The Avengers: Endgame opens and ends with blissful family scenes. Begins with the family picnic, archery, pleasant golden tones, then threat, rising panic, your children missing as in a supermarket or city, and then jumps into the super-hero world of space, guns, army battles, good and evil, weapons, muted darkness, celestial hues, funky outfits, zaps through quantum bends in time, mass killings and musings about second chances, retribution, and ends with family comfort. After all that.
An on golden pond moment of muted real-life colors, leaves, trees, water, a wedding ring, a heteronormative couple, and a kiss. Fade out on the kiss! The ring, the kiss and this epic film finishes. It’s the greatest sell for family values possible. And reinforces America’s central ideology, its warrior status, arms of Good pointing outwardly, across earth, spanning galaxies. A stunning affirmation of conservative American values, war, violence, and the nuclear family. Ideology never worked so hard.
Propaganda rarely achieved such explicit expression, not with Bruce Barton, not with anybody. The Avengers is America’s ultimate promulgation, an Athens-Sparta standing armies at home and around the world, pure Evil and pure Good, sacrifice, working hard, bootstraps, rise after falling. Then your troubles vanish, and you chill as an old man musing fondly about true love and your wife, she was original, a great one. And we believe this, we swoon for it, and we want to nail our prom-posals, believe in high school sweethearts, cross-training in gyms so that we, too, can grab the shield if need be.
