There was always a presumption that someone important was going to bite the dust during this sixth Marvel Studios production, if only because 'something important' had to happen in order to make The Avengers more than just a glorified 'time-out' in between the other stand-alone Marvel franchises. I had theorized that Bruce Banner would be the casualty, mainly due to the fact that Universal and Marvel had twice tried to make a Hulk franchise without success, and that the Hulk was himself a very expensive special effect. Now that I've seen the film, I'm certainly glad that Mark Ruffalo will live to play Banner in whatever else the Marvel universe has in store for him. As many of you know, at the climax of the second act, Loki stabs Agent Phil Coulson through the back with a large spear and poor Coulson quickly bleeds out.
It's a seemingly devastating moment, although it's less emotional than it should have been because of how its handled, who witnesses it, and how much everyone babbles about what should be subtext (that Coulson's death will propel our heroes to put aside their differences and save the day). Dearly-departed Clark Gregg gets two death speeches before succumbing to his injuries, and the weirdly self-aware nature of his demise undercuts what should be a tragic and bitterly unfair moment. More importantly, his death witnessed by Thor, who has barely a fleeting relationship with the SHIELD agent, as opposed to Tony Stark who has an ongoing friendship that goes back at least a couple years. And, while this may end up on the deleted scenes reel, I desperately wanted a moment when Pepper Potts learns of this news and reacts accordingly, as the film remembers their chumminess in the opening reel. It is the lack of that kind of humanity that mars the film as it becomes basically a special effects and action-stunts demo reel (albeit a very good one) in its final 45 minutes.
I figured out who the unlucky victim was going to be about a week before I saw the film, but didn't know for sure until Coulson walked into Loki's cell without any kind of backup. First of all, and this was something that I hinted at the other day, in the deluge of press junkets and interviews that Marvel studio execs have given over the last month, they've confirmed the ongoing plans of pretty much every major character in The Avengers *except* for Coulson, so it was mere deduction by process of elimination. If Kevin Feige and company hadn't blabbed so much about how Loki would be in Thor 2, about whether or not Black Widow would be in Iron Man 3, if Bruce Banner would get another shot at a stand-alone movie, whether or not Nick Fury would be showing up in later sequels and so-forth, then maybe I wouldn't have been able to deduce which major character was not being included in those conversations.
But in retrospect, we all should have figured it out two years ago, or the exact moment when Joss Whedon was hired to direct the film. It's no secret that Joss Whedon likes to bump off major characters over the course of his episodic television shows, something he was doing long before The Sopranos made it an 'in' thing to do (The X-Files was arguably the first in this regard). But the secret to Whedon's cruelty is that he made a point over his career to not only kill major characters but to kill the specific characters that everyone loved the most. Did anyone in the Scooby gang have anything but respect/fondness for Jenny Calendar before Angel snapped her neck at the 2/3 mark of the season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Sure the fans loved her, if only because she brought out new character beats for Giles, but the important thing is that all of the main characters liked her and thus her demise impacted them all. We wept (figuratively or literally) because they wept. Same thing with Tara, hit by a stray-bullet towards the end of season six. Willow's girlfriend was the ultimate innocent among the gang, someone generally untouched by the evil and cruelty that often surrounded the Buffy universe. There are examples of this in Angel (Fred!!) and Firefly (the shocking and arbitrary death of Wash right at a moment of near-victory towards the end of Serenity), but the pattern is the same.
Joss doesn't just kill off major characters. He kills off the characters that every other character loves and thus we all love unequivocally. Like Jenny Calendar and Tara before him, Agent Coulson was the innocent sacrifice to spur the rest of the group to action.Following what amounted to a glorified cameo in Iron Man from a somewhat recognizable character actor, Phil Coulson quickly became both a connective tissue throughout the Marvel universe and the audience surrogate. He was respected, if not quite adored, by all of the other would-be Avengers and had no dark secrets to hide and no character blemishes to taint his pure morality. His death hurt the most because he was the closest thing to you or I on the screen. He was a representative of the sort of person that loves these films the most and like Randy in the Scream series, that made him the prime target for extinction. If you want the stakes to matter, you have to be willing to kill the ones they love. 15 years later, fans still haven't forgiven Wes Craven for butchering Jamie Kennedy halfway through Scream 2. Judging by the response online, the outcry of 'grief' shows that Whedon made the right call.
That he was the most appropriate candidate to be written-out of the Marvel universe doesn't make it any less unfortunate. Clark Gregg won't go hungry. Even if he wasn't an accomplished character actor and screenwriter (he wrote Choke and What Lies Beneath), I imagine he'll be at conventions until the day he dies. As I wrote two years ago, his level of stardom is far higher now than it would be had he not lucked into a reoccurring role of this nature (we also share the same birthday, natch). But the manner in which it occurs makes more sense in the context of The Avengers being a stand-alone film (Thor has a potent moment earlier in the film where he apologizes to Coulson for the carnage that his brother has brought to Earth) than a climax to a six-part saga (since Stark was the Avenger who knew him best). Tony Stark does grief in his own passive-aggressive fashion (including a brief callback to his first scene in the film and an honest acknowledgement of how unheroic his demise really was), but it hurts the film that he's not among those watching Coulson die. It's the difference between Spock's death in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Kirk's death in Star Trek: Generations. And the need to explicitly state what his death represented in a narrative sense (yes, Nick Fury does quite a bit of 'monologuing' this time around) neuters at least some of the impact even while the movie does stop to mourn for a moment.
But it is an appropriate plot turn in a film that arguably needed one or two more of its nature in its climax to really have an emotional oomph in the end. Have another Avenger fall in battle, have our heroes make a tactical blunder than costs civilian lives, give the heroes an impossible choice between saving civilians and saving emergency personal, leave Thor with no choice but to brutally murder his brother as he cries out in anguish. The film needed 'a push' to truly matter in its finale. But for one brief moment, as an old friend quite-literally takes one for the team, The Avengers is more than just an orgy of wisecracks, hero-smackdowns, and city-leveling action explosions. Agent Coulson gives his life so that our conflicting heroes can rally together and save the Earth. But Clark Gregg gave up his gravy-train so that The Avengers could be more than just a blip on the radar screen of the Marvel movie universe.
Scott Mendelson
