Marvel has delivered another act of self-commentary in the new Wonder Man. It comes across as an understated Marvel superhero offering, but it is more about processes -- the overlap of a new hero's backstory and how a Marvel movie is made, where the behind-the scenes of movie production takes precedence over superhero shenanigans.
Let's see if I got this: we viewers are watching an actor (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) playing the main character, actor, Simon Williams, auditioning to play the main character of a remake of a movie "Wonder Man," a character with super powers -- but although Simon has powers, he pretends he doesn't, while auditioning to play a character whose identity is tied to the powers he openly wields. It is a washed-up actor looking to make a comeback, Trevor Slattery, played in real life by Ben Kingsley, who once thought he was acting as a terrorist, not knowing that actual acts of terror in the MCU were being carried out in the name of the Mandarin, the character he thought he was playing. Trevor has put Simon on this path to play Wonder Man, Simon's childhood hero, but the audition itself is a sham, an act Trevor is perpetrating on Simon on behalf of P Cleary (Arian Moayed), agent of the Department of Damage Control. It's Trevor's "Mandarin" role all over again -- smaller, scaled-down and this time fully complicit in the deception.
In summary, we have overlapping layers of actors playing characters thinking they are being themselves, but are really playing characters in someone else's theatre. That is some rabbit hole. The overarching premise, it seems to me so far, is that Marvel is lifting the curtain on the process of making a superhero movie in the real world, but depicting the process in a world inhabited by superheroes, where the actors -- for contractual reasons or because they are hunted by DDC -- have to pretend they don't have powers if they do.
What drives this opening episode is the first step in the actor's process of being cast, the audition. Simon is an actor who overthinks his roles, even when all he needs to do is say a line then lie dead in a moonbeam. Yes, Simon is at the time we are introduced, a Day Player. An extra. A "calafaire", however it's spelled in my region of the world. For Simon, there is no small role. His impulse is to take over his entire shot and build a reality around his character who merely exists as an afterthought for the rest of the crew. But in building his character's reality, he destroys the real reality of the shoot -- time, budget, goodwill and patience -- that his shoot gets cancelled and his reality as he envisions it never gets made.
Having been politely fired, Simon goes to a screening of "Midnight Cowboy" (a movie about a man pretending to be a cowboy, eventually finding meaning in human connection, not performance -- an ironic mirror to Simon's life) and enters Act 1 Scene 1 of Trevor's play which involves implanting in Simon the idea to audition for "Wonder Man". At this point, we get the inkling of a fake friendship that could possibly evolve into a very real one eventually. The situation here is seemingly foreshadowed in the audition script for "Wonder Man" that Simon is to read. It is the character of Wonder Man monologuing about refusing to abandon his friend, possibly mentor, while making a last stand against hostile aliens.
Episode 1 takes us through the audition process, from the interaction with Simon's long-suffering Agent, to Simon finagling an audition spot at the last minute, to the door where he signs in to receive his script (and declare that he does not have super powers), to the queue of hopeful auditionees. We get to observe Simon's nerves under pressure and his breakdown, but Trevor (Act 1 Scene 2) meets with him to steady his nerves and give him tips on how to audition successfully: don't think, which is the very opposite of Simon's method. And when Yahya Abdul Mateen II delivers that monologue at Simon's audition, this scripted speech lands as the most heartfelt and sincere lines spoken in this episode.
This is going to be a fun series, but I anticipate maybe not for the hardcore superhero fanboys. Is it a documentary? A mockumentary? A superhero schlockumentary? I don't know yet, but this series so far pings big on my metafiction radar.
