4/29/19: Movie Review — Avengers Endgame, the Demented Truth
Avengers Endgame doesn’t end. I don’t mean that it lasts so long that it seems that it doesn’t end. It actually doesn’t end. It doesn’t start either. And there is no middle.
Avengers Endgame transcends linear time, which it reveals to be an illusion. There is no chronology to existence. Chronology was developed to bring order to the chaos of being alive, but it ultimately terrifies us. I DON’T WANT TO DIE — we scream into the void. Or we yell WHEN AM I GOING TO DIE if we don’t like how things are going.
Avengers Endgame is a fabulous escape from our fantasy constructed by the conditioning of a society that we fear and desire that we created individually and in a group out of the fears and desires of the society that doesn’t really exist except in our heads and our insane mutual agreements. We call conforming to our mass suicide pact — sanity. We could live anywhere that we choose and we picked Jonestown, Guyana. We escape from our escape into the true reality that we don’t acknowledge.
What inspired this film’s tremendous breakthrough at the box office and the time/space continuum?
The business acumen that figured out a way to kill off characters, and metaphorically the stars who play them, while always maintaining the option to bring them back if the price becomes right and/or the market reheats — again.
The Tao of Commerce.
Avengers Endgame is an (unintentionally?) ironic title. No one dies. No actor gets fired. No story ever reaches its end.
I haven’t even talked about space in the movie and reality yet. That doesn’t exist either. If you don’t like where you are, you can go somewhere else in no time at all. Blink your eyes and click your ruby slippers together. There is no place like home or whatever planet is the site where the fate of the universe is decided.
There are no limits to the universe. How can there be boundaries to a single place and a solitary moment? That is where we are at.
Avengers Endgame feels that it has to patronize we, the audience who desire life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All of the superheroes of the Avengers are gods — not just Thor.
And yet they struggle with how their dad treated them, the loss of someone that they loved, growing up, getting older and freeing themselves from the at first comforting and then terrifying illusions of chronological time.
This is our universal Jesus Christ Superstar approach. It isn’t enough that Christ is God and man. He also had to have the struggles of Freddie Mercury or Johnny Cash or Ray Charles or Elton John — or you pick the pop star biopic.
We love our illusions, don’t we — hatched in our own minds, and school, and in our peer groups —- but mostly by the manipulations of the advertising/entertainment complex which steps into the imagined void and finds meaning — money.
We make that money thing necessary because Eden is terrifying.
Avengers Endgame disguises Eden. Its makers rightly determine that the unvarnished truth doesn’t sell. Art disguises unvarnished truth. I hide it with a torrent of words. I speak about the unspeakable and happily fail — every day
(which really don’t exist — days, I mean.)
Days are an abstract invention of the Romans or the Arabs
or some other civilization that turned to dust
because of Thanos or Trump
or some other misunderstood,
as unadulterated good or evil by different audiences,
super villain
and his minions — don’t forget the minions.
No super without daydreamin’
ordinaries
Super villains and subservient ordinaries
who live to negate time and space,
and with a natural and authentic cruelty
in order to destroy the fears and desires of the ignorant gods
who think that they are mortal
(most of the human race)
and get reanimated
every, well —-
day.
Hitler was a man of purpose.
He destroyed a world.
Those who avenged his actions,
created a world more just, peaceful (in some places) and prosperous
than all the worlds that went before.
And now new versions of the eternal force that animated Hitler
destroys our world.
And await our a-vengeance.
The end of bigotry?
A universal base income?
How will we be more conscious of our godly nature after this Infinity War is over?
Commerce hides the unvarnished truth with popular and sentimental lies.
Flimsy, see-through lies.
Not evil lies.
Lies made by people who like us.
They want to entertain us.
Schindlers.
The heroes that rhyme with swindlers.
They want the laughs of the nightclub, a good meal , an exciting love affair …
They don’t want to hurt anybody.
But they do want our money.
The give us the lies we need to get through the day
the day, which we have established is an abstraction that doesn’t actually exist.
Avengers Endgame asks you to identify with these cartoon gods and only faintly implies that you are a god already.
But if you pay attention …
to the Avengers Endgame, or anything else —
You are a god.
Really.
Not a cartoon.
A god.
That will be twelve dollars. Visit the snack bar.
That’s Life.
That’s Entertainment.
same thing.
Escape and reality reverse themselves in the wormholes of existence …
Avengers Endgame ultimately does not hide the ball. Time and space have no order. There is only chaos.
My mother is in the late stages of advanced dementia. She is far from dead and will soon die. She is simultaneously in every place that has ever resonated in her heart, at every moment that has ever had meaning to her.
The world and your life is chaos. (See the singular. Not poor grammar, copy editor, Paula.) The Avengers never age or die. None of their choices matter. They can always redo them.
The Avengers exist in a world of immortality and infinite possibilities. They live at the one moment of the universe — the moment when it begins.
Or ends.
No difference.
My mother only had one bad day in all of my weekly visits of the last several years (forgive my usage of the fantasy words of time)
She has lived blissfully in the demented dream dimension where the Avengers live too, although she has never met them.
But not two weeks ago.
All pain is on the coordinates of time.
I DON’T WANT TO DIE,
Mom cried out after fifteen minutes of existential angst that resembled very painful constipation.
She was scared.
I held her hand and patted her shoulder as it lay against her pillow — on the bed where I have found her for the past few years.
“You won’t die, Mom. You’re fine. Eat a little.”
She calmed down eventually, and ate some of her Happy Meal.
We sat holding hands for awhile.
“The doctor says that I am fine.”
“Yes, Mom, you are doing great.”
Mom had spoken more, and in a more apparently grounded way, in her journey through terror than she had in the past blissful years of my visits.
I write to get to the place beyond language.
Bliss then returned to Mom with a finality.
In our strained sophistication, we laugh at peace as a delusion.
But Life is Eternal, if not infinite.
Mom dozed off with a smile on her face. She closed her eyes and went to a party with my father and the rest of young us. She made a big dinner and wore some nice clothes — she likes to dress nicely for all occasions, and make feasts. Mom lives in an opera — everything is beautiful and over the top and fun.
My parents more than love me. They adore me. They took the chaos and turned it into love for me — and other people and things.
But they really love me. I saw this as a burden, and a pressure once.
But I went back to that time and changed my choices.
And the universe began again.
The aide had combed Mom’s hair nicely that day. She wore a cloth flower in her hair.
All the nice outfits that she ever wore were hanging on the folds of that cloth flower in her hair.
I blew her a kiss that she couldn’t see. She was at the party.
It was time for me to go.
And be at the party at the same time.
I walked out of the room with a feeling that wasn’t sad or happy.
I felt
pregnant.
Alive
and anticipating new life
that will come from deep within me.
My mind started writing on the blank canvas of chaos, creating my own meaning of the single moment and the one place.
A meaning different from my mother’s and every other person’s.
And fundamentally the same.
Free from fear and desire — an addict who threw the monkey of chronology off his back.
Inspired by my mother.
And reenforced later by that accident of unintended art, physics, philosophy, cosmology and intended show business — The Avengers Endgame.
No one knows anything.
But we stumble to important discoveries when we let go of all of our misconceptions
and go back innocently to square one.
The only square that there is.
Necessity is the MOTHER
of
CREATION.
The Purpose Driven Life is Driven by a Mystery.
Copyright 2019 Richard Thomas
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