The Avengers
Warning: spoilers.
Seriously now, internets. Level with me: am I honest to dog the only human alive who didn’t think The Avengers movie was the most awesome thing in the history of things? More than that - am I alone in thinking that by Joss Whedon’s earlier standards, it was a great big pile of blah?
Evidently so. Because ever since it came out, I don’t think a day has gone by where my Google Reader hasn’t featured a blog post from someone I like and respect about how awesome The Avengers is and why it blew their minds. And this is starting to bug me, because I also seem to be alone in my skepticism about The Cabin in the Woods, which on the basis of comparison was better in some ways and worse in others. And even as I type this, I’m strapping on my Helmet of Fanrage Deflection and turning my Someone Is Wrong On The Internet dampeners to full, because under the circumstances, this post can’t help but court passionate disagreement.
Now, before we begin: I’m a Buffy fangirl, Season 5 of Angel is one of my favourite TV things ever, my love for Firefly and Serenity knows no bounds, and Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was pretty much the best thing to come out of the 07-08 writer’s strike. Dollhouse I was less keen on: it had some cool ideas, and I enjoyed watching it more than I didn’t, but there is a boatload of problematic stuff in that show, and despite such conditional enjoyment as I had from it, I never felt motivated to watch beyond the first season. I’ll even admit - and I’m not proud of this, internets - to owning a Joss Whedon is my master now t-shirt. But I don’t wear it any more, because I’m no longer at a point in my life where I feel comfortable publicly boasting about my slavish devotion to anyone, let alone a straight white man whose coolest cultural contributions, as relevant to and decided by me, happened over a decade ago.
Here’s the other thing about Joss Whedon: he doesn’t have an awesome record when it comes to writing POC characters. Zoe from Firefly is, I think, the one notable exception to this: she’s a brilliant, complex character, and I love her to bits. I’m also a fan of Inara, but the single biggest problem in Firefly - that is, the appropriation of Asian culture in a setting completely devoid of Asian characters - is a problem of exoticisation, and in that context, I feel… uneasy about the casting of a WOC as a sacred prostitute, even though (or particularly as?) the actress, Morena Baccarin, isn’t Asian herself. And then there’s Book, who in terms of the main cast ends up fulfilling the Black Dude Dies First trope; plus, the joke about his hair is less funny than it is worrying. Add to this the many issues raised by Whedon’s treatment of Kendra, Robin, Ronia, Chao-ahn and Gunn in the Buffyverse, and the abuse suffered by Sierra in Dollhouse, and there’s a legitimate case to be made that rather than being a universally feminist icon, Whedon is, in fact, a white feminist icon - which is big intersectional problem.
So when, in the lead-up to The Avengers, I heard tell that a secondary female character, Maria Hill, had been whitewashed, I was less shocked than I was profoundly disappointed. White privilege being what it is, and as much as I’d love to claim otherwise, I didn’t notice Whedon’s issues with POC characters on my own; it was something I became aware of only after the fact, when I saw that other people were talking about it. More recently, The Cabin in the Woods was… not exactly a racefail contender, though the Asian schoolgirls were borderline, but it bothered me that in a film designed to be an overt deconstruction of horror tropes, there was zero overt discussion of the Black Dude Dies First, which should have been quintessential. Maria Hill, though, is a definite fail, and it irks me that so many of the Avengers-praising blogs I’ve seen haven’t mentioned it, even when they’ve been written by people who I know full well were outraged about the whitewashing of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games at the level of casting; outraged at the rampant whitewashing in the live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
All three are instances of beloved narratives being brought to the big screen, and I don’t know enough about the Marvel universe to gauge how minor or major a character Maria Hill originally was - this being relevant if people can reasonably claim familiarity with the comics but not with her - but even so, I don’t see what makes her different to Katniss or Katara, unless it’s the tacit assumption that being a feminist icon makes Joss Whedon immune to fail. I really hope that’s not the case, but right now, I’m honestly feeling hard-pressed to come up with a different explanation.
And that’s before I’d even seen the film.
Conceptually, The Avengers was always going to be weirdly chimaerical, in that, apart from representing the continuation of six thematically different films, it was also, in effect, a synthesis of two films I really enjoyed (Thor and Iron Man), three that were watchable trashy action (Hulk, The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2) and one that I actively loathed (Captain America) - and even if you disagree with that breakdown, the point is, I’d wager that most people went in with the idea that certain of the previous films were better (or worse) than others. Plus and also, there is a major casting-cum-budget problem. By which I mean: all the awesome ladies from the previous films, except for Black Widow and a brief appearance by Pepper Potts? These ladies are absent. Only in the case of Agent Carter does this make narrative sense, on account of her being dead: Betty Ross doesn’t even rate a mention, despite her obvious importance to Bruce, and while Thor’s paramour, Jane, gets a mention, she’s conveniently written out of the script, presumably because paying for Natalie Portman on top of everyone else might just have caused Hollywood to explode; and that’s still more than Sif and Darcy get.
What this amounts to, then, is a Joss Whedon film that fails the Bechdel test, despite the fact that there’s three women in it, and also despite the fact that passing the Bechdel with awesome ladies is literally what Whedon is famous for doing. Pepper only appears alongside Tony Stark, while Maria and Black Widow, despite being in the same place at the same time, never actually talk. And again, this bugs me; it’s why I feel the loss of Jane and Darcy and Sif so strongly, because Thor - which is hands down my favourite of the pre-Avengers movies - passed the Bechdel in the first fucking scene, and then repeatedly after that. And that was awesome!
But look. Whitewashing a character and failing the Bechdel are undeniably problematic things, but they’re also not synonymous with total narrative failure. If these were the only complaints I had about The Avengers, they’d be serious, valid complaints, but acknowledging their relevance isn’t the same thing as saying the whole film also happened to be badly written, badly characterised, badly paced and badly plotted. I get that. But even so, this is the part where the screaming wrath of the internet falls squarely on my head, because this is more or less exactly what I’m asserting.
Let’s tackle this in order, shall we?
1. The Writing
It wasn’t terrible. There were even a few good lines. But it wasn’t Whedonesque, and that, frankly, was disappointing as hell. This is one of the things that The Cabin in the Woods has over The Avengers: the script actually sounds like Joss Whedon wrote it. There’s banter, an irreverent and playful use of language that includes at least one uniquely memorable turn of phrase, and that particular blend of self-deprecation, in-jokes and poetry which characterises everything else that Whedon’s ever done.
Ironically, I suspect the reason why The Avengers departs from this pattern is that, being a comic book movie, none of the characters can actually reference comics - or just about any other form of pop culture - without that being an inherently contradictory act. It’s a fourth wall issue, and also an atavistic one: unable to include any of the characters who usually spout his trademark pop-referential dialogue - that is, teenagers, geeks, madmen and UST-sparking lovers - Whedon has been forced to default to a cast of literal straight men. He does his best with Stark, whose quick-witted loquaciousness come closest to resembling his own native style, and there’s a moment at the beginning where Fury almost sounds like Mal Reynolds when he talks about the turning world, but otherwise, none of the Avengers has either the personality or the speech patterns that make Whedon’s dialogue work. Instead, we end up with lots of tense growling and serious save-the-world talk, and while I expect that level of cliche-ridden pomposity from a Michael Bay film, it’s so far below Whedon’s actual capabilities as to merit a failing grade.
2. The Characterisation
Is terrible. No, seriously: there is no internal characterisation, by which I mean, characterisation that actually happens during the film. Partly this is because The Avengers isn’t purely a stand-alone work: all the main characters have been introduced in earlier movies, and so the presupposition is, presumably, that the audience already knows them. But the thing is that, in five significant instances, we don’t. Maria Hill has never appeared before; Nick Fury and Phil Coulson both have bit-parts in multiple earlier films, but not in a way that actually tells us anything meaningful about who they are and why they do what they do. We get a little flash of insight into Phil (and a fleeting glimpse of Whedonesque dialogue) when he fanboys over Captain America, but that’s pretty much it: otherwise, we’re just meant to infer that we already like these people. Which is also lamentably true of Black Widow and Hawkeye, both of whom are similarly underdeveloped. Black Widow, at least, got a fair bit of screen-time in Iron Man 2, even if we didn’t learn much about who and what she was beyond being a sexy assassin; but Hawkeye’s appearance in Thor is even more fleeting - from memory, I don’t even think he speaks.
What this means is that, unless you know him from the comics, you don’t know him at all - and that is a really big problem, because in the opening scene, Hawkeye falls under Loki’s thrall and thus spends most of the film working, however unwillingly, for the enemy. I shouldn’t have to spell this out, but erasing someone’s identity is a terrible way to develop a character, because it’s the exact opposite of developing their character. As a gambit, this only works if we already care about the person, and while that’s fine and good for comics fans, that’s not the same thing as saying the film itself excelled at characterisation. What it actually did was operate at the level of fanfiction; or rather, the specific type of fanfiction that takes existing characters, assumes the existence of a devoted readership who already knows everything about them, and therefore neither develops nor reinterprets those characters so much as makes them bicker to create tension.
Thus: I get why lots of people who already know and love the characters think The Avengers is awesome, but for those of us who don’t, or who need to get to know them through the film, it doesn’t work. And that’s fine! By all means, enjoy your canonical fanfic - and I don’t say that disparagingly. Fanfic can be an awesome, wonderful thing. But if, for instance, your whole experience of something like Bones was limited to six episodes you’d seen out of context over a period of months, and then someone gave you the Ultimate Bones Fanfic to read, your reaction to it would likely be very different to that of someone who’d been following the show from episode one. In that sense, what separates fanfic from regular fiction isn’t who came up with the idea in the first place - it’s whether the story and characters are comprehensible to a first-time reader. If you changed all the names, would events still hang together? Would the characters still seem well-developed? Or would all the emotional resonance have suddenly leeched away? This is why I say The Avengers is badly characterised: it relies on the audience already knowing who its characters are, and so makes little or no attempt to define them itself.
3. The Pacing
Is screwy. We start with a heap of explosions as Loki takes over S.H.I.E.L.D, which is symptomatic of the characterisation problem: we meet the threat before the people it threatens, because we’re already supposed to care about them being in jeopardy. This scene goes on for slightly too long, and then we have an excruciatingly drawn-out quest to find every single member of the Avengers and put them together. And the thing is, if the film were concerned with characterisation, then this is when it should happen: but Hawkeye, who needs it most, has already been turned; Thor doesn’t show up until midway through; Fury and Maria hit the ground running and never stop for self-analysis; and the others are all shown doing what they do - heroing - in a way that fails to touch on why they do it. The Hulk comes the closest, in that we see him on a quest for redemption, but we don’t see his struggle for control, which is what really matters. Similarly, we have nothing to remind us of why Iron Man or Captain America fight; and though, much later, Black Widow tells us that she has ‘red in her ledger’, the truth of her assertion isn’t shown, and her presumed friendship with Hawkeye happens off screen, leaving the rest of us in a state of emotional lag.
Then there’s lots of bickering on the airship (which, see above re: only works as fanfiction), Thor shows up, more bickering, Loki does schemes, things explode, Phil dies because Joss Whedon likes to kill people and really he was the only expendable character, and then everyone mysteriously feels sad about it, even though their visible interactions with him up to that point have either been largely nonexistent ( as in The Avengers) or based on hostility and resentment (pretty much every other movie in which he’s appeared). Nonetheless! His death galvanizes the team to stop bickering, even though the death itself still isn’t enough and Fury actually has to emotionally manipulate them with a glimpse of Phil’s bloodied possessions (only they weren’t actually bloodied, he just got them out of Phil’s locker and put blood on them because that was the 'extra push’ they needed, apparently), and then there’s a drawn-out battle with Loki’s invading aliens over Manhatten (of course), who also happen to have a couple of dragonwhales that need fighting. Cue heroic sacrifice by Iron Man, who lives through it only because not even Joss Whedon is allowed to kill him, and then there’s some wrap-up stuff, and then after the credits an alien-dude who I assume is meaningful in some way to comic fans looks all glowery and threatening and DRAMATIC CUT TO BLACK.
Once again, this isn’t bad, pe se - it’s just not mindblowingly awesome, and it’s certainly not anywhere near Joss Whedon’s A-game. There’s lots of dead space, lots of lost opportunities for character development, and lots of action scenes that go on slightly too long interspersed with a handful of non-bickery personal interactions that are far too short. It’s stopstart, in other words, and while nowhere near as heinous as Transformers: Dark of the Moon or as nonsensical as Captain America, I’m really struggling to understand why so many people are acting as though it’s transcendent.
4. The Plotting
Was messy. All the weapons-grade handwavium of Thor and Loki’s return aside - I mean, the Bifrost was broken, and Loki had fallen into space - why the hell was Loki’s big plan to set the Hulk loose on the others? Where did the Tesseract come from, and how did it actually fit in with the aliens? Why did the invaders have such a tiny, tiny army, or at the very least, why didn’t they send in all the dragonwhales instead of just, like, three? What’s the connection between the Tesseract and the arc reactor? What’s the deal with that girl thanking Captain America at the end? And why did Joss Whedon of all people think it was a great idea to hang a big fat lampshade on the idea of Iron Man being too selfish to ever commit an act of self-sacrifice, thereby making it blindingly obvious that he’d do so at the finale?
The whole way through, I was bugged by questions like this. They kept throwing me out of the narrative, and none was really answered satisfactorily. This is the other consequence of mashing six movies together: your worldbuilding gets complicated. So far as I understand it, the Marvel universes have been retconned, rewritten and overlapped so many times now that actual continuity is a nightmare; but starting afresh on screen could have been, potentially at least, a way to fix it. Instead, the underlying logic remains fundamentally buggy, and while that was always more or less true of the preceding films, the act of taking all those contradictory elements and uniting them has, rather unsurprisingly, failed to produce a coherent setting. Add to that the extant problems of writing, characterisation and pacing, and the whole thing most closely resembles a mess.
Ultimately, The Avengers is an average action movie: it’s not terrible, but it’s not brilliant, either, and my suspicion is that it won’t age well. And maybe I wouldn’t care, except for the fact that I’ve seen almost nobody engage with it on a level besides unstinting praise; which doesn’t mean that nobody has, or that I think everyone should have exactly the same reaction to it that I did - just that I’m bothered by the idea that, from where I’m sitting, it’s like the whole film exists in a sort of cultural blind spot labelled Joss Whedon. And if I’m just outside the zeitgeist on this one, fine: so be it. I can live with that. But I dislike the idea that for whatever ephemeral, subconscious reason, a film that deserves in-depth critique for reasons of race and gender - if nothing else - appears not to be getting it; or at least, not getting as much of it as it should. Maybe people are just exhausted after all the gender/race discussions provoked by The Hunger Games; or maybe, for whatever reason, there’s just an unusual cluster of fans among the bloggers I follow whose aggregate presence is skewing my view of things.
Or maybe there’s something else going on - in which case, we ought to be asking ourselves what it is.
a-storm-of-nightengales liked this
glowyjellyfish liked this
seshathawk reblogged this from fozmeadows
padme-amidala-deserved-better reblogged this from fozmeadows
aniceword liked this
sk07 liked this
spiegle132-blog liked this somethingtrivial liked this
ifeelyoujohanna liked this
allthestoriescantbelies reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
UH ARE YOU SAYING THAT ARE YOU SAYING THAT are you saying that a movie that is the ensemble ass-kicking-and-explosions...
flamingculture liked this
lainey liked this
jellibat liked this
picklemethis reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
Oh lawdee brilliant. Read it. Read it all. I liked the movie but even I kept thinking “why don’t the women talk to each...
picklemethis liked this
dukenarrativium said: I just wanted to say, I generally didn’t feel strongly about the Avengers. Definitely didn’t find it as awesomesauce as hype suggested. To me it was a silly superhero movie with predictably bad physics. And it needed more Kat Dennings.
fozmeadows posted this