Deacon Steven Greydanus continues his prescient analysis of the nihilism at the heart of the MCU:
Questions of meaning and nihilism in the MCU multiverse and the Spider-Verse have become inseparable from the multiverse-policing agencies in both sagas. The Spider-Verse has the Spider-Society, while the MCU has the Time Variance Authority or TVA, first seen in Loki but coming to the big screen in the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine movie. Because we currently have considerably more closure regarding the nature and workings of the TVA than the Spider-Society, let’s consider the TVA and the MCU first.
The MCU began in 2008 with Iron Man; one could say that it all began with a life-changing moment of moral clarity in the life of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. After leading an aimless playboy life from his youth, Tony’s life takes a dramatic turn as a result of a near-fatal explosion in Afghanistan and three months of captivity by international terrorists. “I had my eyes opened,” Tony tries to explain in his first press conference. “I’m not crazy,” he later tells Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts. “I just finally know what I have to do. And I know in my heart that it’s right.” Later he insists, “There is nothing except this.… There’s the next mission, and nothing else.”
“There is nothing except this” reflects Tony’s withering new perspective on his life up to this point, which now appears meaningless to him. One way of approaching the idea of a meaningful life is that human beings have a deep-seated need for connection to something that is bigger than ourselves. We may pursue this sense of connection in different arenas—e.g., art, religion, philosophy, science, family, love, sex, drugs, service to others, philanthropy—and we may feel the need in different degrees at different times. Some go long periods of time without feeling it at all (Tony’s life has always been entirely self-centered, and it never bothered him before). For those who have their “eyes opened” to this need, though, everything else may be secondary. And those who find that sense of connection often feel that they have found their purpose in life—that they are in some way where they are meant to be, doing what they are called to do. Tony’s belief that he “has to” follow this singular course suggests this sense of purpose or calling.
Signposts of (perceived) meaning
Tony’s moment of moral clarity comes via a specific type of experience or perception of meaning: a phenomenon that Carl Jung called “synchronicity.” Synchronicity involves a convergence of events that impresses us as meaningfully related, although there is no ostensible causal connection.
Here’s an illustration of synchronicity from my own life. A number of years ago, early on a Friday morning, I awoke from a dream about an old friend from my college days with a strong impression that I should pray for him that day and specifically offer my Friday penance for him. The following Sunday I learned that, on the day I was praying for him, my friend was in a catastrophic accident—sideswiped by a large truck that totaled his car. To his own amazement, he walked away unharmed.
Probably most people reading these words have had at least one experience not unlike this: some less dramatic; some more so. There’s good reason to bring critical caution to such experiences! The law of truly large numbers describes how striking coincidences happen all the time by chance, and our perceptions and interpretation are well known to be colored by a range of cognitive biases. There’s the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in potentially unrelated phenomena, called apophenia (or sometimes pareidolia, usually in connection with perceiving visual patterns like faces). There’s also the tendency to notice or emphasize data that supports our preferred way of thinking and to downplay or simply forget data that doesn’t: a form of confirmation bias.
All of that said, any of us, even the most skeptical and rigorously rational, may, at particularly striking moments, experience a profound sense of apparent meaning in seemingly chance events: a sense of purpose or a higher power at work for our good (or potentially a malign power, if it seems as if the universe is conspiring against us!). Committed skeptics may consciously dismiss their own experiences in this regard as the blind workings of chance upon the treacherously irrational pattern-making faculties of their minds. Others may view them as possible signposts of meaning, moments when it seems the curtain of everyday life is drawn back and the pattern-making faculties of our minds discern a glimpse of the mysterious workings of some grand design. In such moments, depending on their beliefs and the vocabulary and conceptual tools furnished by their cultural milieu, people may invoke “providence” (or God), “the universe,” “fate,” “karma,” “the powers that be,” etc.Subscribe
“Unless it was for a reason”
Tony’s experience of synchronicity involves a convergence of massively improbable circumstances. It begins with a nearly fatal encounter with one of his own company’s weapons: a weapon that fell into the hands of terrorists through corporate malfeasance and Tony’s own executive irresponsibility and moral casuistry. This in itself is already an irony so striking that, had Tony been killed or crippled by the misappropriated weapon, some might understandably see karma or fate judging him for his sins. Yet Tony survives, just barely, thanks to the ingenious efforts of a doctor whom the terrorists happen to have abducted. Finally, pretending to build a weapon for the terrorists, Tony creates a prototype suit of armor and manages a nearly impossible escape.
The convergence of all these improbabilities awes Tony, confronting him with the uselessness and delinquency of the life he has lived until now. “I shouldn’t be alive,” he says, “unless it was for a reason.” With this “reason” comes something Tony “knows” he “has to do,” something he “knows in his heart is right.” Whose reason, and the exact nature of the obligations that come with it, Tony doesn’t ask, and the movie doesn’t care—and that may be okay. If at certain striking moments a sense of purpose or intentionality in seemingly chance events becomes apparent to us, it may not be necessary either to give a name to whatever lies behind that apparent intentionality, or to have any particular theory regarding its nature, to take the hint and benefit from its gifts to us and the world.
So far, so good. The problem is that the more we learn about the workings of the MCU, and of the MCU multiverse in particular, the more that sense of meaning in experiences like Tony’s moment of clarity (and the similar experiences of other characters) are undermined by revelations of what’s really responsible for how things pan out—particularly in the lives of pivotal figures like Tony.
The TVA and the Sacred Timeline
The most dramatic example of this undermining so far (not the only one, as we will see) comes from the TVA, introduced in season 1 of Loki. The series finds a multiversal iteration of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Asgardian god of mischief, detained by the TVA, an inconceivably powerful, trans-dimensional bureaucracy. The TVA is charged with a quasi-religious mission of preserving what they call the “Sacred Timeline,” so named because its prescribed path is said to be determined by a trio of wise and benevolent divine beings called the Time-Keepers.
The story goes that there was once a wild and wooly multiverse in which interdimensional war broke out: something about Jonathan Majors’s Kang the Conqueror, a human multiversal warlord, along with a whole lot of Kang variants from other universes—an entire Council of Kangs, in fact—cooperating across time and space until some of them stopped cooperating and went to war with the others.
In the end, we’re told, the multiversal war was ended by the intervention of the Time-Keepers, who established the Sacred Timeline to prevent further such wars from breaking out in the future (or the past, or in any other segment of the Sacred Timeline). To this end they founded the TVA, agents of whom are charged with intervening in what are called “nexus events.” These are points of divergence at which a person making a fateful decision may somehow—in a way connected with or reflective of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics—realize more than one choice in branching realities, in effect simultaneously following multiple threads of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, so that the person himself or herself branches into multiple variants of themselves.
Advertisement
