The Mask (and Hypocrisy)

luka

Well-known member
Gus and Barty have got a fair bit in common its just that bartys social skills are obviously a bit more polished
 
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version

Well-known member
That everyone in their world knows who most of the Marvel heroes are seems significant. We're so used to the superhero's identity being sacred and its exposure being one of their primary weaknesses that it's jarring when you suddenly remember they now mostly walk around without masks, do public events and freely use their real names in the MCU.
 
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sus

Well-known member
That everyone in their world knows who most of the Marvel heroes are seems significant. We're so used to the superhero's identity being sacred and its exposure being one of their primary weaknesses that it's jarring when you suddenly remember they now mostly walk around without masks, do public events and freely use their real names in the MCU.
Yeah great observation. That they'd still be anonymous is inconceivable. Isn't the new Spider Man all about this? The one with Dr Strange?
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah great observation. That they'd still be anonymous is inconceivable. Isn't the new Spider Man all about this? The one with Dr Strange?
Yeah, he's trying to dick around with the timeline to ensure people don't find out who he is.
 

version

Well-known member
It seems a bit redundant when none of the other Avengers bother obscuring their identity and they have a big Avengers HQ building with a logo and everything.
 

sus

Well-known member
FF5nFdEXsAEs7Qr
 

sus

Well-known member
But whether the visage we assume be a joyful or a sad one, in adopting and emphasizing it we define our sovereign temper. Henceforth, so long as we continue under the spell of this self-knowledge, we do not merely live but act; we compose and play our chosen character, we wear the buskin of deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted or scornful or careless or austere; we soliloquize (before an imaginary audience) and we wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part. So draped, we solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush. We profess to live up to the fine sentiments we have uttered, as we try to believe in the religion we profess. The greater our difficulties the greater our zeal. Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our mood and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams. The portrait we paint this way and exhibit as our true person may well be in the grand manner, with column and curtain and distant landscape and finger pointing to the terrestrial globe or to the Yorick-skull of philosophy; but if this style is native to us and our art is vital, the more it transmutes its model the deeper and truer art it will be. The severe bust of an archaic sculpture, scarcely humanizing the block, will express the spirit far more justly than the man's dull morning looks or casual grimaces. Everyone who is sure of his mind, or proud of his office, or anxious about his duty assumes a tragic mask. He deputes it to be himself and transfers to it all its vanity. While still alive in subject, like all existing things, to the undermining flux of his own substance, he has crystallized his soul into an idea, and more in pride than in sorrow he has offered up his life on the altar of the Muses. Self-knowledge, like any art or science, renders its subject-matter in a new medium, the medium of ideas, in which it loses its old dimension and its old place. Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become "person" or masks.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Yeah great observation. That they'd still be anonymous is inconceivable. Isn't the new Spider Man all about this? The one with Dr Strange?
Yeah I actually thought the latest spiderman was the best spiderman so far, out of all 8 of them I think.

Relevant here re: masks, but also relevant to our other discussions about the multiverse in films. This latest film managed to salvage two previously failed franchises, by way of canonically clever usage of the concept and dynamics of the multiverse.

In terms of franchise narrative methodology, the multiverse as a narrative component is perhaps the ultimate tool. Now the writers can make virtually any change they want, to future or previous films, and it will all be canon, i.e. within the nearly infinite constraints of the cinematic universe.

I also thought it was quite funny too. Not sure if anyone else here has seen it. I've found the MCU to be, overall, an enjoyable experience and a monument of blockbuster history.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Even the different corporate studio proprietary distinctions between different Marvel entities can be addressed and integrated into a unified canon.

Seems a decent amount of people think the superhero genre has burnt out, but this latest film I think opens up a whole new field of possibilities for an indefinitely continued metafranchise.
 

luka

Well-known member
"We shall suggest that it was on the basis of this exquisite vulnerability that the unreal man became so adept at self-concealment. He learned to cry when he was amused and to smile when he was sad. He frowned his approval and applauded his displeasure. 'All that you see is not me,' he says to himself. But only in and through all that we see can he be anyone (in reality)If these actions are not his real self, he is unreal, wholly symbolical and equivocal; a purely virtual, potential, imaginary person, a mythical man; nothing 'really ' If then, he stops pretending to be what he is not, and steps out as the person he has come to be, he emerges as a Christ, or as a ghost, but not as a man: by existing with no body he is no-body."

R.D Laing. The Divided Self.
 
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