Thinkiness

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Thanos is America

On the troubling American paternalism of Avengers: Infinity War

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Waiting For A Dream

[gotgifsandmusings]

Full musings on Infinity War

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings: I’m just waiting for your thoughts on Thanos. I know there will be thoughts.

Ha, there are thoughts indeed. I was thinking of recording a video about it, but my mic seems to be messed up from the journey, and Griffin’s mic picks up everything…

Alright, fuck it, I’ll just write everything I was thinking about Infinity War, because overall I’d call it a frustrating viewing experience.

FULL MOVIE SPOILERS are below the cut, so you have been warned.

Very warned.

Keep reading

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I don't identify with Loki so much as appreciate that he was a survivor, someone who bounced back with elan and with a smile, even if this wasn't always genuine.  He may have had issues, but he didn't fully knuckle under, even if he appeared to, even in IW.  He improvised and surprised. He enjoyed and enriched his existence to the extent he could.  He was unapologetic for choosing his own course even if it cost his freedom.  He was openly emotional and was often the only clear thinker in the room.  He sacrificed plenty, but was never insufferably noble about it, though he might have over-dramatized.  He preferred to live.  In the stifled, brutal, masculine world of MCU action films, Loki was a breath of fresh air.  So of course he had to be diminished.  Of course he had to die.

His character gave me the most joy.  Joy is not a small thing.

I do not think resurrection is in the cards for him, and given how Marvel treated his character, that doesn't bother me.  But, here's what I think will happen in Avengers 4, given the photos that were leaked.

Apparently Dr. Strange saved Tony because he knew Tony would be important. I think that while waiting to be transported back to Asgard, ever-curious Tony asked Loki about the Tesseract, and Loki was able to impart some useful information, either about the Tesseract or the stones as a whole, or about Thanos, or about parallel or other universes.  If Clint Barton was there (someone else who is supposed to be important in the next movie), he might have dismissed Loki’s story. If Bruce Banner was there, he remembered Loki's tale but didn’t think much of it.  If Thor was there, he discounted Loki's tale as lies.  But this is this is why Loki will be in Avengers 4: to show that he imparted crucial information.

Photos

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Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture]

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Thanos is supposed to be "mad" right?  Yet Marvel is trying to give him reasons.  They try to make sympathetic his desire to wipe out half the population wherever he goes, like American in Vietnam, destroying the village to save it.

The articles I've read said Thanos wanted to fix Titan but was not allowed to do so before the populace ruined it.  He proposed fixing it by killing Titans. That's like saying, "Self defense of our country is important, so I am going to enslave and starve most of our people for the resources to build nuclear missiles." The self-defense motive might be justified, but the means and ends reflect the worldview of a dictator, one more in love with ravishing worlds than nurturing them.

Where's Thanos' motivation when he kidnaps children and tortures them into becoming his children?  Why does he turn them into killers?  Who seriously believes it is because he might have been right about their parents overtaxing their home worlds?  If Thanos was so reasonable and altruistic and sad, why didn't he use his friggin' gemstones to make sure people cared for their planets, the Mind Stone in the sceptre times infinity?

Desiring power over others is the toxic root of Thanos' motivation, achieved through fear, torture and death, and not concern for his prey while he has them in his mouth. To quote Robin Morgan, "He has made of his power what the Greeks termed thanatos, what the Buddhists call mara: the force of hostility, the magneticism of death."

The desire for destruction is normalized to such a point in U.S. culture that many people feel sorry for mass shooters and those who murder with vans. They justify their actions through their pain.  Their pain is a particularly masculine one, the feeling they are owed something, the wish to punish anyone they perceive as standing in their way, the need to have power over others through force and terror.  I'm not saying that all perpetrators of violence can help their alienation or mental confusion, or that they are all men.  It's just that their actions grow out of a culture that expects us to stand in awe of a fanatic like Thanos and by extension, the filmmakers who "went there" and who will continue to go there instead of finding another way. Marvel wants us to buy the Thanos worldview and maybe even sympathize with it.  And, sadly, there are people who do.

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I'm not going to watch Infinity War.

I won't pay to be emotionally abused.  The characters I love: I don't need to experience their deaths or their sufferings.  The purpose of their losses: none, unless it's to ratchet up the shock and awe beyond the normal level movie watchers endure, or to create manpain to motivate characters who, as Avengers, should have been motivated enough all the time.

The humor: there are things that make me happier.

All this misery and battery is probably in service to a cheap con where, in the next movie, Strange switches the shell with the pea, pulls a rabbit out of his ass, and resurrects certain chosen ones with long-term contracts.  I don't see any of this as daring. It's Disney XD Avenger cartoons. It's running out of ideas. It's not deep or complex, no matter what Thanos' bigger picture. It's hand-wavy bullshit built on the bodies piled up in Infinity War.

At least with an R rating, I can hope little kids are spared sitting through more in-your-face violence and witnessing again the way an MCU so-called father treats a child he says he loves.

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“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”

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The other thing is that Leia’s and Admiral Holdo’s stories were mostly there to support Poe Dameron’s character growth.  I understand the whole “make way for the new” impulse in this latest set of films, but it’s not exactly a celebration of women’s power if the women characters are not developed.

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Finn is like a newly-hatched duckling, imprinting on each person he sees and following them everywhere.

[thelostknee-deactivated20210422]

The point where I became certain that TLJ had more respect for Kylo than for Finn was when we were shown how their wounds from the end of the last movie were treated.

We see the stages Kylo goes through to heal his, from freshly-bruised-up-&-bandaged to a team of droids meticulously stitching his cheek back together with synthetic skin. Rian Johnson himself even went out of his way to have Kylo Ren’s scar redesigned from the last movie, because, as he said, “it looked goofy.” With so much time and effort put into a single scratch on the face, that must mean Finn getting stabbed in the shoulder and nearly having his spine severed by Kylo Ren’s lightsaber will be talked about and dealt with in great detail!

Nope.

Neither of Finn’s wounds, which were so severe they put him into a *coma*, I’d like to remind you, are ever mentioned or seen. Meanwhile, we get about six scenes centered on Kylo’s lil boo-boo.

“But Pop, he was in that bacta suit thingy! Obviously the Resistance had better healing technology! Don’t be so nitpicky.”

Mhm. Yes. The struggling, underfunded, undermanned Resistance has better healthcare than the evil superpower run by all the richest people from the former evil superpower. OKAY! SURE!

They don’t mention Finn’s wounds once. Not once. Even if you think TLJ is the greatest Star Wars movie to date, think about that for a second. Think if they had just glossed over Luke having a metal hand, or skipped straight to Han being right as rain the moment he was pulled out of carbonite he’d been stuck in for years. How cheated would you have felt? How many great scenes would have been lost?

Just think about it.

[leiasbluelightsaber]

Hi, this is an excellent post and I just wanted to add one thing that has been bugging me. IMO, the heart of the matter is this:

This is NOT how Star Wars treats its heroes.

You’ve already mentioned Luke’s hand and Han getting frozen in carbonite, but imo even more similar situation is when Luke gets attacked by a wampa at the beginning of ESB. Now, a wampa is no Kylo Ren. It looks like a weird cross between a goat and an orangutan and Luke doesn’t have to duel it to escape. But he does get hurt and then almost freezes to death and must spend a lot of time in bacta. What translates the severity of the in-universe situation to the audience is Han and Leia’s reaction. They are clearly worried, they are there when he wakes up and even though Han and Luke banter, the humour is heartfelt and no one makes jokes about how he looked in the bacta tank.

Now compare that to what happens to Finn. His injuries are so serious he requires some sort of special suit, yet no one (except Rey, who’s light years away) is all that worried. Sure Poe looks concerned when he sees him, but this is after Finn wakes up from a coma, alone, and the entire scene is played for laughs, complete with him banging his head and falling to the floor. Think about that - Finn is supposed to be our hero, yet the film tells us that all his experience at Starkiller amounts to is a bout of physical comedy. And before he gets to Poe, he’s apparently allowed to wander out of the infarmary, without anyone noticing? If he’s ‘the Finn’ to the Resistance members, why do they not care when he clearly needs help? Even Poe’s sympathy is undermined by BB-8′s ‘joke’. No, BB-8 doesn’t make a joke, he’s just trying to describe things, yet this is clearly supposed to make the audience laugh at Finn’s expense, once again undermining the severity of his inujuries and glossing over his experience at Starkiller.

This is of course horrible all on its own, but when you also consider the lengths RJ is trying to go to make us ‘sympathize’ with a man who got injured after killing his father and attemting to kill two others, it’s pretty damning.

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THIS! One of the many slaps in our face was definitely showing a disoriented Finn oozing liquid from every pore of that suit in the middle of the ship’s corridor, while crew members were ignoring him. Such a cheap, misplaced joke, such a spectacularly bad writing.

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The thing that really disturbed me about TLJ is that the stories seem centered around the troubles of two white male celebrities, with supposedly-nobody Rey serving as their sounding board as much as living through her own story. It’s a main dish of wailing and chest-beating by two privileged men, a second course of the hero discovering herself, accompanied by inconsequential side actions involving sidelined characters. Am I wrong about this?

 I sure hope that Finn doesn’t become the Ron Weasley of Star Wars.

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I just really don’t get people who spend thousands of words saying ‘I love and empathise with this morally grey antihero/sympathetic villain because their fuckedupedness is relatable and human and here are forty ways they have been victimised by others/circumstances/mental illness- I see all this pain and have compassion’ and even say this demands healing for the narrative to be satisfying BUT when it comes to a redemption arc actually happening they’re like 'lol jk I want it to be half-assed at most and for them to never really heal and become healthy because being a functional person is boring’.

Like if you hate happy endings that’s fair, but this isn’t what they’re saying. A lot of the time it seems to boil down to 'recovery isn’t possible’ and 'there’s no middle ground between being a disaster edgelord and being Ned Flanders’.

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I saw The Last Jedi

At the beginning, it was a fun action film, but that soon turned to discomfort, and now that it’s over, it continues to disturb me. It is a truly repellent film in so many ways, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just unpleasant.

There was no-one to cheer for, except for Rose, a new and unambiguously selfless character, maybe the only sympathetic character given major screen time. The generals, including Hux, were essentially doing what duty demanded. Chewie is probably my favorite character, but he's just sort-of there, unremarkable. Everyone else was pursuing their own destination and tramping over others to get there, epitomized by DJ, but most equally reflected in Finn, Poe and Rey. Finn had to be pushed along by Rose to get anywhere, and then when he takes off, she has to save him. Poe displayed  the worst kind of undisciplined "I know better than you" behaviour, and the fact that he was opposed to women who, if they were men, might have been seen as steady, strong, undeniable leaders, made it worse. Rey demanded training and answers, throwing herself headlong into reckless impulses, thinking her curiosity, power and goodwill would be enough to prevail every time.

The women ... what is the message here? Yes, they were leaders of the Resistance, but it was a Resistance defeated, only able to flee or crawl from total destruction, or to cower and hide, or to sacrifice to gain time. (Is this is the parallel to the U.S. political situation, with constant bombardments of outrageous actions until resistors are limping along, barely able to comprehend the horror that awaits?) Rose and Rey were forward-moving, but then again, they both threw themselves into the path of death solely to save a man who was important to them. In the end, women kept people and hope alive, but it seems more likely that Poe and Finn are the ones who will bring those people back into the fight. There's no female fighter equivalent in the Resistance, except maybe Rey, and she'll be busy learning to be a Jedi and probably preparing to become a monk on top of that.

Luke Skywalker's story was interesting, but confusing. Where was the guy who would have seen the darkness in Ben and reached for optimism and support instead of the really bad example of murder? I guess it was this failing that made him so bitter? His lessons to Rey about the Jedi were complete buzzkills. His withdrawal from life - was there a positive to any of it? Jolly Yoda didn't seem to think so. There was redemption for Luke, I guess, if he needed it. Did he? He was old and tired - why couldn't he just retire? I think one theme of this series is, "The doddering elderly are of limited use,only worthy if they sacrifice themselves in a blaze of glory." Anyway, Luke's rubbing the power of the Force into Ben's face, even with an apology, probably didn't teach Ben anything good, even if it made for a great movie experience.

Which brings me to Kylo Ren, probably the most repellent character I've seen on film where the story might have been trying to make me feel sorry for him, or at least understand his pain. And I get it: feared by his parents, who had their own lives anyway and no time for him; tossed into Luke's care and training while being groomed by Snoke's "your parents hate you, everyone hates you, you're nothing ... but not to me" probable whisperings; waking up to find his uncle's face distorted by fear and hatred, hands clutched on a light saber; reacting in the worst way and running to the Master who would only undermine him and give him pain ... I get it. How many choices did he have as a kid? How many adults failed him?

And yet, he embraces the whole Snoke worldview, the whole manipulative and demeaning mode of dealing with others, the whole “violence is greater than any other power” means of influence. He embraces deceit. He can't let go of self-pity and self-justification. He can't let go of grievance and the feeling he is owed more due to who he is. He reacts to challenges with uncontrolled rage and destruction. He is toxic masculinity of a certain type personified, grown more malignant from the first film, and thus, the one whose seemingly full but actually empty heart makes the film so repellent. The best moment of the film, IMO, was when Rey rejected all of his poisonous gifts and chose instead the family she had found in the Resistance.

Compare this to Finn, who probably survived a worse childhood as the First Order’s captured slave, or Rey, who endured years of loneliness and struggle to survive. I wonder if thinking he was “somebody,” or should have been, made Kylo Ren worse.

It was a compelling film, but not one I want to see again right away.  And I can't wait for J.J. Abrams to make a complete sentimental hash of the story.