I can’t get the latest trailer for Guardian of the Galaxy Vol. 3 out of my head because, when you subtract the talking trees and space lasers, it looks like the story of a queer or trans person who has to confront the abusive parent who tried to destroy them.
This go-round, the Guardians are going up against the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a bizarre scientist who created Rocket (Bradley Cooper) as part of his experiments. Along the way, they have to deal with the burden of basically being the Space Avengers while a living weapon named Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) is after them for vengeance against some of their earlier, unsavory activities. Check out the trailer below.
Writer and Director James Gunn has probably the most solid thematic angle with his part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Every Guardians entry thus far has been about surviving shitty parents and learning what it means to form a family when your birth one is so broken. In Vol. 1, both Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) are on the run from their abusive adoptive fathers and their poisonous ideologies. Vol. 2 ups the ante by introducing Peter’s biological father, an even more monstrous and manipulative figure that forces him to confront a lot of childhood trauma (and turn into Pac-Man… it’s a weird film).
Even last year’s Holiday Special continued the theme. If you’ve ever had a group of friends that want no contact with their parents, you will instantly recognize Christmas on Knowhere as something cast outs and weirdoes do with their found families.
Now, it’s Rocket’s turn in the story machine, and it looks brutal. The trailer gives us a voiceover from the High Evolutionary (his initials of HE gives him an extra creeping, Old Testament vibe) saying that he is obsessed with creating perfection, presumably through his torturous experiments. Then we get Rocket saying, “He didn’t want to make things perfect. He just hated things the ways things are.” Lastly, we’re left with images of a baby racoon being put in a literal conversion engine with blood dripping off the blades and the team visiting a grim, sterilized version of 1950s Main Street America populated with HE’s “perfected” animal/human hybrids to rescue Rocket.
The phrase “abomination” comes up a lot when religious people denounced queer and trans folk, drawing on English translations appearing in many Bibles related to passages of men lying down with men. In the Hebrew text, the word is toebah, meaning “abhorrent by reason of impurity,” quite literally imperfect. When rendered into the Greek that Paul would have had in his Bible, the word becomes vdélygma (sacrilege), an offense against the creator’s vision.
Side note: there was a fascinating talk given here in Houston at Palmer Episcopal Church by Dr. L. Michael White in 2005 that discusses the finer points of what these words actually mean and the context they applied to. I’ve preserved the entire thing in audio form on YouTube for those interested.
It’s clear Rocket thinks of himself as an abomination. In Vol. 1, a drunken and angry Rocket screams at the rest of the team, “I didn’t ask to get made! I didn’t ask to be torn apart and put back together over and over, turned into some… some little monster!” What the High Evolutionary did to him was so obscene and painful that he no longer even conceives of himself as a raccoon.
It’s not hard to see the parallels between Rocket and a queer or trans person being trapped with a parent dedicated to fixing them, especially because God supposedly wills it. Despite mountains of both evidence and dead children, conversion therapy remains a popular avenue for bigoted parents. Texas, especially, is a favorite place for the High Evolutionary’s earthly counterparts to set up shop, citing the state’s lack of bans as a plus.
Meanwhile, the state legislature is considering banning all gender affirming care for trans people, as well as possibly criminalizing them for ever being around children. It’s not cybernetics and genetic modification (yet), but the aim is clear: the eradication of queer and trans people from society.
I can’t help but see what’s happening here in my state to gender-sex minorities mirrored in Rocket’s experiences. What he was before the High Evolutionary was already perfect, but it wasn’t what the High Evolutionary wanted. The desires of his subjects do not appear to matter to him, only his vision of a utopia.
That’s exactly what it’s like growing up queer or trans with a family that won’t accept you. They assume what you are is something no sane God could love and demand you be different. Incompatibility with the worldview becomes a flaw of the person just trying to exist, not the worldview itself. Rocket survives his ordeal because this is Marvel and he’s a superhero. Maybe some young queer or trans fan will see that and make it out past the abuse. Maybe, as Rocket himself says in the trailer, we’ll all fly away together into the forever and beautiful sky.
But do the cuts have to be so deep to get there?
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
