“I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, Mr. Stark—please….”
On May 2, 2018, I watched Spiderman die. I knew he wasn’t really a goner. For one thing, it was a movie. For another, he was one of so many Marvel characters suddenly crumbling to dust at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Fans all knew Disney wasn’t about to destroy half their Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) franchises.
But I still cried and clutched the friend sitting beside me. We both gasped, I think, as mothers— the scene plays up his youth.
It was my fortieth birthday. But I wasn’t just scared by the scene as a mother—and I wasn’t just thinking about mortality because I was getting older. Six days earlier, I had received a cancer diagnosis. (Worst. Gift. EVER). I was still reeling.
I didn’t want to go.
I’m thinking about this now because Avengers: Infinity War (2018) is now five years old. The second part of this two-film finale-- Avengers: Endgame (2019)— begins just after Infinity War left off—in 2018—and then rapidly jumps five years into the future. So, technically, most of the Marvel films made since then have taken place sometime in 2023 or later.
Last week, we finally caught up. On the timeline of our world, five years have passed since 2018.
This week, I turned forty-five.
**
Time is a slippery thing. Art and religion grant us new ways to see it. Yosef H. Yerushalmi writes that in early Jewish texts, “The rabbis seem to play with Time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will.”
I’ve always loved this image and longed for that power. I imagine the ridges of an accordion, their sharp pleats shifting apart, then together, like a fold in space-time.
Playing with time is the point of Avengers: Endgame. After the devastating end of Infinity War, the remaining Avengers go on a “time heist” to find the infinity stones and use them to bring back their lost comrades, along with half of the population of the entire universe, all disappeared at the same moment due to the titan Thanos’s extreme “solution” to the environmental challenges of overpopulation genocide.
In doing so, they revisit key moments from their pasts, and even earlier. (Somehow they don’t trigger any grandfather paradoxes, despite Tony Stark’s meeting with his own father). They stand on the margins of their own stories, watching their younger selves stumble past, fighting, joking, living.
The Hulk is so deeply embarrassed by his 2012-era rage levels, that, when told he has to act more like his past self, he half-heartedly crushes a car. “Hulk. Smash,” he mumbles quietly.
If I could revisit my own history, it would not restore half the population of the cosmos. No grand destiny. I’m just a middle-aged lady who really likes to write and teach and listen to the new Ed Sheeran album. But years ago, when my daughter learned a big new word—nostalgia—she told me, “Mommy, you must have a nostalgia headache!”
She’s not wrong. I have an unnaturally vivid memory. My memories flood my brain so easily, overlaid on the world around me like a Snapchat filter. Perhaps this is why I have always been preoccupied with matters of memory.
Last week on Twitter, Marvel fans were remembering too. There’s a lot of nostalgia for Infinity War and Endgame—and all the films of the “Infinity Saga”—because more recently, the MCU has struggled to find a coherent narrative. (Of course, those films also look like a coherent narrative to us now because we’ve seen the ending).
I’m not here for that niche fandom debate (I have actually liked many recent Marvel films, and only loathed one of them). But discontent breeds nostalgia, and last week on Twitter, Marvel fans were reliving their memories of going to theaters to see Endgame in 2019. It still tops the list of biggest opening weekends of all time.
They fondly remembered how the entire crowd cheered each time a returning hero made their grand entrance at the film’s climax. I was one of them, and it was something. I’ve been to a lot of opening weekend films, and I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.
It also changed popular culture. “Marvel's formula for success that gravitates toward appealing to the audience's child-like nostalgia and crafting its own universe is now being experimented with by the industry as a whole,” writes Joe Wilkes.
We are not the first people to wonder if we are living in the end times—but I think the Endgame nostalgia is also about the global trauma of the last few years: the pandemic, anti-democratic political instability, wars expanding as the height of COVID-19 receded. We desperately want it all to mean something. To not all crumble to ashes.
Marvel has always been a perfect fit for Disney because no matter how dark and complex its universe gets, it still has heroes—and it still holds promises of redemption.
When we watched those films in 2018 and 2019, could any of us picture the world of 2023? What would it be like for us to slide straight from 2018 to 2023, as if time had folded?
**
The same day that I was re-watching clips of audience reactions to Endgame, acclaimed artist and educator Jacqueline Nicholls visited Lehigh. She presented her work from drawyomi, a project where she made art as part of her daily study of Talmud, every day for over seven and a half years.
A pop up exhibit of Jacqueline Nicholls’ work at Lehigh. April 27, 2023.
I’ll spare you the long lecture. In sum, the Talmud is a lengthy, early first millennium compendium of Jewish “law and lore,” as she put it, with the oldest debates at the center of the page and layers of medieval commentary added on as you move outward towards the edge. Some of the ideas within it— and some aspects of the rabbinic processes that formed it—precede the destruction of the second temple in Judea in 70 CE, but the cataclysmic ritual and political upheavals of Judean/Jewish life in the first two centuries catalyzed its collection, and most of its material is from after that moment.
In other words, it is informed by trauma.
(For more on Talmud, read this book).
So many parts of the Talmud are about a temple that was no longer there. The page was/is/becomes a portal to sacredness—which Nicholls evokes in the collage used on the event flyer.
Her lecture made me think about time and contingency. “The Talmud isn’t supposed to exist,” she said. Yet it is one of the foundational texts for what we call “Judaism.” Before that, “the Temple wasn’t supposed to be destroyed.”
She used this idea to play beautifully with the audience’s expectations, to encourage us to do and be more than we are “supposed” to do and be. After all, women weren’t “supposed” to study Talmud. The assumed reader of the original text is male.
But she argued that we should all learn about the things we are not “supposed” to learn about.
**
What does “supposed to” mean? What does that mean for time? For us?
In the narrative, the Avengers’ time heist hinges on “supposed to.” Half of the universe wasn’t supposed to be destroyed by Thanos. So, they try to set it right.
In the production of the MCU—here, in our non-cinematic universe of 2023—there have been lots of “supposed to”/”not supposed to’s” since 2018. There wasn’t supposed to be a global pandemic that killed millions of people. Chadwick Boseman (who portrayed T’challa, the Black Panther) wasn’t supposed to die of colon of cancer in 2020, crushing both those close to him and those he inspired around the world.
Of course, that all depends on how we think about time, free will, destiny, and other things easily solved before breakfast.
“Supposed to” brings us into the realm of theodicy—“god’s justice”—also known as the “why do bad things happen to good people?” problem (explored by Rabbi Harold Kushner, who died last week).
Many people—myself included—hold that everything does not happen for a reason. That’s not a new idea. If you read Ecclesiastes, or the Book of Job without its hackneyed, tacked-on “happy” ending, you can see that folks have been noticing that for some time now. And that’s just in Jewish and Christian sacred texts. Look farther east and you will find plenty more nuanced takes on the presence of suffering in the world.
But “supposed to” stills lurks in my brain alongside all those transparencies of past memories that are so vivid: the magnolia blossoms on the day of my cancer diagnosis, the ghosts of dead friends walking on my street, the way sometimes, when my daughter is sleeping, I see her sleeping as a tiny baby, too, all in the same frame.
“Supposed to” whispers: You’re not entirely supposed to be here.
Millions of people survive diseases and accidents every year. Millions of people don’t. My own survival to date is a statistical outlier, but not at all unheard of: I never received a terminal diagnosis. “Just” a metastatic one. (If you don’t know me IRL, I am currently quite healthy and disease-free as far as I know, ptuey ptuey ptuey!).
But I keep thinking about the time slippage from 2018 to 2023. The soundtrack cue for the climactic final battle of Endgame is called “Portals.” It’s the best moment in any Marvel film, ever (fight me!), which is why fans love it so much.
Here’s how it looks and sounds onscreen:
The remnant of the Avengers, a tiny band, is losing their battle with Thanos, and they don’t know yet if their attempt to resurrect half the universe has worked. It’s too soon.
Down, out, but standing up for one more round against his foe, Captain America hears a crackle in his earpiece. “Cap, it’s Sam. Can you hear me? On your left.”* It’s his friend Sam Wilson (the Falcon)—who is no longer ashes, but alive.
We hear drum beats. A golden mystic portal opens like a rising sun. The Black Panther (also dust at the end of Infinity War) steps through it with Suri (his sister) and Okoye (his general).
They are there, and ready to fight.
Portals like it open all over the battlefield—and the rest of earth’s mightiest heroes, all restored to life, step across their thresholds to assemble.
Spiderman swings through one of them.
**
In Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber attributes the following saying to Rabbi Simcha Bunim:
Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words, “For my sake was the world created,” and in his left, “I am earth and ashes.”
There are a lot of sermons and articles on this saying—and on the biblical verse quoted at the end (Genesis 18:27), which is more commonly translated as “dust and ashes.” Often, they are about humility; sometimes, they are about care for the earth, or the significance of our lives, or control (or lack thereof), or how we practice piety.
But today, I am thinking about pockets as portals. Pockets are so useful. (And so rare in women’s clothing aisles). You can sew a little pouch and attach it to the garment’s seam before you close it, and voila! You have a pocket. A marvelous invention.
A pocket is a place to hold your phone, your lipstick, your tissues. A place to place your dreams where you can touch them but no one else can see.
The emotional payoff of Endgame is all about the imagined pocket universes we carry with us in our heads— the endless if/thens of the universe, the longing to simple open a gate and fall into past or future.
Our longing for loved ones near and far, long gone and not yet born, to step through those shining circles.
We are dust and ashes.
But also….
We can assemble.
***This is a direct call back to the first time the pair meets—Steve (Captain America) says “on your left” several times as he keeps lapping Sam on a morning run in Washington, DC.
** The second quote is from Genesis 18:27, in which Abraham rhetorically humbles himself before God while arguing to save some good people from the deity’s wrath: “I am afar v’efer” he says in Hebrew. Buber translates “afar” as “earth” but more translations use “dust”—as you might be able to tell, in Hebrew, the two words “afar” and “efer” resonate beautifully/share a root—“dust” or dry earth seems a better translation than “earth” to me, but this is not my wheelhouse.