Marvel's Avengers; Endgame treats the world with something like wrath, only more cynically. Why does Marvel hate alternatives to capitalism? Why and how does it pledge fealty to capitalism while simultaneously embracing pseudo contrarieties like civic liberty and personal freedom? Perhaps because freedom exists elitely within the capitalist matrix and serves only those who exhibit consumer proficiency. Everyone else is marginalised as a resource, even their suffering in this process becoming the means to profit (the charity circuit, outsourcing abject labour to Third World countries, literal torture under 'rendition', and so on).
Human suffering as a profitable resource perhaps explains the inertia of governing bodies to act regarding climate change, and thusly reveals the inherently anti-rationalist corporate ontology which for so long had flagged itself as rationality's herald, touting the market as the perfect expression of rational actors pursuing 'logical' self-interest. Whatever suffering people 'indulge' themselves in is entirely volitional, a consummate ambience of their own choices. Jordan Peterson, poster boy for 'personal sovereignty', would agree.
Even more horrifyingly, the ways in which the Avengers Infinity War cycle defends capitalism as the only way forward is by negative example of an alternative to managing rising intergalactic populations and dwindling resources; namely with a pragmatic slaying of half the universe's sentient beings, an equation which leaves all surviving life with adequate subsistence.
Really? The only alternative to collapse is a veritable holocaust? Any sane person currently experiencing the ambience of chaos, hoping and wishing for miracles while their feeds pummel them with a fifteen year old Swedish girl shrilly decrying the sins of our fathers, would probably even aesthetically avoid a holocaust as a viable option. A prospective holocaust which, within the confines of the two films, affectively enshrines the status quo as a vindication against anyone seeking to defy or even dilute the suicidally-operable system of capitalism.
I'll admit to having been under the spell of an initially 'experimental' cinematic effort within Marvel to create a sprawling mega-budget-extended-universe unlike anything before it. It's surprising it hadn't happened sooner considering the reliance on franchises for Hollywood pay checks. The astonishing, almost religious commitment of studios to this concept of laborious fluidly-rendered world-building, in hindsight, has perhaps only been possible as a raging success due to the cognitive leaps of hypertextuality normalised by the internet, a natural progression concomitant with almost omniscient media consumption that has folded the behind-the-curtain sketch-lines of cinematic production into the product itself. Writing and production processes are now inseparable from the allures of such movie-behemoths, things like celebrity narratives and casting and plotting decisions all given equal coverage even before actual promotional cycles begin.
Even more astounding, and also not separate from the almost hysterical hunger for these movies, is the immense resources these productions suck up and regurgitate, only to generate and circulate even more capital to themselves (a spectacle the semi-peripheral focus on production is complicit in constructing). Like the richly hyper-defined pixelated renderings of their FX laden frames these evental-films consummately glitter with the appeal of extreme wealth, being above and beyond the imperfections of less ambitiously captured cinema, particularly the analogue varieties (which ironically only exist now as expensive nostalgias, because digital-capture is faster and cheaper). Also, their gleaming digital finish eradicates all the imperfections of working and global poor realities, suggesting affluent modes of exemption from the untold horrors collapse has in the wings for us. Marvel is a massive machinic production-line stalking our fears of collapse and re-packaging them as glossy pornified desires; 'yes the world is running out of stuff and is about to turn to shit, but look at the shiny things we can still make. Why slow down now?'
In this way Endgame is something of a utopian vision for the mega-rich, promising ever more extreme figurations of late-stage capitalism, reassuring the petrified of capitalism's stamina for renewal against all rational odds; and absurdly proffering a death-lottery as the truth behind alternatives of any kind.
Socialist death-squads?
Sure.
Then there's the ways in which Marvel writes heroic embodiment, which borrows from the sexualisation of it's comic-book source material but perhaps more deliberately defines the ideal and almost weaponised figures for capitalism's collapse-pending accelerated pace.
The casual body shaming is in no way accidental then, but rather tethers fitness-oriented Instagram presences and curated celebrity consumption to the fantastic interstellar landscapes within these narratives, disavowing criticism of capitalism in favour of lifestyle refinement as a means of defence against the looming peril of environmental and economic collapse. Just get really hot and hope for the best, okay! These parallelisms only bolster the ideological excuse-making for collapse-by-industry inherent within Marvel's meta-narratives, so that Star Lord's crew ragging him on gaining a few pounds, or Thor running to fat amidst a grief-induced depression, are comedic because they're personal failures towards the machinic perfection of self; that perfection being realisation of body as utility, as optimally primed vessel for navigating a degraded terrain.
On Thor especially; I hate to say it but something struck a chord during Infinity War which I'll admit maybe proves me susceptible to the cinematic apparatus and it's various ideological persuasions (all the more reason to dismantle visual cultures and make criticality an affect of consumption itself). After the genocide of his people at the hands of big purple villain Thanos (aptly named), he's left near-dead floating in space amidst debris only to be rescued by Star Lord and affiliates (Marvel's light relief for these crossover jaunts). He's experiencing a distinct racial loss, the kind of post-colonial trauma not normally packaged in a character so unequivocally white, as if white audiences needed a white character through which to empathise with victims of racial cleansing. He's been virtually de-fanged, trade-mark hammer destroyed, but travels to an obscure blacksmith to have a new godly weapon forged; this time an axe.
Being Nga Puhi myself and coming from an extended family still locked in cycles of poverty, substance dependency, abuse etcetera, all with statistical relationships to colonialism as a generationally transmitted trauma, I can instantly empathise. And was doing so even before Thor went and had his axe forged; my last name means the adze, or battle-axe.
And so as Thor returns from the wilderness with a thunder-shooting axe to avenge his loss, storming the proverbial citadel, I couldn't help feeling weirdly targeted by this joyous de-coloniser fantasy of smashing the oppressor to bits.
I even cried a little.
But beyond any suggestion of Jungian synchronicity and divine-messaging wrapped in archetypes, it reminded me that cinema, being primarily a visual medium but trafficking in heavy multi-disciplinary intersections, frequently eludes codification for being immortalised outside of time and thus subject to theoretical and cultural cognition very much in history's flux; the cinematic image is available for scrutiny by way of it's frozenness, ironically. So a thousand and one readings and wildly free-associative conjectures as to implication and intent can be teased from a single film like from an endless fount, readings which can be revised and/or retroactively erased etcetera. A film in it's contained dimensions of narrative-event is ironically a wild beast, appealing to language's embodied surpluses with it's mostly sensory output and thusly never arriving where it's main narrative intends. There are always untold byways being unleashed on audiences in a single film which makers can usher to the best of their ability, but over which they can never fully be in control (not even Kubrick, lol). Perhaps even more so thanks to the internet, even though studios have recently tried assimilating hypertextuality within the cinematic image (think fake woke, or literally anything on Netflix).
For all of these reasons I reluctantly admit I found a very affecting (pleasurable) paean to vengeful violence against colonial oppression in a Marvel movie.
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