i care a lot about superhero movies
Is it me, or have superhero movies gotten REALLY intertextual lately?
The theme of "Avengers" was nearly a direct inverted echo of "Watchmen"--the superheroes knew that they were being manipulated by authority to work together as a team, but swallowed it anyway, and saved New York from being nuked by authority because of an actual nuclear bomb created as a direct response to a real alien threat that was a very direct allegory for the nuclear arms race, where in "Watchmen," the superheroes had no idea that they were being manipulated by one of their own and the only genuinely heroic character was deeply and automatically suspicious of authority, and the nicest superhero of them all nuked New York in order to make the rest of the world work together as a team to forget their internal arms race in favor of combating a completely made-up alien threat. That is so inverted I almost can't keep track of it. Also, the bit about SHIELD monitoring cell phones? Presented as a gigantic moral struggle in the Batman movies, and thrown off as just a thing SHIELD can do in "Avengers." I do think this was deliberately put in to show exactly how shady SHIELD is, though.
And "Dark Knight Rises" and "Avengers" had really, really similar endings. The rich billionaire who's already saved millions of people multiple times prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice by physically lifting a nuclear bomb out of New York. Except that in "Avengers" this is shown as the apex of Tony Stark's personal growth--in the "Iron Man" movies he goes from being incredibly self-centered to actually caring about other people, and in "Avengers" he is prepared to sacrifice himself for other people, which is like the least self-centered you can get. It's pretty clearly a way the movie shows that he's risen to the level of selflessness of Steve Rogers, whose character was cemented in his own movie by having himself throw himself on a grenade he thinks is about to blow up without a thought for his own safety--Steve berates him at their first meeting for not being willing to sacrifice himself, and the scene with Pepper on his viewscreen is even a direct callback to the scene with Peggy's photo on Steve's dashboard as he's plunging himself into the ocean to keep the Tesseract from doing whatever horrible thing it would have done. It is clear that Tony believes that there is no way out, that his usual strategy of "cut the wire" won't work this time, and he is surprised to find himself alive through sheer dumb luck--it really only is luck that he comes through the wormhole just before it closes. He is rewarded by knowing that he gets to be an Avenger and keep fighting alongside other superheroes for Earth's protection. Selflessness, here, is shown to be a virtue to be aspired to, and is rewarded by the chance to be even more selfless. Being a team player is a virtue, even if it's under an authority you know is emotionally manipulating you.
In "The Dark Knight Rises," Bruce Wayne is shown as wallowing in angst because he no longer has anything to do with his life. He's eager to sacrifice his happiness in memory of the woman he loves, and when he believes he's called upon to serve the city again, he's completely ready to be Batman because he thinks it will destroy him, and that's all he can give--he wants to give the city "everything," which seems to mean his life. Alfred even points out that he's being self-destructive, not in the name of selfishness as Tony does, but in the name of selflessness--he fantasizes about Bruce giving up his responsibility to vacation in Italy with an imaginary wife, and he asks that Bruce rein in his selflessness and serve the city as Bruce Wayne, his charming socialite self, rather than his superhero self. Batman seems to have no compunction about flying the nuke out to sea. Alfred even seems to believe, at the end, that his sad little threat/pep talk has made no difference, that Bruce has happily sacrificed himself. The self-sacrifice in this case would be a failure of character growth, a tragic ending. But this IS NOT SO. Batman has spent the entire movie focused on his own will and his willingness to sacrifice himself as his strength, but at the end he escapes death through the technical strategy that Iron Man wasn't able to reply on at the end--he PROGRAMS THE AUTOPILOT. He lets a machine sacrifice itself and takes off to Florence with the sexy cat burglar to enjoy himself. And yes, this is the happy ending, the fulfillment of the character arc. He grows as a person because he finds a way out of sacrificing himself, and as a reward, he's allowed to get over his angst and stop being a superhero.
Oh, and can we talk about the clean energy thing? In "Avengers," the inspiration for clean energy comes from a McGuffin that's pretty much a bad thing. Tony Stark, the renegade billionaire, uses it for good and to try to help the world, but first to light up his own ego/penis/tower. SHIELD, the emotionally manipulative authority, uses it to try to make weapons, which is explained as a necessary evil, and Loki, the villain, uses it to let aliens try to destroy the world. In "Dark Knight Rises," the inspiration for clean energy comes from some random scientist (presumably a good source) and is backed by the billionaire, but the billionaire won't let it be used for fear that it will be turned into a weapon, and destroys his own company in the process--and it is turned into a weapon by Bane, the renegade anti-billionaire revolutionary who's emotionally manipulating the masses for his own ends.
Oh my god, and does anyone want to compare Loki to the Joker? Both of them are embodiments of chaos. But ironically, the Joker is almost more archetypical than Loki, the actual god--Loki is demystified as an alien frost giant with a giant angsty backstory who wants to rule the world because he wants the authority because it means that everyone will love him. Seriously, the God of Chaos wants to RULE the world. Whereas the Joker has no backstory, no complex motivation--he really does just want to watch the world burn, wants to destroy authority and order for the hell of it, because it's what he does. It's what he is.
These themes seem obvious now that I think about most of the Marvel movies vs. the Batman movies. The Marvel movies are largely focused around the themes of good authority vs. bad authority. The Iron Man movies focus on Tony's control of his inventions vs. other peoples' control of his inventions, and Tony is shown to be the better controller. "Thor" is about what makes a good ruler and what makes a bad ruler. "Captain America" is about World War II, two world powers fighting against each other for whose ideology is going to reign. I'm not going to consider the "Hulk" movie because it sucked and I'm pretending that it was "Fight Club" instead that and Mark Ruffalo is going to come out with an actual "Hulk" movie any day now. But these themes are carried over into "Avengers," where the superheroes come together because the government wants them to, where the "good" authority already has intense control over the world that they don't let on about, and they just aren't willing to give up their control for a more obvious and alien method of control. There is not even a question in these movies of whether having an authority is good or bad or not inevitable--the idea of anarchy is never entertained. Control and authority are constants, and the only question is whether the power is benevolent or malevolent, wise or rash.
And Nolan's Batman movies are all about the precariousness of civilization and order, with anarchy as a motivation--and a not entirely unsympathetic one--for nearly every villain. Gotham City is riddled with crime, true, but the shifting of power from a bad to good authority is shown as mere background to the true plot of order and power vs. a total lack thereof. Both the criminals and the more legitimate power structure are derided by the villains as corrupt and wrong--the League of Shadows sees a crime-ridden Gotham as corrupt, Bain paints a "cleaned-up" Gotham as being corrupt because of the nature of its stratified society and stringent laws, and the Joker sees the entire idea of civilization as a lie and wants to prove it.
But I think this totally different emphasis is characteristic of what I know of Marvel and DC as companies in general. DC is an older company from a fantastical pulp era. Its landscapes are fictional, and its most famous heroes are archetypes, not just ideas but also ideals--the noir brooding knight of the shadows, the bright and good savior, the warrior goddess princess. The bad guys are all carefully themed to be archetypical opposites. Each of Batman's villains represents a dark of side of what he represents because, well, they just are. And Nolan is a great director for that in ways that play out in his other movies I've seen--"Momento" was surreal and unstuck in time, "Prestige" mixed magic with magical science, "Inception" was literally about dreams. Likewise, his Batman movies are grander than life and also more meaningful than life, the colors and decor themed to leave a single, complex impression, the much-vaunted "gritty" and "realistic" tone still immensely dreamlike and mythical. Marvel is a newer company, created in an era of political awareness, designed to be relevant and political. Its most famous hero team is a deliberate political allegory, always topical, its first hero is a complexly characterized everyman, and its most famous hero is a loner antihero. It even uses real places for its settings (except for obviously fictional places like Genosha and Canada). Marvel is the real world but with brighter colors, and so its movies focus far less on grand dramas of universal ideas and far more on political dramas of the here and now. I won't talk about Joss Whedon because I've hated nearly everything else he's done that I've seen. HOWEVER, can I talk about "Thor"? It took gods--representatives of archetypical and universal forces clashing and fighting--and turned them into aliens whose struggles were family quarrels. This is Kenneth Branagh's doing--a man used to Shakespeare plays, which treated power struggles between feuding monarchs as epic battles between good and evil because it was political survival to do so. So it's not surprising that Marvel's movie lens is smaller, using struggles between ephemeral powers for its backdrops, and DC's movie lens is broader, using struggles between the very forces of anarchy and civilization as its themes.
The upshot to this is that Marvel stories lend themselves very well to the kind of slash I like and DC really doesn't. I will read any number of stories where Captain America and Tony Stark fall in love because they are the kind of people I like to see bicker and fuck, whereas it's kind of hard for me to read Batman/Superman, even though the superhero dynamic there is the same, because I just can't get into romance stories between archetypical ideals.
Wow, did you see where I totally stopped being epic and started thinking with the little head again? It's because the coffee I drank two hours before "The Dark Knight" wore off and also the sun is now officially all the way above the horizon.