Why the MCU Is Cool: Bringing the Funny

[This is the third post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


I want to take a brief tangent from my planned outline to discuss something while it’s fresh in my mind.  Just as this whole series was originally inspired by one of the MCU movies,¹, this post is inspired by our recent viewing of Ant-Man and the Wasp.  This movie, like the first Ant-Man movie, exceeded my expectations mainly because I had very low expectations.  And the reasons for that are actually fairly complex.

The thing about Ant-Man is, while he’s actually an original member of the Avengers, Ant-Man the superhero isn’t actually very important to their story.  And part of that is because Ant-Man is a fundamentally stupid superhero: he has weird powers that don’t make sense when put together as anything other than a plot device, a dorky costume, and a lame name on top of everything else.  In many ways, what Aquaman is to the Justice League, Ant-Man is to the Avengers.  So why is he even there?

To understand this, we need to understand how superhero groups work (I already touched on this last installment, but now let’s expand on it properly).  There are two basic types of superhero groups: the “event” group, and the “collective” group.  (To be fair, there’s also sort of a third type—the “non-group”²—but that’s really just a variation on the collective.)  An event group is a group that’s invented lock, stock, and barrel, specifically for an event ... the event almost always being issue #1 of the group’s new comic series.  The quintessential event group is probably the Fantastic Four, although certainly the X-Men are a pretty popular one as well.³  On the DC side, event groups are a little more rare; the Legion of Superheroes is probably the most famous, and even they are not that well-known.  The Watchmen got a high-profile movie,⁴ but they’re only an event group because DC refused to let Alan Moore use the collected heroes he had in mind, since he planned to do terrible things to nearly all of them.  Other DC event groups, such as the Doom Patrol and the Metal Men, are fairly obscure.  Contrasting with the event groups are the collective groups, which consist of pre-existing heroes gathered together into to form a new series.  If you loved Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman on their own, you’ll love them even more together as the Justice League!  If you thought Iron Man and Thor and the incredible Hulk were amazing individually, you’ll be blown away by the amazing Avengers!

These two types of groups are created for very different reasons.  An event group is the shotgun of superhero creation:  If you invent one superhero, and nobody likes them, you’ve failed.  If you invent a whole mess of superheroes, chances are that at least one of them will succeed, right?  Contrariwise, collective groups are about two things: crossover appeal, and reflected glory.  Crossover appeal means taking the Superman fans and trying to turn them into Batman fans, or Wonder Woman fans, assuming they’re not already.  And it definitely works: if it weren’t for Justice League, I’d know practically nothing about Superman, and very little about Green Lantern; for folks like Black Canary or the Atom, I’d likely never have heard of them at all.  Reflected glory means that the creators of the group hope that you’ll come for the big names, and learn to love the guys you never heard of before.  I mentioned last week that the Martian Manhunter fulfills this role in the Justice League: although he had been around for 5 years before the League was formed, and was probably the strongest superhero of the group—he has all Superman’s powers, plus shapeshifting and telepathy—he wasn’t very popular.  Most of those fans who bought JLA issue #1 were probably seeing him for the first time.  Undoubtedly the creators were hoping the Manhunter would get some of that sweet, sweet reflected glory from Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and the rest.

Which brings us full circle back around to Ant-Man.  Ant-Man was introduced in 1962, a time when any ol’ moronic idea could be a superhero.⁵  The following year he acquired a sidekick, the Wasp.  As sidekicks go, Wasp was very unusual: instead of a young boy who idolizes the older, wiser superhero (e.g. Robin, Bucky), Wasp (a.k.a. Janet van Dyne) is a beautiful lab assistant and later fashion designer.  She is independently wealthy and generally independent; though she initially suffers from some sadly-period-appropriate personality traits (such as desperately chasing after Ant-Man in a one-sided romance), she quickly becomes a feminist icon, including campaigns to introduce more women to the Avengers and even becoming the second-longest-reigning team leader.  Even though she’s supposed to be Ant-Man’s sidekick, she is in fact infinitely cooler than he is.

And poor Ant-Man flounders in the Avengers (much as Martian Manhunter does in the JLA).  The writers just don’t know what to do with him ... nearly immediately they scrap the whole ant motif and make him Giant-Man, then they make him stuck at giant-size and call him Goliath, and eventually he ends up with the same powers as Wasp and dons the moniker of Yellowjacket.  Yes, that’s right: here’s a superhero whose ultimate form is to become a knock-off of his own “sidekick.”

So, despite the fact that Ant-Man is a founding member of the Avengers, I was never that surprised to hear that he wouldn’t be part of the team in the MCU ... except that Ant-Man’s secret identity Hank Pym is actually crucial to the story of the Avengers.  Pym is the calm, rational genius to Tony Stark’s brash, impulsive genius.  Pym probably designs more of the Avengers’ tech than Stark does, and it’s Pym who invents Ultron, who goes on to become one of the team’s greatest foes.  So shortly after my entire lack of surprise at hearing there would be no Ant-Man in the Avengers, I started wondering how they would manage having no Hank Pym in the Avengers.

But they managed it perfectly well.  All the tech gets desgined by Stark—who is, after all, a weapons designer—and Stark invents Ultron.  When they need a counter-genius, they just use Bruce Banner, which is actually very smart (Banner is almost criminially overlooked in the vast majority of Avengers comic stories).  Poof: no Pym required.  So at that point I naturally assumed we’d never see Ant-Man appear in any MCU property—not even a brief appearance in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.—and the thought that we could get a major motion picture which featured Ant-Man ... why the very idea was pure madness.

And then it happened.

And it wasn’t even Pym!  They went with the Scott Lang version, which makes absolutely no sense, because the Scott Lang Ant-Man is twice as useless as the Hank Pym Ant-Man because at least Pym is an interesting genius.  But somehow they made it work.  Well, I say “somehow,” but obviously Ant-Man works for the same reason that Iron Man works: they found the perfect actor to portray him.  I never cared much for Iron Man, but Robert Downey Jr makes me love that character.  Scott Lang is boring and Ant-Man is stupid, but how can you dislike Paul Rudd?  I don’t think it’s humanly possible.

Which brings us to why Ant-Man and the Wasp ultimately works: humor.  All of the MCU movies have utilized humor to some extent or other: with Joss Whedon at the helm, that was a foregone conclusion.  Whedon knows that making shows like Buffy and Firefly funny—not just the occasional mild chuckle, but rip-roaringly funny, on a semi-regular basis—somehow makes the emotional moments even more emotional.  There’s something about having laughed along with characters that makes you cry even harder when they hit those inevitable crushing defeats.  Nearly every MCU property has a couple of those moments in it: Hulk’s hilarious first encounter with Loki, the obligatory and highly comical clash of egos when Iron Man first meets Dr. Strange, Agent Coulson’s obsession with his car, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage exchanging origin stories on their first date (“Accident.  You?”  “Experiment.”).  But lately we’ve been getting movies which are pretty much centered on the humor.  Ant-Man gave us that, and Thor: Ragnarok doubled down on it.  Ant-Man and the Wasp doesn’t quite reach the levels that the latter film achieved—Yes Man is no What We Do in the Shadows, after all—but note that, just like Taika Waititi, Peyton Reed is primarily known for directing comedies.⁶  And the MCU is capitalizing on the comedic talents of these directors (and actors) in quite literal fashion: Ant-Man and the Wasp has already passed half a billion dollars on an estimated budget of less than $200 million, so the capital in this case is quite real.

And, let’s face it: humor is the only saving grace for a superhero who is still, fundamentally, stupid.  When your main character shrinks down and talks to ants, you better embrace that and not be afraid to make fun of yourself.  I’m a bit disappointed in the role they’ve relegated Hank Pym to (and Janet van Dyne, for that matter), but I can’t ignore the brilliance they’ve shown in turning what I assumed would be the worst idea for a superhero movie ever, and actually getting me to watch two of them.  And I wouldn’t say no to a third, either ...

So humor is important.  But it’s not the end of the story either.

⇐ The Heroes I Like

__________

1 That would be Captain America: Civil War.

2 Such as the Defenders or the Suicide Squad.

3 The original X-Men were an event group.  Later incarnations did a little of both; the more famous X-Men group from the 70s consists of 4 previously extant heroes (though most were fairly obscure), and 4 newly-created ones.

4 And an excellent one at that.

5 Have I mentioned B’wana Beast?

6 Of course, Guardians of the Galaxy is probably the most consistently funny series in the MCU, but James Gunn is whole different animal.