Last week I wrote a short post about Static Shock in which I argued that the book was mediocre genre product, but that at least it was mediocre genre product that made a gesture at diversity. Better non-racist mediocrity than racist mediocrity, I argued.
I still think that’s more or less the case…but is Static really not racist? It does have a black hero, definitely — but then, there are the black villains.
In particular, there’s Holocaust, the evil mastermind behind the first arc. Holocaust is a gangster, but he’s not just a gangster. He’s a gangster with a racial grievance. He tells Static that the hero is insufficiently appreciated. He adds that those on top in the world got there by “luck” — and not just luck, but privilege. “It’s connections. Who you know. Who your daddy knows. It’s birthright.”
But Holocaust, again, is the bad guy. His critique is part of his evilnness. The equality he wants is the opportunity to get cut in on the business of the Mafia; his vision of social justice is equality in the criminal underworld. He’s essentially a right-wing caricature of civil rights advocates; Al Sharpton as brutish, deceitful thug. When Holocaust starts to kill people, Static sees him for what he is, and abandons his evil advisor to return to his superheroic independent battle for law and order. The possibility that law and order might itself be part of a structural inequity is carefully kicked to the curb, revealed to be the seductive philosophy of an untrustworthy supervillain.
You couldn’t ask for a much clearer illustration of J. Lamb’s argument that the superhero genre is at its core anti-black, and that it therefore co-opts efforts at token diversity. The genre default is for law and order. Law and order, in the world outside superhero comics, is inextricable from America’s prison industrial complex and the conflation of black resistance struggles with black criminality. Static, a black hero, is defined as a “hero” only when he aligns himself with the white supremacist vision that sees structural critique as a cynical ruse.
I think it is possible for superhero comics to push back against that vision of heroism to some degree. Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol does in some ways, for example. But Static is hampered by its indifferent quality; it’s not interested, willing, or able to rethink or challenge basic genre pleasures or narratives. Notwithstanding a patina of diversity, it seems like a superhero comic really does need to be better than mediocre if it’s going to provide a meaningful challenge to super-racism.
J. Lamb left this comment on my post about Static Shock and diversity in mediocre genre product; I thought I’d highlight it here.
 
“C’mon Noah, just drop the empty rhetoric and empty assertions about “quality” and simply concede my initial point: any conceivable writer writing a black superhero comic character is going to be told by a concerned person that they are doing it wrong.” – Pallas
I disagree with this assertion.
People are, as always, encouraged to write comics and other pop culture material that can be judged on its own merits. The difficulty I sketch above involves my assertion that writing a non-White superhero protagonist necessitates some interaction with/ consideration of the notion that the superhero concept itself is racialized. We’re talking about a genre developed when Jim Crow segregation provided the unchallenged public policy state and local American governments applied to Black citizens. We’re talking about a genre developed when successful navigation of American race politics for Black people likely meant that they or someone they know would endure domestic terrorism imposed by fellow citizens and unchallenged in the courts. Why must we believe that a literary genre developed during this time has not racial component, when practically all other American popular culture of the era does?
For me, it’s completely immaterial that the Milestone creators respected the superhero concept enough to offer Black superheroes; McDuffie et al. and their contributions should not be defied by present day observers. Icon’s an alien posing as Black Republican who adopts Superman’s public interaction (demigod savior/ crimefighter) to assist lower income Black Americans whose choices he often disdains. Where the books reflect on respectability politics and reduced economic opportunities for the Black underclass, the material works (at least in the issues I’ve read.)
But when Icon cannot envision better conflict resolution solutions outside of punching the living daylights out of metahumans he doesn’t like — when Icon reverts to the moral position of a stereotypical superhero — the material’s innovation dies, and you’re left with run-of-the-mill 90’s superhero fights. That’s less interesting, and done better elsewhere.
It’s not about who characters like Rocket, Icon, and Static represent, or who the intended audience for their comics may have been (Moore wrote Watchmen for adolescent boys, too.) The question for any comic creator interested in developing a character of color should be “How does this character define their connection with this particular identity, and why should it matter to me?”
A serious attempt at answering this would prevent characters who are tangentially (insert minority status here) from standing in for meaningful diversity in panel, and would force comic narratives to stop ignoring meaningful diversity in favor of an inker’s burnt sienna hues alone. I’ve yet to find a superhero comic that accomplishes this feat effectively; just because the Milestone folk tried does not mean they succeeded.
So of course creators and their work will be evaluated, sometimes harshly. I recognize that for many, my position is heresy. But since Milestone, we’ve seen material like Captain America: Truth and Ms. Marvel and others. Gene Yang’s writing Superman soon, and David Walker will take on Cyborg. Plenty of comic creators will attempt to prove the superhero concept compatible with meaningful identity politics, and I wish them well. But too often the desire to see oneself in panel and on screen, the hope that at some point a person can stride into a comic book shop or turn on the CW and find a person of color in the gaudy lycra and skintight spandex of the superhero with neon strobes flashing from their fingertips overrides all other considerations among progressive comic fans. I oppose this.
Pallas, it’s completely fair to pan any comic for not being “super complex society changing treatise” serious about race. I should not have to assume that the characters of color I read about are only paint job Black. If so, then the audience for superhero diversity has all the ethical standing as the audience for an Al Jolson blackface revue, and I’m not paying $3.99 US for burnt cork comics.
According New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, superheroes peaked with The Dark Knight in 2008. Since then, “the genre, though it is still in a period of commercial ascendancy, has also entered a phase of imaginative decadence.” Scott said that back in 2012, before the release of Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man 3, The Wolverine, Man of Steel, Kick-Ass 2, Dark Knight Rises, and Thor: The Dark World —much less the still future releases of X-Men: Days of Future Past, Amazing Spider-Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Fantastic Four, and Batman vs. Superman.
Which is to say, he’s got a real point. All those masks and capes and inevitable act three slugfests—could we maybe call a moratorium while the screenwriters guild brainstorms new action tropes? I’m probably too optimistic that Edgar Wright’s 2015 Ant-Man will provide a much needed counterpunch to all the BAM! and POW!—the same way his 2004 Shaun of the Dead enlivened the weary corpse of the zombie movie (another genre still in decadent ascendance).
But instead of looking forward, maybe we should be looking backwards. If, like me, you crave a beer chaser for all those syrupy shots of Hollywood superheroism, tell your online bartender to stream some mid-twentieth century French avant-garde instead.
Georges Franju’s 1963 Judex has to be the least superheroic superhero movie ever made. Well into its third act, the title character (think Batman with a hat instead of pointy ears) bursts through a window to assail his enemies—only to allow one to step around him, pluck a conveniently placed brick from the floor, and sock him unconscious from behind. It’s not even a fight sequence. Everyone but the brick basher moves in a languid shuffle. The scene is one of many reasons critics label the film “dream-like,” “surreal,”“anti-logical,” “drowsy”—terms opposed to the adrenaline-thumping norms of the genre.
The original 1916 Judex, a silent serial by fellow French director Louis Feuillade, largely invented movie superheroes. The black cloaked “Judge” swears to avenge his dead father, leading to dozens of similarly cloaked avengers swooping in and out of the 20s and 30s. Judex had barely exited American theaters before film star Douglass Fairbanks was skimming issues of All-Story for his own pulp hero to adapt. A year later, the Judex-inspired Zorro was an international icon.
But Georges Franju was no Judex fan. He preferred Feuillade’s Fantomas, one of the most influential serials in screen and pulp history, and the reason Feuillade dreamed up his crime-fighter in the first place. Fantomas was a supervillain, as was Irma Vep in Feuillade’s equally popular Les Vampires, and French critics had grown weary of glorified crime. Fifty years later, Franju was still glorifying it, making one of France’s first horror films, Eyes Without a Face.
Feuillade’s grandson, Jacques Champreux, was a Franju fan—though he really should have checked the director’s other references before asking him to shoot a remake of the superhero ur-film. When the French government commissioned a documentary celebrating industrial modernization, Franju had focused on the filth spewing from French factories. When the slow-to-learn government commissioned a tribute to their War Museum, Franju used it as an opportunity to denounce militarism. Little wonder his Judex is a testament against the glorification of superheroism.
But Champreux bares some of the unintended credit too. Franju admitted to not having “the story writing gift,” but few of Feuillade’s gifts passed to Champreux either. Much of the remake’s surrealism is a result of inexplicable scripting. Champreux and fellow adapter Francis Lacassin boiled down the original five-hour serial to under a hundred minutes. While the streamlining is initially effective (opening with the corrupt banker reading Judex’s threatening letter is great), it soon creates much of that surreal illogic critics so praise:
Why is the detective so incompetent? (Because this is his first job after inheriting the detective agency.)
Why is the banker suddenly in love with his granddaughter’s governess? (Feuillade’s opening scene establishes her plot to seduce him and steal his money.)
Why set up the daughter’s engagement if her fiancé exits after one scene? (Because he originally returned as a villain in league with the governess.)
How does the detective’s never-before-mentioned girlfriend happen to find him just as she’s needed to aid Judex? (Feuillade introduced her well before, and the two were already walking together when Judex allows himself to be captured.)
How is Judex able to pose as the banker’s most trusted employee? (He took a job as a bank clerk years earlier and worked his way into the top position.)
Why is Judex even doing any of this? (His father committed suicide after the banker destroyed the family fortune and his mother made him vow to avenge his death.)
Some of Franju’s most pleasantly peculiar moments— the travelling circus that wanders past the bad guys’ hideout, the dog that appears from nowhere and sets his paw protectively on the fallen damsel’s body—are orphans from Feuillade’s plundered subplots. The remake is a highlight reel. Though, to be fair, not all of the surrealism is the result of the glitchy script.
By moving Judex’s death threat to midnight and shooting the engagement banquet as a masked ball, Franju offers the best Poe adaptation I’ve ever seen—even if all the bird costumes make it more of a Masque of the Avian Flu. And the Franju’s one fight scene isn’t derived from Feuillade at all. Originally the detective’s girlfriend attempts to save the governess who drowns while trying to escape, but Franju costumes the two women in opposite, if equally skintight attire—a proto-Catwoman vs. a white leotarded acrobat—before sending them to the roof to leg wrestle.
Instead of washing ashore in the epilogue, the governess falls to her death in a bed of flowers. Meanwhile, what’s Judex up to? Not only is the nominal hero not present for the vanquishing of the villainess, but by the end of the film he’s devolved into Douglass Fairbanks’ Don Diego, Zorro’s mild-mannered alter ego. While Franju was imitating the style of early cinema (yes, his version opens with a classic iris-out, a fun gimmick even though Feuillade avoided it in his own Judex), he also grafted Fairbanks’ goofy handkerchief magic into Judex’s less-than-superheroic repertoire. The tricks were cute in The Mark of Zorro, but once again inexplicable in the contemporary context.
And I mean that as praise. A Judex redux is exactly what the genre needs right now. I would love to watch Emma Stone toss the Lizard from a skyscraper while Spider-Man practices his web sculpting—or Natalie Portman shove a Dark Elf through a magic portal while Thor perfects a hammer juggling trick. Superhero films feature plenty of glitchy illogic, but it’s time for drowsy surrealism too. Why hasn’t Marvel or DC handed any directing reins to David Lynch yet? Or David Cronenberg? Terry Gilliam dodged The Watchmen back in the late 80s—but surely his version would have been more memorable than Zack Snyder’s. Isn’t there someone out there who can prove A. O. Scott wrong?
What do you want to be when you group up? My daughter, like lots of teens, has been fielding that question since she was two. She’s looking at colleges now, so the question has morphed into “What do you want to major in?” But she told me that her answer, her secret answer, the heart of hearts answer she’ll never write on any application form, hasn’t changed since she wore big girl pull-ups:
“Batman.”
That’s still the first word that pops into her head. “Astronaut” is the second. But Batman is better. “He doesn’t have X-ray vision or any other crazy powers,” she says, “but he still spends his life and money helping people.” Also the Batmobile is really cool. And his ears. My daughter has always thought the bat ears on his hood were cute. She used to chew on them. The dolls in our attic have her teeth marks.
Several graduate and undergraduate programs in comic book studies have popped up since she stopped hosting tea parties with action figures, but to the best of my knowledge, no school offers a major in Batman. Not even mine. We live a five-minute stroll from campus, so my daughter would rather blast off to an alien planet than stay in our Virginia smallville for college. Her brother is still in middle school, and still peruses the occasional comic book from my childhood trove. He’s gnawed on his fair share of attic superheroes, but I suspect he’ll be feeling the warmth of alien suns soon too.
Which means neither will get to take my Superheroes course. I’m teaching it for the fifth time this spring. It spawned back in 2008 when a group of honor students were scouring campus for a professor willing to design and teach a seminar on superheroes. They’d suffered a few rounds of blank stares and grinning rejections when they wandered into my wife’s office. She was chairing our English department at the time, and you’ll never guess whose office she sent them to next. I said yes. Of course I said yes. I’d always enjoyed comics as a kid and then with our own kids. Now I’d just augment that with a bit of research.
My wife doesn’t regret her choice, but neither of us predicted the black hole-sized obsession the topic would open in me. Conference panels, print symposiums, international journals, radio interviews, cybercasts, newspaper op-eds, lit mags, one-act festivals, my appetite for cape-and-mask forums keeps expanding. When my wife and another good friend spurred me to start a blog, neither had superheroes in mind then either. I could blame those meddling honors students, but that first class of sidekicks flew off to solo adventures years ago. I’m the one who keeps offering revised versions of the course every year while posting blog links on campus notices once a week.
The first day of ENG 255 usually begins with some polite but bemused variation on “Why superheroes, Professor?” Colleagues ask me the same, only with the preface “Don’t take this the wrong way but.” The short answer is easy. Superheroes, like most of our pop culture productions, reflect who we are. And since superheroes have been flying for decades, they document our evolution too. On the surface of their unitards, they’re just pleasantly absurd wish-fulfillments. But our nation’s history of obsessions broils just under those tights: sexuality, violence, prejudice, politics, our most nightmarish fears, our most utopian aspirations, it’s all swirling in there. But you have to get up close. You have to be willing to wrestle a bit. I think we should pull on Superman’s cape. I think we all need to sink our teeth into Batman’s head.
Spring registration at Washington & Lee University starts soon. I have yet to work visiting superhero poet Tim Seibles into the schedule yet, but for interested students and the occasional scholar who’s asked me for a copy, here’s the syllabus-in-progress:
ENGL 255: Superheroes
The course will explore the early development of the superhero character and narrative form, focusing on pulp literature texts published before the first appearance of Superman in 1938. The cultural context, including Nietzsche’s Ubermensch philosophy and the eugenics movement, will also be central. The second half of the course will be devoted to the evolution of the superhero in fiction, comic books, and film, from 1938 to the present. Students will read, analyze, and interpret literary and cultural texts to produce their own analytical and creative works.
Texts:
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy
The Adventures of Jimmie Dale, Frank L. Packard
Gladiator, Philip Wylie
Superman Chronicles, Vol. 1, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster
Batman Chronicles, Vol. 1, Bob Kane, Bill Finger
Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told
Marvel Firsts: 1960s
Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
Missing You, Metropolis, Garry Jackson
Additional texts:
Spring-Heeled Jack, Anonymous
(excerpt from) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Frederick Nietzsche
“The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” George Barnard Shaw
(excerpt from) Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
(excerpt from) A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, George Hunter
“The Reign of the Superman,” Jerry Siegel
(excerpt from) The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, Jr.
“A Retrieved Reformation,” O. Henry
(excerpt from) The Curse of Capistrano, Johnston McCulley
“The Girl from Mars,” Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer
(excerpt from) Alias the Night Wind,
“Don’t Laugh at the Comics” (1940), William Moulton Marston
“The Sad Case of the Funnies” (1941), James Frank Vlamos
“Why 100,000 Americans Read Comics” (1943), William Moulton Marston
(excerpt from) Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (1949), Gershon Legman
Comics Code Authority Guidelines
“Secret Skin: An essay in unitard theory” (2008), Michael Chabon
VQR Spring 2008 Superhero Stories
Films:
The Mark of Zorro (1920)
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
The Gladiator (1938)
Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman (2006)
Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (2003)
Unbreakable (2000)
Hancock (2008)
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008)
Radio:
The Shadow, The Blue Beetle
Writing Assignments:
1. Two 4-page analytical essays examining assigned texts on topics of your design.
2. A 6-page essay combining creative and analytical writing. You will invent superheroes and discuss the characters’ relationships to the history of the genre, responding to specific literary and cultural elements of the evolving formula.
Week One
Mon
*early afternoon film: Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman (2006)
Tues Superman Chronicles; “Don’t Laugh at the Comics”
Wed eugenics chronology; Nietzsche Zarathustra (excerpt); Shaw Handbook (excerpt); Tarzan (excerpt); Civic Biology (excerpt); “The Reign of the Superman”; Nazi response to Superman; selected historical newspaper article
Thurs Spring-Heeled Jack; The Scarlet Pimpernel (chapters 1-14);
Fri Scarlet Pimpernel (complete); The Clansman (excerpt);
*early afternoon essay conferences
Week Two
Mon rough draft of 4-page essay due
Radio serial: The Shadow
* optional paper conferences after class
Tues Jimmie Dale (Chapters 1, 2, ?, 11, and one additional story); “A Retrieved Reformation”;
“Murder by Proxy”
* early afternoon film: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
Wed final draft of essay due; The Curse of Capistrano (excerpt)
Early morning film: The Mark of Zorro (1920)
Thurs Gladiator (Chapters 1-11); “The Girl from Mars”
Fri Gladiator (complete); Alias the Night Wind (excerpt)
* early afternoon film: The Gladiator (1938)
Week Three
Mon Batman;“The Sad Case of the Funnies” (1941); “The Shadowy Origins of Batman”
Radio serial: Blue Beetle
Tues rough draft of 4-page essay due
*early afternoon film: Hancock (2008); begin superhero project
WedNO CLASS; individual essay conferences
Thurs final draft of essay due; “Secret Skin”
morning film: Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (2003)
Superheroes conflate goodness with hitting things. For the superhero genre, the best person in the world is the one with the greatest power; beating evil is a matter of hitting it harder. A world in which force and goodness are one and the same and both always triumph is a world in which you’re essentially worshipping force — and the worship of force is, as Richard Cooper pointed out last week in Salon, a good thumbnail description of fascism. No surprise, then, to find that early superhero tropes have roots in pro-KKK pulp novels and discourses around eugenics. A fantasy of eugenic superiority and righteous violence can give you Hitler or Superman, either one.
Chris Yogerst at the Atlantic objects to this characterization of super-heroes on the grounds that superheroes are, in fact, righteous and use their power wisely. Or as he says, “The “fascism” metaphor breaks down pretty quickly when you think about it. Most superheroes defeat an evil power but do not retain any power for themselves. They ensure others’ freedom.” But, of course, if you were making fascist propaganda, the fascist heroes wouldn’t be portrayed as power-hungry whackos. They’d be portrayed as noble and trustworthy. Batman’s a good guy, so it’s okay that he has all-pervasive surveillance technology in the Nolan films, because we know he’ll use it for good ends. Tony Stark is awesome, so when, munitions manufacturer that he is, he makes a superweapon, we know it’s fine because he’ll use it well. And all those superheroes can act outside the law and beat people bloody without trial, or even torture them, because they are on the side of good, just like the KKK can operate outside the law in Birth of a Nation because they are on the side of good. (Yogerst also argues that superheroes can’t be fascist because they often mistrust the government — as if there’s no history of fascist vigilantism, in Germany or here.)
In fact, as Yogerst and Cooper both acknowledge, there’s a long history of superhero comics criticizing the superhero genre specifically because of the fascistic way it links the good and the powerful. Back in the 1940s, almost as soon as the superhero genre was created, William Marston and Harry Peter created Wonder Woman as an explicit repudiation of what they saw as a male glorification of violence. Wonder Woman preached peace, and worked to convert her foes in lieu of (or sometimes in addition to) battering them senseless. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen presents superheroes as violent lawless bullies and megalomaniac monsters. The film Chroniclehas a teen with superpowers who picks up on the rhetoric of eugenics, with disastrous results. Chris Ware (in Jimmie Corrigan) has a Superman/God figure who acts as a violent ogre/bully; Dan Clowes (in The Death Ray) presents vigilante violence as a kind of adolescent fantasy leading to murderous psychopathy.
On the one hand, you could see the fact that this critique is so prevalent as evidence that it’s true; if so many creators over such a long period of time have seen the link between superheroes and fascism, and have questioned the equation of the powerful and the good, then that critique must have some merit. On the other hand, though, if so many superhero stories warn of the conflation of the powerful and the good, is it really fair to say that superhero comics always promote that particular fascist link? Superhero critique and parody is, and has just about always been, a central part of the superhero genre — so much so that Cooper’s essay can be seen not as an attack on the genre, but rather as an example of the genre itself. When he says, “Maybe one day we will get the hero we need: one who challenges rather than reinforces the status quo,” you could argue that superhero narratives have been doing that for a long time — and that his essay in fact uses superheroes to do just that.
Superhero narratives, then, are about fascism, and the glorification of violence as the good. But being about those things doesn’t necessarily always mean they endorse those things. Some, like the Nolan Batman films, seem to; others like Chronicle very much don’t; still others, like Iron Man, may go back and forth. Cooper and Yogerst correctly identify some of the key concerns of the superhero genre, but they both err in suggesting that those concerns have a single meaning. It would be more accurate to say that one thing superhero comics do is think about the relationship between the good and the powerful, sometimes equating them in a fascist way, sometimes criticizing the tendency to equate them, and sometimes examining that equation. The genre is one way we think about fascism — which is, no doubt, why it was so popular in World War II, and why it has had its recent, post-9/11 resurgence.
Editor’s Note by Noah: Ben originally wrote this on a thread at the Comics-Scholars listserv in response to what he called “the banal, tendentious, flat-footed, and largely comics-ignorant commentary of Manohla Dargis and AO Scott. I asked to reprint Ben’s piece here, and he kindly agreed. With his permission, I’ve edited his piece slightly so it can stand alone without confusing references to a conversation we’re unable to reprint in full. I’ve included ellipses to show where I’ve made deletions.)
_____________________
…as someone who can enjoy some superhero comics and films, and who can even find things to admire and teach in the work of superhero comic-book creators from the 1930s to the present, I have a mixed reaction to the (very common) ideological critiques of this material – that is, critiques that focus on the supposed racism, nationalism, and sexism of the genre.
Depending on the degree of intellectual subtlety and rhetorical talent of the critic, I can find such responses stimulating, informative, educational, and provocative; but I can also find them reductive, repetitive, self-righteous, and (occasionally) no less ideologically dubious than the material purportedly being “critiqued”. Most often, though, I just find ideology critique boring.
To be clear: I am entirely persuaded that the superhero genre as a whole is vulnerable to critiques in term of racism, nationalism, and sexism.
So is the genre of the Western. So is the Crime/Noir genre (in fact, I would say the problem of misogyny is far more fundamental to the crime genre as a whole than it is to the superhero genre; and I like a lot of crime/noir stuff, too). So is the SF genre. (Any Robert Heinlein readers out there?) So is the Romance genre. And on, and on, and on.
My point is NOT that “all these genres can be politically problematic, so why pick on superheroes.” (Although an honest, aesthetically searching discussion of why different genres at different times get cut all sorts of critical and ideological slack, while other get dismissed on such grounds – well, that might be worth reading.)
My point is rather that ideological critique can only take us so far. It tends to proceed as if works of art (or acts of representation, if you prefer) are best judged in terms of their political content and efficacy. In other words, the (generally unspoken) assumption of such criticism is that politics should serve as the primary evaluative yardstick by which the “success” or “failure” of a work of art (or act of representation) can be measured.
I happen to disagree, strongly, with this assumption (although that does not mean that I do not have an interest in and cannot learn from or do not sometimes practice ideology critique!).
One serious problem with the “superhero movies are racist, nationalist, sexist” arguments (and I use the term advisedly) of Dargis and Scott is that it insults those members of the audience who consider themselves to be anti-racist, anti-nationalist, and anti-sexist. I would number myself in that crowd.
And do I really need to add that there are in fact quite a lot of women, people-of-colour, and non-Americans, who enjoy superhero fantasies? How are they supposed to respond to the “arguments” of Dargis and Scott? “Oh my, you are so right! What a fool I have been for enjoying the propagandist “entertainments” of my oppressors! Would you please supply me with a list of approved movies and books so that I may become as enlightened as a New York Times journalist – for surely there is no one wiser or kinder on God’s green Earth!”
I suppose one could make some argument about false consciousness in order to “explain” the phenomenon of, say, a woman-of-colour who just enjoyed the heck out of, say, The Avengers. But personally I find such arguments deeply patronizing, and self-evidently inadequate.
A more productive line of reasoning (to my mind) would be to ask what it is about superhero fantasies that attracts so many people (across lines of race, gender, and generation), DESPITE the ideologically troubling aspects of many of those fantasies.
Isn’t it possible – just possible – that there is something genuinely emotionally compelling and even aesthetically powerful about the best examples of this genre? (Just as there is about the best examples of the Western, the Crime genre, the Romance genre, and so on?) Isn’t it possible – just possible – that sometimes people are responding to those compelling and aesthetically powerful aspects of these narratives (and not just, say, giving in to their inner fascist)?
It might also be worth pointing out that it is possible to be aware of the ideologically poisonous aspects of an art work (or act of representation) such as, say, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or (to take a more recent and perhaps even more disturbing example), The Birth of A Nation, while also considering those artworks important enough to be worth teaching, and even defending in terms other than the political.
And BTW, I don’t find a movie like The Avengers to be anywhere near as troubling as D W Griffith’s racist version of history, or even Shakespeare’s The Merchant. I’m not arguing for some sort of equivalence between these texts – I’m arguing that ideology critique is, at best, an opening move, in critical terms. To my mind, you have to have more things to say about a movie or book than “it’s racist/sexist/homophobic” if you are really engaging with it as a professional critic. Of course, you don’t HAVE to engage with any text critically if you don’t feel like it or think it’s worth it. But if you aren’t engaging in that way, don’t pretend that you are.
Scott and Dargis, I submit, fail this basic test of critical engagement when it comes to the superhero genre… Scott and Dargis just come off as art-movie-snobs, and their attitude is all too lazily familiar. But hey, we already knew that the NYTimes doesn’t have much of a clue about pop culture. This is the same NYTimes that just criticized Comic Con for being too serious, after all. (And they say superhero movies are stupid and incoherent!)
For those of you who might be interested, I’ve found Jonathan Dollimore’s book, SEX, LITERATURE & CENSORSHIP to be very smart and useful when it comes to parsing out the vexed relationship between aesthetics and politics – and in moving beyond the more knee-jerk tendencies of ideology critique. Dollimore’s work is definitely somewhere in the back of my mind as I write all this, and it seems appropriate to give him a nod.
Okay, I’ve just seen The Avengers, Marvel’s and Disney’ latest blockbuster superhero movie, and first I want to state: yes, Jack Kirby does get his name in the credits.
In a half-assed way.
The credit line states: “Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.”
True enough, as far as it goes. A more honest credit would have read: “The Hulk, S.H.I.E.L.D., The Avengers and Nick Fury created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; Thor and Loki created by Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby; Black Widow created by Stan Lee, Don Rico, and Don Heck; Captain America created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.”
(And justice would further be served by the additional line: “Iron Man created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Don Heck; Hawkeye and the Black Widow created by Stan Lee and Don Heck.” Don Heck was never a fan-favorite, and has been dead for some years; there’s no constituency for his memory; but his contribution should not be slighted.)
The problem is, as the dominant paradigm now has it, individuals don’t create; only corporations create. And Marvel/Disney would rather slit their entire management’s throats than acknowledge that this fiction, the source of their billions, is based on a lie.
Well, I shan’t continue in my grumpiness — after all, I was hypocrite enough to ignore the boycott of the film initiated by Kirby family supporters such as Steve Bissette.
So how was the movie?
Alan Moore, when asked his opinion of the first Image superhero comics, made an interesting analogy.
He said an old-style superhero comic (say, a Dick Sprang ’50s Batman) could be compared to coca leaf: a mild stimulant. The powerful superhero comics of the seventies, like those drawn by Neal Adams, would be the equivalent of refined cocaine. And the Image comics were the equivalent of crack.
To steal his simile: The Avengers is the crack cocaine of superhero movies. It will stimulate the comics fan into a near-fatal geekasm.
That’s not a criticism, actually; this flick’s an exceptionally well-made distillation of its genre. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like, to quote Abraham Lincoln. It hits all the right notes. Superheroes beating the shit out of each other? Check. Cool, sexy super spy? Check. Neat-oh futuristic equipment and weaponry? Check (The rise of the Shield helicarrier from the ocean to the skies invokes genuine awe.) Nasty-ass aliens, supercilious super villain, awesome costumes (Loki finally gets to see action in his bitchin’ horned helmet), tons of death and destruction, and Cap instructing old Greenskin: “Hulk, smash!”? Check, check, check, check and check!
The film isn’t lacking in non-infantile pleasures, either. The dialogue is crisp and witty — although poor Thor and Captain America are handicapped by having to wax solemn or anguished while the rest of the cast are given all the zingers. The best lines go to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark (Robert Downey Jr); one scene between the two makes one think more of Noel Coward than of Stan Lee.
(There are plenty of physical laughs, too, mostly coming from the Hulk. After an incredibly snotty divine put-down by Loki, Greenskin educates him with a beat-down that looks like a violent gag from a classic Popeye cartoon.)
Ah, Loki. An adventure tale is only as good as its villain. The classically-trained British Hiddleston plays the part with such relish that one only sees in hindsight the nuances he brings to the character: there is an under-layer of pain and anguish to his posturing. And, true to both the comics Loki and that of Norse mythology, he relies as much on cunning and the psychological manipulation of his foes as upon brute force.
(I won’t tell why, but the funniest line in the film is Loki’s “I’m listening.”)
Downey somewhat unbalances the flick: as some wags put it, a better title would have been ‘Iron Man III, co-starring the Avengers’. Not that I’m complaining — it’s always a delight when he takes the screen, especially when out of armor.
However, Marvel showed great judgment when they chose Joss Whedon to direct. Whedon has extensive experience in comics and feature films, but I’d wager that he was chosen especially for his experience in television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where he proved his ability to handle large ensemble casts in fantastic milieus. The script perfectly characterizes every role, far better and more subtly than the comics ever did. It’s a masterpiece of psychological clockwork.
Two of the minor heroes particularly stand out: Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). There are hints of dark, complex, anguished pasts for both of them. I get the feeling Whedon would have been more than happy to have centered the film on these two.
One surprise, on the other hand, is how overshadowed Thor (Chris Hemsworth) emerges. Frankly, he cuts a poor figure compared to the dashing Stark, the brutish Hulk, the glittering Loki. In Thor, he towered; here, his cape looks tatty, and his previous vikingly cool beard makes you think now that he was too rushed to shave that morning.
The fights, the Hulk-smashing, the repartee are all top-notch. In sum, if you want a summer blockbuster where “you can check your brains in at the door”, this is for you.
But we never can do that, can we?
Art by Jack Kirby and Frank Giacoia
The Avengers has special place in my nostalgic pantheon: issue 5 was the very first Marvel comic I’d ever purchased, back in spring 1964, when I was 9 years old. Sure, I was aware of the marketing hook behind it — “Your favorite heroes TOGETHER!”– and didn’t care a whit. Yeah, I’d already seen it with Justice League of America from DC. Loved it there, too.
Looking back, there were troubling aspects to this comic. The Avengers were the élite, and pretty much also the tools of the élite. They were bankrolled by Tony Stark, comics’ epitome of the military-industrial complex; they lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York — the swankiest address in the world. ( Of the great mansions built there by the “robber baron” capitalists of the 19th century, only the one housing the Frick Collection remains.) They fought commies and aliens and worked with the government. And they were self-selected: the aristocrats of the superhero world.
They resembled nothing so much as an elite private club, like the Yale or Century clubs, floating high above hoi polloi.
The film carries this conceit to the next step, arguably an even more sinister one.
The last half-hour of the movie shows a gigantic battle between the Avengers and an army of extraterrestrial invaders in the streets of Manhattan. And my childish, fannish joy in these shenanigans was overlaid by a feeling of dread — of appallment.
I realized why halfway through: it was the location of this mass destruction that roiled me. A ten-year-old taboo had been shattered, one dating to 9/11. It’s now acceptable once more to depict buildings in New York, and the people inside them, being destroyed.
And this is where my unease was compounded. This iteration of the Avengers wasn’t the old “gentlemen’s club,” obnoxious though that be.
This one was conceived from the start as the auxiliary of a tremendously powerful secret American government defense agency. This élite cadre of superhumans, following the orders of a wise leader, Nick Fury, was there to protect us from unreasoning, fanatic aliens bent on flying into our greatest city and toppling its skyscrapers.
From Space Al-Quaeda.
So that’s my reading of The Avengers. Its subtext, hardly subtly advanced, is the glorification of Homeland Security and of the current security state. Why, even the Hulk, that powerful adolescent fantasy of revolt against authority, meekly goes along with the program. Who are we to gainsay him?
Hmm… maybe I really should’ve checked my brain in at the door. Then again, maybe I did, and just forgot to check it back out…
P.S. I saw this film in Paris, where it was released on April 25; it won’t be in general release in the States until May 5. Such divergences between international release dates are less common than they once were, for two reasons: a) the studios want to discourage piracy, and b) cultural globalisation. It’s only in the past twenty years that France adopted summer as a movie blockbuster season, as it has always been in America: before, summer was given over to b-films and re-releases. (Hey, if you were spending the summer in France, would you want to waste it in a movie theatre watching Hollywood fare?) And gone are the days as recent as 1989, when Warner Brothers had to launch a whole campaign in advance of the Tim Burton movie explaining who Batman was to the French. The crowd I saw Avengers with was wholly familiar with the characters. La coca-colonization culturelle n’est pas morte, helas!
Spoiler alert:
The usual post-credits closer reveals who Loki’s mysterious alien ally is. Yep, it’s Thanos.
