No Good Deed Goes Unpunished - Spider-Man: No Way Home and the crux of MCU media

aka 'It is, ultimately, better to let people die than to try and help them.' Wait? Is that really what the movie's telling me?

Recently, I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was the first MCU movie I didn't catch in the theater. But after the experience of Far from Home, which I was ambivalent to, and Endgame, which I did not like at all, I was in no rush to see this one. 

Spoilers from now on, I guess. 

Also, forgive me if I sound bitter. If you enjoyed this movie, this post is not for you.

So now I finally sat down to watch it, with the promise of at least seeing Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as well as old villains reprising their roles. At the very least that would be enjoyable, I thought.

And I was right. That was enjoyable. However, almost nothing else was. What made this movie almost unbearable for me, was its contradictory messaging that ruined any theme it could have had.

It seems like the basis for this movie was mainly, 'we can have the other Spider-Men and characters from the Sony franchises, we should do something with that!' with a dash of 'need to further establish the multiverse'. This is not unusual for the newer MCU movies and although I don't like it, it would not have bothered me this much if that had been all it was.

Unfortunately, they attempted to throw in a 'Peter learns about responsibility and consequences'-lesson that backfired spectacularly.

Okay. Before I explain my issues, a quick rundown of the movie:
- The world now knows that Peter is Spider-Man and a large chunk believes that he really did kill Mysterio. That is not good. In fact, it costs him (and MJ and Ned) their ticket to MIT.
- Upset about that, Peter turns to Doctor Strange to ask him to make people forget he's Spider-Man. While Strange is casting the spell, Peter changes his mind multiple times about who should remember the secret which messes up the spell and breaks open the multiverse.
- The villains arrive and start causing havok. With the help of Strange's magic they catch them easily.
- Strange wants to send them back immediately but in the meantime Peter found out that at least three of them would for sure die if he sent them back. Because May insists he help them, Peter stops Strange from sending them back and instead attempts to cure them of whatever made them evil.
- They manage to cure Dr. Octopus but then Green Goblin destroys the building and kills May who chooses her last moments to underline her earlier point about needing to help the villains and 'with great power comes great responsibility'.
- Peter meets the other Spider-Men and they fight the villains, managing to cure each of them.
- But 'oh, no! the multiverse is open now and everone who knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man will come through unless we make everyone forget who Peter Parker is'. So that's what they do.
- The end.

Now, this is already a lot. But what struck me immediately, is that the moral the movie wants us to take away is not the one it presents. 

May here insists to her death that Peter is responsible for the villains. She tells him in no uncertain terms that sending them back to their realities to die is morally wrong and he instead has a duty to help cure them and thus ensure the possibility for a happy life. That is, out of context, a reasonable message: Everyone deserves a chance at redemption. I can get behind that.

However. The context the movie provides instead turns the message into 'attempting to help only makes your life worse' or maybe 'don't get mixed up in other people's matters and if they die they die' or as Green Goblin states 'no good deed goes unpunished'.

Because Peter's attempt to help the villains is directly responsible for destruction, injuries, May's death and everyone forgetting who he is*. Had he allowed Strange to send the villains back - like he wanted to originally, none of the tragedy of this movie would have happened. 

'With great power comes great responsibility' works in the Spider-Man origin because uncle Ben dies because Peter does not take action (responsibility). Here, he does take action (responsibility) - in the way May wants him to - and she dies because of that, turning her statement on its head.

Inreasingly, the actions of the MCU superheroes leave the world in worse shape than they found it and so it is with this movie. Peter directly causes all the drama in this movie because he did not get into college. Oh yeah, and Doctor Strange casually tampers with space-time and people's minds to help a kid with his impulsive plan. It just doesn't mean anything. Spider-Man is good because he is a little guy suddenly thrust into having power which he uses to help the little guy. He is 'your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man'. This movie really shows how the MCU uses the classic Spider-Man beats without understanding why they worked - or, more likely - not caring in the least.

And that is - apart from absolutely horrific production issues (excessive use of CGI instead of costumes, sets, props and practical effects; spoiler-mania forcing actors to read lines in isolation; movies being planned out almost fully years in advance) - what truly makes recent MCU movies so soulless. 

Satori over and out

* Also like. not to try and take this mess seriously, but would this spell - to affect the people coming over from the other universes - not also make everyone in these universes forget who Peter Parker is. And therefore also affect the loved ones of all other Peter Parkers? Much to think about.

Don't even get me started that people still know who Spider-Man is. The implication being that everyone would still remember everything they did with Spider-Man (considering that J Jonah Jameson, who knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man still remembers Spider-Man's existence and that he's responsible for the destruction). So MJ and Ned would AT LEAST remember the things they did with Peter as Spider-Man just not that Peter existed. Also did the spell erase all video, photo, documents and related objects (like the shrine at the school)? It seems like it but damn. Also also people still remember May was connected to Spider-Man? How do they think she was connected to him? Where did Peter get an ID from and anything needed to rent a flat? Yeah, I know, I shouldn't attempt to make sense of this.

From emotion comes our power - On women and expressing anger, pain, and sorrow

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. … We make them feel as though by being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up … to be women who turn pretense into an art form.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


Women are asked not to be too much, too angry, too sad, too happy, too passionate, too emotional. A good woman is a quiet woman, who smiles in the face of frustration, and manages to keep her voice calm. As soon as you start expressing emotion, you lose. I am aware that men are also taught to suppress certain emotions, like fear or sadness, and I’m not saying that isn’t a significant problem, I am, however, right now concerned with women and their portrayal in the media.

I want to talk with you about three relatively recent examples where women were told to control and suppress their emotions and in the end let their complicated mix of feelings out into the world in an explosion of power.


I) Captain Marvel (Spoilers)

Let’s start with Captain Marvel. I am really, truly baffled by the people who complain about Brie Larson’s lack of visible emotion in the movie. Her stoic countenance and often neutral facial expression are on purpose. And you don’t have to go searching for the reasons in the subtext. It is said, explicitly, multiple times, in dialog that the Kree value logic and stoicism, they value rationality and control, especially over one’s emotions. Even the little bit of emotion that Carol does show, a smirk, a chuckle, an uncontrolled fighting move, is immediately and strenly admonished, strongly discouraged and presented to her and the audience as a failure on her part and a definite negative thing.

Not only does this make sense in the context of the movie, @EveryJacob on twitter pointed out that women in real life have a similar experience, even though our society isn’t as rational and war-oriented as Kree society is portrayed to be.

Only when she learns about who she was, who she is, and regains some of her memories with the help of her closest friend, does she express emotion more freely. She learns about the truth behind the war and her part in it and comes to recognize that the Kree’s focus on suppression and rationality has purposefully limited her and held her back, so that she, and the power she carried, was easier to control.

In a stunning and emotional scene where Carol fights with the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence in her own mind, she reclaims her name and her identity and with it her passion and emotionality, which unlocks her potential and helps her break free from the prison they constructed for her. In the end, she chooses to be kind, she chooses to be compassionate, she chooses to be loud and opinionated and stubborn and true. She chooses to be a hero and she chooses to burn bright. And it is celebrated by the narrative as a triumph. What a healing thing to see.


II) The Witcher (Spoilers for season 1)

Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) is characterized by her wants and her wants are characterized by what she feels she lacks. From her very first scene onwards, Yennefer is a creature that hungers, for love and affection first, for power and influence later, and always, always for respect. She is, also, denied, by her family, by her mentor, by society.

In her training to become a sorceress she is told to control her feelings, that her emotions make her weak and that her magic will suffer from it. Here, too, any expression of passion labeled as “too intense” is portrayed as a failure on her part. She is trained to be an advisor, to put herself behind, to achieve power ultimately through - at least outward - subservience to men who, as she learns, do not deserve her help.

Yennefer on her own, after she rejected the teachings and broke with the academy, is honest with her desires but holds her true feelings close to her chest still because she has been taught that feelings make one vulnerable and are a sign of weakness.

It is not until her former mentor tells her to access the pain and rage and sorrow she feels, to connect to her inner chaos and let it out, that Yennefer allows herself to fully feel the years of anguish and as she cries and screams a storm of fire bursts forth from her hands burning everything in its path and destroying their enemies.


III) The Umbrella Academy (Spoilers for season 1)

Vanya (Elliot Page) is, maybe, an extreme case. Extreme because her emotions aren’t (only) suppressed by an environment or society that tells her to be rational but literally by medicine that makes her unable to feel anything strongly - a fact that prevents her from forming bonds with people and playing the violin well. Extreme also because her explosion of emotion causes the literal end of the world.

But let’s back up. Vanya is the black sheep of the family because she has allegedly no powers, nothing that makes her special. From the seven children born under special circumstances that Reginald Hargreeves adopted - read, bought - she, alone, did not exhibit superpowers, or so everyone, her included, thinks. In truth, she has strong sort of telekinetic powers that can be canalized through music and are inextricably tied to her emotions. When she was four years old, her powers had violently destructive consequences and Reginald Hargreeves decided that instead of teaching little Vanya how to deal with her emotions in a productive non-destructive way and helping her work with her power, he’d rather make her forget that she has one and permanently cripple her ability to feel emotions with medicine.

Adult Vanya has long since internalized this. She fully believes herself to be a failure and believes any emotions that’s only slightly stronger than neutral to be negative and in need to be suppressed by her pills.

Even though her expression of heightened emotions later in the season are notably destructive and damaging, she is not villainized for them and instead allowed a second chance along with her siblings. And I’m excited to see where she’ll go from here.

There are a few more female emotional explosions of power I could talk about. And it’s honestly one of my favorite things in fantasy/superhero media, if done well, because it not only lets women characters express messy unphotogenic emotions but also reinforces that we aren’t weak for having or expressing feelings that they can be a source of strength instead.

Satori over and out

Addendum: Of course, a genuine expression of emotion does not have to be connected to a supernatural power explosion. I am thinking, for example, of Furiosa’s wail of sorrow in Mad Max: Fury Road when the movie takes the time to let her grief for the green place, a dead paradise that she never got to see again. In this post-apocalyptic action movie, we get to see our tough heroine express her pain and we focus on her doing so. 

Corporate greed and fan apathy

aka why I couldn't care less about things I used to love

Despite the general title, this is going to be a rather personal examination of my feelings towards big franchises I used to love. It is, however, still a more general condemnation of the detrimental effects capitalism has on the industry.

Look, I'm not going to pretend I'm not a sucker for these big franchises. I watched Game of Thrones as soon as it came out, buying two months of a streaming service I didn’t need just so I’d be able to see it immediately, I go to the midnight screenings of new Star Wars movies and I have watched a lot of MCU movies twice (or more) in the theater. I spend money on merchandise, go to exhibits and conventions. I loved everything to do with them. Note the tense.

Now, I don’t have to tell you that people are disappointed with GoT’s season 8 (it went so far that over one and a half million people signed a petition to remake it and most comments underneath a teaser for new GoT content were ‘I don’t even want this anymore’). And the opinions on The Last Jedi diverged drastically, so it’s probably no surprise that I’m on the fence with that (and didn’t even watch Solo yet). I might, however, do have to tell you that I heavily disliked both Infinity War and Endgame (Endgame even more than the other) and that their implications actually taint the whole of the MCU’s future for me. Personally I was never what one could call a Harry Potter fan, so I can’t really speak to that, but what I gather from friends who very much are Harry Potter fans and from youtubers I regularly watch, they feel similar about the newest Fantastic Beasts movie.

I know I’m not alone with my opinion and talking to people who feel the same way, I tried to examine where exactly my frustration comes from and what fosters this almost-resentment with franchises that used to be so dear to me.

The very simple and obvious reason would be that they are just not very good anymore. And while that is definitely true for the last GoT seasons as enough people have already elaborated on much more comprehensively than I ever could (see e.g. Lindsay Ellis' wonderful part one and part two examination), and I personally believe this to be the case for both Infinity War and Endgame, many people did credibly praise The Last Jedi (people also did praise Endgame but you know, that’s just not understandable for me). More importantly, however, a lack of quality hasn’t stopped me from enjoying the movies before. Some of the more mediocre Marvel movies are some of my favorites and I really do like the Star Wars prequel trilogy very much. Some of the bad writing that would be GoT’s downfall already plagued season six and season six is one of my favorites.

Flaws that didn’t bother me before, now made movies unwatchable. I didn’t even enjoy Spiderman: Far From Home very much and I was looking forward to it. It’s not very bad, it really isn’t and I was still unhappy with it. And I came out of Thor: the Dark World loving it, mind you. What is different now?

Well, for one thing, Disney owns Star Wars as well as Marvel and Disney does everything in its power to make as much money as possible while exploiting everyone they can. Disneyland entry is 149 $ now. That’s horrendous. They force movie theaters to pay more money for the privilege to show their movies. They put Endgame back in the theater with one (1) new scene just so they could break the previous record (held by the way by another of their properties). When I heard that news, I was so angry that I wished there was some way to get the money back I already payed to watch Endgame in theater. Not to mention the stuff that lead to Spiderman almost leaving the MCU. And I’m singling out Disney here, because they are such a vast and powerful company with ever decreasing competition and an ever increasing monopoly, but almost all of these companies producing movies and shows put their priorities in making as much money as possible.

Yes, I do realize that companies wanting to make money is an understandable standard that is utterly naturalized. What bothers me, however, is how obvious it has become that creativity and the passion for movie-making are only afterthoughts if that. They didn’t put Endgame back in theaters because the deleted scene changes the whole movie, they literally said it was to make more money. The ‘live-action’ Lion King has no new and interesting elements that would justify a remake, hell, the cgi doesn’t even look all that good. It did make good money, though, so there’s your justification.

People will watch these movies/shows despite vocally complaining about it, the companies know that. I am not exempt from this, not at all. Like I said, I saw Endgame twice, even though I already disliked Infinity War and knew I wouldn’t like whatever they come up with. These companies know how to hook their audiences. With nostalgia, as is the case with Disney’s live-action remakes and Harry Potter, with the promise of a satisfying end, as was the case with GoT and is currently the case with Star Wars, or with fanservice banking on fan devotion, what comic book movies and SW anthology movies rely on.

They do just enough to keep audiences voluntarily paying for more but not an iota beyond that.

When I can almost feel the studio’s desire to make as much money as possible dominating everything surrounding the production while I watch their end-product, this is where they lose me.

Sure, this feeling is less than concrete but it does have tangible symptoms that can be found in popular complaints about big franchises. Movies tend to follow a “winning formula” which makes them appear very similar in structure, character dynamics and optics. Studios play it safe which is the reason that most movies nowadays are prequels, sequels, remakes or adaptations as those are already proven to be successful. Shock moments and plot twists work to keep audiences engaged, so producers put as many of them as they can fit into a story if it makes sense or not and spoilers are treated as vicious crimes and movie-ruining in each and every case (hate to break it to you, but if a spoiler utterly ruins a story, it’s not a very good story). Studios produce so much content of a franchise that is proven to bring in money that audiences can feel overwhelmed or lose interest. Producers put in as much fanservice as possible where it makes sense and where it doesn't.

These are strategies that help the studios make the maximum amount of money, sure, as was yet again proven with Endgame, but all these strategies are also to the detriment of creativity in the industry in general and to the detriment of the quality of the specific products in particular, which in turn leads to people who were loyal fans previously descending into a sort of apathy or resignation concerning new releases.

What I’m trying to say is, capitalism is ruining the movie industry like it ruins everything. Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.

Satori over and out

 

P.S. Literally me:

 

Billy Russo and turning the conventionally attractive villain trope on its head

Warning! Mentions of sexual assault

Spoiler for the first season of The Punisher

 

Source: http://de.marvel-filme.wikia.com/wiki/Billy_Russo

There's this thing that fanfom often does with conventionally attractive villains (that are most often white guys). By virtue of their good looks their actions are excused*. They are reinterpreted as misunderstood and shipped with the respective hero. Some people hate this, some love it and I'm not here to discuss the merits of or problems with this trope. I'm here to talk about how the Netflix show The Punisher subverts it.

Meet Billy Russo (Ben Barnes). He’s attractive and he’s evil, so he could be a classic example.
His apparent attractiveness is not even something the fandom only constructed, the show itself constantly has other characters commenting on it. The show also doesn’t pretend that he isn’t despicable. After a misdirection in the first few episodes he is consistently presented as cold, uncaring and selfish. A sociopath who has limited to zero regard for other people and who fakes any empathy.
This, however, usually doesn’t deter fandom. No matter how abhorrent a character is, if they have a certain level of conventional attractiveness, people will woobify them (again, no judgement, I know there are reasons for this).

This show stops this process in its tracks by making it explicit. Billy’s not only conventional but exceptional good looks are constantly made obvious in the universe itself (nearly every episode someone calls him some variation of ‘pretty’). Furthermore, it is made clear that he himself uses his attractiveness as a weapon to appeal to people and to manipulate them. He, for example, sleeps with the Homeland agent investigating an issue he is part of to push her into a more comfortable direction and find out what she knows.

In the course of the show his attractiveness is deconstructed when it is revealed that he was sexually assaulted as a child, even mentioning the word ‘pretty’ (“when a grown man tells you you’re pretty, you know nothing good is coming”). So naturally, being called pretty is something he resents. He kills another Homeland officer, who has called him ‘pretty’ on more than one occasion, with the angry words “who’s pretty now”, even though he’s been shown to be a disaffected killer before.

Still, the show does not use his past as a justification for his actions (on the contrary, the character himself explicitly rejects the idea that he has just lost his way). His world revolves around himself, other people are only a concern insofar as to how they relate to him* (exemplified with the fitting line “This doesn’t serve me!”). Therefore, hurt he inflicts does not matter, since other people do not matter, but hurt he receives is a grievous offence that calls for retribution. Nevertheless, he is not needlessly cruel or malicious (going so far as to openly mock his boss for his bloodlust). Yes, he does torture and murder and kidnap, but it’s always a means to an end. For example: meeting Frank at the carousel where his family was murdered and wounding two innocents is not because he revels in pain and loves making Frank relive his trauma but instead those are tactical decisions to throw Frank off his game and give himself some edge.

All of this makes for an uncomfortable (but interesting) character.

In the end, his face is cut up to the point where it will definitely not be pretty anymore even if it heals properly. It’s done precisely to take his good looks away from him. Frank promised to make him suffer the way he suffered. Considering Billy never had a family and indeed does not have a single person who he cares about, this promise is not easy to fulfill. Frank finally decides that his looks are the one thing he can still lose - in addition to his reputation, his power, his money - that will make Billy feel the loss.

I’m just glad that the showrunners decided on this way to do their villain. And I haven’t even started to talk about the beauty that is his dynamic with Frank, our protagonist. That, however, is a talk for another time.

Satori over and out


*Tvtropes calls this “Draco in Leather Pants” - and while yeah, this page does paint female fandom negatively and is quite judgy while pretending to be neutral, it’s still useful as a collection of instances of what I describe in the beginning.

*It’s the same thing I that I mentioned in my Peter Pan post. And while that comparison - Billy Russo is like Peter Pan - might seem completely out there, it does make sense. Hear me out. Billy never really had a childhood - abandoned by his mother, the assault, the horror of the foster system - and thus, he’s never able to properly grow up at least not in any normal or healthy way which makes him retain a child’s narcissistic Peter-Pan-like worldview.