“We’re in the endgame now.”
The Marvel Cinematic universe is defined by the specters
of flawed fathers who haunt our heroes,
whether they’re absent dads, dead dads, mistaken dads,
or outright evil dads.
“We’re talking about a guy whose happiest day
was when he shipped me off to boarding school.”
And in ‘Avengers: Endgame’, the Avengers go up against
the ultimate “bad dad” of the whole universe,
Thanos.
“When I’m done half of humanity will still be alive.”
But in fact, ‘Infinity War’ already gave us
an incredibly symbolic scene of this universe’s founding father,
Tony Stark, fighting Thanos, which reveals a lot about
how the MCU is finally resolving the daddy issues that have defined
its first decade.
“Which happens, Dads leave, no need to be a pussy about it.”
So we’re about to break down this scene,
but before we get into it, a little background.
To get ready for ‘Endgame’, we’ve come together with
a bunch of our favorite YouTubers to create this series:
‘One Marvelous Scene’.
Each channel picks one scene from the last 10 years of the MCU,
to analyze in depth.
So after you watch this make sure to check out
all the others, and you can even make your own video on this topic,
just tweet it to us, and we’ll make sure it
gets added to the playlist.
Now, let’s look closer at this face-off between
Tony and Thanos to figure out how it illuminates ‘Endgame’s’
and the MCU’s deeper messages about fatherhood
and about what it means to beget a better future.
Before we go on, if you’re new here
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“You throw another moon at me and I’m gonna lose it.”
“Stark.”
“You know me?”
“I do.”
As soon as the two meet in this scene,
the dialogue reveals something surprising:
Thanos knows Tony.
“He's aware of Stark from that original Battle of New York
as the person who undid the plan.”
Meanwhile, from the Battle of New York on, Tony has also had some version
of Thanos in his brain, as an idea without a name.
“Thanos has been inside my head for six years.”
Co-director Joe Russo has said that Tony, quote,
“Has predicted a threat like Thanos.
It’s lived in his brain even though he couldn’t name it.”
“Threat is imminent.”
In ‘Age of Ultron’, Tony has a vision of
what looks like a post-apocalyptic world where his fellow Avengers are dying.
“You could’ve saved us.”
The setting of this fight scene in ‘Infinity War’ is not unlike
the wasteland of that vision, which on some level
has already come to pass.
“I watched my friends die.
You'd think that'd be as bad as it gets, right?
Nope.
It wasn't the worst part.”
“The worst part… is that you didn't.”
Thanos’ explanation for how he knows Tony is the enigmatic line:
“You’re not the only one cursed with knowledge.”
Both characters have access to some sort of mysterious insight,
which makes them feel they have to make tough decisions
others don’t understand.
“We can bust arms dealers all the livelong day,
but that up there, that's the endgame.”
“If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist.
It needs correction.”
“You don't know that!”
“I'm the only one who knows that.”
The technology-obsessed Tony is a known futurist,
“The Futurist, gentlemen!
The Futurist is here!
He sees all!”
and that’s something he has in common with Thanos.
“They're both aware of something from an early, early point
and constantly having to deal with being smarter.
Thanos is a futurist as much as Tony Stark.”
In fact, these two are similar in a lot of ways.
Both approach problems logically, without emotion.
“Genocide?”
“But random, dispassionate, fair to rich and poor alike.”
Their instinct is to solve the world’s problems
through systems of control,
“We need to be put in check.”
and they may do damage to the world while trying to protect it.
“Ultron can't tell the difference between saving the world
and destroying it.
Where do you think he gets that?”
So on one level this scene represents Tony going up against
a dark mirror of himself.
But visually here Tony appears tiny in relation to the giant Thanos
looming over him.
He looks like David going up against Goliath.
And these visuals are a clue that this fight is really about Tony
battling the source of his father complex.
“My only curse is you.”
The size imbalance highlights how small and unworthy he feels –
this represents the little boy in him, who will always feel inadequate
in relation to the ghost of his emotionally distant father,
Howard Stark.
“You know they say sarcasm is a metric for potential.
If that's true, you'll be a great man someday.”
The fundamental flaw in Howard’s parenting logic
is that he thinks it’s enough to inspire, educate and provide
for his son from a distance.
He doesn’t realize that Tony needs his personal warmth
and presence most of all.
“He was cold.
He was calculating.
He never told me he loved me, he never even told me he liked me.”
When Tony watches the video of his father in ‘Iron Man 2’,
we see Howard rebuff his young son,
“Put it back where you got it from.
Where’s your mother?
Maria!
Go on, go.”
even as he leaves a loving message for future Tony.
“My greatest creation is you.”
In this scene when Thanos put his huge hand on Tony’s head,
it feels like a paternal gesture,
“You have my respect, Stark.”
but evoking a perversion of fatherly love because here he’s trying to kill Tony.
And this moment captures how Thanos is a grotesque embodiment
of all the daddy issues that pervade the MCU.
“I understand, my child.”
He’s the dark father figure of the whole universe,
“You have become children of Thanos.”
like a Darth Vader or a Voldemort,
who goes against the natural order by attempting to kill the next generation.
In fact, Russo has said that that was their intention
to make Thanos, a quote, “Darth Vader for a new generation”.
This frame of Tony taking on an impossibly daunting foe
also evokes a human going up against a God.
And the prominent fire imagery reflects that Thanos is a brutal,
Old Testament-style god who inspires fear.
Like Howard as a father, Thanos as a God
engages in the same kind of well-intentioned, cold logic
that overlooks the person in the equation.
“To bring balance to the universe by wiping out half of all life.”
The way that the MCU conflates the God and Father figures in Thanos
is fitting—
not only because of the paternalistic God-the-Father of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
but also because we begin life viewing our parents as all-powerful.
So for many of us, the relationship to a parent
is a model or proxy for our idea of a God or Creator.
“I want to be a great king, Baba.
Just like you.”
And in fact, the MCU uses its father issues
to get at a bigger existential question of how we relate to the universe at large.
Through this twisted version of a God, the Avengers grapple with inheriting
a world that’s imperfect, unfeeling and disappointing.
“He invades planets.
He takes what he wants.
He wipes out half the population.”
Moreover, we can’t escape being shaped by our disappointing world.
“It’s an imperfect world but it’s the only one we’ve got.”
Even if the son rejects the flawed father,
he’ll inevitably take after him in some ways.
“This is the key to the future.”
“Reframe the future.”
And to some degree, Tony repeats his father’s mistakes too
with his surrogate son, Peter Parker.
“That’s not a hug, I’m just grabbing the door for you.
We’re not there yet.”
In ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’, Tony even sends an empty Iron Man suit
to rescue Peter,
“Mr. Stark, you didn't have to come all the way out here.
I had that.
I was fine.”
“Oh, I'm not… here.
Thank God this place has Wi-Fi, or you would be toast right now.”
mirroring the scene in Iron Man 3 when Tony sends one of his suits
to greet Pepper.
“This is a new level of lame.”
So these scenes symbolize that -- like his dad –
Tony doesn’t always get the importance of being there,
in the flesh, for the people you love.
His reflex is to hide behind his technology –
“My armor?
It was never a distraction, or a hobby.
It was a cocoon.”
and that’s what he does in this scene with Thanos.
But his tech is inadequate and can’t protect him.
At the end his suit is all burnt up, in ruins.
And this might make us think of his conversation with Peter in ‘Homecoming’:
“I'm nothing without this suit.”
“If you're nothing without this suit, then you shouldn't have it, okay?
God, I sound like my dad.”
This scene’s ultimate impact is that, like ‘Infinity War’ as a whole,
it ends the wrong way, Tony loses the fight.
After this, Dr. Strange gives up the Time Stone
to save Tony.
“There was no other way.”
So what makes Tony so important in this fight,
even though he looks so glaringly outmatched here
and may not be the strongest Avenger in objective terms?
“You know me?”
“I do.”
Thanos’ knowledge of Tony reveals that he believes this person
could present a real problem for him.
“He doesn't spend a lot of energy intentionally
trying to murder people unless they are,
in some way, a threat to his agenda.
Almost no one ends up being a threat to the agenda
except for Tony.”
In ‘Infinity War’ each Avenger tests their strength against Thanos
and it’s not enough.
If strength were everything then Thanos would be unbeatable.
But Tony epitomizes what makes Marvel great,
his superhero persona is just a suit he made himself.
“One thing you can't take away.
I am Iron Man.”
The real source of his power is that person underneath the suit
who has the plucky, personal, cunning ingenuity
that David used to outwit the giant.
It’s that unique brain with the creative insight
to find the way around the problem.
“You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play.
To lay down on a wire and let the other guy
crawl over you.”
“I think I would just cut the wire.”
While Tony is conspicuously human here, Thanos is not truly the God
that he pretends to be.
Notice this line near the end of this scene:
“All that for a drop of blood.”
These words seem to tell us that the Avengers’ efforts are futile –
but they call on something that Ivan Vanko says in ‘Iron Man 2’:
“If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in Him.”
So this drop of blood actually proves that Thanos
can be beaten.
“You will never be a god.”
After all Thanos with his infinity gauntlet
is hiding behind a kind of technology too.
It takes a mind like Tony’s, that won’t just go up against
strength with more obvious strength, to find that way around.
Tony begins ‘Infinity War’ dreaming about new life –
“Last night I dreamt we had a kid.
It was so real.”
and it’s significant that these futurists envision tomorrow very differently.
Thanos sees the future as weak, needing to be controlled
and determined by him.
But the key to parenthood and engendering a positive future
is respecting new life and letting it determine itself –
in other words, listening to the actual kid in front of you.
“Nice work in D.C.
My dad never really gave me a lot of support and I'm just
trying to break the cycle of shame.”
“I'm kind of in the middle of something.”
“Don't cut me off when I'm complimenting you.”
While he may take some time to get there,
we see Tony eventually giving Peter this validation and trust.
And with him, we have to hope and trust
that his descendants in the MCU will carry on his best qualities.
“I'm just trying to protect us and future ‘us-es’ and that's it.”
Because if there’s anything Iron Man has taught us over the last decade,
it’s that we humans have a lot more superpower within us than we know.
“Humans.
“They are not the cowering wretches we were promised.”
Hi guys, it’s Susannah and Debra, and we are The Take.
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