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What's up, guys?
Michael here to talk about our favorite extended universe.
Now that we've got a good chunk
of Phase Four material to judge from,
something interesting is becoming clear:
the new generation of Avengers seems kind of...
neurotic?
Insecure?
Lacking a purpose?
So, where we once had Tony Stark
in all his naive narcissism
try to shape the world to his vision,
we've now got Wanda going through a mental breakdown
and remaking suburbia.
Steve Rogers had that unassailable Golden Generation spirit,
while Sam Wilson doubts his capability to fit those shoes.
And Shang-Chi,
arguably the biggest new face of Phase Four to date,
encapsulates this self-doubt even further.
So what's going on with the replacement Avengers?
Put bluntly: they're basically millennials.
Or in Shang-Chi's case,
skirting the edge of Gen Z, his parents met in 1996,
but still exhibiting major millennial vibes.
So why has the MCU suddenly got a bunch
of avocado toast aficionados gumming up the works
with their anxieties, self-doubt, and bad credit?
And, more importantly,
what does this mean for the MCU as it stands today?
Pop your antidepressants and stop looking
at houses you can't afford on Zillow as we investigate
in this "Wisecrack Edition: How Marvel Nailed Millennials."
And it goes without saying, but spoilers ahead for the MCU.
But before we get into it,
I wanna give a quick shout-out
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Now, back to the show.
Let's kick things off by meeting our newest Marvel hero:
Shang-Chi.
Dude has a college degree,
can speak four languages,
and has a wide range of skills,
particularly skills that can inflict bodily harm.
That is to say, he's a pretty accomplished guy.
But he's also completely weighed down
by the trauma of watching his mother die as a child
and the sky-high expectations of his dad
that he become the world's best killing machine.
As a result,
he's seemingly dropped out of the race altogether.
He parks rude rich peoples' cars for a living,
lives in a converted basement
that still looks like a dorm room,
and spends his nights singing drunken karaoke.
(sighs) Come on, bud.
Do better.
This looks like a textbook example
of a very real generational experience.
As journalist Anne Helen Peterson explains in her book
"Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,"
a lot of millennial kids were raised as mini-adults,
urged on in an endless pursuit of first chair violin seats
or perfect SAT scores.
Along the way,
they experienced the anxieties and concerns of adults
long before they were of legal drinking age.
While most of them weren't learning
to kill with their bare hands like Shang-Chi,
his story still feels analogous to the experience
of having a ton of pressure to perform at the highest level
from a ridiculously young age.
As Peterson writes,
this pressure led to "millennial burnout,"
especially when young people realize
"that the thing you worked so hard for,
the thing you sacrificed for and physically suffered for,
isn't happiness or passion or freedom."
Shang-Chi certainly learns that the hard way,
discovering that the life his father planned for him
is definitely not what he wants.
And Shang-Chi's best friend, Katy,
seems to equally be suffering from the millennial blues.
Katy graduated with honors from Berkeley,
which is no small feat.
While a previous generation might've seen this
as a guarantee of professional success,
Katy spends her time joyriding Lambos
and doing drunk karaoke on work nights.
She still lives at home, too,
and we see firsthand the pressure
she's under from her family to achieve more.
This is primarily reflective
of the Asian-American experience,
but the broad strokes are also shared
by a lot of millennials.
This generation, after all, was mostly raised by boomers.
These parents were super preoccupied
with ensuring that their children achieve
or at least maintain middle class prosperity,
primarily through pursuing higher education
and high-paying knowledge jobs.
What's more, we see that Katy's also under pressure
to settle down and start a family,
like when her grandma asks Shang-Chi
when they're going to get married.
He laughs this off, as many a millennial would.
Real-life millennials, too,
are putting off big life stages
like marriage or having kids,
primarily because they're too cash-strapped
to throw a wedding or pay for organic baby formula.
And, as hinted at in the film,
they're met with disapproval
and accusations of immaturity by their elders
for making these perfectly reasonable life choices.
But despite her less-than-desirable circumstances,
Katy comes across as a chill, fun-loving gal.
Yet, later on in the film, we get a little more insight.
We're paraphrasing, but Katy tells one of the villagers
that she keeps trying new things,
but gets bored just as she's starting to improve
and moves on to something else.
She even says that she "knows her limits" and,
accordingly, doesn't see the need to push herself.
If that doesn't sound like a burned-out millennial
who tried and failed to live up to familial expectations,
we don't know what does.
In this informative moment,
we also learn that despite being academically successful,
Katy simply doesn't know what to do with her life.
Similarly, Shang-Chi, in having his life's trajectory
so stringently defined by his arch-criminal dad,
was already ill-equipped to carve his own path
once he rejected the life his father wanted for him.
And while a certain type of cranky boomer
might see them as just entitled slackers
without the drive and determination to accomplish anything,
her apathy and indecision seems to be a legitimate response
to a world without much to offer her.
So why all the defeatism?
These characters are indicative once again
of a real-world generational phenomenon.
See, real-life millennials and Gen Zers were hugely affected
by the economic devastation of the 2008 Great Recession,
which marked a drastic shift
in cultural and economic life in America.
This shift especially affected millennials,
who were raised with the expectations
of boomer upward mobility and economic optimism.
And then, they got thrown into the biggest era
of downward mobility and social collapse
since the Great Depression.
As Annie Lowry wrote in "The Atlantic,"
"millennials got bodied in the downturn,"
"graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years.
That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment
or a couple years living in their parents' basements.
It meant a full decade of lost wages."
Today, millennials have less wealth, fewer opportunities,
and less stability than the generations before them,
but are still held to the same expectations
and sold the same ideals.
And while it might feel like a bit of a leap,
we can see a similar cultural shift not just in Shang-Chi,
but all across the MCU in the pre- and post-Blip world.
Before the Snap, there was an optimistic sense
that no matter what threat emerged, it could be handled
by a group of well-intentioned heroes who were willing
to fall on the proverbial grenade to save others.
After the Snap, it was clear
that there were levels of cosmic evil at play
that made the best of humanity's heroes
look like chumps by comparison.
If Americans struggled with a sort of collective fear
and anxiety after the financial collapse,
regular people in the MCU's world had to deal
with the trauma of seeing half
of the world's population eradicated
only to be magically brought back
five years later in the Blip.
It's no wonder that Katy remarks
that she doesn't see the point in pursuing anything
beyond her current circumstances,
because why bother in a world
where half the population might suddenly disappear?
For folks just trying to survive in the MCU,
the Snap is like a breaking point
between how the world was and how the world is.
And that's not unlike the realities
young people faced in a post-2008 world.
We may not have watched half our loved ones disappear,
but we did watch a lot of life opportunities evaporate.
And we may have not experienced
the literal wrath of an angry god,
but we are contending with a reality
where power is concentrated in the hands
of just a few people, many of whom are giant dicks.
So who's to say we've not been living
through Snaps of our own?
We see millennial reactions
to the post-Snap world across the MCU.
Wanda Maximoff has a particularly traumatic response
to the Snap and its aftermath,
having lost the love of her life, Vision.
Overcome by this loss,
Wanda uses her potent chaos magic
to actualize one of the wildest dreams
a millennial can have.
That's right: homeownership,
with a nuclear family in a presumably good school district.
She retreats into a fantasy-made-reality
marked by television references and suburban stability.
Here, Wanda can live in a different reality,
one that plenty a millennial has imagined:
how much better her life would have been
if she'd just been born a few decades earlier.
This isn't far off from those of us
entering adulthood in the 2010s and 2020s.
While many boomers and Gen Xers found themselves
in stable careers and with mortgages
long before they got receding hairlines
or two-day hangovers,
today's young adults have bounced around
between various entry-level jobs, side hustles,
and shared apartments well into their thirties.
And while 77% of boomers
and 67% of Gen Xers became homeowners,
recent data shows that only 43% of millennials own homes.
And things look equally grim for Gen Zers.
Much like Wanda, a lot of young people
would need chaos magic to conjure anything
resembling that quaint old American Dream.
And it's not just Wanda struggling
to contend with post-Blip reality.
While Sam Wilson, AKA Falcon,
might have technically been born
in the cultural wasteland of the Gen X era,
he is functionally a millennial
due to losing years in the Blip.
And fittingly, he's also been hit
with some very post-2008 problems.
After the Blip and the dissolution
of the Stark-funded Avengers,
Sam is basically doing TaskRabbit,
but for the military,
dropping in for random contract jobs.
That's not unlike the 40% of millennials
who now work freelance, without the benefits
or stability of full-time employment.
Meanwhile, Sam's family's seafood business,
like many small American businesses,
is struggling to survive modern economic realities.
And in a moment that might be relatable
to any millennial brave enough to become an entrepreneur,
Sam can't even secure a bank loan
to help keep the business afloat.
It's hard to imagine Iron Man or Thor ever being bogged down
by financial problems at their regional bank.
But this makes Sam unfortunately relatable
to many post-2008 adults, a generation
that has a collective $500,000,000,000
in student loan debt alone.
But the millennial-ness of the new MCU
goes beyond their material realities.
See, millennials are also marked by profound cynicism for
and disappointment in the world their parents created.
Statistically,
millennials are the most disillusioned generation,
mistrustful of everything from democracy
to politicians to religious leaders.
In one poll, millennials were also the generation
least proud to be an American.
Fittingly, our new Captain America, too,
has become disillusioned with his namesake country,
realizing, much like many millennials,
that a lot of the political narratives he grew up
believing in are actually massive piles of bull (beep).
Through meeting Isaiah Bradley
and learning about the racist past
of the super soldier program,
Sam becomes more critical of the nation he once served.
It's hard to imagine any previous Captain America
having actual beef with America.
Similarly, in "Black Widow," we meet Yelena Belova,
who has learned that the narratives
she was fed as a child came from a corrupt system.
She clings to her idyllic suburban childhood despite knowing
that it was ultimately hollow because it's unlikely
that she'll ever attain such stability again.
Like many millennials
without an institution to identify with,
Yelena's left rootless and wandering.
So maybe it's no surprise
that each of these millennial heroes struggles
with a common theme of self-doubt and self-discovery.
Sam Wilson doesn't think
he can live up to his predecessor's example
because the world has been telling him that he can't.
And also because he doesn't have super soldier serum
flowing through his veins.
His journey is about reckoning
with both the expectations of others
and America's messy past to figure out
what it means for him to be Captain America.
Wanda, having lived through an incredibly unstable life,
has the one thing she considered stable taken away,
and it breaks her.
(suspenseful music) (glass shattering)
Her journey is a bit bleaker
because she eventually gives up her fantasy
to move to the mountains to study dark magic.
Sorta like a friend who gives up their dream
of fronting a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band
to go manage a hedge fund.
Yelena, furious that her life has been built on lies,
has to quite literally take on her past to learn
that she still has a future worth fighting for,
even if she'll never go back to the suburban dream.
And in this latest installment,
Shang-Chi has left his past as a warrior behind,
not even telling Katy of his immense talent.
But he doesn't really try
to form a new direction for his life,
maybe because he doesn't know what else he could be good at.
His journey is ultimately to find out how he can use
his killer fighting instincts to help the world,
instead of simply being a murder machine.
And even Katy is eventually able to find purpose
by shooting arrows into the neck of a giant evil dragon.
Of course, it's not as straightforward for those of us
who lived through a financial crash rather than a Blip,
and millennials will likely be struggling
with all the problems we've been talking about for a while.
And, yes, I'm off to drown my feelings
in drunk karaoke after this.
In this way, though,
we can see Shang-Chi and Katy's journey
as the ultimate millennial fantasy
and one that seems out of reach
to most twenty- and thirty-somethings:
escaping that deadbeat job to find a world
of purpose, meaning, and adventure,
a life where you're able to use your skill
and passion to do something that feels valuable,
like you're making the world a better place,
and a world where you're not super annoyed anymore
at your boomer parents for, well, everything.
Instead, for most of us,
it feels like the best we can do
is find a job that doesn't make us pray
for a real-life Thanos to Snap us into oblivion
while providing the time and money
to at least drown our misery
at Tropical Happy Hour with our friends.
So if the first phase of the MCU
was still in the spirit of the post-9/11 era, offering hope
of a badass American military-industrial complex
that could blow the (beep) out of the bad guys
while still looking cool as hell,
it seems like Phase Four might be exploring the end
of this era of misguided optimism
by telling the stories of millennial characters
who are marked by questions and anxieties
more than they are by confidence and answers.
But what do you guys think?
Has Marvel gone to the millennials?
And do millennials make better superheroes?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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Later.
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