Endgame (2019): With Great Responsibility Comes Great Power
Many years ago, I met Stan Lee. Just for an hour. We were on the same panel at a Comic Con, I think. I was awe-struck, but didn’t really grasp how deep it went. He was funny and personable. We sat next to each other and traded quips and barbs and made each other laugh. I told him how much I loved his work, how grateful to him I was, and had the sense that yes, he’d heard that a million times, and yes, he loved hearing it just as much then as he had the very first time.
He invited me to come to Marvel for lunch. I took his card, shook his hand thanked him for the experience and invitation…and never called.
I froze. I just couldn’t do it. For one of the few times in my life, I had been utterly intimidated. One of my few regrets in life, really. I just. Couldn’t. Do it.
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It is supremely difficult to review Endgame, because there hasn’t quite been anything like it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is twenty-two films over eleven years, billions of dollars of tickets sold, world-wide instant identification for formerly minor characters, and a pretty clear winner in the “DC or Marvel?” schoolyard debates.
The spoiler-free review is that they bring this saga to a satisfying close, and open the door to future films that tap into more than a half-century of heroic storytelling. There’s just no telling what will happen now that Disney has almost every splinter of the Marvel canon under one roof, but I can’t imagine the average score for this movie, among those inclined to see it in the first place, as less than an “A.” It is spectacular when it needs to be, heartfelt when it should be, hilarious when it can be, and surprisingly somber, as is appropriate. Quite the package, and zips through its three-hour length like lightning.
See it.
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So many things to talk about as an era comes to an end, and I’ll almost certainly tug at those. My thought today is that it is hard to see the MCU getting better or more successful. Not impossible — there have already been so many records broken and precedents set that I can only shake my head.
What hits me is that there is one reason I suspect we might have a problem now, and it is connected with the reason I think the entire venture worked in the first place:
We lost Stan.
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Why did the MCU work as well as it did? Well, all Hollywood wants to know that. The entire “Expanded Cinematic Universe” thing is just…remarkable. But it couldn’t have worked without a diversity of voices and tones on the creative side, and coordinating THAT was a major miracle. Note the similarity of tone of the James Bond movies. Hard for a director to put a stamp on that. But a dozen different directors have established a dozen different styles in the MCU, so I have to credit Kevin Feige for being the ringmaster, guiding all of those visions in a way that wove together to make a sustained emotional experience.
What I know is that while transferring the images, characters and concepts to film (costumes were less comic-y, names like “Hawkeye” and “Scarlet Witch” are either discarded or minimalized for “Barton” and “Wanda”) they captured the FEEL of reading a Marvel comic when I was a kid. A “feel” that existed across two dozen four-color titles. I bought about half of them, every month, and no matter whether the art was done by Jack “King” Kirby (probably the best comic artist in history), Steve Ditko, Gene Colan or whoever…there was a consistent tone.
And the only commonality was that Stan was at the center of that web. The “Marvel Method” of comics production seemed to be Stan meeting with a different artist every day, five days a week. Discussing a story possibility, fleshing out basic directions. Then the artist would go off, and pencil the whole thing out, Stan would approve and suggest adjustments, and write dialogue and captions. Then it would be inked and colored.
In that way, one man “wrote” more comics than were actually humanly possible, relying upon artists who were also story-tellers, with a consistent feel to it all. There will and have been endless debates about exactly who did what, and it is quite probable that beyond a fifteen-year stretch in the sixties and seventies, Stan’s writing influence shrank as other writers and editors, and even artist-writers like the amazing Jim Steranko swept through, attracted by what had to have been one of the greatest creative environments in history: the “Bullpen.”
However much influence and contribution the others had and made, Stan was the voice, the face, the tireless cheerleader, the man on the Soapbox.
Unlike DC, where virtually every character was created by a different set of creative minds. Were ANY of the original creators still alive and influential when their movies were being made? One of the original creators of Superman, Joe Shuster, had sold the rights years before, and was reduced to working as a messenger in New York when the first film became a blockbuster. Embarrassed, the studio gave him a pension (the right thing to do) but it suggests a major problem: Marvel was a family, DC a publishing company where many different creators came together, but no single person really influenced the entire enterprise.
Before going any further into questions of why this all happened, I have to state, clearly and for the record, that I think a major factor was some miraculous synergy between Kevin Feige and Stan Lee. Stan, no longer the creative force (and hadn’t been since the 70’s) was still the cheerleader. He could sit in a room and tell everyone stories about what the artists and writers were thinking and feeling when they created that amazing roster of characters, that sprawling world of spandex and neurosis and magnificent wounded heroes.
Only fifteen years of peak output. But then, the Beatles were really only on the world stage for six years, from Ed Sullivan in 1964 to “Let it Be” in 1970. Six years that changed the music industry and established an unmatched legacy. It isn’t duration, it is impact. Feeling. And Marvel had a new and different feeling, something I think flowed from a special chemistry between extraordinary artists, most centrally the Lennon-McCartney team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with Stan ultimately having the greater impact: Kirby never achieved the same success outside of that collaboration, but Stan created magic with at least a half-dozen different artists.
And Stan was still alive, still involved, still carried the torch even if he couldn’t chop the wood. And somehow, I think, inspired a new generation of writers, directors, actors, dreamers. He lived long enough to do it.
Is a single creative vision that important? I submit that it can be, yes. That as William Gaines was the sane, moral, compassionate cynical satirist at the core of Mad Magazine, and it was never the same after his death, still he had laid a core that, for instance, the National Lampoon never had. A sense that the world could be a wonderful place if we just laughed and loved each other and weren’t afraid to point out the absurdities.
I remember meeting the Big Three science fiction writers, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. And was struck by a fascinating difference.
Asimov’s attitude seemed to be “Look how much I know!”
Clarke’s was “Look how amazing the universe is!”
And Heinlein’s seemed to be “Look how amazing YOU are. Come with me, young man, and I will show you what you might become.”
That, I maintain, was Stan. Stan believed in heroes. And how they are created, and their role in the world. The answer of their creation is found in the single most famous sentence from the entire mythos: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
A secret to its magic can be seen if you invert it: “with great responsibility comes great power.” It is true that a secret to excellence is the WHY. Why must this be done? To what are you committed? Every parent can be a hero to their children, just by doing those things that must be done, day after day, rain or shine, sick or well. In my single favorite sequence in the entire run of Spider-Man comics, Peter Parker lifts an impossible weight for no reason other than the fact that he must, to save his last living relative.
Something in the DNA of the Marvel Universe is this sense of power and responsibility mirroring and feeding each other. It ran consistently through thousands of comics, touching on that theme in hundreds of different ways, circling but always returning to it. Whatever magic was happening at the Marvel offices in those golden years, it seems they understood they had tapped into something valuable, important. They somehow saw the dweebs like me who desperately needed some sense of deeper self, were asking: “how do I grow up? How do I become a hero in my own life?” and hearing no sufficient answers.
There was something in those comics. Yeah, lots of leaping and shouting and POW! And THWIPP! And so forth…but on a deeper level, there was love, and faith, and hope.
Stan accepted the responsibility for conducting a ray of light into the heart of a kid without a father to guide him. He burned in that flame. And was the last man standing, surviving long enough to pass along the torch. And now he’s gone. What will happen? I don’t know. Maybe its onward and upward, to undreamed of heights.
Or maybe there will be sparks, and flames, and fun…but a little touch of magic will be lost, and the air will slowly leave the balloon, until you have only ordinary block-buster success, and the occasional bad misfire. That would be expected.
But hey…you never know. Feige and his team have a huge responsibility now. And we know what that can do, if you’re a True Believer.
Namaste
Steve