Regarding Cinema: Arrested Development, Music, and the Guardians of the Galaxy

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING hit cinemas in 2017, presumably establishing the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first franchise focused on “coming of age” as a superhero. But the fact is, Marvel had already done that when it launched GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY in 2014.

The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy has been, from the start, a counterintuitively personal novel about youngsters stuck in adult bodies, hampered by stopped development, practically all of them battling with (usually deadly) parent problems. Consider the humorous bickering, the emotional dysregulation, and the obsessive fixations. But what I find most intriguing about all this is how writer-director James Gunn has used these three films to examine the deadly pull of nostalgia—the fetishization of our childhoods—and the arduous path to develop beyond all that baggage.

And music is the key to it.

If you’ve watched the films, you don’t need me to tell you about the parental problems I just touched on, particularly the Daddy issues that permeate, but I’m going to anyway.

Peter Quill/Star-Lord and Mantis call the murderous planet Ego their father; Peter was also the adopted son of a violent Ravager who kidnapped him from his Earth mother; Gamora and Nebula are the adopted children of Thanos the Mad Titan, a genocidal maniac who tortured and maimed one and ultimately killed the other; and Rocket Raccoon’s “father” is similarly a genocidal crackpot named the High Evolutionary.

Basically, childhood trauma is a condition for joining the Guardians.

In virtually every instance, the Guardians are unable to go on without attempting to murder or successfully killing one of their parents. It’s extremely Greek. But that emotional healing isn’t simple, and for virtually all of them, initially entails attempting to cling on to that childhood trauma in some way or another. After all, suffering sometimes becomes so familiar, so caught up in our identities, that the prospect of living without it is too much to take.

In Peter’s case, his commitment to his trauma is so extreme that he cannot let go of the pop culture that defined his brief, happy childhood on Earth—the seventies and eighties music he brought with him when kidnapped and his numerous (always erroneous) references to iconic eighties films and their stars. The cinematic nail is hammered pretty darn hard on the head in THE GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY HOLIDAY SPECIAL (2022), in which Peter’s buddies attempt to abduct Kevin Bacon, the actor of his favorite film, FOOTLOOSE (1984), to help him get in the Christmas mood.

But let’s concentrate on the music, putting this topic into a bit more focus. In the GUARDIANS trilogy, music is, I would argue, a metaphor for Peter's—and, by implication, the Guardians'—emotional evolution from adult-sized youngsters to full adults.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

A soundtrack consists of loud sixties and seventies tunes that were, we’re informed, some of Peter’s mother’s favorite songs. They also all predate the putative birth of Peter Quill on Earth, since actor Chris Pratt was born near the closing of the seventies.

Nostalgic tunes such as Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling," the Runaways' “Cherry Bomb," and David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” give an easy method for Earth-bound viewers to relate to the spectacular, sometimes quite bizarre occurrences going on in the places on our screens. Music, of course, being closely tied to dance, this is also a delightful opportunity for Gunn to have Peter dance in the manner of Michael Jackson and his idol Kevin Bacon.

(Metatextually, this soundtrack is strongly based in Gunn’s own youth, considering the fact that he was born in the sixties and grew up in the seventies.).

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

More of the same period here, which makes sense considering the fact that Peter must meet his biological father in this film, a person who seduced Peter’s mother to the same music that follows Peter everywhere. These songs represent Peter’s history in every aspect. They are who he believes he is, which is still very much a kid.

Incidentally, VOL. 2 closes with the best cinematic usage of Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son” ever, a passage I still feel misty over if I linger on too long. That’s probably because I have dead dad problems, too, but let’s not go into that today.

Anyways…Peter is ultimately given a Microsoft Zune in the film, replacing his beloved Walkman and giving him a more expanded audio repertoire to enjoy himself with. This is when things become very fascinating.

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The newest—and apparently last—GUARDIANS film starts with an acoustic rendition of Radiohead’s "Creep." “Creep” was published in 1992 and is one among the numerous tracks on Peter’s Zune—tunes spanning the eighties, nineties, and new millennia. By virtue of this Zune, Peter has created fresh emotional vocabulary to comprehend what is occurring. In other words, he’s “growing up” via this music (and, along with him, his buddies).

One of the film’s most devastating sequences has Peter looking out into space, his companion dying behind him, while the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” plays. A special characteristic of VOL. 3 is how such songs convey our characters’ existential concerns. They become portals to feelings too enormous and intricate for any of them to ever even consider expressing themselves.

VOL. 3 finally finishes with Florence + the Machine’s dance single “Dog Days of Summer," which dropped in 2008 but was re-released in 2010 to far more spectacular success. It’s one of three songs on the soundtrack published in the teens, the other two being the Mowgli’s “San Francisco” (2012) and “Koinu no Carnival” (2016)—however, “Koinu no Carnival” is from an anime and less related to Peter’s emotional journey.

The point is, “Dog Days of Summer," a triumphant song released at roughly the same time that Gunn began to work on “GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY” and the film was released, concludes the film. completing Peter’s journey from man-child with his foot caught in a nostalgia trap to complete adult as he should have been when this trilogy first kicked off. The Guardians’ voyage is, in reality, to come full circle. Specifically, to address their pasts as a method to finding their way back to the beings they should’ve been when we first met them back in 2014.

It’s pretty hard to deny that the Guardians trilogy’s use of music isn’t one of the most brilliant narrative components of the movie. It’s a brilliant instance of how the judicious use of soundtracks can grant characters’ just as much “growth” as a script can.

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