By Fr. Parker Love
The Marvel Cinematic Universe recently made its first (and second) foray into on-demand television. Beginning with WandaVision, which premiered on Disney+ in January, the hottest multiple movie franchise followed up its television debut with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which just recently concluded its six-episode run on the same streaming platform.
WandaVision tells the story of Wanda Maximoff, one of the strongest super-powered characters in the MCU, and how she deals with her grief after losing the love of her life, the hyper-intelligent sentient android called Vision. While the series begins by parodying typical sitcom tropes in an engaging way, by the end of the series, it devolves into the similarly stale action set pieces that overwhelm the worst entries in the MCU. What began as an engaging story of a young woman, her grief, and the lengths she would go to avoid facing it ends with little resolution and leaves fans wanting more in all the worst ways.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explores questions of national pride, heroism, vengeance, and racism in a world that has lost its emblem of virtue, Steve Rogers’s Captain America. By the end of the last decade’s worth of Marvel movies, Captain America had been positioned to be a hero for all the down-trodden, one who fights for what is right and refused to be slowed down by a bureaucracy that hinders virtue. When Steve Rogers steps aside from that role for love, he encourages his friend Sam Wilson, also known as The Falcon, to take his place as Captain America. While also beginning with an interesting premise, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier also lets its audience down by skirting the hardest questions it asks and hoping a bunch of, granted more engaging, action set pieces will make up for what it lacks in worthwhile engagement.
All that to say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe lacks faith, maybe in its storytelling abilities and the risks it should take, maybe in its audience and how they could handle those risks, but definitely in God and the place that He should take in stories.
I don’t need characters to be devoted, practicing Catholics, or even people who overtly proclaim a faith for me to enjoy a story. I do need acknowledgment that there is something outside of the human experience that should be the tool that guides decision-making, especially moral decision-making in complicated instances. Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas might call this tool the ideal forms. The ideal forms are non-physical realities that capture a concept in its perfection; Catholics like Aquinas would say that these offer us a hint to understanding the nature of God because they capture a type of perfectionism that usually reserved to Him alone. While not divine, these forms point to the existence of God because He is the perfection of perfection, the form of forms, the origin and goal of all things.
Wanda Maximoff’s grief and love are incomplete and superficial because they lack any substance to make them worthwhile; she doesn’t need to be Catholic and realize like St John does that all the love she searches for is a sign of God’s love, but she must realize that her search for love is a search for something outside of herself. Without spoiling too much, to say that she simply looks more deeply inside herself to find something that she knows that she lacks reveals a self-centredness that is characteristic of our modern society, which also, unfortunately, makes for a boring story with no real resolution. The line which is floating all around the internet, as a supposed paradigm of this story’s great grasp of the depths of love, is Vision’s line to Wanda, attempting to console her loss: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” While on the surface, this seems to be compelling, the ideal form of love (you know, God) reveals that even the ideal form of grief is not something that perseveres in stagnant complicity. The deepest grief must be wrestled with, and if wrestled with properly, it will lead to a vision of love that is emblematic in a suffering messiah.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has so much potential. Based in a nation that is, perhaps, more divided by racial politics than ever before, and certainly, in the last forty years, the goal to present a black Captain America to the world could have been an attempt to offer some form of reconciliation to the horrors of that nation’s past.
And yet, it drops hints about exploring things like the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, then forgets about them. It had an opportunity, as well, to explore the challenges that refugees face and the horrors that they leave behind, but instead, it tries to wrap it all up by having “the good guy” proclaim to agree with the goals of “the bad girl” but disagree with her methods.
When Sam Wilson finally fully embraces the mantle of Captain America and begins a monologue in his best impression of Steve Rogers, his thesis is simply “do better” with no points to support it. I don’t know what the solution to racial division is or how to best serve displaced people who live among the constant threat of violence, but I do know that if we don’t “do better” by looking outside of ourselves and outside of our systems, and towards the ideal form which God offers us, we will fail.
At its best, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a light-hearted action-adventure that invites fans to root for the good and defeat the obvious evil. Perhaps this model is best served by the relatively short nature of a feature film because, in its first two attempts to tell a season-length story, the MCU shows its weakness and unwillingness to look outside of the superficial material world in which it takes place and attempts to entertain.
|
Fr Parker Love is a Priest for the Archdiocese of Regina. Ordained in the summer of 2019, Fr Parker serves as Parish Priest at St Augustine Parish in Wilcox, Saskatchewan. He also often helps at Christ the King Parish in Regina, and he serves at the Archdiocese’s Vocation Director. Somehow, in the midst of this, he still finds too much time to consume media in the form of books, tv shows, and movies. To justify that over indulgence, he also hosts a podcast called Cold Drinks, Questions, and Christ, which can be found here, or anywhere you get podcasts. |
