Every now and then, I take the dog for a walk in the rain, and I’ll find the trail is empty… the side streets are vacant… even the birds are quiet. The world is still and peaceful beneath my feet, like all the life has been drained from it. And in those moments, I think, “Thanos had a point.”
Now, thanks to Avengers: Infinity War, I can share that thought, confident that most people will get it. Having my childhood obsessions consume the mainstream will never stop feeling weird.
Now, obviously, growing up, “my” Thanos was this guy:
I couldn’t precisely remember why he made such an impression on me, so I dug it up to refresh myself. It seems to come down to two things.
First: I was in grade school and still wanted to be an astronaut, so the fact that Thanos had a mile-wide spaceship that looked like the result of a TIE fighter fucking a Borg cube was pretty much the most awesome thing ever.
But what really stuck in my mind was what happened to Thanos at the end. (Spoiler alert for a forty year old comic book you’re never going to read.)
Writer/artist Jim Starlin makes it clear a few pages later that Thanos is alive in there, encased in stone, unable to do anything but scream through eternity.
The mere thought of such a fate severely fucked with my head. I don’t know how many times I stared at that page over the years, disturbed to my pre-pubescent core. Of course, then I became an adult, found out about locked-in syndrome, and realized that life is so much more cruel than art.
As for the movie…
Was that a movie? Don’t get me wrong; I loved it, whatever it was. I’m just not sure it’s a “movie”.
Movies introduce characters, establish situations, raise stakes, and provide resolution. Infinity War says “fuck all that”, on a scale never before imagined. It doesn’t begin and it doesn’t end; it’s a two-and-a-half hour burst of… everything. I’m this close to calling it something new, it’s own kind of thing. A kind of cross-cultural art that can only be created by a multi-billion dollar organization, that can only exist because hundreds of people devoted thousands of their work-hours to build a cinematic Skinner Box that never stops doling out yummy pellets of fun and melodrama.
I’m almost prepared to call it the first true capitalist masterpiece.
For better and worse.