Shields of the Marvel MCU

A week ago I saw Winter Soldier. Meant to write sooner but life has been very dense lately.

It was a great movie. Maybe the MCU's best offering yet, including Iron Man and The Avengers. It has the focused storytelling and character development of the original Iron Man, with all of the interconnected cross-world hijinks of The Avengers. And best of all, it had the MCU's cannon diverge from the comic books in a daring, meaningful way. Frankly, it's the kind of storytelling I expected from Joss. I wanted to see it in The Avengers. I wanted to see it in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The last place I expected to find an enormous in-fiction paradigm shift was with Marvel's most conventional leading man. Like a c-list super villain, I have a bad habit of underestimating the Cap.

Spoilers will be peppered throughout.

I really dug Cap's new outfit. Very solid poster too, 
excepting the obvious T&A pose from Black Widow.

My initial assessment of Captain America was that he was another cardboard paragon; Superman sans superpowers--a really fit boy scout. The first Cap movie, The First Avenger, set me straight. It showed me Steve Rogers was a man who earnestly wanted to make a difference, but lacked the ability to do so. When the universe called his bluff, he rose to the occasion and proved that all he needed was the chance. There's some other really good shit in there about a man who becomes co-opted by propaganda and decides to become something more. It was better than I ever dared dream.

But I figured, "Alright. We've seen this guy's arc. It was a fantastic story, but he's a product of his time, and taken out of that context, what is there left to say?" A whole hell of a lot it turns out. While the self-referential anti-propaganda plot threads of The First Avenger did a lot to quell the inherent jingoism of the Captain America identity, it was still there lurking in the shadows. If you see a guy with armor colored like Old Glory, you can't help but imagine a soldier who will do whatever his country deems necessary. Winter Soldier takes that misconception to task and shows general audiences that Cap not only represents what America is, or even what it can be, but what it ought to be.

Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely waste no time putting Steve Rogers at odds with Marvel's super-spy agency  S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division). In this case, S.H.I.E.L.D. is a transparent stand-in for the NSA with obviously toxic, Minority Report notions on surveillance and security. So, already, like the original Iron Man flick, which stands as one of the first, mainstream cinematic Trojan Horses for post 9/11 thought, Winter Soldier gives us one of the first mainstream post-Snowden narratives. And it's fairly meaty! At least, as meaty as such a thing can be when your heroes primary vehicle of expression are fisticuffs and gunfire. That and shield-bashing.

Please indulge me a paragraph to nerd out about Cap's shield.

Shields are the punchline of violent literature. They are typically ineffectual, or at least invariably penetrable, and generally portrayed as the armament of choice for cowards or hidebound meat heads. One of the things that makes Captain America refreshing as an icon, is that he is a bad-ass who takes care of shit with a shield. In The First Avenger he also regularly uses guns and rifles to eliminate opposition, but it was a war-movie. In a war, a shield is not sufficient to win the day. But in Winter Soldier, we are in the modern day of the USA which is peacetime. A shield is a far more fitting tool for somebody whose mandate is to protect. In Winter Soldier Cap bashes the crap out of people with his magic shield, only briefly wielding guns and knives to turn them back on his attackers. His shield really is magic too. There is a ridiculous (but admittedly awesome) scene where he takes out a S.H.I.E.L.D heavy aircraft by jumping on top of it and throwing his shield at it a couple of times, really, really hard. In this specific scene, the shield causes explosions and works as a perfect boomerang. In other parts of the movie, it completely negates fall-damage, stops all gunfire and incendiaries, and cuts through anything (admittedly most of this is consistent with the properties of vibranium in comic lore. Freaking Wakanda man).

Okay. Shield rant over. Initiating S.H.I.E.L.D rant:

The thing I liked best about Winter Soldier is its big plot twist (which I am about to spoil). It is not an upheaval for the sake of controversy, but an IP molting; a fictional universe sloughing off vestigial and irrelevant appendage to create a newer, leaner, more relevant form. Midway through the movie, it is revealed that S.H.I.E.L.D. has not only been infiltrated by, but sculpted in the image of H.Y.D.R.A., the sci-fi branch of Nazi fucks Cap defeated back in The First Avenger. It is a fitting (if crude and underdeveloped) allegory for what happened to our national psyche in the 50s through the 80s. To this day, S.H.I.E.L.D. is a mainstay of Marvel comics, though frankly, they've always been more than a little scary and Orwellian. They reek of Cold War politics, policies, and paranoia. They are villains more often than not, and in a universe full of godlike heroes, it was high time somebody took them to task, or at the very least, instigated a serious regime change.

Captain America, Black Widow, Falcon, Maria Hill and Nick Fury do just that in Winter Soldier. By the end of the movie, S.H.I.E.L.D. is not a thing any more. They physically destroy and then legally dissolve S.H.I.E.L.D. from the MCU. Even if you brush aside over 50 years of comic continuity, that is still a really bold and interesting choice if you will recall that Marvel has a prime time network television program in the same shared universe called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It would be even more interesting if Agents wasn't just awful.

A couple months back, I firmly stated that I would give Agents the benefit of the doubt, at least for the first season. Well folks, time makes fools of us all. I quit a quarter of the the way through. The standalone episodes were disposable. The writing has been atrocious, from predictable plot-points to a heinously shallow and unlikable main cast. Even the frank and earnest every man, Phil Coulson could not carry such an unevenly paced, cliched, and downright dumb show. Winter Soldier made me care enough to look up the episode synopses, and frankly, I feel like I've dodged a round of bullets. I did watch the latest episode, with it's scandalous betrayal and direct address of Winter Soldier's fallout, but the whole thing still feels like an anomalous lump on the body of the MCU. It has completely failed to pay off on the titular promise of my initial review.

There is a lot I'm not going to delve into. The huge laundry list of Easter Eggs, setting up innumerable sequels. Robert Redford playing the best MCU villain since Tom Hiddleston's Loki.  Scar-Jo's awful one-expression, one-tone, one delivery approach to acting, but her appealing psuedo-sexual bromance with Chris Evans. Anthony Mackie's immensely likable Falcon. The surprisingly poignant and understated man out of time narrative present at the periphery of the movie.

But if you ever wondered why the really cut guy with the magic shield was calling the shots for Hulk, Iron Man and Thor, this movie will answer that question.You see, Steve Rogers is not like Superman without godlike abilities. He is more like the Batman's optimistic, socially adept twin. Both Steve and Bruce are orphans. Both feel powerless and rise to make a difference in imperiled worlds. Batman's quest is personal. His motivations are personal. His resources are personal. Even with his extended 'Bat Family' of crime-fighters, his methodology is deeply personal. Cap is an extrovert's superhero. He was a team player from the start. His resources were governmental. His motivations were global. He was not concerned with America, but rather, what he wanted America to do for the rest of the world.

The best superhero scene in the movie is not the opening sequence when Cap wrecks a ship full of bad guys, or even that part where he takes out a gunship with just a disc of witch-metal, but rather at the climax, where he gives a speech to an entire institution, and convinces at least half of them to do the right thing and fight for the good guys. After a spate of grimdark reality, and grimdark heroes to match, Captain America is the kind of hero we need, and the one audiences deserve.

How I Met Your Mother or Why I am Banging Your Aunt Robin

I know I planned to regale you all with more tales from AWP, but then work got crazy busy. So, somewhat inevitably, the ending of HIMYM got spoiled for me before I could watch it. Even without watching the show, the summaries provoked a strong reaction, and a strong reaction to the all the reactions I've read so far. Want the TL;DR? I think it was a strong resolution to a series that had lost its way.

One of the signs of a good ending is that it looks inevitable when you re-examine the very beginning of the story. A circle, or perhaps a series of circles, is the natural shape of narrative. Consequently, the beginning ought to heavily influence what the ending looks like. We don’t begin the story with the mother. Or with Ted meeting Marshall, or Lily, or Barney. We get all those stories eventually, but we begin with Ted meeting Robin. That gives her character gravitas that really couldn’t be overcome or denied. It was always about Robin and Ted. Even more than Ted and Tracy.

Do not confuse my approval of the conclusion as an endorsement for the characters or the course of the show.

Somewhere along the lines, Ted Moesby stopped being a lovable dweeb and became a legitimate shitbag. Can’t put my finger on when exactly. Might be when he broke up Victoria’s (admittedly doomed-from-the-start) wedding to Klaus, knowing firsthand how awful being left at the altar was. It might have been when he catalyzed the end of Zoey’s (obviously awful) marriage. It might have been when he rushed into proposing to Stella, despite the fact that their relationship only ever half-worked. No matter what way you slice it, the dude was kryptonite to matrimony for a couple seasons. Also, the parade of plowed bimbos was innocent and charming enough for the first couple seasons, but by the end, it had become genuinely sort of sick.

Barney and Robin’s characters get wrecked too, and that one is far easier to chart: it happens as soon as they start dating each other. Barney’s strength as a character was representing a person, amidst all these other lovebirds, who did not need monogamy. I think marriage is the right play for the majority of humans, but there are some people who will always get bored in a relationship. Who Barney became with Robin was not who the series told us he was at the start, and no, his decision to marry her did not constitute maturation: it was rank self-deception. Robin was similar to Barney in that she was self-assured, opinionated, and not wholly sold on settling down; but we learn fairly early on that she did want to have that life eventually. For her, monogamy would constitute character growth. I imagine that the writers set Barney and Robin up because the fans clamored for their pairing. They clamored because Barney and Robin had comparable (but also obviously incompatible) personalities. When their romance went to hell the first time, I thought it was the writers telling the audience “See this? The ‘obvious’ match-up? It’s a fucking stupid idea and this is the end of it.” I cheered.

And then they put them back together. The narrative backpedal alone would have been bad enough, but to make matters worse, Robin and Barney were already dating two other beautiful, brilliant characters who frankly deserved better. That didn’t just make them worse characters, it made them awful people. Flawed characters are interesting, yes, and people make bad choices all the time in real life, but in fiction, the flaws and fuck-ups should serve the central story.

How I Met Your Mother’s story was always about Ted and Robin. That’s not what the title implies, but it’s what the plot was designed to do; hence the showrunners shooting the final scenes with the kids in season two. They knew Ted would seek out Robin after his soul-mate died. So few shows—so few long-running stories in any format—stick to a single planned plot anymore. So it is incredibly satisfying to see a series pay off a plan instead of just making shit up or pandering to fans, especially when the intended ending is kind of tragic and challenging.

What happened to HIMYM is what happened to Friends, which was also always going to end with a hook up: Ross and Rachel. This was even more obvious, but the network had a huge hit on their hands, the actors were being paid stupid amounts of money (to prevent them from pursuing lucrative careers elsewhere), and the also well-paid writers were high on their fans’ adoration, so they milked that tit for all it was worth. What was originally tight and coherent got bloated and convoluted. The characters were becoming less interesting, so to maintain the appearance of growth, the writers had them make decisions that broke their established personalities.
 

That huge flaw acknowledged, the finale manages to pay off Robin and Ted’s story, and Barney also finally gets some genuine character growth in the form of having a daughter. Even if he remains a cocky, chauvinistic man-slut, he gets to address the single solemn aspect of his character by trying to become the father he never had. And while Barney didn’t want to get married, we learn fairly early on that he did want kids.

I don’t actually know how Marshall and Lilly ended up, and to be honest, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. I went to Wikipedia to complete this post, there were sentences on them in the episode summary, and I skipped them. It's not that I hate them... at least, I didn’t initially.

They represented Ted’s dream, and gave the writers an opportunity to explore a criminally under-utilized period in a romantic relationship: the space after monogamy preceding parenthood. Their character arc had enough material for five very solid seasons; seven if you had to stretch it. But Marshall always kind of bored me (thank god for Segel finally forcing the writers to pull the plug though), and by Season 6, Lily, who started out interesting and canny (if prone to selfishness and meddling), had become insufferable.

The gravest sin of the final season, is that after spending twenty-two episodes on a single goddamn weekend (buoyed only by a generous helping of flash forwards and the refreshing episode detailing Tracy’s life), the viewer is hit with a parade of bombshells in the finale. The audience is given no time to process Barney and Robin’s divorce, Tracy’s death, and Ted pursuing Robin again. Having two of your best friends divorce is incredibly ugly and traumatizing. “Nothing will ever change,” my ass. That’s the most haunting line of the entire show, by the way, because it implies this toxic non-three-way between Barney, Ted and Robin will never be completely resolved. Milioti, who was undeniably the best thing about the last season, deserved a heartbreaking goodbye followed by a few minutes for fans to sob uncontrollably. Even the fact that Ted is telling his kids this story six years after her passing begs further explanation. His behavior to date does not suggest he would have the restraint, even grief-stricken and burdened with parental responsibilities, to refrain from screwing around a bit in the interim.

I know that many fans and critics predicted the ending, but it still managed to be surprising, provoke discussion, and make narrative sense. Honestly, this show has always danced between comedy and tragedy, regularly spitting in the face of pure romantic sap. A happily ever after wrap up would have been boring and insulting. The ending could have been executed better, but its problems all have roots in two to four unnecessary seasons’ worth of material. Given what had happened to the show, I am actually quite happy with how it resolved. Like the yellow umbrella, it got lost for a couple years in the middle, but found itself in the end.