Agents of SHIELD starts out as a black superhero story. Mike Peterson (J. August Richards), a laid-off factory worker, is on the street with his son when a building nearby explodes (as they do.) He hears someone screaming for help inside, and uses super strength to smash handholds in the wall, climb up, and save the damsel in distress. He then leaps to the ground and slinks away, covering his head with his hoodie. He’s soon being referred to as the Hooded Hero.
This seemed like an intriguing development. No one had told me that AoS was based around the adventures of a super-powered, single-dad, working-class black man. Even the hoodie — a reference, intentional or otherwise, to Trayvon Martin’s death the year before the pilot aired — seemed potentially positive. The symbol of supposed black criminality reversed and turned into a heroic icon; that could work, maybe. Maybe?
Or then again not so much. As you know if you’ve seen any of the series at all, the Hooded Hero is not the hero. He’s just some schlubby plot point. He never gets to save anyone else. He volunteered to be a guinea pig for an experimental treatment after he was hurt on the job, and his powers are unstable. Soon he’s experiencing uncontrollable rages, beating up his old factory boss, and engaging in kidnapping, assault, and other nefarious super-villainesque deeds. It turns out even the woman he saved wasn’t an innocent, but the evil scientist herself. At the end he gives a speech about how people like him don’t get a fair shake, etc. etc., and the white guy hero without superpowers listens to him sympathetically and calms him down to where he can be ignominiously shot with some sort of sedative for his own good. Yay.
It all seems wearisomely familiar, doesn’t it? For me I was reminded of one of the first comics I think I ever read; an old Flash story from way back in the 1970s. The comic is about Ms. Flash; Patty Spivot is standing in Barry Allen’s lab when (improbably) another bolt of lightning hits, electrifying the shelves of chemicals and giving her superspeed just like Barry Allen had. She too decides to fight crime with her super-speed…except there’s a catch. Her powers are (wait for it) unstable; whenever she runs anywhere, she causes poison gas to seep into the air, or fires to break out. She doesn’t believe that she’s causing the damage, so Barry has to contain her and eventually figure out a way to depower her. Only guys can be Flash; empowered women are too dangerous. End of moral. (It was all an imaginary story anyway, so I guess you could see it as some sort of critique of Barry’s paranoid misogyny, if you felt like being kind.)
Just as the female Flash is a danger to us all, so, in AoS, is the black supehero. The Hooded Hero talks throughout the episode of his desire to be good, and he’s supposed to be a good man confused by the treatment he’s undergone. But that just emphasizes the disconnect between power and blackness. Good white people who get superpowers go off to save the day; the Hooded Hero proves his goodness by recognizing that he can’t do anything but stand there and let the white super-espionage dudes get a clear shot at him with their magic depowering gun.
You could argue I guess that the Hooded Hero doesn’t need to stand in for all black superheroes ever; he’s just one guy, after all. But the show stacks the deck by, inevitably, presenting him as the only black character around. Other than the wearisomely obligatory Asian martial arts expert, the entire SHIELD team is white. (Update: Skye, the superhacker, is bi-racial, with Chinese ancestry.) The climactic surrender scene, then, takes on racial overtones that the show is clearly not prepared to handle. Peterson rails against the giants, the people putting him down — which diagetically are supposed to be the superheroes. But as a lone black man facing a sea of white agents, it reads as a lament about whiteness. In that context, the denoument, in which the solution is for the black guy to trust patiently that the white cops shooting him are beneficent, seems almost unbelievably callous — especially, again, in light of the perhaps accidental but unavoidable resonance with Trayvon Martin.
None of this is particularly surprising given the crappy record of the superhero genre on race…but still, the gratuitous stupidity of it make you shake your head a little. Joss Whedon, who’s supposed to have a brain, directed — and yet, the best he could come up with is a parable about how black men with power need white agents of the state to shoot them for their own good? If this is how the series handles race, maybe it’s just as well that there aren’t any black continuing characters. Erasure is bad, but condescending disempowerment may just be worse.
While she may read as white, the character of Skye (and the actress who plays her) is bi-racial – her father is Chinese-American.
Ah, thanks Osvaldo.
On twitter someone said the handling of race improves…which is both good to hear and maybe inevitable (couldn’t be much worse than the premiere.)
I think your Tweeter is leading you astray: it gets worse.
Oh dear.
Worthy take, Noah. Agents of SHIELD suffers more than most, given the pedantic writing and incoherent plot points. Ming-Na’s Agent May is such a dragon lady stereotype she literally opens doors with her feet in that first season. And Mike Peterson’s story only coarsens, as his difficulty with controlling his metahuman abilities and his desire to prove himself heroic in others’ eyes results in disastrous and dehumanizing consequences.
Agents of SHIELD serves as a useful present-day counterpoint to all the optimistic superhero fans who persist in the belief that superhero narratives can render meaningful diversity effectively. They cannot. In nearly eighty years, they have not, and all the live-action superhero television and movie properties allow today are close ups on people in spandex tights without any race or gender consciousness whatsoever.
Put another way, I don’t understand people who suggest that the superhero genre lacks inherent racial characteristics. Agents of SHIELD, as Noah explains above, tends to disagree.
While I kept sampling the show, it never improved past that first episode in which everything was aggressively generic except Clark Gregg and Michael T Richards.
In addition to the creepy racial politics, there’s off putting presentation of class dissent: Skye is introduced as an Occupy/Anonymous sort who pretty much abandons the movement as soon as she joins the team. It’s implied her she was merely using the movement for a personal quest and a way to get into SHIELD, essentially an inverse Snowden.
If this establishment subtext were being set up to be questioned it might work, but the spy vs. spy SHIELD/HYDRA stuff never quite functions that way, more good state functionaries vs. bad state functionaries without questioning the state at all.
Plus Skye is such a Mary Sue it’s used as one of her aliases, which might have worked were the writing decent, but winking hackwork is still hackwork.
That should be J. August Richards – I mixed up actor and character for a REALLY unfortunate inadvertent reference.
I still think it’s better than Daredevil, though. Or at least, it’s bad in a way I find less painful to watch.
Hmm…so what we have hear is a white-dominated police entity that shoots a black man on the pretext that he’s dangerous?
I didn’t know S.H.I.E.L.D. was a documentary series.
Finally somebody else that has something negative to say about Daredevil. I’d love to see an article about how much that show sucks, but it might be too much of a chore…
I wrote a couple about Daredevil sucking…here’s one:
http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/21/how-netflixs-new-daredevil-series-makes/
Great!
Yeah, the torture thing is really offputting. But it’s such a dreary series overall. Uninteresting characters talking in really deep voices to other uninteresting characters in badly lit rooms. Endlessly. Interspersed with some torture and some fight scenes. But I guess that’s why it’s such a resounding success: It has all the signifiers of being part of The New Wave Of Quality TV.
“Ming-Na’s Agent May is such a dragon lady stereotype she literally opens doors with her feet in that first season”
Huh, I only saw a few episodes but I thought they were going for a Black Widow ripoff… is there anything that distinguishes her from Black Widow?
@Pallas — Jeff Yang, a blogger for WSJ’s Speakeasy and the father of the actor Hudson Yang, the kid who plays Eddie Huang on Fresh Off the Boat, published an interview with Ming-Na around the show’s premiere that you might find fascinating. My take is that Marvel wanted a spy martial artist for the show, cast Ming-Na, and had just enough forethought to change the character’s name away from Agent Rice, their original choice. But all the inscrutable, untrustworthy, domineering dragon lady character elements persisted to the point of mean parody. Much like their pilot’s treatment of J. August Richards’ Mike Peterson, a consistent indifference to promoting race and gender stereotypes bleeds through all the writing.
Put another way, Agent May spends two seasons as an unflappable, emotionally distant automaton, in contrast to Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow who emotes and spends quality time on road trips with teammates. Agent May holds everyone at an emotional distance, especially throughout the first season, because writers who operate within the superhero genre cannot imagine a Chinese female martial artist without reliance on outmoded and dehumanizing stereotypes, in my view.
Also…I think there’s a sense in which Black Widow is herself an Orientalist stereotype in some ways, originally. Cold War Russian/foreign kick ass martial arts spy from the distant east…the Dragon Lady stereotype is buried a bit, but I don’t think it’s absent.
Come now,Russians aren’t in the least “oriental”. Especially not red-headed ones!
There are definitely Orientalist tropes and archetypes around Russia. Casting Johansson goes against those somewhat, since she obviously doesn’t conform to the stereotype. But that just means Agent May is veering back to the blueprint, not that the blueprint was never there to begin with.
The Black Widow never did conform to the stereotype, from long before the movies. Indeed, the stereotype of the Russian woman is closer to Michelle Pfeiffer in The Russia House: blonde, pale-skinned…hyper Euro-Aryan.
I think there’s also a vision of Russia as mysterious, dangerous, exotic, though. Black Widow fits that I mean, her name is Black Widow. Like, I don’t know how much more obvious they could be about referencing Dragon Lady stereotypes.
The Scarlett Empress, starring Marlene Dietrich, is fat packed with Russian exoticism, and its czarist fanart aesthetic is arguably an orientalist vision of the exotic East. (The movie is also awesome)
“Joss Whedon, who’s supposed to have a brain, directed — and yet, the best he could come up with is a parable about how black men with power need white agents of the state to shoot them for their own good?”
Well, this is the guy who made a cult hit sci fi series wherein the hero is an ex-Confederate soldier who’s still mad that his side lost – with no indication that there’s anything wrong with this.
Not that this contradicts the point about the latent tendencies of the superhero genre. Perhaps even supports it, considering that it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer that made him a big name – another superhero story. (Come to think of it, a horror story revised into a superhero story, with the stock vulnerable white young woman becoming the superhero.)
Yeah; I still haven’t seen Firefly. That’s a great point about Buffy being the final girl though; I had never thought of that.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Friday the 13th…but I think(?) I’d argue that those films are not especially racist. There’s a democracy of the scythe in those films, at least…
Noah:
“I think there’s also a vision of Russia as mysterious, dangerous, exotic, though. Black Widow fits that I mean, her name is Black Widow. Like, I don’t know how much more obvious they could be about referencing Dragon Lady stereotypes.”
Well, yes, but although all orientalism partakes of exoticism, not all exoticism is orientalism. The femme fatale stereotype existed for millenia before Europeans had any contact with the Far East.
I would characterise exotic Russianism as almost an anti-orientalism. Look at works like Kipling’s Kim, in which Russia is the European menace from the north threatening India. In terms of America, there is a tradition of negative Euro-exoticism, in which corrupt old-worlders subvert open-hearted, naive Americans. Notice how the good guys are Americanophones against bad guys who are British (The Lion King,Robin Hood:Prince of Thieves), French (Raiders of the Lost Ark),German (Die Hard)…not to mention the countless WW II and Cold War tales…
The theme is even a subject of high literature: cf the novels of Henry James.
Whedon himself has said the concept of Buffy was “What if the blonde girl that always gets killed by the monster turned around and kicked its ass instead?” (Or something like that.)
He seems to think of this purely in feminist terms. I don’t know if he’s ever consciously considered the other implications of his role reversal, insofar as the blonde girl is the daughter of the establishment and the monster is the Other.
Yeah…slashers are all about that role reversal. Not entirely, entirely missing from Buffy (there’s some sympathy for some vampires) but superhero genre definitely mutes it.
I don’t have any recollection of pre-90s attempts at super-hero tv shows (like Wonder Woman & Bionic Man), other than a vague sense of the campiness of the Batman tv show. Has television ever made a good superhero show? I’m going to exclude Buffy from this question, since that’s been well-discussed (and less overtly a SH show).
“Has television ever made a good superhero show?” YES, and it’s called Batman: The Animated Series. (The ’60s Batman is wonderful as well, but given its very tongue-in-cheek nature, maybe doesn’t count as a “superhero show,” exactly.)
I’d argue vehemently that the 60s Batman starts as a superhero show. Superhero parodies have been a central part of the superhero genre pretty much from the beginning —Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman all are parodies or at least have strong elements of parody, as does Watchmen, the Tick, Ambush Bug, Cerebus, Doom Patrol, and on and on.
Re: “superhero parodies”– there has to be a difference between a thoroughgoing superhero parody and a regular superhero story with its fair share of humor. There may never a way to break it down beyond “I know it when I see it, but otherwise, if you say Fawcett’s Captain Marvel is a parody because it had ludicrous elements, then the same criterion applies to various Superman and Batman stories– particularly the Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite stories.
For that matter, even BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES has ludicrous moments, particularly whenever the show did a Harley Quinn episode.
Yeah…well that’s kind of my point. Parody is really central to the supehero genre. What’s the difference between an episode of the tick and some of the old Binder/Weisinger Superman stories except that the Superman stories are sillier?
And of course most of the most critically acclaimed superhero stories are parodies (Watchmen, Death Ray, Superduperman, Cerebus).
There are some genres where a parody does mean you’re not really in the genre any more, or where parodies at least aren’t quite so central to the genre. But superhero parodies are really dead center in the superhero genre, and always have been.
Wonder Woman was very goof in the season, BTW (if you could stomach the sexual politics – your mileage may vary). A pretty Wonder Woman, a pretty Steve Trevor, a heakthy sense of humor w/o going nearly as over the top as Batman, beating up Nazis – what’s not to like?
*very GOOD
What do the Binder/Weisinger Superman stories parody? Just superheroes in general? But that reasoning is circular. If parody is “central to the superhero genre,” then it should be impossible to make a parody of superheroes, since they’re already parodies.
Again, the appearance of humor in a story, superhero or otherwise, does not constitute a parody.
Just for the hell of it, here’s my take on why PLASTIC MAN is not really a comedy, despite the presence of a lot of funny stuff in it.
http://arche-arc.blogspot.com/2011/08/adventure-comedy-vs-comedy-adventure-pt.html
“If parody is “central to the superhero genre,” then it should be impossible to make a parody of superheroes, since they’re already parodies.”
I don’t think that’s even a good parody of sense.
Genres are not algorithms. They’re amorphous collections of similarities and ad hoc cultural agreements. Superhero stories are about empowered individuals, often. And then they’re often also about parodying the idea of empowerment, and making fun of the idea that silly guys in tights can save the world.
So yes, it’s pretty easy to read Weisinger-era superhero stories as parodies of the superhero genre…and it’s easy to read a lot of stories central to the superhero genre as being parodies. This might be a contradiction if we were doing math, but since we aren’t, it’s really neither a problem nor especially confusing…unless you have an impoverished view of the superhero genre as essentially Jungian, or some such.
I don’t think parodies need to be comedies. Like I said, Watchmen seems pretty clearly a parody of the superhero genre, even though it’s not a comedy (though it’s often quite funny.) Same with Doom Patrol.
That would have been a nicer shot at Jungians if it actually articulated any criticism beyond “I don’t like this.”
I think you’re finding it easy to read many superhero stories as parodies because your definition of parody is so loose as to be meaningless.
I suspected you were favoring a definition that was short-hand for “anything that seems to contradict narratives of empowerment,” so thanks for confirming it. I for one don’t think that Superman’s machismo is nullified in any significant way as long as he keeps booting Mxyzptlk back to the imp-dimension, but I assume your mileage varies.
Here’s the problem with such a broad definition of parody: it doesn’t sufficiently take into account the fact that “the other side” can do parodies with the opposite meaning. THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS contains a parody of a touchy-feely psychologist, who is rendered ludicrous through the lens of Frank Miller’s endorsement of Bat-machismo. I would hope that you’d consider this parody, even though it has nothing to do with satirizing heroic empowerment.
I don’t think parodies need to be comedies, either. But given the list of “parodies” you supply, I think you may be defining a lot of elements of simple comedy as having the nature of parodies– PLASTIC MAN, for one.
Absolutely, Dark Knight has elements of parody. I wasn’t trying to give a complete formal definition of parody in superhero comics, largely because I think such definitions are useless.
But I think Frank Miller teeters more or less intentionally on the verge of self-parody as well. The comic mocks liberal bleeding hearts and all-but-mocks its own hard-boiled tropes as well. In that it’s similar to the Batman TV series, which both ridiculed the idea of the all powerful bat daddy and glorified the establishment at the same time.
Lee/Kirby man/monster/heroes have elements of parody too, I’d say. And of course those great giant head flash covers and so forth…
Superheroes are basically a silly concept (and moreso as time makes the tights more antiquated) and they’ve often been best when they acknowledge/comment on the silliness in one way or the other. Parody is not always, but often a possibility and a resource—much more so than in, say, sci-fi, or mystery, or many other genres where parody has been less central.
I don’t really know why you see this as a danger or an attack. Parody is one of superheroes great resources. Much of the best work in the genre has been done in that vein—and it adds a lot of complexity and depth to other work. The rejiggering of and questioning of tropes, the tension between the dream of empowerment and the recognition that that dream is maybe not so great; those are all strengths of the genre, not assaults on it.
Since we fundamentally disagree about the usefulness of a rigorous definition of the term “parody,” there’s no point in rehashing that.
Similarly, I find it interesting that you believe you can be as elastic as you please with regard to said term, you can define superheroes narrowly, as “basically a silly concept.” This may speak to the way in which you personally choose to read them, but if you promote it as a general definition, it’s inaccurate in that it doesn’t address the ways in which the statistically-dominant comics-audience reads them.
I don’t consider what I deem to be the over-emphasis and.or mis-identification of parody as “a danger or an attack.” I consider it an instance of mistaking the elephant’s ear for the whole elephant.
Not sure what you mean by “statistically dominant comics audience.” Like, do you have charts? Polls? Who are you speaking for, and on what authority?
Among other things, comics aren’t anywhere near the most important medium for superhero narratives at the moment. I’d point to Jason Mittell as well, who argues quite convincingly that genres are defined by non-fans and passersby as well as fans. I’m pretty sure that “superheroes are silly” is not some sort of bizarre, marginal opinion among people aware of superheroes broadly described. And, you know, again, “superheroes are silly” doesn’t have to be a diss, or a threat, unless you’ve got some pretty statistically unusual ideas about the Jungian importance of superheroes and the dangers of humor.
Hmm, you don’t want a precise definition of the word “parody,” but you do think that I should have to provide charts and polls to prove that the majority of persons who read American superhero comics are invested in treating the heroes seriously. I think I see an inequity here. For me it’s enough to note that most of the top selling comics-series take a dominantly serious tone, using humor to a degree but not enough to provide the ironic distance I believe you’d like to cultivate. Again, the mileage of your goalposts– which I believe you moved, since most of your cited examples in this discussion came from comic book magazines– may vary.
If the rest of your readership hasn’t read any Jung, I guess you may be able to convince them that he’s all about “the dangers of humor.” Not me, though. I like to remember the application of archetypal signs to humor with the help of a little jingle:
Come and listen to my story–
‘Bout a man named Jung:
Dreamed his father’s church got flattened by
A giant wad of dung.
The “inequity” is between a rule of thumb amorphous category and an empirical claim. Different things are different.
I wasn’t saying Jung was humorless. I was saying that you are. (the poem doesn’t really change that assessment.)
The top selling comics series sell diddly squat compared to the Avengers, which, as Darryl noted in a post earlier this week, is quite humorous.
And for pity’s sake, you’re the one who mentioned statistics! I asked you to explain where the statistics come from, and you think this is unfair? What the hell? If you make an appeal to some sort of mathematically verifiable science, then you shouldn’t be surprised if people ask you to explain why it’s mathematical and verifiable, and/or to clarify what the hell you think you’re talking about. If anything.
“The “inequity” is between a rule of thumb amorphous category and an empirical claim. Different things are different.”
Utter nonsense. The category “parody” is not at all “amorphous,” either as defined by dictionaries or in its normal usage. Here’s one dictionary definition:
“an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.”
Parody is specifically about imitating something else for humorous effect. Various critics might like to believe that Plastic Man is a humorous imitation of theoretically non-humorous costumed characters. But it’s not enough to assert this; if you’re a honest critic, you attempt to show proofs. Even to say “elements of parody” is dishonest if you don’t show how this hypothetical “element” differs from an element of comedy. Is Woozy Winks an “element of parody?” And if so, what makes him different from dozens of comic-relief sidekicks? Same question for Etta Candy.
“I wasn’t saying Jung was humorless. I was saying that you are. (the poem doesn’t really change that assessment.)”
Not what you said at all. You strongly implied that to be a Jungian was to be somehow opposed to humor:
“it’s really neither a problem nor especially confusing…unless you have an impoverished view of the superhero genre as essentially Jungian, or some such.”
Now how can you label anyone’s attitude toward something be “essentially Jungian” without claiming that said attitude is in line with Jung’s outlook? I guess you could accuse someone of misreading Jung, but then why would you label that person a Jungian? I will say that your irrelevant Jung-digression is indeed funnier than my rhyme, though I’m afraid you don’t get credit for being funny accidentally.
“The top selling comics series sell diddly squat compared to the Avengers, which, as Darryl noted in a post earlier this week, is quite humorous.”
Still moving the goalposts. Everything I’ve said addresses your original point, which asserted that parody was “central” to the superhero genre as it was conceived in comic books.
“Superhero parodies have been a central part of the superhero genre pretty much from the beginning —Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman all are parodies or at least have strong elements of parody, as does Watchmen, the Tick, Ambush Bug, Cerebus, Doom Patrol, and on and on.”
When I first posted, I knew that we would not agree on the subject of humor, but I thought you should at least acknowledge that not all humorous elements are “elements of parody.” That’s still the way you’ve chosen to define parody, though, because you’re not concerned with the intrinsic meaning of the word, but with some extrinsic, politicized interpretation of the word. As per your Sedgewickean argument in “Comics in the Closet,” you’re content to interpret all humorous elements as weapons in your campaign to strike down the hated “serious superhero.” This project doesn’t have anything to do with making superheroes more “complex,” as you claimed earlier. it has to do with promoting your own distinctly limited vision of what superheroes ought to be.
“And for pity’s sake, you’re the one who mentioned statistics! I asked you to explain where the statistics come from, and you think this is unfair? What the hell? If you make an appeal to some sort of mathematically verifiable science, then you shouldn’t be surprised if people ask you to explain why it’s mathematical and verifiable, and/or to clarify what the hell you think you’re talking about. If anything.”
The context of my remark about the “statistically dominant comics audience” is backed up by pretty much every direct-market sales chart since the dawn of said market, so I thought your demand for actual statistics was nonsensical. If you want such a chart, here’s an online posting, first one I came across:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/10/03/what-were-the-best-selling-comics-of-september-2014
You will note that of the top ten periodical comics listed, only one shows a strong humorous bent, the aforementioned Harley Quinn. I think this list accurately represents the general tastes of the people who actually buy comic books today. If you want to consider those tastes bad, or harmful, or retrograde to whatever your political outlook may be, go ahead. But it’s pretty goofy to try to promote “parody” as central to this genre when most of the top-sellers are devoted to heroes like Batman and Wolverine, whose adventures only include humor as a lagniappe, not the main course. That is, unless you choose to read their very “seriousness” as somehow parody-related in essence, which indeed you did so when you tried to float the idea of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS as descending into self-parody.
Maybe you could sell the idea that the greater movie-watching audience is hipper than the comics-nerds to some (near-Jungian) archetype of the Silly Superhero– except that hardly any of the successful superhero films are using humor as a central element, and none of them are parodies.
All genres are amorphous.
I didn’t read the rest; as usual your tenacity is impressive.
I guess it makes sense that a Jungian would go into paroxysms at the suggestion that different things are different…
More hilarity as usual, thanks.
I thought about getting into the actual subject of your essay, since I’m sure your readership doesn’t care about whether you don’t distinguish between “humor” and “parody.” But since you’re signing off, I’ll just say that every time you make one of these phony-baloney equivalences between what a given text shows and what it reminds you of, you dilute your own ostensible message. I’m not even a fan of AGENTS OF SHIELD, but there’s little doubt in my mind that Peterson, as the victim of a nasty experiment (at least partly funded by white people), is not criminalized a la Taryvon Martin in the mind of most audience-members. Peterson retains the full sympathy of the audience, and even if you don’t like the image of him being shot to save his life and the lives of others, the take-away is that he not only lives– unlike all the other victims of the experiment– but he goes on to work alogside the SHIELD agents to some extent.
Geez, talk about not being able to recognize when different things are different!
So…Trayvon Martin is different from Peterson because Trayvon Martin is a criminal and beyond sympathy…? Okay, then.
I’m referring to the criminality that was imputed to Martin; nothing else.
Ah, I deleted my own last post. Overly snarky. Sorry about that.