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 Kandiah

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

Music

Sin

Suffering

2 December 2024

5 min read

The holy or the broken: Hallelujah at 40

What’s the magic sauce Leonard Cohen mixed into his masterpiece?

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A black and white photo shows, singer Leonard Cohen to the right hand side, eyes closed and head inclined slightly upwards.

Leonard Cohen, 2008

Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s summer 1984 – Richard Branson has just launched Virgin Airways, the Soviet Union have boycotted the Olympic games, the miner’s strike is still raging on, and Footloose is pretty much the only thing you can watch in the cinema.

Amidst it all, happening miles under the cultural radar, a songwriter of astronomical talent and middling success walks into a pokey studio in New York. He’s clutching a battered notebook which contains eighty verses of a song that he’s been writing and re-writing for multiple years. A song that has been driving him to utter madness, residing tormentedly in his mind. The metre is running in the recording studio, so the eighty verses are promptly whittled down to just four and the song is finally wrestled into existence.

A barely noticed existence, that is.

Those four chosen verses, the ones lucky enough to have escaped the confines of the notebook, continue to dwell in obscurity for a while yet. This seemingly cursed song is housed in an album that the record company have refused, claiming it to be of no real commercial value. Subsequently, it will enjoy a tiny release in Canada in December 1984, but nowhere else. It is, to sum up, profoundly ignored.

Now, let’s fast-forward exactly forty years.

That obscure, over-looked and under-estimated, little song has been covered by more than three-hundred artists, including Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, and Lou Reed. Its lyrics have been dissected and studied by the likes of Bono and Salman Rushdie. It’s a movie soundtrack favourite, a talent show staple, and a part of the furniture at weddings and funerals the world over. Books have been written about it, documentaries made about it. I don’t think it’s a major exaggeration to say that it’s in the cultural air we breathe.

A song that once had its maestro banging his head against the floor in frustration, now belongs to us all. Can you hazard a guess at which song this may be the origin story of? I can give you a hint, if you’d like? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls and the major lifts…

You’ve got it.

This humble tale is the story of ‘the baffled king composing Hallelujah’.

Generation after generation finds itself notably and profoundly moved by this song. We treasure it, we value it, we let far too many people cover it (looking at you, Justin Timberlake).

So, I guess I’m wondering - why?

It’s one of those odd questions to which everyone, and no-one, has the answer. And it’s not that I don’t recognise the outright genius of Leonard Cohen and accredit the success to his mastery, I do. But, apparently, not even Cohen himself fully understood why this song has become such a phenomenon. Its success is an oddity, really. So, we have every right to ask ourselves - what’s the magic sauce that’s mixed into this song?

Cohen... makes a bee line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there.

It opens with Cohen telling the biblical story of King David, who played the harp so beautifully it had a kind of mystical effect – it supernaturally calmed the spirit of the dangerously erratic Israelite king, Saul. David, who himself would go on to become the ruler of Israel, is the ‘baffled king’ about whom and to whom Cohen appears to sing. As Alan Bright notes,

‘He (Cohen) has placed us in a time of ancient legend, and peeled back the spiritual power of music and art to reveal the concrete components, reducing even literal musical royalty to the role of simple craftsman.’

The second verse mingles two further biblical stories together – that of (afore-mentioned) King David and Bathsheba, and Samson and Delilah. Both stories, both men, are brought to despair by abuses of power, moral failure, violence, and death. Their lives are truly toppled by their own brokenness and their own breaking-things-ness. To borrow a phrase from Francis Spufford, their stories act as a signpost for the ‘human propensity to f*** things up’.

These verses are so particular in their subject matter yet so universal in their resonance. Most people have a vague-at-best understanding of the biblical stories its lyrics are alluding to, but a precise-to-the-point-of-painful understanding of the way that old ‘human propensity’ can have its way.

And here is Leonard Cohen, using such despair and brokenness to house a sacred cry. Here’s Leonard Cohen, placing his finger on our vulnerability and telling us that it’s right there – right in the place of pain and shame – where we can engage with the divine. Here’s Leonard Cohen, telling us that if the God of the Bible exists, he can handle the very worst of us.

This song, whether we know it or not, steels past our defences. It makes a bee-line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and it plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there. It tells us that brokenness is inevitable, but it can be made holy. Isn’t that our deepest desire? To know that we’re not too far gone? To be told that we’ll fail, all the time, but never one time too many?

I think, if you were to put that message in any context less real and raw, we’d be suspicious of it. If this song was less gritty, it would have stayed ignored. But it’s just messy enough to have us trust it, Cohen just about honest enough for us to believe him when he tells us that he ‘didn’t come to fool’ us.

So, long may it continue. Long may it sneak past our emotional barricades and wreak havoc in our guarded hearts. Long may the four-minute-long weep-a-thon reign (just, not Justin Timberlake’s version, I beg).