In Disney’s Thunderbolts* memory is an evil technology. But it doesn’t have to be.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Thunderbolts* hit theaters a few weeks ago and is doing pretty well, critically and financially speaking. Much of Thunderbolts* triumph can probably be attributed to its having every mandatory ingredient in the MCU recipe. Taking notes from the success of Guardians of the Galaxy and the dark anti-hero stories of The Punisher (2017-2019) and Daredevil (2015-), the film features an unlikely gaggle of reformed bad guys. Whereas Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel herself are clear cut “good guys,” the U.S.’s newest defenders include four former assassins (three of whom were entangled at some point with the Russian/Soviet Union’s government), one failed Captain America, and a skinny misfit with amnesia.
While the Marvel formula demands “intense backstories,” we perhaps haven’t seen one that hits so close to home for so many Americans. No, not Yelena’s backstory of having lived her early years in rural Ohio as part of a family of Soviet spies before her violent training with The Red Room as an elite Black Widow assassin. I’m talking about the experiences with domestic abuse, mental health disorders, and drug addiction that Bob aka Robert Reynolds aka Sentry is forced to confront. Bob’s fight against the void of despair that comes from replaying your worst memories ad nauseum is relatable for those of us with diagnoses like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and bi-polar disorder. And even though his two mentions of addiction are highlighted as points of comic relief, Bob’s battle against his own mind probably resonates with a lot of the tens of millions of Americans who have struggled with mental health disorders and the tens of millions more who care about someone who has.
(Screengrab from Thunderbolts* curtesy of Reddit)
Violence Without Context
While the issues alluded to in Thunderbolts* are not core themes of the culturally diverse texts within the Autonomous Futures archive, most of (all?) these texts feature violence in some way. Unlike mainstream texts like MCU movies, however, the texts featured in the AF archive almost always contextualize such violence within a critique of the social systems that instigate such harm.
Take, for example, Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008). In this independent Latinxfuturist film set primarily in Mexico, migrants flock to Tijuana to secure jobs in a new technological industry where nodes connect workers’ arms, neck, and back are connected to electrical lines through which they operate machinery. Memo, the film’s protagonist, travels to the U.S.-Mexico border from his rural agricultural town where unrestricted corporate land acquisition has driven the price of water up to $80/litre. Memo meets a journalist named Luz who uses her nodes to download images from her memory to accompany the media stories that she narrates about the border city and its inhabitants.
(Image of Luz in Sleep Dealer courtesy of Google Images)
In Sleep Dealer, Luz co-opts her subjects’ memories without consent, the Mexican government and international corporations steal water rights from poor landowners, and U.S. tech companies facilitate unregulated migrant labor extraction.
The Thunderbolts* story shows viewers that Bob’s mental health struggles and history of drug addiction are connected to the abuse inflicted by his parents. But that’s as far as it goes. No harmful social system is identified, even discreetly. There’s no history from which viewers can draw to better understand the alterable forces that shape the landscape of mental health and addiction. A much simpler narrative of uncontrollable experiences is proposed: Sometimes people are abusive and addiction can happen when you’re abused.
By identifying abuse as the problem that motivates addiction but stopping short of pinpointing the factors that create the context within which abuse emerges (for example, patriarchy), this simplistic formula fails to forge a pathway for repair. Ultimately, this brings about the inadequacy of the film’s primary technology.
Memory as Superpower, Memory as Technology
Unlike the texts in the Autonomous Futures archive, in Thunderbolts* memory fails as a technology useful in the pursuit of problem-solving.
Eighty-five percent of texts in the Autonomous Futures archive are classified under the principle “Rights to Collective Memories and Histories.” Creative works within this principle draw attention to communities’ struggles for political recognition and challenge readers to consider less visible, non-Western histories in world-building. Many texts show how plural memories and histories continue to shape contemporary communities and assert that they will persist in the future regardless of attempts at erasure. In other texts, this theme is highlighted to show how victors write history in a way that marginalizes diverse perspectives by presuming a singular point of view. Still other texts challenge dominant assumptions about what counts as memory and history by holding ancestral wisdom, origin stories, oral histories, folklore, and cultural mythologies in equal or higher esteem than empirical written accounts or what we know as “History” and “Science.”
In Thunderbolts*, memory has several different capacities. When Bob first emerges at the start of the movie, his memories are inexplicably inaccessible to him and throughout the film they appear and disappear out of his control. Memory also collaborates with individual shame to conjure a joyless void entrapping Bob and those around him. In the film’s after-credits it becomes apparent that even after breaking out of the void – and despite being nearly invincible – Bob remains fearful of his own memories, unable to fully contend with them and, ultimately, unable to solve the (partially defined) problem at the core of his struggle.
( Photo of Sentry in Thunderbolts* from MickeyBlog.com)
In contrast, the protagonist of Sleep Dealer learns from even his most shameful memories. Early in the film, Memo demonstrates disdain for his family’s history of land stewardship and disregards his father’s fond memories of their farm. But after seeing his and others’ memories displayed on Luz’s journalistic program without their consent, he recognizes the importance of honoring all memories and the necessity of handling memories with care. For Memo, memory becomes a tool from which he can garner strength for the fight against the extractive forces surrounding him.
I love big-budget films and the aesthetic experience of watching a new movie in the theater, so I’m not sorry that I spent an afternoon watching Thunderbolts* on the big screen. But I very much wish that I could go to the theater to view more films like those in the AF archive. For now, the diverse texts capable of addressing these principles remain largely excluded from large media outlets and popular imaginations. So it is important that we take a double (and maybe even triple) look at the films and shows that are made accessible to us. What problems do they fail to identify? What limitations do the technologies presented within them fail to overcome? And perhaps most importantly, What kind of futures do they inhibit?