I Watched The Avengers This Week
My nephew came over on Thursday. He was in fact supposed to be accompanied by his twin brother but that plan was scuppered by an act of self-sabotage on the part of the latter – the full horror of which I have not yet been fully appraised.
As it turned out “Horror” was the buzz word of the afternoon. My twin nephews are 7. Yes both of them. They are therefore far too young to be fully admitted to the genre to which they are most prodigiously drawn. Having nonetheless promised me that he had seen the trailer to “It” (2017) and did not at all find it scary, my nephew begged me to let him watch the horror unfold in its entirety.
I told him that such an act was unsanctioned by his parents and therefore would not be practically workable. Yes – in theory I could (as a matter of physical capability) give in to his repeated pleas and his carefully constructed arguments. However the outcome could prove to be (quite literally) quite sticky.
He promised he would not be scared when back home with Mum and Dad and getting into bed that evening. He shares a room with his twin which tends to soften the impact of Horror scares somewhat. Ok. So far, so good. But what would happen if he in fact awoke well into the middle of the night because he needed to go to the bathroom whilst his twin was too deeply set in slumber to be awoken?
This would leave him with a quite terrifying choice: either 1) to brave what to a 7 year old might appear to be a treacherous and haunted journey down the hallway to the bathroom to relieve himself of his burden or 2) to try to hold out (or rather hold in) until sunrise and very likely risk wetting the bed.
If he were to opt for option 2 (I choose the word “option” carefully), which knowing him as I do would seem the more likely, he would then have to explain to Mum and Dad why he did not go to the bathroom. After some interrogation on the point, the truth would undoubtedly reveal itself to a chorus of horrified gasps: namely that I had allowed him to watch it. To watch “It”, I mean.
Having set out my reasons, he was finally persuaded to give up the ghost and settle for The Avengers (2012) - aka in the United Kingdom “Marvel Avengers Assemble”.
Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly to those in the know, I tend to avoid Hollywood adaptations of Marvel Comics.
What I met that evening was a film which intended to be dizzying in every possible way for the most cynical and insidious of reasons.
Comrades, The Avengers is not an intelligent film. It is an utterly mindless one which only wears the cloak of intelligence. The Avengers works by allowing stupid people to feel that they are intelligent and that their brains are being engaged.
How does it achieve this prophylactic effect for the incurable?
Ever since Quentin Tarantino revitalised Hollywood with “Pulp Fiction” all of those years ago, there has been an overuse, which has begun to verge on abuse, of snappy, punchy dialogue. Tarantino’s great innovation as a writer was somewhat tellingly a comic book realism – this idea that “this” is how people really talk. In real life.
Why not power screenplays with the pulse of real life conversation?
This idea was barely the revolutionary one that critics raved about in 1994 when Pulp Fiction was released. It had almost entirely been exhausted by the time Tarantino himself attempted to re-use it in 2007’s Death Proof. If that film proved anything at all, surely it made the best case for the limitations of this strangely un-artsy focus on the conversational and the mundane.
To see this when watching The Avengers for the first time today (albeit in knowledge that the film was made almost a decade ago) feels like mere anachronism. This trick already feels horribly dated.
How much joy are we really supposed to derive from one running in-joke? These characters are “super heroes” but they talk, they bicker and they banter just like ordinary people. Rest assured Comrades, I do get the joke. I just do not think it is a particularly good one.
It is a contrivance which at first appears to serve no clear purpose and therefore feels like not so innocent condescension. If the effect is indeed intended to draw attention to the very genre in which the film operates, there does not seem to be any good reason to. Post-Modern does not automatically equate with intelligence. Trust me, if anyone should know that, Gordo should.
(Note 1: At this stage, it would be remiss for me not to point out that, almost on cue, like clockwork (yes, yes, just like wind up toy soldiers…) people will undoubtedly be revelling with the temptation to pounce upon the rather meagre morsel of self- criticism which I have just offered them. Odd. Odd because if I have myself offered the self-criticism, it seems odd for somebody else (anyone else) to react by at worst re-iterating what I have just said or at best paraphrasing it to take credit for it.)
(Note 2: By not only flagging the limitations of the genre which I from time to time dab in on this website but making the comment in Note 1 which addresses the possible public response to such an act of self-flagellation, I have in effect already taken us one level higher than the level upon which The Avengers resides. Does this matter? Is it relevant? In a sense it does not matter. In the sense that nothing really does. Certainly not your new luxury rug. Or that fancy designer vase. But in another sense it does matter. It matters a great deal. Do you know what the budget for The Avengers was? It was a not so cool $220 million. Did the stakeholders get good value on that investment? I have taken us further than The Avengers did in my meagre library/office. It is almost as if I am like some incredibly nuanced and wonderfully complicated superhero with a superpower but the mind of a dysfunctional man.)
Back to the action and pushing aside the patent laziness of the writing, all we are left with is a distraction which removes us from the action and then worst of all has no intelligent comment to make about the limitations of Superheroes. Why point to the price on the cover of the book, whilst someone else is reading it, if you have no other comment to make about it? In the words of The Dude, this is a “bummer man”.
For a film which is so obviously designed to feel fresh, it is amazing how stale it all feels. Robert Downey Jr’s Ironman stopping to have a drink in between his efforts to save the world is nowhere near as subversive or irreverent as the makers of The Avengers pretend it is.
On that point, this film is perhaps dominated by Jr in a way which was unintended. The trouble is in the casting.
Tarantino getting John Travolta to discuss regional differences in Macdonalds Menus with Samuel L Jackson was one thing. Josh Wheddon getting Chris Hemsworth underdressed as Thor to do the Woody Allen stuff is another. I will say that Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, and Chris Evans are all talented actors/actresses in their own rights. However they are not particularly well suited to carry this sort of script and they certainly lack the chemistry that (for example) the Travolta-L Jackson double act had.
In fact the overriding impression we are left with is as heavy handed and clunky as the action is. It all strikes down with the subtlety of Thor’s hammer.
Perhaps this pulverising match of the heavy handedness of action set pieces and dialogue is a deliberate one. I suspect however that it is not. As far as my suspicion goes I think something much more nefarious is at play.
For all of the faux subversion and empty gestures of rebellion, the film cannot help but wear its true colours on its sleeve as a good old fashioned, ameliorative and shameless American propaganda piece.
This is a comfy, conversational spirit which teaches a brutally ugly lesson.
The early signs are there in a scene in which the strangely aristocratic sounding Tom Hiddlestone’s Loki tells a crowd of people to kneel. Of course one brave old man objects to this curiously incongruous otherworldly diktat and of course that brave old man appears to be a survivor of Hitler’s Germany. Whether or not it is implied that he is Jewish is debatable. However what is not capable of contention is the gravitational political pull of that single event in Modern History for Hollywood film makers who by default use it to re-focus the minds of the global public on America’s international role as a Superhero.
There have been many massacres within even the sole ambit of Modern History. It is of course arguable that the West has been responsible for as many of them as it has prevented. There is therefore no objective justification for the disproportionate level of emphasis which America has attached to its role in WW2 (or indeed its crass oversimplification of the event as a battle between “Good” and “Evil”).
If this traditional American sloganeering at the heart of The Avengers were not clear enough, it is spelled out in express terms anyway with yet more heavy handed dialogue:
Captain America: "The uniform? Aren't the stars and stripes a little... old fashioned?" Agent Coulson: "With everything that's happening, the things that are about to come to light, people might just need a little old fashioned."
This inherent tension between the apparently complicated inner lives of our Superheroes and their strangely simplistic political dogmatism effectively derails the steam train and renders it upended, its wheels spinning aimlessly.
So we are expected to sympathise with these characters for feeling unsure about their roles as Superheroes. We are excpected, I think, to give them credit for the fact. However, unsure as they may be of their roles as Superheroes, Captain America is not quite going to be inquisitive or honest enough to respond to Agent Coulson by asking: “But what about all the dead babies in Iraq and Palestine?”
You seem Comrades, The Avengers are smart and complex. Just not that smart and complex.
And yet the film ends on a note which takes us from good old fashioned American values to the veiled threat of good old fashioned American warmongering:
Nick Fury [on the suggestion that letting The Avengers loose on the world could be dangerous because The Avengers are dangerous]: They surely are. And the whole world knows it. Every world knows it.
We are bombarded with the avalanches of skyscrapers and high rise buildings collapsing. These images evoke (I think quite deliberately and quite cynically) the images of the Twin Towers collapsing, casting our minds back to the catastrophic impact of 9/11 and therefore by default the threat of attack by foreign forces.
Ok. Fair enough.
So although the death count of even 9/11 was in reality eclipsed by the death count of the Iraq War, this is a film from an American perspective with everything that entails.
But then what good is the funky dialogue? Is it intended to help us question the role of Superheroes or to hinder us from doing so?
In the end the film’s politics has all the subtlety of a Tinder profile.
Wheddon crafts a world of urban pile-ups and tumescent Superpower-hazed ruin-scapes as billions of dollars of US Real Estate are toppled, crushed and hurled together.
(Note 3: tumescent
/tjʊˈmɛs(ə)nt/
adjective
1.
swollen or becoming swollen, especially as a response to sexual arousal.
2.
(especially of language or literary style) pompous or pretentious.
"his prose is tumescent, full of orotund language"
What exactly is Wheddon driving at? Where do ordinary people fit into this collapsing world? Surely herein lies the way to the truth: at least according to Wheddon.
Even as this perverse marriage of Superpower and urban landscape appears to create its own geometry of architectural wound-orifices and piles of rubble, something is notably missing. Ordinary people.
What would the true death count be of this great gig in the sky? Presumably these toppled buildings have not yet been evacuated. Wheddon’s own vision of US military “intervention” is somewhat traditional to the extent that it has been sanitised and cosmetized. Where are all the dead bodies? Where is the blood?
Perhaps this anonymity of the civilian casualty reveals more about Wheddon’s geo-political compass than he realises. Does this concern (or lack of it) not bring us back to Iraq?
Wheddon’s own original script ends with The Avengers once again playing the roles of ordinary people with ordinary lives. Just as the PR teams behind our politicians do, Wheddon seeks to humanise these people by placing them in the setting of the mundane.
CREDITS ROLL.
221 INT. SHAWARMA JOINT - DAY 221 The Avengers are sitting around a table, eating, stuffing their faces. They are silent, no one makes a peep. The workers are cleaning up this destroyed place. The place is silent. FADE BLACK. THE END.
The Avengers might talk and argue like ordinary people but in The Avengers (and in their quest to maintain American Supermilitary supremacy over foreign forces) what seems to be clear is that ordinary people do not really count.
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