Avengers - Battle of Identities

Joss Whedon's Avenger's is a movie that both the jocks and nerds can enjoy. The jocks enjoy the mind-body defying stunts, the nerds enjoy the brilliant script.  The jocks and nerds will laugh for different jokes though.  If a jock and nerd were to sit next to each other, one of them might wonder if the other is seeing a different movie, I wouldn't be surprised if it is the nerd that is doing the wondering...

The crux of the Avengers is the personality tussles among the super heroes. The tussle between Captain America and Iron Man I think brings out the essence of what the movie is about. Captain America is a WWII hero who has been resurrected back to life. He thinks Iron Man a narcissist intent on building a personality cult. Iron Man thinks of Captain America as 'old-fashioned', obsolete and useless. They keep having verbal duels from time to time.

When Director Nick (Samuel L Jackson) tries to recruit Captain America, he isn't excited about coming on board. He a recluse who sees himself as 'Old-fashioned' and out of touch with modern life. Interestingly, Samuel L Jackson says that it is his old-fashionedness which would be valuable to the team. Among the Super heroes, Captain America appears to have little to bring to the table. For the better part of the movie, he appears confused and out of touch (you got to have some pity for a  man that had been sleeping for the better part of a century). 

In fact when Director Nick says Captain America's old-fashionism is what what he needed, I thought it was a mistake in the script, especially in a movie with 'modernized' superheroes. It is only at the end of the movie that I realized what this under-valued old-fashionism brought to the table and how it really made the Avengers a strong team. But before we can understand how old-fashionism is a solution, you have to first understand the problem with Avengers... To put it in the simplest form, Captain America's old-fashionism is the solution to the problem of Iron Man's narcissism. 

Captain America comes off a rusty man that cares too much and is always in a serious demeanour as though the whole world's weight were resting on his shoulders. Iron Man on the other hand comes off as the typical 'modern super-human man' who in many ways is still kind of a boy and needs a mom-figure to keep his act together (Gwyn Palthrow pays this mom-figure). Iron Man cares nothing for anything other than his own 'brand'. His doing cool stuff and saving people is more a celebration of narcissism than love. 

The irony is that most people, myself included, went to see Avengers to see this self-absorbed narcissistic Iron Man.  It is for a reason the movie's trailer prominently has the caustic yet 'cool' exchange between Captain America and Iron Man, where Captain America asks, "without the mask and the suit, what are you?". Iron Man coolly replies, "billionaire, inventor, genius, philanthropist, playboy".  The reason we love Iron Man is precisely because he is such a self-absorbed guy, oozing an almost god-like persona. The narcissistic Iron Man does not care much about anything but his self-image. In fact his love interest itself is portrayed with a sort of selfish nonchalance that is 'made' to look attractive. 

We live in a world where the narcissistic are more admired than the 'dull' ones who live normal lives and go about each day doing the 'right' things. A few months ago, 'Psychology Today' did a feature on raise of narcissism in the last two decades. I am not talking about celebrities like Charley Sheen or Lindsay Logan whose lives are fodder for the tabloid junkies. I am talking about you and me. In fact, Facebook's sky-high $100 billion (expected) valuation was mostly based on everyday-people's need to make little-celebrities of themselves. Here is the question - how does old-fashionism solve this problem of fickle, pointless celebrity creating narcissism? 

 The novels 'The Great Divorce' and '1984' have the similar problems too, though different manifestations. In one, people are so self-absorbed that they cannot stand each other and move away from each other. In another, people are so self-absorbed and the powerful put the weak on the ground and press their boots on their faces. The former is a democratic manifestation of the need to make oneself bigger than one can be, the latter is an autocratic manifestation. In the fragmentation of life that happens in sophisticated societies and the pressing of boots on the faces of the weak that happens in the banana republics at the other end of the world, we see this happening in real-world outside of fiction. 

In both the worlds, the problem is the one thing - self-sacrifice is not seen as a virtue. This is were Captain America comes in, back in the WWII era, self-sacrifice was seen as the chief virtue. This self-sacrifice entailed that people were willing to give up their lives for the sake of others.  In Avengers, Captain America's old fashionism rubs against the others too, in the final scene the narcissistic Iron Man does the ultimate sacrifice of risking his precious life for the sake of saving mankind. In a world that is increasingly narcissistic, unless there is a self-sacrificing Captain America to show the way, the narcissistic Iron Men (boys, actually) will be lost in themselves.

In some ways, Captain America comes close to the Christ-figure in Avengers. For Christ is the ultimate epitome of self-sacrifice. He show us that to lay down one's life for one's friend is the greatest act of love, ever. The problem with mankind is that from Facebook to I-Phone, we exhibit the propensity to change much of the novelty into things that feed into our narcissism. Not that anything is intrinsically wrong with technology, technology is good. Narcissism is really a problem of the heart. The question before us is whether we seek old-fashioned self-sacrifice over novel manifestations of narcissism. What we seek will depend really on what we admire. Do we adore the Old Rugged Cross or the shiny new Iron Man suit? Do we adore the narcissistic Robert Downey jr or the loving Jesus Christ. Most Christians would say they would chose to adore Jesus Christ, as they rightly should. But the question would be why we seem to emulate the self-loving Robert Downey jr more than the other-loving Jesus Christ.

The battle of personalities that we see in the Avengers is really a battle of  Identity in the Culture at large. Will the narcissistic boy-man win or will the self-giving (sacrificing) real Man win. The answer to this I believe lies in the question of whether you try to reflect the image of the cocky narcissistic unloving Robert Downey jr. or the image of the humble, Rock-solid sacrificially loving Jesus Christ.