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.
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