viz. - superheroes

Daredevil and Urban Backgrounds

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 21:42:55 +0000

One of the interesting (and, at least initially, disappointing) promises made by Daredevil is that it will feature not just a superhero, but also the city in which he dwells. This would be more or less a new thing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Characters may represent regions or ideologies (Thor lands in the American Midwest, Black Widow deals with Russian trauma, Iron Man models a form of urban masculinity), but they never seem to be from a specific, real place. Even in the DC Universe, where the Dark Knight trilogy obsessed over the relationship between Batman and the city he served, takes place in fictional Gotham City, recognizably akin to New York but made bizarre and larger-than-life by its iconography and events.

Daredevil, on the other hand, lives in Hell’s Kitchen, a quite specific location within Manhattan. Admittedly, his Hell’s Kitchen differs from that of modern America, since the events of Avengers: Assemble have de-urbanized the region and transformed it into the “dark, gritty” environment so beloved of contemporary superhero franchises. Still, the real-world environment leaves one with hope that, even in a Marvel film, one might hear a bit of the city’s voice speaking as something other than an echo chamber for the hero’s antics.

Unfortunately, at least with Daredevil’s first episode, this wasn’t the case. After a brief father-son scene establishing the blindness of Matt Murdock (i.e. Daredevil), and a visually-striking opening montage imagining a city (and statue of justice) made of congealed blood, and an scene in a confessional that emphasizes the hero’s alienation from the comforts of religion, the show proceeded to introduce two victims of the city’s criminality. The first victims are an utterly passive group of women who are about to be sold into slavery, the second a beautiful damsel named Karen Page who is framed for the death of her co-worker. Both play along well-trod narrative conventions: the city’s (mostly female) victims are seen as relatively powerless (though Karen, at least, defends herself against a jail-cell attack), and everyone needs Daredevil, the lone hero, to step in.

This ties in rather well with the iconography promoting television superheroes discussed by Deb, with its focus on individual characters abstracted from their environments. But by shifting the focus to the one costumed hero, it silences the rest of the city.

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Netflix

The Hidden Hero: Rhetoric of the Mask in Arrow

Deb Streusand — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 12:43:10 +0000

Image Credit: comicbook.com

The television show Arrow features a cadre of non-superhero vigilantes, superpower-free men and women who succeed in fighting bad guys through a combination of training, intelligence, and deft manipulation of technology. They must also rely on technology and trickery to protect their true identities. The major technology that the characters in Arrow use for this purpose is a simple one: the mask.

Image Credit: bostonherald.com

When Oliver Queen first begins his quest to save Starling City, he depends mostly on his hood to conceal his identity when he is being The Arrow. He smears greasepaint over his eyes to obscure his features, but when he wants to reveal himself as Oliver Queen to his friend Tommy, he simply lifts his hood and speaks in his natural voice. Only when the scientist Barry Allen, later to become the Flash, provides him with a comfortable mask that perfectly conforms to his face does he switch over to the more effective means of concealment. After that point, he’s not recognized as Queen even with his hood off. The simple mask is a powerful enough technology within the world of the story to prevent people from recognizing the extremely well-known Oliver Queen.

Image Credit: docbrowntv.com

Sara Lance as the Canary

Image Credit: docbrowntv.com

Laurel Lance as the Black Canary

The efficacy of masks in the show is not consistent, however. Like the disguises of characters on the Renaissance stage, they are generally ironclad to the point where the other characters seem extremely dense when they don’t recognize the disguised person. When Laurel Lance is impersonating her sister Sara, she puts on Sara’s Canary outfit and mask to speak to her father so that (SPOILER ALERT) he’ll think Sara is still alive. She is able to fool Detective Lance into thinking that she is Sara, even though they are his daughters and are significantly different in height and body type. Occasionally, though, a perceptive character will see through the mask. Sara’s friend Sin is able to recognize that someone else is pretending to be Sara because the woman she thinks is Sara doesn’t acknowledge her presence, something Sara would never fail to do. So the mask is able to conceal differences in physical appearance, but it can’t necessarily obscure differences in behavior.

Image Credit: bamsmackpow.com

The rhetoric of the mask argues that one’s face is one’s identity – if the face is obscured, the person is anonymous. The mask is a convenient choice on a practical level because it’s not enough of a disguise to fool the audience. The idea that it’s generally enough to hide the identity of the hero from those who would seek to penetrate it is a conceit that we have to accept when we watch the show. When the show itself then plays with that conceit for dramatic purposes (such as revealing information to a character) we continue to accept that the mask still disguises the heroes from most people’s perception. Anonymity is crucial for heroes outside the law, as the current plot in which (SPOILERS) The Arrow’s identity is revealed to Starling City at large makes clear. The Arrow can’t help anyone if everyone knows he’s Oliver Queen. So we must believe that he can hide his identity. We must believe in the mask.

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Visual Rhetoric

superheroes

Big Hero 6 and the Consolations of Violence

Scott Garbacz — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 18:31:50 +0000

Image screen-captured from Disney Movies Anywhere.

Last week, I discussed the ways Guardians of the Galaxy mixes a more-or-less serious story of grief and community formation with a gleefully irresponsible sense of violence and adventure. While I emphasized the way these two themes contrast with each other, in reality they work together in the cause of big-screen popcorn entertainment. The story of Quill’s quest to acknowledge and accept the death of his mother provides a certain emotional grounding to the story’s rather silly violence, while the gleeful immaturity of the overall narrative lessens the sting of its brush with seriousness. This week, I want to turn to the kids’ movie version of Guardians of the Galaxy: Big Hero 6. Both share not only their Marvel-produced heritage, but also an odd interest in fatherlessness, the psychological roots of violence, and the process of grief. The most surprising element of Big Hero 6, however, is how much more seriously it takes these issues than Guardians of the Galaxy; its handling of grief, mourning, and violence indeed open up more general critiques both of the superhero genre and of the desires that make it popular. (Obviously, spoilers follow.)

Big Hero 6 may not open with the death of a mother, but its protagonist (Hiro) begins the movie as an orphan, and soon watches as his brother (Daniel) perishes in an attempt to save a professor from a burning building. Orphanhood is of course standard fare in animated children’s movies, though generally a dead mother rather than a brother provides the ghostly presence animating the film. Yet Baymax, the film’s most iconic figure, stands as a constant reminder of Daniel’s absence. The kind-hearted, marshmallow-shaped medical robot carries Daniel’s spirit (or at least his last programming masterpiece) in its heart (or at least the data port located just to the left of center in Baymax’s upper chest), and the movie spends a great deal of time depicting Hiro’s ambivalent feelings towards his brother’s last, greatest scientific invention. If Guardians of the Galaxy deals with mourning only sporadically—primarily in the two scenes where its hero must grasp his dying mother’s hand—Big Hero 6 evokes Hiro’s recent loss every time Baymax appears on the screen. (Hiro’s young aunt, incidentally, survives as an enduring if frazzled maternal presence; her few scenes evoke images of an older and somewhat more settled version of Lilo and Stitch’s Nani, a character whose subversion of Disney romantic formulas has been discussed previously here.)

Image screen-captured from Disney Movies Anywhere.

The film follows much of the same plot structure of Guardians of the Galaxy. As Hiro goes through the process of mourning, he also meets his own team of eccentric, entertaining fellow potential superheroes at “Nerd School,” with whom Hiro shares both jokes and peril. Interestingly, Hiro’s supporting cast features more than a token minority presence; the film’s choice of voice actors, characters, and even the architecture of the fictional city of San Fransokyo reflects the world’s ever-increasing cultural hybridity, side-stepping obvious cultural stereotypes in ways that, for one critic at least “mark a genuine break from the past.” The characters are far from perfect; this may be the first Marvel-made movie to feature two female superheroes, but it still contrasts an absent-minded valley girl against the sort of two-dimensional “competent girl” stereotype that frustrated me in, say, The Lego Movie. Yet in comparison to most superhero movies these days, I was struck by how grounded these heroes seemed to be. They are written as characters who come from the sorts of places we encounter on earth, rather than the billionaire playboys, alien creatures, and historical relics that dominate the Marvel universe. The protagonists of Big Hero 6 seem formed by their worlds, rather than outsiders who work to shape everyone else’s destiny.

Image screen-captured from Disney Movies Anywhere.

More exceptional than the film’s cast, however, is its visual palate and its engagement with violence. Kid’s films have long played on the equation of maturity with bloodless (yet often lethal) violence. Last year alone, The Lego Movie (the year’s top grossing film of PG rating or below) featured a hero who blithely guns down police officers, Maleficient traded on its hero’s dark sorcery, and How To Train Your Dragon 2 taught its Viking hero that some men must be killed because they cannot be reasoned with. Each film, that is, ties the hero’s growth and maturity to his or her ability to change the world through violence. In such an environment, it is notable that Big Hero 6’s characters simply don’t kill anyone, and that Hiro’s companions are horrified at the thought of doing so.

Image screen-captured from Disney Movies Anywhere.

Baymax, in fact, stands as the visual incarnation of a form of power that is neither elegant nor violent. One early wordless joke features Baymax’s attempt to navigate a room; his vinyl body screeches awkwardly between a bed and a table, knocking off a series of books, as he tries to make his way towards Hiro. Hiro tries to make Baymax “cool” by teaching him a fistbump that ends in an explosive sound; Baymax echoes the motion and re-interprets the sound as a childlike “bwadaladaladala.” Even when Baymax helps the heroes to find the film’s villain, he does so as a result of his tendency towards nonviolence; he scans the villain instinctively, since he is “programmed to assess everyone’s healthcare needs.”

Image screen-captured from Disney Movies Anywhere.

In fact, Hiro’s enthusiasm for violence is arguably the film’s true villain. In pursuit of the man who stole his inventions and murdered his brother, Hiro adds secondary, martial functions to Baymax’s programming, and then removes his brother’s chip so as to enable Baymax to kill. While images of a Hulk-like Baymax attacking Hiro’s friends provide the hero-on-hero fights expected in a Marvel movie, they serve as a reminder of the film’s central concern with grief. Throughout the movie, Baymax insists that Daniel lives on, both in his programming and in Hiro’s heart. That Hiro must remove his brother's chip in order to enable his violence materializes the film’s argument about grief and rage. If Hiro is to truly accept his brother’s death, he must learn to desire something other than visceral revenge. Yet the scene also implies an argument about the superhero genre itself: the sort of violent spectacle audiences regularly seek in summer blockbusters may be itself unhealthy, an immediately-pleasing catharsis that masks our ability to deal with weightier matters of life (and death.) A rampaging, red-eyed Baymax is mere spectacle; the cuddly, soft, gentle-toned Baymax stands as a reminder of the reality of death, and the difficulty of mourning.

Image screen-captured from Disney Movies Anywhere.

The arguments embodied in Baymax are repeated in the film’s villian, a professor whose refusal to accept his daughter’s wrongful (apparent) death at the hands of an irresponsible corporate scientist leads to his own acts of megalomaniacal violence. In fitting Marvel fashion, Baymax’s semi-nonviolence is ultimately vindicated when the heroes are able to save the Professor’s daughter despite her father’s insanity. Yet the association between nonviolence and grief lingers.

Baymax is far from the first semi-pacifist comic book hero; Batman, for instance, is marked in most variations by his inability to kill. Yet Big Hero 6 is intriguing in linking such violence explicitly to the wrathful impulses of imperfect mourning. While films like Guardians of the Galaxy use their heroes’ experiences of mourning as a way of giving emotional heft to proceedings that otherwise might spiral into meaningless, unsympathetic violence, Big Hero 6 explores the potential that our desire for such movies may be inherently unproductive. In any case, it is notable that of last year’s two major Marvel movies, the one made explicitly for kids is less escapist, more grounded in visible human experience, and ultimately more thoughtful.

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