Eros! (Not Thanos)

Spoiler alert - at end.

It’s always the child inside us that either kills or saves us. As dramatic as that sounds, I keep turning to mine to keep moving ahead. Yet I know, as the excruciatingly painful movie Patrick Melrose so amazingly reminded us (what a majestic Benedick Cumberbatch!), sometimes not letting go of the inner child can be one’s demise. But, again, that’s not my case. (Or not so much). And I mention all this because I’m back at this blog after such a long break because of my childhood affection for the Avengers.

It’s almost a cliché that these rather dark days in America can drain our enthusiasm for so much. I’m sure that’s not the case for everyone, but it is for this truth and inclusiveness-loving blogger. Another one of the reasons I kept feeling compelled to return to this blog was that I hated that the last movie I wrote about, the one a first time reader would see, was a movie I didn’t like at all. But despite there being many good movies between that one and the one I am commenting now, none of them lifted my spirit up enough to want to write again like Avengers: Endgame.

I know I have the child in me to blame. She steadfastly believed in the ultimate triumph of reason, of fairness; she believed in the truth of evolution, not in the Darwinian sense (though, that too), but in the sense that our species would always continue to better itself. We strove to leave the wrong things behind, those that hurt other people, like sexism, racism, classism. All the isms. We moved forward in inclusion, in respect, in empathy. We became a more global society. Globalization, to that child, didn’t mean a world governed by greed with no borders, but populated by humans with no borders.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dr. King said and I believed.

But then suddenly it didn’t. America, or at least part of it, has shown its very horrible side. Like in Jordan Peele’s movie Us (that everyone writes is the U.S.), we realized that those with any kind of privilege granted them in the past–so men, white people, the wealthy- were really not that predisposed to let it go. Nah-uh! They were suddenly empowered, in the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches of government, at a national and state level, and no amount of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo protests seem to make a dent in their armor of selfishness and greed.

So then, Avengers Endgame.

If in our daily lives we see America losing its battle with evil through these everyday villains that populate the White House, Senate, local courts, the dark web, well then at least when the lights dim and the camera rolls they fade into the obscurity where they belong. And the everyday Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, T’Challa, Tony Stark, Sam Wilson, Hope Van Dyne, Bucky Barnes and the others step forward, rise from the ashes of this burnt out America, so to speak, and try to restore that balance that our inner child will always believe in.

 

Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) and Natasha Romanoff /Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) 

Endgame does not disappoint its fans, as the billion dollar world-wide box office demonstrates. And it’s rather hard to comment much more without spoiling it for those that haven’t seen it, so suffice to say that the movie is like Tony Starks’s Möbius strip. It is an Endgame that we know really doesn’t end. It is a surge of hopefulness because our heroes know about balance, are capable of empathy and sacrifice, and believe that all humans -and those of other species too- are worth our loving them 3,000. While probably not the reason Jim Starling gave his character the name Thanos, I’ve always felt it was too close to Thanatos, or death in Greek mythology, to be just a coincidence; and its opposite is Eros, that is life, but also love. Endgame is about choosing life, choosing to love.

Some of the strongest characters of the previous 21 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) carry the movie well, so it’s fine that many others have small parts. The Russo brothers, who directed some of the best films in the MCU -Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018)- chose their leading Avengers well. (Maybe I would have had Groot in a few more scenes just ‘cause he’s hella cute; and… certainly not Natasha?!). These were the right directors for the film.

Captain America (Chris Evans) and Falcon ( Anthony Mackie)

I may write about more details of the movie as time goes by and more people have seen it. I’ve written about the MCU before on this blog (Heroes for All Ages / May 2013; We are Groot/ August 2014), so I can always get back on the Möbius strip and return to these, my childhood friends.  For now, there is one image from the movie I want to share, even though it’s a tiny spoiler (but the reader wouldn’t understand it out of context anyway). I want to share it because it’s one of those scenes one keeps close to the heart, like when Thelma and Louise hold hands in the car at the end of Thelma and Louise, or when Ellen Ripley picks up that cat to enter into her pod in Alien. You know, the kind that restores our faith in human beings and humanity and in how we can evolve to better ourselves. It is the scene when Steve Rogers, Captain America, passes on his shield to Sam Wilson.