Authority, Responsibility, and Ability

Authority, Responsibility, and Ability

There is a curse. It goes like this: “May you live in interesting times.” 

Colloquially this phrase is said to come from ancient China, but it is much more likely to be a modern reworking.  Regardless of its origin, it has stuck with me for several years now, and I think for many of us, in the early months of 2020 it rings quite true. 

The above video truly and deeply astonished me.  How do we parse it?   With automatic rage at the brutal racist police state that Minneapolis has become?  An immediate defensiveness for the officers that are probably scared out of their wits and just trying to do their jobs and protect property and persons?  Do you just chalk it up as another example of how guns are the bane of mankind, or do you simply see a strong reason for American citizens to arm themselves to protect against state and federal fascism?  Were these cops?  The national guard? Or the Federal military?  Is there even much of a meaningful difference anymore?  What are the laws they were enforcing?  Are those laws just?  Or are they making up rules as they go along?  Does the fact that the filmer was a woman change things?  Should it? 

For me I think the biggest question, the one I have been seeking to answer more than any other is, What do we use to filter our thoughts and our feelings about even one of these occurrences?  Much less when we are bombarded with videos and images from all sides and all viewpoints all day without end?  How do we judge right from wrong in any situation, especially when people we know, talk with, live with, whose children play with ours, and whose lives we have shared from near and far away, think so differently from us? 

This may be the most important problem any individual can attempt to solve in our time if they want to look at the world and understand what is happening and what to think about it. 

With that said I want to share what I think is the best lens I have found for answering all the questions I have outlined above.  

I have found that there is a lovely interplay between the three words that are the title of this essay: Authority, Responsibility and Ability.  And that is what I want to outline here.  But first I need to define my relation to the first and most difficult of these concepts. 

Authority and Me

If you know me, you may be familiar with my background and the fact that the word authority is more than a dirty word for me.  If you don’t know me, I will simply say that when someone claims they have authority over you, your life, and your family, and you believe it, things can go very very badly.  When you wake up and realize that they do not have that authority, that it is illegitimate, and a lie that was being used to hurt you for the benefit of another, it is a good day, but it comes with a price.  It is a serious system shock, and the road back to reason and reality is full of a lot of hurt and regret.  Needless to say my experiences with authority are…loaded.  Authority is a word I take very seriously but one that in time I have looked at carefully to understand it, much like one would look at a buzz saw or a potent drug.  It has hurt me in the past because it has been misused.  But authority is a real thing, a concept not to be rejected utterly.  It is one to be understood, put in its proper place, and used only with reason and respect. 

Authority and Responsibility

One of the most fundamental understandings of authority came for me when I began juxtaposing it with the idea of responsibility and it is where I came to make the first postulate in my own philosophy about how I view the world, the first idea to which I anchored my reasoning about the concept of authority.  I will call it A1.

A1 - If one has authority, one must also have responsibility. The two must not be separated. 

Like any if then statement that is fully true, this statement naturally breaks down into 4 others which I hold to be equally true.  For those mathematicians and logicians out there I have labeled them for your enjoyment. 

A1 α - If one is held responsible, they must be given authority.  Statement

A1 β -If one is given authority, they must be held responsible.  Converse

A1 δ - If one is not held responsible, they must not be given authority.  Inverse

A1 γ - If one is not given authority, they must not be held responsible.  Contrapositive

Now, my background with authority is religious, but I do not intend these to be religious claims.  Instead they are philosophical.  I believe they are true universally.  They apply as much to civil liberties as they do to family dynamics.  They are fundamental to law and faith, and even your interactions at the local pizzeria.  Let’s look at each one and see if they are self evident. 

Let’s start with the first statement.
A1α - If one is held responsible, they must be given authority. 

Let’s say you are in charge of something.  The original something I used as I thought through these ideas was that of roads.  If you are the commissioner, officer, chief engineer or whatever of local roads, what does this mean?  It means the roads are your responsibility. But this only works if you have the authority to have them repaved when they need to be.  You must have the authority to buy construction supplies, to commission workers, to sign construction deals, and to see that the work is carried out correctly.  You cannot be responsible unless you have the authority to do what needs to be done.  Imagine if you were in charge of such a job, but did not have the authority to decide when to pave, or what material to use!  It would be most unfair if you were blamed for potholes you had no authority to fix.  And it would be wrong to praise you if the decision to pave rested with someone else. 

A1 β -If one is given authority, they must be held responsible

This is also clearly true.  If you are the authority in charge of the roads, you should be the one held responsible for their condition.  If they are well paved and maintained, you are to be praised.  If not, you ought to be held responsible for the dangers and damages that occur.

A1 δ - If one is not held responsible, they must not be given authority. 

This is the one that helped me the most because it is the one I often see people fail to apply.  I initially put it to myself as: “If you will not suffer consequences, why should you be in charge?”  For our straightforward example, the department of parks is not held responsible for the paving and maintenance of roads.  Therefore they should not be the ones to make the decisions about it. This seems obvious but I see a lot of failure to apply it in small subtle areas.  I will get into more complex examples later, but for now, take note of this one.  It will come up a lot. 

And lastly,
A1 γ - If one is not given authority, they must not be held responsible. 

This one also made sense to me.  Why would you protest outside the parks department for a road full of potholes?  One may think this is self evident but when people loot and burn down hundreds of shops, big and small, because of police brutality one starts to wonder if people really understand it. 

And this leads into the second postulate which, like the first one, I believe is self evident. 

B1 - If either authority or responsibility is granted without the other, this constitutes injustice.

I don’t feel the need to say much on this.  If you do not think it is true, read any of the above examples with this in mind and see if you agree. 

Ability 

The last piece of this puzzle is that of ability.  I will postulate one simple thing here.

C1 –Authority and responsibility should only be given to one with appropriate ability. 

This one also seems self evident but much hinges on it.  A child cannot manage a baseball team.  Your chinchilla probably doesn’t give good investment advice.  A middle school math student should probably not be given a position as an actuary.  Someone who does not speak English should probably not teach it, and the King of England cannot effectively govern the Americas.  That last one was a matter of opinion for a while but tends to be widely held as true nowadays. 

A Universal Truth? 

Over the past 12 years or so I have tried out these three postulates on situation after situation.  And I have found that they work!  Even the most complex and difficult situations I could find tend to become clearer if viewed from this lens.  Who is responsible?  Who is in charge?  And are they able?  From simple problems to complex ones, from deeply intimate issues to the far off and remote ones. 

If I am in charge of the IT department at work, I must have authority to access the computers, to add and remove software in a manner that still allows work to continue.  If I don’t have the authority to regulate what is on them how can I be held responsible if one gets loaded up with bugs and viruses? That would be unjust.  If my work lends me a computer they should have the authority to tell me what I may and may not do with it because the computer is theirs.  If they say I must install Windows Vista I should do so no matter how bad the program is.  If I do not, I am taking the authority to choose the software, and if I break it I will likely be held responsible for its repair.  And if they say I may not install and run video games on it because it will wear out the CPU, then I should comply.  But if it does break or crash as a result of the approved programs I am not responsible for the crash.  Instead, they are responsible to fix it or get me a new one.

Let’s look at a more complex example from real life. There was a man campaigning to become governor of Pennsylvania.  He promised to pave hundreds of small roads as a part of his campaign.  He won his election and ordered the roads be paved.  20 years later the roads began to deteriorate and no funding had been set aside to maintain them.  Now the state cannot afford to keep them up.  He is long since out of office, and Pen Dot is stuck with the aftermath.  He cannot be held responsible now!  It seems like he shouldn’t have been given that authority.  

I have seen parents who demand the authority to run their grown up children’s lives.  When you were a child your parents were legally responsible for your safety and wellbeing.  As a result, they should have had some form of authority over certain aspects of your life.  But if now you are independent and support yourself, they are no longer responsible and must not claim that authority.  That responsibility falls to you and so does that authority. 

Indeed, when it comes to authority over people we must be extra careful, but it makes for a good example of how to apply these postulates.  In my exploration of authority and people I actually started with the idea that a parent is responsible for the wellbeing of their child because the child is not able to be.  Therefore the parents must have the authority to make decisions about the child’s wellness. 

The child may not wish to go to bed, but the parent knows better and may exert their authority.  The child may wish to eat nothing but cookies and sweets but the parent has authority to require them to eat their carrots and greens.  The neighbor may think the child watches too much television, but the parent has the authority to make that call.  And of course the parents are held responsible!  A child that is malnourished may result in criminal charges against a parent!  Neglect is a highly punishable offense, and a child that is abused will be rightly taken away from the parent and the parent prosecuted.  Alternately, it is evident that the family’s neighbor is not responsible for feeding the family’s child and so will not be the one to receive the punishment if that child is not fed.  

Situation after situation seems to work.  To this day I have not found an issue where looking through the lens of authority, responsibility, and ability did not help.  At the very least it would clarify what the actual argument was.  In many cases the issue boiled down to two different assumptions about who was responsible.  Once that was established a clear debate could begin.   And this works for the hardest of issues! 

A hot button issue right now is that of reparations.  All too often I see the argument devolve into one side yelling racism and the other yelling theft.  But I have found that at the heart of the debate is a question about whether or not the average American is responsible for the welfare of a specific set of individuals.  That is a topic that can be discussed and debated.  The hatred and yelling does not help.  Clarifying the disagreement does. 

Socialized medicine is another of these issues and perhaps my favorite example of how to break down a debate this way.  I hear one side screaming that its proponents are communists, thieves and fascists.  The other screams in indignation that objectors hate the poor, are racist against minorities, and are selfish with their money.  So much anger.   But if you bring to bear the idea of authority, responsibility, and ability, the real heart of the question ought to be, “Should and can the government be responsible for the medical welfare of its citizens or should/can the individuals be?”  Personally I maintain that the government cannot be functionally responsible for so many people, cases, situations, problems, and concerns.  I would agree with the broad strokes of F. A. Hayek’s “Fatal Conceit,”* which is the idea that a centralized body cannot gather enough dispersed knowledge to run as complex a system as it would need to.  Remember this is the government that gave you a food pyramid aligned with American production numbers not health guidelines, which has flip-flopped on whether or not eggs should be eaten at all from year to year, outlaws marijuana but not the much more deadly tobacco, and who enacted prohibition “for the good of its citizens.”  I can see this government someday deciding that gluten does enough harm to enough people that it up and bans bagels, while forgetting about peanut allergies because the peanut industry has better lobbyists.   No, instead I would posit that a complex market economic system with each individual seeking the best for themselves will help more people and will certainly do so more efficiently, and with greater precision.  But whether you agree with me or not, ultimately it is an argument about the ability to be responsible, and therefore have authority!  Can the individual be responsible for their own healthcare, or can the state?  A straightforward question once you get past the yelling. 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit  

One of these days I will set down my thoughts on the importance of liberty versus responsibility which also informs my take on that issue, but for now I think the point is clear.  If you boil a topic down to who is responsible, who has authority, and whether or not they are able, you can get a much clearer picture and perhaps get a better vantage point to decide what you think. 

Application to Today

As for the video which incited me to spend half a day typing over three thousand words of my personal philosophical bedrock, I will present my analysis.  These thoughts on the matter are not the work of a day; they are the result of over a decade of looking at problems through this lens.  The practice has allowed me to form my ideas very quickly and with a level of skeptical certainty which would have taken me much longer otherwise. 

The American people have agreed to have a police force, and to give them the authority to make lawful arrests.  They have the responsibility not to act outside of the law.  They have the responsibility to be well trained enough to not do stupid, careless, and dangerous things.  They are certainly responsible to not take purposefully damaging actions against any of our population.  And because they are responsible, they damned well better be held accountable when they get it wrong.   Whether the death of George Floyd was a result of racism, incompetence, negligence, or simply a lack of training, there absolutely must be a cry for justice.  Someone is responsible.  The knee in his neck was an authority that should never have been taken, and the responsibility for that act must be brought to bear.  That said, the crime must be proved.  A nation with the authority to declare murder is responsible for the due process to prove it.   But given the evidence I have seen, I believe the charge of murder is the beginning of the right course.  Even the guilty deserve their day in court.  Let us hope the court is just. 

Beyond that, in America we have the right and authority to peaceably assemble in protest.  We are responsible to do so.  We do not have the right to loot and burn down stores.  If we do so, I think a curfew is a reasonable response.  The government is responsible to protect life and property although they failed to do so spectacularly for several days.  I am unsure if it is a failure of ability, or if it represents a reasonable rejection of authority by the people of the city (which is a topic I have not really covered here), but either way the curfew is an attempt to regain that authority and fulfill that responsibility.  One may absolutely debate if the city should have that authority, but the law certainly allows it for now. 

However, my understanding of the curfew law is that it may only restrict access to public places. Your front porch is not a public space.  It seems to me that no police officer should be able to order you into your own home and off the outdoor spaces of your private property.  The law was not behind that order.  What was actually behind it was a nonlethal, but very likely harmful, pepper round.  People have lost eyes and suffered serious injury from such “non-lethal” bullets, so using one requires a good reason and must have the force of law behind it. 

What I saw in that video was armed men, entrusted with citizens’ wellbeing, taking authority they did not have, and doing it with brutality, danger to citizens, a form of violence, and perhaps even pleasure. 

I did not decide this right away.  I did some research.  I looked into the curfew order.  I brought the ideas of authority, responsibility and ability to bear and have decided that what I saw, if I have my facts straight, was injustice, and tyranny of the highest order.  A violation of person, property, and the good will of the people they are responsible to serve. 

Let us hope the world is watching. 

Between Two Titans

April 1st 2020

April first, a day widely known as a day for fools, shenanigans, deceptions, and pranks.   But it has a specific significance to the online communities in the era when I write this.  It is the day that no one should believe anything they read on the internet.  An ironic starting point to be sure, but one that may be telling of our times for those that look back on the late stages of the information age from both the near or far future. 

I sit now in isolation.  At home instead of my preferred coffee shop setting, because the governor of the great state of Pennsylvania says that I must.  Evidently someone in a far off country ate a bat and now the world is in one of the strangest battles in its recorded history and many questions have risen to the forefront.  Questions of acceptable deaths vs. GDP have never been more acute.  Questions of free market vs. government programs are being raised.  Civil disobedience vs. the common good is being considered in an uncommonly immediate and practical sense.  Does your auto mechanic’s right to work and pay his rent supersede the chance that in doing so your friend’s grandmother may become ill and die.  Are the government’s shortcomings in creating a reliable, widely available, and time efficient test the fault of capitalism and bad leadership?  Or is the observation that the mobilization of the American capitalist engine brought faster results in diagnosis, treatment, and production of equipment truly accurate? 

I do not intend to answer any of these questions.  Each is extremely specific and to answer them accurately I would need to have a great deal of information that I do not possess, and could only get by querying authorities and data sources that themselves may be debated and challenged, and are almost certainly flawed in some way. 

Instead I intend to embark on a discussion of what I see as the two great titans of thought of our times.  Much of what I have seen of the debate between people of good intention (as well as those who may be a bit mixed in such intentions) has boiled down to two major ideas.  Two deeply juxtaposed and naturally polarizing ideas. 

They are not as you may expect the ideal of the democrat and the republican.  Both ideas have shifted their stances on thing after thing over the decades.  But were you to even take a snapshot of the ideals as they exist in the teaming masses of people all around the globe at this very moment I don’t think they would align to the two ideological titans to which I am referring.

Perhaps if would be helpful If you will allow me a moment of allegory.  We think of titans as great hulking figures, heads scraping the clouds, feet deeply furrowing the earth upon which they walk, shaping the land with their passage as we helplessly look on.  And while that is indeed one depiction of them, I think there is another far more apt image, that of the sleeping titan.  The body of the titan lies reclined, with the detritus of ages obscuring his form.  Forests upon his shoulders, rivers flow from his sides, lakes lie in the crux of his sweeping arms.  Those that walk upon his form do not even acknowledge his presence for he has been there as long as they can remember.  They may mine his very bones for the wild fanciful structures they build.  But he is there, immutable and eternal.  The very foundation of all that is thought of above is what has always been below.

The two ideas I propose to explore are ideas I think form a base for nearly every disagreement I have observed about policy, morality, society, and perhaps even religion. 

They have many names given throughout the ages, but I will introduce them simply.  They are that of the individual, and that of the obligation.  It may also be good to give a second set of names given them by many writers that have come before; they are that of liberty and the community. 

When I hear people argue, or when I engage in the argument myself, I find that most people who disagree, (especially those that disagree badly) hold one of these two ideas above the other on such an unconscious level that it colors all they say and think.  They have such an opposite set of givens toward one side or the other, commonly changing depending on the topic or circumstance, that unless that is understood no headway can be made. 

I find that such an argument either rambles off into the minutia of many details and how we know them, (which I have not found to be of much value) or it gets deeply into the esoteric, (which I find to be somewhat better.)  We either climb up to the spires and argue their height, or we delve to the base to see what the bedrock is made of. 

It is an exploration of the bedrock of these two ideas I propose to embark upon while I am cooped up in the coming weeks.  Their definition, their application, the common ways I see them misunderstood, and the limits of their application are things I have been thinking through over the past few years.  And rarely have I seen the problems of this unexamined set of ideas so plainly as in the world’s current state. 

So I propose to collect my thoughts and explore these ideas, and do so a bit publicly.  I would relish varying ideas on my work.  So I will probably be reading and listening to comments and responses, and I anticipate they will shape my writings and help refine my ideas, but I don’t expect I will be addressing them directly. 

The first step of this exploration will be setting bounds on these two titans and describing what I mean by each one.  Having the same definition for a thing is invaluable if it is to be discussed, much less applied.  So let me know what you think of the endeavor and at the very least I hope I can give us all something for our poor board minds to mull over in the time we have in our homes. 

Falling Left – Permadeath in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Falling Left – Permadeath in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Or: How I Learned to Stop Theorizing and Trust Cinematic Convention

Time to get film buff.  One of the most lovely and subtle, tried and true tricks of cinematography is the use of lateral motion to convey positive and negative emotion.  The key idea is surprisingly straight forward.  If the action on screen moves from left to right your audience tends to feel positive and senses progression.   If it moves from right to left, they feel negative or sense regression.  And it doesn’t necessarily have to be motion.  Character positioning, orientation, and even facing can do similar things. 

This isn’t a small effect. A number of tests and studies have shown purposeful uses of lateral motion can sway a wide audience’s perception of a scene quite potently.  But most audience members are not really aware of this convention as a practice, so it can be done subtly.

 (Every Frame a Painting is a great channel on YouTube and I wish they could have kept putting out more content!  Their video: Snowpiercer: Left or Right highlights a brilliant example of the use of this convention.  I highly recommend both the channel and that video in particular! There is also a great little Video Essay documenting one of the studies on lateral motion.  It gives some solid examples of its use and effects!)

Now, let’s look at the various deaths in Infinity War! 

Loki’s death is of course the one most fans suspect is false.  But it’s the first death in Infinity War so we start there.  The scene leading to Loki’s demise is both subtly heroic and, if genuine, deeply tragic.   It contains several brilliant echoes that bring perspective and closure to his various character arcs, which help sell its genuineness in my opinion.  But in terms of its cinematography and framing it is curious.  There are several quick perspective shot changes that switch between Thanos and the bound Thor leading up to the moment of Loki’s death.  Despite this flexibility, the final shot of Loki’s demise, and the one that definitively comprises his “fall” when Thanos tosses him to the ground, has him fall from right to left.  He then remains in that orientation for all his remaining screen time.  (With the exception of a single, very brief, wide shot) This sudden change lends a finality to his death and the left facing fall lends a subtle emotional weight.  But he is not alone.

Heimdall is quickly killed in that same scene.  Again, despite several changes in camera orientation, the moment when the death blow comes, as well as the moment when his life fades, show him falling back to the left.  Just like Loki the camera then locks, keeping this perspective on him for the remainder of his screen time. 

The next death in Infinity War is Gamora’s but hers is a bit more complicated, so we will skip over that for now to the last of the “natural” infinity war deaths, that of Vision. 

Vision dies twice.  The first death leaves only a crater, but the one that sticks is at the hands of Thanos after he undoes Scarlet Witch’s destruction of the Mind Stone.  This is a particularly interesting one that caught me by surprise when I looked at it closely.  I remembered that Vision fell to the left, but what I did not remember was that after ripping the stone from Vision, Thanos tosses his greying body away to the right.  Despite this fact, vision is then shown falling left. 

Vision is given the same post death treatment as the other two.The camera locks to this left orientation and does not deviate.The film even uses his fallen form as a focal point of the last shot of the remaining defeated Avengers on earth.

Lastly, let’s handle Gamora’s death.  Her fall is decidedly more complex, but it is a key turn in the story and it may be tied to a few things about the soul stone we haven’t been shown yet.  Let’s look at the setup.  Approaching the cliff face we get several angles on the mountain, both during the arrival on the planet and on the climb up.  But once they reach the plateau the camera cements itself out over the edge, establishing a left/right setup that it keeps for the rest of the scene.  The furthest they get from that established setup are some vertical shots, but they never invert that left right setup.  Left remains linked to solid ground, and right is out over the abyss.

Looking at the character motion within this setup is curious.Once Thanos has made his decision he pulls Gamora from left to right and throws her, not left, but right.
However, just like vision, despite the rightward throw, she is shown falling oriented left. 

Here is where it gets interesting.  Unlike every other death so far, the camera does not keep her locked this way.  The final, and only other shot of her body, is a rotating shot.  It is nearly vertically oriented and it slowly rotates bringing her body from a leftward fallen orientation, toward a right one. 

Let’s talk dusting!  We will make it quick.  This works better in motion than in still images so I suggest watching it yourself, but each and every character that dusts does so by flowing away to the right! 

Now honestly there are two exceptions to this.  There are two Wakandan soldiers that are running left when they dust.  As a result, their dusting is a little muddled.  The other more substantial exception is Wanda who is bent over the fallen Vision.  As she dusts she sinks down and back to the left and her dust is drawn up and overhead. 

This is an interesting exception and certainly may break the whole thing.  But I am willing to entertain the idea that it may say something about her desire to follow Vision more than following everyone else wherever they may be going.  

Ok, What in the world do I think this all means? 

I think the difference in the lateral direction the cinematography used to present the deaths indicates a difference in their nature.  Clearly all the dustings are the same, but the strong juxtaposition between left and right in cinema implies more than just “dead” and “differently dead.” I have three major conclusions.  

1 – The rightward motion of all the dustings lends credence to the “Soul Stone Theory” that many people have advanced and supported in so many ways.  Rightward motion is forward.  Especially when it is in opposition to the leftward falling of several other characters.  I think it implies moving on as opposed to just disappearing.  I expect to find that all of the dusted characters are not dead but exist in some way, maintained within the Soul Stone. 

2 – The deaths of those that fell left were actual deaths.  Whether or not some or all of them will be undone by time travel (via the quantum realm, Time Stone, etc) or other means, those deaths were designed to look and feel real.  They had real weight and were entirely meaningful to the characters in the moment as well as to the audience. 

3 – Gamora’s death was somewhere in the middle.  She did indeed fall left, but because it was mixed up in the retrieval of the Soul Stone it may have been shifted toward the dusting side of things after the fact.  This could be supported by the fact that Thanos sees her as a child later in the film in the orange glowing area many believe is “inside the Soul Stone” 

For Endgame:  Looking Forward to Death. 

I am beyond excited for Avengers Endgame!  There is a great deal of meta context for this film and I expect a number of characters will be leaving this franchise, one way or another.  Character death is something the Marvel films have addressed lightly.  Major non-villain deaths have been rare, but they have been among the most powerful and potent moments in the series.  The deaths of Agent Coulson and the original Groot come to mind despite the fact that both were pseudo resurrected.  (Yes, I know the Agents show is not MCU cannon and Groot is a different Groot, effectively his child.)  Lost characters that have not been resurrected in some form are rarer still.  Quicksilver, and Yondu are two of only a very few.  (Thor: Ragnarok is a rather drastic exception to this, stripping Thor of his father, his band of friends, the majority of his home world’s population, and even Asgard itself.) 

But that changed quite suddenly with Infinity war.  The MCU had been turning up the dial on themes of loss and personal tragedy for the last few films and they had done so with a skill that had me delighted and riveted.  They were able to keep their characters heroic and inspiring in the midst of these themes, not falling into despair or nihilism.  Instead, as they turned up the loss, their characters shone brighter. 

The Russo brothers have an amazing setup coming off the combination of Infinity War and Civil War, and they have some fantastic places to take these characters.  Each of the core heroes is in the midst of the darkest part of a deep personal battle with their biggest, most intimate challenges and their most personal losses.  I did a review of Captain Marvel that ended in some thoughts on why the MCU’s brand of super hero film is so powerful.  I discuss how it is a result of what they do with their characters, but here I will simply say that I cannot wait to see where the arcs of these stories go. 

I suspect at least one will end in death.  But death in a comic world is so very hard to make stick, and it can be almost impossible to make that death believable to the audience and give it the weight and staying power it needs to be meaningful.  

Which leads me back to falling left.  Many of the deaths we saw on screen in Infinity War may not stick.  I fully expect to get back practically everyone who got snapped away, and maybe even a few of those who fell left, but I think the Russos were doing something else with those scenes.  Those few deaths that happened in Infinity War packed a punch.  They hit hard and the cinematic convention they used to reinforce it did something else.  It gave us a language.  Because if it happens again, if we go back in time, if we get to try it again, and Loki falls left…If the camera locks, and does not move, and we see that form, in that way, we will know he is lost.  

They did something brilliant.  They planted a short hand in us to let us know they mean it. 

So if…when Cap falls, when he finally gets to make the sacrifice we have always known he would make…When Iron Man gets to make that final choice, the choice to become what he always hoped he could be…to be what he knew he had never been, I am going to be watching.  And I am going to be looking to see, do they fall left? 

Recommended Watching

Why Captain America: Civil War is the Best Comic Book Movie of all time

Every Frame A Painting: Snowpiercer – Left or Right

Trope Talk: Character Deaths – (Truly fascinating in the context of Loki’s Death)