Endgame Thoughts [Spoilerish]

[USU78]

My father never fired a gun in anger.  He returned from GI service to his home town, Logan, Utah, to the wife he married on a 3-day pass in 1945 on the 1^st anniversary of D-Day, and settled down to domestic bliss, getting his degree on the GI Bill.  The soldier came home.

Too many soldiers didn’t.  One of the greatest songs of the era, covered by most of the big bands and singers, both male and female, captured the uncertainty, wistfulness, and very real pain of parting, with the outcome so very much in doubt.

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day
In everything that's light and gay
I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll be seeing you

Here it is, covered by der Bingel, Bing Crosby:

 

Both the soldier and his wife listened with relief and felt with increasing passion over the airways, from the phonograph, in the movies, and on the dance floors of 1945-1946 the anthem of the returned soldier.

Never thought that you would be 
Standing here so close to me 
There's so much I feel that I should say 
But words can wait until some other day

Kiss me once, then kiss me twice
Then kiss me once again
It's been a long, long time

Haven't felt like this, my dear

Since I can't remember when
It's been a long, long time

And here’s the cover used in a recent movie [Spoilers Warning], with Harry James’ cornet and Kitty Kallen’s vocals: 

 

Note the brass following the vocal, as it rises and expands, swelling from sentimental sweetness to passion, until the song abruptly ends.  Our nosey peek into the soldier’s and his lady’s privacy needs to end.

Yes, WWII was a long, long war.  My father never shot a weapon in anger.  He was much too young, graduating high school in 1944.  By the time the war ended in Europe, and mopping up operations in the Pacific were continuing until halted by the atom, he was thwarted in his desire to fly airplanes:  they just didn’t need any more pilots yet.  The loss of most of his childhood friends left him with terrible survivor’s guilt as well as unsatisfied rage at avenge the outrages both in Europe and Asia suffered by the innocent.

The soldier came home, but the soldier was in pain.  Pain that, I suspect, never left him.

So, yes, when I watch Steve Rogers on the screen, and read about Steve Rogers as a child when they brought his character back, I recognized and still recognize the soldier in pain who never completely came home.

I’m not ashamed to admit that, in fiction at least, in a beautiful moment on screen at least, I got to see the soldier, the kid from Brooklyn, come home to perfect love, a perfect reunion, to the accompaniment of a perfect song, to perfect rest after too long a struggle with both real foes and unfulfilled desires.

I like to think my father finally got his perfect return home, to a perfect reunion, free from pain and free from guilt and free from desires unfulfilled.  My tears for Cap and Peggy were really for those kids from Logan.

 

[USU78]

Never thought that you would be 
Standing here so close to me 
There's so much I feel that I should say 
But words can wait until some other day

Kiss me once, then kiss me twice
Then kiss me once again
It's been a long, long time

Haven't felt like this, my dear

Since I can't remember when
It's been a long, long time

And here’s the cover used in a recent movie [Spoilers Warning], with Harry James’ cornet and Kitty Kallen’s vocals: 

 

Note the brass following the vocal, as it rises and expands, swelling from sentimental sweetness to passion, until the song abruptly ends.  Our nosey peek into the soldier’s and his lady’s privacy needs to end.

Yes, WWII was a long, long war.  My father never shot a weapon in anger.  He was much too young, graduating high school in 1944.  By the time the war ended in Europe, and mopping up operations in the Pacific were continuing until halted by the atom, he was thwarted in his desire to fly airplanes:  they just didn’t need any more pilots yet.  The loss of most of his childhood friends left him with terrible survivor’s guilt as well as unsatisfied rage at avenge the outrages both in Europe and Asia suffered by the innocent.

The soldier came home, but the soldier was in pain.  Pain that, I suspect, never left him.

So, yes, when I watch Steve Rogers on the screen, and read about Steve Rogers as a child when they brought his character back, I recognized and still recognize the soldier in pain who never completely came home.

I’m not ashamed to admit that, in fiction at least, in a beautiful moment on screen at least, I got to see the soldier, the kid from Brooklyn, come home to perfect love, a perfect reunion, to the accompaniment of a perfect song, to perfect rest after too long a struggle with both real foes and unfulfilled desires.

I like to think my father finally got his perfect return home, to a perfect reunion, free from pain and free from guilt and free from desires unfulfilled.  My tears for Cap and Peggy were really for those kids from Logan.

 

[Amulek]

On 5/7/2019 at 5:40 PM, USU78 said:

I’m not ashamed to admit that, in fiction at least, in a beautiful moment on screen at least, I got to see the soldier, the kid from Brooklyn, come home to perfect love, a perfect reunion, to the accompaniment of a perfect song, to perfect rest after too long a struggle with both real foes and unfulfilled desires.

Wow. That is much more moving than what I thought when I saw the film.

My reaction was, 'Wait, if he just traveled back in time and settled down with agent Carter, then doesn't that mean he hooked up with his own grand-niece in the last movie? Yuk!'

 

[USU78]

13 minutes ago, Amulek said:

Wow. That is much more moving than what I thought when I saw the film.

My reaction was, 'Wait, if he just traveled back in time and settled down with agent Carter, then doesn't that mean he hooked up with his own grand-niece in the last movie? Yuk!'

The issue is, I know this guy.  Quite intimately.  I was in elementary school when they thawed him out, I saw every one of his early to mid '60s comic book appearances, I played Cap carrying the lid to my mother's canning pot, throwing it like a frisbee, and my late father's worldview = Cap's worldview.  Verbatim.  He was the guy planting himself like a tree by the River of Truth, fists clenched, saying to the world, "No.  You move."  Cap is both himself, an asthmatic shrimp, a quintessential 98 lb. weakling, a self-despising 4F failure, and he's the iconic representation of what is best about American manhood.  Of course I'm moved by the soldier's too-tardy return.

I also lost friends in 'Nam (they shut that conflict down while I was a missionary in Austria).  I share a bit of survivor's guilt because of it. 

In his '80s, I teased my dad about having a pinup in his footlocker during Basic.  He was shocked at the suggestion.  Even before he married my mother, hers was the only conceivable picture he would look at.  The generation was great for reasons other than the men and materiel thrown at the Axis.  I am honored to have known so many.

[Calm]

Thanks for sharing. Helps me feel more positive about the movie which I want to like.  The time traveling reward felt more like negating sacrifices (because they end up not taking place) and others (was the need of Rogers to have a life with Carter more important than the need of her original husband she had two children with...now no longer existing) her to me when I read it and turned me off.

Time travel is never satisfying to me when I start thinking about implications.

Edited May 9, 2019 by Calm

[USU78]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

Thanks for sharing. Helps me feel more positive about the movie which I want to like.  The time traveling reward felt more like negating sacrifices (because they end up not taking place) and others (was the need of Rogers to have a life with Carter more important than the need of her original husband she had two children with...now no longer existing) her to me when I read it and turned me off.

Time travel is never satisfying to me when I start thinking about implications.

True.  They tried to write out of that problem, but didn't do so particularly expertly.  In terms of Cap's character, his loneliness, his out-of-time-ness, and his missing out on what every guy from his era that wasn't killed in the war got to enjoy, a trip home and a life, though, they did a nice job.  Did you, by the way, catch this faux interview of the Carter character?  Really contextualizes the Steve/Peggy thing.

 

[Stargazer]

The best fiction comes from real life.  Many elements in the MCU are genuine just because of that, even if Loki and Thor are totally fictional.

I haven't seen Endgame, yet, and I really wasn't going to bother.  Had given up on the MCU after Guardians 2 (which I enjoyed), and had just gotten tired of super heroes.  Enough already.  My stepson went to see it (he's been following the MCU religiously) and said it was very good.  In fact he saw it a second time a couple of days later.  So, I figured, OK, gotta give it a chance.  So I bought the relevant missed films on YouTube and watched them until I caught up on Infinity War.  "Crap," I thought, "how they going to recover after that?"  Time travel was the only way, and I hate time travel movies.  If you went back in time and killed your own grandfather you'd never exist so you couldn't kill him.  Please spare me the implausibility. "Star Trek: First Contact" managed to do it without too much damage to the timeline and the plot's credibility, but I just didn't see how they could do it for Endgame.  I still haven't see the film (maybe next week), but plan to.  I know they win after all, but I cringe thinking about how implausible it is going to be.

[Stargazer]

One thing that surprised me about Infinity War was how Thanos was given a burst of pathos in his obtaining of the infinity stones and what he felt he had to do with them.  It was actually quite impressive and moving.  "Did you do it?"  "Yes."  "What did it cost?"  "Everything."

Physicist Neal deGrasse Tyson annoys me sometimes with his humanistic atheism, but his comment with regard to Thanos killing 1/2 of all intelligent beings to prevent resource depletion was spot on. Taken from the Newsweek site, but I can't provide the link because the board software objects. For some reason.

<<"Sure, Thanos is singularly evil. But I bet he flunked Astro 101," Tyson tweeted Wednesday. "He wants to kill half of all living things to save the other half—due to limited resources. But the universe has vastly more resources than can possibly be consumed by civilizations that have access to space."

In a separate tweet, Tyson said he "checked the math" to determine Thanos could've doubled the universe's resources instead of killing off half of it. "If you wield the power to snap your finger and end half of all life in the universe—to preserve resources for those who remain—then you surely have the power to snap your finger and double the resources instead," he wrote.>>

So very Marxian to imagine that there is only a pie of a fixed-size and that for someone to have something requires it be taken from someone else. Or that there isn't enough to go around!

In a science fiction series I am fond of, the "Bobiverse", the author imagines a solar system where after merely a hundred years from present day, we've run out of sufficient metal to build enough spaceships to evacuate the 15 million surviving humans from an earth succumbing to nuclear winter.  It's supposed to be an AI von Neumann probe named Bob that is building the ships, and the claim is that he can't find the metal because so much was vaporized or otherwise dispersed in the war.  The shortage is a plot-device, making it necessary for Bob to replicate himself and send his descendants out to find other planets to settle humanity on, but it makes no sense.  For one thing, the Moon has enormous quantities of iron and aluminum and endless supplies of solar power to process it all.  He conveniently never even mentions the moon.  And then there is the asteroid Pysche -- it is an nickel-iron asteroid with enough iron to build hundreds of thousands of spaceships ten kilometers in length and one kilometer across with 100 meter thick walls.  One such ship could evacuate 15 million people with room to spare.  If they were well-packed, and the author posits a hibernation technology that would enable it.

We are so guilty of limited thinking sometimes.

And there I was, trying NOT to get too wrapped up in talking about the MCU.  I need to get some actual work done...

[Calm]

I personally prefer the original comic idea that Thanos chooses to wipe out 1/2 of everything living to impress the girl he has a crush on, Mistress Death...but guess that isn’t enough of a social statement to make a good movie out of. 

[USU78]

6 hours ago, Stargazer said:

The best fiction comes from real life.  Many elements in the MCU are genuine just because of that, even if Loki and Thor are totally fictional.

I haven't seen Endgame, yet, and I really wasn't going to bother.  Had given up on the MCU after Guardians 2 (which I enjoyed), and had just gotten tired of super heroes.  Enough already.  My stepson went to see it (he's been following the MCU religiously) and said it was very good.  In fact he saw it a second time a couple of days later.  So, I figured, OK, gotta give it a chance.  So I bought the relevant missed films on YouTube and watched them until I caught up on Infinity War.  "Crap," I thought, "how they going to recover after that?"  Time travel was the only way, and I hate time travel movies.  If you went back in time and killed your own grandfather you'd never exist so you couldn't kill him.  Please spare me the implausibility. "Star Trek: First Contact" managed to do it without too much damage to the timeline and the plot's credibility, but I just didn't see how they could do it for Endgame.  I still haven't see the film (maybe next week), but plan to.  I know they win after all, but I cringe thinking about how implausible it is going to be.

It's a rowzer.  Just sit back and enjoy.  Save the nitpicking for later.  The issue in this film is finding a satisfying story arc resolution for each of the original 6 Avengers.  Everybody and everything else, including Thanos, is just background for that.  Taking my mentally ill stepson for a matinee today.

[USU78]

5 hours ago, Calm said:

I personally prefer the original comic idea that Thanos chooses to wipe out 1/2 of everything living to impress the girl he has a crush on, Mistress Death...but guess that isn’t enough of a social statement to make a good movie out of. 

Me, too.  Kept expecting Hela [the ever-scrumptious Kate Blanchett] to be that gal.  OH well.

[USU78]

I noticed some things today <spoiler warning>.

Kick-butt, confident Natasha was, upon reflection, my favorite of the original Avengers here.  She took on quasi-mythic qualities at various points.

For example:

- She is acting as mom for everybody else after the realtime trip to take down Thanos in the 1st Act, "keeping it together" for everybody, giving out instructions, acting as the go-between and keeper of the information and the details on the plan:  she's the only one taking notes, so they're all relying on her to keep track of who's doing what; and everyone's reporting to her on what they've done, what they're up to, and looking to her for instructions.

- She is the mom providing sustenance (the peanut butter sandwich) for others, offering her own lunch to Steve and actually giving her lunch to Scott.

- She is the mom offering forgiveness and solace to Client in the 1st Act.

- She had made a joke about "picking up after you boys" in Ultron, signaling her function in the final film.

- She is the mom listening patiently to a wayward child on Vormir tell why he should be allowed to do what he wanted, but refusing any other outcome than the one she knew was best.

In her faith-filled decision to sacrifice herself for the Soul Stone, she steps into the shoes of Mother Eve, whose agonizing decision in Eden, only on incomplete and contradictory evidence, with the outcome very much in doubt, made possible the birth/rebirth of trillions.  The plan could well have failed:  Strange had made that clear.  But Nat had faith in the plan, she exercised faith that Schmidt wasn't lying in laying out the rules, and in taking the impossible decision to let her fall out of Clint's hands by doing a Black Widow gymnastic trick, she exercised faith in her decision despite the doubts that anyone would nurse.

As she gazed up at Clint, I noticed upon first viewing and confirmed today, there was a look of impossibly expansive love as only a mother can have for a child.  Nat, in that moment, saw his agony, saw his determination to save her, saw his guilt, and gave back to him nothing but love and forgiveness and gratitude.

Yup, Nat's my favorite.  And her intimate "funeral" by the pond, attended only by the remaining 5 and a few others, provided, as did Coulton's sacrifice in the first Avenger's film, the unifying motivation for all the heroics that came later:  she must not be permitted to have died in vain.

[Avatar4321]

Good movie. Lots of good fights ans emotional scenes. Thor meeting his mother again was good.

Thats why I liked it even with the plot holes irritating me