This is all to say that Endgame is more interested in fantasy outcomes than solving the problems it gives itself. It promises us a future more bearable than our present but only insofar as it may become more like our past – something we can call new without having to change anything.
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Avengers: Endgame is, at its core, a film that tries desperately to reassure itself that we are now just waiting for events of the recent past – like the 2016 election – to be redone. WARNING: Spoilers ahead.
Unlike the determinate forward thrust of the other films in the franchise, Endgame is a film that wanders through its own recollections. The time-travel narrative places our heroes into scenes and shots directly replayed from previous films in the series. Giant block numbers announce that it isn’t 2019 or whenever five years into the future where the events of Endgame are supposedly set. It’s 2014. It’s 2012. Remember those years? Not only did you get to watch the Avengers consistently beat the “bad guys,” but you got to leave the theater to a world where the “good guys” were still in charge of the country. Fantasy had its place when it was consistent with the reality we felt secure in. But things changed.
Endgame picks up on the events of Infinity War, where half of the universe vanished with a snap of Thanos’s fingers. The “good guys” didn’t win for a change. As we are told time and again: “We lost.” But we also knew this wasn’t really the end. Infinity War was only part 1 of 2. Maybe we would find a way to come back in the second half. . . .
Of course we would! And we knew it all along! Before Endgame even started, I was treated to a preview for the next Spider-Man movie due out this summer. Hold on. Didn’t he die last year? Yes, but no. I never really believed that either, even though it happened. And neither did anyone. And neither did Endgame.
Five years after the events of Infinity War, Endgame finds the Avengers (or what is left of them) in disarray. Some float through the motions of “moving on.” Others find themselves violently caught up in the shifting state of global politics. One can be found fatly wallowing in self-pity; another, resigned to a desk job with futuristic Skype meetings. Much of the film’s beginning, besides the violent-global part, feels much like my day-to-day life, the rest of the film like the fantasy daydreams I have about changing it.
But aside from Thanos, there is one figure who appears content with this new, half-emptied, somewhat boring world. Like Thanos, Iron Man has withdrawn into a secluded cabin-like home, and again like Thanos, he is visited by the rest of the Avengers near the start. He is almost guilted out of retirement by the wild fantasy that time travel might be a way to undo the intolerable present. It is as though the Avengers cannot, or will not, accept the world they find themselves living in. Like us, they feel assured that Spider-Man must be coming back.
Thanos and Iron Man feel strangely doubled in the film. In the end, both share a death scene, both with a kind of resigned stillness – Iron Man’s face half-burnt, Thanos slowly turned to ashes. Iron Man even closely mimics his nemesis when undoing the events of the previous film – being the only other character to snap half a population out of existence. It is almost as though the film must reverse the terms of its narrative, driving its forward movement backwards, replaying a twilight-tinged version of last year’s Infinity War with a revised, more palatable ending. This repetition – between “good guy” and “bad guy” – becomes a way of re-enacting and thereby re-doing the last few unbearable years.
Actually, a similar thing happened in last year’s Black Panther. To oversimply things: the charismatic “bad guy” known as “Killermonger,” played by Michael B. Jordan, becomes the leader of Wakanda following his successful campaign to dethrone the heavily favored T’Challa (by beating him up). But the Wakanda nation is unwilling to tolerate this outcome and the aggressive policies of their new revolutionary leader. As though to reassure us, the film eventually stages a rematch. Dressed in matching black outfits, they fight underground where it often becomes impossible to distinguish the one from the other.
This refusal to accept that a different ideology could have “won” feels strangely consistent with contemporary US political discourse. Not only did the outcome of Infinity War, like the 2016 election, eliminate (or disenfranchise) half of the population, but with Endgame we continue to feel a kind of refusal of the present state of affairs. I’m thinking mostly of my daily newsfeed: which Democrat will call to impeach Trump next? What happened next in the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 election? As with Endgame, it feels like I’m being summoned back to a world wallowing in the aftermath of a recent defeat without a way forward that doesn’t hinge on a redo, one where the “good guys” might “win” this time and allow us to emerge from this strange pause in world progress.
Endgame, for one, is mostly uninterested in the mechanics of its time-travel narrative. Much of the irritating explanatory scenes of the film were added later to appease confused test audiences. Put shortly, time travel in the film makes no sense. It tries to pass off explanation with jokes and references to other (better?) time-travel movies. It’s the kind of self-awareness that states the problem only as a way of not solving it. When Iron Man figures out the real “science” behind time travel, it’s total nonsense. I’m not necessarily a shape expert, but I’m pretty sure than an “inverted Mobius strip” is, by virtue of its properties, simply a Mobius strip. It would be like turning a circle upside-down and calling it an “inverted circle.”
This is all to say that Endgame is more interested in fantasy outcomes than solving the problems it gives itself. It promises us a future more bearable than our present but only insofar as it may become more like our past – something we can call new without having to change anything.
In a kind of double ending to Endgame, both Thor and Captain America relinquish their leadership roles to a couple of once-lost people of color. Why should changes in leadership be so significant to a group of heroes that always seemed to operate without a clear hierarchy, and certainly without much consideration given to the sphere of elected world leaders? It’s almost as if the film were trying to release us back into a world not in some unknown future but to the recent past, with the double promise of an Obama-like return, to a time when a black person ran the country and the Avengers had their first go at it.
But maybe this whole superhero “thing” has a lot to do with a kind of cultural failure to move on, one consistent with the current trend for all things “nostalgic.” Why else would we feel the need to endlessly reboot and remake (and go see) movies about characters mostly generated from a few-years period in the 1960s just before that other period of political dissensus in American history (that being the late ’60s)? Why the relative lack of cultural take-up of the subsequent four decades worth of new characters? Not that I’m gunning for a Warlock film series, but it’s a somewhat curious instance of an intensely felt need to repeat, to take comfort in the familiar when trying to look for a way forward.
Endgame left me with the suspicion that its sudden happy ending (everyone is brought back, aside from Scarlett Johansson’s character, and they win the final rematch against Thanos) concealed something more troubling. Never has time mattered so little, has the weight of mass suffering and confusion been lifted so easily. Even though the Avengers won this time, the bad guys could also be found doing a bit of time traveling before the final battle. How long might any sheet of time retain its hold on reality, or does it just empty itself into an endless series of fantasies forever shrouding something too real to sit with?
At least, that is how I read Endgame. The film begins with Iron Man drifting deeper into space and out of consciousness. He is spent, running out of oxygen, whittling away his final days making speeches – a recording that he fancies might one day be discovered long after he has died. Though this is not what happens in the story (he is miraculously saved!), it is nonetheless exactly what happens in the film, his voice returning as voice-over narration at its very end, after his funeral. But instead of dying in the empty solitude of space, the film allows him to die in a most heroic sacrifice. Almost too heroic, more like a fantasy of heroism. When a bright light from outside his drifting spaceship pulls his eyes open, perhaps it is not Captain Marvel to the rescue after all – but the final flickering of a consciousness quietly leaving this world behind with a flash into fantasy where things could be (or could have been) different.
Maybe, for many of us, this was 2016. Obama was still President, and maybe Biden 2020 is just meant to convince us that he still might be.
