, he still does. There's one scene that surprised me: When Ann is driving Eddie to the hospital, Venom says--inside Eddie's head--that he needs to apologize to Ann for what he'd done to ruin her career. Eddie then gives a heartfelt apology. What surprised me was that 1) the symbiote was the one sensitive enough to her emotions to recommend the move, and 2) Eddie was genuine in what he said. That was the moment that I realized the difference between Venom and all of the other versions of the man/monster that I've seen before. Venom always had a thing about "protecting innocents", which was really more of a backdoor for the writers to exploit whenever they wanted Spider-Man to team up with the hugely popular character. But an entire movie about him meant that he couldn't be all teeth and drool. Brock had to be a genuine character with growth and change, motivations and desires. In fact, they spend probably forty of the 112 minute run time without Eddie and the symbiote being together. That, in my mind, shows a lot of restraint. The filmmakers knew that people were there to see the monster. But they did the right thing by delaying that moment until it made sense for it to actually transpire. So, yeah: I ended up really liking the movie much more than I thought. While it's no contender for best superhero movie, it was an enjoyable romp through one of the cooler (in my opinion) super-beings in the Marvel canon. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Clark Kent. Duh. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! *** Okay, but this is actually something that's been floating at the edges of my mind for the last year or so--no, scratch that: I think it's been there since I started squaring my feelings with Batman v. Superman, which I cautiously liked when it came out, but have been less impressed with as I rewatched the thing and thought more about it. Lots of people--most of whom are quite a bit better versed in Superman lore and current continuity than I am, and also who are quite a bit smarter than I, too--have sounded off on the topic of the Man of Tomorrow, and while I don't want to recapitulate what they said, I feel like undermining my own position of authority by pointing out that I haven't done a serious study of Superman in a long time. There are plenty of examples about the Last Son of Krypton which will probably undermine (or maybe strengthen) my impressions. I'm ignorant of those, so…sorry. First off, I should say that I used to really love Superman stories. There's something to be said about the old-school, Golden and Silver Age versions of comic book heroes. Continuity was more simple, each issue was (for the most part) a single entry into the lives of the fictional characters, and the complexities of decades of dozens of different writers and artists weren't bogging down the storytelling. Formulaic, sure, but there was still a lot of play within the formula's guidelines. I know this because I've read a lot of early Spider-Man comics and, when I was in elementary school, I was shocked and surprised to find that the nearby public library carried bound comic books. I read every Peanuts collection I could find, then stumbled upon black and white copies of early days Superman comics. They were--according to my time-hazed memory--from the late forties, maybe early fifties. By this point, the character was pretty solidly himself, but hijinks would ensue every few pages regardless, relying on the idea that the stories were light, fun, kid-oriented, and of little consequence. I remember one comic specifically: It was a "What if?" kind of comic, written entirely for fun--what we'd call a one-off nowadays--where Clark Kent and Lois Lane go on a date to see a Superman movie. In it, the movie makers (somehow) knew of Superman's alter ego (Clark Kent, just like in real life, making it almost a documentary) and showed Superman turning into Clark and vice versa throughout the film. However, since Clark and Lois were on a date, and the "real" (I guess?) Lois didn't know the truth about Superman's true identity, Clark had to come up with all of these different ways of preventing her from seeing his on-screen self spill the beans about his secret. I don't remember what he does, necessarily, to distract Lois, but it was all in good fun and harmless. Many other adventures of the Man of Steel came my way through this unexpected, librarian find: The one where Superman and Lex Luthor travel to a distant planet that has a red star so that the two of them can beat the crap out of each other and see who the better man is. (Ends up as a stalemate.) Another: Jonathan Kent comes back from the dead (how, I can't remember; I think it was magic) and freaks Clark out by doing all of the familiar tricks they used to use when Superboy was needed (like asking Clark to run to the pharmacist to pick up some "heart pills", thus allowing Clark a cover story for why he'd need to leave), and basically being the missing father-figure that Clark had always needed and wanted. I mention this more to show that, though I may not be cutting edge with DC Rebirth event, I'm not speaking from a "I've seen a couple episodes of the Justice League cartoon and the recent DCEU movies" position. Okay, enough introduction: Who is Superman? For a long time, I've been dismissive of the Man of Tomorrow. After all, those early comics I'd read hadn't really done a lot to explore the character and see what makes him tick. They were goofy stories that were meant to entertain and disappear, like cotton candy--sweet and ephemeral. The Richard Donner films were stronger influences on me as to what Superman was like, and I used the really dumb idea that Superman could reverse time by flying around the world really fast to reverse its spin as proof that Superman, as a character, was pointless because he could essentially invent his powers on a whim. While I still stand by that criticism, I'd be remiss if I didn't admit that there are those who can handle Superman's powers and still make for thought-provoking and interesting comics. Grant Morrison's All Star Superman is a great example of that, in part because Morrison is a really talented writer that demonstrates an inherent goodness to the character that is worthwhile. In fact, there's a moment in All Star Superman that really stands out to me. It's a quick page--not even crucial to the plot--where a desperate girl stands on the edge of a ledge because she's suicidal. Superman appears behind her, telling her that her therapist had been held up and that she is "much stronger" than she thinks she is. They hug. That, to me, is what a Superman story really ought to be about. Yes, he's one of the best building punchers this side of the Incredible Hulk, but those knock-down, drag out fights--as fun as they can be--isn't really what makes Superman a great character. It's that idea of using his power for good.
One of the things that Superman could do better--and, were his universe not so overrun with costumed crazies and interdimensional threats, he could do more often--is care about others. To borrow a phrase, Superman has almost unlimited power: Therefore, there must also come almost unlimited responsibility. I'm not saying that Superman should have to dedicate every waking moment to improving people's lives. There's no institution or entity saying that his duty to mankind demands this responsibility. Instead, it's part of his willingness to become--in important if intangible ways--human. By participating in the world, he accepts the benefits that have come with the system and an obligation to do his best to help those harmed by the system. He has, in other words, the same obligation that we all have. Superman could do a lot for people besides punch monsters really hard. In many ways, Superman is the best suicide prevention person that the world could ask for. He can move so fast that he can be an emblem of hope to many. He is intelligent enough to help solve many of the problems that we suffer from--too much pollution, nuclear proliferation, violent crimes, war--and improve our society. Many people like to compare Kal-El to God, a being of comparative omniscience, omnipotence, and (almost) omnibenevolence. "We wouldn't want God to take away our agency by fixing all of our problems," is a common argument I hear. Maybe for God, but Superman isn't Him. He's a "man"--why not expect him to do all in his power to improve the world constantly? I try, through the small and simple means of my position in life, to make the world a better place. Had I more power, would I do more? I think that's really what is interesting about Superman: Not his powers, his rogues gallery, or his costume (though those are all pretty cool). No, I think it's the idea of contemplating what a person ought to do with power. That's the theme of every superhero story in one way or another. Indeed, that's part of the purpose of mythological stories. Heracles had great power and was forced to use it as penance for a crime--but that penance gave benefit to many people. As we, as a species, gain more and more power, I think we could learn a lot from our mythologies--whether they're religious, historical, or comic books--about how to be responsible with the powers we've developed. The more I think on it, the most important part of Kal-El's name isn't the super, but the man. We humans have a lot that we can do. Superman helps*, in his own way, to remind us of what we can do with it. --- * Maybe this is what the recent movies have failed to grasp about Superman: Is that he helps us be more human. There hasn't been the necessary focus on that as the filmmakers thought they were putting into it (in part because David Goyer's star has waned and Warner Brothers needs to stop thinking that it hasn't). While Clark Kent might be able to doubt his position in the world, Superman doesn't. Having him be as fixed in his goodness as Batman is in his brooding would give us a cinematic Superman that we could better understand. Ever since about the sixth grade, when the Spider-Man: The Animated Series debuted, I've been a web-head. Yeah, my involvement with reading Spider-Man stories has waxed and waned over the years. I have a couple dozen Spider-Man novels, countless comics, as well as trades featuring the web-slinger. I put a lot of money into the action figures-- --and I played the video games. Back in 2000, Activision released Spider-Man for the PlayStation. I remember being so excited to play the game that a couple of times I drove myself down to Media Play exclusively to try the demo that they had on display (I didn't bother tracking down my own copy of the demo disc to play the first level at home). I counted down the days and bought Spider-Man the day it released from a Babbages in the nearby mall. I didn't lollygag after my purchase: I got right back into my car and drove home so that I could spend the day playing the game. I loved it. For the first time, I really felt like I was web-swinging through the fog-drenched cities. I became proficient at all aspects of the game, eventually getting good enough to unlock every costume. I bought the guide (it was worthless, honestly) just to be sure I got everything the game had to offer. I even used the music and some of the Stan Lee voiceover parts in one of my school assignments. In short, I was one happy customer. Sequels were released, new consoles came about, and Spider-Man kept showing up in different types of games. Gone were the days where I would play Marvel vs. Capcom for the only video game connection I could get with Spidey. Shortly before I left for my mission, I picked up the Spider-Man game that was the official movie tie-in. I played through that whole thing a couple of different times before I had to leave for Florida. By the time I returned, two years later, Spider-Man had a new movie on the horizon…and a new game. Most gamers--Spider-Man fans or not--will say that one of the best action games on the PlayStation 2/Xbox generation of consoles was Spider-Man 2. It hit the plot points (and character design) of the movie and had some additional content to spread it into a video game-length endeavor. By this time in my life (we're talking mid-2004) I had moved over to the Xbox for my video gaming needs, so I was able to play Spider-Man 2 on the then-superior system. I was entranced. Web-slinging through the city was a natural and thrilling experience. The first game I played only needed Spider-Man to ever swing on two webs at a time before arriving at the right place. This game, though? Its main purpose was to give players a chance to use New York city as a playground for a guy who can bench press a pickup truck. Fun moves, upgradable powers, and constant challenges made the game a delight. There were some bugs, of course: The quantity of missions to accomplish became repetitive after too long, the voice acting was tinny and poor, and the NPCs were horrible to look at. The studio had obviously put all of its effort into the web-slinging mechanics and Spider-Man's move-set--a logical choice that I don't fault. But it did leave the game feeling, in retrospect, somewhat incomplete. Those flaws aside, Spider-Man 2 remained my favorite Spider-Man game for years. I bought the third installment for the PlayStation 2 when the third movie came out, but that was an inferior product to the one on the PlayStation 3. I picked up the Ultimate Spider-Man game for Xbox (I think?) and was confused why Spider-Man only had one web-shooter. Once I switched back to Sony products, I picked up some Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 which allowed me to play a team-based Spider-Man in a fairly enjoyable hack-and-slash game. I almost earned every trophy in the Spider-Man: Web of Shadows game, Spider-Man: Edge of Time, and I even played Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions thoroughly. I even threw down some cash for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in. (This game had my favorite inclusion to a Spider-Man game--the no-brainer concept of having a web-shooter assigned to each trigger, thus allowing a natural rhythm to swinging around New York--a feature that, lamentably, has not been emulated in the newest game.) In short, I've played a lot of Spider-Man games over the years. Marvel's Spider-Man, the recently released, incredibly hyped, PlayStation 4 exclusive title, is--by far--the best one that I've ever played. If you're one of those who's planning on playing the game and you'd like to stop reading now, that's fine. I'm going to talk about why I liked the game so much, but a huge part of it is that the story really worked for me. As a result, I'm throwing down a spoiler warning. If you're not reading on, let me just say, the game is A+ and you should play it. Spoilers after the picture. Okay, so here's part of what makes Marvel's Spider-Man so enjoyable from a story perspective: They're highly allusive.
The Peter Parker we meet in MSM is a university graduate who has been Spider-Man for quite some time. Early on in the game, one of the many, many things to do in the city is find his old backpacks from when he was a teenager and college student. There are over fifty of them to discover, and each one has a single item in it that Peter contextualizes. The items vary, from leftover pieces of enemies' suits to fanart to vestiges of Peter's life with Mary Jane. And that's what's so cool about finding these pieces: It gives me an understanding about their relationship through internal thoughts and fragments, rather than laying it all out. This allows me to feel like a relationship detective and put the puzzle together as the game plays out. Later, Peter--after fumbling a lot in trying to get things to work out--goes to dinner with MJ. We learn that they broke up six months before, but the reason remains out of reach. One good storytelling trick is to dole out important tidbits, like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs, letting the audience experience each piece and consider it before handing out another one. MSM does that masterfully, showing the audience the results of an action that we have yet to see. Additionally, there are a handful of sequences where I stop playing as Spider-Man. Sometimes it's to play as Peter Parker, helping a mentor and friend, Otto Octavius, to improve his prosthetic experimentations. This is excellent characterization, because Peter Parker's genius is one of the highest in the Marvel canon--not on the same level as Reed Richards or Tony Stark, but he's no slouch, either--and the video games have only ever paid lip-service to Parker's abilities. In the game, I got to do a couple of mini-games that involved increasingly complex puzzles that were "used" to help Octavius. Sometimes these mini-games were ways of advancing the plot, sometimes not. But the point is, Peter's intelligence was highlighted and I got to interact with that aspect of the character's, well, character. Another time where I relinquished Spider-Man's wall-crawling in favor of something of a different stripe was during the Mary Jane episodes. There are only three or four of them, but they're a nice break from the normal formula the game had set up. Because she doesn't have super powers, Mary Jane goes Solid Snake on the levels, sneaking past obstacles, throwing out distractions, and--by the end--even tazing bad guys in her way. The entire time, Mary Jane's character is established, not as a dazzling supermodel, but instead an intelligent, resolute, and brave reporter for The Daily Bugle--the old newspaper that Peter has, at this point, left behind in order to pursue his science career. Having Mary Jane be her own character, capable of solving her own problems, makes it feel--during the Grand Central Station mission especially--like her partnership with Spider-Man is a natural outgrowth of their relationship and burgeoning respect, rather than an escort-mission style of gameplay. In other words, because of the way that I got to interact with Mary Jane--not simply as a character in cutscenes, but as a playable character whose skillset was quite different than the main character's--I was able to better appreciate the way their storylines interacted with each other. Mary Jane flat out says, at one point, that she was glad she could save Peter once, considering how many times he has to save her--which he does, though it's less a damsel in distress and more of a friend in trouble (and there's a difference in those tropes, I should add)--which meant so much more to me as a player because Mary Jane really did feel like she was contributing to the conflict that was consuming the city. The last character I got to play through the course of the game was Miles Morales. His skillset is essentially the same as Mary Jane's, and though his character arc isn't as well developed, its placement in the game really does open up the video game franchise to make future, bolder, more risky decisions. I think they should kill off Peter Parker in the next Spider-Man game. See, they show Peter being forced to choose between saving the countless sick in the city or selfishly using up a cure to save Aunt May. This sort of dilemma shows up in a lot of Spider-Man comics, but the video game format lets this version of Spider-Man stand independent of continuity and to devise its own alternative history--and future. And though the moment of May Parker's death is quite similar to the Amazing Spider-Man #400 "A Death in the Family", the emotional power of the moment of seeing Peter having to do something for "the greater good"--of choosing to save the city, rather than his beloved aunt--was genuinely gratifying. Sad, of course--in fact, I think my wife might have been getting a little misty eyed at that part--but powerful. And that's the thing about this game: It's emotionally satisfying in more than just the "I can't believe I'm web-slinging through New York!" kind of feeling. The gameplay is immaculate--the ability to change costumes with a couple of clicks, the customization of your suit to fit the kind of play style you're interested in, the ease of going from web-swinging to fighting and back again--but that's only one of the components that makes this game good. The story is solid--despite some weird comic book/video game concessions that one learns to simply take in stride--and it's nuanced. I honestly could continue to rave about this game, but I'm running low on time and I have to explain my earlier comment about thinking they should kill off Peter. One of the hardest things about superhero comics and movies is that the stakes never feel real because the hero always wins. (Hence the emotional trauma of Infinity War.) Video games are fortunate in that they can circumvent the laborious process of getting to love a character because the interaction of the gamer to the game forges that affinity faster. In comics, it takes tons of issues for a character to form in a reader's mind. In the case of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they've dedicated dozens of hours to the characters that are in Infinity War. But video games put the gamer into the character's boots and a natural possession--on many levels--occurs. The advantage of this is that characters can die and it can feel like it means something: Batman: Arkham City is an excellent example of this. Why did they kill Joker at the end of the game? Because they could. And not just because they could, but because it was powerful--it was the right ending to the story. The same could happen in the next Spider-Man game, except they could kill off Peter Parker, making room for Miles Morales to assume the role and accept the responsibility. Done correctly, that could be the "Aerith moment" of a whole new generation of gamers. Especially in a medium where death is a minor setback for the majority of the time a player is involved with the game, killing off Peter Parker could really make for a powerful experience. And, since they so carefully set up Miles' character in this game, there's a lot that they can exploit. Or…since there are two Spider-Men, they could just have the next game be two player! That would be awesome. Anyway, the game is incredible. It's gorgeous to look at, and the digital actors and animations are so well rendered that, though I always know I'm looking at a video game, I'm convinced of their emotions in the same way I am when I watch a Pixar film. The gameplay is almost perfect (not having two buttons for the web-shooters was a sad decision, if you ask me, and I wish I could've fought the Sinister Six the first time they showed up, even if it was only so that I could get the crap kicked out of me), and the characterization and world they've cooked up are immensely satisfying and memorable. It's a sensational, spectacular, amazing Spider-Man game. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! I may have mentioned before that I'm a fan of the Cartoon Network series Teen Titans GO! This is a point of friction between me and some of my students, as there is, apparently, a lot of angst toward TTG as a perceived (rightly or wrongly) usurper to the five-season Teen Titans cartoon show. As I understand it, the fifth season ended on a cliffhanger and, due to behind-the-scenes issues, the sixth season wasn't made.
Fans got Teen Titans GO! instead. Whereas the first iteration of the five-person ensemble superhero teenage drama/action hybrid was just that, the second version is a five-person ensemble superhero teenage slapstick/rando-comedy extravaganza. Each of the characters--as much as the comics from which they sprang as the different versions of the cartoon show--has a clear, distinct personality, complete with disparate goals and flaws. Raven (my personal favorite) is more interested in reading and is gloomy all of the time--plus, let's be honest, has the coolest power set of the whole lot. I mean, she can create portals and fly and make objects out of her dark demon energy. All of that is the same among whichever version you're looking at. But the way that Raven works in the midst of a bunch of zany jokemongers is quite a bit different than what she does when she's helping to stop the H.I.V.E. and whatever other superhero job she needs to do. Both are fun for separate reasons. Both are interesting takes on the one character. I would argue that neither is superior to one over the other with one notable and important exception: The Raven (and, by extension, entire cast) of Teen Titans is saturated in the stench of nostalgia. For a lot of my students, watching Teen Titans was part of their after-school routine, much like coming home and bingeing on Batman: The Animated Series and Animaniacs was for me. And, to push my empathy a step further, if someone had taken Batman: The Animated Series away and given me Batman: The Brave and the Bold instead, I probably would be rather resentful, too. But it wouldn't change the caliber of the show that replaced it. (That being said, I haven't ever watched The Brave and the Bold so I can't speak to its quality.) And in the case of Teen Titans GO!, I have my own (admittedly quasi-) nostalgia that connects me to it: It helps me with my depression. I stumbled upon TTG (and its slightly-superior-but-for-hard-to-define-reasons broadcast mate, The Amazing World of Gumball) during a cabin writing retreat. I had neglected to bring enough movies to watch at the cabin after my writing was done for the day, so I ended up turning on the cable TV we have there. Since I wasn't interested in basically anything that was being shown except for cartoons, I tuned into TTG. It was the episode called "Oil" and it had me laughing out loud before too long. Once I came home, I found snippets of the show where I could, but at last I succumbed to an available DVD at Target, bought it, and showed it to my family. My three boys fell in love with it, my wife laughed and rolled her eyes, and I used it as one of my coping mechanisms for when I feel really glum. It's bright, cheerful, exceptionally random (and I've always been a fan of well-done random comedy), and shockingly unexpected in a lot of ways. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's one of the funniest cartoons I've seen. It's hard to compare (except to The Amazing World of Gumball), so I wouldn't say it's "better" than, say, mid-to-late-nineties' Simpsons, but it is really funny stuff. Part of it is the premise is perfectly in my wheelhouse: Random comedy, but a through-line via the superhero stuff that can provide context and grist for some of the jokes. It's entirely episodic, but it still builds on itself and the jokes of previous episodes and seasons. (See, for example, the fact that Robin has baby hands in those green gloves.) So when it comes to Teen Titans GO To The Movies, I had already become familiar with how the characters interact, the predictability of their motivations, and even some plot twists. In other words, I am the prime target audience for this film. And I loved it. They managed to slow things down--a tricky thing, since the cartoon itself is highly frenetic--without feeling like they were padding anything to get it to fit into the feature-length time frame (clocking in at 88 minutes, plus a Batgirl short at the beginning). The animation was better, though still characteristic of the series' character design and tone. But what really makes TTGTTM work so well for me was its theme: Superhero movies. The setup of the entire conflict of the film comes when the Teen Titans sneak into a premier for the next Batman movie. During the previews, they see that everyone is getting their own superhero movie. Alfred does. So does the Batmobile. Even Batman's utility belt is slated for "next next summer". Robin then goes on a quest to figure out a way to get his own movie. As the film progresses, more and more familiar (and some really esoteric) DC characters make an appearance. Often they're in the background, but the idea is that the DC Extended Universe--the arena in which Justice League and Wonder Woman all exist--is a part of the Teen Titan's universe, too. The commentary about how many superhero films are around--while even managing a shout out to a couple of Marvel characters--and what kind of tropes they employ is satirized and ridiculed with all of the love that TTG showers on the objects of its humor. In the end, I loved the film. It had me laughing throughout most of it, and the last line before the credits was so beautifully timed and executed that I can't really explain it. It's just…amazing. That being said, I don't really recommend it if you're the kind of person who doesn't get slapstick, random humor. The jokes--some of them inside jokes--come fast and furious throughout most of the movie, and if superheroes aren't that interesting to you, or if you find hyperactive (and -colored) cartoons tedious or bizarre, this probably won't suit you. But for me and my family, it was worthwhile and enjoyable. For me personally, it was significantly more enjoyable than Hotel Transylvania 3, which I liked quite well. Logan 5 July 2018
Back when the first X-Men movie was released, I remember I was on a campout. I'm not a fan of scouting or camping or being outside, so the entire biking/backpacking/rowing "high adventure" was not my idea of a good time. I really just wanted to go home, get cleaned up, and take my girlfriend to see X-Men. As this was July of the year 2000 (the Earth, surprising many, still intact after both Y2K and the supposed end of the world), there wasn't a lot of internet--not, at least, the way we think about it today. I knew the movie was coming through magazines, newspapers, and maybe a website or two. My family only had a dialup modem, so there wasn't a lot of "surfing" going on in my household and I certainly wasn't going to be watching the trailer or visiting fan sites. In short, I was excited for a movie that was within my wheelhouse (even though it was Spider-Man I really wished were up on the silver screen) and, even more than that, it would mean I was done with the campout. Eventually I got to go home. I can't remember if Gayle and I went to see the movie that same night (back then, advanced tickets weren't a thing, nor was camping out to see a new movie, either…you couldn't go to a midnight showing, nor a Thursday release of a Friday blockbuster because logic ruled in those days and release dates meant something) or not, but I do know I went in and had an amazing time. I was in between my junior and senior years and I could still get excited about things. As an avid fan of the cartoon X-Men, it was loads of fun to see these heroes, fighting each other with cutting edge special effects (lol) and simply enjoying the cool new franchise. That franchise ended a year or two ago when Logan was released. (Oh, and here's your spoiler warning as I dive in. Statute of limitations probably haven't expired on this film yet.) Since the nearly two-decades of X-Men movies have come and gone, I have spent less and less time watching or thinking about them. The third film was atrocious--even at the moment of watching it I had some problems with it, which is really saying something*--and though I thought the First Class idea was clever, I didn't really jive with the liberties with the previous films that it took. After that, I kind of stopped on the main X-Men titles. I'm not opposed to seeing what happened between the last X-Men movie and what I just watched, but I think it might cause some of the tonal issues that I had with Logan. Now, right off the bat, Logan is an impressive film. I think Jackman's performance is absolutely stellar and the premise was fascinating enough to me that I wanted to see what would happen. The wheels sort of fall off by the end, falling back into the frenetic ending that we've come to expect in superhero films, complete with a vicious boss fight, but that is a minor quibble. The film tells a story that is committed and captivating, it's told well, and there's such an understated way that many of the scenes play out, I really worried for old Logan. And that's what makes Logan so great, as I see it: There are real, personal stakes for the eponymous character. Wolverine's biggest draw--both in the films and the comics--would have to be his skill-set. He's strong, has knives coming from his hands, and has that crazy healing factor. And that healing factor really causes a stakes-slip in the wrong writer's hands. Much like Superman, there's not a lot that threatens Wolverine. He can dish out almost as much as he takes, and he takes a lot. This is why it's important for Wolverine to let people into his heart: It gives the bad guys someone to exploit. They can't kill Wolverine, but they can kill something he cares about--give him pain in all sorts of different ways. Well, those different ways require time and tend not to be flashy, so the idea of causing him to stop healing--in The Wolverine, it's through science handwavium that strips him of his powers--is a really interesting one. Taking it to the next step--that Logan has, essentially, aged out of his mutant healing power--is a logical one and makes this story, from the outset, a demonstration of how far Logan has come and what he stands to lose. All of this is excellent storytelling and filmmaking and I'm really impressed by it. Unfortunately, its rating is really appropriate and there's an issue with that. The first word of dialogue is the eff-bomb, and Wolverine lets these fly more regularly than his claws go snkt. On a personal level, I'm not a fan of the word. On very rare occasions, it can be really effective, comical, or significant. "Use very sparingly" would be my motto, edging toward the "but never is better". So hearing Wolverine--and Professor X, as a matter of fact--swearing so frequently and abrasively is jarring. I'll admit it's in part because of the TV show from the '90s that I have a sanitized, more palatable version of X-Men language, but the films are complicit in this, too. All of them (excluding the Deadpool movies, which I haven't seen) that use this IP have been PG-13. There's swearing, sure, but the eff-bomb is held only for significant moments--as is the policy for PG-13 movies. So my spotty memory of the world in which Logan takes place has a handle on the strong language. They only swear like that sometimes, rather than constantly. And it's not about the language, either--at least, not necessarily. The violence has to be explored to a certain extent. Because it's suffering from the same issue: Wolverine has always had knives that cut through the gaps between his fingers. He has always used them to slice and dice his way through a movie's baddies. Very rarely has blood been seen. He'll snarl and scream and swing his arms around near the enemies, who'll then silently fly backward and collapse, the one hit from the hero's claws enough to send them to the Great Beyond. Not so with Logan. There's more blood in this movie, I think, than what I saw in the last Resident Evil film--and that's a zombie movie (ostensibly). What's jarring with the violence--claws popping out of bad guys' faces, limbs being lost, or, in other words, logical consequences of a character like this fighting the way that he does--has less to do with how gruesome it is and more to do with that tonal change. Unlike the language, Logan's violence goes back and rewrites my memories of the previous movies. There may have been times when Wolverine would have sworn more had the ratings system allowed it, but every movie with this character should be just as bloodstained as Logan. Seeing the, as I called it, "logical consequences" of Angry Knife Guy™ shows that there's…I don't know, maybe a false sense of Logan's heroic character? I groused about this once about the TV show Arrow on Twitter, saying that having a protagonist, a "good guy" who kills so many people--often without a second's hesitation or thought--really strains my credulity. I stopped watching Arrow before the end of the first season, in large part because of that inconsistency with what I like in heroic morals. Wolverine has always done a Harry Tasker (the main character from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie True Lies) when one asks, Does he kill people? "Yeah, but they were all bad." He's been an anti-hero in that he doesn't abide by normal heroic conventions, but he's trying to stop injustices and save lives, rather than use his powers to wantonly kill and get away with it. And I get that; it might not be my favorite approach to a moral action, but I understand it. When I saw Logan, all of that internal, perhaps subliminal justification slipped away. Wolverine is more than a guy who tries to do good and gets pushed to the edge too often; no, he lives on that edge and his bloody work is apparent all throughout the film world he inhabits. That's, as I've said before, jarring. It's really the best way to phrase it, I think, because it rewrites so much film history. In some ways, Logan acts as the most effective reboot of the franchise than any of the other attempts in the superhero film genre. I'm going to wrap this up with two final things: One, I do recommend it, provided you're okay with the violence, gore, and language. It's powerfully made, with a lot of excellent acting, interesting plot twists, comparatively few contrivances (it is, after all, a slave to its own genre), and seals off the X-Men universe--or, at least, Wolverine's part of it--in a powerful way. And that, actually, leads to point number two: The final moment, with X-23 removing the cross, tipping it over, and making it an X? Awesome. Incredible. I was not expecting Wolverine to actually die, though I knew it was a contractual possibility (I'd heard Jackman said he was done being that character). So having him finally slip away, finally succumb to the decades of abuse and pass on…that was powerful and unexpected. And to see the icon--the one that was on so much promo material and part of my childhood, the massive X--invoked one last time gave the film (and Wolverine's character) such a powerful conclusion and fulfilling finality…that affected me. Which is what good films are supposed to do. --- * I am an ankle-high-expectations kind of fellow: If I'm at a movie, I almost always like it simply for the fact that I like watching movies. I try to pick films I'm interested in, at least on a conceptual level, and that's usually a good way to spend a couple of hours. So if a movie is stinking enough for me to think, "That was really dumb and I don't like it," then it has to have a pretty rotten stench coming off of it. In keeping with the (apparent) theme of the week, I'm going to talk about a manga that I finished reading the day I started it, Attack on Titan Vol 24.
This manga is long running, and it's also the kind of story that has compelling characters and lots of plot twists. Very few people I know have kept up on the manga, preferring instead to watch the very well done anime. I get that. In fact, I would be in that camp m'self were it not for the fact that, when season 1 ended, my wife immediately set about purchasing every volume of the manga so that she could see what happened next. Since then, her reading has tapered off…but mine hasn't. I still make mental notes about when the next one is coming out (July!) and often use the release of the newest volume as an excuse to go to Barnes and Noble. In the case of AoT #24, it came out a couple of days before my birthday, so I picked it up when I went there to relax after one of the more stressful days of teaching. I don't reread the series every time a new one comes out--there are too many volumes for that--but I'm pretty sure I'm going to reread the whole thing before July. Make sure I remember everything ere the new (and last?) one comes out, you know how it goes. Okay, that's probably enough introduction to keep from accidentally spoiling anything. S P O I L E R S Early on in the Attack on Titan story, Commander Erwin Smith claps Eren on the shoulder and asks him, "What do you see? Who do you think the enemy is?" At first I thought this was a weird question: The answer is obviously the Titans. They're enormous giants that live only to eat humans and don't have any other motivation. They're worse than zombies, for they're almost impossible to kill, save by cutting out the nape of their neck. Easy. What I didn't realize was that Hajime Isayama, the creator of the series, was trying to warn me that I shouldn't remain too focused on the Titans. Much like The Walking Dead, the existential threat is the backdrop of what is happening in this world, not the main focus. It's how other humans react to a pending apocalypse that is the seedbed for the real story. And that makes sense. Most audience members would probably tire of yet another contrived excuse to pit the dwindling strength of the Survey Corps against the Titans if the series were only concerned about the humans defeating the Titans. But the purpose of the series is to look at how the humans defeat the humans who wish to remain in status quo with the Titans…and those who wish to devour them all. I think my largest gripe--and this is a personal one--is that the idea that there's a world outside the walls, destroyed by the ravenous hunger of the Titans turns out to be false. There's a much larger world, and the people out there are responsible for sending the Titans to the island on which the story primarily takes place. In other words, the story isn't about the fate of humanity after all: There are more humans elsewhere. That's a disappointment, if only because it gives a false sense of the stakes. That isn't to say that the people on the island aren't threatened, or that the fight against the Titans isn't terrifying and thrilling and worrisome, because the action is happening to characters I care about. The larger picture, though, shows my earlier anticipation as distorted, and that's kind of frustrating. When it comes to Vol 24 specifically, though, there's a lot of backstory, explanation, and clarification. One of the largest questions that I had, once I learned that the Colossal Titan was Bertolt, was why he would have started the attack on Wall Maria in the first place. Well, Vol 24 answers that, and it makes a lot of sense. I have to admit, if Isayama is pantsing his way through this series, I'm majorly impressed. While I don't always like the twists he throws in, he always makes it fit into the new logic. I don't know if it's the Japanese mode of telling stories or what, but in animes like Death Note, I've noticed that there is always a subtlety to the logic that I don't anticipate. Perhaps it's a cultural difference, I don't know. Anyway, seeing the past explained is exciting, but what really took me by surprise is that the future is given out, too. At some point, Reiner returns home, his mission of destroying the people behind the walls a failure. At the end of the volume, we see an older amputee who turns out, in the very last panel, to be Eren. Years have passed…but again, with that gap of time, we don't know what's actually transpired. The thing about these volumes is, I'm so interested in knowing what happens next that I read in a massive rush. The artwork is consistently good, if a little messy (which is just Isayama's style), and though the translation makes sense, the bubbles sometimes fit poorly--which is to be expected when it comes to translating a comic from Japan. Even reading it right to left is something that takes a couple of pages to get used to again. Yet despite these observations, I sprinted through this book. A lot of the details are lost in my eagerness to see what happens next, and though I wished that some of these later volumes had less talking back and forth and more building punching, I can appreciate the story (and storytelling) to keep that criticism from mattering too much. On the whole, I was shocked and excited by what Vol 24 has to offer. It looks like the final volume will be released this summer. I'll finally see the Titans attacked--and, I hope, my favorite characters make it out alive. I'm a comic book reader (when I can manage it) and I love superhero films (when I can get to them) and I also have a very simple expectation for movies when I get to see them: Do they have dinosaurs in them? If yes, I like them.
I'm not willing to dismiss something just because it doesn't have dinosaurs, of course. I will take building punching as a worthwhile substitute, and maybe even a little bit of kissing--though not too much, because then everyone starts feeling awkward as the actors slurp each other. Funniness and funness both also factor in. If it makes me think afterward, I like it even more. So, did I enjoy Avengers: Infinity War? Yes. Yes, I did. (Since there weren't going to be any dinosaurs, I would've liked to have had more Hulk in it, as an alternative. But we live in a flawed world, so…) And with that as enough of a preamble about the movie to avoid accidental spoilers, let me get into this: S P O I L E R S What just happened? I know that this is a familiar refrain, since so many of the characters died in the final few minutes of the movie. After all, this is Captain America and Iron Man we're talking about. They don't lose. And even when they lose against each other, they still defeat the bad guy. I'm not ashamed to admit that my eyes went wide when Thanos snapped his fingers. That isn't supposed to happen. The bad guy isn't supposed to win. Marvel Studios (or Stud10s, I guess? Celebrating a decade of these films is cool, but…yeah, the logo didn't do it for me) has spent, well, the last ten years grooming audiences to understand this form of storytelling. Everything is going well, then the bad guy's plans become clear, the heroes stop her/him, and the smaller pieces of the broader universe rotate a bit more into position. Film after film, this is the formula. Punch, quip, punch, punch, emotion, quip, punch, credits, after-credits. So when it came to Infinity War, I wasn't entering the theater with anything but a preconceived notion that I was going to see Thanos fail and the Avengers reign continue undisputed. That finger snap left me shaken. Let's consider how gutsy it was for Marvel to do this: They've released almost twenty films with these characters, pushed massive amounts of merchandising, theme park attractions, small-screen adaptations, and much more. In other words, they've given us enough superficial changes that we feel there's a variety, but enough familiarity that we feel comfortable. Then the finger snaps. There's another thing that Marvel movies have been subverting since the beginning, which is the classical model of tragedy and comedy. In a classical tragedy, the world is in order and then things fall apart. In a comedy (not necessarily comedic), the world is a mess and the ending comes when things are put in their proper order. Many of the Marvel movies start off with things put together, then they fall apart--a tragedy--but, because they're superheroes, they reverse the ill fortune and they put the world back together. Infinity War doesn't do that. The world starts off broken--thanks to Captain America: Civil War--and the process of putting it all together, in the end, is futile. It's following a comedic pathway throughout the film--Steve Rogers coming back, the joining up of the Guardians of the Galaxy and pieces of the Avengers, the unification of Wakanda to the rest of the MCU. Things are coming together. Generic (meaning, here, "of the genre") conventions, these comedic expectations, are being met all the way throughout. Then the finger snaps. Because we've been programed to find catharsis through the journey of the hero--since the ending was foreordained thanks to marketing and formula--there was never the genuine possibility of the finger snapping. They push this possibility farther and farther, even having Thor soar in, a deus ex axina, to stop Thanos at the absolute last moment. But still, the finger snaps. The aftermath of Thanos' decision* is particularly heartbreaking, seeing that almost everyone is scared or afraid or confused…except for the Scarlet Witch, who wants to die because of her loss. I don't know how to feel about this, as I didn't realize that Scarlet Witch and Vision were a thing until this movie. I mean, they kind of had a relationship in Civil War, but I didn't see it as anything substantial. That leads to the effect of detailing backstories so thoroughly. A two hour movie can let an audience feel connected to characters they've never met before to the point that tears are shed when the character dies. Having, in some cases, years of affection for the characters is bound to make for an emotional response. My wife was crying, and some of the young kids sitting on the rows in front of us were sobbing at the end of the movie. The trauma of that kind of on-screen death was enough that Gayle and I decided we don't want our boys watching the movie until there's the next one on the horizon. We don't want them to be too traumatized for too long. I would have to say that Peter Parker dying was really affecting. His death, in particular, had him dying in the arms of the man who had brought him into this colorful, violent world. The father/son dynamic is unmistakable, despite Tony's denial of it. The death of a civilian weighs heavily on Tony's conscience in Civil War, and as a leader he's taken on greater responsibility for the people under his sphere of influence. Seeing him sit, surrounded by a world on fire, far from home and having lost a would-be son…that was a powerful moment, one that can only have that kind of emotional weight because of the enormous amount of time we've spent with him as a character. The ending of the movie is where most of the focus of this essay has been, but I should say that I enjoyed it throughout. Having so many storylines that needed to be connected is no small feat, and though there was a Return of the King problem--large chunks of time focused in one area, then shifting to the other area with a sort of "remember these guys?" jolt--near the end, I thought they handled it fairly deftly. Editing didn't stand out much to me, and I disliked how much shaky-cam they incorporated in the fight scenes. That being said, they did allow more of the punches, explosions, dodges, and shots to land on camera than I am used to. Here's hoping they step further away from that as they move forward. The score was serviceable, the acting was all great, and the CGI only kind of bothered me. I don't think Thanos could have been done with prosthetics, but…yeah, it is what it is. I know that they made all sorts of technical breakthroughs by making this movie, but I'm still sad that there's an overreliance on CGI work**, regardless of the high caliber and talent of the artists who make it. I will say, however, there was not enough Hulk. His refusal to come along for the ride probably has to do with having lost to Thanos, but Bruce Banner wasn't the only one wanting to see the Jade Giant come screaming into the battle--like they'd shown in the trailers! Another great way of making sure that expectations were shaken up, though there's a bit of bait-and-switch feeling. Obviously, if you've read this far, you've already seen the movie, so I don't have to recommend it. What I'm thinking of doing, though, is going through the Marvel movies, in order, so that I can see what was--and wasn't--taken care of*** in Infinity War. --- * Which, let's be honest, is a guaranteed way of killing off most everyone else in existence, as losing out such a huge portion of an ecosystem so rapidly will essentially condemn the survivors to extinction…also, was it only sentient life? Did half the dolphins, pigs, and monkeys die? Or other weird alien creatures? Also, how did Thanos know he wouldn't be one of the one half? Then again, he uses the "half" measurement earlier in the film, when he kills off Gamora's mother and reduces the surplus population. In that, he was never in the running to be on one side or the other. Perhaps the Infinity Gauntlet precludes him from being part of the equation. If that's the case, he's showing his selfishness--despite his protestations about what he's given up for the infinity stones. It reminds me of something my student said the other day: Sacrifice means giving something up, not taking something from others. ** At the very end, when Bruce is in the Hulkbuster suit and looking down, super sad, he looks really photoshopped. Like, bad. *** Does Tony Stark not remember that Pepper has superpowers? She didn't lose them at the end of Iron Man 3, right? I'm not misremembering that? Because she can fight, too. Why is he willing to risk a teenage kid from Queens during Civil War, but not his superpowered girlfriend? And if it's about "he wants to protect her", then we need that conversation on screen. That's a crucial part of their relationship, I should think. |
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