Learning to love "The Avengers'

On our way to see The Avengers last year, my husband and I did a little avenging of our own— avenging the high cost of food at the movie theater. Between us, we smuggled in a package of dried mango strips, a bag of sour gummy worms, a king-sized peanut M&M's, a bag of Trader Joe's popcorn, and a ham and cheese hoagie with pickles.

Hey, that movie is long.

And really, even before we sat down for The Avengers, I could never have predicted just how much time I would be spending with comic book characters like Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America and Thor.

But as the credits rolled for Iron Man 3, which opened earlier this month, I finally realized that instead of graduating from the world of Marvel comics, I have become its Sisyphus.

I was like a girl who doesn't understand the difference between a wedding and a marriage. I couldn't fathom the scope of the relationship I'd just entered.

Nazis run amok

The Hulk in 2003 (starring Eric Bana) and The Incredible Hulk in 2008 (starring Edward Norton) were like warning shots. Two years later, I sat through all 124 minutes of Iron Man 2 in good grace.

2011 was a banner year: We saw Captain America (set in the 1940s, starring Chris Evans as a super-soldier endowed with the moral complexity of Lassie) and Thor (in which a leonine Chris Hemsworth plays the hammer-wielding Viking god of the title).

So far, the Avengers have fought a fire-breathing interstellar robot, a whip-wielding, parrot-loving Russian, run-of-the-mill terrorists, Frost Giants, a diabolical chairman, the Norse god Loki, and a fearsomely red Nazi who runs amok, even by World War II standards, and tries to obliterate every city on earth.

Are you with me so far?

Unanswered questions

Now it turns out that all of these films (aka "the Marvel Universe") were but prequels to a grand finale, The Avengers, in which the heroes would unite to save planet Earth.

Unfortunately, I was at a bit of a disadvantage going into The Avengers, since I fell asleep at the end of Captain America and Thor and, consequently, missed the climactic plot details.

I also annoyed my date by speculating about niggling details: How does Iron Man deal with international airspace regulations? How come The Hulk's explosive growth shreds all of his clothes except for his pants? Why do citizens of the mythic realm of Asgard speak English (with vaguely British accents, to boot)? In these days of austerity and tightfisted bankers, who the hell funded that city-sized flying aircraft carrier-cum-laboratory and its invisibility shield?

Rescuing New York

In The Avengers last year, a dour, brawny Mark Ruffalo appeared as my husband's favorite Avenger— our third Bruce Banner (aka The Hulk) in a decade. Even I found the movie funny, well-paced, exciting and much more character-driven than most action films.

And ol' Captain America delivered my favorite line of the whole film, to the inscrutable archer Hawkeye (he hasn't had his own movie) as they're about to rescue New York City from an inter-dimensional alien war-zone:

"Do you have a suit?"

Because what else do you need to know about your compatriots on the eve of battle?

But now that I comprehend the extent of the franchise, the key question remains: How many more Avengers movies must I endure? Let us do the math and consider the variables.

Spider-Man returns

In the world of Hollywood Avengers, not only does each comic character get his own trilogy; The Avengers itself is the first of three films starring the superheroes as a team. If we assume that Mark Ruffalo's Hulk gets three more films in which to grossly exaggerate the elasticity of men's pants, and— oh, dear God— if Hawkeye has his own trilogy in the works, that's 12 more Avengers films, in addition to the eight I've seen since 2003.

And it could be worse. The Spider-Man trilogy (with Tobey Maguire as the eponymous arachnid hero) opened in 2002 and wound up in 2007, supposedly. But in 2012, the lithe Andrew Garfield, in gravity-defying post-Twilight-era hair, appeared in a "reboot" called The Amazing Spider-Man. That movie had more loose ends than U.S. immigration law— yeah, we're looking at a whole new trilogy.

So why do I do keep going? Have I no self-control? It's not like Iron Man's blasters are pointed at my head when I walk into the theater. I could stay home and watch Jane Austen's Persuasion on DVD.

Part of the answer is that marital moviegoing is a two-way street: My husband tolerated Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre for my sake, so I indulge his Avengers addiction.

Wasted Christmas gift

Recently a female friend confided that, as a "Christmas present," her husband had agreed to accompany her to a single "complaint-free" movie— that is, she could choose it, and he would not grouse bitterly over her choice. But when she cashed in her voucher, it turned out she didn't enjoy the movie all that much, and spent the second half of it unhappily reflecting that she had wasted her Christmas gift, because hubby wouldn't give her a second chance.

Somehow, her story made me unutterably sad.

When I do the math, I see that my husband and I have spent almost $200 on Avengers movies since 2003. And if my preliminary projections are correct, they'll cost us at least $264 more before they're through (not including snacks, of course). But when you consider that a single hour of marriage counseling can cost up to $200, tickets to see the Avengers begin to look like a steal.

To me, superheroes offer little more than an endless, noisy stream of robots, soldiers, aliens, explosions and labored battleground repartee. But when my husband can hold my hand while he watches Loki promise the Tesseract to the Chitauri aliens in exchange for the subjugation of planet Earth, he feels loved. And isn't that what marriage is all about? So we'll be stocking up on movie snacks for many years to come.