Symbolic engineering in Avengers: Endgame - part 1

How did the creative process behind Endgame result in everything feeling just right? What made us sympathize with Thanos? More importantly, what does the success of MCU's tentpole say about our society? In part 1 of 3 we examine Infinity War and Endgame's prologue.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that a lot of people liked Avengers: Endgame.

It took the world by storm, ousted Titanic and nearly beat Avatar's box office score during a summer overcrowded with amazing films. It's a cultural phenomenon and therefore shouldn't be treated like any other popcorn flick, no matter how it might look on the surface.

Co-directors of both last Avengers movies, the Russo brothers, compared designing those films to surgery.

Superherohype.com reported Russos admitting to the following during a Q&A:

Marvel has a very “secretive” screening process that allows the filmmakers to find “surgical” ways of making the movie better. The filmmakers call this “plussing,” which is another way of saying additional photography.

I might have an idea what they're doing: they've devised an industrial way to tap into the collective unconscious.

Watching movies, interacting with any art, is like experiencing a dream. We can relax our conscious minds in the knowledge that what they're receiving is not real, while our subconscious searches for ways to project mental tensions on the narrative in hopes of relieving them when the story is resolved. This process has been theorized on by psychologists, neurologists and philosophers going as far back as the times of Aristotle (who called it catharsis), whereas our current understanding of it is mostly a synthesis of the works of the last-century psychologists: Freud, Jung and Lacan. We can already craft powerful stories that speak to us on a primal level through our understanding of the symbolic layer and use of Jungian archetypes. Marvel Studios, however, figured out how to turn it into a more practical science.

If the Russos were testing many various cuts and edits, they might not even have realized to the full extent why their movie looks like it does. Obviously they needed to have enough information to know what variants to test and which scenes to change (for instance, Tilda Swinton's short scene has been reshot a year after it was initially recorded), but their process allowed them to access a great deal more insight than usual. Had they gone with their own instincts, as most creators do, then as their joint dream, Endgame would have just come into existence expressing their own thoughts and desires. Screening various permutations of narrative beats with test audiences, though, means it's a lot more.

Avengers: Endgame has been engineered as a collective dream of our society.

Its box-office score is proof that it's fulfilled this role splendidly. In psychoanalysis, a patient's dreams are often used to detect issues in their real life that their conscious minds don't want to acknowledge. Since dreams are designed by our subconscious to relieve mental tensions, reading dreams can tell us what those tensions are in the first place. Not only that, often we already know the solutions to our own problems but we fail to notice or accept them because of perceived social taboos or misplaced fears and anxieties. Those, too, can appear to us in dreams.

Understanding our cultural zeitgeist is thus vastly important for our collective well-being. Especially in times of crisis. As a reverse-engineered dream that portrays our problems and points to solutions, Avengers: Endgame might just be the most important movie of the year, Oscars or not.

Let's use this three-part, spoiler-filled analysis of what Endgame tells through its symbols - language of the unconscious - to try to comprehend what it says about our society. To begin, we need to step back a little and have a look at the tension and catharsis with which the previous film left us.

Our own shadow

Infinity War, the third Avengers movie, touted as the most ambitious crossover in cinematic history, solved its problem with too many protagonists in the most ingenious way. While heroes shared their screentime punching things and faffing about, Thanos' story took center stage and defined the central theme of both films. Foreshadowed for years, envisioned in Iron Man's cassandric dream, the obvious association is that Thanos is a symbol for global warming, a looming disaster we've been ignoring for so long it became unstoppable. Considering the reason for the protagonists' attempts to thwart him all failing is because by the time the movie begins he's already in possession of the Power Stone and gains the Space Stone in the very first scene, this description fits him like a gauntlet. Appearing as a distant, ominous threat in the end credits of nearly every MCU movie cements this interpretation: this is how the Russos and Kevin Feige designed for us to see Thanos. Like climate change and the White Walkers from Game of Thrones, Thanos was heralded from the very beginning as a threat so large in scale that it would render all preceding drama, especially political kerfuffles - an important supportive element of this analogy - meaningless in comparison.

Infinity War, however, introduced a clever twist less than halfway through. 

Thanos turns out to be an anti-villain. His goal is to save all planets of the universe from destruction that befell his own home.

In this shot, we recognize in Thanos a hero born from our collective shadow. 

In Jungian psychology, a shadow is the sum of the unknown and/or repressed aspects of one’s personality. In popular culture this is usually represented as an amalgamation of egotistical, antisocial, often destructive (sometimes also self-destructive) impulses a person carries hidden away deep within their psyche. Perhaps the most well-known example of a shadow is the brutal and self-indulgent alter ego of the sedate Dr Jekyll, called Mr. Hyde. Obviously, Bruce Banner and Hulk also somewhat fit this term. 

In real life we rarely act on our shadowy, transgressive impulses, we dedicate a lot of our mental power to suppressing them instead. Because it really does take a lot of work to suppress a thought or an instinct, we may sometimes reluctantly entertain fantasies where those impulses are fulfilled - this is a form of negotiation with the shadow that lets our minds rest easy for a while. 

There's a reason we refer to some art as "guilty pleasure." We recognize the wish-fulfilment in it as transgressive and feel the tinge of guilt it produces, yet the relief it provides is enough of an incentive for us to indulge in it.

Thanos embodies a dark latent wish that we all carry in the back of our minds: the thought of someone just deleting this massive predicament we've created. With a snap of his fingers, without prejudice, with cold randomness, half of Earth's populace is gone and our carbon footprint becomes the least of our worries. Thanos' appeal, his power as an anti-villain, lies in the fact that on a deeply repressed layer of our psyche we root for him. Climate change is such an enormously complex problem, after all, that some people semi-consciously choose not to face it, or even live in active denial. Like Alexander the Great, Thanos cuts this Gordian knot in half. He sees we're not yet ready to tackle our problem and comes to solve it for us. He's the devil who will make your life easier if you just give him a gun and look the other way.

This is in huge part why the ending of Infinity War had so much staying power. It tapped into the most prevalent and most taxing mental tension in our society: continuing our merry lives in the face of an imminent disaster. Then it delivered a mighty catharsis for this tension. However, since it was executed by Thanos, it was drenched in shadow, fulfilling a dark, latent wish, instead of the explicit one. Our world has been saved, our problem was solved, but at a horrifying price. Because the narrative created a bond between audience and villain and because he's solved our problem for us, we feel complicit. Seeing half the heroes vanish into thin air was tragic, doubly so because it was in fact a consequence of our own guilty pleasure. On some level, we wanted this to happen (hence "Thanos wasn't wrong" articles like this one), thus we feel responsible.

It's quite likely the most effective sequel hook imaginable. 

Denied closures

Ever since the powers that be at Marvel reverted the character growth Joss Whedon introduced in the first Avengers movie, MCU heroes were stuck in permanent limbo. Nowhere was it as apparent as in Iron Man's character arcs. He's always been circling his own flaws like a neurotic shark, getting deceptively close to understanding them and growing past them, but then another movie undid it all and prohibited him from attaining any insight, as if his psyche was always kept hidden behind his armor.

Here, though, the first things we see him do is accept his own mortality and then graciously lose at a casual party game. It's arguably a small step, but it seems a huge leap for Tony Stark. It's all the more heartbreaking that a while later a scene he shares with Steve Rogers seems to yet again deny him growth. He's still a narcissist, blaming everyone for what he deep down feels are mistakes of his own.

It's the first of many teases Endgame tantalizes us with in its prologue.

All things considered, Tony Stark is as much an anti-hero as Thanos is an anti-villain. This makes him insanely appealing as a character, so it might be difficult to admit, but Iron Man's deeds often came with negative side-effects. He fights for the good guys in slightly wrong ways. He nearly destroys Sokovia in Age of Ultron before the Avengers save a part of it. His motives in Civil War are flawed - first he fights for formal recognition over authentic moral values, then that movie's finale sees him driven by personal vendetta. Only thing foreshadowing his future redemption in this scene is how he still insists that Avengers need new blood: first Spider-man, now Captain Marvel.

In a way, Hawkeye's family barbecue that opens this movie is a tease as well, with his wife and children all disappearing without so much as a word. Note how Clint is clearly shown as having a strong bond with his daughter Lila, not unlike Thanos with Gamorra. This will prove to be important later in our analysis.

What's left of our heroes track down Thanos and capture him alive, but the stones are no more. They can't save anyone. Another tease.

After making his epic masculine hero's journey in Infinity War, Thor feels he's entitled to closure more than anyone. As far as in-universe facts are concerned, he's failed because of his arrogance, yes, but it's more than that. There's a meta-reason on the symbolic layer: he's gone through ALL the motions required to be a successful hero in contemporary narratives. Experienced a crisis of confidence, went on a pilgrimage, then reignited the fire at a historic site, a source of strength of his people. He even went so far as to reforge his iconic weapon, in the mould of his father's no less! As far as archetypal masculine stories are concerned, there was absolutely no way for him to fail. And yet he did. The tease of all teases?

At this point it's arguably Nebula who's got the most complexity on the team, trapped in a gruesome form of Electra complex. A set of compulsions that make her crave her father's approval took a turn for the literal in Infinity War when we learned that she was in fact physically taken apart, modified and rebuilt by Thanos as he saw fit. 

Throughout Endgame it's she who mostly carries the feminine aspect of the story - few narrative structures, if any at all, can be as effective at expressing a woman's imperative for freeing herself from a dominating male figure as is a toxic father-daughter relationship. Her arc in Endgame is kicked off with a terrible tragedy again at the hands of a man, and yet again it's one believing himself to be the hero. Just as she's about to be freed from the psychological shackles of her dependency from a father figure, just as she's finally hearing the words she's longed to hear all her painful and tragic life...

An arrogant traditional hero archetype kills her father mid-sentence, forever denying her resolution to her Electra complex.

Thor has punished the villain. By all rules and stipulations of traditional storytelling ideals he is the hero here. So why doesn't he feel like one?

Thanos' smile at the end of Infinity War was on some level a fulfilling ending on its own merit. Now it's essentially meaningless.

This threefold denial of fulfilment is the tease of all teases in Endgame's prologue, one that sets the stage for deconstructions of heroic archetypes that begin in act 2 and continue until the film's final scenes.

Read on to part 2, where we'll track down what parts of human psyche the characters represent, what tensions their respective paths during the Time Heist resolve, and what symbols are established in preparation for the mother of all catharses, the resolution of all resolutions, insanely sumptuous Endgame's finale!