(Not So) Recent Movie Roundup 22

It's pretty far down the very long list of reasons for its awfulness, but 2016 has not been a great movie year.  The failures of this year's summer movies have been sufficiently enumerated, but the truth is that by the time they rolled around, I was sufficiently burned out by the disappointing spring that I didn't even bother to watch most of them.  And a great deal of interesting 2016 films that I would have liked to see--such as Midnight Special, The Lobster, High Rise, and The Handmaiden--didn't even make it into theaters near me.  This post, therefore, actually covers something like five months of movie-watching, and though some of it has been worthwhile or entertaining, none of it counters my impression that 2016, in its cruelty, couldn't even offer us the distraction of good movies.

• Love & Friendship - The biggest and most vexing question raised by Whit Stillman's adaptation of Jane Austen's unpublished novella Lady Susan is: why the title change?  Not only is Lady Susan a perfectly good title, but Love & Friendship is actually a singularly bad one for a story that is all about selfishness, manipulation, and stupidity coming very close to ruining the lives of some perfectly inoffensive people.  Actual love and friendship are in short supply, shoved off into the background while the real business of the movie focuses on the machinations of Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) as she schemes to marry off her daughter to a rich man whom she doesn't love, to arrange occasions in which to meet her own, married lover, and to entertain herself by seducing an upright young man who believes himself impervious to her charms.  If there's any love and friendship on screen in this movie, they are the ones between Susan and her best friend Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny), who supports, without question or qualm, Susan's schemes and manipulations.  It's here, however, that Love & Friendship fails to take advantage of its opportunities, to expand and fill in some of the gaps in the original novella--such as Alicia's lack of a personality except as Susan's supporter and confidant, or the blankness of Reginald de Courcy (Xavier Samuel), the young man whom Susan seduces, and who eventually falls in love with her daughter.
  
  None of this is to say that Love & Friendship is anything less than delightful--Beckinsale is wonderful as a completely amoral woman, and the cast around her, which includes familiar faces such as Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave, and James Fleet, all on top form, are extremely entertaining as they try to grasp the truth that they can't hope to deal with a person who understands society's rules perfectly, but has no sense of the values underlying them.  But despite occasional gestures towards expanding the story's world beyond what Austen made of it--characters discussing religion or poetry, and philosophizing about the meaning of life in a way that makes it clear that even these privileged aristocrats are trying to give their life more meaning than that offered by the tropes of a Regency novel--Love & Friendship never manages to feel like more than what it is, an adaptation of an imperfect but highly entertaining minor work by a great author.  Which is still quite a lot, and a great deal of fun to boot, but given how few works Austen left us, and how rare it is for a skilled, appreciative artist to try to adapt them, it's a shame that Stillman didn't try to put more of his own stamp on her work.
  
  
• Ghostbusters - Before watching Paul Feig's reboot of the beloved 80s comedy series, I sat down and rewatched the two original movies, for what was probably the first time in twenty years.  This, as it turned out, was doing Feig a huge favor, because time has not been terribly kind to either of these movies.  The original Ghostbusters feels more like a proof of concept, whose jokes--either because I know them all so well, or because fashions in comedy have changed--just aren't very funny anymore; and the less said of Ghostbusters II, the better.  The new Ghostbusters isn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's more competently made than either of its predecessors, and has several scenes that cracked me up, which is more than I can say for the older movies.  It also, however, has a lot of dead air, and in fact the film's core problem is that it feels like a bunch of skits strung together by someone who didn't have the heart to go in and trim the ones that aren't that funny.
  
  What saves the film, even in its slower moments, are its four stars, and even more than that, the charming and engaging characters that Feig and co-writer Katie Dippold have created for them.  Whether or not it's funnier than the original, the new Ghostbusters has a great deal more heart, and that's completely down to its main characters, whose friendship, rivalry, camaraderie, and mutual exasperation are all believable and instantly lovable.  My only complaint here is that I was a lot less engaged with the central story of former friends Erin (Kristen Wiig) and Abby (Melissa McCarthy), who must heal their ruptured relationship over the course of the film.  What I wanted was a lot more scenes with Kate McKinnon's zany mad scientist Holtzman, and Leslie Jones's MTA worker (who also has an encyclopedic knowledge of New York history) Patty.  They don't have character arcs of their own, but it was always a joy to see them on screen, either on their own or interacting with each other, and I hope that the sequel, if it happens, gives them more space in the story.  (Also, it is officially time to accept that Chris Hemsworth can't act.  His role, that of the Ghostbusters' dumb, hunky receptionist, should have been one that Hemsworth could carry off in his sleep; but instead his scenes are consistently the most boring in the movie.  Maybe it's time to reevaluate whether men can even be funny.)
  
  
• Doctor Strange - Marvel's latest standalone movie has a great opening scene, and a final battle that toys with some really interesting ideas, finally upending a lot of the conventions of this increasingly formulaic filmic universe.  In between these two bookends, however, there's an origin story so tediously familiar, so derivative and by-the-numbers, that by the time I got to Doctor Strange's relatively out-there conclusion, all I wanted was for the thing to end.  As noted by all of its reviewers, the film is very pretty, positing a society of sorcerers who fight by shaping the very fabric of reality, causing geography and gravity to bend in on themselves in inventive, trippy ways.  The film's opening scene, in which bad guy Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) and Dumbledore-figure The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) stage such a battle in the streets of London, turning buildings and roads into a kaleidoscope image, is genuinely exciting.  For a brief time, you think that Marvel might actually be trying something new.
  
  Then the story proper starts, and a familiar ennui sets in.  Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is Tony Stark without the charm, the vulnerability, or the penchant for self-destruction.  In other words, he's a bore, and the film's attempts to make him into yet another brilliant asshole thrust unwillingly into heroism feel perfunctory and unconvincing.  The film's middle segment is essentially a protracted training montage, in which Strange, seeking a cure to an injury that ended his career as a surgeon, travels to Nepal to be healed by the Ancient One, and realizes that he'd rather learn to be a wizard instead.  Once again, there isn't a single original beat in this entire part of the film, and though Swinton's performance--alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor as fellow acolyte Mordo, and Benedict Wong as kickass librarian Wong--gives these scenes a little more personality, ultimately what they amount to is an Asian-inflected Hogwarts, notable mainly for pretty set dressing and effects (and, of course, for the decision to put a white actress in the middle of it), but still rather tedious to get through. 
  
  About twenty minutes before it ends, Doctor Strange finally lands on a raft of interesting ideas, any one of which might have enlivened the film and given it a personality if it had been threaded throughout the entire story, but which, at that point, no longer has the space to be developed adequately.  There is, for example, the fact that Strange suddenly remembers that he is a doctor, sworn to do no harm, and his refusal to become the kind of warrior that Tony Stark or Steve Rogers take for granted.  Or Mordo's increasing disillusionment with Strange and The Ancient One's willingness to bend and even break the laws of nature in order to achieve their short-term goals.  Taken together, these lead to a genuinely format-breaking final battle, in which Strange, instead of causing the devastation of a major city, works to undo it (the fact that this city is an Asian one feels particularly significant, given the way that previous Marvel movies have trampled cities in non-white countries as a way of establishing stakes, before gathering their heroes to defend New York or the fictional but still white Sokovia), and defeats his enemy by outsmarting rather than outfighting him.  If these themes had been present throughout Doctor Strange instead of just showing up shortly before it ends, it might have been something to see.  As it is, it feels as if director Scott Derrickson and writer Jon Spaihts had a few interesting ideas, and no clue how to tie them together into a worthwhile story.
  
  (I wrote the above on the weekend of Doctor Strange's release, when the world seemed headed towards a Hillary Clinton US presidency.  A week later, in a world that is about to be ruled by the bigot and rapist Donald Trump, the priorities and preconceptions of this movie suddenly seem much darker.  Only a few days after white men (and women) overwhelmingly decided that eight years under the leadership of an intelligent, compassionate, visionary black man was more than they could bear, and that a highly qualified and competent woman could never compete with a lazy, fraudulent, perpetually dishonest man, the very concept of a story in which we all--women and POCs included--are saved by a privileged white man, while the black man who criticizes the white heroes for their abuse of power is revealed as a psychotic villain, feels like a cruel joke.  Along with the rest of Hollywood, Marvel buys into--and indeed, helps to perpetuate--the mentality that if there isn't a white man in the middle of the story, there must be something wrong with the story.  We have just seen how that mentality plays out in the real world, and we will all spend years paying the price for it.)
  
  
• Manchester by the Sea - Kenneth Lonergan's Oscar-hopeful feels like an object lesson in the arbitrariness of Hollywood's prestige ladder.  The film's premise has been, and will continue to be, the stuff of millions of weepies and made-for-TV movies: protagonist Lee (Casey Affleck) receives word that his beloved older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died of an illness, and that Lee is now unexpectedly the guardian of Joe's teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges).  This forces Lee to return to his home, the titular fishing town, where he is haunted by memories of a terrible trauma, and by lingering resentment from some of his neighbors.  Obviously, it's the execution that differentiates between shlock and drama, and Manchester by the Sea is indeed a well-made, closely-observed and deliberately low key variation on its extremely familiar story.  But I can't help but rankle at the fact that that very avoidance of melodrama is being hailed as proof of the film's seriousness, of its being an exceptional and especially worthy example of its type.  It feels telling that a male writer and director has taken a genre typically associated with women, told a story within it that concentrates almost exclusively on men, focused on "hard", violent emotions such as Lee's still-simmering anger and guilt, and gotten effusive praise for it.  Take, for example, the way that flashbacks spread throughout the movie reveal Joe's role as the strong, supportive center of his family, someone whose loss, by the end of the movie, feels genuinely devastating.  Now try to remember the last time that a movie--much less one as prestigious as this one--made its dead wife or mother as real or as human, anything more than something for its male heroes to get over.
  
  The ultimate effect of this was that I found it hard to appreciate Manchester by the Sea for the thing that it has been most commonly lauded for, Affleck's performance.  He is, of course, very good as a man struggling, and ultimately failing, to overcome terrible loss, but I found myself resenting the way the film valorizes Lee's anger and inability to move on--there is, for example, something almost ridiculous about the eventual revelation of his inciting trauma, as if Lonergan couldn't stop himself from piling on yet another detail that would make Lee's loss more horrific.  What does work, however, is everything around Lee, and particularly Patrick, whose depiction as someone who, on one hand, is a great deal more together and connected to the world than his uncle, and on the other hand, is still a child, is one of the most realistic filmed portraits of a teenager I've ever seen.  The relationship between Patrick and Lee feels real and lived-in, full of unspoken but clearly felt history.  So, too, is the portrait the film paints of the close-knit working class community of Manchester, which supports the struggling family but also makes it impossible for Lee to escape his past.  And the film's ending, which avoids an easy solution to Lee and Patrick's problems while still offering hope for the future, is perhaps the greatest rebuttal Lonergan can offer to his story's melodramatic roots.  It's not entirely Manchester by the Sea's fault that I wasn't blown away by it--a lot of it comes down to the industry around it and the way that it prioritizes men's stories over women's, even when they're the same story--but I still found myself appreciating the film more for its background details than for the figure in its foreground.

Tales of the City: Thoughts on Luke Cage

"For black lives to matter, black history has to matter."  A character says this shortly into the first episode of Luke Cage, Netflix's third MCU series, and the fourth season of television it has produced in collaboration with Marvel as it ramps up for its Defenders mega- event.  It's easy to read this line as a thesis statement on the nature of the show we're about to watch, but it's not until some way into Luke Cage's first season that we realize the full import of what creator Cheo Hodari Coker is saying with it, and how challenging its implications will end up being.  As has been widely reported and discussed, Luke Cage is the first black MCU headliner--not just on TV or on Netflix, but at all.  And, unlike the forthcoming Black Panther, whose story is set in a fictional African superpower, Luke Cage is explicitly a story about African-Americans in the more-or-less real world, at a moment when the problems and indignities suffered by that community are at the forefront of public discussion.  It is, therefore, a show that comes loaded with tremendous expectations, not just of introducing a compelling character and telling a good superhero story, but of addressing increasingly fraught issues of race, in both the real world and the superhero genre.  It's perhaps unsurprising that Luke Cage falls short of these expectations, but what is surprising is how often it doesn't even seem to be trying to reach them.  Or, perhaps, not surprising at all--as the first episode spells out, Luke Cage is less interested in black lives than it is in black stories.

Introduced as a supporting character and love interest in last year's Jessica Jones, Luke Cage sees its title character (Mike Colter), whose skin is super-strong and impervious to harm, moving uptown to Harlem, hiding out in a neighborhood barbershop and working odd jobs under the table.  When some young employees at the barbershop end up embroiled in a plot to rob a local crimelord, Luke steps in to try and defuse the situation, only to watch his benefactor and friend, Pop (Frankie Faison), get caught in the crossfire.  The first half of the season revolves around the war that erupts between Luke, until that point a reluctant superhero, and the crime boss Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali).  In the second half of the season, Cottonmouth is sidelined by his cousin, Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard), who had been using his money to fund her legitimate projects to revitalize Harlem, keeping it in black hands and staving off gentrification.  With Cottonmouth's illegal business ventures crippled by Luke's activities, Mariah turns to slippery operator Shades (Theo Rossi), and his mercurial boss Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey) to solidify her position, not realizing that Diamondback has his own personal history with Luke, which leads him to set Harlem on fire in pursuit of our hero.

There's more to be said about the season's plot (and I have, in fact, elided certain points for the sake of brevity), but quite frankly, it's not worth spending much time on.  It is, perhaps, time to admit that Jessica Jones was unique in being able to dredge through its character's comics history to find a genuinely interesting story that was perfectly suited to the multi-episode format.  Both seasons of Daredevil, and now Luke Cage, have failed to achieve that same alchemy, and instead end up bogged down in predictable origin story beats--Luke protests that he is no hero; various characters, such as Pop and recurring Netflix MCU player Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), insist that he is; some tragedy occurs to make him understand that they are right.  These inevitably lead to a boss fight with a forgettable and over the top villain, in which there is much property damage.  The end.

There is, to be fair, a little more to it than that.  The first half of Luke Cage feels more like a crime story--albeit one whose beats are fairly obviously derivative, most plainly of The Wire--than a superhero story.  It's elevated by the presence of Cottonmouth, whom Ali imbues with a touching ambivalence.  There's nothing terribly original about the story of a mob boss who dreams of going legit, but whose soul is too tarnished by the life he's lived to ever truly leave it behind (and some of the beats of Cottonmouth's story, such as the revelation that as a boy he dreamed of being a musician but was pushed into a life of crime by his family, are downright hackneyed).  But the show gives the character, and the performance, enough space to breathe, in particular when it charts the thorny, deeply dysfunctional relationship between Cottonmouth and Mariah, which is powered by competing currents of love and resentment.

It's in these episodes, too, that Luke Cage introduces its secret weapon, and what I hope will be its breakout character, Misty Knight (Simone Missick), a police detective who ends up as the third point of the triangle between Luke and Cottonmouth, trying to unravel the former's secrets while stopping the latter from starting a gang war.  Stalwart, bold, and curious, deeply rooted in her neighborhood but also committed to a system that has failed it repeatedly, Misty commands the eye and the attention almost from her first appearance.  She's a force in her own right, moving diagonally to both men, and sparring, as well, with Mariah and with her own superiors in the NYPD in her pursuit of the truth.  If Netflix's executives truly believe that Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle--a bloodthirsty serial killer driven by entitlement and self-justification--can carry his own series, then there is simply no justification for not doing the same for a character as magnetic, as interesting, and as blatantly heroic as Misty Knight.

Even with Misty, Cottonmouth, and Mariah to enliven things, however, the first half of Luke Cage's season feels a little perfunctory, and especially when you remember that this is, after all, meant to be a superhero story.  It is, therefore, not much of a surprise when a major twist halfway through the season reveals that its true conflict will be between Luke and Diamondback.  But it is a profound disappointment, because Diamondback is a terrible villain, with antics that were clearly intended to come off as menacing and deranged mainly registering as annoying and over the top.  It's in these episodes, too, that Misty is frustratingly sidelined, from a main actor in her own story to a supporting character in Luke's, who must scramble to prove his innocence when Mariah and Shades scheme to frame him for Diamondback's (and their own) crimes.  (The one bright point in these episodes is that they give Claire Temple a great deal to do, though here, too, there are some odd choices, chiefly the one to make Claire Luke's love interest.  Considering that Claire was previously involved with Matt Murdock, and broke up with him because he refused to give up his vigilantism, the fact that she has no such issues with Luke feels strange--as if his main attraction for her is the fact that he has superpowers.)

You may have noticed that I've said almost nothing so far about the show's title character, and this is unfortunately true to the space he ends up taking in the story.  Colter has tremendous presence, both physically and emotionally.  He's great at conveying both Luke's charm and his determination, even at moments when he's at his most withdrawn and uncommunicative.  But unlike Daredevil or Jessica Jones, Luke Cage isn't interested in digging past its protagonist's facade and poking at their insecurities--on the contrary, even as it reveals his tragic and abusive backstory, it is mostly concerned with validating his belief that he has the right, and the authority, to act in order to protect his community without being questioned or hindered.  You can see why the show makes this choice--by virtue of his skin color, Luke (and men like him) have it repeatedly drummed into them that they are inherently lesser (and perhaps also inherently villainous).  So the fact that this character is possessed of an ironclad belief in his own value, and in his right to act, is quietly revolutionary.  But it also leaves Luke feeling rather flat.  When he learns, for example, that his dead wife had lied to him, and was complicit in the abuse he suffered in prison and the experiments he was subjected to against his will, his only response is to mouth a few platitudes and quietly move on.  Compare that to the moment in Jessica Jones in which Luke learns that Jessica is the person who killed his wife, and that she lied to him about it while becoming romantically involved with him.  There's more vulnerability and humanity in Luke's five-minute reaction to this betrayal than there is in the entire first season of Luke Cage, and the show is all the poorer for that.

Diamondback's introduction is clearly intended to address some of the flatness of Luke's characterization--he and Luke turn out to have a complicated history, and he challenges our hero's simplistic understanding of his past and his family when he reveals that they are half-brothers.  But this history is introduced so awkwardly that it never really registers, especially since, even in these moments, Luke still isn't allowed to drop his facade of emotional invulnerability.  The revelation that his admired father was flawed, and that Luke himself contributed to the victimization of his half-brother, has virtually no effect on Luke, so it can't be expected to register with the audience.  When the final episode in the season opens with a flashback to the young Luke and Diamondback sparring, it feels like too little, too late--Luke is too flat, and Diamondback is too aggravating, for us to become invested in this friendship, much less its dissolution.

What makes Luke Cage work, despite the vagueness of its story and some of its characters, is the specificity of its setting.  It's been a running joke that the Netflix MCU shows tend to treat New York neighborhoods as if they were their own cities, but Luke Cage is the only one of the three to actually earn that approach, first by leaning on Harlem's storied past as a center of black culture and community, and second by showing the neighborhood to us, lingering on distinctive bits of architecture or street art.  Some of the best moments in the season are the ones that let the story pause and allow its setting to simply be.  In that sense, the choice of Pop's barbershop--that prototypical setting for black male bonding and camaraderie--is both obvious and richly rewarding.  It allows Luke and his friends to simply talk, about their favorite books, or boxers, or musicians, or just about the events of their lives.  More than any entry in the MCU, Luke Cage feels specific to a particular setting, which it depicts lovingly and with careful attention to detail.  It's amazing how often those are the qualities that distinguish a flawed but interesting work from one that has no value.

One of the most interesting ways in which Luke Cage creates a sense of place--and one that feels particularly relevant given the recent accusations of blandness leveled at the MCU's musical texture--is the show's soundtrack.  Music is a vital component of the show, down to episode titles taken from the songs of the hip hop duo Gang Starr, or a guest appearance from Method Man, who freestyles an impromptu ode to the title character (a charmingly old school touch, reminiscent of the days when superhero stories didn't take themselves so seriously).  It's also all over the show.  Cottonmouth owns a nightclub, which gives the show an excuse to feature multiple live performances in various genres associated with black culture--everything from hip hop to funk to R&B.  The soundtrack, as well, features multiple interesting cuts, as well as a distinctive and often playful score.  Musically, Luke Cage is the most exciting thing to ever come out of the MCU, and it's that music that gives the show an identity that its storytelling often lacks.

At the same time, Luke Cage's emphasis on giving Harlem its own unique, self-contained identity can have a strange, not always positive effect on the show's politics.  As promised, Luke Cage delivers black stories, and there is something genuinely revolutionary about a superhero story in which not only the hero and the supporting characters, but virtually every minor character, every bit player, every face in the background is black or brown (and in which the perspective of white characters is almost completely ignored).  The fact that Luke is a superhero operating within a community that has suffered from difficult relations with the official authorities gives his actions a weight that most other superhero stories have struggled to achieve.  In a year that has seen multiple attempts to grapple with the morality of superheroes, all of which fell flat, Luke Cage makes a convincing argument that what was missing from these stories was any acknowledgment of race (as in, to take a particularly blatant example, Civil War, in which two powerful, privileged white men grapple over the morality of committing global-scale violence, while the murdered and mutilated bodies that drop as a result of their dispute just happen to all be black).  The fact that the police in Harlem are unwilling or unable to properly police the neighborhood, to protect its residents without criminalizing them, gives Luke a justification for existing that Matt Murdock, for example, doesn't really have.  The fact that the same authorities that wink at Matt, let Jessica Jones off the hook for cold-blooded murder, and bring Frank Castle into court alive, also mount a manhunt for Luke, carrying weapons especially designed to kill him, is a pointed and deliberate choice by the show's writers.

It's also, however, a comparison that is left to the viewers to make.  While the show is vocal in its discussions of the hostility between Harlem's community and the police--which culminates in ordinary citizens donning bullet-riddled hoodies, both as an homage to Luke and a way of shielding him from the police's attentions--it is surprisingly silent when it comes to the role that white institutions, white supremacy, and systemic racism played in bringing us to this situation.  Harlem's insularity appears to extend to the complete absence of influence from any of the city's mostly-white institutions.  Luke Cage seems to take the standard superhero approach, in which government begins and ends with policing.  It thus doesn't address education, infrastructure, health care, housing, or jobs, the neglect of all of which has been the main cause of poverty, crime, and drug addiction in the inner city.  The only character who brings up the role of government in deliberately neglecting black and brown inner city neighborhoods is treated as a joke (and immediately killed off).  Speaking about Luke, Method Man opines that "there's something powerful about seeing a black man that's bulletproof and unafraid." But the show never really seems to want to talk about what it is that Luke--and other black men who are not bulletproof--have to be afraid of.

Nowhere is the strangeness of this lacuna more evident, or more troubling, than in the show's handling of police brutality.  Given Luke Cage's emphasis on Harlem as its own self-contained world, whose problems are rooted in crime rather than systemic racism, it would perhaps have been understandable if the show had simply chosen not to depict instances of police brutality at all (after all, and as noted by several members of the show's cast and crew, the very choice of a hoodie as Luke's uniform is already a powerful and deliberate statement about this issue).  Instead, the show chooses to feature multiple instances of policemen abusing black and brown citizens, but always slants its depiction of these incidents in such a way as to avoid an obvious association with Black Lives Matter and its message.  In one case, Misty's partner, Rafael Scarfe (Frank Whaley), murders a young black man--by strangulation, no less.  But the significance of the moment is very easy to miss, because Scarfe isn't motivated by racism, but by corruption--he's in the pay of Cottonmouth, who wants the young man killed.  Later in the season, Scarfe is mortally wounded, and an entire episode is expended on humanizing him and extending him sympathy--chiefly from the direction of Misty, who still cares about her partner despite his crimes.

Later instances of police brutality show more willingness to call a spade a spade--when Misty attacks Claire in an interrogation room, or when another detective brutally beats a young boy who refuses to tell him where Luke is.  But here, again, it's significant how much the show works to downplay associations with Black Lives Matter.  Both Misty and the detective who attacks the boy are black.  More importantly, both are suffering from extreme emotional distress--Misty recently had an encounter with Diamondback that nearly ended with her death, and the detective is upset because his friend and fellow officer was murdered by, as he believes, Luke--and are trying to lay their hands on a suspect whom they believe to be extremely dangerous.  As Noah Berlatsky wrote recently, one of the problems that emerges when mainstream TV tries to engage with police brutality, even from a standpoint that sees it as unacceptable, is the assumption that the murder or brutalization of innocent black people at the hands of the police tends to involve cops who are in distress, usually over a troubling and serious crime that they're investigating.  In reality, most heavily-publicized cases in which the police kill black people involve victims whose crimes were either minor and non-violent--as in the case of Sandra Bland or Eric Garner--or who had committed no crime at all--as in the case of Tamir Rice or Philando Castile.  So Luke Cage not only minimizes the prevalence and ubiquity of police brutality, it focuses its attention on just the wrong place--the emotional state of the officers who committed the violence, and the excuses that can be offered for it (after Misty's attack on Claire, for example, we spend a whole episode with her in a session with a psychologist)--rather than on the system that encourages these officers to see certain people as inherently dangerous, and thus killable.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Luke Cage's approach to police brutality is what happens after Misty's colleague beats up the boy who refuses to tell him about Luke.  Swooping in with the boy's mother, Mariah Dillard uses the incident to castigate the police for their indifference to violence against black people--and really, to get them to further intensify their pursuit of Luke and draw attention away from her own crimes.  She organizes a rally, ostensibly about police brutality, but with the real purpose of inflaming attitudes against superpowered people, and laying the groundwork for lobbying the city to equip the police with rounds that can penetrate Luke's skin, which are supplied by Diamondback.  So we have a black politician cynically leveraging Black Lives Matter rhetoric in order to achieve her own personal, criminal ends.  And we have that same black politician orchestrating the over-militarization of police, again in order to conceal her crimes and get rid of a personal enemy.  When a city official expresses reservations about equipping cops with these new bullets, it's only because "any weapon that the police or military has eventually ends up on the street", not because the police will inevitably use this hyper-lethal ordinance on regular people, as they have every time in the past.

At the end of the season, when Misty is informed that she doesn't have the evidence to prosecute Mariah Dillard, she rants that "the system is broken!"  That's a fairly standard expression of frustration for a police officer in a superhero story, the justification that such stories offer for the extra-legal violence of someone like Daredevil.  But in the context of a police officer who has, by that point, attacked two different suspects, and whose complaint is that she isn't allowed to go even further outside the law in her pursuit of them, it feels like the show prioritizing the conventions of its genre--in which extra-legal force is necessary to stop bad guys--over their associations in the real world--in which the perception that some people are "bad guys" is used to justify their immediate execution.

In the season's final episode, having defeated Diamondback and while taking a well-deserved moment to rest and reflect, Luke Cage reminds us that his show is about black stories:

People are scared.  But they can't be paralyzed by that fear.  You have to fight for what's right every single day, bulletproof skin or not.  You can't just not snitch, or turn away, or take money under the table because life has turned you sour.  When did people stop caring?  Harlem is supposed to represent our hopes and dreams.  It's the pinnacle of black art, politics, innovation.  It's supposed to be a shining light to the world.  It's our responsibility to push forward, so that the next generation be further along than us.

Just as in the first episode, it's a thesis statement for the show.  And just as in that episode, it's a frustrating one.  Luke is placing the burden of healing and repairing a community that has been neglected and abused for decades on the very people who have suffered the most from that neglect and abuse--perhaps even blaming them for it.  On one level, it's a very superhero kind of approach.  Superhero stories always come down to individual solutions.  The idea of a systemic problem that can't be solved by a single person with powers is anathema to their very existence.  But in the context of a story about a black superhero in a black inner city neighborhood, that statement takes on a very different tone.  It becomes the conservative bugbear about "personal responsibility," the insistence that the only people responsible for black people's problems are black people themselves, and that all those problems could be solved if they would only pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Luke Cage is obviously trying to paint its hero as an aspirational figure, someone who inspires black people (though mostly black men) to believe in themselves and in their ability to change the world.  That's an important message, but like so much else about the superhero genre, it's a double-edged sword.

As I've written in the past, superhero stories tend to have a complex, dysfunctional relationship with the concept of abuse.  Because so many superheroes have a background of abuse, the stories we tell about them tend to fetishize it and treat it as a means to an end.  Most of all, they tend to be harshly prescriptive about what the "right" reaction to abuse is, and to divide people into heroes and villains according to how they respond to their traumas.  But what happens when that abuse isn't personal, but communal and generational?  To reduce the complex problems faced by black communities to a need to "push forward", an imperative not to become "sour", is superficially true, but beneath that surface it raises a lot issues that Luke Cage isn't willing or able to address.  Ultimately, Luke Cage's problem may not be its politics, so much as its unwillingness--or inability--to break free of the conventions of its genre.

Civil Links

It's been two weeks since Captain America: Civil War opened (a week in the US), and I think it's time to call it: the conversation surrounding this movie has been surprisingly, and disappointingly, muted.  Most reviews seem to have reached a consensus of good-movie-that-handles-its-politics-well, which, even notwithstanding that I only agree with the first part, feels like only scratching the surface (meanwhile, the more character-focused conversation on tumblr has tended to revolve around the kind of arguments that only serve to remind me why this is a good life rule).  Around this time after the comparatively incoherent Age of Ultron, we were practically swimming in thinkpieces and conversations, and while Civil War doesn't have as obvious an outrage hook as awkwardly implying that infertile women are monsters, one would think that people would still be able to find things to say about it.  Perhaps the truth is simply what I suggested in my own review: that the worldbuilding and politics of this movie are built on such a flimsy foundation that any attempt to engage with them inevitably leads to the conclusion that they're not worth talking about.  Nevertheless, here are a few interesting links that I have been able to find--obviously, I'd be interested in any others you could suggest in the comments.

• Probably my favorite straight-up review of the film comes from Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com.  Amid a torrent of reviews that have tended to overpraise the film as both a piece of storytelling and a political statement, Seitz is refreshingly even-handed, finding things to be positive about (as there undoubtedly are) without ignoring some of the fundamental issues in the film's construction.
  

  There's a fair bit of "The Dark Knight" logic, or "logic," to the storytelling. Characters do things to other characters because they know it'll set off a chain reaction that'll eventually lead to a very specific moment at the end; luckily for them, each step goes according to plan, because if it didn't there would be no movie. And, as in the inferior yet thematically similar "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," the hero-versus-hero slugfest only seems to spring from real and deep philosophical differences. It turns out that the real problem is that these characters don't talk to each other when they should.

• Writing in the Washington Post, Henry Farrell (perhaps best known to readers here as one of the bloggers on Crooked Timber) lays out all the ways in which Civil War gets global politics wrong.  This might seem so trivially obvious that it's not worth even spelling out, but I actually found it quite useful to have all these issue laid out in plain language.
  

  "Captain America: Civil War" talks about how superheroes might be perceived as vigilantes. There's an even uglier word for someone who jumps into a political situation, blows things and people up and disappears again — terrorist. When Thomas Barnett writes about "super-empowered individuals" in world politics, he isn't talking about Ant Man and Spider-Man. He’s talking about Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11, 2001, plane hijackers, who acted as individuals to change the shape of global politics. The Avengers have better intentions but the same potential for causing chaos without accountability. Even if they're acting to save the human race, it's unsurprising that governments should be angry and unhappy at their willingness to intervene across the world, regardless of the collateral damage.

• One of the points made by Farrell is that Civil War irretrievably skews its story by focusing so myopically on American concerns and perspectives, even as its heroes seek the freedom and authority to operate all over the world.  Samira Nadkarni expands on this issue in a Storify of her tweets about the movie, in which she argues that "the MCU insists that a bomb in Lagos and even the inclusion of an African subplot is basically all about America and the Global North."  Her arguments touch on the way that Avengrs (which is to say American) interference outside of the US, and chiefly in the Global South, is seen as an American issue; on the problems with Wakanda as an African nation that is explicitly un-African; and on the choice to center the discussion of registration (inasmuch as it exists) on Wanda, a white European, whose terrorist activities would surely not have been so easily swept under the rug if she were a Middle Eastern man.
  
  
• If you haven't done so already, check out Samira's review of the TV series Shadowhunters (based on Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments books) at Strange Horizons.  Though published several weeks before Civil War's release and focusing on a (nominally) different genre, it touches on a lot of problems with the way that superhero stories center white, Western people even as they claim to be about issues that largely concern people of color and the Global South.  The construction "a TV show about moderate racists taking on a vehement racist so they can learn to be slightly less racist" describes so much of the current superhero genre (and gets at why I've grown increasingly bored, not to say suspicious, when stories in this genre trot out cartoon Nazis as their ultimate villains--at this stage, it just feels like a distraction, a way to keep me from noticing the heroes' less overt fascist tendencies).  Samira's segue into her outrage at the way that the trailers for Civil War centered Steve's devotion to Bucky, even as other stories about superhero registration have treated people of color as the villains, feels particular prescient:
  

  In Marvel's TV property Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the character of Jiaying (played by Tibetan-Australian actress Dichen Lachman) fights against registration being enforced by S.H.I.E.L.D., as a result of having lived through this information being misused, leading to torture, organ theft, the death of the majority of her community, and the loss of her child. Her desperate attempt to start a war in response to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s American neo-colonial statement-threat of "we'll leave you in peace if you register" with its consequent policing and control of the Asian-themed city of Afterlife, is framed within the show as terrorism and strongly disavowed. Her story of fighting against forced registration isn't one that matters. The reasoning behind her actions—which also involves tortures of various kinds being a possible likelihood for her people as part of her lived experience—isn't endorsed. But, oh, yes, do tell me more about Bucky Barnes. Divorce this story even further from the people it affects. We've always been the villains of the piece. 

• Brian Phillips, writing at MTV.com, makes a valiant attempt to reconcile Civil War and the world of the MCU (and other superhero movies) with present-day political anxieties, trying to get at why we're seeing so many stories about how (and if) we can reconcile the existence of superpowered individuals with democratic society, and with the post-9/11 penchant for violent global interference.  That he doesn't quite succeed is probably not his fault, given how muddled this genre (and the thinking about these issues in Hollywood) are, but this is nevertheless a well-written, funny essay that articulates some of the core problems with this project:
  

  The other explanation for that focus is an irony that, when you start to lay it out, is kind of gobsmacking, and that gets at an almost Greek-tragic dimension of recent comic-book movies. (Let’s say Norse-tragic, because Thor.) The irony is this: The superheroes in superhero movies are always the only force capable of saving humanity from the threats it faces. But with astounding regularity in post-9/11 comic-book films, the threats mankind has to be saved from were either unleashed by the heroes themselves, came into being simultaneously with the heroes, or both. In other words, the chaos from which the heroes are required to save the world is implicit in the heroes’ being in the world in the first place; even when the protagonists aren’t actually the authors of the crisis they are fighting against — something that, again, happens with startling frequency — they are manifestations of the same fundamental shift. Hark!

• Over at my tumblr, I talk briefly about my favorite Bucky Barnes moment in the film--the one that seems most obviously opposed to the woobification impulse that seems to take over fandom when it discusses not just this character, but all the handsome white men in this universe.  I also mention some of the ways the film could have used Natasha better (which is to say at all).
  
  
• Linda Holmes at NPR does the obvious pop culture thing of linking Civil War with, what else, Hamilton.  Clickbaity as that sounds, Holmes has a valid point--both works are about people who initially try to work out their problems through discussion, but who find themselves, by the end of the story, pointing weapons at people they care about once their disputes have passed the point of no return.
  

  There's a fascinating sequence, perhaps unique among movies of this budget and scale, in which a group of characters who are all known to be decent, known to be moral, known to be noble, and known to be literally both Super and Heroes sit in a group talking through this critical disagreement about acceding or not to outside supervision — to acting only when a group of governments working in concert tell them they can (and must). They find themselves forced to balance legitimately compelling arguments on both sides. They argue back and forth, not in the "fight" sense but in the "argument" sense: Someone offers support for one answer, then someone else offers support for the other. Everyone has a point. They all respect each other. They all know they cannot split the difference and cannot find a choice in the middle. They cannot punch or shoot or zap their way out of it. The choice is binary: They will say yes or they will say no, and despite the breadth of their agreement on the relevant issues, they cannot agree on the answer.

  I'm linking to this piece mainly because I want to disagree with it, or at least to point out that drawing comparisons to Hamilton does Civil War no favors.  Holmes is right that some of the discussion scenes in the first half of the film are exciting precisely because they're not the sort of thing we're used to seeing in this genre, but she ignores the fact that by its second half, Civil War makes it clear that these discussions were never the point--that what it really wanted was to get to the fighting.  This is very different from how Hamilton handles its characters' descent into violence, which is depicted as the act of two stubborn, childish men, and, more importantly, not the way to resolve political disputes.  Hamilton and Burr end up in a duel not because they have fundamental political disagreements, but because of their pride and immaturity.  Meanwhile, political action is still happening through conversation--either in the thrilling "Cabinet Battle"s that are the highlights of the play's second act, or in the "Room Where it Happens," where people sit down and hammer out policy details.
  
  Even more importantly, the way in which Hamilton handles its descent into violence is a direct rebuke to Civil War's glibness towards the same subject.  Holmes is right to highlight Burr's line, immediately before his duel with Hamilton, that "This man will not make an orphan of my daughter!"  Newly-minted Tony nominee Leslie Odom Jr. all but screams the line, going off-key as a way of demonstrating the desperation of Burr's will to live.  That desperation is completely absent from the climactic fight scene in Civil War, which both the film and the characters treat almost as a game, thus robbing the film of most of its emotional weight.  It's also significant that after killing Hamilton, Burr's life was basically ruined.  Even in the early 19th century, there were social consequences to his choice to abandon civility in favor of violence.  No one familiar with the MCU will be able to expect similar consequences for any of Civil War's characters.  On the contrary, the film blatantly leaves an opening for Steve and his fellow renegades to use violence in a socially sanctioned matter, saving the world from Thanos in Infinity War, thus sweeping away all their crimes in this story.
  
  
• Not directly Civil War-related, but of interest to people who want to have a discussion about politics (and particularly progressive politics) in comics and have been disappointed in the dearth of such conversations surrounding this movie.  Since the beginning of the year, blogger Steven Attewell has been writing A People's History of the Marvel Universe, in which he discusses the history of the comics company's heroes and how they intersect, and emerge from, the politics of their day.  A lot of the discussions, as you might expect, center on the X-Men (the last few weeks in particular have focused on the infamous "mutant metaphor"), but Captain America has also featured heavily.  It's a great resource for people, like myself, who know these characters mainly from the movies, and would like to know how they developed, and how their political stances reflect social issues of their era more than ours.  If you're reading along at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where the series is being cross-posted, there's also a lively discussion in the comments.
  
  (Incidentally, it occurs to me that Attewell's series is precisely the sort of thing that the Best Related Work Hugo category should recognize.  I'm not crazy about the recent trend of recognizing individual blog posts in this category, but the People's History series is now approaching book-length, and I for one would love to see it recognized as such next year.)

Captain America: Civil War

It's a bit of a strange thing to say, but I might have liked Captain America: Civil War better if it were a less good movie.  When films like The Dark Knight Rises or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice deliver rancid political messages wrapped in equally rancid plots and characterization, the reviewer's job is made easier.  We can point to how a failure to recognize the actual complexity of a situation, or to imbue characters with full humanity, both informs and reflects the simplistic, quasi-fascist message of the movie.  Civil War is a trickier customer.  It tries--and on some level, manages--to be more intelligent and more thoughtful than something like Batman v Superman.  Its characters take the film's central conflict seriously, discussing it rationally and trying to find a way to resolve it without descending into fisticuffs.  But even as they do so, they reveal the inherent impossibility of their project, the way the core assumptions of this entire genre combine to form a black hole that it can never escape.  I've said it before, but the minute you start taking superheroes seriously, and debating the rights and wrongs of them, only one conclusion is possible: that superheroes are a really bad idea, and that any fictional world that houses more than a handful of them will inevitably devolve into a horrifying dystopia in which the rule of law and the authority of democratic government are meaningless.  In the end, and despite the wide gulf of quality between them, Civil War ends up telling the same story as Batman v Superman: a tragedy about people who don't know any way to address their problems except through violence.

Before we get to that, however, let's note that for all my praise of it, Civil War is not a top-notch MCU movie.  Though it does a better job of wrangling a truly epic number of characters than last year's Age of Ultron, the need to service all of them--and set up several future entries in the franchise, chiefly Black Panther and the next iteration of Spider-Man--means that the film is overlong and occasionally listless.  It loses control of its tone--the one quality that has made the MCU undeniably excellent as a comics adaptation--at several crucial points, most importantly its climactic battle scene.  The relationships that were such a delight in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier--particularly the friendships that Steve Rogers develops with Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanoff--are given short shrift, and in general those characters leave the movie feeling flattened and uninteresting^[1].  Perhaps most importantly, the film completely fails to sell the supposedly deep bond of friendship and loyalty between Steve and Bucky Barnes.  Whether you read the relationship as platonic or (as most of fandom does) romantic, Steve's devotion to Bucky is what drives his actions throughout the movie.  And yet what shows up on screen between the two friends is curiously inert--it's never believable that Steve would go the lengths he does for a man that he seems, at most, mildly fond of.  Meanwhile, the relationship that's meant to carry the film's romantic weight, between Steve and Peggy Carter's niece Sharon, never grows beyond a not-very-convincing concept.

Having said all that, there are also a lot of things to praise about Civil War.  Like Winter Soldier before it, it tells a relatively small-scale story, more rooted in espionage and conspiracy tales than in superheroics.  This grounds the film and gives it a weight that was absent from the more high-concept Avengers movies.  The action scenes, similarly, are excellent precisely because their scale is smaller, with the focus placed more on one-on-one matchups than CGI extravaganzas in which our heroes hit large things with even larger things.  Chris Evans continues to anchor the Captain America series--perhaps the entire MCU--with his turn as Steve, conveying the character's staunch beliefs without ever making him seem stiff or inhuman.  The film also, and a little more suprisingly, does a good job with Tony Stark, who is very nearly rehabilitated from his stint as an almost-world-destroying mad scientist in Age of Ultron.  This Tony is more damaged and more thoughtful without losing his defining egotism, and the best scenes of the movie involve him and Steve arguing, not because either one of them is a bad guy, but because they have fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews.  It's in these scenes that Civil War comes closest to selling its argument that "superheroes: yes or no" is a question on which reasonable people can disagree, and that both Tony and Steve have valid points to make.

In order to achieve that gloss of reasonableness, however, Civil War has to commit several rhetorical slights of hand that, as soon as they become clear, undermine not just the film's argument but its very premise.  Our heroes' problems kick off when an Avengers mission in Lagos goes wrong, leaving dozens of civilians dead.  It's the last straw for a world that has grown tired of seeing superheroes at the center of city-destroying mayhem, and as a response the Avengers are asked to sign the Sokovia Accords, which would place them under the auspices of the UN.  While Tony champions the agreement, Steve demurs, refusing to once again place his power at the disposal of the authorities, and insisting that "the best hands are our own."  What seems like a stalemate erupts into open conflict when the summit at which the accords were to be signed is bombed, apparently by Bucky Barnes.  As Steve scrambles, first to bring Bucky in alive, and then to break him out when it becomes clear that he's being framed, he and Tony draw battle lines, with the other MCU characters falling in on both sides.^[2]

There are so many problems with this premise, and with how Civil War develops it, that it's hard to know where to start.  For one thing, there is the subtle but insistent way in which the film massages the events of Age of Ultron so that no real blame attaches to any of the Avengers, most especially Tony Stark.  Civil War makes much of the guilt that Tony feels, and of the personal consequences he's suffered as a result of the earlier film's events--we learn, for example, that he and Pepper have broken up.  But like so much else about the movie, this is a bait-and-switch.  The film pretends to acknowledge Tony's guilt, even as it obscures the things he is actually guilty of.  When Tony tells Steve about his breakup with Pepper, for example, he blames it on his inability to leave behind the life of a superhero, not on the fact that he made the unilateral decision to build an all-powerful AI who went crazy and nearly destroyed the planet.  People who hold Tony responsible for the deaths caused by Ultron are similarly unaware of his real guilt, which means the film can act as if it is taking the events of Age of Ultron seriously, without ever facing up to the consequences they should have had.^[3]

In other words, Civil War pretends that the problem with the Avengers is collateral damage, their inability to save everyone when they involve themselves in a messed-up situation--this, for example, is what happens in Nigeria, when Wanda Maximoff tries to levitate away a man wearing an explosive vest, but fails to contain the blast long enough to prevent any casualties.  But the real problem with the Avengers is not what they don't or can't do, but what they have done, and what they've gotten away with.  In one particularly galling scene, Wanda sadly muses that the world fears her for her psychic powers.  When really, if anyone fears Wanda, it's probably because she's a former terrorist who sided first with Hydra and then with Ultron, who knowingly sicced the Hulk on a city of three-quarters of a million people, and who has avoided any consequences for these crimes because she enjoys the protection of powerful, connected people like Steve Rogers and Tony Stark.

Another way in which Civil War fudges its premise in order to make it workable is the very purpose of the Sokovia Accords.  The film claims that, as in the original Civil War comic, the accords exist to regulate the actions of "enhanced" individuals, and uses Wanda as a poster child for that need.  But the truth is, people like Wanda are the vast minority of MCU superheroes, and recent additions to boot--Wanda and Vision were introduced in Age of Ultron, and Spider-Man is new to Civil War.  That leaves Steve as the only Avenger whose power is innate.^[4]  Every other MCU hero is either someone who dons a supersuit--Tony, Sam, Scott Lang, James Rhodes, T'Challa--or a highly-trained super-agent--Natsha, Sharon Carter, Clint Barton.  Once you realize this, it becomes easier to see that while Civil War claims to be about the question of whether we should have superheroes, what it's actually asking is whether people who are rich and famous (and, for the most part, white and American) should be allowed to form their own private armies, and carry out military missions in population centers all over the world.

Once you ask the question that way, it's clear that the answer is no, and the fact that Steve does not give this answer, while not entirely unearned, is ultimately inexcusable.  Given the events of Winter Soldier, you can see why Steve would balk at placing himself and his powers under the control of any authority.  Civil War also, and wisely, works its way up to the moment when Steve decides to become an outlaw and a criminal--initially, he merely refuses to sign the accords, and tries to bring Bucky in peacefully; it takes several fight scenes for him to become the aggressor.  But ultimately, Steve's reticence to follow anyone's orders but his own is taken to extremes that are not justifiable, and which can't be explained by his loyalty to Bucky.  Aside from anything else, it's not a believable turn for the character, who has to be flattened into self-satisfied authoritarianism in order for the story to work.  The film tries to argue that Steve believes that he's doing the right thing--most notably, by quoting one of Cap's most famous comics lines, "When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world: 'No, you move.'"  But of course a person who truly believes this sort of thing can just as easily be a monster as a hero.  The thing that has made Steve Rogers into the latter rather than the former has, until now, been the sense that he realizes this.  In Civil War, that no longer seems to be the case.

Steve's failure to recognize just how far beyond the pale he's gone may or may not be a betrayal of the character^[5], but it certainly makes him seem unreasonable, and ultimately even a little villainous.  So does the fact that he can't seem to find any middle ground between getting exactly what he wants, and erupting into violence when he doesn't.  In fairness to Steve, Civil War does not seem to take place in a world in which such a middle ground exists.  When he brings Bucky in to stand trial for the UN bombing, Steve's request that Bucky be represented by a lawyer is greeted, literally, with laughter and derision.  When Steve's allies are arrested near the end of the movie, they are placed, without trial, in a secret prison in the middle of the ocean--even the ones, like Sam or Scott, who have no superpowers without their suits.  It in fact gets a little hard to blame Steve for his intransigence when we realize just how untrustworthy and villainous government is in this movie.  This, however, is a flaw in the story, not a justification for the characters' actions.  It's a flaw that is hardly unique to Civil War, the MCU, or even superhero stories--seemingly all of Western pop culture has bought into the notion that government is either incompetent or evil, and that individual action, usually of the violent variety, is the only way to achieve change.  But it reinforces the sense that for all the movie's pretense to thoughtfulness and sophistication, it ultimately has very little to say.  In a world in which there are only two ways to respond to a problem--surrender and all-out war--there's only so much talking you can do before throwing punches becomes the only possible way to advance the plot.

Nowhere are Civil War's confusion and incoherence more palpable than when its characters finally start throwing punches, in a battle royale between the supers aligned with Steve (Sam, Bucky, Wanda, Scott, and Clint) and the ones aligned with Tony (Natasha, T'Challa, Rhodey, Vision, and Peter Parker).  It is, simultaneously, the film's best scene and its worst one, a brilliant piece of action filmmaking that makes it clear that, for all the thought and care that went into making Civil War seem like a not-stupid movie, in the end this was all it was ever about--an excuse to get our heroes fighting each other, no matter how thin the pretext and how many contortions it has to take their personalities through to get there.

Most of the characters who choose to involve themselves in the climactic fight of Civil War have no real reason to be there.  Why would Scott Lang and Clint Barton endanger their freedom and their lives with their families?  Just because Captain America asks them to?  That sort of thing worked in Winter Soldier, but when Steve's motives are so much murkier and less defensible, it's a lot less believable--and makes Scott and Clint a lot less sympathetic when, later in the movie, they are shocked to discover that breaking the law has landed them in prison.  And then there's the matter of Spider-Man, who is not only a teenager, but, as played by Tom Holland, a very young-seeming one, whose heroics have so far amounted only to tackling street crime.  The fact that Tony Stark recruits this inexperienced child to fight against trained killers is unforgivable.  The fact that Steve Rogers, upon realizing that he's been pitted against a child, doesn't immediately lay down his arms is equally so.  In a coherent story, this alone should disqualify either character from ever again being called a hero.

But Civil War doesn't acknowledge this, because it wants us to, simultaneously, take this scene very seriously--to thrill to the angst and conflict as our heroes are compelled to fight against one another--and not to take it seriously at all--to lean back and enjoy the quips and jokes, forgetting that it actually means something when people abandon diplomacy and compromise and choose violence instead.  The ultimate effect of this tonal zigzag is to make these previously-beloved characters look callous and foolish, something that is only exacerbated by the choice of venue for this fight.  The filmmakers clearly chose an empty airport runway because of the by-now frantic fear shared by all superhero storytellers of seeming indifferent to civilian casualties, but it's a choice that also reinforces the heroes' silliness.  They end up looking like nothing so much as a bunch of hooligans, meeting up for a fistfight at an empty weekend parking lot, because violence is the only way they know to resolve their disputes.^[6]

Late in the movie, Steve tells Tony that the fundamental difference between them is that while Tony puts his faith in institutions, Steve chooses to believe in people.  This is, obviously, a false and facile dichotomy, but what's worse is that it isn't even true.  There is nothing about Steve's behavior in Civil War that suggests that he believes in people.  On the contrary, his actions can only be explained by a profound distrust--perhaps even disdain--for the public, the press, and anyone who might form an opinion and pass judgment on his choices and actions.  Instead of arguing publicly against the Sokovia Accords, instead of demanding in the press that Bucky be granted the same right to a fair trial as anyone else, instead of exposing things like the government's secret prison, Steve's approach is to expect everyone else to trust him, implicitly and without question, even as he repeatedly squanders that trust through his choices and actions.  Civil War is a lot more subtle and insidious about it, but by its end the portrait it paints of Steve is not that different from Zack Snyder's take on Superman--they're both men who believe that they have the right to exercise violence as they see fit, and that anyone who tries to question them is so wrong that they're not even worth engaging with.  For a character who was introduced, way back in Captain America: The First Avenger, with the line "I don't like bullies," this is a profoundly disappointing turn.

In Civil War's final scene, Tony and Steve finally realize that they've been played--that the entire purpose of the film's events, and the plot to frame Bucky, was to get them at each other's throats.  It's a truce that doesn't last long, because the film's villain (Daniel Brühl as Zemo, whom I haven't mentioned already because he's ultimately not that important to the story, but who does a good job with a character who deserved more space and attention) reveals what Steve had already known and kept to himself, that one of Bucky's assignments as the Winter Soldier was to kill Tony's parents.  The film obviously sees nothing wrong with the fact that this revelation sparks the final, knock-down fight between the two former friends^[7], leading to a rift between them that will obviously not be resolved until Steve and those who have sided with him return to triumphantly save the day in Infinity War.  But to me, Tony's choice to resort to violence--and Steve's choice to go along with him--reveal everything that is wrong, not just with this movie, but with the MCU and possibly even the superhero genre as a whole.

It's OK for Tony Stark to be furious at what he learns about Bucky and Steve.  It's OK for Tony Stark to throw a punch at Steve Rogers.  It is not OK for Iron Man to try to kill Captain America over what is, in the end, a personal matter.  The minute that Tony (and Steve) feel free to use their powers to gratify their own roiling emotions, they cease to be heroes, because a real hero knows that they have the responsibility not only to act, but to know when not to act.  To use their power only as a last resort, and not for frivolous or unjustified reasons.  That both Tony and Steve fail this test is perhaps understandable and human.  But that Civil War does not recognize this as a failure--that it sees their descent into violence as understandable, natural, perhaps even desirable--tells us everything we need to know about its world, in which people arrogate to themselves tremendous power and the right to use it whenever and however they want, and the rest of us don't even get to question it.  Much as I enjoyed it, I think Civil War is the point where the MCU and I part ways, because there is, quite simply, no one left to root for.

---

[1] This is particularly true of Sam, whose devolution, from a counselor who was happy to befriend and help Steve but who also had his own life and his own career, into Captain America's sidekick, has been one of the more disappointing turns of the post-Winter Soldier MCU movies. ↩

[2] As an aside, it's extremely gratifying that the country that takes the lead in championing the Sokovia Accords is the fictional African superpower Wakanda.  Obviously, as far as the MCU's handlers are concerned, this serves the purpose of introducing the Wakandan crown prince T'Challa, also known as the Black Panther.  But given how casually the MCU's movies and TV shows have assumed that their American heroes are entitled to jet into sovereign--and mostly non-Western--nations, cause mayhem, and jet away, it's encouraging to see that within the films' universe, the pushback to this approach comes from the leaders of non-white countries.  I've seen some conflicting reactions to the entire concept of Wakanda--why, some people quite reasonably ask, invent an African nation instead of using one of the many real ones that Hollywood blockbusters tend to treat as nothing but a backdrop?  The answer to that question will obviously depend a great deal on how Black Panther handles its setting, but the little we see of it in Civil War--and the fact that Wakanda is able to demand concessions from the Western world--feels encouraging. ↩

[3] The fact that the world has been allowed to remain ignorant of Tony's role in creating Ultron is one of the huge potholes in the MCU that Civil War can't avoid falling into.  It robs Tony of any moral authority he might otherwise have had, while making the other characters look stupid for not even bringing it up in their arguments with him. ↩

[4] Bucky is not an Avenger at any point in this movie, and anyway it's never been clear to me whether he has actual superpowers or is simply supremely trained.  Technically, Thor and the Hulk should also count as supers with innate powers, but neither of them appears in this movie, and more importantly, it should be obvious that the Sokovia Accords can't be applied to either one of them. ↩

[5] Certainly by this point there seem to have been more MCU movies that depict Steve as a self-righteous prig than ones that take a more nuanced view of him. ↩

[6] It should be noted that not everyone in the film is so casually accepting of Steve and Tony's recourse to violence, but that the characters who question it are, for the most part, also the ones given the least space in the story.  Natasha initially sides with Tony because she feels that signing the accords is the best solution to a real predicament, and stands with him in the parking lot fight.  But she also chastises him for letting his ego guide his decisions, and, realizing that the situation between him and Steve can only escalate into further violence, removes herself from it.  She is thus absent from the film's final act.  Vision correctly warns that Tony and Steve's unwillingness to compromise will lead to calamity, but when his warnings go unheeded, he apparently feels obliged to join in the fighting.  Only T'Challa is allowed to truly grow in his views, and to see clearly how foolish and pointless Steve and Tony's squabbling is.  But he is also the character who is most disconnected from the rest of the story and its characters, existing, seemingly, in his own narrative that just happens to coincide with theirs. ↩

[7] It is darkly funny that in both Civil War and Batman v Superman, the crucial turning point in a battle between the two heroes is rooted in the Batman character's lingering issues over the murder of his mother. ↩

Show Me a Hero: Thoughts on Jessica Jones

2015 has been an interesting year for Marvel Studios and the MCU.  The ever-expanding franchise's movie wing struggled this year, closing out the otherwise excellent Phase II with the overstuffed Avengers: Age of Ultron and the underbaked Ant-Man, two very different movies whose single shared trait is how definitively they demonstrate that Marvel isn't interested in--is, in fact, terrified of--letting women take center stage in its movies.  The TV arm, meanwhile, premiered three very interesting--if, ultimately, imperfect--projects, all of whom gave more space to women and people of color than the movies seemingly ever will.  Agent Carter finally gave one the MCU's most magnetic characters (and performers) her own platform, though the show struggled to find something to do with its protagonist, or, with one important exception, to surround her with equally interesting supporting characters.  Daredevil is easily the most experimental--visually and structurally--thing that Marvel has produced, and features one of its best villains, even if it the show as a whole lacks a coherent, interesting story.  And now, just as the year winds to a close, Marvel's partnership with Netflix delivers what is not only its best TV series thus far, but a work that would easily rank near the top of any list of the MCU's properties--Jessica Jones.

Based on the comic by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos, Jessica Jones's eponymous heroine (Krysten Ritter) is a hard-drinking, self-destructive private detective with (thus far unexplained) super-strength.  In the pilot episode, Jessica is hired to track down a missing girl, and as she traces her footsteps she realizes that the girl has been taken by Kilgrave (David Tennant), a man with mind-control powers who held Jessica, compelling her to act as his girlfriend and commit crimes on his behalf, for months, leaving her shattered and suffering from PTSD.  When Kilgrave compels his latest victim to commit a gruesome murder on Jessica's doorstep, she vows to hunt him down and stop him.

At its most basic level, the genius of Jessica Jones is that this is all it's about.  This small, intimate, self-contained story, whose parameters are the polar opposite of the globe-spanning stories and world-destroying stakes that the MCU usually delivers.  Kilgrave, a narcissist who cares only for his own pleasure, has neither the power nor, really, any interest in ruling or destroying the world.  He's only a danger to the people unlucky enough to cross his path.  For those people, though, he is a nightmare.  In one scene, we see him order a man to "cross the street, face that fence, and stay there forever."  The next time we see the poor man, hours later, he's still facing the fence, his face a rictus of horror.  Jessica's goal, meanwhile, isn't to kill Kilgrave (which she is actually in the position to do, with relatively little difficulty, several times throughout the course of the season) but to prove the existence of his powers and thus the innocence of the people who have been left holding the bag for the crimes he ordered them to commit--chiefly Hope Shlottman (Erin Moriarty), the young woman Jessica was hired to find in the pilot.  Most MCU movies and shows struggle to find a challenge worthy of their heroes, but by making the stakes of its story so personal Jessica Jones delivers something that strikes at the heart far more powerfully than the near-destruction of the planet in Age of Ultron.^[1] The evil that Kilgrave does, though localized, is viscerally horrifying.  The fact that he will almost certainly get away with it, unless Jessica manages to outsmart him, is enraging.  By the time its pilot episode ends, Jessica Jones has got us irresistibly on the hook--we need Jessica to defeat Kilgrave in a way that no other MCU story has managed.

It's a good thing that Jessica Jones has such an ironclad story, because on a technical level, it is rarely more than OK.  It feels, in fact, like the exact mirror image of Daredevil, a show whose first season was misshapen and badly paced, but whose individual moments--scenes like Karen's confrontation with Wesley, Matt's conversations with Father Lantom, or the famous hallway fight--remain etched in memory.  There are no moments on this level in Jessica Jones, but creator Melissa Rosenberg and her writers manage what Daredevil didn't, to structure their season in a way that is impeccably paced, never letting up on the story while still giving the audience room to breathe (unlike Daredevil, whose lopsided structure made it ideal for binge-watching, Jessica Jones would probably have worked just as well as a weekly series).  Visually, too, Jessica Jones lacks Daredevil's flourishes, its use of repeating visual motifs, of color and texture, and of course its amazing fight choreography (this last one is somewhat justified, because Kilgrave is not a fighter and Jessica relies more on brute strength than skill, but it's still a shame that the show's action scenes are so lackluster).  None of this is a dealbreaker--again, all this serviceable yet unremarkable writing is working to move the plot along, and does so perfectly--but in a year in which Netflix has repeatedly pushed the envelope in terms of what television is capable of, delivering not just Daredevil but also Sense8, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Master of None, it's a bit disappointing that Jessica Jones looks and sounds so conventional.

This is not to say, however, that Jessica Jones is only conventional.  If the show lacks its own style, it more than makes up for it by having a very definite point of view--that of a show by, about, and for women.  This goes all the way down to the smallest details, such as the fact that bit parts that in almost any other series would have been filled by men almost as a matter of course--roles like a courier delivering a package, a guest on a radio talk show, or a drug dealer--are here played by women.  Or the fact that the show casts many of its recurring and guest roles with middle-aged characters actresses like Carrie-Anne Moss, Robin Weigert, Jessica Hecht, and Rebecca De Mornay.  Or the fact that it features three gay women.  Even closer to the core of its story, the show continues to prioritize female characters and female relationships.  Its central relationship is between Jessica and her foster-sister Trish (Rachael Taylor), and though both women have romantic subplots--Jessica with handsome bar owner Luke Cage (Mike Colter, whose own MCU Netflix series will debut next year); Trish with police officer Will Simpson (Wil Traval), another of Kilgrave's victims who tries to join Jessica's fight against him--ultimately both of these men are treated as sideshows to the season's main love story between the two sisters.^[2]

And then, of course, there's the thing that everyone has been talking about, the fact that Jessica Jones is explicitly, unabashedly, a show about rape, abuse, and recovering from them.  In the original comics Kilgrave was a supervillain who used his control of Jessica to get her to betray the Avengers.  The show quite wisely gives him a more personal, and thus more revolting, motive.  Kilgrave claims to be in love with Jessica, but really he wants to possess her, and the things he does to get her attention--from sending Hope to destroy herself in front of her, to placing a spy in her building, to targeting the people she cares about like Trish and Luke--are designed to isolate her and play on her feelings of guilt and self-loathing.  The real danger to Jessica throughout the season is not that Kilgrave might kill her--which he does not want to do--but that she might buy into his toxic worldview, become convinced that his "love" for her is real, or at least the best that she could ever hope for after everything he's done to her and made her do.  Kilgrave's power becomes a metaphor for the entitled narcissism of an abuser, who sees other people only in terms of what they can do for him, and is incapable of recognizing that they are real people with real feelings.^[3]

As brilliant as Kilgrave is as a portrait of an abuser, what's even more brilliant about Jessica Jones is that he is not the only abusive character on screen, and that unlike him, the others are less obviously monstrous even as they cause tremendous damage.  Moss, for example, plays high-powered attorney Jeri Hogarth, who is leaving her wife, Wendy (Weigert), for her secretary.  When the divorce turns acrimonious, Hogarth enlists Kilgrave's help in getting her wife to back down from her demands, with predictably horrible results.  Unlike Kilgrave, Hogarth is not a sociopath, and yet when she's confronted with the consequences of her actions, she retreats into the same justifications that Kilgrave offers.  "You told me to handle it," she tells her mistress, who was forced to kill Hogarth's wife in self-defense.  "I didn't do anything.  You chose to pick up that thing and crush her skull."

Even more interesting is the story the show gives Simpson, who nearly kills Trish under Kilgrave's orders, and is then driven by his guilt over this to join Jessica's campaign against Kilgrave.  On another show, Simpson might be the hero.  His actions while under Kilgrave's control are just bad enough to make him seem dangerous, but not so bad as to make him look unattractively vulnerable (in other words, he hurts other people, but he never compromises his own masculinity).  He's driven by guilt over hurting a woman, but this doesn't stop her from embarking on a romantic relationship with him.  But because the show is Jessica and Trish's story, Simpson's determination to redeem himself, while understandable and even sympathetic, comes off as pushy and entitled, and as the season draws on he keeps throwing up red flags that, on their own, can be explained and excused, but which taken together paint a picture of a man who is driven primarily by the need to protect his own brittle self-image.  It's understandable that Simpson would want to apologize to Trish, but the fact that he insists that she allow him to do this, camping out on her doorstep for hours, is more worrying.  It's understandable that Simpson would feel that his special ops background makes him uniquely qualified to fight Kilgrave, but the fact that, once Jessica refuses him, he starts badmouthing her to Trish behind her back feels like a deliberate tactic.  It's understandable that Simpson would disagree with Jessica about whether it's more important to kill Kilgrave or help his falsely-accused victims, but the fact that he tries to sabotage her attempts to do the latter feels like it's more about satisfying his needs than doing the right thing.

By the season's final stretch, it becomes clear that what's driving Simpson is his inability to accept that he was made to lose control of himself.  Which is, again, understandable and sympathetic, but his method of dealing with this is to cede control--to the scientists who experimented on him in the army, giving him a drug that turns him into a monster of rage and adrenalin.  This is important, because the image that a lot of abusers project--and which the public discourse around abuse often buys into--is that they are slaves to their own rage.  This is how Simpson excuses his behavior after the drugs he takes lead him to attack Trish and Jessica.  But the truth is that Simpson gave himself permission to lose control when he chose to take those drugs, and that he continues to make that choice even after seeing its destructive consequences, all because he can't face up to the fact that he might be powerless before people like Kilgrave--and Jessica.^[4]

What makes Jessica Jones worth watching, however, is that it's not just a show about fascinating but horrible people.  Hogarth, Simpson, and Kilgrave exist, in part, to offer a contrast to the main story of the show, which is about people who are trying to overcome abuse without becoming abusers themselves.  This they achieve with varying degrees of success--indeed, it's one of the show's smartest choices to feature a wide variety of abuse survivors, with varying coping strategies.  They range from the seemingly together (yet perhaps not so stable) Trish, a do-gooder who has the heart of a superhero even if she doesn't have the strength; to Jessica's neighbor Malcolm (Eka Darville), who wants to continue to believe in people's goodness but struggles with the effects of Kilgrave's influence on him, and with the question of whether he chose to obey his orders; to Hope, who descends into nihilism after Kilgrave makes her out to be a monster, but is galvanized by Jessica's belief in her to keep fighting.  And then of course, there's Jessica herself, whose responses to Kilgrave's abuse are deeply conflicted and self-contradictory, never purely good or bad.  She self-medicates with alcohol, engages in risky behavior, and refuses to get treatment for her PTSD, but her destructiveness is only ever pointed inwards--even in her darkest moments, she rarely loses enough control to hurt others indiscriminately.  And while her determination to fight for Kilgrave's victims seems admirable, it is also clearly an act of projection.  Jessica is so determined to prove the innocence of Kilgrave's other victims, and to convince them that they are not responsible for what he made them do, because she holds herself to too high a standard to ever forgive herself for doing the same.

That Jessica's reaction to abuse is so multifaceted--and rarely purely heroic--feels important given the fraught history that the superhero genre has with trauma and abuse.  Most superheroes, after all, originate in acts of abuse, trauma, and violation, from Batman's murdered parents to the human experimentation that produced Captain America.  And many supervillains are, equally, victims of abuse or experimentation who have reacted violently and vengefully to their violation.  Superhero stories thus often fall into the trap of fetishizing abuse, usually while ignoring its systemic causes, and even more disturbingly, of drawing arbitrary and unrealistic distinctions between the "right" and "wrong" reactions that victims have to it.  That Jessica does not respond to being raped and violated in the correct way, while still behaving heroically and selflessly, is an important reminder that there is no "good" way to respond to abuse, and more importantly, that abuse is not a means to an end, as too many superhero stories end up implicitly suggesting.^[5]  And the fact that Jessica is struggling to find a way to overcome her experiences without losing herself to them lends moral weight to her words when she chastises others for not doing the same--as opposed to other superhero stories, in which deeply privileged heroes lecture traumatized victims about the need to let go of their anger.

In fact, if there's a single problem with the show's handling of Jessica, it is that it doesn't go far enough in depicting the ugliness that would almost have to result from the trauma she's endured.  Ritter is more than game, but Jessica Jones seems a little afraid to make her into the anti-hero that it keeps telling us that she is.  Despite her self-destructiveness and bad attitude, Jessica is a deeply compassionate, selfless person, who spends most of the season trying to help near-strangers, and who never quite seems to earn the disdain and exasperation that so many of the show's characters direct towards her.  Even Jessica's alcoholism, which is referred to frequently throughout the season, feels like an informed trait.  We keep seeing her down drinks, but at no point does her supposed addiction get in the way of her quest.  (It doesn't help that Ritter simply does not look like a woman who has been living at the bottom of a bottle for the better part of a year.)

Paradoxically, the moments when Jessica does do things that are beyond the pale are underplayed and minimized by the show.  In a moment of crisis, she attacks and nearly kills Wendy Hogarth, but she also saves her life at the last minute, and anyway this attempted murder feels less important after Hogarth's own actions get Wendy killed.  More importantly, early in the season we learn that the thing that most haunts Jessica about her time with Kilgrave is the fact that he made her kill a woman, who turns out to be Luke's wife.  Obsessed with this guilt, Jessica begins stalking Luke, and finally embarks on a sexual relationship with him without telling him about their connection.  When Luke learns the truth, he voices his disgust in terms that seem deliberately reminiscent of the accusations of sexual abuse that Jessica makes to Kilgrave: "You slept with me. ... You let me be inside you.  You touched me with the same hands that killed my wife."  And yet for the rest of the season, the fact that Jessica chose, of her own free will, to commit this violation against Luke is never discussed, and everyone behaves as if the thing Jessica has to feel guilty about is the act she couldn't control, killing Luke's wife, and not the one she could.  At the end of the season, Claire even encourages Luke to give his relationship with Jessica another shot.

It's hard to escape the feeling that Jessica Jones is afraid to let its heroine be truly bad and off-putting.  The things that supposedly make her an anti-hero are actually extremely sympathetic traits, while the actual wrongs she commits are not sufficiently acknowledged.^[6]  This feels particularly important because next season, the show isn't going to have Kilgrave to kick around any more.  Without that brilliant, deeply resonant story, Jessica Jones is going to have to rely more strongly on its title character, and I'm not convinced that it has enough faith in her--or in the audience's willingness to accept her as a protagonist even if she does things that are ugly and un-heroic.  If that happens, we'll still have this brilliant first season, and the fact that it finally found a strong, compelling story to tell within the MCU, but I'd like to believe that the best show Marvel has produced has more life in it than just one story.

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^[1] In fact, the only real problem with the show's premise is that it inadvertently makes SHIELD look completely useless.  Kilgrave, as we learn by the end of the season, has been leaving a trail of dead bodies and broken lives behind him for decades, and yet the organization whose job it was to deal with people like him never even noticed he existed.  Given my growing disgust with SHIELD, however, I'm inclined to view this as more of a feature than a bug.↩

^[2] The show is also good at filling its street scenes and backgrounds with a mix that reflects the actual New York's diversity, and two of the main characters are played by black men, but women of color fare less well.  Only one female character of any importance is played by a person of color--Daredevil transplant Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson)--and she only appears in one episode.↩

^[3] Tennant is unsurprisingly excellent in the role, but it's hard to shake the conviction that Rosenberg cast him as Kilgrave primarily because of his status as a beloved geek icon, the better to puncture certain toxic habits of thought in that community, such as the tendency to excuse and apologize for the entitled, self-absorbed behavior of white, male characters.↩

^[4] Another important aspect of the Simpson subplot is the fact that Trish continues to buy into his self-presentation as a good man who was made evil by drugs.  The show positions Trish as the stable, healthy counterpoint to Jessica's self-destruction, someone who has processed and gotten past her own history of child abuse even as Jessica remains trapped by her various traumas.  But the fact that she falls for Simpson's manipulations suggests that she's just as damaged as Jessica--and reminds us of how pernicious those manipulations are.↩

^[5] It also helps that Jessica's powers are not the result of Kilgrave's abuse, though the season strongly suggests that they originate in illegal experimentation, another kind of abuse to which Kilgrave was also subjected.↩

^[6] In a way, Jessica Jones is a victim of its timing.  In any other year, it would be revolutionary simply for being female-focused and for touching on issues of trauma and abuse. But in 2015, which also gave us Mad Max: Fury Road, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and UnREAL--all female-focused works that touch on similar topics as Jessica Jones--it's easier to notice that its execution, though still very fine, falls short of the others.↩