The Short Take:
Closer to the highs of Episode 2 than the lows of Episodes 1 and 3, mostly due to the considerable development of the Priscilla-Fury relationship (which we should have gotten last week) and a bit of payoff with Talos.
Image Credit: SlashFilm
[SPOILER ALERT: Do not proceed without having seen all of the series to date.]
The Long Take:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
It’s amazing what a few well-placed verses will do.
For the first time, this series had my full attention. And that was largely due to a Raymond Carver poem, “Late Fragment,” published in 1989. One might assume that my bias as a literature Ph.D. is at play here, but other than an adorably mediocre slam poetry show in high school and a modern poetry seminar I tried to take in college (but ultimately dropped), I have never been a big poetry person, and I certainly have never been a poetry scholar. It’s more the employment of a poem — this poem — in this week’s episode of Secret Invasion that struck me.
With Carver’s potently minimalist words (though he hated that characterization of his work, apparently), the writers tie a thread between a 2012 flashback of Fury and his wife, Varra-turned-Priscilla, in Paris, and a tense, spy v. spy conversation they have seated on opposite sides of their dining table in London. These two scenes deepened my understanding of their marriage. For the first time, I believed that they were a real couple who have had ups and downs together for years.
In the flashback, the poem could function as a way for Priscilla to tell Fury that she has no regrets about their relationship. Fury asks her what she’s reading, and she picks up a collection of Carver’s poems. When he asks her if she has a favorite, she asks him to read “Late Fragment” with her, as a conversation between two people. Her choice in poem conveys that she feels “beloved” with Fury, in spite of his unpredictable spy hero life. 2012, not so coincidentally, is the year the film Avengers came out in theaters, and the scene opens with her saying that she assumes that Fury should take credit for the Avengers saving Earth. So “Late Fragment” in some ways is a reassurance to Fury that she knows what she’s signing up for.
The poem ends, however, with the phrase “on the earth,” and considering Priscilla’s list of Fury’s fine qualities includes his wanting to fight for a home, “Late Fragment” could also refer to her status as a Skrull in disguise. That all she and the other Skrulls want is to have a home, and, perhaps, to one day call Earth their home. Even though the series positions Talos’ dreams of human-Skrull cohabitation and Gravik’s villainous plot to eliminate humans and claim the planet for Skrull-kind in opposition to one another, they both want the same thing: to “feel myself beloved on the earth.” Even if we can’t condone the actions of Gravik and his followers, we can empathize with their motivations.
Carver’s poem does so much to lay the groundwork for the dinner table conversation we get decades later because once Fury begins to repeat “Late Fragment,” it’s not only a callback to a happier time for them. It’s not only an evocation of decades of history between them. It’s a reckoning of the paradox that they are both enemies and lovers. At that point we know that Rhoadey has ordered Priscilla, on behalf of Gravik, to kill Fury, which makes the earlier part of their conversation incredibly stressful. They’re dancing around each other with domestic niceties, but both of them are trying to suss out what the one knows about the other or what their intentions might be. Fury eventually cuts to the chase and reveals that he knows Priscilla plans to kill him. They put both their guns on the table, and then we hear the backstory of how Varra assumed Priscilla’s identity. It’s a beautiful conversation because it twists and tangles their love for each other with the antagonistic threat they each pose.
Image Credit: Geek Girl Authority
Through Priscilla’s backstory, we learn that the original Dr. Priscilla Davis, about to die of a congenital heart defect, chose to give Varra her identity posthumously because she would, in a way, be able to live on and “fall in love” with Fury. The story Priscilla tells is an end of life story, and the layering of Carver’s poem on top of that connects its main theme: taking stock of your life at the end and being happy as long as you are the title of this episode, “beloved.” This theme expands out to the entirety of the show. Fury, at the end of his career, counted out by many, must now take stock of his life and decide if it was all worth it. Similarly, Varra must think back on her life trying to spy on the man she loves to decide if she can break her promise to the original Priscilla and hurt him.
I could infer that Raymond Carver himself reflected back on his life when he knew the end was near, just as Fury and Varra might in the moments before they both fire their guns. The writer’s tombstone features an inscription of “Late Fragment.” It was the last poem he wrote before he died of lung cancer in 1988. The creators behind this episode of Secret Invasion could have chosen the poem specifically because they knew of its significance during Carver’s final days.
This is not the first time a film has appropriated “Late Fragment,” however. Alejandro González Iñárritu includes the poem as an epigraph at the opening of his Oscar-winning film, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). The story centers on a washed up Hollywood actor best known for playing a popular superhero, Birdman. This Ouroboros-esque reference being intentional is much more of a stretch, but how clever would it be to choose “Late Fragment” as the touchstone text for a superhero franchise series because Birdman satirizes an actor who is frustrated that he is only beloved for a mainstream superhero role as opposed to any artsier projects he might pursue.
If I factor Birdman into the conversation about what kind of meaning this poem makes for Secret Invasion, all the characters — Fury, Priscilla, Talos, G’iah, and Gravik — seem lost and displaced, adrift like Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thompson. (And now it just dawned on me that Michael Keaton plays Vulture in the Sony Spider-Man films three years after he plays an actor best known for playing Birdman. I hope that’s because he has a sense of humor).
Keaton’s Riggan Thompson disastrously tries to adapt a collection of Carver’s short stories — for which he was much more known than poetry — for Broadway in the film, and this is tragic because the short stories themselves are filled with characters like him. Folks who can’t quite catch a break. They’re lonely, destitute, estranged, battling addiction, or touched by tragedy in some way. Most literary critics place Carver in a literary movement called “dirty realism,” because works in that tradition take a hard, close look at the seedy underbelly of life, focusing on the have nots more than the haves (sometimes financially, sometimes emotionally). Again, I see a direct connection to Fury and the Skrulls, with Fury positioned as a has-been with people calling out his mistakes at every turn, and with the Skrulls losing an ontological battle with each passing year of their illicit refuge on Earth.
According to “Late Fragment,” these characters will not simply find love when they look back on the lives they have lived — far from it. The inclusion of “even so” in the opening question of the poem, to me, is the most crucial because it implies that life was not straightforward or even all that happy. That the second speaker may have failed to realize their dreams or suffered many tragedies. Reading the poem in the context of Carver’s entire body of work certainly points us in that direction.
Carver’s ultimate thesis, however, has a little bit of hope piercing through the wayward tragedy. Even so, such a person could still get what they wanted, still live a satisfying life, as long as they feel beloved. And that’s why Fury and Priscilla do not kill each other. They’re clutching this idea that even if they’re on two sides of a war, even if they’ve violated each others’ trust, and even if they would consider murdering their partner for the sake of their perceived greater good, they might still be able to call themselves beloved.
Weeks ago, when the series first dropped the “Fury has a wife” bomb, I took issue with the idea that Varra had to morph into Priscilla for Fury. Here, we get something of an answer to that criticism, as part of their “guns on the table” conversation implies that Priscilla may have been trying to entrap Fury and use him as an asset even in the beginning of their relationship. She says she wanted to find a human who would “slip your [Fury’s] defenses.” This means that her visage as Priscilla is specifically targeting Fury’s tastes and, therefore, if she wants to appeal to him, Varra morphs into Priscilla. This also means that for some period of time Fury didn’t know that Priscilla was actually Varra. My interpretation of his confession that she was his greatest mistake and that he went against reason and every warning signal when he married her is that he probably figured out that Priscilla was Varra pretending to be human pretty quickly, but loved her so much that he married her knowing that she would be trying to spy on him. (That’s dark.)
When Fury accuses her of “playing the long game” on him, though, she says, “Don’t do that, Nick.” The meaning of that admonishment is ambiguous, but I would guess that it’s yet another indicator of their complicated relationship. That she has used him in the past and plans to kill him for Gravik’s cause now, but, at the same time, she loves him — their marriage was still genuine and real. Even so.
Image Credit: Tor.com
This defining and deepening of their messy relationship makes the final shootout between them all the more suspenseful and chilling, because I genuinely did not know who would shoot whom. But they both take the shot. They both take the shot even though they love each other. That’s some tragic spy business right there.
I would have preferred that we had been following Varra in parallel with Fury since Episode 1, such that we could have gotten to know Varra as a spy more with a slower build-up to this tense moment. And after watching this episode, I really wish we had gotten some of the Fury/Priscilla dynamic we see here last week because when they were standing around their kitchen for the first time, I didn’t know how I was supposed to interpret or respond to their interactions. I wasn’t convinced that they were two people with a checkered past who loved each, like I do now.
My desire speaks to a problem the series has had more broadly — that it builds its story around cliffhangers for each episode rather than feeling confident enough to to trust the audience with a more gradual, focused narrative that earns its climactic moments. That’s ultimately why confirmation that Rhoadey was a Skrull feels a little anticlimactic. We had already established that he probably was one at the end of last week’s episode, and the only reason that happened is so that the episode could end on a cliffhanger. Perhaps it would have been better to wait; I’m imagining the cut from the 2012 Paris flashback to present day Priscilla sitting in the church as being that much more powerful if a couple seconds later Rhoadey sits down next to her, to our total surprise.
Image Credit: Collider
Carver’s signature brevity that still “packs a punch” as Priscilla says, speaks directly to this issue of pacing. With only six episodes, there isn’t enough time to tell all of the story the creators want to tell, at least not well. Yet they’re going to attempt to do it regardless in the hopes that it still “packs a punch.” It will only do so if there is less repetition, more focus, and more economizing of the narrative.