Avengers: Endgame brings superhero cinema’s 9/11… | Little White Lies

Avengers: Endgame brings super­hero cinema’s 911 obses­sion full circle

03 May 2019

Words by Al Horner

A man wearing a black leather jacket standing on a city street with people and buildings in the background.
A man wearing a black leather jacket standing on a city street with people and buildings in the background.
The con­clu­sion to the MCU’s Infin­i­ty Saga brings a sense of clo­sure two decades in the making.

Amer­i­ca likened that morn­ing to some­thing out of a movie,” and ever since, movies have looked like some­thing out of that morn­ing. 911 has had a pro­found impact on block­buster cin­e­ma. In the two decades since 2,996 peo­ple were killed in the biggest ter­ror attack in US his­to­ry, the shaky eye­wit­ness footage that cap­tured the hor­rors of that fate­ful day has been mor­phed into a vis­cer­al new visu­al lan­guage for film­mak­ers want­i­ng to con­note pandemonium.

Big-bud­get epics have alle­gorised the ques­tions posed by the attacks: did Amer­i­can colo­nial­ism bring this upon the nation, asked James Cameron’s Avatar? How did we not notice the loom­ing threat lurk­ing beneath us, won­dered Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds? Audi­ences flocked to cin­e­mas to process the pan­ic of 911. Almost 20 years lat­er, they’re arguably still doing it: head to your local mul­ti­plex and you won’t have a hard time find­ing films that deploy 911 imagery – shat­tered sky­scrap­ers, plumes of smoke, ter­ri­fied cit­i­zens cloaked in ash.

Which brings us to Avengers: Endgame. 9/11’s biggest impact on Hol­ly­wood has been the age of super­hero movies it helped ush­er in, an era that reached a mile­stone this year with the Rus­so broth­ers’ clos­ing chap­ter in the Infin­i­ty Saga. Endgame does some­thing dif­fer­ent to the films that pre­ced­ed it with regards to 911, both in the con­text of the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse and wider super­hero cin­e­ma. To under­stand exact­ly how the film brings the genre’s 911 obses­sion full cir­cle, we have to step back in time, quan­tum realm style, through recent caped cru­sad­er history.

Spiderman in a red and blue costume scaling a tall building against a cityscape backdrop.

Super­hero movies exist­ed long before 2001. After Richard Donner’s Super­man effec­tive­ly birthed the genre in 1978, the decade pre­ced­ing 911 saw fits and starts of masked vig­i­lantes on the sil­ver screen: a trio of Bat­man movies here, an X‑Men ori­gin sto­ry there. When the planes struck, Sony had its first Spi­der-Man movie, direct­ed by Sam Rai­mi and star­ring Tobey Maguire, in post-pro­duc­tion, posed a prob­lem. The film’s teas­er trail­er, shown before the likes of Juras­sic Park III and Tim Burton’s Plan­et of the Apes, fea­tured Peter Park­er catch­ing a heli­copter full of bank rob­bers in a giant web between the Twin Tow­ers, a scene the stu­dio scram­bled to erase. (Spi­der-Man wasn’t the only film to wipe the mon­u­ments from the city’s sky­line: Zoolan­der, Men in Black II and many oth­er films from 20023 deemed the sight of the tow­ers too raw).

Raimi’s Spi­der-Man, pay­ing hope­ful homage to New York City and its resilient cit­i­zens with­out ever acknowl­edg­ing the real-world events that reduced parts of it to rub­ble eight months ear­li­er, was a huge suc­cess. Its box office per­for­mance, tak­ing $114m on its open­ing week­end, sparked a rush to put more super­heroes on our screens. The mes­sage reached stu­dios loud and clear: in a time of ter­ror, audi­ences craved the com­fort of a myth­ic sav­iour swoop­ing in to save them, from threats they could not be res­cued from in real life.

And so the era of the super­hero movie began. Spi­der-Man, X‑Men and Blade sequels arrived. A Fan­tas­tic Four film was fast-tracked. Hulk was hand­ed over to Ang Lee. Hell­boy and Han­cock offered alter­na­tive spins on the super­hero guise, with new Dare­dev­il, Elek­tra, Pun­ish­er, Cat­woman and Super­man films also announced before the MCU start­ed to take shape in 2008.

Of course, 911 wasn’t the only dri­ving fac­tor behind this trend. Advances in CGI and spe­cial effects meant it was now pos­si­ble for Spi­der-Man to con­vinc­ing­ly swing through Man­hat­tan, for Hulk to smash through every­thing in his path with pho­to­genic real­ism, for Nicholas Cage to play a flam­ing skele­ton in Ghost Rid­er with­out it look­ing (too) laugh­able. The fact that these were huge­ly pop­u­lar com­ic book prop­er­ties with built-in glob­al fan­bas­es also made them attrac­tive to Hol­ly­wood studios.

Large, muscular green humanoid with a fierce expression in the foreground, surrounded by city buildings and helicopters in the background.

But pre­vi­ous super­hero films had nev­er been this pop­u­lar; nev­er in such high demand. Dri­ving this appar­ent­ly insa­tiable appetite, crit­ics the­o­rised, was the new Amer­i­ca that had emerged in the wake of 911. Super­hero movies became end­less attempts to rewrite 9÷11” in the Amer­i­can con­scious­ness, as Vox writer Todd Van­Der­W­erff lat­er put it, set­ting bat­tles between good and evil in US city sky­lines that, this time, Amer­i­ca would win.

As mod­ern super­hero cin­e­ma grew, it increas­ing­ly became a forum for Amer­i­ca to exor­cise its post‑9/​11 fears. How do you reck­on with an anar­chis­tic force that wants to watch the world burn, whose very ide­ol­o­gy is destruc­tion, asked Christo­pher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? Did Amer­i­ca help cre­ate the groups that now threat­ened them, ques­tioned Iron Man? In that first instal­ment in the MCU, Tony Stark’s cap­tors are ter­ror­ists he had pre­vi­ous­ly sold weapons to – an eerie echo of America’s guilt about the CIA hav­ing alleged­ly finan­cial­ly aid­ed Osama Bin Laden decades before 911.

Post‑9/​11 soul-search­ing in com­ic book movies didn’t stop there. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, the most jin­go­is­tic of Mar­vel heroes on paper, was used as a jump­ing off point to probe time­ly notions of patri­o­tism and pro­pa­gan­da. By 2012’s The Avengers, the 911 allu­sions were explic­it. The film’s final bat­tle takes place in New York, with alien air­craft plough­ing into build­ings, send­ing twist­ed shards of debris hurtling towards side­walks below. In this fan­ta­sy, how­ev­er, the invaders are even­tu­al­ly foiled, Man­hat­tan is saved and 911 is rewrit­ten – just as it was rewrit­ten again a year lat­er in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, a film full of shocked onlook­ers flee­ing thick fogs of dust and soot as build­ings crash around them dur­ing a bat­tle between Super­man and Zod.

Also in 2013, Iron Man 3 prompt­ed the New York Times to mar­vel at just how thor­ough­ly Sep­tem­ber 11 and its after­math have been col­o­nized by the movies.” They had a point. Nothing’s been the same since New York,” Robert Downey Jr’s voiceover begins in the film’s first trail­er, teas­ing a plot that would use touch­stones from Bin Laden’s emer­gence as the attacks’ mas­ter­mind: a long-beard­ed antag­o­nist wag­ing a war of anti-West­ern cap­i­tal­is­tic val­ues, using video dia­tribes to voice their vio­lent manifesto.

Then came Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: Win­ter Sol­dier, offer­ing a dif­fer­ent angle on America’s response to the attacks: mil­i­taris­tic fire­pow­er. Tri­umphant music plays as Nick Fury intro­duces Steve Rogers to his mas­sive new arse­nal of state-of-the-art fight­er war­ships, brag­ging about how his satel­lites can read a terrorist’s DNA before he steps out­side his spi­der hole.” The bat­tle of New York at the cli­max of The Avengers, he explains, was proof that steps need to be tak­en – and lib­er­ties sac­ri­ficed – to keep Amer­i­cans safe, echo­ing the con­ver­sa­tion around America’s mil­i­tary advances into Iraq and increased sur­veil­lance fol­low­ing 911,

Two men, one wearing a black superhero costume with a star emblem, the other wearing a blue jacket, in a dimly lit setting.

There are 22 films in the Infin­i­ty Saga, but there’s an argu­ment to be made that many of them are one film stuck on repeat: a Ground­hog Day replay­ing of 911 and its fall­out, in which that day is ret­conned, Amer­i­ca wins and the sub­con­scious trau­ma it left the nation recov­er­ing from is eased.

Endgame, how­ev­er, breaks from tra­di­tion, swap­ping out fan­tas­ti­cal 911 revi­sion­ism for loss, grief and regret. It picks up right from where Infin­i­ty War left off, with The Avengers hav­ing lost. Mount­ing a dar­ing raid to kill the man who inflict­ed that loss on them – remind you of any­thing? – does noth­ing to bring back the dead or soothe Rogers, Stark and co’s mourn­ing. The Avengers have lost and all they can do is pick through the rub­ble and hope to some­how, some­day move on.

Five years pass in Endgame and aban­doned boats still bounce against the docks at the feet of The Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, the tremors of Thanos’ vic­to­ry ful­ly felt in scenes full of sur­pris­ing still­ness and qui­et. The film’s first act lan­guish­es in this set­ting and this mood – an adven­tur­ous move for the most antic­i­pat­ed super­hero movie of all time, in a genre that for 18 years has exist­ed as a means of escap­ing exact­ly this sense of mourn­ing. Super­hero cin­e­ma took flight in the ear­ly 2000s as an anti­dote to post‑9/​11 anguish and anx­i­ety. But Endgame basks in it: the despair, the help­less­ness, the remorse.

Okay, so The Avengers may even­tu­al­ly fix it all, undust those they feared gone for­ev­er and claim vic­to­ry again. But see­ing the real-life emo­tion of 911 reflect­ed in char­ac­ters whose very exis­tence has been to purge that day’s demons, to run away from it, feels like the clos­ing of a loop: a super­hero cin­e­ma endgame two decades in the mak­ing. Does Marvel’s lat­est epic mark the end of com­ic book movies’ fas­ci­na­tion with 911? Nothing’s been the same since New York,” Iron Man once said. Maybe it won’t be the same after Endgame.

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