You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

Every now and then a movie surprises you. That’s not unusual, but I hadn’t expected that movie to be Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. I too am no stranger to ‘Marvel Fatigue’ and have not really been invested in anything after Endgame with the exception of Loki and WandaVision*. When enjoying a movie requires an advanced degree in Marvelology you have lost me. Thunderbolts* only got its viewing as a sort of last hurrah before our Disney+ subscription goes the way of the OG Avengers. So it was a pleasant surprise when it wasn’t just a half-decent superhero movie, but offered an radically interesting perspective on mental health and redemption.

Warning, contains spoilers

Several elements make Thunderbolts* stand out from the recent Marvel fare. For one, it manages to take itself lightly without getting zany. While in the opening scenes we see Yelena Belova (Black Widow’s adopted sister, played by Florence Pugh) at work ‘cleaning up’ some off-the-books lab run by the movies baddie, we simultaneously hear her narrating how even her work cannot fill the emptiness she feels inside. The contrast is poignant, but ends in a lighthearted flourish when visuals and narration synchronize to show us Belova has been talking to a tied-up goon all this time. A goon who clearly has more important things on his mind than an assassin’s existential angst.

The self-aware humour remains present throughout the movie. It knows that it is working with the B-team, it knows that its protagonists (who are neither ‘super’ nor ‘heroes’) know, and it knows the audience knows. Early on in the movie, an exasperated Belova literally complains that it would be nice if someone in their reluctant team had a marginally useful superpower, beyond simply being able to shoot things. Luckily for our nascent heroes, neither superpowers nor marksmanship are required to defeat this movie’s villain.

Thunderbolts* offers us with two villains. There is the unavoidably nefarious CIA director. And there is her pet new ersatz Avenger, known as ‘The Sentry’. The Sentry easily ranks as one of the most implausible heroes/villains, because not only did someone think it was a great idea to inject some superserum into a test subject with extremely poor mental health only to then misplace them in a warehouse and forget about them, but the superserum now grants flight, telekinesis, superstrength and a bunch of other powers. I’m old enough to remember the 1930s when all it did was make Captain America a bit stronger, but clearly in the 21st century some advanced biochemistry can give you powers that previously you had to eat an Infinity Stone for.

Inevitably, the latent bipolar disorder of The Sentry’s past self (Bob) results in a Jekyll and Hyde situation where the would-be saviour of humanity flips into his severely depressed counterpart: The Void. Unfortunately for New York, The Void quickly extends a depressive cloud around him that displaces anyone it envelops into a pocket dimension where they are forced to forever relive their most shameful or traumatic memory. (Incidentally, why anyone in the MCU would still choose to live in New York is beyond me, given the frequency with which it is ground zero for supernatural disasters).

This is where Thunderbolts* makes its most interesting move. Because you cannot actually fight depression. You cannot shoot it. You cannot punch it. You cannot pummel it into submission, or blast it out of yourself. Violence is not the road to catharsis. Our heroes cannot defeat The Void by fighting it, nor by attacking it from the inside, having been absorbed to try, locate and extract good old Bob.

What overcomes depression is empathy and compassion. It is connection with other people and their ability to understand, forgive, and comfort. The radical idea at the heart of Thunderbolts* is that healing is a social process. You cannot CBT yourself out of your depression in isolation. This is not a new insight, but it is profoundly at odds with our pervasive culture that posits mental health as an extremely individualised responsibility, requiring constant ‘investment’ by way of mindfulness, exercise, and other forms of ‘self-care’ in order to attain happiness. Or if not happiness, at least the ability to perform effectively as a worker. In short, I had not expected echoes of Mark Fisher’s critique of neoliberalism in a Marvel movie.

All this is represented in a pivotal and excellent scene during Thunderbolts* finale where after Bob has been ineffectually battering away at The Void, it is the compassion and affirmation of our group of misfit heroes that allows him to overcome it. As Laozi says in Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching**:

Compassion wins the battle

and holds the fort

it is the bulwark set

around those heaven helps.

In doing so, Thunderbolts* avoids the obvious pitfall of suggesting that a hug can cure depression, by showing that Bob is not healed, but healing. As in Burnout, healing is portrayed as a process rather than a state, a journey rather than a destination.

The other theme woven through Thunderbolts* is redemption, playing the minor key to compassion’s major one. Each of our heroes has done wrongs in the past, but avoid being defined by these by redeeming themselves through their actions. As a form of social rather than individual forgiveness, redemption is a natural companion to the movie’s use of compassion. Yet the almost unconditional way in which it is deployed is possibly so far removed from daily reality as to test our willing suspension of disbelief. At a time when anyone can be dogpiled for a social media post from decades past, deported or arrested for protesting genocide, or imprisoned for possessing minor narcotics, the suggestion that we would be allowed to move beyond a past with as many actual skeletons as some of our heroes’ seems more fanciful than spacetime bending powers from a bottle. Nonetheless, proclaiming that redemption is possible remains worthwhile.

Whether Thunderbolts* can redeem the MCU remains to be seen, but as a surprising combination of carefully choreographed action spectacle and meditation on trauma and mental health, it is certainly worth watching.

Notes & Suggestions

• *I still haven’t forgiven Marvel for how it spectacularly botched Wanda’s story arc in Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. What. A. Waste.
• **This is the fifth verse in Chapter 67 from the excellent version of the Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

Posts will be cross-posted to my Mastodon feed, so feel free to leave a comment there. Any feedback or response is much appreciated. You can also subscribe to receive future blogs via email using the ‘Subscribe’ button at the bottom of the homepage, or by adding this blog to an RSS feed.

How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative #cyberpunk #solarpunk #superheroes

Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism

Warning – contains spoilers

What happens after the revolution? It is a question that is somewhat of a liability for the Left, with a tradition of unsatisfyingly vague answers tracing back all the way to Marx’ (in)famous quip that his job wasn’t to write cookbooks for the post-revolutionary society. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to see this question taken up as the central theme of a series in, of all places, the Marvel universe.

Loki season 2 picks up from the end of Loki season 1, where we saw ‘He Who Remains’ killed at the hand of Sylvie (implausibly the only female Loki variant we ever see), and a sacred timeline shattering into infinite fragments. ‘Our’ Loki finds himself in an unfamiliar timeline, now one of many, and quickly discovers that HRW wasn’t lying about the universe tearing itself to shreds now that the Sacred Timeline is no more. Unbeknownst to the Powers that Were at the TVA, they had a ‘Temporal Loom’ in the basement which had the job of keeping the known universe together. Unable to cope with the manifold new timelines, it is in danger of falling apart, taking the universes with it. It is up to Loki, assisted by like-minded TVA employees, to fix this piece of pseudoscientific technobabble and keep the universe together.

Compared to season 1, the surface level plot of Season 2 is less compelling. The Temporal Loom is conceptually unconvincing, and like most other series dabbling in multiversal physics, one shouldn’t scrutinise the (temporal) logic too closely lest it falls apart faster than you can say ‘event horizon’. Cinematographically Season 2 also leans less into the ‘70s bureaucratic vibes of the first season, instead confining the action mostly to the slightly odd maintenance department and a Star Trek-esque control centre.

Just like season 1, however, Loki season 2 contends with themes more interesting than its unconvincing plot. Season 1 wanted to make us think about the balance between individual freedom and the greater good. Season 2 harkens back to that tension a bit, but shifts its main focus to what you do the day after a revolution. For revolution is what the death of HRW brings about: a complete rupture in how the universe operates, and who is in charge of it.

What season 2 wants to get across is that while revolutions may be difficult, what happens after is harder. Viewers familiar with revolutionary history will find no shortage of familiar challenges that beset the new regime at the TVA. There is the old-guard counter-revolution, led by General Dox and breakaway elements of the TVA, whose numbers for reasons of complex multidimensional physics range between 3 and infinite, but are always exactly what the plot requires. There are opportunists seeking power, represented by the double-crossing Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes. But both of these are mere distractions to the biggest challenge: how to make sure that after the rupture, society (in this case reality as represented by the Temporal Loom) doesn’t fail to reproduce itself.

With reality falling apart around him, the dilemma Loki is faced with is that, if the new order cannot sustain itself, it is better to put the old order back in place, or to let the whole thing burn down and see what rises from the ashes. Loki’s allies at the new TVA, as well as latterly HRW, represent the former view, whereas the latter is represented by Sylvie taking a clear “it is better to die free than live enslaved” line. Caught between these two poles, Loki desperately tries to find a third option that would make the new order viable, but without putting the TVA back in charge or purging all realities but one.

In dealing with this question of whether it is better to have freedom even if it leads to chaos and death, or accept control and sacrifice for the greater good, Loki treats both sides thoughtfully and with sympathy. It would have been so easy to cast Sylvie as the fanatical revolutionary, willing to sacrifice everyone on the alter of ideological purity. Instead, the series shows how for someone like Sylvie, who has suffered enormously at the hands of the old order, it is better to let it all burn down and just see if something will rise from the ashes. For a good part of the season, her position seems more plausible than Loki’s, who is now cast as the reformer desperately trying to salvage elements of the old order to give the new order a fighting chance, but with very limited success.

The season finale resolves the tension through two surprising twists that make for a remarkably satisfying ending. First, after making the entire show a quest for a fix to the Temporal Loom, we discover that regardless of the efforts made, the Loom cannot be fixed because HRW designed it to fail. Turns out his prophecies were less about omniscience and more about his own handiwork. In a move whose logic echoes that of ruling elites throughout time and space, HRW designed the Loom to be a spacetime boobytrap precisely to defeat a revolution like the one Sylvie and Loki accomplished. It turns out the whole search for a version of HRW who might put matters right was a red herring all along.

Yet when all seems lost, it turns out that the way forward is not a technical fix, or even a compromise with the old order. Instead, we see Loki realise that he himself can take the place of the Loom and embrace his facet of the God of Stories, weaving the strands of all the realities together to keep them alive. Downside for Loki: he needs to sit on a multidimensional throne for, most likely, eternity, to keep the show on the road. The symbolism here is obvious: the alternative to either burning it all down, or putting the old ruling class back in charge, is for the revolutionaries (i.e., all of us) to do the constant work to keep the new society alive. Because Loki’s solution is not a single act, but a commitment to actively sustain the new order for eternity. Of course, a real post-revolutionary situation would not have such a singularly neat (if cosmic) solution. But that doesn’t diminish the message that we can have our better world, provided we are prepared to build it every single day after the revolution comes.

Notes & suggestions

• The theme of permanent struggle is also excellently portrayed in Paul Anderson’s One Battle After Another.
• Hannah Proctor’s Burnout is a more introspective account of the emotional toll that permanetn struggle, like Sylvie’s, takes on aspiring revolutionaries.
• Vincent Bevin’s If We Burn is a very good overview of (quasi-)revolutionary movements in recent years that were more in line with Sylvie’s approach of burning the old world down without worrying about what might come after.
• Ursula K. le Guin deals with the question of what makes a good revolution and how it is then sustained both in The Dispossessed and the related The Day before the Revolution.

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