Avengers Dissemble
The key to Marvel’s (35 interwoven films in the MCU) success isn’t found in Endgame or Infinity Wars, nor in In-Civil-ity. Irony Man (ironic that every single brilliant Tony Stark creation is eventually used against him to his dire disadvantage, like every screenwriter’s previous failures and wins!) got their foot in our doors in 2008, but even before Ultwrong sealed the deal (2015), it was LowKey’s monologue in Stuttgart early in the very first Avengers film (2012) that turned our heads around when the opera crowd had left the opera house and spilled into the square, Loki shedding his classy eveningwear appeared in full array as the Asgardian god of Deceit, Mischief and Trickery in his green and gold uniform complete with longhorn hornyhelm and yelled, “Kneel! … I said Kneel!” and when we knelt, he went on to say, grinning charmingly, “Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It’s the unspoken truth of humanity, that you CRAVE subjugation. The bright light of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.”
“Not to men like you.”, replies an aging character actor with the familiar face of Kenneth Tigar, who appears to rise to his feet from a sitting position, while the multitude surrounding him is still sunk to its knees. “There are no men like me.”, is Jokey’s grinning response. “There are Always men like you.”, is the rebuttal. And the re-direct is imminent as Pokey’s spear/cane with the glowy Mindstone (I think) embedded in its head rises to obliterate the old familiar character actor’s character and put him in his place with a hearty, “Look to your elder, people … Let him be an example (pointing the spear at the old guy’s frightened face) KA-bluey spits a blast of bright blue light that KA-rooms off CAPTAIN AMERICA’s shield, probably maiming dozens of extras who are, thank goodness, out of frame, and saving the old guy with no more lines, anyway, so fuck ‘im. “You know, the last time I was in Germany, and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing.”, says The Gap of Banana Republic. “The soldier. The man out of time.”, is unWoki’s rejoinder. “I’m not the one who’s out of time.”, is Fap’s cue for a S.H.I.E.L.D. hovercraft to descend to a point of menace behind his left shoulder, as our Widow aims a large cannon at Cokie, whose Ka-bluey misses her plane AND the skyscraper behind it, KA-bluing harmlessly (?) the night sky. Cap’s not winning the ensuing fight that ends with Irony Man’s arrival.
The key to MARVEL’s success is timing. The now-cancelled Joss Whedon wrote and directed that scenario for the 2012 Donald Trump Inaugural delivered in the form of a largely-forgiven insurrection on January 6, 2021, when James Cameron’s fervent wish for Avengers Burnout finally came true, and the Theme Park rewrite, from Martin Scorsese’s point-of-view, tainted MARVEL’s halo with a blanket sewage treatment plant review, and Bill Maher’s whiney little bitch that only overripe adolescents see profundity in superhero movies … all of them miss the point that God now wears several uniforms and plays to packed houses ever since STAR WARS last (best) hope parked millions of butts on sidewalks ’round the blocks of movie theaters for midnight en mass visitations from on high.
The movie medium has changed since 1977. Religion (since Lascaux & Chauvet [cave paintings from 30,000-40,000 years ago), less. Now it’s possible to revisit blockbuster religious experiences in the comfort and convenience of our homes, even on our tiny home PHONES, for goodness sake!, obviating the need for delousing ointments after an IMAX pilgrimage, but the key to MARVEL’s success has been DC’s consistent failure to measure up to everybody’s expectations of story, character and spectacle. Apart from one Wonder Woman‘s initial unqualified success and a Batman franchise that started brilliantly and wandered into mess the relative successes of MARVEL & PIXAR smell a great deal better, but it was the toxic work environment Joss apparently generates everywhere he’s banished to that shows us the way to beat Republican oligarchy and find the way past subjugation, getting up off our knees to walk a better way.
Re-hire Whedon. Rewatch Moneyball. Listen to Sorkin. (Lies, damn lies and statistics, to quote Mark Twain) Come on people, now, smile on your brother, progressives & Progressives stop! bickering, backbiting and pulling rattail backcombs out of each other’s bald spots. Love one another right now, it’s the Jesus thing to do … right now. Right Now!
Mare Tranquilitatis
…might well have been my favorite episode of the twelve-part miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon, if Buzz had been the first human to hop out of the LEM saying,
“One baby step for a man. One giant step for you, Alice, baby!”,
thereby making good, once and for all time, on Ralph Kramden’s metaphorical, tag-line promise to punch his ornery, tough-minded and independent wife in the kisser, as was his theoretical right in the 1950s, sending her to the moon.
“One of these days, Alice! Bang! Zoom! One of these days!”, said the uncancelled baby-man who would have been thrown under his own bus after the turn of Our century, and if that century was ours, you gotta wonder who the hell we were, are and will be now that we no longer stand for UCLA’s colors, nor Ukraine’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98qw86DsdZ0
Maybe that little rewrite would have rippled backward in time to correct JFK’s inexplicable mispronunciation of the word “decade”, steeled the national will to thoroughly rape the moon for the past fifty years, and spread our human infestation throughout the solar system, and perhaps even beyond it to infinity and so on, Buzz.
But. No-o. Neil Armstrong hopped out first and delivered that other two-step homily that didn’t drop the other shoe that was so perfectly installed (like a Manhattan Project gadget) by the beloved The Honeymooners television show that warmed American cockles starting in 1955-56 and could have made it Our moon briefly, until international syndication democratized the allusion for the rest of the world, but, however briefly, the moon was ours, the domesticated moon might have led directly to visions of connubial bliss in microgravity, and extraterrestrial sex vacations, visions left unrealized for several decades by prudish remiss and a very few words of revised connective tissue. Alas. It’s probably just as well. I’ll have to stick with episode 5, Spider. Even less sex, if that’s possible, but one of my favorite “everyman” actors, Matt Craven, shines throughout that hour and the entire d’Cade.
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