Avengers: Age of Ultron

If the Western is essentially about Manifest Destiny then Avengers: Age of Ultron is about the Cold War. It is a post hoc justification for NASA, the H-bomb and Coca-Cola. All aimed at the audience from Robert Downey Jnr’s intensely irritating face. He’s like a little five year old brat who has morphed into the hideous body of a fifty year old brat due to some horrific nuclear accident that you find yourself brutally lacking any sympathy for. I especially want to emphasise what a humourless OAP in teens clothing Robert Downey Jnr is. Why isn’t he called Robert Downey Snr or Robert Downey RIP?

Hitchcock said that there is only one place for tension to go – laughter. Following this instruction like a pedant following grammatical orders the film is all structured around a comic rhythm of building some sort of pseudo drama and then cutting it down with a glib remark from RDJ (twat). The key problem with this is that the remarks have zero wit. A typical comeback to some huge crash of giant space ships might be ‘OK’, ‘that was awkward’, or ‘Err yeah’. Big explosion. ‘She’s fit’. Character dies. ‘Well that was sad’. More CGI porn. ‘Whatever’. The audience of filth-gluttons lapped it up. Hearing the crowds laugh was like being at a Nazi rally. I just hoped nobody noticed me. I felt increasingly alienated until finally I think I experienced the Marxist alienation of no longer recognising your self as a human being. I had morphed into a lizard and left the Vue in search of some crickets for dinner.

There are a couple of Eastern European baddies (read commie bastards), who upon releasing a dangerous new weapon which seems safe but then has some hidden danger within it (subtle) realise how silly they were and essentially beg the gang of American philistines to let them join. Thankfully it all ends happily with the obliteration of the East. Guys, you won, you don’t need to spend a hundred years justifying yourselves just enjoy it. We don’t have to go to the cinema and watch all that boring high brow Russian stuff, we can watch this obscenity instead. It is actually worse than obscene, I’d much rather go home and watch ten minutes of YouPorn. At least I wont have seen a twenty foot RDJ call me a moron.

There was an advert for some car before the film started. It was being chased by a CGI monster. The film was then full to the brim with product placement such that there didn’t seem to be any separation between the two. I was paying to see an advert. The logic of that is a piece of evil genius. It is as if we have realised that we don’t even want what the advert is selling us anymore, we want the advert itself. Avengers: Age of Ultron is the finest example yet of this strange new world of Advert/Propaganda/Product/Commodity Fetishism all combined in a Russian doll of layers of facade. The true symbolic meaning of Pass the Parcel. The sadness is when all that symbolic structure is finally placed on an actual object which cannot sustain it. The saddest child is the one who wins and is faced with this Wizard of Oz moment.

* Quasi-spoiler in following paragraph

Another thought is that assuming the target market is teenage males and elderly-teenage males there was a distinct lack of women characters even as sexual conquests. These new trollagers can not even accept objectified sex objects anymore. They have to instead fantasise about masculine ideals. But the masculine ideal is only coherent when defined in opposition to the female. This necessary symbolic function is entirely resting on the shoulders of Scarlet Johanson, whose beauty is, I must admit, almost enough to suffice. I say almost because, I don’t think any one feminine symbol can provide an ontological framework for, what is it, ten masculine ideals? Perhaps they think the male is so infinitely fascinating and the female so much a negative idea that there is only one type of woman. This all leads me to the conclusion that the whole purpose of the Cold War was to provide a working definition of masculinity. Peckinpah’s famous quote that there are two types of woman pussies and cunts springs to mind. We can have an infinite number of males (literally, the climax of the film is an unending stream of baddies; a final affront to the Russian war dead) but only the two tropes bitch and blond are needed from women (apparently there is this whole other group of people called non-whites but lets leave that for another time). Perhaps there was some wife character or something? They needed something to put a character’s son on.

I’m going to go even further and say that the refusal to put their one woman Scarlet (aside from the enemy commie bitch trope a la Xenia Onatopp. Ultimately won over and of course killed) in a sexual situation is actually a feminist regression. The teenage boy can happily drool over endless homoerotic scenes such as Thor in a jacuzzi as long as it is never fully revealed as joy in masculinity. Michelangelo knew he liked men, these guys don’t. The reason I say no sex with Scarlet is reactionary is because the misogyny is so complete now that we cannot even bear to have sex with them. Their only role is in propping up RDJ’s corporate semi-on, a scaffolding built on sand. The women are fully what De Beauvoir calls the ‘inessential other’.

Now that we lack the Soviet union as a sufficient Other and have long given up on women providing the requisite symbolic content (can we try Muslims?) we must find increasingly ingenious ways of justifying RDJ’s fragile emotional state. This is a complicated procedure and I wish Marvel all the best in this endeavor. I suspect it may take at least another ten films.

Yours in drooling wild eyed sarcasm,


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