I’ll be honest, I had my doubts. When they attached Joss Whedon to this picture, I cringed – TV guy, very good for genre shows that get whored by Fox, excellent at empowered young women but overly fond of gratuitously killing supporting characters for the sake of a cheap jolt – but absolutely nothing on his CV suggested that he should be given the controls for the crowning piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the payoff of five (FIVE!) interconnected movies over the last four years…it looked like a cheap-out move by a studio that didn’t want to pay Jon Favreau, like a move designed to say “we’ll just fanboy it up and milk the nerds for all they’re worth instead of trying to draw the broader audience.”
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Easily the best superhero movie since the first Iron Man. Maybe the best…well, ever. A movie that actually felt like it was paying off five lead-ins. A movie that gave us character development and plausible relationships and a sufficiently feasible “save the world” story. (Even if Joss did fall back on his one predictable crutch.) Basically it was exactly what one reviewer described: “a Transformers movie with brains, heart and a working sense of humor.”
Everyone knows by now that Robert Downey Jr was put on this earth to play Tony Stark. We knew he was going to be incredible. What stole the movie, I think, was Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner, who knows damn well what he has inside him and knows how important it is to keep the other guy bottled up. Until it’s time not to.
I think of this because of work.
It was about this time nine years ago that I was well and truly embarked on my MVP year at the first job. It was the year that taught me Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.” And Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.” Combine that with some very real mendacity and some outright willful obstruction from many different angles, and it’s not surprising in retrospect that I was driven by rage – the very real burning fury at the people who were trying to beat us, trying to prevail on us, trying to tell me how to do my job – or worse yet, trying to be allowed to do my job instead of me. I burned like a supernova for a year and change, and I burned hot and I burned bright. And ultimately I burned out.
Since then, I’ve tried hard not to make my job too much of what I am and what I want to be. I can’t afford to have my happiness, my core friendships and my ultimate sense of identity dependent on a mere job, no matter how much of my waking life it takes up. And I’ve managed to keep a fairly even keel and plug along, marking time and clocking in and out and basing my happiness on things that have nothing to do with my daily grind.
And yet.
All that dark rage is still there, in a bottle on the mantlepiece with a label that says “IN CASE OF MOST DIRE EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS.” And today – when I was being threatened by some other user because a completely different group had failed to do their job, despite my prompting and best effort and doing 100% of what I could do – I admit openly and without shame that I had my hand on the bottle and my arm raised and I was about five seconds from smashing it and going full-bore 2003 Dark Hulk.
I didn’t smash it. I might have pulled the cork out for a couple minutes, but I didn’t smash it. I don’t really want to go down that road again, especially without the kind of in-house support team and best-friend-as-manager cover I had in the old country.
Less Bruce Banner. More Tony Stark.
Maybe I just need a better budget for armor.