Superheroes and Multiverses, Part 1—The Zeitgeist
This is Part 1 of my look at Superheroes and Multiverses. In Part 2, I will review the new film Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Fourteen years ago in the summer of 2008, Paramount launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) by taking a gamble on the embattled Robert Downey, Jr. with Iron Man, while Warner Brothers delivered perhaps the best superhero film to date with Christopher Nolan's beloved Batman sequel, The Dark Knight. Little did we know then that the entire Hollywood landscape would change. By 2012, it further evolved when Marvel's The Avengers did the unthinkable of bringing together different worlds and characters. The "Cinematic Universe" is nearly ubiquitous now as studios and streamers rush to attempt to pull off similar crossover events. In the winter of 2021, a new chapter was written in the ongoing superhero genre with the runaway success of Spider-Man: No Way Home. In this film, the multiverse was brought to the fore as different iterations of the same character crossed between studios and timelines to deliver an emotionally—albeit not so much intellectually—satisfying spectacle. If Disney's WandaVision, Loki, and the forthcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are any indication, the multiverse isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
But before delving more into all of that, a digression about the superhero genre...
I like the MCU fine. I will usually show up for the tentpole films and enjoy them for what they are. I'm going to lay aside my slight bias against the way they dominate blockbuster filmmaking for the moment, but suffice to say I'm very sympathetic to Martin Scorsese's good points of the disappearing middle-budget film and genres aimed toward adults (or as some pejoratively say, "people talking in rooms"). Most of these types of screenplays and storytelling have migrated from the silver screen to the small screen/stream of Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and Hulu. But with movies, superheroes have completely captured the imagination of not only America and the Western world, but all of the globe if one puts any stock in the international box office receipts. If early Hollywood's guiding mythos was the black-hats and white-hats of the western genre, the 21st century's is the capes and spandex of the superhero, vanquishing threats to civilization from both inside our world and outside. In the case of Thor, the MCU quite literally takes up the mantle of past gods and myths to entertain the masses with stories of good versus evil (or in some rare characters like Black Panther's Killmonger, the morally ambiguous). Why is this the case? Why superheroes in our cultural moment?
One reason hinted at by author Todd Miles in his 2018 book Superheroes Can't Save You is the secularization of the West and America. Miles writes, "The superheroes represent humankind’s best efforts to create saviors, demigods made in our own image, beings who are able to rescue us from the horrors that accost us all as humans." In his influential tome A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor chronicles the decline of religious belief and the gap that emerges in the culture's shared narrative. He calls this shared narrative the "social imaginary." The social imaginary is the way that ordinary people imagine their social surroundings, expressing itself through images, stories, and legends. The social imaginary of the premodern world was one in which a transcendent God or gods controlled and ruled the world and those living in it. In our modern post-Enlightenment world, there is now a "transcendence gap." Who do humans look to for help and hope from danger and despair? The answer is often now: other stronger (super) humans.
Another reason could simply be one of aesthetics—superheroes are entertaining, fun, funny, cool, etc. and Hollywood follows the money and gives people what they want, which is entertainment and escape from a polarized and fragmented world. "Mitch, you're way overthinking this."
And of course, another reason is simply wish-fulfillment. Superheroes are who and what we want to be if we weren't tethered by finitude and weakness. But I digress...
Back to the multiverse...
In light of secularization and the social imaginary, it makes sense that superheroes are more popular than ever the past fourteen years. But why the multiverse?
If you would have told me that the multiverse theory would anchor the plot of the #2 and #3 domestic-grossing movies ever made (Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home, respectively), I would have replied that that's insane, but here we are. Why the multiverse in the 2020s? I can't improve on film critic David Ehrlich's answer:
"Multiverses are so hot right now. And why shouldn’t they be? At a time when people can’t even look at their phones without being confronted by a seemingly infinite number of competing realities — a time which everything seems close enough to touch, but almost nothing feels possible to change, and even the happiest people you know are haunted by the endless possibilities of who else they might have been — telling a story that only takes place on a single plane of existence might as well be an act of denial."
Read that again not only because it's one heck of a sentence, but because it's stuffed with truth that resonates with likely all of us. Let me slow it down and meditate a bit more on some of these points.
1. Digital Distraction
If you've made it this far into this article, then well done because that means you haven't yet been completely distracted by a notification, fleeing thought, or desire for a quick dopamine hit from elsewhere on your screen or device. It's no longer a "take" to say smartphones have made us more distracted, made reading long-form articles or thoughtful books more difficult, or that social media has made us more anxious and sad. Our brains have been rewired by one of the greatest human inventions ever conceived. For every wonderful blessing from these pocket-size devices is a soul-sucking feature. If you watch the new film Everything Everywhere All At Once (and you should!), you'll immediately notice the dizzying pace and plot that feels handcrafted for a people who have been stuck inside looking at their phones for the last two years (and let's face it, much longer than that). One universe is simply not enough when we're as distracted as we are!
2. Competing Truths and Subjective Realities
In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year was "post-truth." They write, "Post-truth is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’." A quick glance at commercials and advertisements will display a reliance on appeals to emotion rather than to reason. To use the Aristotelian appeals, we've become infatuated with "pathos" instead of "logos." As seen in politicians' use of "fake news," even the "ethos" is now lost in the swirling vastness of hot takes, social media, and the internet. Now anyone with a keyboard and an opinion can claim authority and truth, seen most keenly and destructively in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic. But I don't need to tell you that you can find whatever authority, truth, or perspective you want nowadays. It's common to hear someone say "speak my truth," which lends itself to the language of subjectivism, rather than objectivism. A multiverse makes more sense when it feels like people are living in completely different ideological universes!
3. Despair and Lack of Change
Think back to the summer of 2020. (I know, I don't want to either.) The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor dominated the news cycle and my own conversations with friends and family. Because of the 24-hour news cycle, social media, the internet, and smartphone cameras, the world was able to witness not only injustice and racism on a micro level, but on a macro and systemic one too. With each death of a black person at the hands of law enforcement, more waves of despair come crashing down. Why, oh why, does this keep happening?! Why aren't things changing? With the slow wheels of justice in our world, an escape to a different world in which justice is carried out swiftly and systems and institutions are changed for the better makes a whole lot of sense.
4. The Paradox of Choice
In past generations, cultures, and time periods, one did not have as much choice for their path of life or vocation. If you were born into a farming family, you'd likely become a farmer in the area. When Jesus was born, he would become a carpenter or stonemason like his father before him. For women, employment was even less likely as they were relegated to homemaking and child-rearing. Now, there are more career opportunities for young people than in any generation in human history. In a time when the possibilities are endless, choice becomes paralyzing. In Alan Noble's recent book, You Are Not Your Own, he addresses this paradox, writing, "In my experience, asking a college student, 'What do you plan to do after college?' is the fasted way to induce a panic attack... the more options there are available to us in life, the harder it is to be confident in your choices." Failure is now your own fault because our world is a meritocracy. If you don't pan out as a doctor, the regret of choosing to go to med school is nobody's fault but your own. Your mind goes to questions like "What if...?"—ironically, the name and idea of a Disney+ Marvel show! With more choices, come more anxiety. Increasing choices lead to decreasing satisfaction. In a multiverse, there is a universe in which we make the right decision and find ourselves happy and fulfilled in a land where justice flows and cynicism dies. In the multiverse, maybe we can live up to our potential.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking movie to hit theaters this year is “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” But this review is already too long so stay tuned for part two.