Marvel series asks ‘What If?’
What if Chicago never had Lollapalooza or Daley? What if deep dish was born in Milwaukee and you never read this headline?
Somewhere amid the infinite universes, on one of the infinite Earths, in one of the infinite Chicagos, there is a variant Lori Lightfoot and she canceled Lollapalooza. Outrage followed, as well as lawsuits. In this alternate Chicago, the vaccination rate kept pace with the nation — about 95%. A quick-acting President Donald Trump was clear and honest about the sacrifice and danger posed by the pandemic, and the nation mobilized with speed, calm and humility. But once the delta strain started circulating, the mayor decided, why risk progress? In this alt-Chicago, the summer was palatial and violence was down, the empty Michigan Avenue storefronts were filling again and your favorite neighborhood pub never shuttered. Somewhere, in one of the infinite Chicagos, fate unfolded as we had hoped it might.
Except we don’t live in that Chicago.
Still, what if ?
Nothing is inevitable. The world is built on possibilities and choices. What if white families never left the South Side of Chicago as Black families moved in — would the city be less segregated now? What if Richard J. Daley was never mayor? What if the Bears were content on the shores of Lake Michigan and not floating their own alternate universe based in a cold corporate nowhere? Is there another world where the Malnati family and the founders of Pizzeria Uno and many others developed deep dish pizza in Milwaukee, leaving Chicago to become the birthplace of pineapple-ham pizza?
We don’t live in that Chicago, either.
We live in the stubborn now.
Yet this idea of parallel universes and mirror worlds, alternate histories and a multiverse of realities where everything is familiar but the fine print — this concept of every road taken (and avoided) existing somewhere, in a parallel dimension — has more resonance than ever. Once a fringy storytelling device of speculative fiction, alternate realities have become not only a 21st century cultural standby but a handy way of explaining American life itself. Behind every fresh “code red” issued by climate scientists who warn of a worsen
ing environment, there is the loud existential sigh of what might have been. As more and more organizations and businesses and communities require proof of vaccination to simply move through the world, the unvaccinated exist in a parallel reality.
What’s so smart then about Marvel’s “What If ?” — a great new animated Disney Plus anthology series, adapted from the inventive 1970s comic book — is the recognition of how close we come to even the least probable future. The best and worst run on tightly parallel tracks. For a time there was a version of this essay in which I began by describing the show, but my editor thought you, dear reader, would be too Marveled out and move on to something less cartoony — and maybe I should begin a touch broader and less geeky? Perhaps. Or perhaps there’s nothing geeky about this. “What If ?” — the series and the comic — isn’t much about superheroes and villains. It’s about regrets and reliefs, the melancholy and the bittersweet. It’s about the things that might have been. Which is where a lot of us spend the day, zoning out in the car, or arguing with ourselves in the shower, wrestling with a multiverse of unrealized futures, asking how much agency we have to change what’s already gone.
The comic book “What if ?” began in 1977 with a single question: “What if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four?” (Turns out, he’d break them up.) Each issue began this way, with a new question that asked what would happen if some element of the Marvel Universe was altered in ways both large and small. Which allowed Marvel writers and artists to tweak decades of Marvel mythology without damaging the sacred Marvel canon. It was, in a sense, an ingenious way of market-testing in plain sight, without affecting the brand. What if Captain America became president? What if the Avengers got old? What if every superhero in New York City relocated to Toledo? (Seriously.) In one issue in the 1980s, all existence on Earth is erased; the next issue, in a meta-twist, a few superheroes return to the planet and find themselves grappling with massive swathes of white blank pages to fill.
Clever stuff. Indeed, one of the issues (“What if the Avengers had never been?”) is the plot of the third episode of the Disney series. The basis of the next Thor movie — which finds the Norse god’s ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) becoming a new Thor — can be traced back to issue No. 10, 1978: “What If Jane Foster had found the hammer of Thor?” As in the comic, the narrator is the Watcher, a kind of bulb-headed Rod Serling, an alien immortal who, as promised, merely watches, never interferes, offering only a vague chorus. He describes himself (voiced by actor Jeffrey Wright) as “your guide through these vast new realities.” In the first episode, when the future of Captain America pivots toward something vastly different, he blurts “There! That’s the moment!” In the second episode, when T’Challa, Black Pantherto-be, is kidnapped as a child by aliens who later became the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Watcher asks: Does our destiny determine our future? Or is it the nature of our world?
A cynic might say “What If ?” is a ploy to extend the seemingly inexhaustible Marvel Universe to infinity and beyond. And sure, it is probably that. At times, it plays like partly that. But it also rarely feels cheap. Each questions produces consequences. By switching Captain America’s gender, a fresh host of new concerns float up. Kidnapping T’Challa as a child (then telling him Wakanda is a wasteland, to be forgotten) echoes the history of Black America. Besides, comic books have used that device of alternate worlds to tinker for decades. Often quite well. The gold standard, the 1980s “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” proved so vast that DC published atlaslike guides to its alternative Earths. The path forward for the Marvel TV and movie universe is similarly its “branching timelines.” On the Disney Plus series “Loki,” parallel realities are tided up by a bureaucratic Time Variant Authority, but as “WandaVision” and the upcoming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” movies suggest, time can be peskily elastic, and possibilities quickly generate chaos.
Also joy: The beautiful and exuberant “SpiderMan: Into the Multiverse,” winner of the 2019 Academy Award for best animated film, gave us Miles Morales, a Black teenage Spider-Man who meets a Spider-Man Noir, a Spider-Girl, Peter Parker 1.0 and even a Looney Tunes-ish Peter Porker (voiced by Chicago comedian John Mulaney). Even those worn thin by an endless stream of superhero movies have to admit this is pretty cool: There are hints that the next live-action Spider-Man film will co-star former SpiderMen Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. The upcoming “Flash” movie — taking a cue from DC’s alt-world “Flashpoint” series — has Ben Affleck as Batman and Michael Keaton as Batman.
Pending intellectual property lawyers, it’s the freedom of the sandbox realized.
As Jeffrey Wright himself has correctly noted in interviews, the Watcher is really nothing more than the ultimate Marvel fanboy, squeezing every drip of potential from the very thoroughly pulped.
Once upon a fantasy world, when characters poked their heads into strange doors, they tumbled into enchanted lands and mystical realms, and now they stand up, brush off and find themselves at home, only the furniture is rearranged and someone left on the TV on. That TV might be showing “Palm Springs,” last year’s poignant Andy Samberg comedy about a man forced to revisit the same day again and again, with alterations each time. Or if they flip through streaming services, there’s “Russian Doll,” and “Stranger Things,” and “Parallel,” and “Counterpart,” and the animated “Rick and Morty” — each with a familiar world running parallel to the usual, modified in ways large and small. Which is not a bad description of watching the recent Olympics in Tokyo: It was like watching the Olympics, only set in a universe where the stands were empty and none of the competitors seemed to want to be there very much. Not that you need a TV for alternate universes. Last year when the University of Chicago shut down for the pandemic, to foster community, a group of Hyde Park scholars created “A Labyrinth,” a kind of role-playing game that integrated social media, email and phone calls (for starters) to craft an alt-reality. At the Art Institute of Chicago, among the pleasures of “Cosmoscapes” (though Sept. 20), artist Tai Xiangzhou’s exhibit of Song Dynasty-esque paintings, is “Parallel Universes,” a nine-panel series offering multiverses resting side by side.
Which, of course, is not even the obvious place to find an alternate reality right now.
Step out the front door. Billionaires are flying into space, briefly leaving us to tend to Earth 1.0. According to the Pew Research Center, the wealth gap has only accelerated in the past five decades — the rich are no longer simply different from you and me, now they seem eager to avoid breathing the same air. Indeed, the pandemic revealed just how much we reside in parallel universes. Physicists at Fermilab in Batavia have not found evidence of parallel universes, but recently they did discover evidence of particles that didn’t behave according to known physics. Which sounds like a good start. No wonder, last year, at the peak of the pandemic, social media was atwitter with claims that NASA had located parallel universes. (Not true.) In 2016, after Donald Trump stunned the world and won the presidency, one widely circulated online theory suggested physics research in Switzerland had inadvertently plopped the world into a parallel universe where a Trump presidency was possible. Also not true.
Plus, hardly necessary when, even out of the White House, Trump has built an alternate ecosystem of misinformation, conspiracies and exoneration, always on brand. Loyalists even claim he’s meeting with his “cabinet” regularly, and that the military answers to him. Several polls last spring found more than half of Republicans believe the election was stolen and Trump is the real president. Some claim “Joe Biden” is a decoy for the real Biden (who’s dead, of course) and Trump has been president the whole time. Salon called it the “weaponization of alternate reality.” But squint and you could almost see the outline of Philip K. Dick’s weird, posthumous “Radio Free Albemuth.” Like several of the Chicago sci-fi oracle’s novels, it’s set in an alternate United States, in this case a country that elected a neo-fascist president whose populist movement is fed lies and conspiracies. Like any demagogue, the question posed is always the same: Who are you going to be believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?
All of which poses a curious problem for the “What If ?” TV series (already OK’d for a second season): One of the hoariest truisms of pop culture is that it mirrors its times. Marvel itself found success in the early 1960s with characters who reflected issues of racism (The X-Men), the family (the Fantastic Four) and job security (SpiderMan); Marvel’s TV and films have found room for sexism (Captain Marvel), the surveillance state (Captain America) and even sexual abuse (Jessica Jones).
But who expected parallel-universe plot lines to compare with the real thing?
Perhaps it was inevitable in a country where shared beliefs have become rare. But for superheroes and nations alike, the problem is the same: Too many competing realities and it’s hard to keep the story straight. Even the Time Variance Authority on “Loki” struggles to maintain its version of Greenwich Mean Time, known as the “Sacred Timeline” — the single agreed-upon universe of shared futures. By the end of the last episode, that Sacred Timeline, of course, splinters and reality begins to look more like a central nervous system of diverging arteries. Hence, the Multiverse of Madness. Hence, the melancholy found at the margins of any thoughtful consideration of the roads not taken.
For an audience watching a promising new TV series, it’s where the fun begins: “What If ?” is the inventive follow-up, a lesson in how storytelling is fundamentally decisions, big and small, all in a row.
But in life, that’s less fun. The Watcher introduces himself in the first episode of “What If?” as the guide to a “prism of endless possibilities.” While taking notes, I wrote down a “prison” of possibilities and had to rewind a few times
before I realized that he actually said “prism.” It just
sounded a little too optimistic to be true.