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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The Avengers - Age of Ultron - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Contemplates Heroic Narcissism




Marvel Comic's Avengers series and its spin offs have become a staple of the reluctant family's shared entertainment.  Even the reluctant son, who now hates going to the movies, was immediately on board with the plan to see this film the weekend that it opened.  We all agreed as we left the theater that it had lived up to our high expectations - that it was enthralling, exhilarating and deeply satisfying.  Despite its roots in comic books (or maybe because of them) and being an action movie, this movie's plot was so complex and interwoven that when we started to talk about it, it took us the ride home and beyond to untangle just the surface layers of what happened in what order - and there was much intriguing stuff - including dream sequences - that went undiscussed and likely will here as well.  And, frankly, I have lost some of the intricacies over the time that has intervened.  I have been letting this movie marinate while writing about other things, but some of the meat may have fallen off the bone while it was stewing in its juices.

The Avengers are a group of super heroes each of whom, a reviewer noted before we saw the first movie, is a first class narcissist.  The review was positive - the reviewer enjoyed the film - but he or she wondered about the limits of our ability to appreciate the exploits of a loose competitive confederation of self involved and flawed people with superhuman skills - apparently the reviewer is not a sports fan (ba da bing) (nor prescient - by the time we get to The Avengers Endgame the crowd has only grown).  OK, so that begs the question even more, what is it that we find so compelling about the brew of superhuman ability and self involvement?  Why are we drawn to this stew, not just in its first iteration, but repeatedly, seemingly with a greater hunger each time?

First, a disclaimer.  I am not a Marvel Comics geek.  As a child, my very limited taste in comic books ran more towards the DC comics Superman variety - simple, straightforward good guys plunked down on the earth from another planet, trying to get by anonymously, but called on in extreme circumstances to do good just because that was the right thing to do and, after being imperiled, they prevailed - and the good guy was always too modest to come clean with the woman he loved about his secret identity and exploit his superhuman powers to woo her.  I think the closest Avenger to this type is Captain America - a super skinny kid from New York named Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans), nerdy and clumsy - the guy all the girls look past; he is drafted into the Second World War and is given an experimental serum, which, though intensely painful, transforms him into someone with superhuman strength, and he is given a shield made out of Valadium, the strongest metal in the known (comic) universe, he is able to both attack others (the shield is apparently the first Frisbee) and defend himself, but his real strength in this group of misfits is his ability to function as a military leader, binding them together - reminding them that they are on the same team, and assigning each a function fitting to their character.

The mastermind of the group is, however, Iron Man/Tony Stark (Played by Robert Downey, Jr.).  He is both the son of a military industrialist, and one in his own right.  Stark enterprise's ability to craft weapons that kill and maim people has made him fabulously wealthy.  He is also fabulously smart and, together with his Artificially Intelligent side kick, JARVIS, he is able to engineer incredible military equipment, including the Iron suit that he wears that allows him to fly and do other superhuman feats.  Iron Man is partially powered by a heart like module in his chest which both provides strength (and perhaps intelligence?) but is also sucking the life out of him - more so in previous movies - maybe this glitch got fixed when I wasn't looking.

Btw, I went looking for an answer to the question of Iron Man's heart like thing, which is not explained, to my satisfaction at least, in the movies, and disappeared down a rabbit's hole named Google.  The back story on these characters in the comics is complex and changing - they have been retooled over the years as the threats to the US have morphed.  At least in one version, Stark's heart is destroyed when he is forced to work with others to build weapons for the enemy.  He was also originally modeled after Howard Hughes.  In any case, in the current movie iteration, he lives above his corporate offices in Manhattan in a penthouse atop a truly cool building with his Girl Friday (Pepper Potts) - also the CEO of his company - played by Gwyneth Paltrow - and races formula 1 cars.  Pretty sweet.

The thing about being as powerful as Stark is, he wants to be even more powerful.  So when the sword that Loki made a big deal about in the last film, the one with the tessarack (sp?) in it, the one that gave all that power to the bad guys, is on loan to him for a couple of weeks, he can't help but monkey around with it.  He enlists the aid of Dr. Bruce Banner - who could not be more mild mannered, polite and interested in doing good than when he is  played by Mark Ruffalo.  Of course, when he gets angry, mild mannered Dr. Banner becomes The Hulk and smashes everything in his path.  But Dr. Banner, who is smart enough to impress Stark and who works well with him, somewhat reluctantly agrees to evaluate this tessarack thing with Stark.  Well, it turns out that the tessarack contains a basic program for a sentient machine creature.  Stark and Banner work together with Stark's A.I. buddy JARVIS to install this program in a creature - Ultron.  Their intent is a good one - to produce a creature that will protect all of us from the bad stuff out there - but as happens in these things, they don't really know all of the ramifications of what they are doing (I have heard, and it may be an urban legend, that when the first nuclear test took place, some of the scientists posited that it might set up a never ending chain reaction that would explode the world.  Despite there being no definitive proof that this was not the case, the test explosion, which would determine whether it was so or not, of course went on).  So, in a plot that the reluctant son recognized as being lifted straight from Isaac Asimov's "I Robot", Ultron is charged with protecting human beings and, in a fit of hyper logic determines that the best way to do this is to kill them all because if they keep on living, they will simply continue to create ways to harm maim and murder each other.  

Well, while the Avenger Boys are trying to figure out who is strong enough to lift Thor's hammer (Oh, yes, one of the Avengers is a Norse God - one who comes here from his own world, Asgar, and adopts us because we clearly need looking after.  It was his brother Loki who believed that we needed to be told what to do rather than to be looked after - but noblesse oblige and tyranny are all but bedfellows - see my review of the Boys in the Boat).  The ability to lift Thor's hammer is supposed to be determined as much by moral righteousness as brute strength (only Captain America can budge it), Ultron defeats JARVIS and runs off to the laboratories of other bad guys in a nondescript Eastern European country to build himself a body and an army of robotic followers.  He finds twins with superpowers to help him; they happen to hate Tony Stark because their parents were killed by a bomb from Stark Industries.  So Tony Stark and Bruce Banner have to confess their sin of fiddling with powers in the Universe that are beyond them, and the Avengers are back in the business of fighting bad guys.

Ultron lures the Avengers to the place where he is securing Valadium for his projects, including making an even more perfect version of himself, and here the girl twin uses her powers to inflict dreams on the Avengers: The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a bewitching double agent able to destroy enemies with her charms as well as her physical strength - dreams of her abusive childhood as she was trained to be a ruthless spy by the Soviets; Captain America remembers the 1940s - a time with people who were lost to him as he lay frozen under the sea for decades; Thor has dreams of his planet and the intrigue there; and Iron Man has dreams of failing the Avengers.  The Hulk is, not surprisingly, driven mad by his dreams and smashes a third world city for no apparent reason - other than to give Iron Man a chance to work out a way to entomb the unstoppable force that is the Hulk so that he can come back to his senses.

Ultimately, the dream girl reads the mind of Ultron, and realizes that his plan is even more evil than her experience of Tony Stark.  The twins want to join sides with the Avengers, but need to be convinced that the Avengers really do have people's best interests at heart.  When Ultron uproots the twins' city to hurl it back to earth - with the intent of creating an explosion that will annihilate the population of the entire planet, the Avengers work with the twins to both evacuate the city as it is pulled into the sky without any loss of life and to simultaneously sate our thirst for destruction by killing all of the thousands of robots that Ultron has created to do his dirty-work.  The ballet-like movements that occur in these fights - many of them in slo-mo so we can appreciate every bit of their aesthetic beauty - are breathtakingly well done.  The large scale special effects are also overwhelming in their grandeur and their terror, but I think it is ultimately the humanity of the Avengers that draws us into this work.

We are all familiar with the work of Freud who posited different aspects of ourselves - aspects that were named the Ego, Id and Superego by his translators.  I think that the concrete representation of psychologically separate aspects of ourselves as individual elements predated but anticipated a development within psychoanalytic theory of dream interpretation where one layer of an interpretation is to consider whether each of the characters within a particular dream might be representing aspects of the dreamer's personality - a part of him or herself, as it were, that can be quite different than other aspects of the self.  If we think of this movie (and I generally think of all movies in this way) as a dream, and think of the satisfied viewer as the dreamer, these narcissistic superheroes may be characterizing not just part of our identification with powerful, self absorbed others, but a veritable dictionary of primitive, invincible - all but eternal aspects of ourselves.

This may sound a bit of a stretch, but bear with me.  Modern theories of narcissism (and they range from Kernberg's narcissist who is quite touchy - think Iron Man or the Hulk - to Kohut's narcissist, who is more empathic but also a bit thin skinned and torn about acting - perhaps Thor and Hawkeye (who provides a safe haven for the group with his - surprise, surprise - family in the middle of the movie) are more at this end of the spectrum) suggest that a critical component of personal development is narcissistic development - the development of a sense of self - one that is ideally integrated, but that may involve a great deal of fragments to pull together into that integrated whole.  The Avengers might be a representation of our internal selves - aspects of ourselves that develop to meet particular needs in particular situations.  Even those of us who are most action oriented have a watchful component (Hawkeye) of ourselves that we will occupy at the right moment.  We don't develop in a smooth manner - creating a narrative that is uncluttered by fits and starts, feints and retrials.  If we did, analysis would not be much fun.  We may have a dominant narrative - our primary identification may be with Captain America's being bullied but staying true to his own integrity and being the quintessential company man - but we also, and this may be part of why it has to be a separate character - identify with Iron Man's dislike for authority and willingness to create his own rules.



So the genius of Stan Lee, the mastermind behind the Marvel Comics Empire, is that he is able to fathom the myriad components of our self experience and integrate them into a stable of characters that mirror not just the range of people out there in the world, but the range of self states that we can call up internally - depending on the situation and our own history.  It should come as no surprise, then, that when I delve into the history of these characters as they were presented in the comic books that there is a shifting of the presentation of each character across time.  This may mirror our own individual development across time - the rage of the infant is different than the nuanced anger of the adult - but it may also be tracking our collective cultural identity development - in so far as we mirror Stan Lee and his stable of writers' development - as we move forward towards the always fluid solution to being a single entity - a person (or a culture - think of the US culture, whatever that is) with a stable sense of self - and on a personal and cultural level we have multiple conflicting agendas and approaches to solving problems - many of them having at their root the need to preserve the personal but also the corporate self - both physically (to ward off attack) but also psychologically - to feel good and competent and, in a word, like a superhero.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

I have written also written about The Avengers Endgame, Captain MarvelBlack Panther and, in the DC Universe, the movie Wonder Woman.

Of course, I have written about many other things as well - to access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 



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