The Avengers part 5

We now scoot over to India, where we meet Bruce Banner.  Or rather, first we meet a little Indian girl, who dashes through a slum in search of Dr. Banner to aid her dying father.  The little girl’s desperation is palpable, and the good doctor can hardly help but follow her.  Our hearts go out to the little girl, and we desperately want to see Dr. Banner help her father.  Like everything in The Avengers, this is played out very quickly but with great efficiency.  A little drama is created, as our protagonist shifts from Nick Fury to Black Widow to this little girl on her mission to save her father.  And, because the direction is so sure and the production design so convincing, we accept the truth and stakes of the girl’s plight.

The little girl, it turns out, is bait, set by Black Widow to capture Bruce.  The little girl, in her helplessness, plays on Bruce’s good nature and feelings of sympathy and gets him to go to an empty house.  There’s a wonderful moment just before they get to the house where the police roll by and Bruce shields the little girl with his body, as though keeping her out of the hands of the authorities.  He is, of course, keeping himself out of the hands of the authorities, but he plays the moment for the sake of the girl, as “the caring father.”

Kurt Vonnegut once said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.”  This applies to no one in the comics universe more than Bruce Banner, who must be very careful indeed what he pretends to be.  His life as a doctor is, in its way, a performance, or an act of contrition, a way to pay for the things he does as “the other guy.”

When the little girl leaves Bruce like a groom at the altar, we realize: the little girl isn’t just like Black Widow, she is Black Widow, using the patented Black Widow technique of getting men to let their guard down by putting on a weak-and-helpless act.



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The Avengers part 4

Now that our movie has a protagonist, the question, as always, is “What does the protagonist want?”  Superficially, the protagonist of The Avengers, Nick Fury, wants “to save the world,” that most generic of motives.  To save the world, Fury must get a group of superheroes from vastly different backgrounds to work together.

Surprise!  What the protagonist wants is exactly the same thing as what the writer-director wants!  If Joss Whedon cannot succeed in getting his dog’s-breakfast of a cast to mesh, meld and work as a unit, his narrative will fail and no one will go see his movie.  This not only gives the writer a keen insight into his protagonist’s character, it’s a stroke of genius, giving the narrative a spine that would otherwise make it an ensemble comedy-spectacle, an It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with superheroes.

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The Avengers part 3

Our protagonist, Nick Fury, gets out of his helicopter, along with his sidekick Agent Maria Hill, and exchanges some rapid-fire dialogue with Agent Coulson as he heads down, down, down into the depths of the installation.  He’s arrived in a helicopter, a symbol of power, and now he descends deep, deep underground.  What does he talk about with Coulson?  “A bunch of stuff.”  The Tesseract, we come to understand, has done something surprising, which has necessitated the evacuation of the installation.  The Tesseract, which, again, we don’t know what it is or what it does, is kept deep, deep underground because it’s so freaking powerful.

(Incidentally, why must the installation be evacuated?  The answer: because The Avengers, in order to make the ton of money it needs to make, must be rated PG-13.  The installation is about to go sky-high, so to speak, and if the movie begins with a catastrophic loss of life, it becomes Saving Private Ryan instead of the colorful spectacle it needs to be.)

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The Avengers part 2

At the end of the last post I mentioned “stakes.”  An important thing to understand about stakes is that they are directly related to the success of a cinematic narrative.  When the stakes are low, the movie feels “small,” and the narrative decreases audience involvement.  A movie about a guy who loses his keys is going to be less involving, to most people, than a movie about the end of the world.  On a macro scale, less audience involvement generally means less audience.  When the stakes are life-or-death, audience involvement increases.  So The Avengers takes care to mention, right up front, that nothing less than the fate of all humanity, and the universe, is at stake.  Not the planet, not the solar system or even the galaxy, but the universe.  Obviously, this movie is playing for keeps.

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