A Decade's Endgame

A Decade’s Endgame

How some of the biggest movies of 2019 reflect the socio-polotical landscape of the West

I enjoy a good movie review. Often the more scathing the review, the more I enjoy reading it. Maybe it’s just because I (ashamedly) like a good bit of drama, or to feel measured because someone else feels unbalanced. Or perhaps it is because it at least means the reviewer was emotionally moved. The degree to which that movement is in line with the vision of the director is a good measure of the success of a movie, but sometimes any emotional stirring is good. However even from scathing movie reviews I often find something missing. In particular, rarely do reviewers situate a movie in it’s cultural or social framework, beyond some cursory statements. As I look back on some the movies I watched this year (Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, The Joker) I might try a feeble attempt at that.

(I will presume the reader has seen these movies and is broadly familiar with their characters and plot).

Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel will be forgotten by history as just another cookie-cutter Marvel ‘superhero’ film. Its importance was overshadowed by being in the wake stream of Black Panther and swallowed up by the quick release of Avengers: Endgame after it. However, for all those who lived through its release we will be hard-pressed not to remember the social media and identity politics storm it created in it’s own short-lived wake. Much of this revolved around Brie Larson, who plays the titular character Captain Marvel as a superhero from outer space discovering her own sense of self over the course of the movie. The movie was attacked by many prominent males in social media for being too overtly ‘pro-girl’ and for promoting itself as a landmark feminist film. Critics of the film denounced it as being anything new, noting decades of strong female protagonists in film and TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tomb Raider, Sarah Connor in Terminator, Xena the TV series) as ‘progress’. Critics often went further however, to suggest that the advertising of this film on feminist values was somehow inherently anti-male. (You would think by 2019 opponents of feminism would have come up with a new argument, but then again change is not their strong point).

But I felt the movie did do something new – it refuted that there even was a competition between men and women, it refused to paint the feminist dialogue in terms dictated by gender. For this reason, when Jude Law in the climactic fight scene challenges a dominant Captain Marvel to fight him and she replies: “I have nothing to prove to you”, I felt she was talking more than just to Jude Law. Unlike the previous female protagonists listed above in the previous franchises, Captain Marvel is not out to compete with the men, she refutes that there is even a competition. Whilst it’s a commercialization of the feminist agenda (pro-girl movie both generates free advertising in social media and helps attract women to the superhero franchise), at least it’s an original one.   

Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame is a masterpiece of storytelling, weaving dozens of plots into a coherent and enjoyable film. Sure, it’s not a great work of ‘film’ but it certainly is a great movie once you stop asking it to be a ‘film’. If the Academy Awards were decided not by faceless elites but by how many people watched (and often re-watched) a film – then this would have swept the floor in all categories. The fil was significant not just for it’s ox office popularity, but by it’s acceptance of demographic trends and how America as a nation will see itself in coming decades. What struck me most however was that just as the movie signified an end to an decade of Marvel movies, it’s closing scenes also signified an end to ‘white’ America. Trump is in the White House, and the next US election for the first time will feature ‘white’ Americans as a minority of the population.

In the closing sequences of the movie, Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) uses a time-travel device to go back to the 1940s and re-live his life with his first love, Penny. He appears back in the present as an old man sitting on a bench. He passes his shield on to Tony Stark (aka Iron Man, and at this point  - spoiler warning) dies, with the mantle of Iron Man passing from the rich white male billionaire to those around him – notably the young Peter Parker (aka. Spiderman). Thor, the lovably destructive god of thunder, also appears to refuse the mantle of leadership of his surviving Asgardian community, deferring it to Valkyrie – a young lesbian woman of colour.

In all cases, established white men are deferring their ailing power and passing the baton onto a younger, more female, more ethnically diverse generation of heroes and heroines with smaller goals and aims. The smaller goals of it’s protagonists and their reluctance to band together and protect the world in the movie are further expressions of a smaller and more reactionary U.S. foreign policy around the world. The film signifies the passing of a generation of superheroes just as the passing of America’s view of itself as a global, white, heterosexual, male Uncle Sam is occurring in the real world.

The Joker

The Joker plays on a sense of being an ‘outsider’ in one’s own society, going some way to empathise with society’s perceived outcasts and downcast alike. The film itself inhabits a divided and at times destructive society. It frames power as being with white, educated and rich men, with society’s failings viewed through this contrast with disadvantaged, poor, uneducated, ethnically diverse characters. Apart from the other two films I have mentioned, this film is different in that it embraces an already divided society, without offering solutions for it’s cohesion or solving it’s problems apart from social unrest.

Conclusion

In 2019 all these movies demonstrate the cultural and commercial growth of identity politics in a fracturing Western world (note that I do not believe in all the doom and gloom as a ‘fracturing’ of The West, but that there is certainly a sense of this decline in the stories society is telling itself currently). They represent how increasingly this generation self-identifies with markers of ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality.

Personally, I think identity politics is another way of dividing society. It segregates and rationalizes each of us into defined categories of ethnicity, gender, sexuality. In weakening the bonds that bind us as a society and as Western culture, it makes it easier for more powerful factions to play the society off against each other and distract from the real narrative of widening gaps between rich and poor, the retreat of empathy within our community, the control of values by mainstream media, and the resurgence of challenges abroad to a free-thinking West. All in all, we should always be wary of forces that seek to divide a community and ask ‘who benefits from our division?’. The films of 2019 have profited from selling themselves on these divisions, lamentably without raising this question.