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Eddie <3 Venom 4-ever.

Serkis sets Venom 2 at a ballistic pace — so much that I think the 90-minute runtime feels generous. There’s no exposition, no world-building, no long-winded villain speeches about motivations. It’s just high-velocity Venom, via a plot about a serial killer who’s accidentally imbued with a variant strain of the symbiote.

On its face, Venom 2 is a no- frills, rock-and-roll superhero flick that unashamedly swings for the fences when it comes to camp and cheese. Yet beneath those elements, it’s strangely about finding love and the intimacy of relationships, building on the rom-com core of the first movie.

We catch up with Eddie and Venom still living in a one-bedroom apartment (do not quote me on this, because it could be a really big studio) in San Francisco. Eddie has transitioned back to print journalism after a stint doing independent viral video reporting in the previous movie. I suppose in Venom’s reality, print journalism thrives. Another quirk in this world: Print journalists do not seem to have editors, and answer only to themselves.

An alleged serial killer named Cletus Kasady contacts Eddie and asks for a one-on-one interview. As played by Woody Harrelson, Kasady is loony and maniacal. This is telegraphed to the audience because he sometimes speaks in haikus; we also learn that he told Eddie he suffocated his grandmother and electrocuted his mother in a bathtub when he was a kid. Since Eddie hides Venom from the outside world, Kasady doesn’t realize that his one-on-one interview — Kasady’s grab for fame and chance to indulge in his infatuation with Eddie — is a tag-team encounter with a hyper-intelligent and hypersensitive alien symbiote.

With Venom’s prowess, Eddie and Venom find Kasady’s burial ground and Eddie becomes mega-famous. However, their success leads to emotional conflict.

Ostensibly, Venom can enjoy the perks of his and Eddie’s collaborative success, but he needs more than just bylines and nice television sets to stay alive. Venom needs to eat human brains to keep his intergalactic metabolism going. Eddie can’t give him those, and only allows him chicken brains (attached to live chickens), which Venom scoffs at.

And even as Eddie’s journalism star rises, he can’t make himself desirable enough to his old flame Anne (reprised in Let There Be Carnage by Michelle Williams, who also reprises her wig from the first movie). She’s the only person in the world who understands Eddie and his relationship with Venom, and unfortunately, she’s moved on, at least in theory, engaged to her loyal boyfriend Dr. Dan (Reid Scott). She knows all too well that Eddie doesn’t have a lot of space for her in his life.

Their clash over cracking the Kasady case and Anne is just a symptom of a bigger problem between Eddie and Venom. Neither can meet the needs of the other. Eddie does not speak in Venom’s love language of fresh medullas oblongata. Venom cannot fathom the limitations of Eddie’s humanity or why he chooses to shrink himself by living as a tabloid journalist instead of living like a god. Because the two understand each other so well, Eddie knows he can hurt Venom by telling him he’s just a loser parasite from a different world, and Venom knows he can hurt Eddie by destroying the belongings that Eddie has finally earned.

While Kasady’s transformation into the mutant symbiote Carnage turns him into the movie’s titular villain, the real villain of Venom 2 is the fallout between Eddie and Venom. Learning to love each other is more important to Eddie and Venom than defeating the prescribed foe.

In exploring this strange romance, Serkis and Venom 2 tap into emotional territory rarely explored by superhero movies, no matter the studio. While superheroes often have girlfriends (or implied girlfriends) and boyfriends, those significant others rarely feel like anything more than accessories. They’re often flat characters, and that in turn makes their relationships feel hollow.

Because the focus of a superhero film is typically on some global threat and what the heroes must do to thwart it, we rarely get to see the needs, wants, or desires of the heroes’ loved ones, or how the consequences of those instincts and impulses affect them and their relationships. It’s a slice of humanity that’s missing from the people tasked with saving the world in movie after movie.

What other superhero stories could learn from Venom

 Courtesy of Sony Pictures

Michelle Williams in a wig and Tom Hardy in a leather jacket in Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

The most fascinating and distinctive element of both Venom movies — more than their action, humor, and gore — is how hopeful they are about companionship.

While almost all superhero movies run on themes of personal sacrifice and putting everyone else first to save the world, Venom and Venom 2 emphasize, in their own unique and sometimes raunchy ways, that finding someone who completes you can make you stronger, better, and happier. Venom 2 in particular lowers its storytelling stakes: The goal becomes just getting through this life with a little more joy. The film suggests that finding your soulmate — whether they be romantic or platonic or symbiote alien parasite — can be just as important as anything else in the world.

Venom’s freedom to tell what is primarily a wacky relationship story comes from being self-contained. The Venom movies and all their camp, in contrast to Marvel’s endlessly interconnected cinematic universe, can exist simply on their own and in their own world. It’s difficult to imagine a typical MCU film making space for a wigged Michelle Williams to earnestly say lines like “I’m sorry about Venom,” like you would offer condolences to someone who got dumped, or constantly ask a frenetic Tom Hardy, in séance style, whether Venom is currently in the room. Not being part of something bigger allows Venom to take risks with its tone, humor, and scale.

At no point during either Venom movie are earth and all its citizens ever in danger, nor are Eddie and his symbiote the only obstacles that stand in the way between humanity and its sheer obliteration. In Venom 2, Carnage doesn’t seem like an unstoppable force; the movie never suggests that the only way to fight him would be to rope in more superheroes to help. In fact, both Carnage/Kasady and Eddie/Venom seem like they’d be fine never interacting with the world again if they could simply have their significant others and an endless supply of brains.

It wouldn’t hurt to see Marvel or DC make room to tell these kinds of more personal stories about their heroes. Or if they were to approach romance or deep friendship for those heroes, to really explore how being superhuman affects someone’s relationships, and consider the consequences of their global-scale actions.

We saw a bit of that in Marvel’s Disney+ series WandaVision, as Wanda Maximoff channeled grief over her dead husband Vision into a romantic fantasy that brought Vision back but victimized hundreds of other people. The storyline wasn’t without faults, but it made the character much richer, sympathetic, flawed and more human than she’d ever been in earlier movies. It showed that for as much as we love to watch superheroes save the world, their social and personal lives are what make them resonate with fans.

But as I wax nostalgic about Eddie and Venom’s bad romance, it’s worth keeping in mind Venom’s self-contained world may soon expand. The financial success of the first film and projections for the second may have already convinced the powers at Sony to open up a Spider-Verse where Tom Holland’s Spider-Man and Hardy’s Venom must collide, just like in their source comics. For now, though, it’s nice to be able to appreciate a superhero movie that understands how scary the world can be even if you have literal superpowers, and that there’s something beautiful in not going it alone.

Even though Google is a highly desirable employer, 53 percent of 230 verified Google workers said, in a survey for Recode that was conducted by workplace community app Blind, that they would think about leaving the company if they moved and had their pay cut. That’s a bit less than the 68 percent of all professionals on Blind who said so, but it’s still high. Googlers are also more likely (30 percent) to have moved outside their metropolitan area since the pandemic began than professionals at large (22 percent), and some Googlers have already shown a willingness to leave the company over what some of them have called hypocritical remote work policies.

Of course, there are other reasons keeping people at tech companies like Google — prestige, innovation, paychecks so big pay cuts don’t matter — but they might not be enough.

So why are these tech companies floating this idea in the first place?

Google, like many companies, says it has always based people’s pay on where they live. But one could argue that adjusting existing employees’ pay downward was a rarer instance before the pandemic, and that with an increasingly dispersed workforce doing the same labor, location-based pay is becoming a thing of the past. Thanks to remote work technology like Zoom and Slack, employees have been successfully working remotely for over a year and a half. During that time, Google has logged record profits. In turn, employees have enjoyed better work-life balance, shorter commutes, and the potential to live in places where their salaries can go much further. Remote work has moved from a perk that they’d willingly pay for to an expected benefit.

And most other companies have gotten the memo: Some 95 percent said they would not lower pay for fully remote workers, regardless of where they live, according to a survey of 753 organizations by compensation data company Salary.com. That’s because it’s widely understood that pay cuts are bad for worker morale, performance, and retention. That makes tech companies like Google notable outliers.

Beyond what these companies are saying, experts have a few theories for why they’re so far standing firm.

Foremost is that companies know office work works. Although they have seen that their workforce can be just as productive working from anywhere in the short term, they’re still unsure about remote work’s long-term effects on innovation.

“If all you care about is day-to-day productivity, then remote work is great,” Columbia Business School leadership and ethics professor Adam Galinsky told Recode. “But if you care about long-term commitment to an organization and collaboration among people, remote work is problematic.”

Pay cuts — or even the threat of pay cuts — might help maintain the status quo by disincentivizing people from moving to places where they couldn’t go into the office. But it will also likely have some unintended negative consequences for commitment and collaboration, which is precisely what these companies are trying to retain by having people come into the office.

“It’s particularly ironic because the entire reason why we want people to come back to the office is so they’re more committed, engaged, functional, collaborative members of the organization,” Galinsky said. “But if we force them into the office because of pay cuts, they’re going to come in hostile, resentful, and potentially rageful.”

There’s another reason for continuing location-based pay policies: equity in compensation. For example, not docking pay for a worker who moves from San Francisco to Boise, Idaho, might seem unfair to the person in Idaho already making less.

“What am I supposed to do, pay the Boise person more or pay you less?” Paul Rubenstein, chief people officer at Visier, which helps companies make HR decisions based on data, said.

Then there’s the economic rationale: Location-based pay models not only ensure a consistent rationale for paying tech workers in certain areas less than in others but also stand to save the company money. Not paying workers based in Idaho or India less could end up being very expensive for a global tech company.

“Once you start to do that, it’s like tugging at the thread on a sweater: Why do we pay people less than other markets? Why do we pay people less anywhere? Should there be one global salary for all?” Rubenstein said.

Indeed, the pandemic is causing location-based pay to become outdated, according to the salary comparison company Payscale, which also found that most companies don’t plan to lower pay for remote employees.

“What we do expect to see more broadly is a shift from employer- location-based pay strategies to pay strategies that can better accommodate a remote or distributed workforce,” Payscale CEO Scott Torrey told Recode.

That means instead of basing pay on where a company is headquartered and adjusting downward if people live elsewhere, more companies are adopting a national pay median for each position.

Nowhere is that happening faster than in tech, according to Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski, co- founder of Braintrust, a user-owned talent platform that connects companies with technologists, exclusively remotely.

“There is now a global market for their skills,” he said. “Enterprises will pay top dollar regardless of where those individuals are located.”

Additionally, smaller tech companies could swoop in with more generous remote policies as a way to punch above their weight.

That’s all to say that employees, especially ones at tech companies, have options other than having their pay cut. And employee turnover is very expensive, costing a company about a third of an employee’s salary, according to Salary.com CEO Kent Plunkett. Add that to the fact that he said 50 percent of workers — compared to the typical 25 percent — are thinking of leaving their jobs, and it seems like a very bad move for companies to reduce worker pay.

Given the situation, it seems Google feels it has the power and motivation to keep as many people as possible near its offices. However, several of the experts we spoke to also aren’t convinced that companies like Google will continue with these changes in the long run, or might only apply the policy selectively to weed out people it doesn’t want.

“I don’t believe that’s what they’re actually going to do when it comes down to retaining their top that wants to relocate,” Plunkett told Recode. “You’re not going to let your best talent go out the door over a $15,000-a-year pay differential.”

Although Google told Recode it has always adjusted employee salaries based on location, the current damage to employee morale might already be done. “Just because you work in tech doesn’t mean you’re magically enlightened in management styles,” Rubenstein said.

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