Being Normal in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Being Normal in the MCU

Stephen Lee Naish

25 September 2023

It is a beautiful day. You decide to meet a friend for lunch and to catch up, talk about your latest hook-up, the promotion you've been chasing at work, the holiday you've been saving up for all year. There is hope in your future. Sunny days are ahead. Over coffee you discuss the trials and tribulations of modern life with positivity. Then, after a while, the conversation switches to the all-encompassing subject, one that invades every aspect of your day, something that no one on earth can simply ignore; you live among superheroes, and they live among you.

Literally Gods are out there right now doing the things that you are doing. Except not really. With their immense strength, vast intelligence, knowledge of other worlds and realms beyond our own, and an uneasy sway towards corruption, egotism, and discarding of everyday social norms, they instead live alongside you. A shadow society of human, and sometimes non-human oligarchs. Along with your friend you suddenly come to the terrible realization that everything is utterly meaningless. The casual hook-up, the job, the holiday, it's all pointless in a world of God-like superheroes. Because potential danger exists within every moment of your life and with the occurrences of almost world-ending atrocities escalating it's hard to make plans for the future.

The superheroes that inhabit this world will endeavor to protect the innocents, but not before many die in incomprehensibly large alien attacks where whole cities are completely obliterated, or when giant god-like entities known as Celestials use the planet as a birthing cocoon and begin emerging out of the oceans, or when half of all living creatures just vanish in a ‘snap’ before your eyes due to some alien tyrants grand scheme to reset the balance of universal life. You watch your friend across the table, sipping on the dregs of coffee with both hands shaking slightly, a twitchy side glare that shows the scars of physical and emotional trauma. Falling from a burning building, being swept up in an insanely loud gun battle, or being one of the unlucky ones who watched their husband and kids disappear and reappear five years later at the exact same age they vanished. They have of course moved on. Dealt with their grief over years, found a new life, and a new partner. Now they handle the trauma of their loved ones popping back into existence. How awkward. Life is a consistent state of unease in this world. There is no end to the horrors. There must exist a overwhelming amount of social anxiety disorder and impending doom anxiety groups attempting to cope with all this. The exhaustion of living among these enhanced individuals is all consuming on the health and wellbeing of society.

This type of scenario has occupied my mind for many years. What must it be like to live an ordinary life knowing there are so many extraordinary beings out there? Superhero movies have been a favorite of mine since my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. My first obsession was Christopher Reeve’s Superman. Thanks to some tacky wallpaper, my bedroom was quite literally adorned with heroic images of the Man of Steel. The plight of ordinary folk within these childhood films wasn't a concern back then. The people of Metropolis certainly got caught up in the chaos of battle, but the danger seemed more localized and even slapstick. The man casually talking on a pay phone as three superhuman assailants blow a hurricane strength wind through the street’s springs to mind. As superhero movies have become more violent, more destructive, and more grounded in the real world, the daily toll on the mental health and physical wellbeing of those living under superhero occupied cities has become more concerning. I’m obviously not alone. A study led by scientist and disaster expert Charles Watson estimated that the damage caused to New York City by Superman's confrontation with Kryptonian madman General Zod in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) was around $750 billion dollars. To contrast this with a real life catastrophe, the Federal Reserve of New York estimated the cost of the attacks on the World Trade Centre to be between $33 billion and $36 billion. The death toll of the Superman vs Zod showdown can only be imagined in the hundreds of thousands the injuries in the millions, the mental trauma on a national, or even global scale.

Superman is interesting, but the focus of this essay is the films and television shows of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) which predominantly take place within the real world. The places, events, and historical contexts (with slightly adjusted outcomes and fictional places) all exist and inform the narrative until the films become a kind of alternative past, present, and future running alongside our own. Take for example the first film in the chronology of the MCU. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) sees scrawny Steve Rogers rejected from Second World War military recruitment due to his ill health and childhood malnourishment. Eventually Rogers is enlisted to the Strategic Scientific Reserve as part of a "super-soldier" experiment to create a unit of soldiers with immense strength and strategic cunning. Rogers is injected with a serum that increases his height and muscle mass. As the newly crowned Captain America, Rogers battles Johann Schmidt, a Nazi lieutenant general and head of the Hydra organization, a scientific research department of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Schmidt’s intention is to harness the power of the Tesseract to create powerful weapons to be used against Allied forces. Schmidt is foiled and victory is assured. We are led to believe that the events, the operators, and the outcomes of the Second World War occurred just as they did, yet within this conflict another alternative narrative was seeded.

Big surprise. We do not live among superheroes. Quite the opposite. There are certainly individuals and groups within our society who we might place superhuman status upon. Sportspeople are often attributed as having superior strength and agility. Pop stars, film actors, book authors, and record producers are handed superstar status for their talents and contributions to culture. Scientists and philosophers are awarded for their intellect and bequeathing humanity with the tools of understanding and progression. Teachers, nurses, doctors, and caregivers are applauded for their protection of our health and providing education. Certainly during the Covid-19 pandemic we labeled health workers as greatly heroic. As super as all these, and many others are, none can fly as of yet.

On the flip side, our democratically elected governments are barely functional and grossly incompetent. They are mostly overstocked with egotists, chancers, grifters and in some cases outright criminals. The fairly peaceful ‘end of history’ world that has existed for decades is crumbling away to reveal what was perhaps always there: a deeply unstable world built upon a house of cards by an oligarch of extreme gamblers. On top of this, and possibly because of this, the planet is in turmoil. A poly crisis consisting of climate change, dwindling resources, mass migration due to extreme weather events and civil unrest, ecological collapse, war and conflict, cyber threats, and the rise artificial intelligence. Like a constantly stacking game of Jenga it could topple at any moment. No bulked-up hero is coming to the rescue to save it from them nor the havoc they’ve caused. Yet even if we were fortunate (or unfortunate) to be normal in the MCU and have superheroes on tap to intervene would they even do so? Evidence within the MCU suggests not.

The Avengers and those on the superhero periphery are always deeply concerned when a mad despot takes the decision to eradicate half of all life. They run to the action when a rogue A.I hurtles a massive chunk of rock towards the earth. And when a literal god decides to invade earth with alien tech they converge on New York and assemble to fight off the bombardment. Anything that requires instantaneous attention is dealt with. The long game and unsexy stuff are neglected. The world in the MCU is considered to be the same as ours. The same thirst for oil, gas, and extreme wealth exists just the same. The Avengers seem nonplussed about the heads of oil and gas conglomerates plundering the planet’s natural resources. Climate destruction is not on their agenda. They don’t seem bothered about the mass media disinformation campaigns and sowing of culture war narratives that divide and distract the population. The same devastating events that unfolded in our world unfolded in theirs and they stood by and did nothing. This became evident to me only recently when watching the exceptionally dull (narratively speaking, but also by its murky, colorless mise-en-scène) The Eternals (2021). I could almost forgive The Avengers crew for the lack of intervention when the wheels of modernity were already in motion decades before they arrived on the scene, but the god-like individuals that make up the Eternals really have no excuse. The film concerns a group of immortal superpowered beings who arrived on earth around 5000 BC. Their only task is eliminating an invasive insect-like species known as Deviants. All populated worlds across the universe are gifted groups of Eternals to combat these foes. Over the centuries the earth-based Eternals battle the Deviants as they arrive and are victorious every time. However, with the last battle taking place in the year 1521, the group disbands and goes to live among the people of earth right up until our present day, their powers still very much intact.

The group's noninterference is addressed early on. When asked why the group didn’t intervene in real earth conflicts or even in-universe events such as the battle with Thanos, the leader of the outfit Sersi insists they were only there to fight the Deviants and were not permitted to steer humanity in any direction but to allow events to unfold naturally. This is soon shown to be hypocrisy. In flashbacks to their history on earth we see the Eternals constantly nudge humanity towards so-called progress. After the band breaks up, one member Phastos, a designer and inventor, works alongside humanity for centuries and invents on their behalf the plough, the steam engine, guns, and eventually the atomic bomb. His hand is seemingly in every major invention since humans began to plow the fields. He only bails out on humanity once his invention has is used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Phastos was fine to pursue and invent weapons and technology that ensured humanity's slow burn destruction and stood idly by while his inventions were used by empires to enslave, torture, and systematically murder countless millions, but the bomb was too much for him to stomach. Druig on the other hand is the one member of the group who believes they should intervene in humanity's misdeeds and openly criticizes Phastos concoctions. Druig uses his cosmic powers to manipulate, and mind control a group of warring factions and leads them into the Amazon rainforest to form an isolationist cult that leads a pre-industrialized life far away from humanity.

In an offhand comment that boils the blood, Sersi reveals that she can manipulate matter, boasting that she can "change a rock into water. I could turn a rock into wood. Or a rock into metal. Actually, one time, I turned a rock into air." Great. How about turning all that carbon dioxide into breathable air? Or how about not even allowing those inventions in the first place? Phastos could have invented solar grids before the oil extractor. The contempt one feels for The Eternals' passivity and stupidity is all consuming.

To bring this all back to our two friends having coffee in the MCU and being utterly terrified of the next big catastrophe to impact them, I sympathize deeply. While obviously not having to concern myself with superheroes countering attacks from space or other realms, I find myself nonetheless in a simmering state of constant anxiety about the current state of the world. While this feeling has been building for a while it reached its epoch in the past year or so. There is a lot to contend with and I don’t pretend it is all impacting me directly. The sense that for decades the shifts in climate were another part of the world’s problem was put to bed when the Canadian city in which I have resided this past decade was covered in a blanket of choking smoke brought on by raging wildfires thousands of miles away. The sun shone like an orange basketball in the sky. The haze so thick the end of the street vanished into it. The smoke eventually traveled to New York City and its density resembled a citywide protest action by Just Stop Oil.

There have been other events these past years that have signified climate disruption; hotter summers, less regular rainfall, more intense storms hitting in both summer and winter. This is just my own noticing of the shift in weather pattens and the anecdotal musings of friends. The shift in other parts of the world has been far more abrupt and destructive. There is a perception that the planet is biting us back and with that a sense of powerlessness. While climate disruption is the most concerning and overbearing, the current war in Ukraine and its aftereffects on global stability and international relations offers another concern. The continued mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and what that means for long-term public health. The whirlwind rise and untested use of artificial intelligence gives me chills of utter dread, and the declaration by some experienced voices in A.I and automation that humanity is simply not ready to implement this technology in any responsible way is frightening. And experienced, knowledgeable, and questioning voices being shunned and silenced from our mainstream media landscape in favor of self-important talentless grifters is alarming in a world of disinformation, misdirection, and lies that only seems to becoming more saturated with twisted untruths about all of the above events. On a smaller scale, yet still inflicted by the bigger decisions made here, are our own personal conflicts. The cost of living, inflated price of food and energy, the scarcity of housing, automation in the workplace, the precarity of jobs, a looming mental health crisis, the gradual collapse of health care services, the abrupt collapse of social infrastructures, the divisional culture wars inflicted by the media, and the political class to confuse and distract from some basic level of solidarities and commonalities that might otherwise exist. It’s a poly crisis on every level that feeds into each other and loops back on itself in an impenetrable and unsolvable tangle.

My sympathies with the two normal MCU friends might be a vague feeling of envy. The MCU has its issues that seem colossal in scope, yet by the next entry in the franchise, society has solved the issue, moved on and reset itself as if it were the next level of video game. The multi-crisis is managed well. They, like us, must confront monumental problems, yet the intervention of superheroes at least offers a curiosity and uniqueness to the phenomenon. We on the other hand face the many catastrophes with a profound sense of confused sadness, boredom at the same script being reread, and a little shrug of the shoulders, if we face them at all that is. Is life hard for normal people in the MCU? Yes, certainly. Is life harder in reality for normal people than those in the MCU? Yes, without a doubt. The one thought that leads me to believe that we have it slightly better in our world is that we, unlike them, can rectify or adapt to the damage that’s been caused. The decisions in the MCU is always taken out of normal people's hands. They’ve surrendered to the inevitable. The superheroes always swoop in and save the day and the population feels relieved that another action does not have to be taken by them. We don’t have that privilege. We instead have options.