I've been on a major Marvel movie kick lately, and I've been thinking about why they are so enjoyable. Here's what I've come up with so far.
1) A legitimate effort at fun has been made - Every day, it seems like the news is full of new horrors. People are killing each other for no legitimate reason. Things are disappearing or being used up. Both America and the world seem to be increasingly divided. People are just plain hateful to each other based on differences which make no difference. Our political landscape is filled with a wide array of non-choices we'll have to pick from in a few month.
One of the greatest uses of entertainment is being able to escape all that, even for 120 minutes, and Marvel films do that so well. The interplay between the characters is always a delight. The snark between Hawkeye and Quicksilver in Age of Ultron. Tony Stark bating...pick a character. Anyone. Everyone, really. Ant Man in Iron Man's wiring or in Sam's Falcon suit. Ant Man getting punched in the face by Hope. Happy getting taken down by the Widow. Spiderman and Bucky. (Spiderman and everybody.) The entire Bucky/Sam dynamic. One of my favorite scenes of all time was in Civil War when all those huge, ridiculously powerful guys are crammed into that old Volkswagen and Bucky asks Falcon to move his seat but Sam refuses. It was short, little compared to the huge drama going on, but it was perfect. My immediate thought was, "Actual Crap Guys Do." I still snicker thinking about it.
And don't even get me started on Deadpool. That entire film is just a gift.
2) A legitimate effort at more than just escapism has also been made - Because they're not just fluff. Even when we laugh at the one-liners, we can come away from the films thinking seriously about important concepts. Loyalty (and who deserves it), purpose, self-definition, coping with situations that we can't control, the need for second chances, who gets to write history and tell stories, the effects of conflict and violence on the macro and micro level, it's all in there. If you don't believe me, go to Tumblr for about five minutes and look at the way that talking about Marvel films is allowing people to talk about the very same real-world issues they help people escape for a minute, too.
It's a little like Shakespeare to me. (I'm going somewhere with this. I promise. Don't throw things or pass out.) He used these fabulous characters and riveting stories to present important ideas. Mercutio is fabulous, so sparkly he almost steals the entire play from that other moody teen, but what we need to learn from him is that his excess destroys him and that friends can get caught up in our drama whether we intend them to or not. Hamlet, with all his intelligence and sublime skill with language, teaches us it is possible to wait too long and that everybody suffers from it. Macbeth shows us what happens when ambition subsumes loyalty and character. And on and on. This is a whole separate blog post from me, so I'll stop here. What I'm saying is that the MCU films do a lot of this same kind of thing. There's something deeper at the core of them that makes them more than blockbuster entertainment.
3) Even though it can't be easy to be an actor for these films, they always look like they like each other and like what they do - I know that being a part of something like the MCU has got to be a big choice for an actor for a lot of reasons. I assume they are physically rigorous films, especially since many of the actors seem to be doing as many of their own stunts as they can. They also seem to require long commitments to the franchise. I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, but I'm assuming it limits what actors are allowed to do otherwise even though most of the MCU films do well at the box office.
I also figure that being a part of something like MCU denies those actors a great deal of the pleasure of being an anonymous person. I'm just a lowly school teacher, nothing so public and glorified as a film actor, but I actually love to go hang out with my friends who live in other cities just for the sheer pleasure of not having to worry about who I'm going to see that might know me. I'll never forget the time I got one of my ear piercings redone and came to school the next day to be told, "We saw you getting your ears done." I hadn't seen them, and the entire thing was paranoia-inducing. Where were they? Why did they care? Was I floating around out there in a Snapchat getting my ears repierced? Jesus.... If it's like that for me as a public school teacher, can you even imagine what it is like to be one of the actors in these films? Is there anywhere they can enjoy being just them and not Cap or Nat, Bucky or Tony Stark? I hope so. Everybody deserves a place to be simply themselves.
The biggest thing I guess I'm talking about is the apparently endless parade of interviews and convention panels. Because I have a board on Pinterest called Geekery that I add stuff to from Doctor Who, Star Wars, MCU films, etc., I see a bajillion interview pins (again, probably mostly assembled from things from Tumblr, that frothing bastion of fandom, God bless it). It has to get old. I wonder how many thousand times they get asked the same questions. Some of the things I see they've been asked are things I wouldn't be able to respond to well, but they always seem to stay classy (reasons they're actors and I'm not, probably).
In spite of all these things that would be drawbacks to me, they also always look like they like each other and are having a lot of fun. They support each other, defend each other from the really brainless, tactless, and crass questions. I really hope that's true. I hope that they look forward to making these movies and mess around on set and during those ridiculous interviews and are basically just happy. Maybe they don't all hang out at one of the hundred-and-eighty-seven-guys-named-Chris's houses on the weekend, but while they're there, it seems like they're having a blast. It increases the enjoyment of the films to me to think that it's in some way an effort of friends.
4) The female characters kick ass - The women are as interesting and strong as the men and nobody acts like that's anything other than the way it should be. I have loved Wonder Woman since I was a little girl small enough to fit into Underoos, and I have always, always wanted to see a film in which she was not a cameo or just done wrong. Marvel doesn't seem to have that issue. They aren't afraid of women who can hold their own. I can't wait to see Hope Pym as the Wasp. When the Scarlet Witch blasted Vision through the floor in Civil War, I (silently) cheered. Kick that ass, girl. I'm still catching up on the Daredevil series, but Electra is so very well done, deadly and complicated. And yes. Like the rest of America, I do want an entire Black Widow movie. She deserves it. (And throw some Red Room Bucky up in that, too.)
5) They are not afraid of brokenness - All of the MCU heroes have big, huge faultlines running right up the middle of them. Serious things have happened to them, things they couldn't control. They've made choices the best they could or had all their choices taken from them. Accidents have happened. They lost things. They lost people they loved. They've lost part or all of themselves.
Bucky is the poster boy for this and one of my very favorite characters in the entire MCU. Each time we see him in the films, he is picking the pieces of his life up and sorting through them. Even though he has been as destroyed as a person can be, with the help of his friends, he is trying to put those pieces back in place. Sebastian Stan does an amazing job showing this process. Bucky can't be easy to play.
This is what real life does. All that ugliness I mentioned at the top that surrounds us every day is doing this stuff to us, and we have to pick ourselves up and deal with whatever remains. I think the MCU heroes do an excellent job of giving hope that it is possible to stand up and keep trying. Sure, we're never going to be kidnapped by HYDRA, twisted by the Red Room, recreated by the mind stone, but we are going to get knocked down, hurt in hearts, minds, and bodies, and there's a lot to be said for seeing survival of the worst in fiction. It's important to have stories that show us people can overcome.
6) The villains are complicated - As a million little Loki fangirls will attest, even Marvel's bad guys aren't simple. Maybe it's the richness of the decades of source material and all the incarnations they've gone through as different writers shaped the characters, but instead of just big powerful evil, there's always a reason. There's always a backstory. They aren't Iagos; they're Claudiuses. (And I promise, that's my last Shakey reference.) The Marvel villains are the flip side of the hero's brokenness. They show us what happens when you choose NOT to get up. When you choose to hold on the the darkness instead of finding some way to purge it or leave it behind. They are as important in that dynamic as the heroes are.
My favorite of them is almost inevitably Wilson Fisk. D'Onofrio always amazes me with the depth he brings to anything he plays, and his portrayal of the many, many layers behind Kingpin is one of the main reasons I like Daredevil so much. The character is absolutely terrifying, utterly ruthless, but as the details of his becoming are revealed, it becomes possible to have compassion for him. Then he decapitates somebody with a car door, and you are not quite sure how to feel. That's the way a good villain is supposed to function.
7) The characters grow and change - Captain America has undergone this beautiful and complex transformation, but all of them evolve. The Tony Stark we saw in Civil War wasn't the same guy from Iron Man. All the characters in Daredevil are shifting, and it's impressive to watch. Even fairly newly-introduced characters like the Scarlet Witch and the Black Panther have changed dramatically from who they were when we first met them. Others are poised on the edges of that kind of change, especially Bucky, and I hope we get to see it happen. Real life leaves marks. When characters don't change due to what they encounter, they're allegories, and while allegories are interesting, I don't think we learn as much about survival from them as we do from more dynamic characters.
And I could probably go on, but I'll stop here. It may seem kind of an odd thing for me to write about, but it's what was on my mind today. Gotta go watch a movie.
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