Ernestina is watching all of the Marvel movies in order, so now I am watching all the Marvel movies in order.

The only one I thought I had seen was Thor Ragnarok, but as we started to watch I realized I had at least gleaned the plot and aesthetic of a few from 2014 Tumblr.

As you probably know whether you want to or not, the first movie in the Marvel universe is Ironman.

I am not going to explain the Marvel universe or like, Stan Lee’s whole deal, but TV Tropes has a pretty interesting write up. watching all of these at once has helped me better understand what the CIA and FBI being involved with Hollywood means in practice (and I bet there’s a whole thinkpiece I’m not equipped to write in the gradual transformation of HYDRA from vaguely In Pakistan to Literal Nazis to vaguely Eastern European).

Anyway. Ironman.

It is… pretty much as I remembered.

Good editing.

Clear story.

Lots of Paternally racist and Regular racist Parts.

It’s funny to watch over a decade later because so much of the tech I remember seeing and coveting is so old looking.

The Google Glass interface Robert Downey Jr. uses looks like something you would break if you had to have it on your face for longer than a few seconds.

His whole lab set up basically… you could do with a raspberry pi (I couldn’t, but someone could).

It reminds me of the time that Ernestina and I went to the Maritime Museum in San Diego, since we are two old men when on vacation. There was a Soviet submarine, covered in hardware store wires, that looked like a Radio Shack antique.

Technology that we spend billions of dollars on eventually becomes something anyone can use, theoretically, and then eventually becomes something you see lying around in your mom’s garage.

Anyway. IronMan.

It was 2008, so some pretension of racial justice had to be at least pandered to. Robert Downey Jr.‘s lab partner while he is kidnapped is from Pakistan.

He is an electrical engineer? A doctor?

He wears glasses.

He is a frail intellectual, a nerd to be respected, if not admired like Tony Stark.

Anyway. Of course, this other guy dies heroically, tragically, and in a way that makes the audience not feel too too bad about his death, since you know, his whole family was already dead and he missed them and all.

“Why does he have to die?” Ernestina asked me, when I said something obnoxious about how this character was definitely going to die for story reasons.

I didnt really have an answer, I was just being pretentious.

So.

let’s say they kept this character alive.

Now IronMan has a friend who is equally gifted at electronics and has equal stake in the suit, with a different background, a different personality, and from Pakistan.

If he is alive, there are questions about ownership, values, what Iron Man should do with the suit. And those questions would make for a completely different movie.

That movie probably wouldn’t be about Iron Man.

The term “fridged” denotes when a character dies for reasons related only to plot logistics or the development of other characters.

It is an old trope, one named in the 1960s when a superhero‘s wife, who had very few characteristics other than being the Superhero’s Wife, was murdered and stuffed inside of a fridge by the villain.

Fridging a character gives the main character a purpose, a grudge, a desire for revenge, a traumatic backstory.

This, as you may not be surprised to know, happens often with characters that are people of color, women, characters with disabilities, or queer. And it happens to keep stories simple, stories that might become otherwise complicated, nuanced, + or even more about the people who are marginal in the story and the dominant cultural narrative.

But what I didn’t think about until we started watching Iron Man is that it also helps the writer avoid having to tell stories they don’t want to tell.

Stories where the stakes are different, the protagonist might be flawed in different ways, where Iron Man might end up in an international copyright disagreement with the man who saved his life before he even puts gold and red paint on his suit.

We live in an anti-fridge moment. People do not like it when you violently or graphically kill queer, POC characters, characters w disabilities, for plot reasons, if Lovecraft Country is any indication.

But it’s not always an indictment that someone fridged a character. Sometimes you fridge someone to save the story you want to tell.

I’m curious about how we fridge characters to save them.

So I’m thinking about Black Panther, another Marvel movie, especially after Chadwick Boseman passed away earlier this month.

At the end of Black Panther, antagonist Killmonger, a sympathetic, militant, Wakandan throne usurper from Oakland is offered the chance to live, to be healed of his wounds from the final battle, and get prison time in Wakanda, essentially. Killmonger, until this point has been a (distilled) symbol of black radicals, of uprising, and... to some extent, of the movements building power + fighting for prison abolition.

(I don’t know why I am summarizing the scene or the movie, everyone who is reading has seen BP 1000 times and written at least three articles of literary criticism in response.)

Killmonger says hell no to that offer, and then he dies.

Look, I don’t know the motivation for this exact character moment. But it feels consistent with the story director Michael Coogler is telling.

It’s also a pretty neat response to a logistics issue beyond his movie, that extends into the marvel universe, some of the highest grossing films in cinema history. Which is that Marvel owns the characters you’ve written long after your movie is over.

So — when Killmonger dies, he dies. instead of having Michael B Jordan play some reformed deformed Killmonger spouting Malcolm X quotes while shaking hands with the CIA in Infinity War, the symbol lives on.

We want to tell the stories we want to tell.

But we can’t always tell those stories exactly right, especially at the scale of a Marvel movie.*

And we don’t want our story, the characters that embody our story, to become antique, useless technology in someone’s moms basement.

So sometimes you fridge things to save them.

Anyway. Iron Man.

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* Right now I am imagining Ryan Coogler’s brain when he first heard how much money he had for Black Panther.

* and all of the stories surfaced about how he had to hide his cancer in order to get work