Himalayan Quake

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

“Now take that frequency and see if you can amplify it,” Jiaying says.

Skye wants to obey her new mentor but is frightened of her own powers. “The last time I did something like this a lot of people got hurt.”

“You can’t hurt the mountain. And you’re not going to hurt me. Don’t be afraid.”

Skye braces herself, turns toward the snow-banked mountain range, and raises her hand in standard superhero style. Soon an orchestra of emotion-signifying strings rises from the soundtrack, and then a CGI avalanche tumbles scenically down the mountain side.

Skye gives a shocked smile. “I moved a mountain.”

“Remember that feeling. It’s not something to be afraid of.”

This is episode 2.17 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which aired April 14, eleven days before the Nepal earthquake. In Marvel Comics, Skye goes by the codename “Quake.” In the TV show, she’s just acquired her superpowers and has been whisked away to a secret mountain sanctuary to be trained by its semi-immortal leader. Jiaying never names the Himalayas, but that’s the main location of the Inhumans’ secret city in the comics, and in the show Skye was found as an infant in China. During the same episode, she discovers that Jiaying is her mother—played by Dichen Lachman, an actress of German, Australian, and Tibetan background. Lachman was born in Kathmandu, miles from the earthquake’ epicenter, which triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest, killing 19 people. The total death toll is over 7,000.

The coincidences are hard to comprehend. My wife and I watch S.H.I.E.L.D. with our son, and I remember her protesting from the other end of the couch that Skye’s avalanche could have hurt plenty of people. We’re usually a day or two behind streaming episodes, so this was still at least a week before the actual earthquake. We teach at Washington & Lee University, where a spring term roster of students was flying to Nepal for an interdisciplinary Economics and Religion course. I bumped into a wife of one of the professors in Kroger, and she said news of the quake broke just hours before their flight was to take off. She had been going too.

That’s as close as I get to the disaster.

This time last year, I was teaching my “Superheroes” course, and gave a guest lecture on colonialism and Orientalism in the superhero genre for Professor Melissa Kerin’s “Imaging Tibet” course. I showed image after racist image of European Americans visiting the magical realm, acquiring superhuman powers, and then returning home to battle evil. Batman Begins opens with Bruce Wayne scaling a Himalayan mountain side to arrive at Nanda Parbat, home of the League of Assassins, where Bruce would train with the semi-immortal Ra’s al Ghul to become Batman.

It wasn’t airing yet, but the current season of the Arrow TV show is centered around Nanda Parbat too. The TV Ra’s is played by a former Australian rugby player, and the equally European-looking actress playing his daughter speaks with what I think is supposed to be a British accent. Only the Ninja-like underlings look Asian. Nanda Parbat is a variation on Nanga Parbat, the western-most mountain of the Himalayas in Pakistan.

My wife, son and I sat on the same couch, watching Oliver Queen (“Green Arrow” in DC Comics) agree to become Ra’s al Ghul’s heir in exchange for Ra’s saving Oliver’s mortally wounded sister by dunking her in his magic fountain of semi-immortality.

The ceremony involves a virginal white dress and antiquated pulley system of wood and rope. After vanishing under the bubbles, she catapults twelve feet through the air to land cat-like on the fountain ledge.

“Tibet is one wacky place,” I said, and my wife laughed.

That’s episode 3.20, which aired on Wednesday April 22^nd, three days before the Saturday earthquake. In the week after, Oliver would be brainwashed into a heartless mass-murderer plotting the destruction of his own city, and Skye would use her newly controllable powers to rescue a fellow Inhuman and a cyborg S.H.E.I.L.D. agent from Hydra’s Antarctic prison laboratory.

On April 29, NPR reported on the flood of people trying to leave Kathmandu, and The Guardian described the rise of tensions over the slow pace of aid. The same day actor Ryan Phillippe told Howard Stern that he had an upcoming meeting with Marvel, hinting that he may be cast as Iron Fist in the new Netflix superhero show about another European American traveling to the Himalayas and gaining superpowers.

The collective origin point for all the superhero exoticism is Shangri-La, the magical Himalayan city of the 1937 film and 1933 novel Lost Horizon. It features a semi-immortal High Lama who recruits a European American to be his heir and rule the secret mountain paradise.

Edward Said asks: “How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another?”I answered last year in a PS: Political Science & Politics essay: “In the case of superheroes, it is through the unexamined repetition of fossilized conventions that encode the colonialist attitudes that helped to create the original character type and continue to define it in relation to imperial practices.” I continued the thought in the book manuscript of On the Origin of Superheroes I sent to my press for copyediting last month: “The 1930s is an Orientalist pit superheroes may never climb out of.”

My claims are already outdated. These TV shows aren’t just continuing superhero Orientalism—they’re digging the pit deeper. And they’ve been digging it while actual Nepalese rescue workers have been digging earthquake victims from actual pits.

Stealing Your Relics for Your Own Good

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Well, I was supposed to have another post today, but it fell through…so. Second episode of Agents of SHIELD, just as racist as the first? Somewhat improbably, yes.

Our team heads off to Peru to find an object of great power, which they appropriate in the name of international law and harmony and because white people are the best ones to hold onto bombs, just ask Hiroshima. The Peruvians understandably don’t see it quite that way, and try to get the object for themselves. In particular, one of Coulson’s old flames, a (surprise!) hypersexualized Latina woman tries to use her wiles on him, but he’s too stoic and smart and white. The team sets aside its internal differences to self-actualize through the slaughter of the brown people whose stuff they’re stealing. Then at the end Samuel Jackson shows up and gives forth with the silly over the top indignation just to show that there’s no hard feelings from POC about the pillage and murder. Happy ending all around.

What’s interesting here is that this isn’t even really a superhero narrative. There aren’t any metahumans about; it’s a basic action-adventure narrative. Yet, the superhero filled world it exists in remains important — and part of the way it’s important is in the racism. Superhero genre default is that the powerful are good; the righteous who win are right. In the context of international security arrangements, this ends up meaning that stark imperial condescension is justified, and the bad guys are the indigenous people who object to having their borders violated and their resources robbed.Similarly, online activist Skye’s efforts to argue for people resisting oppression are pooh-poohed; rebellion against authority is portrayed as violent while the gun-wielding international agents with the flying fortress are just protectors.The connection between superpower narratives and the international superpower couldn’t be much more naked, or much more unquestioned.

Be White Or Explode

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

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.

The Fall of Superheroes

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Remember when the end of summer meant the end of superheroes? If you could get past August you were free of the masked and superpowered until spring. Six months. That’s the minimum period of regenerative hibernation required before the next explosive, power-punching, evil-thwarting onslaught of hyperbolic do-goodery. This past year Captain America: The Winter Soldier opened in April,

followed by Amazing Spider-Man 2 in May,

before X-Men: Days of Future Past spilled into June.

July offered only the semi-superheroic duo Lucy and Hercules, but August made up with Guardians of the Galaxy.

I admit to seeing all but one of them, but something changed for me this year. Maybe it was the death of Gwen Stacy. It felt like Hollywood’s way of punishing an uppity girlfriend. How dare Gwen figure out how to defeat Electro when Peter couldn’t—and imagine if he had actually followed her to England. Superhero as trailing spouse? Obviously the woman had to die. The seventh installment of the X-Men franchise restored me a bit, with its mildly complex characters making occasionally unexpected choices. Sure, the cast members from the original 2000 film are looking a bit gnarled these days, but we can’t all have anti-aging mutant powers. And, hey, who didn’t have an absolute ball at Guardians? Funniest superhero movie yet. A week later I could barely recall a scene, but that’s normal. It was August. My superhero processing systems were cycling down already. Time to tuck the capes and cowls away for a well-deserved cryogenic nap.

Except, wait, why do I still hear the thumping of a bombastic soundtrack? Superheroes aren’t hibernating this year. They just shrunk down a bit. September has already brought the TV premiere of Gotham

and season two of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

October promises Flash

and season three of Arrow.

Add Constantine, Agent Carter, Supergirl, Teen Titans, and the four Marvel shows in production at Netflix, and the power nap is over. We’ve seen plenty of superheroes on primetime before—Batman, Wonder Woman, Hulk, and Greatest American Hero all boasted multi-year runs in the 70s and 80s—but never so many simultaneously. I can’t resist them any more than I resisted their summer siblings, but I do worry how long the onslaught is going to last.

I actually requested a show like Gotham two years ago. The Fox production isn’t exactly what I described, but I won’t quibble. And I named every supervillain-in-his-youth cameo for my son and wife as we watched. Though was it really necessary to film the Wayne murder scene yet again? Imagine arriving at the crime scene with Gordon and glimpsing little Bruce for the first time. Cut three minutes from the script and that opening could have been dynamic just through a POV change. Instead we get a repeat, something closer to Nolan’s Batman Begins than Burton’s Batman. The WB has managed to throw in some bare-chested goofiness into Green Arrow’s character, but DC is keeping its dark and dire palette for the bigger network.

S.H.I.E.L.D. had a firmer grip. Last year’s series premiere was flawed but hopeful—and then the follow-up episodes were some of the worst TV I’ve ever sat through. I don’t know how they made it to mid-season, but I’m glad they did, because the final season arc was one of the best long-term plotting coups a series ever pulled off. This year opened at a sprint, with the expanded cast and juggled originals introduced with gloriously little exposition—a huge trick given the upheavals in status quo the last Captain America film forced on the show. Though my favorite moment was a narrative sleight-of-hand employed for the new characterization of an old but radically altered returning character—one of those look back and reevaluate a half dozen scenes when you realize brain-damaged Fitz is only hallucinating Simmons. Oh, and bad Ward grew a beard and lives in the basement now—just like the dragon in the first season of the BBC’s Smallville-inspired Merlin.

So, yes, I guess I can’t complain about the superhero’s autumnal shift to the small screen. I’m their audience. But what happens next spring? Will we have recovered enough for The Avengers 2: Age of Ulton in May? Or Ant-Man in July? Or Fantastic Four in August? Or the following year when have to go see X-Men Origins: Deadpool and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America 3 and X-Men: Apocalypse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 and Doctor Strange and Shazam! and Sinister Six? All that after having just watched Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist combine forces on Netflix’s The Defenders? Plus the other seven planned superhero shows airing fall and winter?

It’s not quite genre domination–there are still more cops and doctors and lawyers on TV than I can list–but have two publishing companies ever generated so many simultaneous franchises? Marvel and DC are spreading their genes faster than the zombie plague. The superhero apocalypse is here. Will we survive it?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Himalayan Quake

Stealing Your Relics for Your Own Good

Be White Or Explode

The Fall of Superheroes