Reviews and Essays – Page 2

Peacemaker Season 2 Review

Promo artwork from the Peacemaker series.

I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for James Gunn. Yeah, there’s some valid criticism of his cinematic crutches: his reliance on licensed music, the gratuitous shock factor he employs, and the repeated trope of mercenaries and their found families. But his movies and TV shows often have strong character arcs and lots of emotional fidelity—the meat and potatoes of a satisfying narrative, which most superhero properties fail to bring to the table.

That said, Peacemaker Season 2 left me a little malnourished.

It’s a bummer, because Season 1 was fun and poignant in a lot of unexpected ways. I love stories about lesser known comic book characters. Peacemaker is unencumbered by any preexisting fandom, which lets Gunn tell an original story, with a nuanced take on masculinity and generational trauma—that is, in between alien butterflies hollowing out people’s brains and piloting them like undead meat mechs.

On that note, it’s interesting how often Gunn’s stuff centers on angry, zombified masses—a reasonable obsession for someone who became the internet’s Villain of the Month, exiling him from Marvel and forcing him to wander the DC deserts for a while. From Starro commandeering the Corto Maltese army in The Suicide Squad, to Lex Luthor’s brigade of shitposting monkeys in Superman, the man is understandably getting some catharsis after tangling with the terminally online mob.

Anyway, in comparison to Season 1, Peacemaker Season 2 felt very uneven. Half of the episodes felt interstitial at best, the characters slowly ambling towards the next plot device while volleying some very hit-or-miss barbs. The action sequences were energizing but also very sparse for a superhero story.

I will say, the multiverse angle of Season 2 had more pathos than anything Marvel has done with its entire Multiverse Saga (save perhaps Loki). Early in the season, Peacemaker gets swept into an adjacent dimension where his father and brother are still alive and they’re a trio of celebrated, kaiju-slaying saviors. In some ways, it’s James Gunn continuing to digest the perils of internet culture: the idea that if you just walk through the right portal, you can live in a small but perfect world where nothing is wrong and you’re always the hero.

Of course, nothing in a Gunn story is that clean. Peacemaker’s perfect world turns out to be one in which the Axis powers won the war, and he’s the unwitting beneficiary of a Nazi-run America. But this big reveal is a blip on the radar, glazed over with a single flurry of heartbreaking violence that Peacemaker is forced to flee. The show never burdens him with processing what it meant to feel at home in that world, a missed opportunity given that Peacemaker’s entire arc is about him escaping the legacy of his white supremacist dad. In a show about taking a macho douchebag through a journey of emotional complexity, what did it mean to Peacemaker that his alternate universe dad was not a Nazi but unwilling to fight it with the full force of his heroism? Guess we’ll never know.

All that said, I could’ve watched a supercut of Freddie Stroma’s trivia-loving psychopath Vigilante and still gleaned the best parts of the season.

Does Peacemaker need a Season 3? Probably not. But as long as the Gunn keeps aiming for the heart, I don’t mind if he misses now and then.

Broken and Known

A digitally illustrated mandala of telescopes, agave shrubs, and socks in a tumbling laundry

Of all the places to be seized by revelation, I didn’t expect it to be the Wash & Go Laundromat in Redondo Beach, California.

I’m on the West Coast for work, but also for reconnaissance. This past week, I’ve been trying to learn videography as rapidly as Neo learning kung fu. I’m attempting to give our company a healthy dose of modern digital marketing, filming the shoe wear testing process at our biomechanics lab in Los Angeles, and proving to our team we have the internal capacity for webinars, TikToks, and podcasting.

I’ve also been staying at a friend’s studio in the back of their house near Hermosa Beach, testing the waters of a move back to this side of the country.

I miss Southern California. Like, a lot. Yeah, the traffic sucks, and shit’s expensive, and the city sprawl is as thick as kudzu. But I have tried to replenish the word “home” in my brain with at least seven other states in the Union, and none of them fill it to the brim like this one does.

Last time I lived here was in 2008, right when the Great Recession was revving its engines. It was not a great time to be a college graduate in the City of Angels with only an inkling of a career path. I made the right choice at the time (that is, after a brief and impulsive move to the Pacific Northwest that led to a nervous breakdown, but I digress). I moved to the East Coast, where there was extended family and a semblance of stability. And for at least a decade, it remained the right choice.

But stability isn’t always growth, and historically, California is where I’ve come to grow. It’s where my first memories were forged, combing shells on Newport Beach as a little blonde-haired kindergartener when my family lived in Costa Mesa in the 80’s. It’s where I came back when I left home after high school in the Midwest. I got my bachelor’s degree in Azusa, had my first kiss in Pasadena, got hired for my first marketing gig in the Arts District. The decade or more I collectively spent in California was arduous sometimes, but it was nourishing, like how a shrub thrives in the desert.

And now, at the end of a long but fruitful week of shoe footage, I find myself doing laundry at the Wash & Go in Redondo Beach, getting ready to fly to a trade show in Portland. A song comes on the radio. It’s “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls.

This song. I think I first heard it when I was living in Indiana at 16, driving back and forth between home and my summer job as a kitchen manager at a youth camp. The last gasps of radio before MP3s nearly drowned it.

There’s a bit of trivia about this song that’s never left my brain’s disheveled archives. When it was written, the lead singer and songwriter John Rzeznik was suffering from a year-long case of writer’s block. Just when he thought his career might be withering, he got a call to produce a song for the movie City of Angels. And he determined that no matter what spilled onto the page, no matter what he felt about it, he would commit to it wholeheartedly.

He wrote the song in one day, like a primal scream. The song was so ubiquitous—and the word choices were so elementary—that it was easy to overlook the earnest tension on display in the chorus:

And I don’t want the world to see me‘
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

In the music video, Rzeznik swivels on a chair in a lonely tower above the city, peering through a series of steampunk telescopes at a world he either can’t or won’t participate in. In the context of the lyrics, he’s a man torn in two: anchored to his isolation to protect what he perceives as grotesque injuries to his soul, but wanting to risk exposure to people so his soul might have a chance to flourish. It’s not unlike a songwriter in the throes of writer’s block, torn between latching his heart shut or opening it up to the world.

And it’s not unlike a single man with no kids at a transitional stage of his career, torn between the two coasts that, respectively, now offer the same prospects of stability or growth they always have in his past.

The song ends. The washing machine comes to a standstill. The clothes stop tumbling. An empty dryer awaits them.

It might be time for a transfer.

The Real Punk Rock

I wasn’t a fan of Superman growing up. He was always a little boring to me. Every decision he made seemed to be the right one, and besides proximity to a glowing green rock, he had no natural weaknesses. Morally and physically, Superman’s strength always made the stakes feel too low for his stories to be truly heroic.

I gravitated more towards heroes like Batman: ones that were brooding and flawed. I liked that Batman walked a mental tightrope, barely hovering over the psychological precipice his villains would often willingly plunge themselves into. I liked his lack of superpowers, how his thinly armored mortality meant that his heroism required more risk. In the battle for my fandom, Batman often won, and Superman often lost.

That said, I always wanted to love Superman. I remember when the teaser for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel first dropped—the swelling orchestrals, the bucolic scenes of a young Clark Kent—I thought we might get a movie about whether the world’s most famous do-gooder from the Second World War could exist in a 21st-century world of moral grey.

Unfortunately, Snyder’s answer to that question seemed to be: who cares? Sure, he gave us a couple of ham-fisted allusions to the Christ and a paint-by-numbers scene of our hero crying over having to murder of General Zod (which, to me, seemed to be a no-brainer given Zod was a genocidal maniac). But otherwise, there was no wrestling with the anachronism of Superman. If anything, the MCU took up that banner with their Captain America saga. But no such exploration for the man in red, blue, and gold.

For that reason, I was hopeful for James Gunn’s Superman. Gunn’s stories are usually about the exploits of barely reformed thieves and mercenaries, so a Boy Scout like Superman might seem like an odd fit. But Gunn knows how to find what makes comic book characters tick, and how to match that ticking to the beat of your own heart.

In Gunn’s film, I found a Superman I could root for—and who felt like he was rooting for me.

As an adult who’s a fraction less cynical than his teenage self, I’ve come to understand what Superman is, and I think James Gunn understands it, too. Superman is, at its heart, a thought experiment: in a world where power and cruelty often go hand-in-hand, what would it be like for the world’s most powerful man to be kind? It’s why Superman must be kind in his stories; otherwise, despite the laser vision and the freezing breath, there is nothing truly remarkable about him.

His rival Lex Luthor has power, too—in some ways more power, as his intelligence gives him an omniscience about the world that allows him to manipulate it in ways that Superman can’t. Lex tells himself that people’s reliance on Superman’s strength weakens them, a self-deceiving humanism that acts as a smokescreen for his solipsist view of the world. In truth, Lex isn’t jealous of Superman’s power but of his kindness, the actual quality that indicts Lex Luthor as just another unremarkable, power-hungry man.

There are so many things about this movie I could praise. The casting is flawless, especially with David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan. I could watch a two-hour stage play of their Clark and Lois, just dialoguing about their strange, budding relationship in a Metropolis studio apartment. I love the genuine Midwestern warmth of Ma and Pa Kent, the plucky grit of the Daily Planet staff, the disjointed foibles of the Justice Gang. I love how weird this movie is, how unabashedly it embraces the cosmic, surreal, and eclectic nature of comic books. I love how it promises a DC universe where many stories can be told and voices can be heard, without the MCU burden of sterile cinematography and tangled plots that clumsily weave between films.

But mostly I’m just glad that it gave us a Superman our pop culture has desperately needed for the past decade: one who recognizes that kindness is the most rapturous and radical way to wield power. James Gunn has given us a modern Superman we can now hold up to the Lex Luthors of the world and say: see, you bastards? This—this is how it’s done.

We Shouldn’t Need Another Statue

A couple of weeks ago, I was on vacation with my family in Ireland. During the last few days, we stayed at a hotel right on the River Liffey, and near us was a series of bronze statues by Rowan Gillespie called Famine. The statues are stark, melted figures—reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream—depicting Irish refugees of the Great Famine departing for American shores in the mid-1800’s. Gillespie unveiled the statues in 1997, and shortly after in 1998, the City of Boston, which is the closest metro to me, commissioned Robert Shure for a similar work, memorializing the arrival of those same refugees.

I don’t have any Irish ancestors to speak of, although if you ask my dad, we’re more Irish than James Joyce. He took a 23andMe test years ago that, according to him, says he’s over half Irish. I’ve always had my doubts about this, given that 23andMe seems to lump British and Irish results together without much distinction. And unfortunately for Dad, his son is prone to hyperfixation. So I spent the better part of an evening building my family tree, to see if any Irish immigrants were, in fact, sitting in its branches.

Turns out, most of my Dad’s side of the family has been American for a long time. I found long lines of New York agrarians and Tennessee hillbillies. He did have great-grandparents who emigrated to New York from a town called Wookey Hole in Somerset, England, which sent me on a tangent learning about the fabled witch who once lived in its caves. (Years ago I learned that I’m a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, the last woman to be convicted in the Salem witch trials. There’s a theme in this family, apparently.)

Lots of fascinating leaves in the tree. But no Irish progenitors to be found.

My Dad’s belief in his Irish heritage is shared by over 30 million Americans. In a place like Boston, with its long history of Irish immigration, it’s likely true for many people. But I doubt it’s true for everyone. It gets me thinking about why so many Americans are obsessed with finding an Irish connection. Culturally, I get it. The art, the music, the libations—so much Irish culture is interwoven into American life, especially in the Northeast, that it’s not surprising people want to imagine it’s their birthright. But there’s nothing wrong with just enjoying—even participating in—a culture without being native to it, and I’ve yet to meet a bona fide Irish American who didn’t want to freely share it. I think it’s something else that makes us white Americans long for Irish heritage. And I think it has much to do with guilt.

When my dad first mentioned his DNA results, I asked his mom about it. His dad’s lineage is demonstrably English, so she would be the most likely conduit for any Celtic roots. She wasn’t certain, vaguely mentioning a family acquaintance who might have visited from Ireland when she was a young girl in the 30’s. But she did remember distinctly the signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” in the windows of shops that were hiring in her Midwestern town, and how sad it made her that people would treat the influx of immigrants that way.

“No Irish Need Apply” is mentioned on Shure’s memorial as a phrase that appeared frequently in Boston, a town that now embraces its Irish heritage with fervent pride, despite its initial hostility. I think this is instructive of why so many Americans want to claim Irish heritage, even if they can’t prove it. None of us want to think of ourselves as descending from the oppressor. It brings with it a specter of guilt we either feel is undue or don’t know how to reconcile. Rather than grapple with it, I think a lot of us would rather rewrite the narrative to claim we were part of the oppressed, especially if we can do so under the cover of a vague ancestry test.

To be fair, I don’t think was my dad’s motivation. As someone who lived abroad most of his young life, I think he just has an abiding love of immigrants in general. I think a lot of natural-born Americans crave the inherent dignity of being an immigrant. To immigrate to America is to pursue a radical faith in merit—the belief that under the stars and stripes, one’s hard work can reap the reward it deserves. Maybe that’s why so many natural-born Americans also resent them: often the superior patriotism and work ethic of the immigrant undermines their claim that their blessings due to merit, not inheritance.

We don’t have to reach for non-existent ancestry, Irish or otherwise, to honor the dignity of immigration. We can do it—we must do it—now by demanding it from our legislators, especially as the administration seeks to demonize and persecute them. The signs no longer read “No Irish Need Apply.” They read “Mass Deportations Now,” and they are being wielded with the same gleeful, banal cruelty as during the fallout of the Great Famine.

I don’t want to give mournful sculptors any more reasons to build statues. There’s one standing on Ellis Island now, torch in hand, welcoming the foreigner to our shores. For the near future, let her be the only one we need.

You Can’t Fight the Void Alone

Martin Scorsese once described Marvel films as less than cinema and more like roller coasters. Even though I’m a fan of them, I tend to agree. Since the beginning with Iron Man, I’ve taken the time to watch them in theaters. When I do, I’m not looking for the complexity and depth of a Dostoevsky novel. I’m looking to sedate my brain for a couple of hours, popcorn and soda in hand, ready to just enjoy the ride.

But every once in a while, a Marvel property hits an emotional note with such earnest simplicity that it has to be more than just a theme park attraction. WandaVision gave us a portrait of mourning with a slice of poetry—“What is grief if not love persevering?”—that stayed etched on my heart years later. I refused to watch Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in public, knowing the story of a cyborg raccoon (of all things) confronting his core trauma was going to send me into a sobbing fit.

Who would’ve thought the next Marvel tearjerker would be Thunderbolts.

In truth, this movie was always going to be a sucker punch for me. I love ensemble stories that center on secondary or throwaway characters. And I love superhero movies with lower stakes than universe-ending catastrophes. This movie has the added juice of Florence Pugh and David Harbour reprising Yelena and the Red Guardian, whose debut shined in the otherwise unremarkable Black Widow movie.

But what this movie did better than almost any other Marvel property is pick a theme and knock it out of the park. From the start with Yelena practically sleepwalking off a building and bemusedly ambling through an adrenaline-fueled solo heist, this movie wants you to think about loneliness. The color palates are desaturated and monotone. The characters endure flashbacks to their most sequestered moments. The lead-up to the climax of the film has the Thunderbolts literally breaking through walls of their psychological torment to save each other.

But nowhere is this theme driven home harder than in Bob’s story. Him being absorbed by his alter ego the Void the more he tries to beat it senseless—and it receding only when Yelena and the others embrace him—caught my emotions off guard. I’m a sucker for an unconventional superhero climax in general, but this one really anchored itself in my head.

Melodramatic as it was, it’s the kind of blunt instrument I need sometimes, that community is the only remedy to isolation. Believe it or not, you can’t fight loneliness alone. It’s such an obvious statement to most people. But for me, it takes a superhero blockbuster to remember. I’ll take it.