Venom Week: We Are Venom … And The Friends We Made Along The Way

Welcome to the table,

As Venom week draws to a close and we look back fondly on the last few days at all our coverage of the weird alien goo monster it may conjure the question, why? Why did the collection of goofballs, comic readers, gamers, and those other people we can’t quite figure out but don’t want to forget them, spend a week talking about Venom?

Was it because Tony said, “Hey, let’s do a Venom-themed week.”? Maybe. [Ed. Note: It’s sure not because I like Venom.] We all love a good theme. There is for sure a conclave within the hallowed halls of the Comicon bullpen that cheerleads the hell out of anything wacky simply because it makes us all laugh. Even if we are states, timezones, and sometimes continents apart we still take the time each week to connect with each other and talk about the stuff that is happening in the pop culture space.

Was it because we all love Venom? Maybe. In some small way, we do. [Ed. Note: Eh.] Even if we don’t love weird alien sentient entities telling stories of muscle-bound reporters turned vigilante, turned anti-hero, turned god killer, turned, a million other things, we do at least relate to that weird relationship that Eddie and Venom have with each other because everyone wants a friend and as adults, it can be really difficult to cut through all the social nonsense we construct as a society and just say “Hey, I’m lonely, are you lonely to? Do you like comics? Let’s talk about comics … or gaming … or action figures. .. or baseball … or Bigfoot .. or whatever…”

Was it because Venom: The Last Dance, the third in a franchise of films starring Tom Hardy and the voice of Hardy as buddies from different worlds wandering into and out of wacky situations in a framework that is easily understood by anyone who grew up reading comics? Maybe. We all like movies, and the optics are pretty hard to beat. With a movie coming out and a pop culture site like this catering to you, lovely readers, who dig things like a talking goo monster and his attractive host fighting other goo monsters and assorted space nasties it kind of makes sense we would take that opportunity, and capitalize on it.

So let’s talk about the Venom movies! Or what I think is the most interesting factor in them. The relationship between Eddie Brock and Venom.

Venom

In Venom, Eddie Brock and Venom share this very chaotic yet always somehow endearing relationship that evolves from fearing and hating each other to something resembling love and camaraderie. Eddie is this struggling journalist who has really ruined his personal life and is barely hanging on. He is isolated and hates himself for all intents and purposes, and is drifting defeated and alone through the day-to-day as so many adults (including myself) have done in some way or another in their adult years. Then something happens, as things do in stories to move plots along. Eddie gets dragged into this world where a movie villain who you could totally see buying a super popular social media platform that is bird-themed and running it into the ground — tell me you did not make that connection because I sure did — is out here trying to bond alien goo monsters to random poor people that he is kidnapping off the street for power and possibly so someone wants to hang out with him and listen to him talk about rockets. Eddie gets bonded with Venom while trying to help save one of these people. From there, the symbiote and he set off back into Eddie’s life, now hunted by said weirdo tech billionaire and his army of hired guys with guns.

Weirdly, despite being hunted and bonded with a brain-eating slime Eddie’s life seems somehow better. He is still struggling financially, he is still stressed, he always looks tired and uncomfortable, but at the end of the day, he is not alone. That one key difference in spite of the rest of the weird stuff happening around him seems to make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. Having a friend, even if you don’t like them all the time, kind of does that. The two learn from each other in a non-after-school special way, and they end up actually bonding and becoming friends and companions all while doing some really wacky slime-based fighting against dudes with guns, other slime monsters, and the most dangerous demons of all, the ones in your own head.

It’s a sweet story and shows that redemption arcs don’t have to be huge and flowery. In Eddie and Venom’s case, it’s just about finding confidence and a purpose even if that purpose is just to look after the little guys around him and protect the innocent in a way that does not involve press conferences and super suites and all the pomp and circumstance that we have come to expect from superhero movies.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

The second movie explores relationships again, this time in a slightly different way, focusing on the weird murder-marriage relationship between Carnage (Woody Harrelson) and Shriek (Naomi Harris), two ride-or-die murder people who fell in love at a young age and were imprisoned and then through those pesky plot devices escape and reconnect to have a murder marriage. I know that sounds so silly, but Carnage (who is a serial killer who has bonded with a small chunk of Venom’s symbiote creating a red spikey mean version of our good goo-boy) and Shriek (an unstable sonic wave spitting lady) reconnect and want to have a wedding in this broken down old chapel on a cliff overlooking the sea. As wedding gifts to each other they are kidnapping and killing people they feel wronged them. In this case, the police officer who shot Shriek when she used her sonic blast on him, and Eddie and Venom who Carnage views as somehow the cause of all their issues, though they honestly were in jail and murderers long before those two came on the scene but we don’t care, because it’s fun and a loose connecting plot with small slights that causes a murder slime boned with a serial killer to go even more unhinged just sort of works in this instance.

Eddie and Venom’s bond is tested as normal relationships go through ups and downs and Eddie and Venom actually split for a bit, with Venom bonding with various other people and going to a rave after the breakup, coming out, and then leaving the party after dancing the night away to take comfort in the body of the wacky neighborhood shop keep.

Eddie is meanwhile alone again, a fact he at first thinks he is going to be fine with, but when he realizes that he can’t help save others, and more importantly he kinda misses his best friend, the slime he has become attached to, seeks out Venom and the two reconnect and are stronger than ever fitting the murder slime and his grumpy girlfriend and saving the day and more importantly each other.

Venom: The Last Dance

The third movie seems to really give up on needing a plot structure tossing Venom and Eddie through all sorts of nonsense including holes in the multiverse, a hippie road trip with a family who wanted to see Area 51, a horse chase, a fish chase, a motorcycle chase, a casino, and a demolished military base all while letting the relationship between the man and his muck serve as the gooey center of the whole chaotic ordeal.

There is a loose plot in Venom: The Last Dance. It’s fun and frantic, but it really feels less like a typical superhero movie and more like the early 1990s comics I grew up reading. What I mean by that is you totally know who your main characters are, they are Eddie and Venom, you know they are friends, I would go so far as saying they love each other, and they are at the end of their rope because they are being hunted by the government and space aliens who were introduced in a really short blurb in the beginning of the movie for some cosmic spanning reason that if you did not read Venom comics you would be totally lost on. What I mean by that is my wife is super smart, smarter than me by leaps and bounds, and she has recently watched all these movies, and upon the closing of the final scene in The Last Dance, she looked at me and goes, okay so who was the white-haired guy? When I tried to explain it was Knull (Andy Serkis), the guy from the beginning of the film, she did not get that, and then had to be explained to what Knull was and why this was even a threat or issue for Venom in particular, because the movie does not do a great job there. It’s great, it’s fun, I recommend if you like popcorn movies and slime monsters and Tom Hardy, you see it, but if you are there for a deep connected plot in the vein of Captain America: The Winter Soldier or even Black Panther, you may be disappointed.

If you are looking for a date movie where two people who love each other explore ups and downs and love and care for each other and have cute banter and are just generally cute together, honestly you could do a lot worse than Venom 3. I mean that. This movie feels like all the stuff from Hallmark film, filtered through a mid-sized box office budget design shop, and wrapped in the pages of an old comic where people had too many pockets and guns the size of small cars. It’s goofy and weird and fun and cute and heartwarming and at the end of the day, it returns to the core of what all these movies are really about, relationships.

Why does this franchise resonate? What is it about the whole ordeal that just sort of works and checks the right boxes for so many? I think it’s because as an adult, it is so hard to make friends sometimes. COVID made it a million times worse. Responsibilities, work culture, social media posturing, FOMO, cultural decisions, online discourse, it all makes connecting with other people feel like a minefield because you could feel like “Hey, this person is rad” and then turn around and find out they think the government is run by lizard people or that water makes frogs homosexual or something. If that does not jive with your personal brand of beliefs now you have this weird inpass you are faced with. Things get more deeply weird when you have to be one way at work because your boss, who holds dominion over your paycheck, thinks one way and you think another. We as a society, at least as adults, are so strained in so many directions trying to check all the right boxes to just get through the day we miss out on the fundamental part of things that make us human in the first place, the simple need to communicate and connect.

The Venom movies, when you strip down all the goofy slime and madcap adventure of it all, are about what happens when we put aside our own bullshit and actually listen to each other, do things for each other, and are just real with each other. At its core these movies are about a person needing a friend, making a friend, changing for the better to make their friend’s lives better, and in the end, just being there for their friend.

It’s really that simple, there are a slew of kid’s books about the same thing, I am sure these lessons are taught on that street all the muppets live on, I’m sure that the aardvark kid, the hippies with the talking dog, and the talking English trains have taught the same lesson. I know the kid with the blue vest and the electric rat tout the power of it all the time, but those are for kids, and these are movie that says “shit” and have heads being bitten off. Regardless of the tooth and claw, maybe the power of friendship and connecting with each other being presented to us as adults is not the worst idea in the world. Maybe the only reason Tony suggested we do Venom week was because he likes Venom, and maybe we all said yes because we like Tony. Maybe there were other reasons, but even if Tony had suggested Hot Dog Week, or Garbage Bag Week we would have probably said yes. Because I think deep down, we are friends, and much like these movies about brain-eating slime monsters teach us, life is better with friends.

Until next time, We are Comicon.