Movie Enthusiast Issue 41: I’m a Film Critic Who’s Never Seen a Marvel Movie
In May 2012 Marvel’s The Avengers arrived in theaters, right at the end of my first year of college. A friend had invited me to go see it during our reading period, but I had to be somewhere else on the exact day and time he was planning on going, so I declined. A week later I went to breakfast with a family from my church who always shared the news of their latest movie adventures with me. They had just seen The Avengers and gave it a strong recommendation. I took note of this and filed it away; I was too deep into exams by this point to find time to make it out to the theater. My final deadline for final papers passed and I flew back to Boston for the summer. The Avengers was still going strong at the box office, but by now there were other summer films starting to open that I was more interested in seeing. By mid-July, I was carted off to the magical land of jaw surgery and eating pureed food out of a syringe for weeks, in which time my face was so embarrassingly swollen I feared to leave the house. Eventually my cheeks returned to their normal size, I regained the use of my teeth, The Avengers left theaters, and I returned to the college grind.
In 2014 “The Birdcage” by Mark Harris appeared in Grantland (R.I.P.). The point of departure for Harris’s essay is Birdman, the eventual Best Picture winner of that year, which Harris frames as “a good movie, but the type of good movie it is has nothing to do with what the movie industry is about. What the movie industry is about, in 2014, is creating a sense of anticipation in its target audience that is so heightened, so nurtured, and so constant that moviegoers are effectively distracted from how infrequently their expectations are actually satisfied.” Harris proceeds to discuss everything from the economics of film distribution to creative exhaustion in relation to movie franchises generally and Marvel and DC movies specifically. At one point in the piece, he waves his hand at an in-text table outlining the chronology of forthcoming DC and Marvel movies, 32 of them due out between 2015 and 2020. “Depending on how that makes you feel: Yay! Or: Hmm. Might there be anything else to eat?”
Around the same time that this piece was published I dutifully went to see Birdman, a movie that screeches its disdain for superhero movies at you for 2 hours of impressively stitched-together single-take shots. Some 90 minutes into the movie I had grown so tired of having a movie shout at me about the banality of superheroes that my mind wandered to that trusty old line of Macbeth’s about the idiot strutting about on stage telling tales full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Precisely 45 seconds later a character appeared onscreen quoting that very soliloquy. I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or throw something at the screen.
Last Thanksgiving I got into a conversation with my cousin about movies. He wanted to know if I had any particular feelings about Zack Snyder’s movies. I did not. We talked a bit about Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy; a few months later one of my friends would describe these films as “grim and humorless trolley problem presentations” in a conversation about superhero movies and I would chuckle along in general agreement of her assessment.
Earlier this year I went to see Wonder Woman with some friends. By some stroke of misfortune we ended up having to sit in the front row. I enjoyed myself, my friends enjoyed themselves, I had some misgivings about the filmmaking but none so serious that I felt my time had been wasted.
I am a film critic who has never seen a Marvel movie. I don’t exactly know how this happened. I am not averse to the genre (or subgenre, depending on how you’re looking at it) of superhero movies. I have paid money to see DC movies in theaters, though I have also snickered along in private reading the scathing reviews of Suicide Squad and other DC misfires from critics whose jobs demand that they go see them. I will probably go see Black Panther next year out of loyalty to Ryan Coogler, a director I like and whose movies I like to support. But until then, I will continue to have never seen a Marvel movie.
This situation presents some interesting problems. As a published film critic, I am expected to have Opinions about movies. I am always happy to oblige, though I have needed to work on my elevator pitch for when, invariably, some new interlocutor asks for my thoughts on whatever superhero movie from the aforementioned Grantland chart is playing in theaters this month. I still don’t quite have it down pat. It’s difficult to come up with a response, really, now that we have so much variety of superhero to choose from: there are serious superhero movies, cheekily self-aware superhero movies, superhero movies directed by auteurs, superhero movies for adults, superhero movies for teenagers who think they’re adults, woke superhero movies, unwoke superhero movies, a superhero movie on every street corner, in every Christmas stocking, under your seat and waiting for Oprah to reveal it to you. I have seen some of these superhero movies. But for some arbitrary and possibly unconscious reason, I haven’t seen any Marvel superhero movies.
Some film critics have made a living out of having an opinion on Marvel, metonymically speaking, with regard to the movie industry. Some film critics make their living complaining about Marvel movies and how they distract attention from the pieces they would rather write and have read. Having never depended solely on film criticism to feed myself, I’ve managed the odd feat of seeing only the movies I really want to and subsidizing my moviegoing with whatever I earn from writing about the movies that nobody else in my corner of publishing is writing about. I’m not complaining, nor am I turning around and giving my money to Marvel.
The more time that passes without my having seen a Marvel movie, the more it strikes me that my predicament has come about more out of economic considerations than artistic ones or matters of taste. Last year I made a note of how much all of the new releases I had seen that year had grossed at the U.S. box office. 18 of these movies made under $1 million domestically. The two highest-grossing movies of 2016, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Finding Dory grossed nearly $1 billion combined. The third-highest-grossing film, Captain America: Civil War pulled in $400 million on its own. I vaguely remember my friends enjoying this Captain America movie more than either of the previous two. I unhurriedly made a note of this and continued not to desire to see it at the expense of other, smaller movies that would only be in theaters for short, one-or-two-week-long engagements.
Recently some of my friends have written enthusiastically about the merits of several specimens of the Marvel movie. Some have written enthusiastically about their demerits. I read these essays, I smile and nod, my motivation for seeing any of these movies for myself remains as unchanged as that of all of the friends I have told to watch Graduation in the last 3 months. (Graduation, to the best of my knowledge as a non-Netflix subscriber, is currently streaming on Netflix.)
I go to the movies like some people go to the theater, or the symphony, or the opera. I will readily acknowledge that it’s a ritual of sorts, the end of which is not my salvation. I will see comedies, I will see dramas; I will see movies that Americans are going out in droves to watch in multiplexes; I will see movies championed by my film critic friends, even at the expense of traveling hours out of my way to Baltimore for an afternoon to see with my own two eyes that The Ornithologist wasn’t actually as good as they had led me to believe it would be.
Someday I will probably see a Marvel movie. I might even like it. I might like it more than whatever obscure independent film is playing on 15 screens in 5 cities that weekend. But if I have any enthusiasm for it, I won’t have anyone to share it with or any reason to do so. The MCU generates its own enthusiasm, its own interpretation, its own means of financial sustainability. Film lovers need not apply.