All the Beauty and the Bloody MCU Ideology, Weekly Reel #53
A two-parter on different opiates for the masses. One’s a pill, the other a fantasy, addictive and conducive to artistic creation or artistic destruction.
News of the Week: Welcome all. A sudden burst of creative energy struck me after the death of my second favorite English author, Martin Amis. I’m back to active-anti-social moviewatching and sentencemaking and will have plenty more content for y’all.
This post is a subtle throwback to my essay commentary days, which, for better or for worse, perhaps inevitably but unconsciously—nowadays even atavistically and maladroitly—was because of a new Marvel essay. Doch.
Watch Now
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras, USA)
With the increased demand for content on streaming services came the proliferation of documentaries and bio-pics, unfortunately mostly limp music and sports bio-pics, but also the company bio-pics (Air, BlackBerry, and Tetris in the first five months of this year alone), and too many bio-pic documentaries to count. The formula for documentaries, especially about very famous people, are simple and tell themselves without the need for filmmakers, so it seems. They need casual image splicers, a solid B-camera team for inserts, and a hungry streamer willing to overpay. Boom, docu-bio-pic!
Because of this formula and the necessity for insider access (for legal and ethical permission) on the documentary subjects themselves, most documentarians don’t craft something that will ruin that access or bend the formula too far—one wouldn’t want to be known as the experimental documentary filmmaker, a financial death sentence. Documentary filmmakers that play by the rules are committing a dereliction of cinematic duty. We already know the subjects and why they’re famous, and the big “revelation” (that is supposedly one of the reasons for getting insider access) pitter patters like a seventeen-year-old dog. They try to hide their faults through flash & awe, greatest hits moments, and your willingness to sit in front of the TV mindlessly consuming a frozen dinneresque chunk of content.
This current docu-desert therefore creates massive potential for awe-inspiring pieces of art. Do you remember the last documentary to tickle both your artistic and intellectual sensibilities? The answer is, or should be, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the latest release from contemporary docu-filmmaker Laura Poitras about legendary photographer and activist Nan Goldin. Finally, a documentary rising to the cinematic challenge of matching (and respecting) the level to which the subject resides and requires.
First Poitras. Her Oscar nomination for My Country, My Country, a 2006 documentary about Iraq under U.S. occupation, confirmed her political and filmmaking bonafides, bit Citzenfour, the 2014 Oscar-winning documentary revealing the inside-the-room moment when Edward Snowden broke the archaic Espionage Act, revealed a proper filmmaker with a vision and the ability to stand by their convictions. (If you haven’t seen Citizenfour, you’re not permitted to read beyond this point, which will be enforced via no-knock warrants and heavy weaponry. You’ve been warned.) The point is that Poitras can be trusted handling the official story, which Goldin literally handed to Poitras, of Goldin’s life as an artist and activist against powerful cultural forces.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is more conventional than Citizenfour. There were no, as far as I know, concerns about intense government surveillance and threats of treason. But, and arguably more challenging from a filmmaking pov, Poitras was handed a cache of footage from Nan Goldin to make a documentary about her recent activism against the Sackler family, that sleazy and criminal blood-line behind Purdue Pharma, creators of oxycodone and fentanyl. While any documentary about that evil lot could have been conventional and watchable, Poitras also had to battle with Goldin’s legacy as a photographer and artist well-ahead of the times. And Poitras had the added difficulty of presenting a popular figure not in the mainstream, household-name category of famous people, which requires extra grease to get going.
The documentary presents a relatively formulaic structure: seven chapters that crosscuts Goldin’s personal history with her covid-era efforts to get museums to refuse Sackler family philanthropic “donations.” It’s bookended by the tragic story of her sister, who, a month before her nineteenth birthday, killed herself. At first we think it’s because of her oppressive Mother, a domineering influence that provides both nonfiction and fiction films with enough Freudian frivolities. The life Goldin lives, and Poitras presents, between the two Schwester points repeats a mirrored structure, as if Goldin was living a life for two. And as the story progresses, and Goldin ages, it becomes clear how the underlying establishment structures held tight against all un-undue resistance.
At the risk of reducing Goldin’s substantial career, a few greatest moments should be mentioned. Her photographic exhibits via slideshows brought together disparate underground communities (gay, transgender, black radical) and carried their portrayal into the mainstream museum community—The Ballad of Sexual Dependency being her most evocative, which details traumatic moments from Goldin’s life (namely her sister’s suicide and boyfriend’s physical abuse) not for sympathy and victimization, but to shake the grip of others experiencing similar problems without an outlet for resistance. Then, fast forwarding several decades, she developed an opioid addiction after wrist surgery, which led to her founding Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), an activist group directly resisting the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma. Again, Goldin led this charge not for personal/artistic gain, but for the hitherto ill-resisted opiate industry. As one would know from the end of this documentary, P.A.I.N.’s efforts led to famous museums and universities dropping the Sackler’s philanthropic laundering and, eventually, name from various wings and rooms.
Poitras spoils us by providing two documentaries in one, both about the potent connection between underground resistance and collaboration leading to real change in the world.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is streaming on Max in the USA and playing in theaters in Germany.
Save (and Read) for Later
An essay commentary! Remember these?
This one is about every filmwriter hack’s favorite topic: the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), it’s inevitable downfall that’s been predicted to death for a dozen years, and why it’s a problem for Hollywood and modern-day filmmaking. (I must admit that I’ve participated in these dark arts and even used it as part of my master’s thesis.) These analyses run the line between (the too often boring and clickbaity) pusillanimous strength-in-numbers hit pieces and genuine, skin-in-the-game resistance (Martin Scorsese et al.)
I feared the former would rise again in Michael Schulman’s latest tome for The New Yorker, “How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood.” Don’t let the ChatGPT-inspired title and anti-Marvel talking points one would expect from it fool you. Schulman, author of the recent six-hundred pp. Oscars book and staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote about the origins of the MCU from a moderately nonjudgmental perspective. Though Marvel’s origin and entry into filmmaking is quite interesting, it’s not the point I want to highlight.
Let’s get on with it:
Dissenters have been loud. In 2019, Martin Scorsese pronounced Marvel movies “not cinema,” earning the undying enmity of comics fans. Last year, Quentin Tarantino lamented Marvel’s “choke hold” on Hollywood and said, “You have to be a hired hand to do those things.” When I mentioned this comment to Joe and Anthony Russo, brothers who directed four Marvel movies, including the highest grossing, “Avengers: Endgame,” Anthony said, “I don’t know if Quentin feels like he was born to make a Marvel movie, which is maybe why he would feel like a hired hand doing it. It depends on your relationship to the source material.” Joe added, “What fulfills us the most is building a sense of community around our work.” People involved in Marvel projects often talk about “playing in the sandbox,” which is another way of saying that the brand takes precedence over any individual voice—except that of Feige, the affable face of the franchise.
The Russo brothers, known for being the biggest sand-castle builders in the MCU sandbox, essentially admit to being hired hands because they can easily go along to get along. That they were, I guess, “born to make a Marvel movie”?
Is there any combination of words less meaningful than “building a sense of community” coming from, basically, the upper managers of a giant corporation? ‘Brand’ > ‘individual voice’ is the basic formula of Hollywood today, and it’s comical, not when individual voices resist that model, as Scorsese and Tarantino have publicly done, but when a groundswell of “popular” resistance consisting of child-adults defends the status quo and corporate products against individual artists. Marvel even uses the ur-Manchild himself, Kevin Feige, as its public face to legitimize their populist appeal and turn resistance into octogenarian reactionism. There is, no doubt, legitimate criticism made against Marvel’s influence, which isn’t the only studio committing these cinematic sins, but they’re often drowned out by industry rags and their declining audience appeals for meaningless internet impressions.
So we beat on:
You might picture arriving for your first day of work on a Marvel movie and being handed a leather-bound bible of character mythology. Instead, directors who are in the running for their first Marvel job are given a fifteen-or-so-page “discussion document,” distilled from corporate brainstorming retreats. Landing the job requires not slavish adherence to the document but a nifty approach to executing it. The movies are shot all over the world but edited in Burbank, on the same lot as Feige’s office. Each film’s creative team meets multiple times a week with Marvel’s upper management—until recently, a group known as the Trio, consisting of Feige, Louis D’Esposito, and Victoria Alonso. Filmmakers also receive notes from the Parliament, a group of senior creative executives who are each assigned to individual projects but review them all as a committee.
All this corporate machinery may sound oppressive, but Marvel collaborators tend to describe their experiences as surprisingly free-form and hands-off. One editor referred to Marvel’s oversight as a “pinkie on the steering wheel.” “There wasn’t anything dictated at all,” Joe Johnston, who directed the first Captain America film, told me. Erik Sommers, who co-wrote the Spider-Man trilogy, recalled that Marvel assistants had put together a document that explained the difference between a “universe” and a “dimension.” But otherwise, he said, “it’s not a giant diagram of preëxisting dots that need to be connected in a certain order.”
May I propose making “pinkie on the steering wheel” the cinematic equivalent of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”? Besides, all it takes is the slip of a finger on a steering wheel to plow into a family of four.
A few directors—Patty Jenkins, Edgar Wright—have quit Marvel projects, after battling for creative control. “The only times we’d run into problems is if we got a filmmaker who said, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and then showed up and wanted to do something completely different,” a former Marvel executive told me. “So then you hear people saying, ‘Kevin Feige came in, and he took over the process!’ But, if you know what the game plan is, you end up having a ton of creative freedom at Marvel, because we’re working inside the box.” Scorsese would shudder.
This is the great formulation for how ideology works: yes, I understand there are certain constraints and blueprints one must follow to work here, but once you follow them, you are totally free! (Is this not, now I’m being bold, the problem with institutions today?) And if you try to think outside the (sand)box, you get sacked. Resisting dominant modes of ideology is often a rough process, as one can see in politics, for instance, today, but moreso in the seven-decade, slow death-declining industry of Hollywood. (I’ve got my Weißbier in hand, so let’s get into it.)
For signs of petty business practices, look no further than Disney’s insistence on blacklisting VFX companies that dispute working ten-plus hour days after lowering their rates for that sweet sweet contract to work on Thanos’s purple hue. But that’s what the sandbox requires, which includes a cache of hired hands working under Herr Affable-Face Feige producing fifteen-page discussion documents (that used to be called outlines) distilled from corporate brainstorming retreats for a nifty execution by a filmmaker who won’t have creative differences and allows a council of wise-men edit the finalized product to make sure they’re below the legally allotted limit of rat shit so that forty-year olds can escape into meaninglessness and avoid the shit realities of global problems that leaders are unwilling to tackle and, at worse, making worse.
There’s an apt comparison to the Golden Age of Hollywood studio system that can be made regarding Disney’s film production (that, again, I wrote in my thesis), but one would have to admit and assume Disney is making films right now that anyone will care about in the next generation or two. The rigidity of the studio system with talent under tight non-compete contracts still emphasized storytelling, acting, writing, production design, etc., through their adherence to genre necessities and star personalities. Those elder filmmakers, but not all, used these constraints as an artistic hurdle to transcend, which made them the celebrated classics they are today.
The problem is that there’s no creative rule-breaking in Marvel’s sandbox. Subversion is now just a B-subplot to motivate the main plot. Nuance is the gradient of hues for superhero outfits. Revelation is that moment when a good guy becomes a bad guy and vice versa. Story is what happened in the previous Marvel entry that bled into the next one. Plot is how the current film will set up a character for their own film later. Characters are plucked from comic books. Directing is watching millionaires act in front of blue-screens. Writing is a “fifteen-or-so-page ‘discussion document,’ distilled from corporate brainstorming retreats.”
I should stop before I get cynical.
Pass
Sternburg beer; holy shit this stuff sucks.
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