Reflecting on the Beauty of Marvel Through the Lens of Mom’s Binge

Warning: Spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame follow. Do not continue if you have any interest in protecting your innocence.

Let’s say that there are 14,000,605 ways to enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe in its entirety. Fair? It’s the same amount of outcomes Doctor Strange saw when he lapsed time in Avengers: Infinity War, trying to discover how this impending battle with a purple, butt-chinned titan could possibly end well. He found one outcome in which Earth’s –– and space’s, and Wakanda’s, and … you get it –– mightiest heroes were victorious. Well, we’re lucky, us home viewers. We have 14,000,605 possible ways to experience this 23-film behemoth of entertainment, but we have two correct ways. Only two; don’t get greedy now.

There’s a problem, though: one of these two ways is no longer viable. The Infinity Saga of the Marvel Cinematic Universe –– three phases of 23 movies –– came to a theatrical close last July with Spider-Man: Far From Home, a fitting coda even if people wanted Avengers: Endgame to be the period to the series’ run-on sentence. So, Doctor Strange wins again, I suppose. The time stone speaks, with Strange as its emissary. We have one proper mode of viewing and, like practically everything else today, it’s via a feverish, addicting binge.

It’s not so easy for my mom to dedicate a week to an all-out binge, though. She’s a kindergarten teacher –– one of Earth’s actual mightiest heroes –– who’s managing lesson plans and would like to have a bit of variance with how she takes her break. So yes, her binge has taken four weeks, but she’s needed that time. For first-timers, I’d say it’s warranted to require a staycation between trips to Asgard and Morag.

I also don’t think that she’d enjoy a full-on binge as much as an oddball like myself would. A Marvel binge is complicated, if only because it’s a series so wildly complex and intricately designed, each film carrying its own vocabulary and stakes, all while leading to the inevitable endgame (both in a titular and literal sense). It can also feel complicated because nothing in Marvel occurs without there being some shred of long-term importance attached. The significance of vibranium or Hank Pym’s quantum realm transporter has to somehow be fresh in your mind at all times, particularly during an Avengers movie. Why did he say that? How did they get here? Wait, what’s a “Thanos” again?

Not to mention, along the way, from Iron Man to Guardians of the Galaxy to Black Panther, you meet a throng of vital characters, all of whom will someday, somehow prove pivotal. It’s a lot to manage all at once, I imagine particularly so for a person whose morning consisted of explaining phonics and a dramatic reading of The Mouse and the Motorcycle for distracted five-year-olds.

We got in a mini-spat at dinner last night because some of the folks at the table told my father that Doctor Strange isn’t important if you wish to understand what’s happening in Infinity War. I couldn’t disagree more, obviously, but that’s the way my dad wants to understand it, and that’s the way my mom views it, regardless of the fact that she’s seen every movie and knows he’s important in the grand scheme of things (she hated Doctor Strange, finding it confusing and exclaiming that it hurt her eyes). He’s elected to go down a third path: he watches when he happens upon the living room and we’re just sitting down to start another movie. Mom and Jamie say that’s fine. I, an irritatingly obsessive intellectual, shove my head into my hands and fall victim to the majority.

It’s different for me, you know? I first saw every one of the films in a theater over the course of a decade of my life, a very important one at that. It’s dorky, but I’d confidently assert that Marvel is on par with Harry Potter in terms of importance in my life. It felt then as though every installment served as significant, albeit temporary points in my adolescence. A lot of Tony Stark’s quips land better for a 21-year-old than they did when I was 10. I suppose that’s the beauty of a binge. But I grew up with these characters, wanting to be them, periodically aping a web-shooting motion from my wrist just in case something changed overnight. If I clench hard enough, I’ll turn green and grow to be the size of a minivan, right?

Which is perhaps why I spent a few weeks legitimately mourning and pouting after batches of minor characters and a bevy of larger ones –– many of whom I aspired to be –– collapsed to dust after that purple butt chin snapped his fingers. He collected his stones, and with them he eviscerated my heart. Sure, he left my brain to realize that there would be a fourth Avengers film, one that would undoubtedly bring Peters Parker and Quill, King T’Challa, Wanda Maximoff, and even Laura Barton back to life in 2019. But I was devastated, wishing to remain devastated in the interest of feeling close to the jarring, ultimate cinematic moment (even after I saw Infinity War for the third time in two weeks). At one point, I was searching for virtual funerals being held on Reddit. Truthfully, I was probably the one who needed to be held.

What Infinity War means to me in the grand scheme of all Marvel things has much evolved over two years. In 2018, general (and critical) reception of the snap itself chalked it up as an infuriating and devastating plot device that had minimal purpose. It didn’t take a master reader of tea leaves to figure out that Tom Holland still had another two solo Spider-Man’s to appear in after Infinity War. It took a quick scroll of IMDb’s long-term calendar. How can one evaporate and still show up in a movie in 2019 and then again in 2021? Well…

Marvel’s game isn’t tricky to decipher, nor should the studio be derided for doing what its natural progression called for all along. In a series, there’s often an endgame, and whether or not the final film’s name is Endgame doesn’t matter. Think Harry Potter. Every film before Deathly Hallows: Part Two was leading toward a climactic encounter with Voldemort. The original Star Wars trilogy led toward a bout with Darth Vader. Marvel’s roads always led to a final Avengers battle. That’s just the nature of franchise cinema.

Which is why one can evaporate because it’s known that he or she isn’t actually gone. “Nick Fury collapses into a pile of dust? Devastating. But oh, look! His pager! That looks interesting! Whose symbol is that?” The internet tells us it’s Captain Marvel’s. Well, who’s that? Ah, she’ll be played by Brie Larson in the 2019 film, uh, Captain Marvel. She also appears in Avengers: Endgame. And so does Tom Holland, and Chris Pratt, and … Jeremy Renner? Listen, I’m just on IMDb. This isn’t a difficult maze to figure out.

And it doesn’t have to be. What was (and is) beautiful about Infinity War wasn’t just that it brought every major character from film one through 18 together for a magnificent and colossal war that, naturally, caused the fate of the universe to hang in the balance. It’s that it leaned right into it. The Russo brothers haven’t made great films whilst out from under Marvel’s wing, but they delivered spectacles in the form of competent and stunning tentpole triumphs. They’re filmmakers built for the undertaking of an “event film,” which could be practically anything inside the Marvel universe if it wished to be. And for an event film like this one –– a franchise’s cornerstone, too –– to end on this note? It was (and is) as epic an accomplishment as I’d ever seen.

I found that the film had the same effect at the time for anyone who didn’t necessarily see it coming. Naivety can be beautiful like that, I suppose. My girlfriend –– who’d seen only two Marvel films at that time, bless her heart –– was so taken aback by the snap I wondered if she’d been lying to me this whole time. Perhaps it was the fact that I was a pile of shambles in the seat to her right. My roommates, most of whom had seen the Avengers movies and perhaps a Captain America installment or two, offered up the typical knee jerk reaction: “Oh, shit.” Everyone, in their own way, was baffled. How would they come back? They have to, right? Why would Marvel do this? They realize they just used genocide as a plot point … right?

But not every Avengers movie could end in relative triumph and have said victory be followed by one sullen post-credits Easter egg and a humorous one after that. For once, Marvel laughed in the face of those who assumed the Avengers were invincible. Infinity War’s climactic final moments didn’t just annihilate its heroes –– they annihilated every notion any fan had ever counted on when it came to the tales of their personal heroes. They annihilated hope.

Regardless of how they first consumed it all, any binger with a soul could have recognized the rising tension –– it was all leading to something –– as the series of films roll along, particularly with every ensuing entry in the Avengers quartet. Mom still let out a whimper of sorts –– it was a gentler “No…” than my reaction to the culmination of Thanos’ conquest –– when Peter Parker proclaimed to his hero that he felt a bit under the weather. “I don’t wanna go,” he uttered through quakes and tears, a trepidation so profound and pure in the moment that two years to the day, still makes me cry. Go ahead, ask me why I continue to view the scene on YouTube. I don’t have a sane answer; I’m stuck inside. I need to feel something.

I’ll say with confidence that Mom has felt something, and that she’s enjoyed herself. A woman notorious for planting one eye on her iPad’s Facebook browser and one on “American Idol,” she’s treated this experience like the rollercoaster ride it truly is. Arms inside the cart at all times, phones in the accommodative cubbies, eyes planted forward. Do I think she beelines for her computer after every film we watch in order to catch up on Reddit theories and lore? No, though I do believe and appreciate that she cares enough to ask us to pause if she needs a refresher on how Gamora and Thanos are related (and she often doesn’t … she may not be a Marvel buff, but she’s the most intuitive person I’ve ever known). And I genuinely appreciate the excitement and devastation she experienced during and following the snap. It was a proper mix of both, too. She was crushed in the moment, as much as one who realizes that this isn’t real life could be. But within minutes, she was pumped for the next ride. When I sat down to write, we shared the following exchange over text:

Almost 53 or not, she’s spent this quarantine living like a 15-year-old boy, experiencing the best franchise of all time with the fervor and intrigue we all possessed every time we sat down in the theater. And in the process, she’s reminded me what it felt like to be a 15-year-old boy. As if that part of me ever left.

Will Bjarnar May 14, 2020Comment