Once, I attended the funeral for a loved and respected musician in my hometown. If you’ve been present for such a gathering of artists and creatives, you’d know that grief does not long have an opportunity to crowd before the light of communal celebration bears luster. While delivering a eulogy, the musician’s uncle asked those present to consider the origin of creativity, and the purpose that it serves. Does it spring from us, fully formed and ready to rock and roll? Or is all without form and void, until the zephyrous breath of some Muse graces us with favor?
Those ideas have informed my creative processes and influenced the way that I perceive some of my most favorite publications, recordings, and films. Of the latter, my love of Marvel bears no exclusion, and so it is that I often turn those stories over in my mind, seeking to find in them the source of what resonates most within me. It was with surprise that the latest cinematic release from Marvel Studios, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, has my gourd working overtime.
Presently, the Marvel Cinematic Universe consists of 32 films, some of which include various gods, deities, and their respective pantheons; however, it wasn’t until James Gunn’s 2023 picture Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 that the sublime was called into the cosmic spotlight.
Preceding MCU films have remained somewhat secular in their presentation, relying on either the cold precision of science via Shuri and Tony Stark, or the ardent performance by the late Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, to drive their ever-expanding stories forward. Even the inclusion of Natlie Portman and Idris Elba’s rendezvous in Valhalla is delivered with a slight wink and nudge, and I’ve given up all but the last shred of confidence that anyone should take the events contained within Moon Knight as having been reliably narrated…
Still, with characters like the brilliantly stoic Vision hinting at the possibility of lab-created agency and the development of the self with a capital ‘S,’ it wasn’t until this year’s Guardians that the MCU has asked us to consider the nature of being, and whether or not the Promethean fire of compassion, and creativity can be manufactured by human hands. Certainly, it was by design that by landing a bit left of center, the Guardians flicks are able to explore the more unconventional aspects of Marvel’s comic-book worlds, and navigate metaphysical flight paths that even Carol Danvers can’t traverse. Director James Gunn’s final installment of his galactic trilogy differs not.
Guardians has always hit just a little bit different, thanks to Gunn’s keen ability to keep us laughing, all while caressing the heartstrings into cooing affection - just before severing them from our collective chest. It’s also Gunns knack for crafting a thematically nuanced screenplay amidst poop jokes and the curation of a genius-tier soundtrack that makes GotG special. In the first two films, themes of companionship, loyalty, found vs. consanguinean family, as well as sacrifice, are explored - Groot gives the gift of his life in the first installment to save his new friends, tilling the path for his own sapling growth throughout the next picture - and Pratt’s self-styled Star Lord denies his Celestial father in Vol. 2 ,instead choosing to extoll his own adoptive daddy - again, to capstone heartbreak. Running parallel to these notions are the consistent thorny exterior/saccharine interior characters of Drax, siblings Gamora and Nebula, the empathic Mantis, and most especially Rocket Racoon, upon whose procyonid frame the final film is carried.
It’s with this unpredictable shift in narrative for Guardians Vol. 3 that it seems natural to start uncovering the why beneath the obligatory onscreen who, what, when and where. By delving into Rocket’s excruciating backstory - a terrestrial mammal tortured and manipulated into speech and advanced cognition via Chukwudi Iwuji’s biologically militant High Evolutionary - the film peels back layers of thematic inquiry previously absent from the MCU’s backlog. As the High Evolutionary begins to recognize Rocket’s capacity for inspired thought, he’s maddened by the apparent ghost in his machine. For all of the High Ev’s “creations,” Rocket possesses the one thing that our villain cannot himself replicate - the creative spark. As such, nearing the film’s climax, an enraged High Evolutionary is driven to proclaim “There is no god! That is why I stepped in!”
This idea alone deviates from Marvel’s foray into deity, and calls into question the provenance of creativity and the role it plays within our lives. The story’s villain makes a definitive statement, and the filmmakers have taken a hard position in refuting that claim.
In what could have been another cliched afterlife scene, Rocket and his friend, Lylla, are reunited in the Big White Room that so often follows the premature death of a protagonist character. Here, Lylla informs Rocket that he still has a purpose to fulfill despite his anguished insistence that he was “made to be thrown away.”
It’s this interaction between characters that establishes the concept of purpose beyond heroic action and super-powers, and offers insight into the why of it all - for Lylla comforts Rocket with the knowledge that “there are the hands that made us, and there are the hands that guide their hands.” It’s this guiding sense of inspiration that underlies the whole of the MCU, and binds concepts such as luck and fate - coincidence and destiny - love and entropy - into what our friend Loki Laufeyson might call “glorious purpose.”
Nebula, arguably the thorniest of the Guardians, finds kinship and purpose in the parallels between the horror Rocket endured, and the evils she suffered at the hands of Thanos. Even Peter Quill, so broken by the death of the Gamora he knew, responds to the call when given renewed purpose - the drive to do whatever it takes to save the life of his teammate, companion, and friend, Rocket. And so does Rocket return, using the sum total of his skill and ingenuity to rectify the atrocities performed by the High Evolutionary.
Rocket’s story is an important one, and the reasons for having relegated the remaining Guardians to co-pilot status become evident as the picture unfolds - Rocket’s past threads alongside the present, weaving in and out of audience perception as does his own tenuous hold on the realm of the living. Rocket Not-A-Raccoon was created against his will, and monstrous things were done to him; however, in those crimes were sown the seeds of an existence that bears the fruit of love and belonging, and of the capability to lead and right tremendous wrongs.
Lylla’s “hands that guide the hands” suggest that there is always at work a motivating principle - the Primum Mobile or, as revered scribe Alan Moore suggests, “the inner dynamo of us.” Ironically, the engines of our own grace are often obstructed by grief and perceived failure, and the burden of proof lies upon us should we wish to reveal the truth of them.
It’s within this journey that Guardians Vol. 3 gives us a glimpse beneath the glitz of the MCU fanfare and green screen light show, and offers something on a grander scale. Like the question that was asked of me so long ago during a time of loss, we're here called to search out our own purpose while we occupy the bodies resting comfortably in front of the flashing silver screen.