Review

Culture

Film & TV

Friendship

23 May 2023

4 min read

Guardians of the Galaxy’s longing for an enchanted universe

We are not isolated bodies who happen to be coexisting in the coldness of space. Krish Kandiah reviews Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Five people in red jump suits help each other stand together.

Marvel Studios.

The final instalment of Director James Gunn’s hugely popular Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy has hit the cinemas. This threequel about a relatively obscure set of characters from the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) has been incredibly well received. It’s set to outperform the first two films in the series as well as other MCU films like Iron Man and Captain America, widely known household names before their stories were transported from comic page to silver screen.

I went to watch Guardians Volume 3 at the cinema on Coronation weekend with my daughter and was struck by the relative ease that it navigated cultural diversity. It offered a fascinating perspective on cultural inclusion and empowerment thanks to the radical diversity of its central characters.

There’s an orphaned boy abducted and brought up by space pirates to become a master thief. There’s a widower and bereaved father whose whole family was massacred but has a gift for nurturing children despite his ferocity. There’s also an abuse survivor rebuilt as a cyborg , a sentient teenage tree, an adopted empath with antennae and a genetically modified racoon.

The Guardians are not just a performative or representational diversity but a functional one. They are the most unlikely synergistic team whose sum is far greater than any of its parts.

These characters represent not simply different ethnicities but wholly different species – plant, mammal, humanoid. None of them seem to be included for purposes of tokenism: each brings essential skills or experience that make the team not only successful, but outstandingly so.

At the Coronation Concert from Windsor Castle that was watched by 12.7 million people in the UK, the diversity on stage seemed more contrived. Despite moments of genuine beauty, dignity and pathos, the need to represent the four nations and the Commonwealth felt like it was motivated primarily by a desire not to offend, a tick box exercise of inclusion rather than a line-up that made coherent sense as an aesthetic whole.

The Guardians are not just a performative or representational diversity but a functional one. The unlikely heroes are drawn together through a vision bigger than themselves and are willing to risk their lives on numerous occasions to save the universe. They are the most unlikely synergistic team whose sum is far greater than any of its parts. This is not just idealism – the well-known McKinsey report showed the legitimate competitive advantage that diversity brings, promoting a breadth of cultures, gender and ages in the C-suite of major businesses.

Diversity works. Diversity also sells. The movie industry is slowly waking up to the need of baking in diversity rather than simply waiting for the global markets to lap up the US leftovers. Films are now being made for a global audience from the beginning. The Marvel franchise are buying into this big time: with Black Panther and Shan Chi tapping into the potential for Black and Asian audiences to engage with the brand.

Most of the Guardians heroes begin life isolated, abandoned, rejected, betrayed or bereaved. During the course of the films, their social coldness thaws and they each find the warmth of fellowship, community and even family.

Perhaps Marvel can do for diversity in the film industry what Spice Girls did for diversity in the music industry. The girl band was deliberately designed by marketeers with audience demographics determining the very make-up of the group which somehow managed to transcend its inception and help a generation of young girls realise there were many different ways to express femininity that broke traditional stereotypes and yet could harmonise. The Spice Girls showed that femininity could include ferocity, sporting ability, elegance and cuteness and no one was the lesser for it. Girl power was in my opinion a positive cultural contribution. It engendered acceptance.

The Guardians trilogy speaks to our cultural longing for an enchanted universe where we are not isolated bodies who happen to be coexisting in the coldness of space but a place where we are known for who we really are and are loved and accepted, despite our differences. Most of the Guardians heroes begin life isolated, abandoned, rejected, betrayed or bereaved. During the course of the films, their social coldness thaws and they each find the warmth of fellowship, community and even family.

The storyline is not a new one. Thousands of years ago another disparate group of outcasts were brought together on a mission to save the world. They were hunted down for their allegiance to that mission but did not give up on their belief that God wanted to create a genuinely inclusive community, where people of all abilities, genders and race could experience welcome as equals. Jesus Christ formed that original band of disciples and is now followed by millions. Churches at their best are similarly diverse. Rich and poor, refugees and natives, old and young, male and female and everything in between are united, not just by being in the same place at the same time, consuming religious services together, but by a purpose beyond them, seeking to share the boundary-breaking, radically welcoming love of God to all without distinction, and to be the guardians of that purpose, of our planet and of all its people.

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

9 July 2024

6 min read

When America presses in on you

A returning American feels the heat generated by contesting ‘realities'.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A runner passes a church and a flag in an America suburb, under billowing clouds.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

There’s a man. Running. My eyes snap into focus. Time slows - I catch his pace. Then, my eyes start widening. An odd feeling. Being forced into it. Seconds stretched out into minutes. Taking in more, looking for more, looking down that sidewalk, on a street corner in New Jersey.

Before? I was sitting there. In the backseat of my Uber. Winding our way through New Jersey. And I’m sitting there, tired, mindlessly scrolling my phone until that moment. He’s there running.

And I see him. T-shirt. Running shorts. And I’m sitting. And—a nervous flash—he’s running. Why?

And my eyes adjust, widening, scanning, checking detail, and I’m almost seized. My mind shaking itself, coming online, no more automation. My consciousness catches up: “you’re in America,” I tell myself.

Right. I’m not in Scotland. And that man is running. Here in New Jersey. In America. And I’m talking back to myself in this silent car. I’m watching him run. I’m asking why am I slowing this down? And—it flashes—“running from what?”

And I catch up to myself. To what I was trying to say, that people in America run from shooters, too. A wave crashing, sitting in the back of the Uber, and look. Now I’m really looking. Not forced. But naming. There’s other pedestrians passing him, walking. Slowing. On the other side of the street— no fast movement. No screaming. No pops.

I start breathing. I didn’t know I stopped. He’s out jogging. The automated safety check ends. The tranquility of tyranny resumes. I’m sitting in the back of an Uber. I make a note. Be more alert at the train station.

—

People ask me how the relocation back to America has been. And I don’t know what to tell them. There’s a wide gap between the visceral sense of it all pressing in on you, and more common—but also abstract—analysis.

The experience of coming back has been oddly particular. I lived in Scotland for three years, and most of it was spent studying America. From that distance, the broad strokes of American life, the larger trajectories and dangers of our shared political decisions and religious extremism, well, they’re a bit clearer.

But coming back, America presses in on you. And the only way of talking about that, maybe, is specificity. Kerouac was always good at articulating this. His America wasn’t the rise of the military industrial complex in the 50s. It was the road, the gas station on the way from Denver, it was jazz, the dim doorways of San Francisco bars. I’m thinking of Kerouac, but also Langston Hughes. Poets and artists who in their own time, held a mirror up to America, helped us move from the “I” to the “we” as Steinbeck said.

We’re all asking a version of “what’s wrong in America?” (And, do keep asking.) But to ask that question often assumes the broadest strokes, the ones that are most clear from a distance. Which means they are, in one at the same time, the most abstract.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.”

Asking after democracy, after the election, and the increasingly nebulous “the church” — I’m convinced that answering “what’s wrong in America?” in the biggest of terms is leading me to (wrongly) believe that responsibility lies among the gargantuan free-floating concepts which we use to narrate our world. As if solving the “crisis of democracy” is a conceptual problem. When in reality, it is concrete, and involves more than coalition building or political activism.

Why more? Because the choices Americans have made over the last 10 years originate from imaginations which limits the scope and scale of what is possible. This is what I mean by “America presses in on you.”

Coming back to America has made this clear. I’m more aware than ever that we can produce good answers and generate compelling analysis about America without ever asking in what way these answers or analysis are sharp enough, concrete enough to puncture the bubbles of social reality in which people choose to live and in some cases are forced to live.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.” They press in on us all in their own way.

In some cases, they dull our senses. We say, “as long as our Amazon deliveries continue, as long as the streaming services work.” In some cases, they don’t just press in on us, but press down and perpetuate injustice. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, “where are the responsible ones?”

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes.

Do I care about democratic machinery? Yes. Am I concerned about whether or not the church is, in fact, the church, and not a gear in a partisan machine? Yes. But I’m increasingly convinced that responsible living in the American situation becomes most clear, most evident as we consider the large in terms of the small.

Responsibility emerges with attention paid to the concrete and intimate. January 6 is the subject of my dissertation. But before that, in the months leading up to January 6, I was a pastor just 40 miles from DC. For me, January 6 was a local event. That particularity, that specificity, is a window into a concrete responsibility.

And now, back in this same community, I found myself distracted in a church this weekend. The man in front of me raised his hands in worship, revealing a revolver hanging on his belt. What America is this? But also, what Christianity is this?

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes. And I wonder what it will take to break the spell of our most cherished illusions, of a certain type of freedom — one that tells us it is Christian to raise our hand in surrender to a god who we say is loving enough to save the world, but seemingly not strong enough to deliver us from our evil.

In the end, perhaps it’s best to say that it’s been proof of a good ruining. After all, we’ve experienced nothing short of a conversion, a move closer towards peace, towards hope, that unsettles all our strategies of security and comfort underwritten by violence and oppression. This is the kingdom of Heaven. Something Jesus announced that continues to unsettle and disrupt the likes of T.S. Eliot who put it well in Journey of the Magi:

We returned to our places, these

Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old

dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods

I should be glad of another death.