Review
Culture
Film & TV
Friendship
4 min read

Guardians of the Galaxy’s longing for an enchanted universe

We are not isolated bodies who happen to be coexisting in the coldness of space. Krish Kandiah reviews Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3.

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Five people in red jump suits help each other stand together.
Marvel Studios.

The final instalment of Director James Gunn’s hugely popular Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy has hit the cinemas. This threequel about a relatively obscure set of characters from the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) has been incredibly well received. It’s set to outperform the first two films in the series as well as other MCU films like Iron Man and Captain America, widely known household names before their stories were transported from comic page to silver screen. 

I went to watch Guardians Volume 3 at the cinema on Coronation weekend with my daughter and was struck by the relative ease that it navigated cultural diversity. It offered a fascinating perspective on cultural inclusion and empowerment thanks to the radical diversity of its central characters.  

There’s an orphaned boy abducted and brought up by space pirates to become a master thief.  There’s a widower and bereaved father whose whole family was massacred but has a gift for nurturing children despite his ferocity. There’s also an abuse survivor rebuilt as a cyborg , a sentient teenage tree, an adopted empath with antennae and a genetically modified racoon.  

The Guardians are not just a performative or representational diversity but a functional one. They are the most unlikely synergistic team whose sum is far greater than any of its parts. 

These characters represent not simply different ethnicities but wholly different species – plant, mammal, humanoid. None of them seem to be included for purposes of tokenism: each brings essential skills or experience that make the team not only successful, but outstandingly so.   

At the Coronation Concert from Windsor Castle that was watched by 12.7 million people in the UK, the diversity on stage seemed more contrived. Despite moments of genuine beauty, dignity and pathos, the need to represent the four nations and the Commonwealth felt like it was motivated primarily by a desire not to offend, a tick box exercise of inclusion rather than a line-up that made coherent sense as an aesthetic whole. 

The Guardians are not just a performative or representational diversity but a functional one. The unlikely heroes are drawn together through a vision bigger than themselves and are willing to risk their lives on numerous occasions to save the universe. They are the most unlikely synergistic team whose sum is far greater than any of its parts. This is not just idealism – the well-known McKinsey report showed the legitimate competitive advantage that diversity brings, promoting a breadth of cultures, gender and ages in the C-suite of major businesses.  

Diversity works. Diversity also sells. The movie industry is slowly waking up to the need of baking in diversity rather than simply waiting for the global markets to lap up the US leftovers. Films are now being made for a global audience from the beginning. The Marvel franchise are buying into this big time: with Black Panther and Shan Chi tapping into the potential for Black and Asian audiences to engage with the brand.  

Most of the Guardians heroes begin life isolated, abandoned, rejected, betrayed or bereaved. During the course of the films, their social coldness thaws and they each find the warmth of fellowship, community and even family.

Perhaps Marvel can do for diversity in the film industry what Spice Girls did for diversity in the music industry. The girl band was deliberately designed by marketeers with audience demographics determining the very make-up of the group which somehow managed to transcend its inception and help a generation of young girls realise there were many different ways to express femininity that broke traditional stereotypes and yet could harmonise. The Spice Girls showed that femininity could include ferocity, sporting ability, elegance and cuteness and no one was the lesser for it. Girl power was in my opinion a positive cultural contribution. It engendered acceptance.  

The Guardians trilogy speaks to our cultural longing for an enchanted universe where we are not isolated bodies who happen to be coexisting in the coldness of space but a place where we are known for who we really are and are loved and accepted, despite our differences. Most of the Guardians heroes begin life isolated, abandoned, rejected, betrayed or bereaved. During the course of the films, their social coldness thaws and they each find the warmth of fellowship, community and even family.   

The storyline is not a new one. Thousands of years ago another disparate group of outcasts were brought together on a mission to save the world. They were hunted down for their allegiance to that mission but did not give up on their belief that God wanted to create a genuinely inclusive community, where people of all abilities, genders and race could experience welcome as equals. Jesus Christ formed that original band of disciples and is now followed by millions. Churches at their best are similarly diverse. Rich and poor, refugees and natives, old and young, male and female and everything in between are united, not just by being in the same place at the same time, consuming religious services together, but by a purpose beyond them, seeking to share the boundary-breaking, radically welcoming love of God to all without distinction, and to be the guardians of that purpose, of our planet and of all its people.  

Article
Culture
Justice
Trauma
4 min read

Why are we so obsessed with true crime?

Our prurience often mistakes curiosity for compassion

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Crime scene tape
Joshua Coleman on Unsplash.

Last month, Terry Barnes wrote in The Spectator about the ‘Trial of the Century’: that of Erin Patterson, a middle-aged Australian woman accused of murdering a dinner party-full of people with deadly mushrooms. 'All this week, on unusually cold and frosty southern Australian winter mornings, pre-dawn queues of rugged-up and puffer-jacketed hopeful spectators formed outside the rural courthouse, breath steaming in television spotlights as people stamped their feet to stay warm.' 

Journalists covering the ongoing trial compete with those spectating - and reporters have flown in from around the world to an obscure, otherwise undisturbed country town. The general fascination mirrors the streaming charts, where you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to observe a pattern in what’s hot. True crime – whether recreated on TV or happening in the courts - is having a moment.  

The attention of criminologists, the press, law enforcement and the justice system on real life cases such as Patterson’s is paramount. But is ours? 

A voracious appetite for true crime isn't new. In St Augustine's Confessions, he writes about a friend called Alypius who resisted peer pressure to go into the gladiatorial amphitheatre. Augustine writes about his friend being dragged in: 

'When they arrived and had found seats where they could, the entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty.' 

Alypius kept his eyes closed, but eventually gave in to the spectacle: 

'As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. Without any awareness of what was happening to him, he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure.' 

Alypius' story is one of being freed from this addiction, but there's still a thirst for blood today in the arena of both true crime and cancel culture. The human condition, as well as being predisposed to voyeurism, is closer to William Golding's Lord of the Flies than we'd like to admit. It doesn't take much displacement of order for chaos to unravel. 

And this is why we're so fascinated: that true crime is true. The whodunnits of Agatha Christie have kept people entertained for decades, but truth is stranger than fiction. The perpetrators aren't ridiculous 2D villains and monsters, but men and women who for whatever reason have given themselves over to darkness. The mixture of motives, methods and mania aren't easily unscrambled, so we like the serialisation. The devil is in the detail, and it takes time to pore over. 

The Russian author and dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, when he was sent to the gulag, gradually solved his own puzzle: that evil can be observed, but it is much closer than we think: 'Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.’ 

Even so, we don't like to admit that sobering reality, or nuance. We like to think we're on the side of justice. We confuse curiosity with compassion. But the Netflix shows, podcasts and twists and turns of the courtroom upend our 'just world hypothesis': we see that justice often isn't fully served in this life, making us wonder if it might be possible eternally. 

Then there's also the reality of truth being contested. The prophet Isaiah writes of a time where 'Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far off. For truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter.’  

Perhaps our thirst here is not just for all the gory details, but for justice and truth. It's a theme picked up by St John in the New Testament, writing 'And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.' Jesus declares later in this same gospel: 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’ 

The only way we can begin to make sense of evil is to consider one who absorbs our darkness, absorbs all darkness, and yet remains light, even against the backdrop of our world’s darkness.  

So what's the right balance? Can I enjoy a true crime show and be filled with light? The tipping point will probably be different for each of us. St Paul, himself a victim of injustice, writes from his prison cell: 'whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’ 

This isn't a call to turn a blind eye to evil. Paul isn't escaping his prison cell with escapism. He is starkly, soberingly honest about the nature of his own sin and its pervasive, polluting quality in the human condition. And we all have a responsibility to one another to detect, be vigilant and call out where there's injustice. To be ready for it. Our world is in a mess because of blind eyes and burying heads in the sand. Jesus quite clearly says he brings that light to expose the darkness. But meditating on and marinating in darkness as entertainment? That is something different.  

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief