This is the stage my mind has been in for the last 24 hours and yes it is a DC comic reference. You see, the movie Thor, Love and Thunder woke something up in me. It was the mid 80’s and there was a Dutch version of an Avengers comic book I read. In this there was a reference on a ‘villian’ which led to all kinds of things and I remember that in the end there was an image of all in hell for torment felt relieved for a second as Lucifer felt fear for the very first time. It was about the optional undoing of Eternity. The end god in the Thor movie and he was just like the real thing, except for size (the length of his foot is about the size of the Chrysler building) but lets keep this to semantics and creative freedom. Yet these is the stage, it started my thinking. You see, it started at that time and the movie Black Adam merely build on the stage my mind devised.
I gre up being a huge Batman fan, in my preteens I grew up on the Batman that Adam West gave us and the man was dope. He was the real deal. OK, that is and will forever be the kid talking in me. But as others went for all the other comic book heroes for whatever reason they had and this tainted the thoughts I had. There was a side in that comic book that gave me pause to think, even now almost half a century later these thoughts are still there. What if the villains were right? They might go about it wrong, but what if there is truth in their actions? Joker, Lex Luthor, Ares, sorceress Circe, Lucifer, and that list goes on. So what happens when we create a hidden trap. A mindset where Batman does the ‘right’ thing, but he falters to see what he does is right. The encounter with someone like Eternity brings it to the surface? It allows for an interaction with Constantine, it allows for all kinds of options. And today’s world is all about what is legally right and what could be correct and they are not the same thing. We have all seen versions of that and as far as I can tell the comic movies aren’t digging into that, even though Black Adam gives a nice stage to exploring that side deeper. The creation of Amanda Waller allows for a deeper investigation of that side and perhaps the people behind DC movies should do just that. You see, there is too much polarisation in these movies and for the most we accept this as the villains in these movies are over the top bad. Yet what happens when the hero (unintentionally) overreacts? We see that in some cases, but at times it is some plot twist. What happens when we wrongly hunt down a person and we learn after we stop them that they were trying to set us all free? Consider that we have ben misled by the church for almost a millennium. Now consider that we have an Arabic setting where an Afreet is set free, but that Afreet is tinted by the history up to 1200AD, that character missed out on 800 years and that anger is now unleashed. We want to ‘protect’ and stop that character and we now have a setting that approximates what we are trying to achieve, because we learn of what was done is only now beginning to surface, in this we create a new level of ambiguity. One that most comics never touch on and it is these new borders where we get a much larger setting for who are the actual villains? Perhaps some are tainted through polarisation and recognising that opens a new dialogue, a new stage of more interesting movies.
Consider an article from 2019 ‘Medusa was punished for being raped—so why do we still depict her as a monster?’ This sets a new premise towards the stage of a Medusa. In the Theogony, by the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod, she is described as being the child of Phorcys and Ceto and she was raped in the temple of Athena by Poseidon and Athena punishes her of all people. So what happens when we see this in a new DC setting, but until the end of the movie we aren’t told of HOW the transgression started and that opens up new doors, opens up other doors too. What if the avenging demon is Lex Luthor, getting aid by Lucifer no less and the stage is that Constantine is trying to figure out what Lex Luthor is up to (and of course Superman gets involved). Yet as we are given a partial tapestry, the loom will see the involvement of others, but until that for example the daughter of Wonder Woman Trinity was kidnapped which starts the manhunt, but at the end we learn that Trinity feared her future and got Lex Luthor to aid in her escape her dark future. Lex feeing for her and feeling his heart for her aids her and it starts a much larger feud all fuelled by Lucifer (which gives us Constantine) and there we have the making of a larger tapestry and the loom involved has the wires in one direction and cannot vouch for the fabric of the tapestry (an Odysseus reference). The stage that still bothers me is how the loom is managed, someone is pulling the strings behind the curtains of the stage and that comes to light after we see parts of the truth involved. It creates new settings of polarisation, not entirely unlike the people choosing team bat (team Cullen) or team hound (Jacob Black). The same is said for the Underworld saga. When the people are left to chose which team is the right one, you get a lot more interaction, a lot more social contribution and that pushes the story and the movies to the top of so many lists. Ambiguity gives us one side, but not all sides. What happens when Ares (opponent of Wonder Woman) is pushed to this degree by the fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos? What happens when they are pushed by the future and by someone wielding that side to push towards a reality free of Αion, the god of eternity? We now have a very different setting and we get the question into the open, what makes a hero a hero and a villain a villain?
Just a few thoughts going through my head (its Sunday after all) and tomorrow is another day.
Enjoy the end of the weekend, soon it will be Monday.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 