The Marvels of Our Mind
The true reality behind entertainment giant Marvel’s success is its ability to manipulate minds.
Graphic by Grace Peng, News Editor & Vecteezy
Reetu Maran, Staff Writer
Billionaire industrialist. The strongest man alive. America’s pride. A green giant. Teenage nerd. A deadly woman. I’m sure this rings a bell: The Avengers.
The Marvel franchise has grown to be one of the most successful movie franchises in the film industry. Many people credit the franchise’s success to the actors, its unique storylines, and a strong connection to the comic books.
These are very plausible reasons to justify the franchise’s success. However, there is a larger force that accounts for the prosperity of the Avengers franchise: the psychology of our minds.
The secret to Marvel’s success lies in the working of the human mind. Our desire for escape is seemingly much stronger than one would think it is. The brain is wired to escape discomfort and seek fantasy, and Marvel movies provide us just that. The franchise follows the stories of different superheroes, often following the plot of regular human beings with a special twist to the realities of their worlds. Our troubles, pains, sorrows, and struggles are liberated as we watch these movies. We sit back for two to three hours to live through someone else’s journey and adventure since we can’t seem to find a way to enjoy our own.
Black Panther is a perfect example of this, as it portrayed a seemingly impossible world as it sprung to life. The movie introduces the mythical world of Wakanda not as a place of poverty and struggle, but as a setting in which African wealth, technology, and military reigns supreme. Wakanda has one of the strongest armies, and its leaders wear suits of glowing purple vibranium. The cities are filled with trains moving at the speed of light and the buildings tower higher than any structures known to man. Wakanda proposes an alternate, polarizing reality to the poverty that the world thinks real-life Africa faces, giving consumers from around a globe a virtual reality in which struggle is almost always solved. According to the research institution Brookings, about 41 percent of the population of Africa lives under the poverty line. While America has worked to help these poorer countries, we still tend to brush aside these issues. The fact that Black Panther was one of Marvel’s highest-grossing movies just goes to prove two theories of how America deals with foreign issues: we don’t want to deal with issues that are not our own, and we can’t deal with them because they are simply too difficult to comprehend. This is one of the largest reasons why Marvel movies do so well, not because of their top-notch actors or their attention-grabbing storylines, but because of the solutions they offer to real-world affairs.
These struggles we face with the issues of others, ourselves and the world are not the only source of success for these movies. Success also stems from the connection between the composition of our mind and those of the superheroes. According to Sigmund Freud, we have three major structures of our mind: the id, the superego, and the ego. The id itself has two substructures known as Eros and Thanatos. Thanatos is translated to the death instinct and is viewed as a set of destructive forces that are present in all humans. Coincidentally Marvel’s most recent villain, Thanos, not only sounds oddly similar to Thanatos, but his violent impulses represent our natural id. Spiderman embodies the Eros aspect of the id, the infantile desires to live and act on instinctual impulses. He acts immediately, disobeys mentors, and displays average teen behavior. He opposes the Thanatos, which is a theory as to why he was dissolved in Infinity War. The Eros and the Thanatos are constantly working against each other, and eventually, one will come to dominate the other. In Infinity War’s perspective, it was the Thanatos that triumphed.
Iron Man takes the shape of the ego, which points the id in the right direction, often times taking credit as if the action was their own. This connection is seen in Iron Man and Spider Man's humorous yet complex relationship. Hulk displays a struggle between the id and society’s expectations shown through the transition from his violent, monstrous green form to the society-educated, calm Bruce Banner. Captain America represents the superego which incorporates the morals of a society that are learned from others. He was constantly told what to do and how to act while training for war. All of these characters and movies please our id’s natural craving for violence. We can connect with these characters unknowingly because they represent the various aspects of our own minds. We see them develop and grow, mirroring how our minds do the same.
The structure of mind is so important that it guides the way movies and so many other aspects of society are formed. Marvel is not only an entertainer but a master manipulator of the mind. And that is the true reality behind its success.
