(You should be up-to-date on all Marvel Cinematic Universe films before reading this)
The Guardians of the Galaxy, having accepted that they must stop Ronan the Accuser even at the cost of their own lives, throw everything they have into a suicidal assault on his unstoppable ship. With Ronan seemingly defeated, his ship plunges towards an explosive stop, leaving the bloodied and broken Guardians nowhere to go. Groot, impossibly lovable tree-man Groot, expands his form into a wooden cocoon to encompass and protect his friends. “We are Groot,” is his only explanation right before the ship strikes the ground and Groot is blown to twigs.
It’s a heartbreaking moment, powerfully played by both writer-director James Gunn and Groot-voice Vin Diesel, a scene sure to draw tears from audience members of all ages. More, Groot’s sacrifice brings home all of Guardians of the Galaxy’s themes of friendship and sacrifice.
And two minutes later it gets completely undone.
Because of course Groot lives. And, hey, you’d have to be at least sort of an asshole to not adore dancing Baby Groot, an image so immediately canonized in pop culture that famously spoiler-intense Marvel stuck it on Youtube. There are toys and dolls and cookies all devoted to Baby Groot, and there’s no arguing that it caps Guardians of the Galaxy, easily the best of the standalone Marvel films, on a note of such palpable joy that you leave the theater desperate to see the film again. There’s a solid chance that without Baby Groot, Guardians would not be the record-shattering juggernaut that it has become.
But while Groot’s resurrection works fine in the context of the film, it’s part of an alarming trend in each of the Marvel movies. Namely, Marvel is constantly killing off characters in grand, dramatic fashion, only to immediately resurrect them within that same film. Every single one of Marvel’s Phase Two films has seen a heroic character ‘die’ only to pop up again before the credits.
I can already hear people running to Twitter or the comments to complain that resurrecting ‘dead’ characters is damn near foundational to comic book narratives. This is true (to paraphrase Professor X: “Superhero heaven doesn’t have pearly gates, but a revolving door”) but I’d counter with a couple points:
1) Comic books and movies are not the same fucking thing, and treating them like they are, in fact, the same fucking thing is detrimental to both art forms.
2) Comic book resurrections are a function of ongoing narratives which span months, if not years. Characters are not killed in the beginning of an issue only to be resurrected later in the same issue. We all knew that Steve Rogers was going to survive the ‘Death of Captain America’ storyline, but Ed Brubaker told entire volumes of stories before bringing the big guy back.
And point two is really the problem here (the whole “treating movies like comic book installments” is an industry-wide problem that deserves its own article). By constantly killing off characters only to almost-immediately bring them back to life, Marvel is inadvertently training their audience to not become invested in any of the stories that they are telling.
What makes us invest in a story is stakes. Now, what makes us care about a story is the characters and the ability of the storyteller to make us empathize and connect with those characters. But in order for what happens to those characters to truly matter, the audience needs to believe that there is actual gravity to the action that occurs in the story.
This doesn’t mean that every story needs to come down to a question of life or death, of course. With some stories, the stakes are the emotional well-being of the protagonist, or the state of a relationship before the credits roll. But whether or not the story is asking if Bruce Willis will kill all the terrorists or if he’ll repair his relationship with his wife, the audience needs to believe that these are real concerns that really matter to the character. (The best blockbuster movies are the ones which combine the personal narrative with the cosmic punch-ups. There’s a reason why Spider-Man 2 still makes grown men weep a decade after its release.)
And therein lies the problem with Marvel’s whole instantaneous resurrection thing. They’ve proven again and again that their movies have no stakes. Oh, Pepper Potts fell to her death? Nah, she’s fine. Loki gets stabbed through the chest? He’s fine. Nick Fury shot through the chest half-a-dozen times and dies mid-surgery? Yes, SOMEHOW HE ALSO IS FINE.
It’s like Kevin Feige is hanging out in the editing bay with a stopwatch going, “Oh no! We’ve allowed the audience to experience actual, weighty emotion for over ten minutes! Quick, make sure the Tumblr people know that Loki and his cheekbones will be back!”
Marvel has succeeded where DC had floundered because the Marvel Cinematic Universe is based around colorful optimism and a boundless sense of fun. The movies have a hangout-vibe, where even when little action is happening you can just enjoy seeing these actors and characters bounce off of each other. That’s a great (and clearly profitable) approach but increasingly I think that Marvel’s dedication to preserving that atmosphere of pleasantness is stunting the quality levels of their films. Even as they get better and better at making movies (and there is little arguing that Phase Two has been exponentially stronger in all aspects than all non-Avengers parts of Phase One) there’s a sense that the films will always stop at “a great Marvel movie” instead of “a great movie”.
Off the top of my head, I can think of three heroic characters who died and stayed dead within their respective movies: Bucky in Captain America: The First Avenger, Coulson in The Avengers and Frigga in Thor: The Dark World. And, shocker, each of these deaths and their immediate fallouts represent the strongest, most affecting moments in the entire Cinematic Universe. Cap mourning Bucky with Sharon Carter, Fury’s “I still believe in heroes” speech, Asgard performing funeral rites, these are the scenes which most powerfully speak to the humanity of the godlike (or straight-up godly) beings whose exploits so captivate us. Those are the scenes in which these apparent trifles of CGI and green screens truly seem to matter.
I know Joss Whedon understands how important death is as a dramatic function of narrative. He’s Joss Goddamn Whedon. He’s dropped more bodies than Ol’ Painless, and has pushed more than one of his shows to the point of emotional torture porn in his pursuit of challenging his audiences and earning every bit of pathos that can be wrung from stories of vampires and space cowboys. Even if it means pissing off millions of people, Whedon can always be counted on to make the tough choices.
And I know James Gunn gets it. In films like Slither and Super, he showed a marked willingness to make sure the audience understood the emotional and physical dangers of the spastic-toned universes his stories were set in. With Super, he allowed the audience to indulge in the fascist power fantasy of superheroes before bludgeoning them with the true cost of such a fantasy. Super is an often ugly film, but it reaches for a place of grace and catharsis that is somewhat staggering and is only reachable because Gunn makes sure you understand what it costs.
So, as much as we all love Baby Groot, I think Guardians of the Galaxy would be a stronger film if they had let Groot stay dead. Hell, keep the bit with Rocket carrying a single stick in a pot and let the audience leave the theater buzzing with the hope that Groot might come back.
I love the Marvel films, but I’m tired of being coddled and soothed by their films. By neutering death, they come closer and closer to sapping away the very humanity that so defined the Marvel bench from the impossibly-perfect pantheon of DC characters. Marvel’s ace in the hole has always been the real-world aspect of their heroes and universe, their sense that the gods and monsters have as many hang-ups and problems as the rest of us.
If Marvel and the filmmakers working under its banner want to keep that humanity alive, they need to embrace it in all aspects, not just the ones that pacify the rods and cones before everyone flits away to something else.