SpiderMan: Homecoming

Spiderman: Homecoming, the latest movie in the Marvel Universe

franchise, is getting great reviews (93% at Rotten Tomatoes from critics, 92% from the audience). It’s not the best movie Marvel has done, but it’s solid. This version of Spider-Man is going to be an interesting addition to the Avengers: he’s lighthearted, somewhat naïve, and not yet jaded (matured?) by life; he’s also strong, fast, brilliant, and incredibly excited about fighting evil and injustice with his heroes. But, as this movie makes clear, he’s got some growing up to do.

Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange has been crushing it at the box office, and rightly so. It’s gorgeous and smart, and it offers a compelling (albeit common) superhero narrative: ordinary people become extraordinary, and in the process they realize that with their great power comes great responsibility. This will require what we think of as virtues: bravery, wisdom, self-control, altruism, moral goodness, and a willingness to sacrifice self for the sake of others. There are plenty of places to read plot summaries and discussion of the movie as a movie. I would like to highlight several things that stood out to me.

THE CHARACTER ARC OF DR. STRANGE

I really like how the narrative moves Dr. Strange from a cold, rational, self-centered egoist to a man who realizes that he must be willing to give up himself for the sake of the world. What began as a myopic quest to gain enough power to heal himself becomes a calling to save the world even if he can never get what he wanted personally. By the end of the movie, he has even gone back and sought to mend the trail of broken relationships he was leaving when we first met him. 

Evil as presented in the movie is strong and mesmerizing early on - but isn't that the case with most things that tempt us? By the end, that same evil has lost its luster. The really cool people in this movie are the ones who are not only fighting for good but who are good. It's nice to have a movie that shows the rise in Dr. Strange's virtue as desirable and compelling.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHOOSING THE GOOD

Some are arguing that Dr. Strange is actually a villain because he taps into the evil side of this power to bring about good. I didn't see that happening. Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One, is shown to be wrong for making the kind of moral compromise ‘for the greater good’ that actually draws the evil to this universe. Dr. Strange rejects this (though he does later describe her as ‘complicated’, which may be setting up a scenario in which he is drawn to the same flawed justification). 

Mordo flatly rejects the Ancient One because he believes all the power into which they tap is evil. That does not appear to be true, but his opinion makes sense considering his experience. We see his start on a path to villainy: he is willing to kill anyone who has that kind of power - once again, for the sake of the greater good. Sound familiar? In the process of fighting the kind of moral compromise he saw in the Ancient One, he has given in to the same siren song of "the end justifies the means." His concern is legitimate; his methods are not. He has the potential of becoming perhaps the most sympathetic of the Marvel villains, one whose means we cannot justify but whose ends may well be more important than we realize.

Batman: The Killing Joke

Zach Snyder's Batman v Superman offered a controversial dark knight that was truly beginning to fall into the darkness he claims to fight (the extended addition makes that even more clear than the theatrical version). The Killing Joke (which is based on the 1988 story arc from Alan Moore and Brain Bolland) builds on this trajectory in a move that might rightly be called Breaking Bat.You can find summaries of the plot elsewhere; I prefer to focus on the worldview within the movie.

A flashback to the Joker's early life reveals the first meaning of the title, The Killing Joke. He was a struggling comedian looking for a joke that ‘killed,’ the one that got the audience rolling with laughter. He was desperate to support his pregnant wife and do something meaningful in the world. When some criminals approach him about helping them with a heist, he reluctantly agrees. One big score is all he needs to keep his family – and his dream of making people laugh -  afloat. It falls apart, of course. On the day of the robbery, he receive that news that his wife and unborn baby have died. The mobsters won’t let him off the hook. That night, he falls into a vat of acid while running away from Batman and emerges as the Joker.

That’s where we find the second meaning to the title. Life is the killing joke. Life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Joker is the comic book world’s premier nihilist. He just wants to watch the world burn. If that’s not possible, he will do everything he can to burn away the goodness and sanity of those around him.

He doesn’t think it will be that hard. He believes that everyone is just one bad day away from embracing the insanity that has become his closest friend. One bad day where everything you love is ripped away. One bad day where all hope is lost. He seems truly convinces that even Batman or Commissioner Gordon would join him on the other side of reality if what happened to him happened to them.

This provides the plot to the story. The Joker does his best to force Gordon and Batman into that one bad day to prove his theory correct. If he is successful – if he can take the two best people he knows and break them not just bad but insane - he will be vindicated.

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War, Marvel’s latest box office hit based on a comic series from 2006 and 2007, offers an important allegory for our post-911 times.*  It’s not a perfect movie – I’m still not sure why the Avengers were to blame for the explosion, and the villain's plot was preposterous – but the deeper issues are worth exploring.

The Avengers, a team of the most powerful people in the world, travel the globe to fight crime. They basically answer to no one. Unfortunately, in spite of all the good they do, there have been a number of missions that have failed very publicly (reminiscent of the starting premise in Batman v Superman). They are asked to sign the Sokovia Accords, which would put the group under United Nations supervision. When asked to describe them, Thaddeus Ross says,

“How about ‘dangerous’? What would you call a group of US based, enhanced individuals who routinely ignore sovereign borders and inflict their will wherever they choose and who, frankly, seem unconcerned with what they leave behind? New York, Washington D.C., Sokovia, Lagos...”

Peter Parker, when asked why he acts as Spider Man, notes, ”When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen? They happen because of you.” That’s not entirely true, but we get the point. With great power comes great responsibility.  But what if you do the things you can do and because of that bad things happen? King T’Chaka claims that “victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all.”  If he is correct, that's a problem, because that’s how victory has been won time and again. That may be inevitable in a messy world, but must it be so often, and involve so many?

The Beauty (#1-6)

“Two years ago,  a new sexually transmitted disease took the world by storm. This STD was unlike any other that had come before. This was a disease that people actually wanted. ‘Victims’ of this epidemic were physically changed by the virus. Fat melted away, thinning hair returned, skin blemishes faded, and their facial features slimmed.  It became known as The Beauty… Suddenly, perfect skin, flawless features, and a gorgeous body were only one sexual encounter away… Now, over half the country’s population  has the beauty, and the other half of the country hates them for it.”

The Beauty is built on an interesting premise: what if an STD (with only minimal side effects) made you beautiful? No more need for diet and exercise to get people to check you out. No more need for the average person to exercise self-discipline to maximize their genetic potential.  Beauty and overwhelming sexual desirability are just one lucky virus away. Who wouldn’t be tempted to become one of the elite? As you might expect, The Beauty spreads swiftly. 

But it turns out there’s a catch: a fairly horrible death is inevitable after one has been beautiful for a while. Fortunately, there’s a cure. Unfortunately, it appears that the cure will make the people as ugly as the virus made them beautiful. Throw in a Big Government/Big Pharma conspiracy to weed undesirables out of the population by not making the cure available for a while, and you’ve got a story for our times.