The Problem with Fanservice, Clichés, and Politics
Or: how I fell out of love with Marvel movies
A Quick Autobiographical Note: Marvel and I
So, Deadpool & Wolverine was pretty great, uh?
Yeah, I know. I’m late to the party. It has been three months since its release, which in internet time means it might as well be an obscure movie from the 1980s. But I was procrastinating, taking my time thinking on why exactly this film felt different from most superhero movies in the last few years. My conclusion: the fanservice felt right.
Marvel was to me what Harry Potter was to kids in the early 2000s. I was five when Robert Downey Jr. rolled down the desert to the sound of AC/DC, and nearing adulthood by the time Tony Stark’s funeral was held. During those years, I would often get on the internet, watch the trailers, and read the theories about them. Since every character, every object, every storyline had a comic counterpart, each of these opened up new narrative possibilities, like an ever-expanding fractal. Those movies were watched, so to speak, in three dimensions: not just linearly, following the narrative of each installment, but sideways, into the shared universe, and forwards, towards the future.
Along the way, however, something started to change. Around what they called Phase Three (2016-2019) the MCU1 was starting to lose its breath. The momentum of the heavy-hitter Avenger movies carried it across the finishing line; but in the following years, something began to feel… off.
For the sake of intellectual honesty, the only movies I’ve seen from the dreaded Phase Four were Spider-Man: No Way Home, Ant-Man: Quantumania, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But I’ll trust the internet on this one and suppose the others were not much better. This post is my attempt to explain what felt weird to me in these movies — and to do that I must take a step back and present my theory on the real problem of fanservice, clichés, and politics.
This article is not about how modern legacy media has become oversaturated, unoriginal, or “woke”. Whether this is the case is immaterial to my point. I am looking for a formal cause, rather than an efficient one; not on how bad stories come to be, but why do we consider these things bad storytelling in the first place.
Clichés
Let’s start with good’old clichés: artistic elements that “have been done a thousand times”, to the point where they are readily recognized by the public as such, and lose most of their narrative power. There is a lot of discourse among writers on clichés (and their two older, more respectable brothers, tropes and archetypes). A good part of it, in my experience, boils down to: given the sheer amount of fiction produced, every idea has already been done. But it’s okay, because clichés are not bad, as long as you put your own original spin on them.
Which is weird advice. It’s okay not to be original, as long as you do it in an original way — that is, it’s okay not to be original, as long as you are original. If every writer tries to “put their own original spin” on an idea, given the sheer amount of fiction produced, you will have two writers putting the same spin on an idea (evil Superman, cof cof). Not only has every idea been done: every variation and subversion has been done.
But we are getting distracted. The point is: why? Why do we, as authors, do not want our readers to look at a scene and think: “I’ve seen this before”? Are we simply egotistical narcissists who want to be recognized by our brilliance and creative power?
Obviously, humans like new things. We do not want to read the same story again and again, the same way we do not want to eat microwave lasagna every day. It gets old fast. However, there is a deeper reason.
How a (Good) Story Works
In his An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis defines what he considers to be a good reader and good reading, in order to then, by corollary, define what a good book is — a good book is one which invites a good reading, a bad book is one which makes a good reading hard or impossible.
Lewis’s literate reader receives the story, instead of trying to use it. His imagination is active, but obedient to the pattern the writer has put before him. The act of reading, while it is happening, is an end in itself. “That way, it may be compared (upward) with religious contemplation or (downward) with a game.”2
Since the good book — and the good movie, play, and music — is, while it is being read, an end in itself, anything that takes the reader out of it is working against the greater artistic experience.3 There will come, of course, a time for reflection: to think of the inner mechanics of the book, separated from its whole, or to reflect about the real world. But that time is after the reading is done.
Back to Clichés
The problem with clichés is not, strictly speaking, that they are predictable. It is that they take the reader out of the story.
When the audience sees a horror movie in which a girl tries to escape a killer, only for her to trip and start crawling on the floor instead of getting up, they stop thinking of that particular girl and that particular killer. Instead, they think of every other slasher they have seen in their life. They see the scene not as a scene, as a “real” event, but as worn-out machinery.
In that respect, clichés are like watching a magic show knowing how the trick is done. Instead of focusing on what they are seeing, audiences are led to focus on how what they are seeing works. It creates a mental barrier between public and work.
Something similar, I would argue, happens with politics in movies.
Politics
I use politics here as a catch-all term for when the artist's real-world beliefs become obvious through his work (even those beliefs that are not political): I include here both the long rant about the calling of the revolution in Capitães da Areia and the Christian eschatology in Lewis’s The Last Battle.
Behind such passages often seems to be the belief that a work of art should in some way reflect, comment on, or advance a change in the real world4. There are two problems with that. The first is that it gives the poet the job that rightfully belongs to philosophy and religion — the job of moral instruction. The second, even worse, is that the idea that people can or should only read stories that are, in some level, about themselves in particular, is patently solipsistic, and diminishes one of the greatest powers of literature:
This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. They are not, any more than our personal experiences, all equally worth having. Some, as we say, ‘interest’ us more than others. The causes of this interest are naturally extremely various and differ from one man to another; it may be the typical (and we say ‘How true!’) or the abnormal (and we say ‘How strange!’); it may be the beautiful, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, the exhilarating, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
“An Experiment in Criticism”, C. S. Lewis, “Epilogue”.
Once again, I digress. This is not a discussion on how authors end up preaching to their audiences, but on why do these scenes feel preachy. On a craft level, my answer is the same as above: it takes our attention out of the story, and puts it somewhere else — on a situation or an idea of the real world — taking away from the here and now where art takes place.
Which brings us back to the dark film theater room, where we began…
Fanservice
Fanservice is a moment or scene put into a fictional work that is meant to please the audience in some way, despite adding little direct value to the story. The most easily identifiable examples would be gratuitous nudity and sexuality in movies.
But fanservice is not limited to the erotic. Easter eggs and cameos often serve the same purpose: despite having little effect on the narrative, seeing a familiar element onscreen gives audiences a short-term satisfaction boost.
Of course, making your audience enjoy your work is, you know, a good thing. And just like clichés and politics, it may be hard to determine which instances of it are warranted or not. But, just like clichés and politics, I would argue fanservice is almost always bad when it is recognized by the audience as being such.
Marvel, of course, has weaponized fanservice and turned it into an exact science. Countless easter eggs, the late Stan Lee’s cameos, the moments paralleled to the comics. Anytime a viewer recognized one of these elements, it gave them a tiny wave of satisfaction, and he could proudly poke the viewer to his side and ask “did you see it too?”
Don’t think, please, that I’m mocking: I used to be one of those people. But — and I believe this is essential — in its first years, Marvel’s fanservice was a fun optional activity, that removed nothing to the experience if it was ignored. There were many movies to watch; but anyone who put themselves through them could be expected to understand the story in its entirety.
In more recent years (though it is debatable when it really began, and I have my own rose-tinted glasses about that time), the optional became mandatory. The internet culture of dissecting Marvel movies and introducing the uninitiated to the comic book lore became so prevalent that the studio, it seems, began to expect people to know it beforehand. They started to assume you had done your homework.
The most egregious example is the Illuminati scene in the second Doctor Strange movie. Almost everything in this scene seems to have been hand-picket by committee to fulfill fan-speculation. The Illuminati are a popular concept in the comics, so let’s put them in. John Krasinski appears as Mr. Fantastic, because fans had asked for it. Sir Patrick Stewart comes back to die as Charles Xavier a third time in his career. This scene is not an easter egg or a side joke. If you have no idea what the three sentences above mean, you would think that the fifteen-minute segment in Doctor Strange is a random detour from the main plot.
The movie stops being a piece of storytelling, and becomes a kind of weird metagame. Marvel moviegoers (those who are left anyway) are not following a narrative unfold; they are playing a betting game of making predictions online and hoping these unfold onscreen. The viewer is thus constantly reminded of himself; and how can he believe this world is real when it is so flexible to his own whims?
It may be that I am simply getting old. But I feel the reason I liked Deadpool & Wolverine is that the brand of humor of the movies lends itself well to this metalinguistic Marvel has, perhaps accidentally, created. And it makes the magic work again, at least for a little while.
And the Walt Disney Company in general, but that is a story for another post…
“An Experiment in Criticism”, C. S. Lewis, Chapter Nine: “Survey”.
There is some nuance to this discussion, about which Lewis gets into more detail. For one, words by definition “take you beyond themselves”; that is what being a word means.
To be carried mentally through and beyond musical sounds into something inaudible and non-musical may be the wrong way of treating music. But to be similarly carried through and beyond words into something non-verbal and non-literary is not a wrong way of reading. It is simply reading. Otherwise we should say we were reading when we let our eyes travel over the pages of a book in an unknown language, and we should be able to read the French poets without learning French.
“An Experiment in Criticism”, C. S. Lewis, Chapter Fours: “The Reading of the Unliterary”.
Though this need not be a conscious belief, or even be present at all. C. S. Lewis, methinks, is guilty of “messaging” in his work more than once, but he has explicitly rejected that he writes in order to convey those messages.
Great article! One of your bests...