The Making Of Melancholy

I’m not sure how much I have to say here, and it’d be easy for me to overwrite this, but I just finished bingeing all of Voices Rising: The Music of Wakanda Forever and it put me in a mood.

I’m impressed, I have to say before anything else, with the resources Marvel put into ancillary material around Wakanda Forever. Both the music docuseries and the official podcast (as far as I know, the first Marvel Studios has done) are fantastic, in ways both similar and dissimilar to how I felt, and feel, about HBO Max’s official podcast for Station Eleven.

We’re capable of so much if just we were to seek each other out, make safe spaces to be who each of us is, and collaborate as curious equals. Nonetheless, somehow we can’t stop ourselves from destroying everything around us.

There are obvious ways in which those two exemplars of official “making of” material are very, very different. While they seem to share that the environments of their respective creative endeavors were joyous and safe, something like Wakanda Forever and its careful, deliberate intentions toward disparate cultures somewhat sets it into its own sphere.

In both cases, though, these official “making of” channels are suffused with this idea that we have so much capacity for amazement, to be amazing and to be amazed, if only we’d choose to be open to one another.

These sorts of things are a sort of melancholy, because if we are capable of making worlds together in ways that leave everyone feeling—and being—seen and heard, then what the fuck are we doing the rest of the time.