“Some people move on. But not us.”
In one of the opening scenes of Avengers: Endgame, after the Avengers have righteously chopped off Thanos’ head to no avail, Natasha and Steve sit across from each other in the now empty compound and sadly contemplate their failure to bring back half the world’s population.
Natasha cries into her dinner, while Steve tries to be encouraging, before he eventually drops the facade. Both are still rattled by the events of Infinity War, their failure to stop Thanos something that looms over them constantly, even five years later.
It is one of my favorite scenes in the entire franchise, not just the film, for the real, delicate way it portrays grief and trauma. Yes, you’ll be unspeakably sad, but you’ll also carry on with your work. Yes, you’ll cry, but do it while biting into a peanut butter sandwich.
It’s clear from their short conversation, that neither Steve or Natasha have moved on, and what Endgame takes pains to establish early on, is that neither has the rest of the world. After the quick prologue, the film flashes forward to five years later, and shows a world that seems stuck in an iteration of what it used to be. Streets are empty, buildings are unmaintained, Citi Field has practically crumbled into ruins. A child rides a bike down a suburban street, but not without glaring suspiciously at a stranger.
The world, Endgame establishes, is mired in a kind of unrelenting grief, refusing to let go of what happened. Sure, some people are trying to move on, but it’s narratively clear that their lives are a shell of what was once possible.
The entire premise of Endgame is built on the belief that, actually, the world can’t move on from Thanos’ snap, that is is actually impossible to get over that magnitude of loss, that the only choice in moving forward is to somehow set things to right.
In hindsight, that seems like a fantasy.
Endgame was released into a very different, pre-pandemic world, and what a year of real world context has exposed is the glaring, narrative flaw at the heart of the movie. The truth is, people can’t wait to move on.
There is (thankfully) no direct comparison in scope between what we’re going through now and what happened in Endgame, but there are parallels that strip away the veneer of the film. We didn’t lose billions of lives in an instant, but rather we’re going through a slow and prolonged loss that is filled with uncertainty. Still, the coronavirus has been an unprecedented seismic shift in how we live our lives, and has consumed everything we do. Our cities are empty, and we’re shuttered in doors away from loved ones, the economy is in ruins. This time, right now, is as close as we’ve ever gotten to an apocalyptic scenario.
A year ago, no one anticipated that we’d be struggling as a nation through a health crisis that exposes the fundamental flaws in our highly stratified society. Here we are, two months into a global pandemic and, we, as a nation, have basically had enough. States are reopening, bars are crowded, beaches are packed. Though there is no vaccine in sight, no reliable way of controlling the transmission, our society is hellbent on surging back, because the truth is that there’s no only so much people are willing to take. We can’t flipping wait to move on.
In Endgame, the shot of an empty Citi Field conveys that professional sports have basically come to an end. In reality, pro sports, even during a pandemic, are hell bent on coming back. There is simply too much money at stake to think about not playing. It’s naively sweet that Endgame thinks we’d all still be so sad five years later.
Coronavirus deaths are continuing to rise across the nation, and, instead of deferring to the reality of what it would take to stop those deaths, we have all decided to make concessions on human life moving forward. No one knows who’ll get it, but the chances are they’ll be poor and of color, but those are all risks we’ve decided to take. It is what’s acceptable to keep up our way of life. We barely made it two months trying to put the welfare of others above our own. It is the height of Hollywood make believe then, that as a population we’d still be reeling from so much senseless loss after all that time.
The truth is that humans long to be amnesia machines, and what we can forget, we will. What we can’t forget, we’ll do our best to re-write and revise, painting history with a more favorable brush.
Superhero movies represent utopian ideals, showing us bolder, better versions of ourselves. Yet, through the prism of what we’re all living through at the moment, perhaps the other biggest fiction in Endgame is that the people responsible for the world’s tragic circumstances would not just step up and take responsibility for them, but work to actively to set things right.
All six Avengers in Endgame are haunted by their failure to defeat Thanos, which they viewed as their burden. Forget the fact that we do not have a Tony Stark or Steve Rogers to help right the ship. We don’t even have a functioning federal government that is willing to work to mitigate the affects of the coronavirus. What we’re left with is a societal free-for-all, every man for himself, where even the most basic concession to safety (wearing a mask) is now a highly political act.
A lot of people will rush to spin our return to normal as a sign of the country’s resilience, but it’s closer to the truth to say we are simply willing to put those that will inevitably die in the rearview mirror. In Endgame, overwhelming loss made everything screech to a halt. What we’re seeing now is that society refuses to mourn for too long. Modern life simply won’t stand for it.
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