(This post contains spoilers for a bunch of movies that came out from May to July)
The oldest and I were in a Saturday night showing of Haunted Mansion when something occurred to me: Is every movie this summer about grief in some way? Granted I have not seen every movie this summer. I don’t do horror movies. I have not seen Barbie yet though I am going to because EA says it’s amazing and our rector spent a good chunk of a sermon talking about the movie. I also did not see the newest Transformers movie because I was forced to see Revenge of the Fallen many years ago and swore I would never go to one of those movies again.
But the summer blockbusters that I have seen? All have characters haunted by grief.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - We learn Rocket belligerent exterior is masking the immense pain of losing his first friends Lylla, Teefs, and Floor. Peter is grieved by the loss of his relationship with Gamora and grappling with having been taken from his home as a child.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Gwen is haunted by the death of her best friend Peter. Miguel is hellbent on legalistically protecting the multiverse because of losing a daughter. Miles, having already lost his uncle, fights a whole multiverse of Spider-People, Critters, and Cars to protect his father.
The Flash - Scarred by his mother’s murder and his innocent father’s imprisonment, Barry goes back in time and breaks reality. Supergirl mourns her cousin and people. Batman grapples with aging. The whole movie is about whether we should change the past even if we could.
Elemental - Originally I thought this was the exception, but Wade is impacted by the loss of his father. Ember’s immigrant parents are constantly grappling with the absence of their homeland, family, and culture. Ember herself struggles with letting her father down by not pursuing his dreams for her.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - Indy grieves the loss of his son and the erosion of his marriage as he also deals with the ravages of time. The antagonist wants to go back in time and fix the mistakes of World War II (but not the ones a person should fix). History, changing the past, and the temptation to just give up are prominent themes.
Oppenheimer - What do you do when you feel guilty for the death of an ex-lover? What do you do when the blood of hundreds of thousands is on your hands? What do you do when the possible future annihilation of the planet is on your hands? Oppenheimer is constantly haunted by ghosts of the past and yet to come. The last scene of Oppenheimer is a gut punch unlike any I’ve experienced in a movie theater.
Haunted Mansion - Ben mourns the loss of his wife. Gabbie and Travis mourn the loss of her husband and his father. Gracie unleashes a supernatural evil upon the world in efforts to connect with his deceased wife. Multiple characters live with the tension of how to move on and whether or not there is any point to moving on.
Uh, are we okay? I know that sometimes loss is used as a shortcut to get audiences to sympathize with a character. Yet I cannot recall a summer when even all our popcorn flicks were so thick with loss. It feels like this is a barometer indicating our collective mood. There is a lot of grief in the air.
This haunted movie season makes sense. We’re still feeling the aftereffects of a worldwide pandemic in which people lost loved ones and normalcy. Students lost critical years of their development and rites of passage. We live in a culture where school shootings are common and there seems to be little movement at the legislative level to stop it. We reckon with sins of the past and present like racism while others are determinedly trying to pretend like those evils weren’t really that bad. All of that is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re going through some stuff.
I am mainly just writing this to say that we need to pay attention. When our entertainment is grappling with loss then maybe we should check in on ourselves and our neighbors a little bit more. After all, if there is a thread that runs through almost all of these movies it is that we can navigate loss and grief with others. Rocket and Peter need the Guardians. Miles, Gwen, and Peter B. need each other. Barry needs Bruce. Wade and Ember need each other and their families. Indy needs his goddaughter and Marion. Ben, Gabbie, and Travis need their weird band of ghost hunters, mediums, and exorcists. And Oppenheimer needs…well, that one is pretty darn complicated.
What I’m saying is that we need each other. All of us experience loss in some way or another. We cannot change the past. Grief is a good and healthy way of wrestling with our losses. And if we are attuned to one another and live in community then maybe we can live in a present that is not so haunted and nudge the future in a slightly better direction.