Welcome again to We Have Always Live the Kraken, a pop culture blog transmitted directly to you from the belly of the beast. Here in the Notes we’ll show you this month’s posting schedule, but first here are some thoughts.
Now that the blight known as April is past us we can move to the magnificence known as May.
Man, who knew Barney crossed with Homer Simpson could be so threatening.
It has been ten years since the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and my, what a journey it has been. I have my fair share of issues with the MCU, but that is because its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness–it is consistent as hell. Outside of the heyday of Pixar there has never really been a run of films like this that have been this consistently, well, at the very least not bad (except for Thor 2, which had many, many issues). The problem is that this consistency leads these films to have a remarkably similar tone, look, and sound, and especially in Phase One and Two the same feel for both writing and direction. This makes it really hard for any of the films to stand out, and creates this weird, messed up bell curve of basically one bad movie, a shit ton of average to good movies, and a very few very good to great movies. This leads to many of these movies, especially Captain America 2: Winter Soldier, to be quite overrated. Combine this with the fact that these films are not nearly as interconnected as they pretend to be, and the MCU is quite frustrating.
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that something like this has never been done before in film, and for that Marvel and Kevin Feige must be lauded, as all of this has led to Avengers: Infinity War, which despite the fact that even over the course of ten years the MCU has failed miserably at setting up Thanos as a viable villain, works wondrously, and manages to do what I thought was impossible–make a legitimately moving and good superhero team-up movie. Such a thing is just so difficult, with so many stars to juggle and giant budgets to manage, but the Russo Brothers and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely pull off a nearly impossible job, even if the failures of the last movies drag things down at times. This is a thrilling and remarkably poignant movie that is a perfect set-up for the final uh, phases, of Phase 3, and set up a Phase 4 that will hopefully be much more willing to go in more experimental directions (hello Eternals). So as much as I have criticized the MCU in the past, it only seems fair that I offer some praise when it does something really, really well.
David
From the depths of the Kraken, here is what we are bringing you this month.
Contributor Henrik M. offers the next in his series about Criminally Underrated Cartoons. This time he is looking at MTV’s Downtown.
Catch of the Week Month:
Each and every week the residents here in the Kraken will offer one recommendation for the week that we think you all would enjoy. It might be a movie. It might be a book. Who knows? This is your… Catch of the Week Month.
David: Hmm, let’s see… for this glorious May, I offer you well, The Infinity Gauntlet. It only seems appropriate that after speaking about Infinity War I talk about the comic that inspires it all. This event is, well, bonkers and really shows how much farther you can go in comics than movies, especially when using characters that were made in the ’70s under the influence of all the psychedelic drugs. If you are worried about spoilers for either Infinity War or the yet to be named sequel, don’t, because other than there being an Infinity Gauntlet and Thanos and the superheroes you know (or likely in this case don’t know), the story goes in a direction that the films will definitely not be going (with a few key exceptions), so read up and enjoy a bit of 1990s comic mayhem.
Kyu: This month I’m recommending one of the best books I’ve read in quite some time, a stunning debut collection of short stories by Carmen Maria Machado. Her Body and Other Parties collects eight unusual tales of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, each taking a genius concept and fulfilling it with gorgeous, perfectly commanded prose that really brings home the emotional realities of her characters in some very unreal situations.
In “The Husband Stitch,” fairy tales and scary stories inform the life and secrets of a wife and mother. The protagonist of “Inventory” begins listing people she’s known, and as it becomes clear what they all have in common, the backdrop of a deadly plague creeping across the country brings unbearable poignancy to her accounting. “Mothers” and “The Resident” both deal with unreliable narrators, the former about a possibly imagined idyllic family situation, the latter about a possibly imagined horrifying social situation; both pulse lyrically with discomfort and unease. As a fan of Law and Order: SVU, my favorite has to be “Especially Heinous,” which offers short plot descriptions of every episode in the show’s first 12 seasons–descriptions that grow increasingly surreal, gradually revealing an overarching narrative that sincerely engages with the psychological results of living in a TV universe defined by injustice, social dysfunction, and sexual violence. Rounding out the collection are a trio of oddities exploring fashion, food, and pornography from a unique vantage point. In the incredibly, heartbreakingly sad “Real Women Have Bodies,” a dress shop employee tries to pursue love in a world where women mysteriously turn transparent and then invisible. The protagonist of a very funhouse mirror “Eight Bites” follows social pressure from her family into having an extreme version of bariatric surgery. And in “Difficult at Parties,” a recovering rape victim discovers a way to move forward through watching pornographic videos.
What stands out in this collection is not just the ideas, not just the way Machado uses inventive scenarios to get at the heart of love, loss, fear, desire, and pain, not just the way her prose is not limited to one style but encompasses a variety of voices which she calls up to give what amounts to the key testimony in the trial of their lives. It’s also the thrillingly unapologetic way Machado weaves queerness into each tale. Almost every story’s protagonist is a gay or bisexual woman whose sexuality is allowed to exist without comment, justification, fetishization, or exploitation. Who each loves is simply a part of her story, of how her body feels, what it wants, what it must have and fears to lose. It’s a sad state of affairs that this makes this collection feel extra special, but Her Body and Other Parties would be worth reading even if such things were commonplace in genre literature. It’s just that good. I can’t wait to see what Machado brings us next.
That’s it for this month. The blight has passed for now; it is time for us all to mourn and then prepare for what is to come, such as the Kraken’s imminent return to the Unspeakable Horrors bowling league (no one tell him that he isn’t very good).