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Monday, April 29, 2019

Captain Marvel – Girl Power Takes Center Stage in the Avengers Universe




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 EndgameAge of UltronBlack 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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