Editorial

Avengers: Endgame and Mainstream viewing

Originally printed in Compass, May 1, 2019.

At a quarter to six last Thursday, while standing in a popcorn line long enough to weave in a comically serpentine stretch around the packed lobby of my local arthouse theater, I composed a text to my friends. “I’m about to see the ‘Avengers: Endgame’ premiere and every middle schooler in town seems to be here, too.”

The reply I got back was a curt one. A friend wrote, “Why are you seeing that movie?”

To my college friends, self-professed snobs who think good taste in literature, opera and foreign cinema is a mark of good character, it’s a point of idiosyncrasy that I have seen every Marvel movie since the first “Ironman” in 2008. Some, like the first “Avengers” in 2012, I even saw at the midnight release. This was not planned. I’m no rabid fan-boy with a nearby timer counting down the days until the next bombastic, CGI-spectacle of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. And yet, somehow, without my realizing it, these films have permeated my life. So my friend’s question stands: Why?

There are plenty of reasons to dislike the Marvel franchise on principle. The movies are lab-grown Goliaths that decimate the financial field, crushing smaller, more intimate films in a race to cross the billion dollar finish-line, and have practically wiped out the once reliable studio-made, mid-size movie. The complaint is common: outside of Cannes and the Oscars, no one is interested in making movies for grown-ups.

Why go to the premiere night of the new ‘Avengers?’ Not because it’s art. It’s not. But it is an experience, and for me, a direct look at what spikes the lifeline of today’s audience. Centuries before high schools made Shakespeare’s plays required reading they were blowhard spectacles for the rowdy groundlings at The Globe Theatre in London, who ate, drank, whooped it up for the heroes and booed the villains. The audience’s vocal participation at the “Endgame” premiere was a reminder that storytelling, divorced from artistic merit or intellectual significance, is a plea, from creator to audience, to care.

Marvel’s characters are big and silly; armor-clad, cosmically powered titans who quip like the cast of “Cheers.” They exist in an alternate, de-politicized modern world but are rooted in the 20th century concerns of their comic book origins. Captain America is a wimpy Brooklynite turned super-strong soldier as a salute to the can-do power of the ordinary during World War II. Black Widow springs from Cold War anxiety as the Soviet spy who defects to the side of democracy. Eccentric inventor Iron Man, Marvel’s take on Howard Hughes, is the might of the individual, but also a refutation of Ayn Rand’s objectivism. He’s the capitalist heir as a bleeding heart.

The sly humor of the mystical, mind-bending Doctor Strange dwelling in Greenwich Village, once a neighborhood of acid-dropping bohemians, is lost on young audiences. Tom Holland’s performance as Peter Parker, the teen from Queens, is not. A motormouth with a puppy-eyed need to be liked by the Avengers, Peter is the closest approximation to the audience, and when he showed up at the end, having skirted his presumed evisceration, they went WILD. They CARE.

I found out they CARE about Gwyneth Paltrow, an actress criticized for her expensive wellness advice. Here as Pepper Potts, Iron Man’s formidable girl Friday turned wife, she is the people’s hero, leading every super-powered woman in the story marching into battle with Bechdel solidarity as the crowd cheered. It’s a stirringly effective yet obvious mea culpa from Marvel, who has just recently made moves toward inclusion with the release of “Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel.” In “Endgame,” we learn Captain America has a gay friend he earnestly encourages with dating advice. Who knew?

As whitebread as many of the characters might appear today, it’s worth noting their legacy as the creations of the late writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, two sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, raised in poverty and born Stanley Lieber and Jacob Kurtzberg. Their ink-drawn heroes were people above all; underdogs from real New York neighborhoods. They had bland, goyish names like Steve Rogers, but they were colored with anxiety, wit and humanity as they battled prejudice and societal separation in a rapidly changing America, always sticking up for the little guy. Kirby, who served with General Patton fighting Nazi occupation in the South of France, couldn’t punch Hitler in the face — but Captain America from Brooklyn could.

Why did I go see “Avengers” with a packed audience? Maybe to just pretend. Not pretend in gamma-ray green monsters and spiderweb-slingers and vibranium shields, but to pretend in the audience. That we’re all on the same side. That we agree on what’s good and what’s evil. Because if you don’t think evil has come to court us in our daily lives, well, you are goddamned blind.

So I watched the audience. They clamored victoriously, laughed at the jokes, and when one beloved character sacrificed his life for the world, a girl in front of me wept so audibly it was downright uncomfortable. I was jealous. Was it a bit mawkish? You betcha. But I felt a benevolent sense of envy hearing their unapologetic sobs and hurrahs, to be that deeply moved by fiction.

At the end? They clapped. In a theater where no one responsible for the film was present, the audience clapped without any feeling of obligation. They clapped just because they had been stirred enough to applaud what they had seen. It was heartening not to watch something alone, but to experience it as part of the world.