This past weekend, one of the great mono-cultural events
left in our collective lives occurred: the release of The Avengers Endgame – a record
breaking weekend. The reluctant wife
and I agreed to a double feature of sorts, watching Captain Marvel, which we
had been putting off seeing, as a way to prepare for the final feast. As it turns out, we would have better
prepared by watching the prequel, Avengers Infinity War. On the other hand, we could have just skippedEndgame; Captain Marvel was much more interesting – and I agree with the
reluctant wife that the Avengers shows that have revolved around one of the
characters have generally been more interesting than the ensemble pieces (with the exception perhaps of Age of Ultron).
Captain Marvel, the movie, uses a series of devices to
engage the viewer – the first of these is the device of amnesia. This draws us into an identification with the
hero of the movie, Captain Marvel (played by Brie Larson), as she attempts
to discover who it is that she really is.
The twist here is that she doesn’t know that she is not who she imagines
herself to be, and so she needs to discover that her failure to remember
significant parts of her history hides a deeper mystery. A second device is that her costar is Jude Law. Mr. Law is the reluctant wife’s mulligan – (she
is allowed to have an affair with him without consequence – he replaced Prince
when Prince died). So any movie in which
he appears is a good one for her.
So, Captain Marvel, the hero, to disentangle the story a
bit, was an All American girl who liked to live dangerously – pushing her body
to the limits in baseball, driving go-karts, and, when it came time, playing
with the boys by joining the air force to become a pilot. Of course she couldn’t be trained as a combat
pilot, any more than she could play major league baseball or drive go-karts as
fast as the boys – girls weren’t allowed to go into combat – so she became a
test pilot for a top secret section of the air force. And there she discovered a mentor – Dr. Mar
Vel, who was not, it turns out (though Captain Marvel never knew it at the
time), human. She was a Kree (the race,
from another planet, that Captain Marvel believed she belonged to at the
beginning of the film).
A quick note on identity.
This movie is partly about identity.
It is about Captain Marvel’s identity as a woman. She is not, I don’t think, ever referred to
as Captain Marvel in the movie, even though I will do that throughout this post
for simplicity's sake. She is referred
to by the Kree by the part of her name that survived on the severed dog tag
that they discovered her with. She
assumes this to be her name until she discovers her full name when she returns
to earth (more on that in a moment). And
she is called many things by different people but not, I don’t think, Captain
Marvel – which apparently is a moniker that she takes on as an homage to her
mentor. So while this person is
discovering what it means to her to be a woman, she is also discovering, as it
were, what it means to become herself – but also to transcend that name and
take on an identity that is beyond it, but that acknowledges a debt to a mentor and friend.
Fortunately for Captain Marvel, when she was a test pilot,
she also had a best friend who, it is important to note, is African American
and a person who has her back completely. To fast
forward a bit to the beginning of the film, Captain Marvel is being trained by Jude
Law to better fight the Skrulls, the enemy of the Kree, but Captain Marvel gets
captured by Skrulls and they access her memory.
She escapes from the Skrulls and crash lands on earth in the middle of a
Blockbuster,
the once ubiquitous source of videos that is now all but gone, and there she
runs into Nick Fury (Samuel
L. Jackson) who is a functionary for S.H.I.E.L.D. and does not yet know
that extraterrestrials, much less superheroes, exist.
Fury trails Marvel and, importantly, learns from her –
demonstrating his lack of knowledge but also subtle forms of intelligence as
they become a team – this film is partly about breaking down stereotypes – one of
which is that blacks are not intelligent (that this is a stereotype that needs
to be addressed in a film is an important issue – and that it is being
addressed here – in a way that the writers, directors and actors must rely
either on the subtlety of the interaction to bypass the stereotype – or by
relying on the intelligence of the viewer to get it and get the underlying
message – is an important commentary on the need to drive this message home in
this film – but it won’t be the last instance of attacking stereotypes while
also, necessarily, portraying them – and thus prolonging them – in order to
deconstruct them).
In fact, the subplot involving Captain Marvel’s friend
from long ago, Maria Lambeau (played by Lashana Lynch) involves
a very old movie stereotype – Maria is a kind of Mammy figure to Captain
Marvel. Does Marvel's subsequent support of
Maria’s child, Monica – and mentoring her to follow in her footsteps as a
liberated woman – while also allowing her to pick the outfit colors for her
superhero suit, make up for the stereotyping of Maria? Is this a healing moment between the white feminists and young black women? These and other questions abound as we travel
the tricky path from prejudice and marginalization towards becoming gender
and ethnicity transcendent.
Fury and Marvel, along with Maria now make the discovery
that shifts the entire film – the Skrull are the race that Dr. Mar Vel was
trying to help – and the Skrull are the more humane of the races (despite, in their
true form, being reptilian – and capable of shapeshifting to take on whatever
form they choose). Captain Marvel as to
do an abrupt shift in her identity and, as she does this, she comes to realize
that those who have seemed like her allies – including Jude Law – have really
been suppressing her – and she further comes to realize that she has greater
power than she could have imagined.
Further, this power does not emanate from the Kree high command – quite the
contrary. Instead of fueling her, they
have been oppressing her. When she
realizes this and frees herself, we behold the true and awesome power that was
driven into her by Dr. Mar Vel’s invention when Captain Marvel attempted to
destroy it to keep it out of the hands of the Kree at the very moment that she
lost her memory and was abducted by them.
OK, at this point I am hoping that you saw the film, because
if you did not, that plot synopsis may have been even more confusing than the
film might have been. If you did see it,
I’m hoping that the synopsis squares with and helps organize the
experience. What is of interest from all
of this to me psychoanalytically, is that this is a deeply felt and well
enacted movie that traces the arc of the women’s movement on a socio-political
level (the oppressors are not doing this for my good – and I have a power
that they cannot even imagine that will be unleashed when I quit being
oppressed by them – see the
movie RBG) and the individual level (as a woman comes into experiencing her
own power she becomes capable of much more than she herself imagined possible).
But it’s political reach is much further than this – it is
also an appeal to realize that we in the U.S. have much more in common with those
who would immigrate here and who are feeling lost and abandoned and even
tortured – sometimes, ironically, by our own government or by its effects –
than we do with the governmental forces that We the People have supported and
emulate. It is proposing that we wake
from an amnesic slumber and remember who we are and where we came from and to
recognize that those we see as alien are the downtrodden – the underdogs – that
we would, when we are our better selves, fight desperately to defend.
Captain Marvel’s power dwarfs that of the other
Avengers. Her relationship with Fury
predates anyone else’s as well. She is
called by Fury in the last moments of the Infinity Wars – as he is being
disintegrated – in order to help. We
learn that she has been away taking care of the oppressed in other corners of
the galaxy. Hilariously, in one scene in
the Endgame, many Avengers have to acknowledge that they have never left Earth’s
atmosphere. She is not only capable of
doing this on her own, without a spaceship, but revels in it. While she is, in some ways, a trump card in
the Endgame, the writers were right to limit her role there – it is not really
her story. Her story is started here, in
this film – and it is about someone who was disempowered – in not just one but
two incarnations – coming into her own and, in the process of doing that
transcending whatever limits others would impose – and also learning how to
undo the limits she would impose on herself – believing, for instance, that
others are helping her when they are not.
She deserves her own story and she gets it here – and it should not get
lost in the already overreaching that was the Avengers growing network of
interrelated stories intended to be brought to rest by the Endgame.
Despite my enthusiasm for Captain Marvel, it is guarded. She brings to the franchise what all of the heroes do - a desire to do what is right and, perhaps it is in her U.S. DNA, she believes, as did her mentor, that the road to peace is paved with more power - Mar Vel was building a light speed engine - and the generator for that engine powers Captain Marvel - apparently forever. And it seems that there will always be an enemy - an oppressor to be overpowered in the name of peace. But is that really what women should be empowered to do? Shouldn't we strive for something better than endless war in the name of peace?
I have written also written about The Avengers Endgame, Age of Ultron, Black 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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