Moon Knight Brings the Mindfuck to the MCU

 When I was in my freshman year of high school, a friend of mine recommended two movies: Fight Club and Memento, which were both recent movies (I started high school in 2000, and so I think both movies came out when I was in 8th grade). Fight Club's legacy is a little fraught - a movie that I interpret as a warning about toxic masculinity and misogyny and the way that consumerism threatens to unleash a tide of testosterone-fueled terror, but that inspired a lot of people to think "hey, starting a fight club sounds fun and cool!" Memento I think has had less of a lasting cultural impact, but did propel Christopher Nolan to the heights of Hollywood (I've written recently how, sadly, I think Nolan has become a filmmaker who I think puts cleverness ahead of thematic meaning).

The point, though, is that when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I'd say the stuff I was most drawn to was the "Mindfuck."

A Mindfuck is not just a story with a big twist. Indeed, I wouldn't even define it as one where the twist totally upends our sense of what we had seen - by my narrow definition, the Sixth Sense isn't exactly a Mindfuck, though it comes close. To me, the true Mindfuck is one that has us questioning the reality of what we are seeing the whole time, disoriented as the viewpoint characters are. To argue why the Sixth Sense isn't one, I'll say that the story is presented fairly straightforwardly until the big reveal in the end (I don't know how many people don't know the ending of that movie, but it's the one that cemented M. Night Shayamalan as the guy whose movies always had big twists) recontextualizes what we'd seen in the preceding two hours - but we weren't invited to be skeptical the whole time (unless we were very keen observers).

Moon Knight is Marvel's newest MCU show. After the relatively grounded and straightforward Hawkeye (perhaps their most restrained Disney Plus show yet) this throws us into a new scenario - and also one that, so far at least, shows no direct connection with the rest of the MCU. At one point, our protagonist uses a Motorolla Razor flip phone - though whether that means this is set in the past or it's just an old phone is not something I'm ready to comment on.

The key, though, is that we are seeing things from the perspective of Steven Grant (is that three Marvel Steves or have I forgotten one?) Steven is a sad, isolated Englishman living in London and apparently working as a gift shop clerk at the British Museum (I think it's the British Museum, unless it's some fictionalized version thereof - notably, The Eternals' Sersei was teaching a class there, which could tie Moon Knight into the MCU). He has problems with sleep - he wakes up in unfamiliar places, and so he's taken to chaining his ankle to his bed at night, spreading sand to see where he has stepped, and taping his door.

He also makes an effort not to fall asleep at all.

But one day, he suddenly becomes conscious somewhere in Austria or maybe Switzerland, and finds that people are shooting at him. He then walks into a town where a strange man (Ethan Hawke) is holding some odd cult meeting in the town square, where he seems to be judging them through the power of the Egyptian deity/monster Ammit (the crocodile that judges the souls of the dead). He apparently has a relic in the form of a golden scarab, which the cult wants back. Meanwhile, however, there's a voice in his head that complains about how "the idiot is in control," and when the cult leader's goons come after him, he blinks out of consciousness - only to reawaken with the goons bloody and broken on the ground.

A chase ensues, and every time Steven is in dire risk of getting killed, he loses consciousness and then awakens to find that his foes have been killed, at one point even waking up with a gun in his hand.

And then he wakes up, as if this had all been a dream.

But things don't add up: his one-finned fish now suddenly has another fin, and when he goes to the pet shop to inquire/complain, the clerk says he was there the previous day. He also finds out that the date he was getting ready for on Friday night is a no-show, because, well, it turns out it's actually Sunday.

Investigating the fish tank, he realizes that there's a secret compartment in his flat with a key and a cell phone, and he realizes he has many, many calls from someone named Layla (and one from someone called Chapman, if I recall correctly). Calling it, the woman on the other end asks why he's doing an English accent and also refers to him as Marc.

When he shows up to work the next day, the cult-leader arrives, and it seems he has many followers working there. They unleash some kind of jackal-like monster to attack him, and Steven finally confronts someone in the mirror of a bathroom where he's hiding out - presumably Marc - who tells him he has to let Marc take control if they're going to survive. As the monster bangs at the door, Steven seems to give in, and linen wraps begin to form around him. The next thing we see, the monsters is being dragged back into the bathroom as this strange, mummy-like superhero is kicking the shit out of it.

So... what the fuck?

What's immediately apparent is that Steven Grant, as a persona, is just one facet of this person. I'd even argue that he's a persona constructed to specifically be as innocuous and ignorable as possible. He's socially isolated and gives off a kind of pathetic vibe (other than a charming interest in Egyptology). What I'm curious about is how the show is going to handle its central character. Steven is the one we're relating to right now, and it makes sense to focus on him because he's learning about all of this as we do. But I also get the sense that Steven is only there to serve a purpose for the more proactive, superheroic parts of Moon Knight's psyche.

Our villain is pretty obvious from the get-go. Arthur Harrow (I'll confess I had to look up the character name) serves Ammit, and gives us a spiel about how Ammit sought to judge people before they committed their crimes, claiming that if she had been able to do that unimpeded it might have prevented countless tragedies perpetrated by history's greatest monsters (I did note that there wasn't any "real guy, real guy, fictional guy" listing that is common to this sort of genre - Hitler, Stalin, Thanos, for example. Part of me wonders if the show is actually set in the past, though maybe I'm reading way too much into the Motorolla Razor phone).

As with most good villains, he's convinced he's the good guy - the first shots of the show are actually of him doing some ritual in which he drinks a glass of water and then smashes the glass, sprinkles it into his shoes, and then puts them on. This kind of mortification is pretty clear code for a fanatical villain, and I imagine the show might make its moral stakes super clear in order to give the audience something to hold onto while parsing the complexity of its split personality protagonist.

The tone and look of the show feels like a departure for Marvel, at least in this first episode. I suspect we're going to get more explicit answers with episode two, but I hope we get to indulge a bit in this mind-bending mystery.

The Thematic and the Plot

 A few months - maybe a year - ago, I watched a super-long video essay on YouTube about Twin Peaks. The essay broke down the show as an elaborate metaphor for David Lynch's (and Mark Frost's) views on the problems with the way television depicts violence, particularly about murder mysteries and police procedurals. Essentially, the argument was that Lynch wanted to focus on Laura Palmer as the complex, nuanced, and beautiful character who, in most such shows, would be a kind of non-character - a human McGuffin whose purpose was simply to drive the plot forward. The essay goes into extensive, elaborate detail to make every element of the series a direct metaphor for television both in its tropes and in its literal mechanics.

It's a frustrating essay, in part because of the profound smugness of the tone, but also in that the argument is fairly compelling. But I didn't want it to be compelling, in part because it created a detachment from the story - turning it into something purely metaphorical and not something to relate to with any sense of immersion.

Tonight, I watched Maggie Mae Fish's (part one) essay on Twin Peaks, which was in part a response to that same essay. While her essay was a response to the first one, largely arguing against the fully-mapped-out logic of the metaphor, she did also arrive at the idea that David Lynch wanted to focus on Laura Palmer as a fully-realized person - someone who wasn't just a glorified prop. She makes an interesting comparison between Fire Walk With Me, the prequel film made shortly after the show ended, and another massively influential film from the early 90s, Silence of the Lambs, suggesting that just as Twin Peaks was a reaction to soap operas like Dynasty, the follow-up film was one to movies like Silence of the Lambs.

So, what does this have to do with Christopher Nolan?

I had a discussion with my best friend a few weeks ago about Dunkirk, and how we've both become disillusioned with Christopher Nolan over time. If you asked college-aged me what some of his favorite movies were, Memento and The Prestige would probably be high up there (actually, the Prestige still ranks high, I think the better point was that I'd have listed Nolan as one of my favorite filmmakers). Nolan made a name for himself by making this elaborate puzzle-box movies with massive twists. Also, he washed the neon kool-aid taste of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies out of the public's mouth with the shot of straight whiskey that was his Dark Knight trilogy.

I remember listening to an interview with some scientist who had consulted I believe on Inception (or maybe it was Kipp Thorne on Interstellar), and hearing that Nolan had dismissed some scientific principle because the "audience wouldn't care," which, as someone who was a big Nolan fan at the time, I found kind of disappointing.

Watching Inception, I remember thinking that the visuals of the story were cool, and it was an exciting movie, but the thing that felt odd to me is that the whole thing was supposed to be about going into different layers of dreams, but the dream-world never actually looked the way that dreams feel. It presented a premise and scenario with rules that were more or less consistent (at least enough to function as a sci-fi setting) but the notion that it was tied to actual dreams didn't really ring true.

The common read on Inception is that it's actually a metaphor for filmmaking - but while I can see how the different members of the crew are like different members of a film crew, there are other parts about it that don't really feel tied into that. Why the layers of dreams?

See, I think that at the end of the day, Nolan is a filmmaker who just wants to make things that are "cool."

Dunkirk I think is a great example. The film tells some exciting stories, and it has this odd nested timeframe where we follow three plots - one takes course over what I believe is several days, another takes place over several hours, and the other takes place more or less in realtime. The plots all converge at the end of the movie as they all lead to the same moment.

But why?

This was the thing that my friend and I were talking about. All of this effort was put into writing, shooting, and editing the film so that it could pull off these cinematic acrobatics, even using a score that invoked the Shepherd's Tone to give that sense of constant building tension stretched out over time, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why. What did this have to do with the story? Why was the movie made this way?

So, the title of this blog is based on a story I pitched when I was six years old. Two of my favorite movies when I was very little were Back to the Future and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Both are comedies about time travel, so six-year-old Dan wanted to make a story about time-travel (also, the protagonist, who was, coincidentally, also a six-year-old named Dan, would be from the near future and thus, naturally, have a jetpack that he'd use to get around, because I was also obsessed with being able to fly).

Time travel stories are infamously difficult to write - or at least, they are if you want to follow any sort of logic. Indeed, I think one of the reasons why Back to the Future and Bill & Ted are sort of unquestioned (at least in terms of science fiction concepts) is that, being comedies, the easy response to any complaints about its logic is "eh, it's a comedy, don't think about it too much." Getting hung up on logical inconsistencies in these movies would make you look like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who seemed like he was going to be the next Carl Sagan and then wound up being the pedantic nerd who just says "um, actually" complaining about the science of superhero movies that involve literal magic.

But I think the broader question regarding time travel movies (and sci-fi in particular, but especially time-travel,) is whether you have intellectual room to tell both a compelling clockwork logic puzzle of a story and also, you know, have something profound to say.

I've always resisted the idea that some, say, cinema is "art" and some isn't. To me, "art" does not denote quality or sophistication. I think art is basically any work that intends to evoke an emotional response in someone. Now, a dumb action blockbuster does evoke emotions, but those emotions are maybe less complex. You get excitement, maybe satisfaction at seeing the good guys prevail over the bad guys. It's the same way that McDonald's french fries are still food, even if you're getting a very basic "salt and fat" taste to them.

Generally, I think most "high art" is the sort that engages in a more nuanced and subtle way than "low art" (though these terms are also profoundly classist).

One of the big criticisms of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar was the sentimentality of it - Anne Hathaway's line about love being a constant in the universe ringing schmaltzy (for the record, I think most antipathy toward Anne Hathaway is not really based on her acting skill, but more the sort of snowball effect of internet opinions).

Ironically, the sentimentality of Interstellar is actually supported by the plot itself - when (um, spoilers for Interstellar) we discover that the "aliens" who have provided humanity with a path to salvation are actually future humans who have evolved beyond our comprehension and have sent a message back in time, there's no longer any need to explain why the aliens would understand human emotions. Thus, the humanist and the cosmic perspectives in that movie can actually coexist with internal consistency (I still didn't love the movie, but I did not find this to be one of its flaws).

I think this post has gotten very rambly, and I should probably get to a point.

Essentially, I think there's a balance that you need to strike when telling a story - a balance between the Thematic and the Plot (I actually wrote the title to the post before I wrote the post, which means I guess I kind of stuck to a thesis? I count that as a win). If you make something all theme - all metaphor and meaning and deeper meaning without allowing your audience to connect with the story on an immersive, emotional, empathetic level, the story will feel hollow and kind of hard to connect to (yeah, Brecht, I know you prefer it that way). But, at the same time, if you ignore theme and deeper meaning in service of just crafting a meticulous puzzle-box of a plot, it can start to feel a bit like you're just smashing action figures together.