Eternal Apocalypse

 I had a very interesting weekend earlier this month, one that helped me to challenge my assumptions and prejudices. That is always a blessing.

 

On Saturday my wife and I were invited on a date with a good friend, a lady of about thirty for whom we have acted as sort of mentors for many years, and who has rewarded us by becoming an impressive woman who is always great company.

 

After some excellent Chinese food in Flushing, a place that now offers a wonderfully absorbing cultural experience if you are ever able to find any parking, our friend escorted us into a cinema to watch the Eternals movie from the Marvel franchise. It was our first experience back in front a giant movie screen and one more tentative step back towards a life before the pandemic.

 

Now, this movie is one I would never have chosen to watch. It is precisely the sort of thing that I disdain and look down my nose at. My basic stance on movies is that there is enough material available from real human experiences, real people doing real things in believable situations, and we should not look too far beyond that canvas. Superpowers and monsters and endless violence and computer generated graphics and ridiculous plots just leave me confused, disinterested and even angry. This movie turned out to be almost an exaggerated pastiche of all of those pet hates.

 

So I sat through this movie. Luckily, it was dark and our friend was across an aisle so I did not have to pretend that I was enjoying myself. I didn’t enjoy myself, at least not how I was supposed to. I spent the first part affirming all my prejudices. The plot is so ridiculous. The music is one long cliché after another. The violence is nauseating. How come somebody can suffer impossible injuries and survive, indeed recover in two minutes, while somebody else incurs rather less serious punishment and does die? And are we really supposed to find these awful jokes funny, such a the one about how somebody could not have commitment issues since they dated the previous boyfriend for over a hundred years?

 

Worst of all, how could anybody feel any empathy with any of these characters? They are sort of quasi humans, but obviously not real humans, so how can I project any human emotions onto them, even if these highly paid and highly trained actors are pretending as hard as they can with this junk?

 

Many of these prejudices remain and are even solidified after watching the movie. But after a while I did at least start to engage my sad brain. If I just treated the plot as a sideshow, I could try to admire the computer graphics as though admiring a painting in a gallery or a piece of modern music. Some of it was indeed quite cute on the giant screen. A Giotto or a Paolo Veronese is not depicting a credible scene either and doesn’t even offer perfect perspective, yet I claim to admire that art, so why not this art?

 

I still struggled with all the moralizing. Even though this movie was obviously trying its best to move past the narrative that America always wins in the end led by straight white men, in some ways that made it worse, because at least the traditional plot is not pretending to be more than it is. Here we had every diverse category under the sun, and some faux nuance about humanity learning steadily by recognizing its flaws, something that the all-seeing benevolent guides have to allow to happen despite the seemingly unnecessary suffering it causes.

 

After the movie I managed to keep my mouth shut in front of our friend, but could not put the film out of my mind once we got home. Then the next morning we got up and went to church.

 

The readings were all about the apocalypse, final judgment, omnipotent creator and the second coming. Father Boniface made a valiant attempt to preach on these subjects, but to my mind fell over at a hurdle towards the end of his chosen course. He tried to claim that although it was possible to lead a good and worthwhile life without any belief in an afterlife or higher purpose, somehow such lives lacked for something. I suppose he has to claim this, but I feel that it is perfectly possible to find a full purpose for a life without resorting to such stuff.

 

Father Boniface made reference to superhero movies during his homily, but even without that trigger I would have spent much of my Sunday comparing the two narratives of my weekend. On Saturday I watched an unbelievable plot filled with wild inconsistencies, driven by an arrogant urge to find comfort from feeling part of a species with a special purpose, and somehow deriving moral messages from selective logic. It left me feeling angry, superior and disdainful. On Sunday I listened to exactly the same thing, and, while I did not buy into the factual claims of the story, the experience left me feeling comforted. On Sunday I took what I liked and discarded the rest. On Saturday I could not really get past the discarding element.

 

It is strange how our attitude to the supernatural has evolved. Fifty years ago, and until now in many parts of the world, we were brainwashed and put under enormous peer pressure to believe Father Boniface’s story. Then the perpetrators, people like me, complained when people rebelled.

 

Now, in liberal societies at least, few consider themselves constrained by traditional religion, but somehow become attracted to the Marvel version, with all its escapism and none of the tough stipulations. And people like me complain again.

 

So I am in a small minority in both cases. In the case of these movies, that minority is tiny. Not only do I not appreciate the genre, I don’t even understand it; indeed I don’t even understand how anyone can appreciate it. I guess I have to accept that this all says a lot more about me than about everybody else, and that a lot of that is not flattering.

 

Even so, it does seem sad that this new religion has so many elements that seem detrimental to society. The portrayal of women, the glorification of violence and the lazy propaganda of the morals all jar. Perhaps most damaging is how this genre may incline us to recklessness. The impunity of the characters that we are supposed to resonate with must surely feed a dangerous sense of immortality and perhaps also selfishness.

 

I can bleat about this all I like, but then I have to confess that the damage still inflicted in the name of the former religion has been far more and remains far more even now. I can also bleat away, but clearly I am not going to change very much about all this. More likely I’ll just make myself more miserable and more intolerant and hence spread misery to others.

 

Altogether it proved to be rather humbling weekend. This is not the first occasion nor the only area of our lives where the woman we previously mentored now mentors us. And that is a wonderful blessing. Maybe Marvel could make a moral out of that?