(This is a guest post from our very own A Teacher!)
So, we saw the Avengers this weekend. Going in we were excited because it’s a Joss Whedon movie, written and directed, and we’ve been fans of his writing since Buffy (for which he got an Emmy nomination for the one episode, oddly, that had almost no dialogue).
Of course as we sit down, the wife looks at me and says, “you know that since this is a Whedon movie, everyone’s gonna die.”
This post contains spoilers for the following movies and TV Shows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, Firefly, The Hunger Games, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along-Blog and The Avengers. If you have not seen any of these and do not wish to be spoiled, then please move along. Otherwise, everything from those is open season.
Now that’s a little unfair. First, Whedon doesn’t kill off every character ever. He does, however like to kill them off, to keep the audience off balance and unsure what’s going to happen next. For the pilot episode of Buffy, Xander’s friend Jesse is introduced, turned into a vampire and then killed. We met someone who did give off an air of “extra buddy who’s not going to live” but it wasn’t until he met the stake that we knew for sure.
But what Whedon wanted to do went one step further. He wanted to do an entire title sequence just for that episode that featured Jesse as a main character getting the same billing there as Allyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendan, and Sarah Michelle Geller. He wanted us to watch the openning, see Jesse as a main character and then be shocked when in the first episode a main character was killed off.
Why didn’t he? He didn’t have the budget to edit together two title sequences.
And as you move through the body of Whedon’s work, he really does like to see people go down. A major turning point in Serenity was the sudden and rather unexpected death of Wash. One second they had just narrowly missed disaster, and the next moment Wash was dead. In the commentaries, Whedon comments that he did this in order to set up the fact that everyone else lives. He reasoned that a sudden and very obvious death (there was no chance of recovery for Wash) at that point would make all the close calls (which people survived) later in the movie all the more tense. You’d start to wonder who was and was not going to live.
Now there’s a problem that Whedon had with Firefly that was unique to that film over many other projects. Firefly had been cancelled and had, really, little to no hope of ever coming back. Through a great deal of fan pressure, Whedon was able to get the movie on the table as what most people believed to be the “final chapter” in the Firefly story. That meant that it was quite possible, even probable, that his direction was going to be to end this show with a massive tragic and epic finale as everyone goes down in a blaze of glory together. For many people watching the movie (or at least for me), that moment was where I checked out and said to myself “Yep, he’s gonna kill them all off out of spite.”
Maybe not out of spite, but I was quite sure this was it. And because of that, I stopped cheering for them.
I just sat back, sipped my soda, and waited for the reavers to take them all out.
Now this wasn’t helped much by the last season and final episodes of Buffy. While it was great that the show ended with a mass awakening of Slayers, there was still a pretty high body count. You could say that it was only logical that not everyone would live to see the end, that people would die in the great battle. But it also goes into that “we’re all going to be okay” that many people look to when they look at film. At the time I wrote it off as “the show’s over, might as well have some random death”.
Which is why when Wash went, not only did I mentally check out, but I’ve been told that many Browncoats up and walked out of the theater. That was the point of no return, the point where they’d decided there wasn’t any hope left in the ‘verse and it was time to return to mowing lawns, filing taxes and changing dirty diapers. The escape of the high action movie was over. Life sucked, people died, and babies poop.
Now to contrast this, consider the ending to Dr. Horrible. That story is intended to be a tragedy. In true Shakespearean form, you think you’re watching a comedy, perhaps a farce, or even some kind of under-dog hero story. But in the end, it is Dr. Horrible’s hubris, his need to be accepted by others that blinds him to the logical risks he imposes on others, and leads to Penny’s death. I would have liked Penny to live and for Heroine and Villain to live Happily Ever After, but that would have been a very different film.
To really be true to the theme of the dangers of obsession with acceptance, Penny had to be sacrificed to show Dr. Horrible (Billy) as having paid the highest price he could. Death would have spared him having to live without the thing he thought the most important next to his acceptance into the Evil League of Evil.
Which gets me, as I work my way towards my comments on The Avengers, onto a question that I hinted at when I wrote my response to the Hunger Games.
At what point does a death shift from quality story telling to blatant emotional manipulation?
Collins wanted us to be outraged at the Games when Rue died. It was meant to tap into our anger, and make us root for Katniss just that little bit more. Whedon wanted us (with Jesse) to always be on the edge of our seats as to who might die next, and then he wanted us in the same emotional place when he ran a massive wooden spike through Wash. He wanted us to be off balanced through the ending.
What starts to wear on me is that it feels like this was less about story telling and more about “I know there’s a button I can push that will get this reaction so I’m going to push it and push it.”
Now I understand the power of conventions and emotional investment. The problem is that when those manipulations become too obvious, or they erode my sense of investment they jar me out of the moment. In the case of Rue, I knew the button was being pushed. There was no subtlety. It was as though there was a big flashing sign that said “You’re going to cry for her”, followed later by a sign that said “Okay, Cry Now.”
Whedon I think is little more circumvent but I fear, for me, it does the same thing. Where it may put more people into the moment and the tension, for me it does the opposite. A sudden random death makes me stop wanting to care because how do I know who’s going to be next to get knocked off? I can start cheering for that neat cool character and waiting for them to really kick some butt, and then… wait? They died HOW? Where’s my investment after that? Why keep watching? In the hope that the people I ~didn’t~ like will avenge them?
It’s like watching American Idol for those three people you think are really talented and then asking yourself why you’re going to watch the final two episodes after all of them are voted off.
Perhaps it’s the result of me getting old. Perhaps I’m not a 20 something who figures that the world has enough happy endings it’s fun to engage in some not so happy ones. Perhaps it’s seeing more and more real unhappy endings that I turn to movies, TV and video games to escape that reality, to find something more fun to slide into and forget just how bad it is. I can root all I want for a family member with a really bad medical condition, but odds are odds, and often the odds are not good.
So I look to popcorn action movies to help me get past that, to just forget for a while how bad it can be and to cheer for an underdog who is going to knock in the teeth of evil, and quip about fashionable footwear while she does it.
Which takes us, finally, to The Avengers.
We meet Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD in Iron Man. Or I did at any rate. He was a professional if a little awkward agent who had a job to do, and he did it well and he did it without airs. He didn’t flash a badge, he didn’t demand attention. He showed up, he did his job and he did it well.
We see him do it again in Iron Man 2. We see him do it in Thor. Every time Agent Coulson makes an appearance we’re given a guy who has a job, the job’s not glamorous, and yet he does it.
I’m still not sure what to mentally do with his own spear through the chest. Unlike Wash (who also died with a gaping chest wound), Coulson gets some final dialogue, indeed some of the best in the movie. “Oh, so that’s what it does.” And also unlike other Whedon deaths, it gets used as a plot point. It united The Avengers with that final piece they needed. The bonding had always been there. Caps and Thor knew about doing the right thing for the right reasons. Stark and Banner knew about the dangers of science run amok and bonded over what could happen if the portal was opened. Black Widow and Hawkeye had a past. But it was Coulson that was the final glue.
It was a death with Purpose.
Now, to be fair, I had mentally put Coulson in the same box where I kept Wedge Antilles from Star Wars. That punky minor character who gets a handful of lines in each movie and still survives from one fight to the next. You’re never quite sure HOW he survives but you root for him anyways. Seeing Coulson go down I was left trying to figure out if they could keep him alive somehow, or if he’d turn into some other character later down the road. But I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that as far as the movie franchise story arcs go, he’s dead.
And this time, I kept rooting. Wash’s death made me give up. Rue’s death annoyed me because I hated the way I was being blatantly played for emotional reaction. Penny? It was a tragedy; I was meant to sit and stare at the screen in quiet respect when that story was over.
But in The Avengers? No, that’s a popcorn munching brawl fest where you’re supposed to pump your fist in the air and cheer when the good guys break a bus over the bad guy’s head. And yet… Phil….
I’m going to miss him in later movies, but I get it. And for the first time in a while I saw a character I cared about in a movie die off in a way that I think was perfect to the story, respectful of me as an audience member, and neither oversold nor undersold the relevance of death.
I don’t like it, but respect it the most of all the carnage that’s been visited upon characters I cared about.
Are you sure this is an RTodd Feature?
I mean.. in a few hours it’s going to show up on ~my~ blog under ~my~byline….
Oh, my gosh, I AM SO SORRY.
I ran out of gas. I… I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts! IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!
Though if we could set something up where other people write my posts for me, that would be pretty awesome.
I thought Apple products had an app for everything…
Which reminds me….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCFfIv-IKzg
Yes that’s my adorable (now) 4-year old. He’s such a ham.
I almost had the opposite reaction to the deaths in Serenity and The Avengers:
Serenity was the first time I’d see a Joss Whedon character die. I wasn’t expecting it, I was totally flabbergasted by it, and I was still very much thinking of this as a TV show where you knew the characters would be back the next episode.
When Wash died, suddenly there was a little thought in the back of my head. “What if none of them gets out alive?” It started small, but it kept building. Soon, the characters were trapped. River had sacrificed herself to buy them time, Zoe had been shot, and there were countless reavers in between the crew of the Serenity and safety. It was also clear that “winning” and “surviving” weren’t intertwined. Just because they managed to broadcast the signal doesn’t mean that they’d get to walk away at the end. And so that little voice in my head slowly grew in volume until it was a giant shout. “WHAT IF NONE OF THEM GETS OUT ALIVE!?” That made the movie for me. To this day, it’s probably the most compelling movie I’ve ever seen. It’s the one that made me care about what happened at the end because none of it was a foregone conclusion.
Agent Coulson in the avengers left me cold. Maybe if I wasn’t so familiar with comic books, and all their pointless deaths, I’d have been more shaken by it. But as it stood, I didn’t have an emotional reaction to his death. It didn’t make me sad, it didn’t make me energized and angry. I enjoyed, from a storytelling standpoint, the way that Nick Fury handles his death. It gives us fury as the tortured, cynical bastard that was the only good thing in The Ultimates. But emotionally, I felt nothing.
It’ll be weird to keep seeing Principal Coulson in the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon, though.
I remember reading an interview with Rowling (and I want to say that it was around the 3rd or 4th book)where she talked about how so many people (children!) wrote her telling her to not kill Ron.
Now, of course, Rowling did *NOT* kill Ron (yet, anyway) but we know why we (or anybody) would suspect that she would. I mean, seriously. It’s difficult to not read that book and see Ron as a walking chalk outline. He’s a loyal friend, but not too smart, not too skilled, not too good at anything except being a good, honest, quintessential Best Friend Forever. (How in the hell did he get into Gryffindor?)
It’s a template. It’s not that difficult to see who fits into it… as such, it’s usually a surprise to see the someone who fits the template standing on the dias at the end of the movie.
Ron got into Gryffindor partly because “All Weasley’s are in Gryffindor”. It shows some of the “flaws” in sorting inasmuch that it also tries (in theory) to equally spread out students to all the houses to keep the House Cup competition fair. So one year the “cut off” for being a Slytherin might be “mildly smarmy” and the next it could be “Only the ones who like to pull off the wings from flies just to watch them suffer” depending on how many kids qualify. Also it’s not fool proof. Percy got into Gryffindor, and then more or less sold out his family.
I think Ron was out of danger once Rowlings knew what her audience was. Few of us are the hero. Many of us fall into that category of being “Hero Support”. And knocking off Ron would put a pretty glaring light on the danger of that role. Then again, maybe Rowlings is the kind who would say “hey, kids need to learn how to deal with the death of their peers so here’s a chance to do just that. BuhBye Ronnie boy.”
“Oh Ronnie boy… the pipes, the pipes are calling…..”
Personally I’m not a fan of the “teach kids about death/ rape/ murder/ drugs/ etc when they’re young because it’s how the world works.” I think the Hunger Games may be a great book for high schoolers; I panic to see people handing it to 5th graders.
My 6th grader has finished the first two books of The Hunger Games. I have mixed feelings about that, and I did not let her accompany her 14 year old sister and me to the movie.
I was in 6th grade, and reading books about drugging people to have sex with them (detective novel) and different sexual positions.
I think people VASTLY overestimate teh amount of paying attention that kids do. My Tolkien experience in 7th grade was very very … superficical.
Only a Hufflepuff would think someone wasn’t smart or skilled enough to get into Gryffindor. What Ron was, that landed him in Gryffindor, was brave. Just as brave as any of the rest of the Weasleys (‘cept maybe the twins – they’re really TOO brave, and always make me think Rowling was thinking of the foolishly brave young Britons of WW1 (no politics?)).
(‘Course, Jaybird says, “Only a Ravenclaw would think ‘only a Hufflepuff’ was an insult.” Guilty as charged.)
Ravenclaw practice spells like “locomotor” and “silencio” and Hufflepuff practice “aguavitaementi”.
I skipped over the parts about “The Avengers,” but I agree with everything else you wrote in the post.
I could maybe have seen Whedon killing off the Firefly crew in a blaze of glory fighting the oppressive regime. I wouldn’t have considered that a betrayal. But killed by Reavers? That would have been a horrible thing to do, not only to the characters, but the fans. Nobody wants to imagine that end for them. Whedon would have been pilloried, and rightly so.
Watching River finally come into her own as a kick-ass fighting machine, though? Against the Reavers? That was space fishin’ awesome. The best ending I could hope for.
The remainder of this comment is a spoiler for later seasons of “Torchwood.”
The wholesale slaughter of all but two of the principal cast members at the ending of the second and third seasons was a complete and utter pile of garbage. The completely pointless death of Ianto was particularly galling. It signaled nothing but contempt from the writers that they would kill just about everyone off, and expect fans to live with it.
I agree entirely with you about Coulson. I loved his presence in all of the films. Eventually I got to the point of being like “Oh it’s Shield, where’s Coulson?” His line in Iron Man was one of my favorites in any Marvel movie. The deadpan delivery of “If you try to escape, or play any sort of games with me, I will taze you and watch “Supernanny” while you drool into the carpet.” Was just perfect!
I will miss him.
Writers get frustrated when people come with buttons prepushed.
I don’t watch anime with the same feeling of “everyone’s gonna make it” (well, if you’re doing a schoolkid comedy, i’m not going to expect a spiritual journey that involves sailing and a fishpen. School Rumble,you are one crazy show).
meaningless death becomes yet another trope. Sorry,e verything’s a trope.
but some things do it better than others.
Elfen Lied seems set in someplace similar to Martin’s books, thematically speaking (life sucks, but you still gotta live)
But Elfen Lied doesn’t need to do jack to “spice things up”
I didn’t mind killing off Coulson, although I liked him too. I did mind…
Um, we are past the spoiler warning here, right?
I did mind the way Nick Fury played it as a tool to unite the Avengers — in particular, the way he “embellished” the trading cards detail to manipulate Captain America’s emotions. He certainly didn’t seem to mourn the sudden and violent death of a man he thought of as a friend and a trusted lieutenant. I know he’s a soldier and used to taking casualties; I know he’s become more politician than hero. But the lying didn’t sit right with me, especially when the lying was aimed at motivating a man who literally personifies America (to go fight a war he wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to fight before the prod, natch).
Egads. I forgot the Gift of Gab colum would show the first few words of my comment and make me a spoiler. Rookie mistake by me.
It didn’t sit right with you in the sense that it hurt you appreciation of the movie? or just that it made you dislike the character?
Because I loved that moment. It’s when the Movie Universe’s Nick Fury stopped being just Samuel L Jackson with and eyepatch and started being a character.
Yeah I’m with you but I do wonder what “Kind” of lie we’re talking about. Everyone knew that Phil had those cards and that Phil really wanted to get them autographed. Everyone knew what a fanboy Phil was. So in the one sense it wasn’t an outlandish fabrication.
I almost see Fury pacing trying to find a way to really get Caps and Thor on board with doing something. He could just put the cards on the table and say “Look, Coulston never even got a chance to get these signed because he was so busy doing what he had to do support you guys”, or he could add the blood and kick the whole thing up one more notch.
Hill did agree with Burt that it was a little “off”, but that’s one thing I was willing to forgive in Fury. He did what had to be done, in this case, for the right reasons.
There is something, on the other hand, to be said for the manipulation of “Facts” to encourage action. Excellent commentary on things like the war in Iraq.
On the other hand I’m reminded by the memes about English Teachers and symbolism:
To the English Teacher: The curtains on the window are blue to represent the longing of the main character to embrace his masculity while at the same time he is yearning for the freedom of flight, an escape from the gilded cage built by his mother. He clings, literally, to the blue curtains as he looks at the outside world because he needs to touch something more etheral than the dullness of his room.
To the Author: The curtains on the window are blue because yellow would have been fishin’ stupid.