Crisis of meaning in superhero multiverse movies! Alan Rickman silly poems!
An inquiry years in the making—and ephemeral poems texted by my kids
Very excited about this one!
Last September I participated in a seminar at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington called “Multiverses and Alternate Realities: Other Worlds in Film.” The latest in the annual “Faith, Film, Philosophy” series from Gonzaga’s Faith and Reason Institute, the seminar looked at the extraordinary ascendancy in recent years of multiverse and alternate-reality storytelling in popular culture—an expansive phenomenon embracing everything from the 2023 Oscar favorite Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Marvel Cinematic Universe juggernaut to TV series like Rick & Morty, The Umbrella Academy, and Stranger Things, among many other examples. I called my presentation “Crisis of Meaning on Infinite Earths: The multiverse and superhero movies.”
The seminar was a blast, and my presentation seemed to be well received, but I was disappointed. The sad fact is that I was overwhelmed with starting two new jobs in a brand-new field (teaching), and my preparation was far from complete. I had plenty of material—too much, in fact, and I found myself triaging what to omit on the fly, which is never great.
Well, I’m no longer overwhelmed, and I’ve been working on reshaping the material for online presentation. It’s still not quite finished, but with the Deadpool & Wolverine movie opening at the end of the month, there will never be a better time! I’ll be posting new installments over the next couple of weeks at my other Substack, All Things SDG.
From “Crisis of meaning, part 1” at All Things SDG
A third kind of objection [to the multiverse idea] is raised by a certain type of moralist who considers the multiverse concept to be debilitating to moral thinking, or even antithetical to morality itself. For example, if everything that can happen does happen—say, if Hitler always loses and always wins an infinite number of times in an infinite number of worlds—then it might understandably be wondered just how pressing anyone’s duty really is to suffer and sacrifice in the struggle against the Nazis.
This last concern is, of course, the one most directly relevant to multiverse storytelling: Is it possible to tell meaningful stories in a multiverse premise? Or does the multiverse idea tend toward nihilism? While this question is obviously much bigger than superhero storytelling (in particular, Everything Everywhere All at Once confronted this question head-on), in this series of essays I’m primarily concerned with the two biggest venues of ongoing multiverse storytelling, the MCU and the Spider-Verse.
P.S. Also at All Things SDG: Reflections on the curious value of ephemeral art, and a series of silly poems about Alan Rickman my kids recently wrote via family group message:
From “Silly odes to Alan Rickman in Sense and Sensibility and Die Hard”
Alan Rickman ride a horse
Alan Rickman ride real fast
Alan Rickman read a verse
Alan Rickman shoot the glassWe watch a lot of movies as a family at Huis Greydanus, or, as we’ve taken to calling our home, the Grey Havens. Recently we watched Ang Lee’s lovely 1995 Sense and Sensibility, with Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon, the underdog suitor for Kate Winslet’s Marianne. Afterward, my daughter Anna dashed off the above bit of doggerel in a family group message thread.
(Boilerplate clarification: The Decent Films Substack, which you’re reading now, will keep you up to date on all my movie writing. All Things SDG covers everything I write, movie-related and otherwise. If you subscribe to All Things SDG, you probably don’t need a subscription here as well. On the other hand, if you only want the movie stuff, this is the place to be.) As always, thanks for reading!