Tag Archives: Avengers

Civil War, Civil Crap

Posted on by

So the critics like it, they really really like it.

Poor old Batman v Superman (RT Score 28%) is sitting in the corner sucking his thumb as Captain America does his victory jig and Iron Man shakes his buttocks in delight.

But at least BvS didn’t put me to sleep which is more than I can say for Captain America: Civil War. I spent the first hour of the movie fighting back the urge to take a nap and I almost never fall asleep while watching movies at the theater. Yet how are we to fathom this when the Grand Lodge has determined the vast superiority of Civil War (RT Score 94%)?

CW_Poster_01

I think it’s fair to say that the only thing worse than a comics critic is a movie critic, at least as far as standards are concerned. At The New Republic, Will Leitch swoons over Joss Whedon and Jon Favreau as if they are demi-gods of celluloid, proclaiming them “terrific four-quadrant filmmakers.” In the very same breath, he suggests that Civil War can’t stand up to the two previous Avengers movies but is awesome nonetheless.

I’m sometimes seen as a harsh critic but saying that a movie is worse than Avengers: Age of Ultron is nothing short of farting pointblank into someone’s face. I cringe in horror whenever I think of Whedon’s farm house scene from Ultron especially when I remember how Whedon supposedly fought tooth and nail for its inclusion and considers it the epitome of his superhero aesthetic—in other words shallow, fannish, unnecessary, and dumb.

At the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey gushes uncontrollably and announces that, “Civil War is the “antidote to Batman v Superman’s poison for comics fans.” Speaking as a comic fan, I think Marvel-Disney has done an exquisite job of poisoning comics and pissing on its grave but let’s not quibble over the finer points. Here’s the best part of Gilbey’s review:

“The plot is so satisfyingly worked out, and the foundations for the hostilities in the second half of the film so carefully prepared, that you want to take aside the makers of Batman v Superman (who thought it was motivation enough just to have one superhero mistakenly believe that the other was running amok) and say to them: See? This is how it’s done. It’s not so hard, is it?”

It helps also that there is nuance and colour here. The characters are multi-layered, crammed full of old allegiances and grudges and irritations. They have personalities. Remember those?”

I don’t know Mr. Gilbey, I agree that Batman v Superman isn’t made of the brainiest stuff (maybe it needs to be retained a year or two) but having two opposing superhero groups decide to wreak havoc across continents because Steve Rogers doesn’t want to sign a UN contract and just wants to protect his mass murdering pal (Bucky) does seem like rather poor motivation compared to seeing all your friends and colleagues killed by two superpowered Kryptonians.

And, no Mr. Gilbey, despite being the characters with the most lines in the movie, Captain America and Iron Man do not actually have “mutli-layered” personalities. They both speak in clichés, are one note cardboard caricatures, and barely have time to articulate a single serious idea; largely because they spend 50% of the movie beating people up, and a solid 25% of their waking hours cracking jokes while destroying public property.

But Gilbey is as nothing compared to the Uber Marvel fanboy, Justin Chang, writing in Variety:

“The shaming of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will continue apace — or better still, be forgotten entirely — in the wake of Captain America: Civil War, a decisively superior hero-vs.-hero extravaganza that also ranks as the most mature and substantive picture to have yet emerged from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Now I’m happy for Batman v Superman to be buried and forgotten as long as its tentacles reach out from the deepest nether regions and pulls every single Marvel movie down with it as well. What a wonderful world that would be. No more Superhero Movies as the Scarlet Witch once said. Chang continues:

“And the sides-taking showdown between Team Captain America and Team Iron Man, far from numbing the viewer with still more callous acts of destruction, is likely to leave you admiring its creativity.”

So let me see, would this lack of numbing callous destruction also include the part where the Avengers destroy parts of Lagos, a Berlin airport, and some unimportant city where the Winter Soldier is camping out? I guess it’s all less “numbing” because only Marvel superheroes ravage foreign lands with a smile. Chang is so clearly invested in these idiotic characters that it’s pure comedy to see him turn the joyless lives of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers into Ingmar Bergman Spandex hour. But he continues:

“In assembling this Marvel male weepie, scribes Markus and McFeely show a rare talent for spinning cliches into artful motifs: The pain of deep, irrecoverable loss recurs throughout the narrative, and for both Iron Man and Captain America, the bonds of friendship are shown to run deeper than any commitment to the greater good.”

In other words, Civil War is 3-Kleenex movie: one for when you feel the bile emerging from your stomach, the second for when you spit on the ground in disgust and have to clean up after yourself, and the third for when you finally fall unconscious and someone needs to wipe the dribble from mouth. But let’s talk about that “deep, irrecoverable loss” shall we?

The most affectionate moment between Tony Stark and his parents (the great motivator of the movie’s final fist fight) occurs near the start of the movie where the audience is abused with some godawful CGI which turns Robert Downey into some pasty refugee from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf. Seeing this in IMAX 3D did not help one bit. Tony then emotes to a lecture hall full of MIT students about his exquisite feelings of loss before handing out grant freebies to them all. Voila! Instant emotion and reason for knocking the crap out of Captain America. I guess when you’re shot up with the Marvel Super Critic serum, you don’t really need to see and hear the loss to feel the loss. You can just get it by telepathy, presumably from the rotting corpse of Walt Disney.

These are frightening people, folks. They want to convince us that the doggie doo in the apple pie is good for you. But there’s still some butter in the crust. I think it’s possible to see Civil War as a kind of Dr. Strangelove style satire without the bite; all hidden in plain sight with the umbral subtlety of a Dick Cheney.

The fact is, the protagonist of the show (Captain America for those not paying attention) encapsulates the true American Spirit of derring-do and humanitarian intervention. Chris Evans is dressed in primary colors unlike our bespectacled madman, Peter Sellers, but he’s a true psychopath of near Tom Cruise-ian Mission Impossible levels.

When someone tells Cap not to break things, he lets them know that he has to because it’s his Responsibility to Protect; he has to burn the village to save it. He has no interest in the judicial system since it’s run by military madmen just like himself. Like a true villain, his loyalty to Bucky overrides all moral and ethical responsibilities. Logic isn’t his strong suit, he just needs his freedom because his Democracy of One is indubitably best suited to the practice of ecstatic violence. The true heart of the movie is that Captain America wants to save a world that doesn’t need to be saved; a world that was never in any danger in the first place. The real hero of Civil War is Baron Zemo who has engineered a preposterous scheme to get Cap and Iron Man to fight each other and disassemble the Avengers (if they don’t kill each other first) so that the world will be saved from Marvel movies. He’s the Ozymandias of Civil War and, of course, he fails; doomed to watch reruns of Bambi in his jail cell for the rest of his days.

Even the Captain America of the comics turned himself in after a while and got himself killed, but this isn’t an option for the Steve Rogers of the movies since he’s probably all ready to do battle in Marvel’s upcoming Infinity War. Hopefully they’ll just kill him off when the Marvel movie universe starts tanking (just like the superhero pamphlets) some years down the road. Nothing lasts forever…I hope.

(Non) Super (Non) Direction

Posted on by

Superheroes are supposed to be amazing. They can leap tall buildings, run faster than a speeding whoosh, and see sights that no sighter has ever sighted.

And yet, on film, superheroes are, visually, banal.
 

 
That’s a little documentary about Kurosawa’s use of movement. At about 4:30, the video compares scenes from Joss Whedon’s the Avengers —and shows pretty definitively that Whedon does basically nothing with the camera, with his actors, or with his composition. The Avengers might be the world’s most powerful mortals, but Whedon films them with the dynamism of grey, flatulent paint (though I’m sure Kurosawa would film flatulent paint with panache, if he felt like it.)

Whedon is an unusually blah director, but superhero films in general aren’t known for their visual distinctiveness. Look at this sequence from Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man.
 

 
There’s some effort to promote visual interest there. The camera beings moving away from Ant-Man, and then flips so you’re moving towards Henry Pym and Hope. Once your close to Pym and Hope, the door slams, and then there’s a zoom towards the keyhole, followed by a shot back to Ant-Man, who races towards the door. The back and forth of the camera, from Scott to Pym to Scott to Pym, could be seen as mirroring the (humorously) repetitious failed attempts. And there’s a nice comic moment when you see him racing towards the door, and then the shot on the other side as he smashes against it, leaving his impact to your imagination.

But while the sequence is workmanlike enough, it’s not exactly impressive or memorable. The back and forth of the camera doesn’t feel especially regulated or meaningful. Notice the last shot of Ant-Man before we switch back to the door closing, for example. The camera is stationary; it’s no longer pulling away from him. the sense of motion is frittered away; the shot doesn’t add to the tension or the sense of motion. It just reminds you that Ant-Man is still standing there. Similarly, the first run at the door doesn’t really use the camera pacing to create suspense. Instead, after all the build-up, there are just a bunch of shots: moving in on the keyhole, cut to Ant-Man closing his mask with a flourish, then running, then watching him run through the keyhole, then a flash of blue, then the sound of impact. It’s haphazard and disjointed; there isn’t a clear rhythm or build, which means that there isn’t a sense of anticipation or failure. As a result, most of the work of the scene is up to the Foley artist, for the thud-into-the-door sound effect.
 

 
In contrast, the scene from Hitchock’s The Birds uses orchestrates shot/reverse shot movement to build suspense throughout. The cuts come quicker and quicker throughout the scene as the inevitable disaster looms, culminating in what are essentially freeze frame snapshots of Tippi Hedren’s horrified face as the explosion rips through Bodega Bay. And then of course there’s that marvelous move upwards to the bird’s eye view, looking down on the flames forming a slash across the city, with the bird’s squawking in triumph before they swoosh down to do more damage.

It’s kind of cruel to compare a couple of random big-budget hacks to Kurosawa and Hitchcock, obviously. But, on the other hand, Hitchcock, at least, was a Hollywood hack too; The Birds was a suspense picture that was meant for box office success (and did fairly well at that.) Given the buckets of money the studios throw at the Marvel films, it seems like they could find a director with rudimentary visual skill, if they wanted to.
 

 
Guy Ritchie’s not one of the all time greats of cinema or anything, but The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has some visual flair. I like the sequence at about :45 where the camera rushes in for a close up at the first car, then pulls back and in the same (presumably digitally enhanced take) rushes forward for a close up of the trailing car. It provides a nice sense of speed and urgency—again, not breathtaking, but fun—which is more than can be said for the direction in Avengers or Ant-Man.

Of course, Man From U.N.C.L.E. bombed, while Avengers and Ant-Man were mega-hits. The sameness of the Marvel films (and the fact that Daredevil, on television, is somewhat more visually adventurous) suggests deliberation. Marvel could have hired Guy Ritchie to direct one of their properties; they haven’t bothered because they figure boring is best. The direction is meant to be bland, because they figure (rightly or wrongly) that audiences wants superheroes who are bland. We want heroes, apparently, who are not too interesting, or surprising, or exciting. We want superadventures that keep to the superconventions.

The ‘Avengers’ Films: The Maze of Continuity and Joss Whedon’s Voice

Posted on by

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
_________

By the time Joss Whedon joined the Marvel wagon, there had already been four distinct movies set in that universe. He would have to continue characters arcs already established in previous movies as well as set up the following installments of the individual franchises going forward. The difficulty of his job lay in having to develop the paths of characters that started before his involvement and maintain a coherent relation with what came before, all the while setting up a end point from which other writers and directors can go off on.

In “‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ Is the Ultimate Joss Whedon Movie Whether You Like It or Not,” Jacob Hall argues that while Joss Whedon (known for television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly) was “adored by his small, passionate and often overeager fan base, Whedon was a niche talent”, both “too specific and too nerdy” for the mainstream taste. However, tackling the Avengers property ended up being a task Joss Whedon was particularly suited for precisely because he is specific and nerdy. He understood the core elements of the characters and the best way to provide each character with a moment-to-shine and an overall arc. His television work also demonstrated his ability to work with an ensemble cast and he was well known for his comics’ bona fides, having personally written Marvel comics (Astonishing X-Men).
 

steve-rogers-and-tony-stark-in-the-avengers

When Whedon comes on board, Iron Man/Tony Stark has, over the course of two movies, been traumatized by his kidnapping in the Middle East and has been using his suit as a form of protection while dealing with the ramifications and repercussions of a war-mongering past. Furthermore, although the suit brings out a heroic side of Tony and while he does make the initial change of not manufacturing more weapons at Stark Industries, his fights have mostly been personal in nature (Obadiah Stane, Justin Hammer, Ivan Vanko). Thor has journeyed from an arrogant soldier to a cast out son to a humbled champion, becoming unarguably worthy of his hammer Mjölnir. Captain America/Steve Rogers is, of all the Marvel heroes, the one with the subtlest arcs because Cap is such a pure hero that he affects the world without letting the world affect him. His sacrifice at the end of Captain America led to a 70-year slumber and meant he lost his place in the world and his girl as well.

Joss Whedon’s greater accomplishment with The Avengers, though, may have been taking the characters who didn’t have their own franchises and fleshing them out. Black Widow had what amounted to a glorified cameo in Iron Man 2, suggesting she was either a mysterious sex kitten or a deadly martial artist. In Thor, Hawkeye had a mere walk-on role and had even less to do than Black Widow. As for the Hulk, both his previous incarnations — Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s Hulk (2005) and Edward Norton in Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk (2008) — were defined by what Film Crit Hulk defines as “solipsistic detachment”, mistaking the “self-sacrifice” of the character for “relentless dourism”, which meant both iterations were insufferably “mopey”.

In The Avengers, Steve Rogers discovers a way to stay relevant in a world he doesn’t recognize (“Aren’t the star and stripes old-fashioned?”) as the captain of this unconventional team. Thor laments how he “courted war” in his youth, he’s much altered from Thor’s and becomes instrumental due to his relationship to Loki, his willingness to fight for Earth contrastig with the latter’s hubris. Tony Stark learns, via Steve Rogers’ chastisement, to “lay himself on the wire” instead of cutting the wire and going the easy (for him) way.

In The Avengers, Mark Ruffalo and Joss Whedon’s take on Bruce Banner/Hulk is the most successful yet. He is “gentle and dignified”, even if “impossibly weary and haggard”. To my chagrin, I realized the line that most encapsulated Banner’s arc in The Avengers was cut (“Are you a big guy that gets all little, or a little guy that sometimes blows up large?”), but the movie still managed to convey how Banner stops fearing the mindless rampage and uses the Hulk as a tool for purposeful fury — the “other guy” can actually help.

Clint Barton gets the short hand of the stick, and besides being “unmade” by Loki and wanting to put an arrow through his eye socket, Hawkeye has very little to do until Age of Ultron — and even then, it’s less an arc and more an apology from Joss Whedon to Jeremy Renner. Black Widow, however, starts a journey that continues in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and in Age of Ultron. She continues to use her skill set as a spy and precise combatant, but the righteousness of the side on which she is fighting on becomes gradually more important. By the time we reach Age of Ultron, she does the fighting not because she has “red on her ledger” but because fighting in the Avengers, protecting humanity, is the larger-than-life cause she wants to pursue.

The Avengers was a complicated movie, but even so it was a lot simpler than Avengers: Age of Ultron. By the time we reached that movie, not only did Joss Whedon have to respond to his own Avengers, but also to the following franchise installments (Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier). And beyond that he had to deal with the bigger characters arcs that have been underway since year one at Marvel Studios, along with handling storylines for Twins, Ultron, introducing Vision, allowing time to the dream sequences to matter 1. Amidst all this, it’s not surprising that someone’s story had to be shortchanged; Thor’s character is as sidelined in Ultron as Hawkeye was in the first film. All the Thunder God gets to do is further the Infinity Gems/War overarching (and undercooked) plotline, which suffered from severe and crippling cuts in the edit room that affect the movie as a whole.

In a very Joss Whedon move, in Age of Ultron, the writer/director continues his self-appointed task of paying more attention to the characters that don’t have franchises. Hawkeye gets the secret family that represents what the Avengers are fighting for, and Black Widow 2 and the Hulk get a choice: either run away from their responsibility to save the world (and towards personal happiness) or stay devoted to the cause. The Hulk is changed by Wanda’s interference and reverts to not trusting himself around people, only this time it’s The Other Guy that makes the decision.

Whether at the behest of the studio (although, in interviews, Joss Whedon says it came from him] or not, the inclusion of Wakanda and Klaue, as well as Steve Rogers’ and Iron Man’s conflicting ideologies seem like a set up to future Marvel films (the upcoming Black Panther and Captain America: Civil War), but they’re also symptoms, or rather, the results of two different things. Wakanda and Klaue, just like Vision, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch come from a very nerdy desire to play within the larger playground that is the Marvel Universe. That’s the reason I see for wanting to include Spider-Man and Captain Marvel at the very end 3.

Steve and Tony’s relationship is simply a continuation of both their interactions in The Avengers and their respective arcs within their franchises. Their differences are highlighted by the ways each of them responds to the fever dreams provoked by Wanda, as Tony unwittingly builds another war machine, and Steve accepts that while he will always be mournful of the time he didn’t spend with Peggy, he wouldn’t have done things any differently. They each have conflicting ways of viewing heroism, experiencing trauma and surrendering to sacrifice. Jacob Hall argued that Age of Ultron suffers from being an “overindulgent experience that’s far too mired in continuity and too desperate to set up the next 10 movies in Marvel’s ambitious “Phase 3” schedule”, but it is unmistakenly a Joss Whedon movie, above all else.

Where these are unarguably Joss Whedon movies is in the movies’ themes, witty banter and careful planning of each character. Whedon has won a reputation for telling “tales of personal responsibility” that often revolve around a normal person being appointed an unbearable responsibility given extraordinary circumstances. Both the Avengers movies focus on a team that features both gods and normal people — the normal alongside the exceptional — and argue that what matters are their actions: are they heroes despite their different characteristics, are they bound by a larger calling?

Whedon is also known for his penchant for deaths that matter because he understands the value of human life. The deaths of Phil Coulson (even if reversed) and Quicksilver matter to us as viewers. I’ve seen criticism concerning how Whedon’s decision to have the Avengers save every single person in Age of Ultron, but it certainly underlines the importance of human life. Even if we don’t know the Sokovia victims, they’re still not disposable because they might be someone’s Phil Coulson.

At this point, Marvel movies, or at least the Avengers movies, might function a lot better as part of a continuity than as standalone pieces of entertainment. The movies seem destined to be increasingly steeped in their own mythology.There is a chance, a very palpable one, that Marvel Studios’ movies will no longer be able to be viewed as simply standalone texts. Joss Whedon did a remarkable job, juggling the different plotlines, character arcs and allotting time for each character to have their own moment on screen. I’m curious to see if the Russo brothers, David Ayer or even Zach Snyder, are able to do as nuanced a job as Joss Whedon did.

Ana Cabral Martins (@rrruiva) is Portuguese and is currently finishing her PhD on contemporary Hollywood. She couldn’t think of anything witty to write here.
___________
1. Tony Stark’s PTSD, the grand theme of all Iron Man movies as Devin Faraci has so aptly referenced (See his piece “Earth’s Mightiest Monsters: The Character Arcs Of Avengers: Age of Ultron”), Steve Rogers heartbreak over Peggy.

2. The perceived un-feminism of Black Widow’s infertility is, in my eyes, absurd. She doesn’t say she is a monster because she can’t have children but because she was bred as a killing machine, devoid of choice. Why can’t a well-rounded female character — who is defined by her badass-ness — have feelings or opinions or even reference an inability to have children? Why would that hinder her heroism?

3. At this point, Whedon has been decried from both having played with too many characters and not having been given the free reign to play with many more at the end. His account of the Marvel/Sony deal make it sound like the character had been on the table when it hadn’t and I still don’t think introducing Captain Marvel out of the blue would have been the best way.

Avengers, Assemble

Posted on by

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
_________
 

tumblr_mdjqa6FRIy1rxfnupo2_500

 
Introduction

“They’re trying to turn movies into comic books,” I lamented in the period of years, months and weeks leading up to the 2012 blockbuster The Avengers. My concern had been that, like superhero comic books, the Marvel Studios film franchise was beginning to focus on large events at the expense of the individual unit of storytelling.

In this day and age, and for many years prior, it has become less likely that an individual comic book would provide the reader with a complete narrative or even a fulfilling storytelling module. Entire comic books, even entire series would come and go and amount to essentially a chapter or even a paragraph in the big-picture narrative that had become priority for the publishers. More than selling comic books, Marvel (and DC) had begun pitching their full line of books to the audience as the end product. More than stories, Marvel had begun selling a lifestyle, a culture. When the films began under the Marvel Studios company, the references between the films felt cute and charming at first. And then when the Avengers project started to congeal into a reality, it stopped feeling cute and began feeling like bricklaying.

It turns out that bricklayers build sound structures, large buildings to exist inside of. I went to see 2012’s The Avengers film with three of my friends, comics people but not superhero fans. All four of us were impressed. Thrilled, tickled, impressed and thoroughly entertained. In addition, I was personally taken by surprise that Marvel’s scheme had truly worked out and paid off with a sound and entertaining film.

How did such a bizarre scheme work?

This is a film that is a sequel to several different films, which is something that to my knowledge hadn’t been attempted before. There have been previous near-attempts such as Kevin Smith’s linked New Jersey films and Quentin Tarantino’s interconnected film world. But those merely hinted at what Marvel’s The Avengers would eventually attempt and accomplish.

Character

This is a film with no single, fixed protagonist. Ensemble cast storytelling is not a common choice in popular narrative, most writers opting to lift one character above the others. While it can be argued that Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark functions as the protagonist of The Avengers, this character does not hold the primacy of position that he holds in the Iron Man films. While Tony Stark gets the most intimacy from the filmmaker Joss Whedon, his is not a point of view that the audience is necessarily tied to.

Each major character has his or her own narrative arc that from their perspective as characters, makes the narrative their own story. As an ensemble, The Avengers becomes the story of autonomous entities crossing paths and becoming a group. As such, the interplay between the characters feels human, lived-in and real. The reason it feels real is that just like people in real life, these characters are presented to the audience as idnividuals who have concrete histories, defined desires and motives. The characters do not appear in this narrative as storytelling props to support the story of one individual; rather they all seem important in themselves.

Scene Construction

The other achievement that Joss Whedon pulls off with 2012’s The Avengers is an unusual consistency in scene construction and weaving scenes and themes together. Admittedly, I don’t see enough movies to call myself a film expert but I know a thing or two about storytelling.

When watching (and rewatching) The Avengers, I felt that the film was built on an unusually firm structural foundation. The plot itself is not what I am referring to, the full plot of the film is fairly simple. It is the individual scenes that comprise the story which stand out in my mind. Each scene of The Avengers feels not only driven toward the plot and the underlying themes of the film but also feels like a small, neatly-constructed story in and of itself.

Every individual scene–from the establishment of conflict to the gathering of characters to the fight scenes–is built from the same conceptual engine. That engine is comedy. The scenes open with a setting and a premise, the characters go about their way to navigate their goals, personalities and compounding textual circumstances drive the scene toward its plot-relevant resolution and the scenes often punctuate with a joke.

As much as the action of this film is character-driven (essential since characters are the selling point of the film), it is the jokes that sell the film as a story and as a concept. Jokes, ironic reversals, physical comedy and sight-gags, miscellaneous scripting and directorial slights of hand. These are the rungs by which the narrative climbs up. Even the tip-tail end of the film is a punchline which loops back to a one-off reference to create a call-back.

The Avengers resonated with audiences because it took relatively simple themes, stacked them and juxtaposed them, looped them and returned to them at odd intervals, allowing the themes to move on different tracks, at different paces, which creates multiple effects: allowing the large cast to take turns reaching growth points in their individual character arcs as well as airing out a potentially dense story.

I mentioned above that even the fight scenes are constructed as character-driven, character-building, plot-relevant scenes rather than showy departures from the narrative. Thor’s stubbornness leading him to square off against Iron Man, Hulk’s rage which can only be matched by Thor’s clear-mindedness, Hulk sucker-punching Thor which called back the prior animosity. Everything from the punchlines to the literal punches operates in a dual function as comedy writing and character writing. The Avengers is an action film that doesn’t use wild or blurry action just for the sake of violence. Everything in the film is constructed to tell the story of how a small group of characters became friends.

Whedon’s Binary

Posted on by

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
_________
In the Joss Whedon Avengers universe, to exist somewhere outside of the gender binary is suspect; to be genderless is monstrous.

Whedon adores the “superheroes can be dangerous” theme. In both Avengers films, the Avengers’ potential danger to society is presented repeatedly. Superpowers, whether innate, learned, or built, are dangerous, and superpowers without proper control are likened to nuclear weapons in the hands of madmen. The control of superpowers is associated with the command and control of gender expression. While the 2012 Avengers film features only one female Avenger, Black Widow, the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron introduces additional team members, revealing a sharp gender distinction.

Summarized by Agent Maria Hill – he’s fast and she’s weird – twin siblings Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are the representative binary in the Whedon Avengers universe. Quicksilver’s superpower is speed: simple, mono-dimensional, active. There is no further revelation or exploration of his powers throughout the course of the film. Scarlet Witch’s power is weird: manipulative, subversive, unpredictable. Wielding sparks of scarlet lightening from her fingertips, she exhibits the ability to control both objects and minds. Her exact powers are never defined, but we learn that she can control the emotions of others and that her own strong emotions activate her most destructive powers. The twins are a traditional gender dichotomy; he is bodily action and she emotional manipulation. Both expressions are conceived of as equally powerful – the difference lies in the approach. Theirs is the traditional superhero’s fate: he meets a hero’s death and she rounds out a heroic team. Channeled in traditionally masculine or feminine ways, superpowers are safe and effective.
 

liu_avengers1

 
In the Whedon Avengers Universe, both exaggerated and mutilated gender is dangerous, whether it’s the inflated maleness of the Hulk or the broken femaleness of Black Widow. Bruce Banner’s angry transformations to the muscular and furious Hulk are an easy metaphor for the worst of the testosterone-fueled violence of masculinity. Banner, who fears and reviles “the other guy,” rejects this aspect of himself as a monster. His über-gender has rendered him incapable of raising a traditional family with the would-be mother of his children, Black Widow, alter ego Natasha Romanov. Romanov herself is played up as overly flirtatious, not to be trusted, and duplicitous. Romanov assures Banner, however, that her indoctrination as an assassin in the Red Room included a traumatic forced sterilization. After the confession of his inability to provide her the stable family life that she (supposedly) desires, she confesses her dark secret of infertility and wonders “who’s the monstrous one now?”

If femininity is emotional power – the power to exploit our attachments to one another, as Scarlet Witch does – then to harm that power hampers the overall humanity of the female person. A woman without the ability to form that most intimate of biological relationships must be lacking her power. A man whose gender is hyper-expressive is (quite literally in the case of Hulk) not fully human either. He lacks the ability to control his power.

Both Hulk and Black Widow are the only superheroes who, once having joined the Avengers, express doubt over their continued ability to play the part of “good guy”. Banner is prone to brooding and insisting that he is simply too dangerous for human interaction or vehicular containment. Romanov expresses her “dream” to actually be an Avenger, even though she is clearly an established member of the group and hardly the only Avenger lacking superhuman powers. With their gender expressions out of whack, Hulk and Black Widow at best can be marginalized members of the team, capable of doing good, but perhaps not to be fully trusted.
 

liu_avengers2

 
If hyper- or mutilated-gender is dangerous, a lack of gender expression is nothing short of monstrous. The most terrifying monster is, of course, that which exhibits an apparently human mind but is somehow less than human. Ultron, who is human intelligence and emotion trapped inside a crumbling, mechanical body, is humanity without physical expression. It has no gendered body – and therefore no power – with which to control the worst aspects of humanity. In a confrontation scene in which Ulysses Klaue dismisses Scarlet Witch and asks to speak instead to the man in charge, Ultron aborts the interrogation and declares: “there is no man in charge.”

The irony is that Ultron is logically the “man” in charge. The character is voiced by male actor James Spader, and we as an audience have a tendency to presume that anthropomorphized non-humans (dogs, toasters, robots, what-have-you) have a default gender of male. Thus, given the presumption of Ultron’s “maleness”, such a statement might normally be interpreted to suggest Ultron’s lack of humanity – i.e., Ultron is a machine, not a human, and therefore there is no (hu)man in charge. However, the juxtaposition of the specificity of the word “man” with Scarlet Witch’s abrupt and sexist dismissal allows for a second interpretation: Ultron denies not only humanity, but with it gender altogether. There is no “man in charge” because a robot is in charge, and, well, machines have no gender.
 

liu_avengers3

 
Vision is the logical counterpoint to Ultron. With a mind similarly born of Tony Stark’s foray into artificial intelligence, but with a human body grown by medical genius Dr. Helen Cho, Vision is Ultron’s foil. Vision is, to be sure, ambiguous, and the ambiguity remains at the end of the film. The character, however, is clearly intended to be Good, and his Goodness is grounded in his full association with humanity, which includes an apparently male gender (indeed, a hetero-normative male gender, as the beginnings of his relationship with Scarlet Witch implies).

In the Whedon Avengers universe, a tightly defined gender binary informs the superhero’s ability to be human, and therefore to be good. Shambolic gender expression limits the superhero’s humanity, resulting in an ambiguous, potentially dangerous figure. To remove gender expression from the equation altogether stumbles upon an uncanny valley in which the human-esque but grotesque terrify and repulse.

—-

Em Liu is a fiction enthusiast particularly interested in depictions of women and minorities onscreen. She blogs over at FictionDiversity.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @OLiu1230

Punching Your Problems Away

Posted on by

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
_________

cedric1

 
Spoiler, but not a big one: Age Of Ultron’s last big action sequence ends with our heroes shooting down drones. Iron Man 3 and Captain America 2 both having ended the same way was kind of a giveaway. Marvel’s last few movies have had an surprising topicality, and this last one is no exception. But Winter Soldier got all the accolades for coming out against the surveillance state while thinkpieces on Ultron were comparatively few.

From both his recent declarations since leaving Marvel and from cursory knowledge of Hollywood, you know that doing Avengers 2 came with a few constraints. One of them was that it had to be bigger than the first one. So instead of New York, this time the whole world is the stage. This, and the growing concern over destruction porn following movies like the first Avengers and the Superman reboot, means that Avengers 2 is surprisingly filled with things like characters concerned with property damage and getting civilian victims out of the way. A subplot mandated by the future Black panther movie also gives us a passage about exploiting foreign countries’ natural resources.

We end up with would be world saviors building killer drones, taking metal from Africa to build super weapons in Asia, plus some resentful American bombings victims in Eastern Europe. Topical! Avengers 2 is a movie about America and its relationship to the world. (note the careful avoidance of the Middle East: Whedon probably knew no big budget movie from Hollywood could treat the region in a tone other than jingoistic). It all gets muddled in the necessities of having ten previous films to follow and just as many sequels to set up, but it’s probably the most explicitly relevant blockbusters of the year, and one of the few overt political statements in Whedon’s oeuvre.

Joss Whedon studied at Wesleyan under Richard Slotkin, who wrote about the myth of the American frontier in books like Regeneration through Violence. In his writing, Whedon hascertainly portrayed more than his share of Americans self actualizing through high-kicks, lasergun shots and mythical hammer blows. As a liberal he seems to struggle with this violence, though. So in Avengers 1 you get super heroes stopping SHIELD from atom bombing New York, and the organisation is purely and simply dismantled in Winter Soldier (Whedon had a nebulous role as supervising writer on all Marvel movies at the time, so I choose to consider “larger events” in these movies as at least partly his doing).

But how do you escape the violent trapping of the American myth? You can’t, Whedon seems to say. Certainly not in big blockbuster about a bunch of super strong guys. So the moral from Avengers 2 may then be “admit you failed and try again”. It’s what Tony Stark does when he builds Vision to save the world after failing to do so with Ultron, and it’s what SHIELD does when it comes back as a big warzone savior in Age Of Ultron. In the end, SHIELD has new soldiers and new Avengers to hit the bad guys with but it’s going to be different this time because they really really mean it.

Firefly is Whedon’s other big political statement. It tells the story of a bunch of rogue space cowboys, in a corner of space far from our own, where humans have had to settle after the destruction of Earth. The protagonists are on the run from the Alliance, a central interplanetary government that emerged from a civil war our heroes were on the losing side of. One of the things Whedon stressed in interviews at the time of the series was that the Alliance was essentially benign (they do end up looking bad in the movie, how much of it was a change of mind on Whedon’s part I don’t know). Our heroes were then rebelling against… what? Organised government? Bureaucracy? The loss of a certain sense of adventure?

The later one seems more likely. Joss Whedon likes comfortable modern life, but he also loves romantic stories of demons and super heroes, living on the frontier, rejuvenating through violence. His Angel is a metaphor for fighting addiction, but on a surface level it’s the story of a knight who cannot stop fighting, again and again, and I’m not convinced the metaphorical level is more important to Whedon than cool swordfights are.

Buffy, for all its reputation as a feminist show, was only so because its protagonist was female. She rarely, if ever, is confronted with outright misogyny. Occasionally she fights a phallic giant snake, but they just as often she battles standing metaphors for various non-gendered teenage fears. She fought a stupid military built demon cyborg that stood for god knows what. She also fought evil itself. Buffy was not so much about fighting patriarchy as she was about fighting for fighting’s sake.

Whedon’s adoption of combat as a value in itself is symptomatic of a post ideological left. You can identify big, systematic problems like America’s capitalistic and military dominance of the world, or patriarchy, or bureaucracy, but you don’t have any big, systematic answer for them like Marxism once provided. All that remains is the will to fight, and the hope of punching the bad guys away (metaphorically). So you tell yourself stories of people who keep punching, no matter what.

The Nerd That Shouted Look At Me At Everyone

Posted on by

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
 
We can at least be sure that Joss Whedon is clever. His writing tends to be exceedingly precious and knowingly proud of itself, which is both the source of its largest appeal to people who enjoy that sort of thing and its most irritating aspect to people like me who are sick of simple metahumor that only calls attention to the writer’s awareness of genre conventions rather than actually saying anything about them. The dialogue in the Avengers films is made up almost entirely of this; one of the lines consistently featured in trailers for the first film (and in two different “Funniest Lines” youtube videos I watched) is this exchange:

Captain America: You’re just a man in a suit, take that away, what are you?
Iron Man: Genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist.

This shares a characteristic with the part at the beginning of Age of Ultron in which Baron Von Strucker asks a nameless lackey if they can hold their fortress against the Avengers, and the lackey replies, terrified: “They’re the Avengers!” Whedon’s narratives are constantly winking at themselves like this. The characters are aware of their presence in a film, but in a depressingly nihilistic fashion in which they seem to acknowledge that their only choice is to participate in the action; they must do this, even if, as in the second case, they have the faculty to be aware of their certain death. Both exchanges here read like one person talking to themselves; Whedon’s defining dialogic principle seems to be the experience of obsessing over the coolest thing to say at that party when that douchebag called me a homo in high school. It’s a hallmark of being an adolescent nerd, using one’s creative abilities to constantly imagine a world in which people finally realize you are the coolest (see also: all young adult fantasy, brilliantly parodied by D.C. Pierson in his novel Crap Kingdom). In scripts that Whedon has written but not directed however, he still manages to insinuate this tendency through subtext, on more than one occasion producing films which are bad-faith jokes on the audience.
 

resurcrew

Consider Alien: Resurrection, Whedon’s third film writing credit. This movie is a sort of practice run at things that would later appear in Firefly (wise-cracking team of space pirates), Cabin in the Woods (insipid attempt at commentary on horror genre), and Avengers (the aforementioned prissy dialogue style, at one point the pirate-team’s scoundrel-alcoholic says “I am not the man with whom to fuck.”) Whedon himself is known to dislike this film, having said of it that:

They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script…but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.

I recognize that up to this point I’ve taken a rather uncharitable tone toward Mr. Whedon, but I have a great deal of sympathy for him here. A:R is indeed abominably directed, so much so in fact that I gained a respect for Whedon’s ability to competently direct his own scripts in a fashion conducive to the humor in his writing. Jean-Pierre Jeunet murders every joke in the film by steadfastly avoiding the camera movement and quick editing that would help them to land, and by apparently drugging the entire cast with Quaaludes before shooting.
 

 
But the blame is not squarely on Jeunet and the narcotized cast. Resurrection’s plot turns on scientists at the Weyland-Yutani Corp. trying to clone Ripley and thus the xenomorph growing inside her in Alien3. They are unsuccessful after several attempts until they finally produce Ripley 8, an intact (and apparently super-strong) version of her from whom they extract the xenomorph embryo and use it to grow more of them. Ripley 8 looks just like Ripley, but acts nothing like her. The major subtext here is that films have been unsuccessfully trying to clone Ripley since 1979, and even this one will do it incorrectly. In doing this, Whedon managed to write a film that is a joke about how stupid an idea the film itself is. It is an impressive feat that, back in 1997, Joss Whedon managed to write a story that embodied what we would come to call “hipster irony” ten-to-fifteen years later, but being ironically distanced from doing something is still doing it. It’s maybe not as egregious as the embarrassingly prevalent superhero comic “gag” of female characters saying something out loud about how their costumes resemble lingerie and then not doing anything about it, but Resurrection is not comedy nor does it even approach parody.

But Cabin in the Woods tries this out. This film (co-written and directed by Drew Goddard) is a clear attempt at the sort of “generational horror-comedy” that Scream was for the 90s and Shaun of the Dead was for the early 2000s. The critical difference between those films and Cabin is that the former two are loving parodies of a genre executed by people who love and understand them, the latter is a total misreading of the horror genre that, in trying to subvert clichés, makes them worse. Whedon said about the film and its relationship to the genre that

I love being scared. I love that mixture of thrill, of horror, that objectification/identification thing of wanting definitely for the people to be all right but at the same time hoping they’ll go somewhere dark and face something awful. The things that I don’t like are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances

which is particularly bizarre because the film is made up almost entirely of the qualities of which he expresses disapproval. Running through most of the problems with the film would be redundant because Sean Witzke did it perfectly here, but its bad-faith, Hobbesian stupidity demands further explication.

Cabin in the Woods follows a standard setup for slasher films, 5 teenagers go on a weekend trip to a secluded cabin, but its twist is that the cabin is a staging ground for a corporation (headed by Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins) that directs the slaughter of teenagers as part of a “blood ritual” that appeases “the Old Gods” and keeps the end of the world from happening. The idea that horror is an innate expression of the darkness in the human subconscious has been around forever, but to my mind is most barely stated in Stephen King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” which is now a classic of introductory cultural studies classes: “[horror movies] lift a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throw a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.” Just substitute “alligators” for “gods.”

The way Cabin goes about investigating this tendency is by continually chastising the audience for watching the thing that is being shown to them repeatedly by the movie; it is the “stop hitting yourself” of films. At one point, Whitford’s character watches a monitor hoping that the character referred to repeatedly as “the whore” will get naked. Another character asks “Does it really matter if we see her…” and Whitford responds “we’re not the only ones watching here,” and Richard Jenkins finishes “Gotta keep the customer satisfied.” When she actually does remove her clothes, you, the viewer, are now Age Of Ultron’s terrified lackey, aware of your fate but unable to do anything about it; guess what, now you’re a voyeur. The Hobbesian “people like horror movies because it placates their innate evil” critique does not work when you are forced to participate in that event. The last 45 minutes of Cabin kills every single character in the movie, generally in a manner as gorily exhibitionist as possible, but, the film says, it’s all your fault because you want to see this, you horror fan, you. Carol Clover wrote in Men Women and Chainsaws, “I […] do not believe that a sadistic voyeurism is the first cause of horror. Nor do I believe that real-life women and feminist politics have been entirely well served by the astonishingly insistent claim that horror’s satisfactions begin and end in sadism (19).” While this sounds like it is in agreement with the above quote from Whedon, he and Goddard wrote a movie that accomplishes the opposite, continually insisting that the problem with horror movies is their sadism while indulging only in that very same sadism with none of the masochistic identification Clover identified as being provided by the slasher structure.

In fact, the film deliberately avoids the structure to its own detriment. Cabin starts off by ostentatiously presenting a few trope subversions: the football player is also smart (communicated by his recommending a book to another character), the mousy girl who will clearly be the film’s Final Girl is not sexually pure. There is also an immediate example of every character being one person when the football player (Chris Hemsworth) and his girlfriend (Anna Hutchison) act out the famous “I learned it from watching you!” anti-drug PSA with the ease of a veteran sketch comedy team. Despite being, to all appearances, run-of-the-mill college students in the 2010s, all of these characters are secretly “Joss Whedon.” This quality is actually less obnoxious in the movie’s most important character, Marty, the stoner of the group. While he is constantly quipping, he at least appears to be the sort of person who would do such a thing. Marty is clearly supposed to be the audience identification character in the film, which has unfortunate consequences for the movie’s attempt at genre critique.
 

marty

 
The character is constantly “ranting” about how the cabin is clearly not what it seems; by virtue of being a stoner stereotype we assume he is more pop-culturally savvy or genre aware than the rest of the characters, but the film is inconsistent on this point. Marty is in one scene reading a Little Nemo in Slumberland comic, marking him as a giant nerd, but he also has apparently never seen Hellraiser, which Cabin has multiple direct references to. It features both a puzzle box and an ersatz Pinhead that Marty directly encounters. This is infuriating because neither of these things are really generic enough to be chalked up to archetypal monsters the way that zombies or werewolves can be, they only come from one thing, and the character who continuously points out all of the horror tropes he walks through seems to have no idea what that thing is. Finally, Marty, along with aforementioned mousy girl Dana, survives until the end of the film, where every character (and everyone in the world) dies.

Through the apocalyptic ending, Whedon and Goddard neuter the one integrally feminist quality of the slasher film, the Final Girl. Clover wrote of this type, “She is intelligent, watchful, levelheaded; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the pattern and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation.” All of these things happen in Cabin, but to Marty, not Dana, and neither of them learns to defeat the evil force, the necessary narrative event that make the Final Girl compelling.

The one thing that allows for a complex identificational relationship between viewers and horror films across lines of gender expression is instead replaced with two helpless people that we are apparently supposed to pity but instead, despite the film’s admonishments, really want to see killed because we know the movie will be over when they die. When the last shot of the film reveals that the Old God kept in check by the ritual is clearly a giant human being, Whedon and Goddard instead succeed in removing the single aspect of this film which may have characterized it as thoughtful, rather than being a joyless middle-finger to its audience. I have nothing against feature-length middle-fingers (Joseph Kahn’s Detention does what Cabin is trying to do while being much funnier and stylistically fascinating), but the critical part of doing such a thing is not giving the audience what they want, rather than unabashedly giving them that thing while saying they’re bad for enjoying it.

This is why it’s impossible for me to enjoy Whedon’s work, it isn’t a loving nod or a well-deserved fuck you the way most metafiction is, it’s all just about how knowledgeable the writer is about whatever genre he’s operating in.
_____
Tim Jones is an English Ph.D student at Louisiana State University with a Master’s degree in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University. He is @cutebuttsaga on twitter.