Manifesto for the MCU

about superhero films, why they worked, why they will again

I write about superheroes and I think a lot about what makes them work in a novel - a medium that like films adds a realism and psychological depth that superheroes didn’t have before, and now seem to have lost.

The MCU and DCU boom years started off so well.  Iron Man was 2008, and then we had the rapid rise, the staggering box office totals, all the way to the imperial prime with the late Avengers movies. And now we're into a recognizable decadent phase, marked by reboots and metanarrative experiments that feel like a symptom of desperate creative fatigue. Oh, and the grimdark The Boys whose desperate-to-shock premise has gone on much longer than I would have predicted.

There are lots of takes about comic book films and superheroes as a genre have been run into the ground, and certainly the studio system has done its best. There’s a collective inability to imagine what comes next. It makes me think about how as a writer I keep coming back to a genre that doesn’t seem to have a next step, how as a writer I try to find the power in them when there’s nothing but exhaustion. Newer and weirder powers? New ways to transgress against genre conventions?

What’s the route back? I try to think what I’d tell a Marvel screenwriter (presumably we’re lounging poolside at one of their mansions). Or what do I tell myself when I sit down to write?

Something like, let them become strange again." Let the writing stay quiet and small and aware of how impossible they are. Keep it mundane and human until you’re able to feel the exact moment in a character's life where their body has to break the laws of physics if anything is to be bearable ever again. 

When you can feel that fracture happen, the genre starts to have a meaning. It’s findable, I think, in Robert Downey Jr.'s early performances, the real founding aesthetic for the whole business. The sadness and the jittery off-rhythm charm of his improvisations feel unmistakably real, a broken personality whose only outlet is to do something that can't be done. To break the world in a way that feels emotionally necessary.

It’s there and it works. Superhero stories are a dramatic, violent invasion of the story by something else, genre-inflected, carrying tangible friction with narrative realism. Akin to a horror movie, actually, but distinct.

In films, that realism is carried by the actors themselves. We had great moments early on, in bullied Peter Parker’s private joy as he clings to the ceiling of his bedroom, in Bruce Banner's depressive rage turned first inward and then, shockingly outward. Great actors are, I usually find, really smart, and Downey, Ruffalo, Evans knew what they were doing. But it needs a light touch, a quiet sensitivity to the moment that was inevitably lost in reflexing jamming of more money into the sound-and-light machine. 

But it's always there to be found again, is the good news. Not in some new unheard-of power or interplanetary invasion, but closer at hand -  never farther away than our own skin and the histories underneath it. Strange energies just waiting to be unleashed.