The Weekly Muse #85
Solid B Plus Movie and an Epiphany
Hello, all:
Last Sunday I watched Captain America: Brave New World. Herewith thoughts (and also spoilers about the new movie and also Captain America Civil War so feel free to skip to the Writing Update section if you haven’t seen either of those yet)
One problem I’ve been noticing with the post-Endgame movies is the pacing seems to be all off. I first noticed this in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; the same thing happened here. They had a big fight scene with Captain America and the Falcon (now Sam Wilson and Joaquin Torres) trying to stop the American and Japanese navies from attacking each other thanks to the machinations of Samuel Stern, and when that was over it really felt like the movie should wrap up then. In prior movies we usually ended with the big fight scene (Iron Man 1, 2, 3), or hit the big fight scene and then scaled it down to be more personal (Civil War was brilliant at this). This had a Big Fight Scene and then some futzing around and then a Big Fight Scene which was also supposed to be the Big Reveal but which we all knew about already thanks to the movie’s relatively subtle foreshadowing THEY PUT IT IN THE DANG TRAILER.
I mean, honestly, guys. Here’s a fun fact for your amusement. I went back and rewatched a bunch of the trailers for Captain America: Civil War. You know who’s not in any of them? Zemo. As in, the guy who turns out to have engineered the conflict in order to break up the Avengers in the first place thanks to the death of his family in Sokovia during the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron. None of that was in the trailers. Which meant we found out about that how? You guessed it folks: by watching the movie. Element of surprise, which meant we were engaged, and the movie didn’t drag. Remove that, and the whole thing topples like some plotline-themed Jenga tower.
I’m probably mangling the metaphor here, but you get my drift. I mean, it was fun, I’d watch it again if I were in the mood, but that’s about it. If I had to rank it, better than the 90s X-Men movies, worse than Iron Man and the rest of top-tier Marvel. As one character himself notes in the movie, “Solid B plus.”
Indeed.
Writing Update
Yesterday several seemingly unconnected things happened which crystallized a sort of personal realization/epiphany for me, if you will. I don’t remember the precise order exactly but here goes:
posted his brilliant look back at his own epic serial anthology, The Samyuzot, What The Samyuzot Taught Me. If you haven’t read the serial, go and read it and then read the look-back post because it is really fantastic. Highly recommend. One of the many intriguing observations in the look-back was how personal the writing turned out to be, how, as Eric quoted the inimitable , “This is about more than this story for you.” That got me thinking. I’d been mulling over in a scattershot sort of way if my stories had been saying anything about me that I didn’t mean, because I had a feeling they were but I didn’t know what.- wrote the below Note:
I had hit the penultimate post of We’re Not in Edison City Anymore, and was thinking of how to close the thing out.
Somewhere between that and Eric’s post, I all at once realized what may be blindingly obvious to anyone who’s been reading my work and who’s passingly familiar with my personal life: I’ve been using the Edison City stories to process. To put it another way, the most recent serial wraps up with *spoiler again sorry* one of the characters losing his father suddenly and unexpectedly. Well, this month, the day before yesterday in fact, marks three years since my dad passed unexpectedly due to SUDEP.
I’ve been here on Substack until December 2022, so I don’t really know definitively why my subconscious decided that now was the time to start working out the Kubler-Ross model by way of plotlines in a superhero serial that I didn’t even start consciously thinking about until somewhere back in January.
Indeed, as
said yesterday, “the subconscious mind really just does things”.It does that, you guys. It does that.
I also feel it’s important to mention at this point that neither John Cute nor anyone else in the serial is based off of real-life characters, nor does anyone bear any resemblance to any real person living or no longer with us except entirely by coincidence; the plot elements are, as I know now thanks to my subconscious (buddy, we need to talk) may have derived from real-world and personal events, but I also have a policy about writing in real people: I don’t, without express permission. So there you are.
Also, a final concluding thought: I am oddly pleased and a little horrified that in John Cute I created a bad guy that people really dislike, as opposed to someone who’s more playing the role for laughs like the Malevolent Med-Student. Apparently this sort of thing comes from deep personal pain; at the time, what I thought I was doing was a) making a bad guy who was really genuinely a nasty sort of a person, and therefore b) giving him a name inspired by a character I vaguely remembered from a Charles Dickens story whose name (the character, not the story) was Alderman Cute. My subconscious, it seems, needed a Really Bad Guy to personify this unexpected personal tragedy.
Well then.
I am naturally planning another Edison City serial. At this point, I am reasonably sure that somebody will have a happy ending. What form that takes, I don’t know yet. Let’s see how this goes, shall we? *looks askance at subconscious*
Closing Time
Hey, here’s a performance of Into Eternity by Brian Tyler and the London Philharmonia Orchestra and Choir with soloist Tori Letzler.
Until next time,
Michael