by Jeff Salzman

Here’s something you don’t see everyday: an explicitly integral blog post on a non-integral site. Titled, “The Avengers: Integral Alchemy”, it’s a an evolutionary view of the mega-hit movie The Avengers posted on Hogwarts Professor, Thoughts for Serious Readers. It was written by Susan Raab, who many of us know from various integral gatherings (good to catch you in the funny papers, Susan!)  Check out her mini-review here.

Fave quote:

“In the Avengers, we see our evolution writ large: The Hulk, the raw strength and power of our animal origins; Hawkeye/Black Widow, our human skills of vision, recognition, and intuition; Thor/Loki, the kingly magic, mystery and maya that science can’t explain away or overcome; Captain America, the noblest ideal of modern science; and Iron Man, the sardonic postmodern technocrat.

“The Avengers movie shows what we can accomplish when we unify all of this and bring to bear that best of what we’ve learned.”

This character display of the stages of evolutionary development may be what makes the movie and the comic book franchise so powerful and popular (it’s shattering sales records all over the globe, and went over the $1 billion mark in its second week).  At any rate, it sure makes me want to see the movie!