I realize that "the meaning of life and everything" is an absurd concept altogether. I just saw the movie in theaters and could not for the life of me tell whether or not this movie actually was about the meaning of life and everything or if it was just because I was tripping on LSA. I could write a book on the spiritual/metaphysical symbolism within the movie. For now, I'll just say it was very good, and I'll sleep on it before I post more on the main theme. Has anyone else seen it?

For me, this movie was just a junkyard of ideas and gags, piled up in the hope that the visuals will compensate for the lack of any meaningful narrative.

It's funny (and somewhat enlightening) to think that there is angle to it from which it becomes perfect.

Yea, Avengers and the meaning of life is survival.

Ok. So this all seems kinda far-fetched to me now, but it was extraordinary to watch it play out when I fully believed that these were actual themes of the movie. I would say that the main topic of the movie was the nature of the ego.

Puzzle pieces:

1. One of the first lines in the movie that caught my ear was Fury's response to his side kick asking why bother saving the presumably doomed earth. Fury's response "Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on", which I interpreted to be representative of spiritualism/brain-in-a-vat, e.g. "Until such time as hyperspace or an a hyper-awakened state is proven to exist, I will go on with my life as though it does not". In other words "It is reasonable for me to act on the assumption of the most positive interpretation of my life heretofore".

2. Another quote from the movie that I found to be very powerful was spouted by Loki early in the movie: "Freedom is life's great lie, and once you accept that, you will know peace". This of course brought on all sorts of ideas about free will. This idea in combination with the power of the tesseract (#3 below) was a statement that the ability to discern truth is dependent on factors that we cannot control and thus our ability to find real knowledge and truth is an illusion, and our ability to control our own minds is out of our control.

3. Loki has some sort of remote viewing experience where he is discussing the terms of some agreement with some evil alien that exists in a far-away realm. The being threatens Loki and Loki reminds the alien that he does not exist unless Loki brings him back to our world. To me, this symbolized the fact that thoughts within our mind (indeed sometimes dark and evil thoughts) do not affect how we are perceived by others until we let them out by telling others or by acting based on them. In other words, my true personality is a secret that only I know.

4. The tesseract shows people some amazingly wonderful "truth" that hypnotizes them, thus taking control of their minds. This symbolized the tendency of people to latch on to ideas as truth, and how this tendency ultimately clouds our minds. My further interpretation at the time: "The main heroes don't need this truth, of course, because their sense of truth comes from within".

5. Though there is presumably much of it going on in the movie, there are few actual shots of everyday people in the city streets scrambling for safety. Every time I saw a scene like this, I couldn't help but think about the fact that, while these insignificant characters were not the main heroes of the movie, they are who I should identify with most since, in the end of the day, I would be one of those people in such a crisis situation. This came off as very weird to me because it is so obvious who I am supposed to pay the most attention to in the movie, and yet I find that I [reasonably] emphasize most with these inconsequential characters; These small people who are really nothing in the grand scheme of the story.

6. Over the past few weeks, I've watched a lot of the marvel movies leading up to the avengers to make sure that the Avengers movie made the most sense possible. The strangest thing about the avengers was that each of the main characters was THE main character in a different movie. Suddenly I found myself ricocheting back and forth between the respective worlds of these different characters. I felt that the main point of this effect was to demonstrate that the ego feels that it is the main character of the world, the supreme hero. One sees the world from behind one's own eyes alone, and in a context where the most important thing in existence is ourselves and our own minds. To have seen the world from behind each of these characters' minds in their respective movies, and then to have these characters come together in The Avengers was an interesting parable of how we reconcile our solipsist/egoist tendencies with the existence of others. Egos clashed throughout the entire movie, making this the strongest point.

7. The portal that opens up in the second half of the movie looks unignorably like a giant tumultuous eye which, to me, symbolized the inevitable ego-destruction that occurs when the subjective and objective worlds meet.

8. Finally, the characters coming together with different skill sets and personality types symbolized, to me, how the different parts of one's mind come together to form a well-rounded personality. The fighting between the characters in the movie then symbolized internal struggle and how we deal with cognitive dissonance and personally difficult decisions.

That's all I can remember, for now, but I think I covered about all of the main ideas that I was overwhelmed by in the theatre. Sorry for any sloppy spelling and grammar. I typed this in a hurry.

I think you were just tripping on LSA and it made everything seem so deep. But that's the nice thing about tripping, you can watch a movie and you will understand it on so many more levels than just watching it sober.

This is pattern matching at its best.

You used the images/scenes of the movie as triggers to pull out ideas from the unconscious and ordered these into workable models of reality.

I wonder what it is like when this mechanism works at full power. Schizophrenia? Enlightenment? The buddhists talk about the "Mahamudra", when the entire world becomes a symbol. How cool it would be to experience reality as the direct manifestation of an ever-changing psychological gestalt.

Fantastic interpretation. I speculate that those patterns you described could be at least part of the reason why it has done so well. Because those patterns speak to our subconscious minds.

It all depends on ones viewpoint I guess. To me its makes a lot of sense though.

i think it possibly makes sense to a psychonaught who has these themes in their life, but if you gave that plot explanation to my Dad he would laugh himself stupid.

im glad you enjoyed the film hixidom, but i think the LSA may have tinged your view of the story line.

I just saw this movie , and I had noticed this thread earlier but didn't wanna read your numbered points until after seeing it, and now that I read them I gotta say most of them are pretty spot on to what I noticed aswell. I wasn't tripping but because of this thread I guess I was subconsciously looking for any symbolism, otherwise I'd probably have thought that it was just a cool action movie. But yeah the symbolism is definitely there if you look for it.

In addition to what you listed, I really felt a huge symbolism about the nuking of manhattan and the heroes trying to stop it. Like, nuking is a perfect example of dealing with problems by NOT dealing with them and just hiding them under a carpet. Out of sight, out of mind. Whereas the heroes were trying to deal with the problem by battling the different parts of the problem on the inside of the problem-zone. In the same way you can just repress issues in your head by "nuking" them, OR you can face them and try to actually deal with them one by one. So within us all there are the suits who just want to nuke things and move on, but there are also the heroes who want to fix all things no matter how small they are. And as we all know , sometimes it's really hard to summon these heroes without the help of external triggers, like psychedelics.

So psychedelics are like the bat-signals projected into the sky to summon these heroes to deal with the bad guys that are wreaking havoc in our subconscious. So psychedelics don't do any of the actual work, they just signal that the battle has started, and the battle won't necessarily be easy at all. Whereas nuking is the easiest thing you could possibly do, but a big part of you dies everytime you do that. Fortunately even the nuked things can be rebuilt, but it takes way more time than if you had just dealt with the problem directly.

Ok maybe thats all a bit far fetched but that's how it felt like..

It's not too far-fetched for the nexus. I really appreciate that interpretation, and I'm glad you thought of this thread while watching the movie. I can hardly remember those aspects of the movie that you mentioned (I remember the nuke but I forgot who had launched it). I should watch it again sometime soon and see if I still find that it contains all of the same symbolism.