Over at Strange Horizons, I review the second and third books in Ayize Jama-Everett's Liminal People series. This was one of those cases where a book comes to you just when you need it the most. As they've slowly taken over popular culture, I've found myself growing increasingly impatient with superhero stories, and with how the ones that show up on our screens choose to handle politics (see, for example, this series of tweets from last night in which I try to sum up my frustrations with the seemingly endless barrage of superhero shows and their messed-up politics). It's been particularly frustrating watching what is, by now, the dominant genre in pop culture carefully and studiously avoid anything like a real engagement with issues of social justice. For all that they claim otherwise, superheroes are about preserving the status quo, and that usually means siding with those in power, not those whom they oppress.
So Jama-Everett's books, in which opposing--and trying to dismantle--the status quo lies at the core of most of his superhero characters' stories, were just what the doctor ordered. And as if that were not enough, most of the superhero characters in these books are people of color, and people whose ethnic and cultural heritage is central to their identity and to how they see the world, which is also something that mainstream superhero stories don't do enough of. I might not have like these books as much if I'd read them five years ago, but I'm extremely glad that they exist now, and if you're like me and are finding the glut of reactionary superhero stories oppressive, I heartily recommend these books as an antidote.
Showing posts with label superheroes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label superheroes. Show all posts
Monday, February 01, 2016
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Just Following Orders: Thoughts on Agents of SHIELD's First Season
Coulson: You're going to lose
Loki: Why?
Coulson: It's in your nature.
Loki: Your heroes are scattered. Your floating fortress falls from the sky. Where is my disadvantage?
Coulson: You lack conviction
The Avengers, 2012
Sam Wilson: How do we know the good guys from the bad guys?Captain America: If they're shooting at you, they're bad.Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 2014
What a long, strange trip it's been this year for Marvel's Agents of SHIELD. Starting the TV season as one of the fall's most hyped and anticipated new shows, the expansion of the wildly successful Marvel cinematic universe into television, it quickly became one of the year's most beleaguered new series. As the show hemorrhaged viewers exasperated with its tedious storytelling and boring characters, SHIELD's producers and stars seemed determined to make a bad situation worse, accusing disappointed viewers of not being "real" SF fans, and pretending that critics of the show were only complaining because they'd gone in expecting weekly guest appearances by Iron Man. By the time Captain America: The Winter Soldier rolled around, SHIELD was in dire straits, too uninteresting to qualify even for hate-watching status. The bombshell that The Winter Soldier throws into the MCU, however, is one that SHIELD was clearly created to anticipate, and in its wake the show's storytelling tightened and kicked into gear, delivering a solid, often genuinely thrilling final chapter to its first season that has had the core faithful who stuck with the show in the lean times proclaiming its arrival. My own take, however, is more ambivalent. While the final half-dozen episodes of the season represent a giant leap forward in the show's quality--and, more importantly, in creating the sense that SHIELD's creators and producers know what kind of story they want to tell with it--they do little to address some of the show's core flaws, and may in fact even highlight the fundamental problems at the heart of the entire MCU.
Set some time after the events of The Avengers, SHIELD begins with the (heavily publicized) revelation that Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), the erstwhile agent who was killed by Loki in the film's final act, is in fact still alive. Granted some leeway by a grateful Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Coulson assembles his own team, set to jet around the world on a mobile base, addressing the problems that emerge in a world that is now aware of the existence of hostile aliens. Coulson's team includes the taciturn, traumatized warrior Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) and scientists Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), but the pilot episode's focus is on the characters Ward (Brett Dalton), a "specialist" accustomed to working on his own who resists Coluson's attempts to get him to play with others, and Skye (Chloe Bennet), a member of the hacktivist group Rising Tide who object to SHIELD's unregulated operations and its concealment of the existence of aliens and superpowers, whom Coulson recruits for her outsider's perspective. The first season is driven by Coulson's growing awareness that the story he's been told about his survival isn't true, and by the team's pursuit of a shadowy cabal, led by a figure known as The Clairvoyant, who are using alien technology to create an army of supersoldiers.
That SHIELD's early episodes--particularly the first, nine-episode stretch of the season, which are mostly standalones--are so unexciting is perhaps to be expected. Most genre shows take a while to get their legs under them, and the art of writing a solid, engaging standalone hour seems to be vanishing from their writing rooms as they become more and more consumed with overarching mythology plots and soapy character arcs. But there's something genuinely upsetting, almost infuriating, about how lazy and unengaging SHIELD's storytelling pre-Winter Soldier is. The show seems to take its audience's attention for granted, and one could almost swear that the people writing it hadn't watched TV since the mid-90s. Joss Whedon (who is credited as the show's producer, as well as writing and directing the pilot, but whose influence is difficult to discern) revolutionized genre TV by recognizing that savvy viewers were familiar with the stories he was telling, down to their individual beats. By subverting those expectations (the blonde girl turning out to be the vampire rather than the victim in the Buffy pilot) or cutting through the boilerplate (Mal Reynolds shoving an uncooperative captive into a jet engine rather than listen to his belligerent defiance; Zoe immediately choosing her husband when a villain sadistically allows her to save either his life or Mal's) Whedon made these stories his own, and created a new norm for genre storytellers--one that SHIELD's writers seem happy to ignore.
In a landscape in which it has become the norm to obscure plot holes, inelegant dialogue, and trite plot points by barreling through story (on series like Heroes--whose producers, Jeffrey Bell and Jeph Loeb, are, bafflingly enough, SHIELD's executive producers--The Vampire Diaries, Arrow, Orphan Black, and many others in and out of genre), SHIELD seems content to mosey along the world's most predictable and padded standalone plots. The show instead places most of its storytelling eggs in the mystery basket, teasing the answers to such questions as the truth about Coulson's resurrection, the cause of May's trauma, and Skye's secret origins. But even if it were true that you can sustain a weekly TV series merely by dangling mysteries in front of the audience--a theory that TV writers have been disproving through abject failure since Lost exploded onto the scene ten years ago--the answers that SHIELD delivers to the questions it raises are as vague and unsatisfying as the questions themselves. A mid-season episode in which Coulson is kidnapped and tortured for the secret of his resurrection ends with the discovery that he was dead for far longer than the official eight seconds and was brought back to life using secret, alien technology--something that most viewers will have taken as a given five minutes into the pilot. The big revelation about Skye is that she is an 0-8-4--SHIELD code for "object of unknown origin"--which would almost seem like a joke about using meaningless bureaucratic jargon to hide the fact that you don't know anything if the show and characters did not treat it like a major turning point.
It comes as quite a relief, then, when Winter Soldier upends the entire MCU, and with it the show's universe. The film's revelation that Hydra, the Nazi offshoot who were defeated by Captain America in the 40s, have infiltrated SHIELD and spent seven decades corrupting it and using its resources to further their own goal of world domination through chaos and destruction, is obviously one that the show's first season was built to lead up to. And indeed, in its first post-Winter Soldier episode, SHIELD steps up in a big way, depicting the aftermath of this revelation and of Captain America and Black Widow's exposure of SHIELD's secrets for the organization's rank and file--whether the true believers, like Coulson, or the more ambivalent, like Simmons. More importantly, given the film's exposure of a fifth column within SHIELD, it's obvious that someone on Coulson's team has to be working for Hydra, and the revelation that this is Ward--who is under orders from his former commanding officer, Garrett (Bill Paxton)--is suitably shocking. For the rest of the season, as Ward first plays on his team's trust in him, and then openly joins forces with Garrett, SHIELD is an entirely different series--a tense, fast-paced story about trust and betrayal in which our heroes are grimly determined to stand up for what they believe in. Winter Soldier gives SHIELD a purpose--to articulate not only what the MCU looks like after the film's events, but why SHIELD is still necessary in that world, and what it still stands for.
None of this, however, makes the preceding sixteen hours of television any easier to sit through. Looking back, it's clear that the season was written in order to build up to the huge twist of Ward's betrayal, with subtle hints and Easter eggs that only make sense in retrospect sprinkled throughout, going all the way back to the pilot--which sets Ward up as the true blue SHIELD agent and Skye as a potential disruptive element, only for the show to later reveal that it's the other way around. Rewatching the season before writing this review, I was struck by how much more interesting and watchable it becomes when you know what to expect. It's easier to spot the games that Ward--and other characters with secrets, such as Garrett, Skye (who first joins SHIELD on behalf of the Rising Tide), and May (who is spying on Coulson for Fury)--are playing in order to achieve their goals (and the fact that the smaller mysteries set up in the first part of the season have such underwhelming solutions, or that the episode plots are so forgettable, becomes more palatable when you know to expect this). But the show seems completely uninterested in how viewers will respond to it the first time around. It puts no work into making its buildup interesting or compelling in its own right, or in encouraging the audience to invest in the world that it's about to tear down. In the sixteen episodes before Winter Soldier, Ward is a straight-shooting, rule-loving, protocol-obsessed bore. Which is interesting in retrospect when you realize that this was merely a performance, but the first time through it makes the character almost impossible to care about, and thus robs his betrayal of much of its sting.
That blandness, unfortunately, afflicts the rest of the cast as well, and isn't alleviated after the upheaval of The Winter Soldier. Though the actors are game, often doing much with their performances to elevate the middling material they've been given (Wen and De Caestecker are particular standouts), there's only so much they can do. In my review of the SHIELD pilot I observed that its use of the physical space of the team's plane was similar to how Firefly had used Serenity, but lacked the imagination and texture that made that setting such a believable, lived-in space. The same might be said of the cast--May, the taciturn female warrior; Ward, the amoral bruiser; Fitz, the unexpectedly brave scientist; Skye, the mysterious girl who might have powers--but none of the characters are as well-delineated as their counterparts on Firefly, and their camaraderie and rapport aren't as captivating as they were on that show.
Nowhere does SHIELD's problem of blandness strike as brutally or as deeply as in the case of its putative lead. Coulson won the hearts of MCU fans by providing a down-to-earth, no-nonsense contrast to the larger than life antics of Tony Stark, Thor, and Loki. He was heroic and resourceful--as seen, also, in the Marvel One Shots The Consultant and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor's Hammer--but in a decidedly uncool, dad-ish sort of way. Clark Gregg is so well-suited to playing this kind of dry, sympathetic, hyper-efficient cog in the machine that he was doing it years before Phil Coulson or the MCU were a gleam in anyone's eye. But in SHIELD's first season, he doesn't manage to translate that impeccable supporting role into a star turn. His Coulson can't hold the spotlight. His dry understatement comes off as underpowered; his hero moments as shrill and trying too hard. That the first season finds Coulson at a crisis point--questioning his lifelong habits of unquestioning obedience, and the very company-man-with-a-soul persona that made him a fan favorite--doesn't help matters, as instead of conveying deep inner turmoil Gregg's performance makes Coulson seem whiny and sulky. The destruction of SHIELD in Winter Soldier means that it falls to Coulson to embody the organization's ideals as they should have been--as well as, at the season's end, to rebuild it. And yet Gregg's most persuasive onscreen moment is a scene in the episode after he and his team find out about Hydra, when he breaks down under the strain of believing that Fury is still out there sending orders, crying out, with little conviction, that "we are not agents of nothing!"
That's a great shame, because SHIELD is in a unique position to address some of the core issues of the MCU that the films, with their need to deliver blockbuster-friendly thrills and moments of triumph, can't face up to. When Winter Soldier came out, many reviewers, while praising the film's willingness to question and even dismantle SHIELD, expressed frustration at the stark division it posited between loyal SHIELD members and the hidden Hydra agents. As pointed out, for example, by Genevieve Valentine, the problem is not merely Captain America's division of good guys and bad guys according to whether they're shooting at him, but the fact that the bad guys are so obligingly willing to pick up arms in order to mark themselves out. In reality, after seven decades of growing into each other, it shouldn't be so easy to separate out SHIELD from Hydra. On the one hand, Hydra should have so completely infested SHIELD as to taint all but the most minute of its good acts--as evidenced by the fact that even the good guys, who aren't shooting at Captain America, were perfectly OK with SHIELD's rampant trampling of privacy and civil rights before these escalated to mass murder. And on the other hand, SHIELD's protocols and organizational culture are the ones that nearly all Hydra agents were trained in, which would shape their habits of thought even as they employ their training to evil ends. No matter who they swear allegiance too, SHIELD and Hydra agents should be pretty hard to tell apart, and the lofty or vile ideals that guide them should, in all but the most extreme cases of true believers, be less present in their psychological makeup than institutional culture.
It's hard to imagine a better illustration of how interwoven SHIELD and Hydra have become than what the show does with Grant Ward. In the season's first three quarters, Ward is the consummate SHIELD agent. He follows protocol to the letter, doesn't let personal feelings cloud his judgment or sway his decisions, and most of all, he obeys orders and respects the chain of command, without ever needing to know the broader context of his missions or their ultimate purpose. The revelation that he works for Hydra means that Ward immediately begins wearing leather jackets and growing out his beard, but it changes nothing about the kind of agent he is--it just means that the orders he's following come from different people and have a different nature. In this essay about Ward, Sam Keeper observes that Ward doesn't think of himself as a villain. He's actually proud of having successfully carried out his mission--to deceive good people and trick them into caring about him, and then to kidnap, torture and kill them if they don't do what he wants--and angry that Skye doesn't realize how difficult this has been to pull off. But, leaving aside the fact that no one, no matter how depraved, ever thinks of themselves as a villain, it's not clear to me why we'd expect Ward, of all people, to do so. By his own standards--"I go in alone; I get it done"--he has achieved exactly what was expected of him.
To be sure, the fact that Ward sees no difference between being ordered to protect people and being ordered to kill them is a sign that he is, at best, scarily disconnected from his humanity (and places him in stark contrast to Skye and Coulson, both of whom repeatedly evaluate their orders based on whether they comply with their own ideals and what they perceive as SHIELD's guiding principles). But as we learn throughout the first season, the system that taught Ward to blindly obey is as much the SHIELD system as it is Hydra. In the episode "The Hub," Ward and Fitz are dispatched on a dangerous mission, only to discover that the extraction they were promised upon completion was a lie (it was a similar abandonment, incidentally, that spurred Garrett to renounce his loyalty to SHIELD and join forces with Hydra). When Coulson protests, he's told to "trust the system." But the system, as Winter Soldier reveals, is decidedly untrustworthy. The show doesn't explicitly draw the connection, but it seems obvious that there would have been countless loyal, decent SHIELD agents who enabled Hydra and its evil precisely because of this unearned, undeserved trust, and the culture that encouraged it.
"You're a criminal ... Specialized skill-set ... No family ... That is what these people do. SHIELD. They prey on fear, and loneliness, and desperation, and they offer a home to those who have nowhere else to turn to." Skye is told this by Ian Quinn (David Conrad), a billionaire who turns out to be in league with Garrett. He's describing her--she is an orphan who finds in Coulson's team the first real family she's ever had--but the description fits Ward, who was kidnapped out of a juvenile detention facility and whose abusive family abandoned him to Garrett's indoctrination, equally well. Coulson, too, has a similar background--he was scarred by the early death of his father, and was recruited by Nick Fury before he was even out of high school. That SHIELD and Hydra have essentially the same recruiting tactics doesn't mean that the two organizations are one and the same. Skye finds a genuinely nurturing parental figure in Coulson, while Garrett abuses Ward in ways specifically designed to stamp out his independence and sense of self-worth. In the season's penultimate episode we see Garrett, in flashbacks, teaching Ward that attachments--to people other than Garrett, it remains unsaid but clearly understood--are a weakness, a lesson that Ward takes to heart when, at the episode's end, he tries to kill Fitz and Simmons. In the present day, meanwhile, Coulson praises Skye, who is berating herself for not letting Ward die when she had the chance, arguing that her compassion is a strength. But what this similarity does suggest that how all three of these agents turned out is at least partly the luck of the draw--if Ward had been mentored by Coulson, or Coulson by Hydra chief Alexander Pierce, the whole story might have been very different. From what we see in the show's first season, there is nothing inherent to SHIELD and its protocols and training methods that encourages the principles of selfless protection that the agency supposedly stands for.
The problem with all this--and the reason that I remain skeptical about SHIELD's ability to leverage its post-Winter Soldier arc into a meaningful improvement in its quality--is first that as much as Ward's betrayal breathes life into the show, it--and the season's other villains--are the only thing to do so. It's not just that Ward becomes a more interesting character after he turns evil, but that the season's entire rogue's gallery comes to life as the characters are given the chance to interact and spark against each other--Paxton's hammy folksiness with a sinister undertone gives Garrett a level of charisma that Coulson never achieves, and his and Ward's perverse father-son relationship is endlessly fascinating; Ruth Negga's Rayna, a scientist with her own hidden agenda, combines monomania with a disarming manner to create something at once alluring and creepy, and her ability to effortlessly manipulate both Garrett and Ward from a position of seeming weakness suggests that she is the true power to watch out for; J. August Richard's Mike Peterson, though not technically a bad guy since he's being coerced by Garrett, is also an intriguing figure, transformed both physically and emotionally, and only able to retain some semblance of his humanity by embracing the villain role assigned to him. (Having said this, there's quite a lot about Mike's character arc that gives me pause, especially given that until the very end of the season SHIELD consistently fails to field black characters who are not evil, crazy, victimized, or some combination of the above; the way that Mike is repeatedly punished by the narrative for trying to be heroic, and the oddly self-effacing way he behaves towards our heroes, makes me very uncomfortable, though I don't quite feel able to articulate my issues.)
Against these complex figures, the blandness of the main cast is shown in even sharper relief. Skye, Coulson, and May light up when they're up against Ward, but go back to being inert when he's away (a particularly glaring example is the episode "The Only Light in the Darkness," in which a tense, pulse-pounding game of cat and mouse between Ward and Skye is juxtaposed with a soporific story about Coulson coming to the rescue of his cellist ex-girlfriend--Amy Acker, criminally wasted in an insipid, underwritten role). The discovery that the organization to which they've pledged themselves has been rotten to the core for longer than they've been alive should elicit some interesting material from the show's loyal SHIELD agents, but the most the show offers are banalities about how Skye worked so hard to join SHIELD only for it to collapse under her and rousing speeches from Coulson (May, meanwhile, remains frustratingly silent on the subject of SHIELD throughout the season, and is seemingly driven solely by her loyalty to Coulson). It's hard to hope for improvement on this front when one considers Ward's replacement on the team, Antoine Triplett (B.J. Britt), whose geniality and general agreeableness somehow manage to make him even less interesting than original, good Ward.
An even bigger problem is that I'm not sure how many of the similarities between SHIELD and Hydra are intentional, and how much the show would prefer to elide them through an appeal to personality. Much is made of the fact that Ward is weakened by his amorality--without Garrett to give him orders, he spins out and ends up thoroughly trounced by May--while Skye is strengthened by her deep moral convictions. But the show can't convincingly argue that Skye's moral fiber--or indeed Coulson's--are something that SHIELD instilled in them. At best, SHIELD can take credit for recognizing their commitment to helping others--though in that case it must also take the blame for failing to recognize that Ward, and hundreds or even thousands like him, were merely mouthing that commitment without really possessing it. In the season's almost inappropriately jokey finale, Coulson and Fury trade jibes about how Garrett has failed to grasp Fury's adage that "a man can accomplish anything when he realizes he's a part of something bigger; a team of people who share that conviction can change the world." But, just as in Coulson's dying words to Loki in The Avengers, SHIELD fails to acknowledge that conviction isn't a good thing in its own right--a lot depends on what your convictions are (oddly enough, this is something that Whedon grasped perfectly well in Angel's fifth season premiere).
The season finale pits the self-absorbed--and by that point, actually insane--Garrett, who believes that he can be "something bigger" on this own, against Coulson, Fury, and the team, who correctly recognize that they are merely a part of that something bigger. But this is to draw a false contrast. The problem with Hydra isn't that its operatives lack conviction and aren't willing to work together towards a greater goal (though it is the case that true believer Hydra operatives are completely missing from the show--as James Nicoll points out, it's strange that the show uses Hydra as its big bad and yet none of its villains are Nazis). And neither does our heroes' ability to work together towards a common goal do anything to mitigate SHIELD's colossal failure to instill the right convictions, and the right idea of something bigger to belong to, in so many of its agents.
But then, perhaps this isn't so surprising, when you consider how unwilling the show is to acknowledge the darker aspects of the legitimate, "good" parts of SHIELD. Even before Hydra is revealed, SHIELD--who as we already knew routinely conducts extra-legal surveillance and military operations, and conceals information from the public--turns out to have been involved in some pretty shady stuff, very little of which receives condemnation from the show's good characters. This includes secret prisons where people, including civilians, are held without trial or recourse to the law; human experimentation, often without the knowledge or consent of the subjects; the hoarding, study, and development of alien technologies and weapons; and a fairly cavalier attitude towards the abuse and mistreatment of prisoners. In the season's early episodes, Skye gives voice to the view that SHIELD is an inherently illegitimate organization and that its methods are unacceptable. But it's soon revealed that her actual motives for infiltrating Coulson's team are personal--she believes SHIELD has information about her parents--and after one or two episodes of criticizing Coulson's methods, she buys into the SHIELD culture completely, a loyalty that is further cemented when she discovers that SHIELD agents died to protect her as a child. By the time Black Widow releases all of SHIELD's secrets online in Winter Soldier, it's left to Skye to sigh that "[Coulson was] right all along. Having all this out there in the world makes it too dangerous, and now there's no one left to protect it."
(Meanwhile, the show seems genuinely not to have noticed that nearly every terrible thing that Ward does was done by a "good," loyal-to-SHIELD character first. Ward kills multiple SHIELD agents during Hydra's assault. But several episodes earlier Coulson, desperate to find a cure for a mortally injured Skye, leads a team to an off-book SHIELD facility and attacks it, killing its defenders in the process. One of the named characters that Ward kills is Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows), a high-ranking, tough-minded senior officer (who is also the person who sent Ward and Fitz on a suicide mission without their knowledge). But the last thing Hand does in life is to suggest to Ward that he kill a bound prisoner--Garrett, who has been exposed as the Clairvoyant--because she feels that a lifetime's imprisonment without trial is too good for him. It's hard, therefore, to see her death as anything but poetic justice.)
The question of following orders, of the duty of the soldier to both obey and question, and of the obligation of powerful people to both use their power for the greater good and make themselves answerable to some higher authority, recur in different guises throughout the MCU. Tony Stark doesn't trust anyone to use the products of his intellect--not the buyers of the weapons he makes, nor the government eager to lay claim to the Iron Man suit. But the authority he arrogates to himself is compromised by his narcissism and poor judgment. The Hulk's power is defined by a complete lack of control--his own as well as anyone who tries to contain him in his enraged form. He is incapable of following orders, and can only exercise control over how he's used by preventing himself from becoming powerful and keeping himself out of the hands of those who would use him as a weapon (including, of course, SHIELD). Most crucially, Captain America is riven by the dilemma of how and whether to be a good soldier. His instinct as a patriot--and a man who believes that no single person, no matter how powerful, is above the law and the chain of command--is to put himself at his government's disposal. But he is also too moral, and too heroic, to blindly obey, and when his investigations of his superiors yield results that fall short of his ideals (as they do in both The Avengers and Winter Soldier) he uses his superior power to take control of the situation ("I guess you're giving the orders now, Captain"). The Winter Soldier acts as a sort of dark mirror to Cap, possessed of his strength, intelligence, and tactical acumen, but incapable of questioning his missions, much less comprehending their larger purposes and consequences (this parallel is the only justification for the Winter Soldier's presence in the film that bears his name, which otherwise gives the character short shrift).
SHIELD does something similar when it posits Hydra's supersoldiers, who are controlled through threats to their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. This, both the show and the film seem to be saying, is Hydra's idea of the perfect soldier, someone incapable of questioning their orders. Garrett's downfall comes, appropriately enough, because he forgets why his soldiers obey him. When Skye frees Mike Peterson's son, who was being held hostage, Mike wastes no time in killing Garrett, who spends his last moments in shock and outrage that his tool has turned on him. But just as the existence of the Winter Soldier, and of Hydra's evil plan, frees the second Captain America movie from having to deal with the more thorny question of whether Cap has the right to use his powers without sanction or oversight, and whether SHIELD has the right to deploy him, the existence of Hydra's supersoldiers frees SHIELD from having to address the kind of soldiers that the organization has made of its own, supposedly free operatives. In their last encounter of the season, Coulson berates Ward, not a little self-righteously, for "[devoting his] entire life to a deranged narcissist who never gave a damn about anyone," and though it seems obvious that the character will recur, perhaps on some path towards redemption (the producers have, indeed, all but promised this), it seems unlikely that that redemption will include any acknowledgment of how much Ward is a product of SHIELD, not Hydra, and how much he embodies its notions of what a good soldier is.
The season ends with Coulson promoted to Fury's former position as head of SHIELD, charged with rebuilding the organization. The implication is that in the hands of a man like Coulson, who embodies the ideal of selfless protection of others, SHIELD can be what it was meant to be--that he has the conviction and moral vision to guide the organization. But this is merely to recapitulate Skye's plot arc--taking someone who questions SHIELD's very existence and core assumptions (or, in Coulson's case, who has learned to question them after being victimized by them) and making them part of the inner circle. It seems likely that the end result will be the same--that like Skye, Coulson's response to being granted the kind of power he had previously questioned will be to embrace it unthinkingly. It's still possible for SHIELD to address some of the truly complex--and perhaps unanswerable--questions raised by its premise. But with the show's first season seemingly so blind to the faults of what it has designated the "good" side--and with so little complexity in its good characters--I find it hard to hope that this will happen.
Set some time after the events of The Avengers, SHIELD begins with the (heavily publicized) revelation that Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), the erstwhile agent who was killed by Loki in the film's final act, is in fact still alive. Granted some leeway by a grateful Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Coulson assembles his own team, set to jet around the world on a mobile base, addressing the problems that emerge in a world that is now aware of the existence of hostile aliens. Coulson's team includes the taciturn, traumatized warrior Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) and scientists Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), but the pilot episode's focus is on the characters Ward (Brett Dalton), a "specialist" accustomed to working on his own who resists Coluson's attempts to get him to play with others, and Skye (Chloe Bennet), a member of the hacktivist group Rising Tide who object to SHIELD's unregulated operations and its concealment of the existence of aliens and superpowers, whom Coulson recruits for her outsider's perspective. The first season is driven by Coulson's growing awareness that the story he's been told about his survival isn't true, and by the team's pursuit of a shadowy cabal, led by a figure known as The Clairvoyant, who are using alien technology to create an army of supersoldiers.
That SHIELD's early episodes--particularly the first, nine-episode stretch of the season, which are mostly standalones--are so unexciting is perhaps to be expected. Most genre shows take a while to get their legs under them, and the art of writing a solid, engaging standalone hour seems to be vanishing from their writing rooms as they become more and more consumed with overarching mythology plots and soapy character arcs. But there's something genuinely upsetting, almost infuriating, about how lazy and unengaging SHIELD's storytelling pre-Winter Soldier is. The show seems to take its audience's attention for granted, and one could almost swear that the people writing it hadn't watched TV since the mid-90s. Joss Whedon (who is credited as the show's producer, as well as writing and directing the pilot, but whose influence is difficult to discern) revolutionized genre TV by recognizing that savvy viewers were familiar with the stories he was telling, down to their individual beats. By subverting those expectations (the blonde girl turning out to be the vampire rather than the victim in the Buffy pilot) or cutting through the boilerplate (Mal Reynolds shoving an uncooperative captive into a jet engine rather than listen to his belligerent defiance; Zoe immediately choosing her husband when a villain sadistically allows her to save either his life or Mal's) Whedon made these stories his own, and created a new norm for genre storytellers--one that SHIELD's writers seem happy to ignore.
In a landscape in which it has become the norm to obscure plot holes, inelegant dialogue, and trite plot points by barreling through story (on series like Heroes--whose producers, Jeffrey Bell and Jeph Loeb, are, bafflingly enough, SHIELD's executive producers--The Vampire Diaries, Arrow, Orphan Black, and many others in and out of genre), SHIELD seems content to mosey along the world's most predictable and padded standalone plots. The show instead places most of its storytelling eggs in the mystery basket, teasing the answers to such questions as the truth about Coulson's resurrection, the cause of May's trauma, and Skye's secret origins. But even if it were true that you can sustain a weekly TV series merely by dangling mysteries in front of the audience--a theory that TV writers have been disproving through abject failure since Lost exploded onto the scene ten years ago--the answers that SHIELD delivers to the questions it raises are as vague and unsatisfying as the questions themselves. A mid-season episode in which Coulson is kidnapped and tortured for the secret of his resurrection ends with the discovery that he was dead for far longer than the official eight seconds and was brought back to life using secret, alien technology--something that most viewers will have taken as a given five minutes into the pilot. The big revelation about Skye is that she is an 0-8-4--SHIELD code for "object of unknown origin"--which would almost seem like a joke about using meaningless bureaucratic jargon to hide the fact that you don't know anything if the show and characters did not treat it like a major turning point.
It comes as quite a relief, then, when Winter Soldier upends the entire MCU, and with it the show's universe. The film's revelation that Hydra, the Nazi offshoot who were defeated by Captain America in the 40s, have infiltrated SHIELD and spent seven decades corrupting it and using its resources to further their own goal of world domination through chaos and destruction, is obviously one that the show's first season was built to lead up to. And indeed, in its first post-Winter Soldier episode, SHIELD steps up in a big way, depicting the aftermath of this revelation and of Captain America and Black Widow's exposure of SHIELD's secrets for the organization's rank and file--whether the true believers, like Coulson, or the more ambivalent, like Simmons. More importantly, given the film's exposure of a fifth column within SHIELD, it's obvious that someone on Coulson's team has to be working for Hydra, and the revelation that this is Ward--who is under orders from his former commanding officer, Garrett (Bill Paxton)--is suitably shocking. For the rest of the season, as Ward first plays on his team's trust in him, and then openly joins forces with Garrett, SHIELD is an entirely different series--a tense, fast-paced story about trust and betrayal in which our heroes are grimly determined to stand up for what they believe in. Winter Soldier gives SHIELD a purpose--to articulate not only what the MCU looks like after the film's events, but why SHIELD is still necessary in that world, and what it still stands for.
None of this, however, makes the preceding sixteen hours of television any easier to sit through. Looking back, it's clear that the season was written in order to build up to the huge twist of Ward's betrayal, with subtle hints and Easter eggs that only make sense in retrospect sprinkled throughout, going all the way back to the pilot--which sets Ward up as the true blue SHIELD agent and Skye as a potential disruptive element, only for the show to later reveal that it's the other way around. Rewatching the season before writing this review, I was struck by how much more interesting and watchable it becomes when you know what to expect. It's easier to spot the games that Ward--and other characters with secrets, such as Garrett, Skye (who first joins SHIELD on behalf of the Rising Tide), and May (who is spying on Coulson for Fury)--are playing in order to achieve their goals (and the fact that the smaller mysteries set up in the first part of the season have such underwhelming solutions, or that the episode plots are so forgettable, becomes more palatable when you know to expect this). But the show seems completely uninterested in how viewers will respond to it the first time around. It puts no work into making its buildup interesting or compelling in its own right, or in encouraging the audience to invest in the world that it's about to tear down. In the sixteen episodes before Winter Soldier, Ward is a straight-shooting, rule-loving, protocol-obsessed bore. Which is interesting in retrospect when you realize that this was merely a performance, but the first time through it makes the character almost impossible to care about, and thus robs his betrayal of much of its sting.
That blandness, unfortunately, afflicts the rest of the cast as well, and isn't alleviated after the upheaval of The Winter Soldier. Though the actors are game, often doing much with their performances to elevate the middling material they've been given (Wen and De Caestecker are particular standouts), there's only so much they can do. In my review of the SHIELD pilot I observed that its use of the physical space of the team's plane was similar to how Firefly had used Serenity, but lacked the imagination and texture that made that setting such a believable, lived-in space. The same might be said of the cast--May, the taciturn female warrior; Ward, the amoral bruiser; Fitz, the unexpectedly brave scientist; Skye, the mysterious girl who might have powers--but none of the characters are as well-delineated as their counterparts on Firefly, and their camaraderie and rapport aren't as captivating as they were on that show.
Nowhere does SHIELD's problem of blandness strike as brutally or as deeply as in the case of its putative lead. Coulson won the hearts of MCU fans by providing a down-to-earth, no-nonsense contrast to the larger than life antics of Tony Stark, Thor, and Loki. He was heroic and resourceful--as seen, also, in the Marvel One Shots The Consultant and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor's Hammer--but in a decidedly uncool, dad-ish sort of way. Clark Gregg is so well-suited to playing this kind of dry, sympathetic, hyper-efficient cog in the machine that he was doing it years before Phil Coulson or the MCU were a gleam in anyone's eye. But in SHIELD's first season, he doesn't manage to translate that impeccable supporting role into a star turn. His Coulson can't hold the spotlight. His dry understatement comes off as underpowered; his hero moments as shrill and trying too hard. That the first season finds Coulson at a crisis point--questioning his lifelong habits of unquestioning obedience, and the very company-man-with-a-soul persona that made him a fan favorite--doesn't help matters, as instead of conveying deep inner turmoil Gregg's performance makes Coulson seem whiny and sulky. The destruction of SHIELD in Winter Soldier means that it falls to Coulson to embody the organization's ideals as they should have been--as well as, at the season's end, to rebuild it. And yet Gregg's most persuasive onscreen moment is a scene in the episode after he and his team find out about Hydra, when he breaks down under the strain of believing that Fury is still out there sending orders, crying out, with little conviction, that "we are not agents of nothing!"
That's a great shame, because SHIELD is in a unique position to address some of the core issues of the MCU that the films, with their need to deliver blockbuster-friendly thrills and moments of triumph, can't face up to. When Winter Soldier came out, many reviewers, while praising the film's willingness to question and even dismantle SHIELD, expressed frustration at the stark division it posited between loyal SHIELD members and the hidden Hydra agents. As pointed out, for example, by Genevieve Valentine, the problem is not merely Captain America's division of good guys and bad guys according to whether they're shooting at him, but the fact that the bad guys are so obligingly willing to pick up arms in order to mark themselves out. In reality, after seven decades of growing into each other, it shouldn't be so easy to separate out SHIELD from Hydra. On the one hand, Hydra should have so completely infested SHIELD as to taint all but the most minute of its good acts--as evidenced by the fact that even the good guys, who aren't shooting at Captain America, were perfectly OK with SHIELD's rampant trampling of privacy and civil rights before these escalated to mass murder. And on the other hand, SHIELD's protocols and organizational culture are the ones that nearly all Hydra agents were trained in, which would shape their habits of thought even as they employ their training to evil ends. No matter who they swear allegiance too, SHIELD and Hydra agents should be pretty hard to tell apart, and the lofty or vile ideals that guide them should, in all but the most extreme cases of true believers, be less present in their psychological makeup than institutional culture.
It's hard to imagine a better illustration of how interwoven SHIELD and Hydra have become than what the show does with Grant Ward. In the season's first three quarters, Ward is the consummate SHIELD agent. He follows protocol to the letter, doesn't let personal feelings cloud his judgment or sway his decisions, and most of all, he obeys orders and respects the chain of command, without ever needing to know the broader context of his missions or their ultimate purpose. The revelation that he works for Hydra means that Ward immediately begins wearing leather jackets and growing out his beard, but it changes nothing about the kind of agent he is--it just means that the orders he's following come from different people and have a different nature. In this essay about Ward, Sam Keeper observes that Ward doesn't think of himself as a villain. He's actually proud of having successfully carried out his mission--to deceive good people and trick them into caring about him, and then to kidnap, torture and kill them if they don't do what he wants--and angry that Skye doesn't realize how difficult this has been to pull off. But, leaving aside the fact that no one, no matter how depraved, ever thinks of themselves as a villain, it's not clear to me why we'd expect Ward, of all people, to do so. By his own standards--"I go in alone; I get it done"--he has achieved exactly what was expected of him.
To be sure, the fact that Ward sees no difference between being ordered to protect people and being ordered to kill them is a sign that he is, at best, scarily disconnected from his humanity (and places him in stark contrast to Skye and Coulson, both of whom repeatedly evaluate their orders based on whether they comply with their own ideals and what they perceive as SHIELD's guiding principles). But as we learn throughout the first season, the system that taught Ward to blindly obey is as much the SHIELD system as it is Hydra. In the episode "The Hub," Ward and Fitz are dispatched on a dangerous mission, only to discover that the extraction they were promised upon completion was a lie (it was a similar abandonment, incidentally, that spurred Garrett to renounce his loyalty to SHIELD and join forces with Hydra). When Coulson protests, he's told to "trust the system." But the system, as Winter Soldier reveals, is decidedly untrustworthy. The show doesn't explicitly draw the connection, but it seems obvious that there would have been countless loyal, decent SHIELD agents who enabled Hydra and its evil precisely because of this unearned, undeserved trust, and the culture that encouraged it.
"You're a criminal ... Specialized skill-set ... No family ... That is what these people do. SHIELD. They prey on fear, and loneliness, and desperation, and they offer a home to those who have nowhere else to turn to." Skye is told this by Ian Quinn (David Conrad), a billionaire who turns out to be in league with Garrett. He's describing her--she is an orphan who finds in Coulson's team the first real family she's ever had--but the description fits Ward, who was kidnapped out of a juvenile detention facility and whose abusive family abandoned him to Garrett's indoctrination, equally well. Coulson, too, has a similar background--he was scarred by the early death of his father, and was recruited by Nick Fury before he was even out of high school. That SHIELD and Hydra have essentially the same recruiting tactics doesn't mean that the two organizations are one and the same. Skye finds a genuinely nurturing parental figure in Coulson, while Garrett abuses Ward in ways specifically designed to stamp out his independence and sense of self-worth. In the season's penultimate episode we see Garrett, in flashbacks, teaching Ward that attachments--to people other than Garrett, it remains unsaid but clearly understood--are a weakness, a lesson that Ward takes to heart when, at the episode's end, he tries to kill Fitz and Simmons. In the present day, meanwhile, Coulson praises Skye, who is berating herself for not letting Ward die when she had the chance, arguing that her compassion is a strength. But what this similarity does suggest that how all three of these agents turned out is at least partly the luck of the draw--if Ward had been mentored by Coulson, or Coulson by Hydra chief Alexander Pierce, the whole story might have been very different. From what we see in the show's first season, there is nothing inherent to SHIELD and its protocols and training methods that encourages the principles of selfless protection that the agency supposedly stands for.
The problem with all this--and the reason that I remain skeptical about SHIELD's ability to leverage its post-Winter Soldier arc into a meaningful improvement in its quality--is first that as much as Ward's betrayal breathes life into the show, it--and the season's other villains--are the only thing to do so. It's not just that Ward becomes a more interesting character after he turns evil, but that the season's entire rogue's gallery comes to life as the characters are given the chance to interact and spark against each other--Paxton's hammy folksiness with a sinister undertone gives Garrett a level of charisma that Coulson never achieves, and his and Ward's perverse father-son relationship is endlessly fascinating; Ruth Negga's Rayna, a scientist with her own hidden agenda, combines monomania with a disarming manner to create something at once alluring and creepy, and her ability to effortlessly manipulate both Garrett and Ward from a position of seeming weakness suggests that she is the true power to watch out for; J. August Richard's Mike Peterson, though not technically a bad guy since he's being coerced by Garrett, is also an intriguing figure, transformed both physically and emotionally, and only able to retain some semblance of his humanity by embracing the villain role assigned to him. (Having said this, there's quite a lot about Mike's character arc that gives me pause, especially given that until the very end of the season SHIELD consistently fails to field black characters who are not evil, crazy, victimized, or some combination of the above; the way that Mike is repeatedly punished by the narrative for trying to be heroic, and the oddly self-effacing way he behaves towards our heroes, makes me very uncomfortable, though I don't quite feel able to articulate my issues.)
Against these complex figures, the blandness of the main cast is shown in even sharper relief. Skye, Coulson, and May light up when they're up against Ward, but go back to being inert when he's away (a particularly glaring example is the episode "The Only Light in the Darkness," in which a tense, pulse-pounding game of cat and mouse between Ward and Skye is juxtaposed with a soporific story about Coulson coming to the rescue of his cellist ex-girlfriend--Amy Acker, criminally wasted in an insipid, underwritten role). The discovery that the organization to which they've pledged themselves has been rotten to the core for longer than they've been alive should elicit some interesting material from the show's loyal SHIELD agents, but the most the show offers are banalities about how Skye worked so hard to join SHIELD only for it to collapse under her and rousing speeches from Coulson (May, meanwhile, remains frustratingly silent on the subject of SHIELD throughout the season, and is seemingly driven solely by her loyalty to Coulson). It's hard to hope for improvement on this front when one considers Ward's replacement on the team, Antoine Triplett (B.J. Britt), whose geniality and general agreeableness somehow manage to make him even less interesting than original, good Ward.
An even bigger problem is that I'm not sure how many of the similarities between SHIELD and Hydra are intentional, and how much the show would prefer to elide them through an appeal to personality. Much is made of the fact that Ward is weakened by his amorality--without Garrett to give him orders, he spins out and ends up thoroughly trounced by May--while Skye is strengthened by her deep moral convictions. But the show can't convincingly argue that Skye's moral fiber--or indeed Coulson's--are something that SHIELD instilled in them. At best, SHIELD can take credit for recognizing their commitment to helping others--though in that case it must also take the blame for failing to recognize that Ward, and hundreds or even thousands like him, were merely mouthing that commitment without really possessing it. In the season's almost inappropriately jokey finale, Coulson and Fury trade jibes about how Garrett has failed to grasp Fury's adage that "a man can accomplish anything when he realizes he's a part of something bigger; a team of people who share that conviction can change the world." But, just as in Coulson's dying words to Loki in The Avengers, SHIELD fails to acknowledge that conviction isn't a good thing in its own right--a lot depends on what your convictions are (oddly enough, this is something that Whedon grasped perfectly well in Angel's fifth season premiere).
The season finale pits the self-absorbed--and by that point, actually insane--Garrett, who believes that he can be "something bigger" on this own, against Coulson, Fury, and the team, who correctly recognize that they are merely a part of that something bigger. But this is to draw a false contrast. The problem with Hydra isn't that its operatives lack conviction and aren't willing to work together towards a greater goal (though it is the case that true believer Hydra operatives are completely missing from the show--as James Nicoll points out, it's strange that the show uses Hydra as its big bad and yet none of its villains are Nazis). And neither does our heroes' ability to work together towards a common goal do anything to mitigate SHIELD's colossal failure to instill the right convictions, and the right idea of something bigger to belong to, in so many of its agents.
But then, perhaps this isn't so surprising, when you consider how unwilling the show is to acknowledge the darker aspects of the legitimate, "good" parts of SHIELD. Even before Hydra is revealed, SHIELD--who as we already knew routinely conducts extra-legal surveillance and military operations, and conceals information from the public--turns out to have been involved in some pretty shady stuff, very little of which receives condemnation from the show's good characters. This includes secret prisons where people, including civilians, are held without trial or recourse to the law; human experimentation, often without the knowledge or consent of the subjects; the hoarding, study, and development of alien technologies and weapons; and a fairly cavalier attitude towards the abuse and mistreatment of prisoners. In the season's early episodes, Skye gives voice to the view that SHIELD is an inherently illegitimate organization and that its methods are unacceptable. But it's soon revealed that her actual motives for infiltrating Coulson's team are personal--she believes SHIELD has information about her parents--and after one or two episodes of criticizing Coulson's methods, she buys into the SHIELD culture completely, a loyalty that is further cemented when she discovers that SHIELD agents died to protect her as a child. By the time Black Widow releases all of SHIELD's secrets online in Winter Soldier, it's left to Skye to sigh that "[Coulson was] right all along. Having all this out there in the world makes it too dangerous, and now there's no one left to protect it."
(Meanwhile, the show seems genuinely not to have noticed that nearly every terrible thing that Ward does was done by a "good," loyal-to-SHIELD character first. Ward kills multiple SHIELD agents during Hydra's assault. But several episodes earlier Coulson, desperate to find a cure for a mortally injured Skye, leads a team to an off-book SHIELD facility and attacks it, killing its defenders in the process. One of the named characters that Ward kills is Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows), a high-ranking, tough-minded senior officer (who is also the person who sent Ward and Fitz on a suicide mission without their knowledge). But the last thing Hand does in life is to suggest to Ward that he kill a bound prisoner--Garrett, who has been exposed as the Clairvoyant--because she feels that a lifetime's imprisonment without trial is too good for him. It's hard, therefore, to see her death as anything but poetic justice.)
The question of following orders, of the duty of the soldier to both obey and question, and of the obligation of powerful people to both use their power for the greater good and make themselves answerable to some higher authority, recur in different guises throughout the MCU. Tony Stark doesn't trust anyone to use the products of his intellect--not the buyers of the weapons he makes, nor the government eager to lay claim to the Iron Man suit. But the authority he arrogates to himself is compromised by his narcissism and poor judgment. The Hulk's power is defined by a complete lack of control--his own as well as anyone who tries to contain him in his enraged form. He is incapable of following orders, and can only exercise control over how he's used by preventing himself from becoming powerful and keeping himself out of the hands of those who would use him as a weapon (including, of course, SHIELD). Most crucially, Captain America is riven by the dilemma of how and whether to be a good soldier. His instinct as a patriot--and a man who believes that no single person, no matter how powerful, is above the law and the chain of command--is to put himself at his government's disposal. But he is also too moral, and too heroic, to blindly obey, and when his investigations of his superiors yield results that fall short of his ideals (as they do in both The Avengers and Winter Soldier) he uses his superior power to take control of the situation ("I guess you're giving the orders now, Captain"). The Winter Soldier acts as a sort of dark mirror to Cap, possessed of his strength, intelligence, and tactical acumen, but incapable of questioning his missions, much less comprehending their larger purposes and consequences (this parallel is the only justification for the Winter Soldier's presence in the film that bears his name, which otherwise gives the character short shrift).
SHIELD does something similar when it posits Hydra's supersoldiers, who are controlled through threats to their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. This, both the show and the film seem to be saying, is Hydra's idea of the perfect soldier, someone incapable of questioning their orders. Garrett's downfall comes, appropriately enough, because he forgets why his soldiers obey him. When Skye frees Mike Peterson's son, who was being held hostage, Mike wastes no time in killing Garrett, who spends his last moments in shock and outrage that his tool has turned on him. But just as the existence of the Winter Soldier, and of Hydra's evil plan, frees the second Captain America movie from having to deal with the more thorny question of whether Cap has the right to use his powers without sanction or oversight, and whether SHIELD has the right to deploy him, the existence of Hydra's supersoldiers frees SHIELD from having to address the kind of soldiers that the organization has made of its own, supposedly free operatives. In their last encounter of the season, Coulson berates Ward, not a little self-righteously, for "[devoting his] entire life to a deranged narcissist who never gave a damn about anyone," and though it seems obvious that the character will recur, perhaps on some path towards redemption (the producers have, indeed, all but promised this), it seems unlikely that that redemption will include any acknowledgment of how much Ward is a product of SHIELD, not Hydra, and how much he embodies its notions of what a good soldier is.
The season ends with Coulson promoted to Fury's former position as head of SHIELD, charged with rebuilding the organization. The implication is that in the hands of a man like Coulson, who embodies the ideal of selfless protection of others, SHIELD can be what it was meant to be--that he has the conviction and moral vision to guide the organization. But this is merely to recapitulate Skye's plot arc--taking someone who questions SHIELD's very existence and core assumptions (or, in Coulson's case, who has learned to question them after being victimized by them) and making them part of the inner circle. It seems likely that the end result will be the same--that like Skye, Coulson's response to being granted the kind of power he had previously questioned will be to embrace it unthinkingly. It's still possible for SHIELD to address some of the truly complex--and perhaps unanswerable--questions raised by its premise. But with the show's first season seemingly so blind to the faults of what it has designated the "good" side--and with so little complexity in its good characters--I find it hard to hope that this will happen.
Monday, January 06, 2014
Becoming Something Else: Thoughts on Arrow
For the last decade and a half, as superheroes have migrated from the pages of comics to the very heart of mainstream pop culture, they've been almost exclusively the purview of feature films. This despite the fact that the long-running, episodic, open-ended comics medium and the bite-sized film medium map very poorly onto one another, a disconnect that has told in what passes for most superhero films' plots. So the X-Men films have warped an ensemble story into a star vehicle for one character, the Marvel films have uniformly sketchy plots and forgettable villains, the Spider-Man films remain, even before the unnecessary reboot, caught in the gravity well of their hero's origin story, and the Superman films have simply failed to take off. Only Christopher Nolan's Batman films, for all their problems, have managed to tell an actual story, and even then, it's a story that tends towards its hero's abdication of his heroic role, not his continuing adventures. Television seems like a much better fit for superhero stories, to the extent that superhero conventions have been showing up in procedural TV series for years--Angel and Person of Interest both have a great deal of Batman in their DNA, for example. And yet with one glaring exception, attempts to translate existing comics properties into television series have fizzled and died, while original superhero series like Heroes have found themselves stranded in a no man's land between the two mediums' conventions.
That glaring exception is, of course, Smallville, whose long shadow (quite literally--it's terrifying to think this, but it holds the record for longest-running American genre series) might have something to do with the chilly reception that other attempts to port comics characters to TV have met. It's certainly a big part of the reason that I was so singularly unimpressed with the pilot for Arrow, a show that, now in the middle of its second season, might just prove to be another exception to the no superheroes on TV rule. In its pilot episode, Arrow seemed to indulge in all of Smallville's (and the CW network's, the home of both shows) most annoying traits--blandly handsome, wooden leads, an emphasis on romance as overbearing as it is puerile, overheated emotions declared in too-obvious speeches, a tangled backstory involving the hero's father, and an aversion to the supposedly campy tropes of the comics, like costumes and catchphrases, that does absolutely nothing to make either show seems mature or realistic. In the year and a half since this violently negative reaction, however, Arrow has slowly gained in popularity and acclaim, which finally encouraged me to give it another look. What I found was a series that, while still suffering from a lot of CW-ish flaws, is nevertheless a lot better and more enjoyable than anyone watching its pilot could ever have hoped. More importantly, Arrow is a series that actually takes advantage of the television medium to do something comics-like, and uses it to offer a genuine engagement with the superhero concept.
Based on the lesser-known DC character the Green Arrow[1], Arrow begins with the return of Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) to his home of Starling City, having been cast away on an island for five years after being shipwrecked while sailing with his father, billionaire industrialist Robert Queen (Jamie Sheridan). The reactions to Oliver's return are decidedly mixed--his mother Moira (Susanna Thompson), sister Thea (Willa Holland), and best friend Tommy Merlyn (Colin Donnell) are overjoyed but also unsure how to cope with the changes in his behavior and personality, while his former girlfriend Laurel (Katie Cassidy) and her father, police detective Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) are incensed, since Oliver went on the ill-fated trip with Laurel's sister Sarah, whose loss has decimated their family. Oliver, meanwhile, has returned to Starling City with a purpose, a list of names bequeathed to him by his father of people who have failed Starling City--corrupt politicians, embezzling bankers, slum-lords and mobsters. Though by day he continues to play the shallow, hardy-partying playboy he was before his ordeal, by night Oliver poses as a vigilante known as The Hood, using the archery and martial arts skills he learned on the island to hunt these people down and force them to atone for their sins--or, if they refuse, simply kill them.
This is, to say the least, an unpromising beginning. The show's premise is, at one and the same time, too reminiscent of Batman (in particular, Nolan's Batman Begins, a similarity that persists throughout the first season) and steeped in a sub-Occupy rhetoric that feels exploitative and skin-deep. The fact that Oliver seems not only to have survived on the island but to have become a super-soldier on it (it is strongly implied, for example, that the timing of his return isn't coincidental but a choice, and that he could have arranged for his rescue to happen far sooner than it did), promises a Lost-like missing backstory--which is to say, a show more interested in filling in the missing pieces of its past than in developing its story and characters into their future--which is indeed doled out in flashbacks interspersed with each episode. The show immediately begins teasing the resumption of Oliver and Laurel's romance, in the time-honored fashion of establishing a love triangle between them and Tommy, which would be groan-worthy even if it didn't require us to ignore the surely insurmountable obstacles to such a reconciliation. Most importantly, the fact that Oliver is an unrepentant killer--and not just of the people on his father's list, but of their henchmen and lackeys--is shocking and unpleasant, all the more so because he is so unconflicted about it. The impression formed is of a show trying to trade on Smallville-style soapiness, Batman-style darkness, and the hot button issues of the day without any real sense of what any of these components mean in themselves, and of what kind of story it wants to tell.
And yet, as the first season draws on, Arrow steadily improves into a compelling, engaging series. Partly, this is simply a matter of execution. After a dozen or so forgettable one-percenter-of-the-week episodes, the show's storytelling kicks dramatically into gear, barreling through plot twists and complications with little in the way of narrative dead weight.[2] Visually, too, Arrow is impressive, utilizing what must be a limited budget to deliver top-notch, masterfully shot and choreographed fight scenes. Whatever the show's narrative failings, after the middle of its first season, it is never boring to watch.
At least one of those narrative failings, however, Arrow's seemingly muddled definition of heroism, turns out to be a deliberate choice. "To save my city," Oliver tells us in every episode's opening narration, "I must become something else." It takes a while to realize this, but Arrow's central thesis is that Oliver has no idea what that something else is, and that he is making many mistakes and wrong turns on his path to figuring that question out, and to becoming an actual hero. That Oliver's original mission in Starling City, crossing off the names in his father's list, is unheroic both in concept and execution is something that is repeatedly drummed into us--through Detective Lance's disgust at the carnage he leaves behind him, but even more than that, through Oliver's own inability to defend it. When other vigilantes emerge in Starling City, either independently of Oliver or in emulation of him, he moves to neutralize them without ever being able to articulate, to them or to himself, just what makes his vigilantism different and justifiable.
When, over the course of the first season, other people learn Oliver's secret, their initial reactions are almost invariably dismay and rejection. The first of these is John Diggle (David Ramsey), Oliver's driver and bodyguard, who is brought into the fold early on. Diggle's induction into Oliver's team would be a welcome change if only because it gives Oliver someone with whom he can discuss his nocturnal activities, thus eliminating the tortuous voiceovers that plague the show's first few episodes, but he quickly becomes one of Arrow's most important components. Though his initial reaction to learning Oliver's secret is to declare that "You really did lose your mind on that island" and call him a criminal and a murderer, Diggle comes around to Oliver's arguments that Starling City needs extra-legal protection from the predation of people too rich to be touched by the law. But he continues to challenge Oliver's ideas of how that protection should look, encouraging him to look past the straightforward mission of his father's list and address crime wherever he finds it. Later in the season, the team is joined by techie Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), who also declares her ambivalence towards Oliver's methods, and agrees to help him and keep his secret only in exchange for his help on her own project. Though that thread is underplayed for the rest of the season--Felicity quickly buys into the vigilante party line[3]--it's her focus on this alleged side project that leads Oliver to discover the season's central villain, and takes him to the next level on his journey towards true heroism.
The most important character to discover Oliver's secret in the first season, however, is Tommy. Arrow places trauma, the recovery from it and the failure to recover, at the center of most of its character work, suggesting, for example, that Oliver's experiences on the island--where he encountered a host of violent enemies and was forced to endure and commit heinous acts in order to survive--make his difficulties in reintegrating to his old life not dissimilar from those of a soldier returning from war. The rest of the cast, too, is coping with their own traumatic experiences--Diggle is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and is also reeling from the death of his brother; Laurel and Quentin are still picking the pieces up from Sarah's death and the destruction of their family; when Oliver challenges Thea for acting out, she reminds him that "my brother and my father died... you guys all act like it's cool, let's just forget about the last five years. Well I can't. For me it's kind of permanently in there." That trauma, the realization of the world's fundamental unfairness and of their own smallness and vulnerability before it, is what lies at the heart of most of the characters' willingness to at least consider that the vigilante is a force for good, so Tommy, as the only member of the cast who is relatively un-traumatized, plays a vital role as the voice of normalcy and sanity. Unlike Diggle and Felicity, he can't talk himself into Oliver's point of view, decisively declaring that Oliver is "a serial killer" and eventually cutting off their friendship. Before that happens, however, Arrow puts us into Tommy's headspace, in an episode in which he's forced to bribe a city official who wants to investigate Oliver's lair, which lies under the nightclub they've opened together, and then stall the police who want to search it. The episode makes it clear how seedy and underhanded these actions seem to Tommy, and all to protect a friend whose compulsions he neither respects nor understands.
Of course, Arrow isn't Watchmen. Even in its early episodes it ultimately comes down on Oliver's side, and is clearly moving towards a wholehearted embrace of his vigilantism. But the format of a television series gives the show more room and time to build up to that point organically, and in unexpected ways. When we watch a Spider-Man movie, we know that Peter Parker's uncle Ben will die because of Peter's indifference. What should be a defining, life-altering trauma becomes just another set-piece to get through before the actual story can start. Arrow, because it's taking such a long, meandering path through Oliver's origin story, can embroider it in interesting ways--as when Oliver forms a bond with a woman who, like him, is stalking the streets at night killing criminals, going so far as to invite her on his crime-fighting escapades, only to realize that she lacks even his flawed judgement and self-control.
Arrow allows characters like Diggle, Quentin Lance, and Tommy room to express their disapproval of Oliver without him having a good answer for them, because at that point in the show's story such an answer doesn't exist. More importantly, it allows him to learn from their criticism and slowly refine his idea of what the "something else" he wants to be actually is. Tommy's rejection of Oliver in the first season leads him to reconcile with his estranged father Malcolm (John Barrowman), who turns out to be the season's main villain. This eventually leads to Tommy's death, an event that so shatters Oliver that he leaves Starling City and goes back to the island--as bold a declaration of his failure to reintegrate into his old life and find a place for himself in it as he could possibly make. When he returns, Oliver announces a new mission, one of heroism and personal example rather than vengeance and violence, but his progress towards achieving that goal has been haphazard. He resolves to stop killing, but already in the first half of the second season there have been occasions on which he's been unable to keep that resolution; he changes his moniker from the Hood to the Arrow, but most of the citizens of Starling City use the two names interchangeably, and some still call him simply "the vigilante." This suggests a series in which it might take several seasons for Oliver to become the Green Arrow that comic book readers know, and one in which we can be privy to the process of developing that character's image and credo.
Somewhat less successful, but still quite interesting, is Arrow's handling of class. One of the few things I did pick up about the comics' Green Arrow is that he's considered the left-wing answer to Batman, and especially in the current political climate, in which the fascism of the Nolan Batman films has been getting more and more pushback as people notice how problematic it is for a billionaire to go out at night and attack poor criminals, there's space for a story in which the Batman analogue is focused on systemic, economic crime. As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, Arrow's social consciousness initially seems skin-deep, but as the first season draws on it becomes clear that issues of class are baked into every aspect of the show's world--in which the class war is a literal one, with the privileged classes drawing first blood. Malcolm Merlyn turns out to have been the leader of a group, which also included Oliver's parents, of rich people who have felt the sting of street crime in Starling City--Malcolm's wife was murdered by muggers outside the free clinic she established in the Glades, Starling City's worst neighborhood; another member's daughter was raped. In a Batman-style story, these people would be the heroes, cleaning up the streets of riffraff and scum. In Arrow, they're the villains, who have failed to realize that their suffering is a symptom of a disease they've helped cause, and whose proposed "solution," dubbed The Undertaking, is to level the Glades and kill its inhabitants. Despite his best efforts, Oliver is only able to partially prevent the Undertaking; at the end of the first season, a large segment of the Glades is destroyed and hundreds of people are killed.
As I've said, there are some obvious similarities here to Batman Begins, which revolves around a plan by the League of Assassins (who also appear as villains in Arrow's second season) to destroy Gotham because they perceive it as hopelessly corrupt, and believe, as Malcolm Merlyn does of the Glades, that "it can't be saved, because the people there don't want it to be saved... They deserve to die. All of them." As in Arrow, that plan is only partially successful, encompassing only the Narrows, Gotham's own bad, crime-riddled neighborhood. The difference between Arrow and Nolan's Batman films, however, is that after Batman Begins, the Narrows--whose inhabitants were driven mad, but not killed, by the League of Assassins's neurotoxin--are never mentioned again. In Arrow, the Glades, and the aftermath of the Undertaking, remain a central component of the show. In response to the outrage of the Undertaking, some of the citizens of the Glades respond by emulating their supposed champion, forming posses of masked vigilantes who set out to murder the alleged architects of the attack, or simply the random rich. Some of the comic's central villains emerge as a direct response to the Undertaking, most prominently Sebastian Blood (Kevin Alejandro), a mayoral candidate who has made retaking the city for its ordinary citizens his rallying cry (and is using Oliver and his family as whipping boys to rally support to his cause), even as he amasses an army of super-soldiers for some as-yet undisclosed purpose.[4]
As refreshing as it is to see class issues addressed so baldly on American TV--and in genre TV, no less--Arrow's handling of these issues often leaves something to be desired. It is, for example, enormously problematic that the only reaction to the Undertaking to emerge from the Glades is a villainous one. Even more of a problem is the fact that the voices of ordinary Glades citizens are almost entirely absent from the show. Arrow does a good job of humanizing the Undertaking's architects: Malcom Merlyn is believably damaged (or, again, traumatized) by his wife's murder, and is shown to justify his monstrous actions by claiming to be protecting his son (when a shocked Tommy protests at his father killing a disarmed opponent, Malcom explains that he killed the man "as surely as he would have killed you"); even more interesting is Moira Queen, whose participation in the Undertaking is grudging at best--she knows that Malcolm is responsible for the sinking of Robert's yacht, and he has threatened Oliver and Thea--but who fails to grasp, until it's very nearly too late, that she has a responsibility to the hundreds of other families who are also in danger. But, perhaps predictably for a series whose champion of the oppressed is himself a billionaire, the voices of the ordinary citizens of the Glades are entirely absent from Arrow's second season. When Moira is acquitted of murder for her role in the Undertaking (an acquittal that, we later learn, was orchestrated by Malcolm, who intimidated the jury), we see Oliver's ambivalence about the verdict, but not the outrage of the people whose homes she helped destroy and whose loved ones she helped kill.[5]
Nevertheless, Arrow is committed to the notion of crime as a social, rather than individual, problem, and of economic crime as being equally destructive as street crime, if not more so. It's particularly notable that even at his most unheroic moments, Oliver can be remarkably sympathetic towards people who are driven to crime, much more so than Diggle, who encourages him to address street crime (which Oliver dismisses as "a symptom") but also takes a much more black and white view of it. When Oliver investigates, at Diggle's urging, a bank robbery that left a cop critically injured (even in his later, crime-fighting incarnations, Oliver doesn't really care about property crime), he discovers that the thieves are a family who fell on hard times after his father closed the factory where their father was employed. Though Diggle insists that the robbers are guilty regardless of their misfortunes, Oliver tries to reason with the older man, and to give him an out that would prevent any further robberies without the family going to prison.[6] At the same time, Arrow doesn't shy away from the fact of its main character's privilege, and how it can blind him. There's a strong sense that Oliver's certainty that his vigilantism is justified (while other vigilantes must be stopped) is merely an extension of his pre-island personality, the spoiled rich kid who could have anything he wanted and hadn't heard the word "no" often enough. And in the second season, when Oliver arranges for Felicity and Diggle to be close to him in his everyday life by making them, respectively, his assistant and driver, it falls to them to remind him how humiliating these subservient roles are for people who, in reality, are his partners and allies.
For all the good things I've said about it, I wouldn't want to oversell Arrow. This is still a CW show, which can mean soapy storylines, too-obvious dialogue, and some infelicities in the writing. In Arrow's case, a particular problem are the island flashback scenes. Though they've grown more interesting as the show has progressed, and introduced some appealing characters--most notably, Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett, best "known" as the Hobbit films' Azog), a mercenary who becomes Oliver's friend and mentor, but with whom he had a bitter falling out--these sequences are still rather inelegantly presented, dumping a portion of backstory into each episode with little attempt to tie into the present day events or maintain an even pacing. Another sort of problem is the show's diversity, or lack thereof. In its rich neighborhoods and its poor ones, Starling City is almost uniformly white, and there's no sense that it contains ethnic enclaves--black characters, like Diggle or Moira's second husband Walter (Colin Salmon) seem to exist in isolation, not as part of a community. And perhaps most importantly, as the show has drawn on and as Oliver comes closer to his destiny as the Green Arrow, its rooting in real world economic issues is beginning to fade. However problematic Oliver's mission against one percenters was in the first season, it did have real world implications. In the second season, his enemies are more and more often comic book villains, whose roots in socio-economic issues are growing more difficult to discern.
Nevertheless, Arrow is still worth a look--for a fun story, for good action scenes, for compelling characters (I've said little here about the acting, but Amell in particular has surprised me by growing into his role, ably conveying the many facets of Oliver's personality and his emotional journey as he rejoins the human race). Most of all, for its handling, however flawed, of class issues, and for being, at least for the moment, the most interesting live-action treatment of a superhero story, in film or TV.
[1]Lesser-known, that is, to people like myself, who get their superheroes through cultural osmosis and film/TV adaptations, not comics--where the Green Arrow is, I gather, a central figure. A lot of the discussions I've seen of Arrow have focused on how the show adapts its source material and how beholden it feels to it, but my interest is in the series as its own entity.↩
[2]Other reviewers have referred to this breakneck pace as Arrow learning the lesson of The Vampire Diaries, another CW series that overcame an inauspicious premise and pilot by being fearless with its plotting, but since I never gave that show a second chance, my frame of reference is a little different--the show that Arrow reminds me of, whenever I look up to realize that so much has already happened and yet we're barely at the middle of the episode, is Scandal.↩
[3]In general, Felicity is Arrow's most problematic character, a fact that surprised me since one of the few things I knew about the show going in was that she was a fan favorite. Rickards is a fine performer who imbues her character with presence and verve, and her rapport with Amell is winning (it's easy to see why Oliver and Felicity have become fandom's favorite pairing), but all this only serves to obscure the fact that she has little in the way of a personality. Especially after the fig leaf of her reason for keeping Oliver's secret is done away with, it's simply taken for granted that she will stick around and continue risking death or imprisonment for no discernible reason. While most other characters on the show--even the generally-disliked Laurel, who has spent the second season in a well-earned but hard to watch downward spiral that still feels more realistic than anything Felicity has ever done--are given their own friends, family history, and interests, Felicity appears not to exist outside of Oliver and his mission.↩
[4]For all that their political perspectives on the same story are so diametrically opposed, something that Arrow and Batman Begins have in common is that neither one acknowledges the role of government and social policy in addressing (or exacerbating) economic inequality and the root causes of crime. In the Batman films, the only department of Gotham's government we see is the police (while homeless orphan are left to billionaires like Bruce Wayne to see to). In Arrow, Oliver seems aware of how limited his power to affect society on a large scale actually is, even in his guise as the philanthropic CEO of his father's company, but doesn't make the obvious connection to agitating for welfare and pro-equality laws and policies, while Sebastian Blood, though he talks about the importance of government and is running for mayor, obviously has other ideas about how to achieve change. It's tempting to blame this on bad writing, but really it strikes me as a symptom of a larger trend in American pop culture (and culture in general), in which the role of government to do anything but punish wrongdoers is only rarely understood or admired.↩
[5]This is also an aspect of the show in which its CW-ness works against it--though some characters, like Diggle or Thea's boyfriend Roy (Colton Haynes) are supposedly from the Glades, they look like the standard CW actor, who spends two hours at the gym every day and whose hair is professionally styled. Even more importantly, there is no sense of a cultural gap between the Glades and Starling City's upper class--Roy has no problem dressing for a party at Thea's house, or switching between the modes of behavior in the Glades and those of the Queens' mansion.↩
[6]Another amusing example of Diggle's law and order mentality comes later in the first season, when Oliver, having realized that his mother has some connection to his father's list, confronts her in his guise as the Hood, only for Moira--alone among all the one percenters that Oliver has attacked--to pull out a gun and shoot him. Diggle's response--that Moira must be guilty if she wouldn't trust the word of a known killer who has promised not to hurt her--was rather different than mine--that Oliver clearly gets badass-ness from his mother.↩
That glaring exception is, of course, Smallville, whose long shadow (quite literally--it's terrifying to think this, but it holds the record for longest-running American genre series) might have something to do with the chilly reception that other attempts to port comics characters to TV have met. It's certainly a big part of the reason that I was so singularly unimpressed with the pilot for Arrow, a show that, now in the middle of its second season, might just prove to be another exception to the no superheroes on TV rule. In its pilot episode, Arrow seemed to indulge in all of Smallville's (and the CW network's, the home of both shows) most annoying traits--blandly handsome, wooden leads, an emphasis on romance as overbearing as it is puerile, overheated emotions declared in too-obvious speeches, a tangled backstory involving the hero's father, and an aversion to the supposedly campy tropes of the comics, like costumes and catchphrases, that does absolutely nothing to make either show seems mature or realistic. In the year and a half since this violently negative reaction, however, Arrow has slowly gained in popularity and acclaim, which finally encouraged me to give it another look. What I found was a series that, while still suffering from a lot of CW-ish flaws, is nevertheless a lot better and more enjoyable than anyone watching its pilot could ever have hoped. More importantly, Arrow is a series that actually takes advantage of the television medium to do something comics-like, and uses it to offer a genuine engagement with the superhero concept.
Based on the lesser-known DC character the Green Arrow[1], Arrow begins with the return of Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) to his home of Starling City, having been cast away on an island for five years after being shipwrecked while sailing with his father, billionaire industrialist Robert Queen (Jamie Sheridan). The reactions to Oliver's return are decidedly mixed--his mother Moira (Susanna Thompson), sister Thea (Willa Holland), and best friend Tommy Merlyn (Colin Donnell) are overjoyed but also unsure how to cope with the changes in his behavior and personality, while his former girlfriend Laurel (Katie Cassidy) and her father, police detective Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) are incensed, since Oliver went on the ill-fated trip with Laurel's sister Sarah, whose loss has decimated their family. Oliver, meanwhile, has returned to Starling City with a purpose, a list of names bequeathed to him by his father of people who have failed Starling City--corrupt politicians, embezzling bankers, slum-lords and mobsters. Though by day he continues to play the shallow, hardy-partying playboy he was before his ordeal, by night Oliver poses as a vigilante known as The Hood, using the archery and martial arts skills he learned on the island to hunt these people down and force them to atone for their sins--or, if they refuse, simply kill them.
This is, to say the least, an unpromising beginning. The show's premise is, at one and the same time, too reminiscent of Batman (in particular, Nolan's Batman Begins, a similarity that persists throughout the first season) and steeped in a sub-Occupy rhetoric that feels exploitative and skin-deep. The fact that Oliver seems not only to have survived on the island but to have become a super-soldier on it (it is strongly implied, for example, that the timing of his return isn't coincidental but a choice, and that he could have arranged for his rescue to happen far sooner than it did), promises a Lost-like missing backstory--which is to say, a show more interested in filling in the missing pieces of its past than in developing its story and characters into their future--which is indeed doled out in flashbacks interspersed with each episode. The show immediately begins teasing the resumption of Oliver and Laurel's romance, in the time-honored fashion of establishing a love triangle between them and Tommy, which would be groan-worthy even if it didn't require us to ignore the surely insurmountable obstacles to such a reconciliation. Most importantly, the fact that Oliver is an unrepentant killer--and not just of the people on his father's list, but of their henchmen and lackeys--is shocking and unpleasant, all the more so because he is so unconflicted about it. The impression formed is of a show trying to trade on Smallville-style soapiness, Batman-style darkness, and the hot button issues of the day without any real sense of what any of these components mean in themselves, and of what kind of story it wants to tell.
And yet, as the first season draws on, Arrow steadily improves into a compelling, engaging series. Partly, this is simply a matter of execution. After a dozen or so forgettable one-percenter-of-the-week episodes, the show's storytelling kicks dramatically into gear, barreling through plot twists and complications with little in the way of narrative dead weight.[2] Visually, too, Arrow is impressive, utilizing what must be a limited budget to deliver top-notch, masterfully shot and choreographed fight scenes. Whatever the show's narrative failings, after the middle of its first season, it is never boring to watch.
At least one of those narrative failings, however, Arrow's seemingly muddled definition of heroism, turns out to be a deliberate choice. "To save my city," Oliver tells us in every episode's opening narration, "I must become something else." It takes a while to realize this, but Arrow's central thesis is that Oliver has no idea what that something else is, and that he is making many mistakes and wrong turns on his path to figuring that question out, and to becoming an actual hero. That Oliver's original mission in Starling City, crossing off the names in his father's list, is unheroic both in concept and execution is something that is repeatedly drummed into us--through Detective Lance's disgust at the carnage he leaves behind him, but even more than that, through Oliver's own inability to defend it. When other vigilantes emerge in Starling City, either independently of Oliver or in emulation of him, he moves to neutralize them without ever being able to articulate, to them or to himself, just what makes his vigilantism different and justifiable.
When, over the course of the first season, other people learn Oliver's secret, their initial reactions are almost invariably dismay and rejection. The first of these is John Diggle (David Ramsey), Oliver's driver and bodyguard, who is brought into the fold early on. Diggle's induction into Oliver's team would be a welcome change if only because it gives Oliver someone with whom he can discuss his nocturnal activities, thus eliminating the tortuous voiceovers that plague the show's first few episodes, but he quickly becomes one of Arrow's most important components. Though his initial reaction to learning Oliver's secret is to declare that "You really did lose your mind on that island" and call him a criminal and a murderer, Diggle comes around to Oliver's arguments that Starling City needs extra-legal protection from the predation of people too rich to be touched by the law. But he continues to challenge Oliver's ideas of how that protection should look, encouraging him to look past the straightforward mission of his father's list and address crime wherever he finds it. Later in the season, the team is joined by techie Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), who also declares her ambivalence towards Oliver's methods, and agrees to help him and keep his secret only in exchange for his help on her own project. Though that thread is underplayed for the rest of the season--Felicity quickly buys into the vigilante party line[3]--it's her focus on this alleged side project that leads Oliver to discover the season's central villain, and takes him to the next level on his journey towards true heroism.
The most important character to discover Oliver's secret in the first season, however, is Tommy. Arrow places trauma, the recovery from it and the failure to recover, at the center of most of its character work, suggesting, for example, that Oliver's experiences on the island--where he encountered a host of violent enemies and was forced to endure and commit heinous acts in order to survive--make his difficulties in reintegrating to his old life not dissimilar from those of a soldier returning from war. The rest of the cast, too, is coping with their own traumatic experiences--Diggle is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and is also reeling from the death of his brother; Laurel and Quentin are still picking the pieces up from Sarah's death and the destruction of their family; when Oliver challenges Thea for acting out, she reminds him that "my brother and my father died... you guys all act like it's cool, let's just forget about the last five years. Well I can't. For me it's kind of permanently in there." That trauma, the realization of the world's fundamental unfairness and of their own smallness and vulnerability before it, is what lies at the heart of most of the characters' willingness to at least consider that the vigilante is a force for good, so Tommy, as the only member of the cast who is relatively un-traumatized, plays a vital role as the voice of normalcy and sanity. Unlike Diggle and Felicity, he can't talk himself into Oliver's point of view, decisively declaring that Oliver is "a serial killer" and eventually cutting off their friendship. Before that happens, however, Arrow puts us into Tommy's headspace, in an episode in which he's forced to bribe a city official who wants to investigate Oliver's lair, which lies under the nightclub they've opened together, and then stall the police who want to search it. The episode makes it clear how seedy and underhanded these actions seem to Tommy, and all to protect a friend whose compulsions he neither respects nor understands.
Of course, Arrow isn't Watchmen. Even in its early episodes it ultimately comes down on Oliver's side, and is clearly moving towards a wholehearted embrace of his vigilantism. But the format of a television series gives the show more room and time to build up to that point organically, and in unexpected ways. When we watch a Spider-Man movie, we know that Peter Parker's uncle Ben will die because of Peter's indifference. What should be a defining, life-altering trauma becomes just another set-piece to get through before the actual story can start. Arrow, because it's taking such a long, meandering path through Oliver's origin story, can embroider it in interesting ways--as when Oliver forms a bond with a woman who, like him, is stalking the streets at night killing criminals, going so far as to invite her on his crime-fighting escapades, only to realize that she lacks even his flawed judgement and self-control.
Arrow allows characters like Diggle, Quentin Lance, and Tommy room to express their disapproval of Oliver without him having a good answer for them, because at that point in the show's story such an answer doesn't exist. More importantly, it allows him to learn from their criticism and slowly refine his idea of what the "something else" he wants to be actually is. Tommy's rejection of Oliver in the first season leads him to reconcile with his estranged father Malcolm (John Barrowman), who turns out to be the season's main villain. This eventually leads to Tommy's death, an event that so shatters Oliver that he leaves Starling City and goes back to the island--as bold a declaration of his failure to reintegrate into his old life and find a place for himself in it as he could possibly make. When he returns, Oliver announces a new mission, one of heroism and personal example rather than vengeance and violence, but his progress towards achieving that goal has been haphazard. He resolves to stop killing, but already in the first half of the second season there have been occasions on which he's been unable to keep that resolution; he changes his moniker from the Hood to the Arrow, but most of the citizens of Starling City use the two names interchangeably, and some still call him simply "the vigilante." This suggests a series in which it might take several seasons for Oliver to become the Green Arrow that comic book readers know, and one in which we can be privy to the process of developing that character's image and credo.
Somewhat less successful, but still quite interesting, is Arrow's handling of class. One of the few things I did pick up about the comics' Green Arrow is that he's considered the left-wing answer to Batman, and especially in the current political climate, in which the fascism of the Nolan Batman films has been getting more and more pushback as people notice how problematic it is for a billionaire to go out at night and attack poor criminals, there's space for a story in which the Batman analogue is focused on systemic, economic crime. As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, Arrow's social consciousness initially seems skin-deep, but as the first season draws on it becomes clear that issues of class are baked into every aspect of the show's world--in which the class war is a literal one, with the privileged classes drawing first blood. Malcolm Merlyn turns out to have been the leader of a group, which also included Oliver's parents, of rich people who have felt the sting of street crime in Starling City--Malcolm's wife was murdered by muggers outside the free clinic she established in the Glades, Starling City's worst neighborhood; another member's daughter was raped. In a Batman-style story, these people would be the heroes, cleaning up the streets of riffraff and scum. In Arrow, they're the villains, who have failed to realize that their suffering is a symptom of a disease they've helped cause, and whose proposed "solution," dubbed The Undertaking, is to level the Glades and kill its inhabitants. Despite his best efforts, Oliver is only able to partially prevent the Undertaking; at the end of the first season, a large segment of the Glades is destroyed and hundreds of people are killed.
As I've said, there are some obvious similarities here to Batman Begins, which revolves around a plan by the League of Assassins (who also appear as villains in Arrow's second season) to destroy Gotham because they perceive it as hopelessly corrupt, and believe, as Malcolm Merlyn does of the Glades, that "it can't be saved, because the people there don't want it to be saved... They deserve to die. All of them." As in Arrow, that plan is only partially successful, encompassing only the Narrows, Gotham's own bad, crime-riddled neighborhood. The difference between Arrow and Nolan's Batman films, however, is that after Batman Begins, the Narrows--whose inhabitants were driven mad, but not killed, by the League of Assassins's neurotoxin--are never mentioned again. In Arrow, the Glades, and the aftermath of the Undertaking, remain a central component of the show. In response to the outrage of the Undertaking, some of the citizens of the Glades respond by emulating their supposed champion, forming posses of masked vigilantes who set out to murder the alleged architects of the attack, or simply the random rich. Some of the comic's central villains emerge as a direct response to the Undertaking, most prominently Sebastian Blood (Kevin Alejandro), a mayoral candidate who has made retaking the city for its ordinary citizens his rallying cry (and is using Oliver and his family as whipping boys to rally support to his cause), even as he amasses an army of super-soldiers for some as-yet undisclosed purpose.[4]
As refreshing as it is to see class issues addressed so baldly on American TV--and in genre TV, no less--Arrow's handling of these issues often leaves something to be desired. It is, for example, enormously problematic that the only reaction to the Undertaking to emerge from the Glades is a villainous one. Even more of a problem is the fact that the voices of ordinary Glades citizens are almost entirely absent from the show. Arrow does a good job of humanizing the Undertaking's architects: Malcom Merlyn is believably damaged (or, again, traumatized) by his wife's murder, and is shown to justify his monstrous actions by claiming to be protecting his son (when a shocked Tommy protests at his father killing a disarmed opponent, Malcom explains that he killed the man "as surely as he would have killed you"); even more interesting is Moira Queen, whose participation in the Undertaking is grudging at best--she knows that Malcolm is responsible for the sinking of Robert's yacht, and he has threatened Oliver and Thea--but who fails to grasp, until it's very nearly too late, that she has a responsibility to the hundreds of other families who are also in danger. But, perhaps predictably for a series whose champion of the oppressed is himself a billionaire, the voices of the ordinary citizens of the Glades are entirely absent from Arrow's second season. When Moira is acquitted of murder for her role in the Undertaking (an acquittal that, we later learn, was orchestrated by Malcolm, who intimidated the jury), we see Oliver's ambivalence about the verdict, but not the outrage of the people whose homes she helped destroy and whose loved ones she helped kill.[5]
Nevertheless, Arrow is committed to the notion of crime as a social, rather than individual, problem, and of economic crime as being equally destructive as street crime, if not more so. It's particularly notable that even at his most unheroic moments, Oliver can be remarkably sympathetic towards people who are driven to crime, much more so than Diggle, who encourages him to address street crime (which Oliver dismisses as "a symptom") but also takes a much more black and white view of it. When Oliver investigates, at Diggle's urging, a bank robbery that left a cop critically injured (even in his later, crime-fighting incarnations, Oliver doesn't really care about property crime), he discovers that the thieves are a family who fell on hard times after his father closed the factory where their father was employed. Though Diggle insists that the robbers are guilty regardless of their misfortunes, Oliver tries to reason with the older man, and to give him an out that would prevent any further robberies without the family going to prison.[6] At the same time, Arrow doesn't shy away from the fact of its main character's privilege, and how it can blind him. There's a strong sense that Oliver's certainty that his vigilantism is justified (while other vigilantes must be stopped) is merely an extension of his pre-island personality, the spoiled rich kid who could have anything he wanted and hadn't heard the word "no" often enough. And in the second season, when Oliver arranges for Felicity and Diggle to be close to him in his everyday life by making them, respectively, his assistant and driver, it falls to them to remind him how humiliating these subservient roles are for people who, in reality, are his partners and allies.
For all the good things I've said about it, I wouldn't want to oversell Arrow. This is still a CW show, which can mean soapy storylines, too-obvious dialogue, and some infelicities in the writing. In Arrow's case, a particular problem are the island flashback scenes. Though they've grown more interesting as the show has progressed, and introduced some appealing characters--most notably, Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett, best "known" as the Hobbit films' Azog), a mercenary who becomes Oliver's friend and mentor, but with whom he had a bitter falling out--these sequences are still rather inelegantly presented, dumping a portion of backstory into each episode with little attempt to tie into the present day events or maintain an even pacing. Another sort of problem is the show's diversity, or lack thereof. In its rich neighborhoods and its poor ones, Starling City is almost uniformly white, and there's no sense that it contains ethnic enclaves--black characters, like Diggle or Moira's second husband Walter (Colin Salmon) seem to exist in isolation, not as part of a community. And perhaps most importantly, as the show has drawn on and as Oliver comes closer to his destiny as the Green Arrow, its rooting in real world economic issues is beginning to fade. However problematic Oliver's mission against one percenters was in the first season, it did have real world implications. In the second season, his enemies are more and more often comic book villains, whose roots in socio-economic issues are growing more difficult to discern.
Nevertheless, Arrow is still worth a look--for a fun story, for good action scenes, for compelling characters (I've said little here about the acting, but Amell in particular has surprised me by growing into his role, ably conveying the many facets of Oliver's personality and his emotional journey as he rejoins the human race). Most of all, for its handling, however flawed, of class issues, and for being, at least for the moment, the most interesting live-action treatment of a superhero story, in film or TV.
[1]Lesser-known, that is, to people like myself, who get their superheroes through cultural osmosis and film/TV adaptations, not comics--where the Green Arrow is, I gather, a central figure. A lot of the discussions I've seen of Arrow have focused on how the show adapts its source material and how beholden it feels to it, but my interest is in the series as its own entity.↩
[2]Other reviewers have referred to this breakneck pace as Arrow learning the lesson of The Vampire Diaries, another CW series that overcame an inauspicious premise and pilot by being fearless with its plotting, but since I never gave that show a second chance, my frame of reference is a little different--the show that Arrow reminds me of, whenever I look up to realize that so much has already happened and yet we're barely at the middle of the episode, is Scandal.↩
[3]In general, Felicity is Arrow's most problematic character, a fact that surprised me since one of the few things I knew about the show going in was that she was a fan favorite. Rickards is a fine performer who imbues her character with presence and verve, and her rapport with Amell is winning (it's easy to see why Oliver and Felicity have become fandom's favorite pairing), but all this only serves to obscure the fact that she has little in the way of a personality. Especially after the fig leaf of her reason for keeping Oliver's secret is done away with, it's simply taken for granted that she will stick around and continue risking death or imprisonment for no discernible reason. While most other characters on the show--even the generally-disliked Laurel, who has spent the second season in a well-earned but hard to watch downward spiral that still feels more realistic than anything Felicity has ever done--are given their own friends, family history, and interests, Felicity appears not to exist outside of Oliver and his mission.↩
[4]For all that their political perspectives on the same story are so diametrically opposed, something that Arrow and Batman Begins have in common is that neither one acknowledges the role of government and social policy in addressing (or exacerbating) economic inequality and the root causes of crime. In the Batman films, the only department of Gotham's government we see is the police (while homeless orphan are left to billionaires like Bruce Wayne to see to). In Arrow, Oliver seems aware of how limited his power to affect society on a large scale actually is, even in his guise as the philanthropic CEO of his father's company, but doesn't make the obvious connection to agitating for welfare and pro-equality laws and policies, while Sebastian Blood, though he talks about the importance of government and is running for mayor, obviously has other ideas about how to achieve change. It's tempting to blame this on bad writing, but really it strikes me as a symptom of a larger trend in American pop culture (and culture in general), in which the role of government to do anything but punish wrongdoers is only rarely understood or admired.↩
[5]This is also an aspect of the show in which its CW-ness works against it--though some characters, like Diggle or Thea's boyfriend Roy (Colton Haynes) are supposedly from the Glades, they look like the standard CW actor, who spends two hours at the gym every day and whose hair is professionally styled. Even more importantly, there is no sense of a cultural gap between the Glades and Starling City's upper class--Roy has no problem dressing for a party at Thea's house, or switching between the modes of behavior in the Glades and those of the Queens' mansion.↩
[6]Another amusing example of Diggle's law and order mentality comes later in the first season, when Oliver, having realized that his mother has some connection to his father's list, confronts her in his guise as the Hood, only for Moira--alone among all the one percenters that Oliver has attacked--to pull out a gun and shoot him. Diggle's response--that Moira must be guilty if she wouldn't trust the word of a known killer who has promised not to hurt her--was rather different than mine--that Oliver clearly gets badass-ness from his mother.↩
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2012 Edition, Part 3
We're coming near to the end of what has been a singularly unimpressive pilot season. Progress report on the shows I've stuck with: Revolution has so far failed to ignite and if it doesn't within the next few weeks I'll probably ditch it. Vegas's second episode bored me, so it's been dropped. Elementary, on the other hand, had a strong second episode that deepened the two main characters, but the show still doesn't feel much like Holmes. Last Resort is maintaining the intensity of its pilot but still not giving the impression that it has an idea of where to take its premise. There are still a few stragglers left, and they'll be trickling on screen over the next month, but right now I'm willing to pronounce the 2012 fall pilot season a bust. Better luck next year.
- The Paradise - The BBC's prospective answer to Downton Abbey draws loosely from the novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise) by Émile Zola, moving its action from post-Napoleonic Paris to an unspecified English city some time in the 19th century, but maintaining its focus on the titular establishment, a department store specializing in ladieswear and accessories. Our heroes are Moray (Emun Elliott), the store's owner, a consummate flatterer who is eager to expand and make his store the hub for fashionable women in the city, Kathrine (Elaine Cassidy), his not-quite fiancée who is both repulsed and intrigued by Moray's ambition and relentless striving, but who he may be taking advantage of in order to get at her father's money, and Denise (Joanna Vanderham), whose uncle's smaller store is being crowded out by The Paradise, and who takes a job there as a shop girl. Despite being based on a novel, The Paradise's approach seems to be more open-ended--the better, presumably, to compete with a soap like Downton Abbey--with individual episodes centering around some self-contained plot while overarching plotlines proceed in the background. Unfortunately, these overarching plotlines veer decidedly towards the soapy--the mystery surrounding the death of Moray's first wife, the mean girl-style disputes between Denise and her colleagues, the burgeoning love triangle between Moray, Katherine, and Denise. And going by the second episode, in which a rich, unhappily married customer kisses a shop boy and then accuses him of assaulting her to protect her reputation, which gives everyone in the cast the excuse to trot out all the rape apology standbys--but why did she invite him to her house, he's such a nice guy, think of how this will destroy his life--and have them be entirely true, the self-contained plots aren't much to look forward to either. Which is a shame, because at its core (and, from what I've read about it, in the original book) The Paradise has an interesting concept that I don't think period dramas have done much to address so far--the growth of capitalism, and the social changes that it spurred among both entrepreneurs and consumers. The fact that the business in question here isn't something male-associated like industry or trains but women's retail, and that Denise discovers in herself a talent for salesmanship and a thirst for success that only Moray truly understands, might have made for an interesting angle on this topic, if only the show were more interested in it than in its more soapy elements.
- Hunted - A British-American co-production written by X-Files stalwart Frank Spotnitz, Hunted is a spy thriller about Sam (Melissa George), an operative for a private intelligence company who is betrayed and nearly killed by someone close to her, and who returns to her employers in order to discover who betrayed her and why. The premise and setting are reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, as is the show's style--lots of atmospheric locations shots, overbearing camera filters (orange for the Middle East, almost colorless in London), offbeat soundtrack (though often low-key and environmental, which sharply contrasts with Haywire), very little dialogue, mainly because the distrustful Sam spends a lot of time on her own, her silent actions or flashbacks, rather than her words, working to fill in the plot (this might also be the show playing to its strengths--when characters do speak it's usually to utter trite clichés such as "Ask yourself this: why won't you trust me? Is it because you don't love me anymore, or because you're afraid you still do?"). While it's nice to see a show about a woman that doesn't feel compelled to surround her with allies and helpmeets, Hunted doesn't really avoid many of the other clichés that dominate shows about vengeful female spies. George isn't exactly Gina Carano as far as her body type or believability as an imposing fighter are concerned, and where most shows of this type motivate their heroine through the kind of emotional connections that women are supposed to care exclusively about--a failed relationship, a dead parent, a lost child--Sam is motivated by all three, and even finds herself, at the end of the first episode, embedded as a tutor in the home of a widower with a young son, which is no doubt intended to play on her emotions. So far what Hunted has going for it is Sam's calculating, emotionless presence at its core, but though George is game the writing isn't quite there to make Sam a three-dimensional figure, or to overcome the clichés that permeate the show.
- Arrow - Pretty much everything I read about this show before watching the pilot compared to Smallville, which is perhaps understandable given that it's on the CW, that the main character was a recurring figure on the earlier show (though Arrow offers a new spin), and that Smallville was the last show based on a major comic book superhero to hit it big. But Arrow lacks Smallville's central conceit--the fact that it was a prequel to the familiar Superman mythos. It kicks off where the Green Arrow's traditional origin story does--having been shipwrecked on an island for years, billionaire Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) trains himself as a super-fighter and, for some reason, archer, and upon his rescue returns to his home town of Starling City to fight evildoers. Far more than Smallville, Arrow reminds me of last year's disastrous attempt at crafting an original superhero show, The Cape--like that show, it suffers from a toxic combination of po-faced seriousness and cartoonish plot points and dialogue--and even more than that, of Batman Begins. Some the similarities between Batman and the Green Arrow stem from the comics--both are billionaires who have secretly trained themselves into unbeatable fighters, augmented by gadgetry and unlimited financial reserves--but the Arrow pilot seems almost to be cribbing from Batman Begins's script--a former wastrel, Oliver is motivated by the death of his father, who believed that it was his responsibility to "save" Starling City, to do the same, choosing to do so as a vigilante, and he continues to wear the mask of a playboy while wishing that he could reveal the truth to his ex-girlfriend (Katie Cassidy), a crusading lawyer. There are some interesting original notes here and there--Oliver's ex hates him not because of his playboy lifestyle but because he was on the fateful cruise with her sister, who died in the wreck, and unlike the Batman films the pilot doesn't shy away from the emotional toll that his years on the island have taken on him (though on the other hand it is entirely blasé about Oliver's willingness to kill, which he does quite often in the pilot). The problem is that Amell is more Tom Welling than Christian Bale, and the best he can muster in scenes where he should be conveying intensity, grief, or shame, is a uniform woodenness (the show tries to compensate for this with voiceovers that tell us what Oliver is feeling, but these are not only overwrought but read by Amell, who fails to imbue them with emotion in the same way he fails to convey that emotion in his performance), which neither the writing nor the acting around him do anything to compensate for. Arrow is clearly building up to a tangled mythology. The pilot features Lost-like flashbacks to Oliver's time on the island, where he clearly wasn't alone, since he learned martial arts, languages, Eastern philosophy, and of course archery (thus completing the Batman Begins parallel), and he returns to Starling City with a very deliberate plan, and a list of enemies to get rid of. What it doesn't give us is a reason to care about this mission--for all the crap it (rightfully) takes, Smallville had a freshness and levity to it, at least when it started out, that made it intriguing. Arrow is too self-serious, but not nearly accomplished enough to justify that seriousness.
- Nashville - So, should I be happy that the show touted as the great white hope of this miserable pilot season centers around two women, or sad that they spend its pilot--and look set to spend the rest of the series--fighting over fame, money, and men? That's maybe being a little glib: the two women around which Nashville circles, middle aged country music diva Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton) and up-and-coming crossover sensation Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) are complex and well drawn, and their dispute--Rayna's latest album is struggling, and her label is trying to force her to tour with, and open for, Juliette in order to expose her to a younger audience, while Juliette is eager to gain respectability by poaching Rayna's professional crew, and particularly her band manager and former lover Deacon (Charlie Esten)--isn't a catfight so much as it is the struggle between two players in a system with only limited spots at the top, both of whom happen to be women and to suffer from the pitfalls of being a woman in the entertainment industry. But the pilot also veers frequently into the realm of too-obvious soap, and most of the its subplots--a love triangle between Deacon's niece Scarlett (Clare Bowen) and two aspiring songwriters, a mayoral campaign thrown into disarray by Rayna's oily father (Powers Boothe in a performance so over the top that it will either become the show's greatest asset or its greatest weakness, it's too soon to tell which) backing her failed businessman husband (Eric Close) as a surprise candidate, whatever tangled history there is between Rayna and Deacon--are uninspiring, which makes it difficult to hope that its main plot strand will develop in intelligent ways. Also, I'm saying this as someone who has been spoiled by Treme, but as a show about the world of music Nashville leaves much to be desired. The glimpses we get of the process and craft of music-making lack the spontaneity, the messiness, and the obvious sense of effort that Treme captures so well--Scarlett, for example, is an obvious Jewel stand-in who writes "poems" to which she sometimes hears music in her head, and when one of her potential love interests finds her notebook he convinces her to work on them together; at the end of the episode, they perform, on the fly and with no preparation or rehearsals, a flawless, implausibly professional version of this song. Even worse, the music itself is rather dull. Rayna complains that Juliette's music is mindless, incomprehensible country-pop, but her songs aren't much better, and there's very little sense in the pilot of the richness of country music and its history (only Scarlett's song at the episode's end, and an earlier one performed by Deacon, are truly attention-grabbing).
Still, comparing every new music-based show that comes along to Treme isn't fair--we should be grateful, I suppose, that Nashville isn't trying to be Glee, since that's clearly where the impetus for it comes from--and even without a genuinely revelatory look at Nashville's music industry, there are things to watch for here. More precisely, two things, the two leads. Britton brings warmth and intelligence to a role that could easily have devolved into a trite diva-ish stereotype. She makes Rayna seem more human than her well-worn storyline has any right being, and convinces us that there's a real person under a plot borrowed from recent Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Country Strong and a million other country music sob stories. Panettiere, amazingly, has to contend with an even bigger bag of clichés--the young sexpot with a tragic past and well-concealed vulnerabilities--and whether as a deliberate choice or simply as a result of a limited range, she defuses them by playing Juliette as inhumanly cold and calculating, creating the impression of a smart, ruthless young woman who knows that all the performances she's putting on--of innocence, of sexiness, of respect towards her country music forerunners--are but a means to an end. It's a performance that could become wearying very quickly, but for now it's just brazen enough to be interesting. By concentrating on Rayna and Juliette--and hopefully by putting them together more than the pilot does--Nashville could find a core of genuine drama amidst its soapy subplots that could make it worth watching. After all, even if they're fighting each, shows about smart, ambitious women should be celebrated. - Beauty and the Beast - This show has been taking a pummeling at the hands of reviewers, and though they're not wrong that it is terrible, I can't help but feel that the opprobrium is a little extreme, and motivated more by the obviously bone-headed decisions that drive this remake of the cheesy-but-romantic 80s original--retooling the show into an obvious Twilight ripoff in which Vincent is a soldier experimented on by the government who periodically turns into a rage monster, and calling him a "beast" because he has a small facial scar (because as we all know, a scar running down a man's cheek makes him look horrifying, not sexy and dangerous)--rather than their execution. Which is, again, quite bad, but not significantly worse than, say, Arrow, which has been getting more favorable reviews, sometimes from the same sources that have panned Beauty and the Beast. The two shows have similar flaws--wooden leads (though Kristin Kreuk tries so much harder than Arrow's Stpehen Amell to inhabit her character, here a tough police detective), lazy plots (the pilot centers around a murder investigation that not even Kreuk's Katherine seems very interested in--certainly not once Jay Ryan's Vincent turns up), trite character motivations (Vincent is oh-so-tortured by what's been done to him; Katherine, in a plot ripped straight from Castle, is trying to find out who killed her mother), and very little chemistry between the two leads (though this is less down to the actors and more the fault of a script that gives them little to do in their shared scenes but gaze longingly at each other). There are, on the other hand, points about the show that I like--Katherine has a female, Hispanic partner, which might make them the only all-female cop duo on TV right now, and Katherine's mother is played by an Asian woman, which is more than Smallville ever did for Kreuk, as far as I can recall. They're obviously not enough to make Beauty and the Beast watchable--especially since the mother, as I've mentioned, is quickly killed off, and the partner will no doubt be ditched for Vincent soon enough--but they are enough to make me a little upset at the disparity between the reactions to Beauty and the Beast and Arrow, which may very well be linked to the former's girly subject matter.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
The Dark Knight Rises
I've been thinking for some time about how fandom reacts when its beloved auteurs fail. When someone like Aaron Sorkin produces something as preachy, self-satisfied, and misogynistic as The Newsroom, fandom reacts with dismay, but is that surprise justified? In Sorkin's case, all of these flaws were baked into his work going back as far as Sports Night, and they were ignored, excused, and forgiven because what he was producing was of such high quality. Is it really surprising that a writer who has been showered with unconditional praise and adulation should feel free to indulge their worst impulses, and revel in bad habits they might previously have worked to curtail? I mention this because going into The Dark Knight Rises, I was determined not to make this sort of mistake. The previous volume in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight, was an excellent film--thrilling, sharply plotted, one of the best superhero films of the last decade. It also ended on a risible note, with Batman choosing to take responsibility for the crimes of crimefighter turned psychotic murderer Harvey Dent, on the belief that the people of Gotham couldn't handle the truth of Harvey's fall from grace, and that without his shining example to guide them they would fall into barbarism and criminality. It would have been easy to ignore this troubling conclusion in favor of the excellent film that preceded it. To do as fandom is too prone to doing, and say "yes, this story is problematic, but it's also such a good story!" But this would be to ignore the strain of fascist authoritarianism, of Great Man fetishism, that has run through all of Nolan's Batman films. In the trilogy's concluding volume--in which, after being relegated to observer status in The Dark Knight, Batman would once again take center stage--it seemed reasonable to assume that these problematic themes would be intensified rather than toned down.
I was prepared, in other words, for The Dark Knight Rises to be an excellent story with a contemptible message. But what Nolan, along with brother and collaborator Jonathan, has delivered is so much more disappointing. The Dark Knight Rises is a flabby, talky film, prone to pounding in its points with a hammer, then repeating them several times to catch up the slow audience members. It has a silly plot whose twists, with one notable exception, are telegraphed well ahead of time, and which hangs together only because the film as a whole is too dreary to arouse the kind of scrutiny that would lay bare its many plot holes. Most of these flaws can, indeed, be traced back to the Nolans' determination to reinforce their Randian vision of Batman as the only person who can restore Gotham to its glory. Most noticeably, the film bogs down in its final third because the Nolans whisk Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) away from the beleaguered city for months so that he can gain enlightenment and return to Gotham even more heroic than he left it--a process that is achieved by having various Magical Foreign People spew repetitive cod-philosophy at him while he has a training montage. But the Nolans also undercut this theme, in ways that, far from granting it the complexity it so desperately needs, only serve to neuter it. In the end, the Nolans seem to lack the courage of their convictions.
In the early scenes of The Dark Knight Rises, there's almost a sense that the Nolans are about to back off from the high-handedness of The Dark Knight's ending. In the eight years since that night, the sainted and hollow memory of Harvey Dent has been used to clean Gotham's streets, but only by stripping away the civil rights of those deemed criminal, and the architect of this process, Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), is sick with himself over the lie that he's promulgated. What soon becomes clear, however, is that rather than feeling shame at having lied to the people of Gotham, or at having sold them the fantasy of a savior, what irks Gordon is the fact that he's sold them the wrong savior, and that Batman remains maligned and despised. As if to drive home the theme of unappreciated heroism, we learn in the film's opening scene that the mayor is planning to fire Gordon. "He's a hero," Gordon's gladhanding, politically-savvy second in command protests. "A war hero. This is peacetime," he's told. Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, is a shut-in, his body ruined by his crimefighting escapades, his mind still reeling from the loss of his lover Rachel. He's the subject of sneering rumor and speculation, not least from the board of his company, whose fortune he's squandered on a clean fusion project that he later shut down with no results. He did this, we soon learn, to keep the technology out of the hands of those who could turn the reactor into a bomb. This echoes the subplot in The Dark Knight in which Bruce builds a machine that can spy on anyone in Gotham, then destroys it after one use because no one should have such unlimited power, and nor is it the only instance of such thinking in The Dark Knight Rises--by the end of the film, the revelation that Bruce has bought yet another company, or concealed yet another technological development, to keep it out of the wrong hands, feels almost like a running joke. The film, of course, means it entirely in earnest, and accepts that Bruce not only has the right but the authority to decide which technologies are safe enough for the general public to use.
Far from toning down The Dark Knight's message, then, The Dark Knight Rises takes it to even further extremes. This isn't simply Batman having the moral authority to act as judge and jury on Gotham's criminals. This is Batman--and Bruce Wayne--as John Galt, the mysterious, reclusive, omni-competent, super-rich industrialist who is the only hope for the future. The Dark Knight Rises extends Batman's authority past crime, into technological progress, and even into social welfare--when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Officer Blake, a Batman believer who is one of the first to uncover signs of the film's villain, starts his investigation by following up the murder of a homeless teen, he learns that the boy was kicked out of his group home because the cash-strapped Wayne Foundation has stopped funding it. In other words, it's not just the police that needs to be augmented by a caped crusader, but every level of government that must be replaced by private enterprise and private philanthropy. And when that private benefactor is mocked, derided, hobbled in his efforts to keep his community safe and even hunted down for those efforts--why, then he will retreat from his obligations, and the result will be disaster.
That disaster comes, fittingly enough, in the form of a people's revolution--or rather, this being that sort of movie, in the form of a revolution that claims to be on the people's behalf but is really a force of evil. Bane (Tom Hardy, wasted under a mask that conceals most of his face and in a role that demands little of him but an imposing physique), the last surviving member of the League of Shadows, the villains of Batman Begins, arrives in Gotham seeking revenge. He steals Bruce Wayne's fortune, defeats and disables Batman, and converts that dangerous fusion reactor from a few paragraphs ago into a nuclear bomb. This he uses to hold the entire city hostage, an act that he describes as the liberation of Gotham's citizens--from a corrupt government, from Commissioner Gordon's lies about Harvey Dent, and from the oppression of the moneyed classes--but which is really a preamble to the bomb's inevitable explosion. What follows is equal parts Communist and French revolutions, with Gotham's rich and powerful rousted from their homes and marched into show trials as enemies of the people--in a court which is presided over by Batman Begins's deranged (and, when last seen, committed) villain, Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who looms over the accused from atop a pile of desks.
Now might be a good time to stop and boggle at the fact that the Nolans' Batman films are renowned for their realism. The image of Crane perched on those desks is a reassuringly Alice in Wonderland-ish touch, a hint that we're meant to take the city's sudden descent into Jacobinism with a grain of salt. Alas, it's but a brief reprieve from the po-faced seriousness with which The Dark Knight Rises otherwise serves up this plot. The Dark Knight managed to make comic book characters and plots seem organic to the real world because it injected a single irrational player--the Joker--into a system whose other participants, cops and criminals alike, were rational, and therefore had no idea how to approach a force whose choices and motivations they couldn't fathom. The Dark Knight Rises fills Gotham with these irrational players--not just Bane but an army of henchmen who seem to have no recognizably human reactions or emotions, and will gladly die at Bane's command--and has them do ridiculous, cartoonish things--Bane traps Gotham's entire police force in the city's sewers, and then instead of killing them he keeps them prisoner for months, at the end of which they march out, uniforms barely mussed, ready to fight Bane's forces--all while pretending that this is a meaningful political statement.
A silly premise might have been forgivable if the film had developed its implications in interesting ways, but, much like The Legend of Korra last month, The Dark Knight Rises uses its villain as a means of avoiding those implications. Both stories are ostensibly about the cities they are set in and the battle for their soul, and yet those cities--their culture, their norms, and most of all their people--are curiously absent. Like Korra's Amon, Bane claims to be acting on behalf of the city's underclass, and establishes a policy of violent persecution against the upper classes. And as we were in Korra, we are kept entirely in the dark on the question of how the people of Gotham feel about this. Do they support Bane? Do they oppose him? Do they think he has the right idea but the wrong methods? Are they, as seems most likely, divided between these options according to their social status in the pre-occupation world? The Dark Knight Rises ignores all these questions. The people responsible for Gotham's suffering are only Bane and his followers (whose ranks are not, as far as we can tell, swelled by Gotham's have-nots), and the people responsible for stopping him are only the few policemen who managed to evade Bane's trap, the authority figures whom he has deposed--no civilians join the resistance. Anyone who does not fall into either of these groups is completely ignored.
Gotham spends months under Bane's rule--months that you'd expect to have a profound impact on the social, psychological, and cultural life of the city--but upon his defeat all we see are its citizens stepping out of their homes (as if they'd spent all that time indoors), ready to resume their lives as if the very fabric of their society hadn't been ripped to shreds. What's interesting is that the Nolans had an opportunity here to reinforce their authoritarian message and show why Batman is necessary--because when stripped of both their white knight, the lie of Harvey Dent, and their dark knight, the citizens of Gotham turn to Bane, a false savior. The film could have shown us Gothamites turning on one another, informing on their neighbors and signing up to do Bane's bidding--the nightmare scenario that justified Batman's choice to take responsibility for Harvey Dent's crimes. Instead, the Nolans prefer to serve up a fantasy of docile, patient goodness, of a populace content to wait for Batman to save it without doing anything--good or evil--on its own behalf.
Since Bane is planning to blow up Gotham, his claims of populism are easily dismissed--can be taken, in fact, as an attack against the very notion of popular, anti-capitalist protest. Even more disappointing, however, is the fact that The Dark Knight Rises squanders the opportunity to address the class struggle in a more nuanced way, through the character of Catwoman. For a lot of Batman fans, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight had to clear an impossible hurdle in the form of Jack Nicholson's turn as the character in Tim Burton's Batman. For me, the iconic Batman villain performance is Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman, and I was very nervous to see what the Nolans and Anne Hathaway would make of the character--not least because, let's face it, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan have a woman problem. It's not as pronounced as Aaron Sorkin's or Steven Moffat's--the Nolans' women are generally competent, rarely hysterical or weepy, and have interests other than landing a husband--but it has nevertheless marred most of their films, in which women are either love interests (often dead ones), or minor plot tokens with little in the way of personality or motivations. So it was something of a surprise to discover that Hathaway's Selina Kyle, though she doesn't hold a candle to the scary intensity of Pfeiffer's performance, is one of the Nolans' best female characters (and my favorite part of the film), followed close behind by Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate, the visionary who contracts with Bruce to build the fusion reactor. Both women have their own agenda and aspirations which are given their own space in the narrative, not just as they reflect on the hero's journey or his feelings--the first time this has been true of a woman in a Nolan film since Carrie-Ann Moss's character in Memento. Hathaway's Selina, in particular, has her own arc of growth over the course of the film, and she is also the one who gets to defeat Bane (though only after it's revealed that he is actually the film's secondary villain). At the film's end, she is the only character in the cast whose further adventures I'd like to learn about.
All that said, the cost of this compelling character arc is that Catwoman's rough edges are filed off, and with them her politics. Perhaps wisely given their track record with female characters, the Nolans choose to veer away from the angry feminist slant that Burton gave Catwoman, and instead make her a class warrior. A jewel thief, she justifies her crimes simply by the fact that she steals from those who have so much, and tells Bruce Wayne that "you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us." Unlike Bane, Selina says things like this in earnest, and also unlike him, she is for the most part a sympathetic character, whose moments of villainy are usually the result of straitened circumstances rather than malice, and whose bitterness over having been dealt a bad hand that has forced her to make increasingly bad choices shines through her disaffected mask and lends moral authority to her views. Through her, then, the film could have given us another perspective on the class struggle that Bane sparks, one that could have suggested that he is playing on a legitimate grievance. Instead, the film uses the earnestness of Selina's convictions to dismantle them. When she sees the violence that has accompanied Bane's revolution, the suffering of the rich whom she had previously reviled, Selina repents of her desire for revolution, and by the end of the film she is fighting by Batman's side to defeat Bane. The message here is clear--capitalism, however predatory, is still better than the alternative--and it's Selina's own believability as an enemy of capitalism that helps to sell it. What's more, the fact that she's positioned as a love interest for Bruce Wayne--the very representative of everything she despises--helps to undercut Selina's convictions, which are overpowered by her affections for Bruce. One can't help but compare this turnaround to Pfeiffer's last scene in Batman Returns, in which she tells Batman "I would love to live with you in your castle ... I just couldn't live with myself." That Catwoman had the strength to give up what she wanted for the sake of her beliefs; the Nolans' Catwoman doesn't.
Of course, by the time this turnaround happens, Batman himself has backed away from the authoritarianism, the Randian dogma, that permeated the first half of the film. The crux of Bruce's long sojourn away from the city (which is the reason that Bane's occupation of Gotham lasts so long despite the fact that the film can't convincingly portray the effects of such an ordeal, and indeed glosses over most of that period as far as Gotham is concerned) is that he is courting death. This echoes Albert's repeated admonitions in the film's first half, and indeed the tone of the entire film is slanted to both warn us and lead us to expect Batman's death. In case we weren't clear on just what kind of death he's heading towards, the film has Selina offer to leave Gotham with Bruce, because "you don't owe these people any more. You've given them everything." "Not everything. Not yet," is his reply. And if that were not enough, the film's surprise villain stabs Batman in the side. That's right. After three films, including one of most critically lauded superhero film in years, and a mass of critical and fannish buzz building up to a consensus on the uniqueness and depth of the Nolans' vision for Batman, their final statement on the character is: Batman as Jesus. The same tired, unoriginal, hokey theme that has shown up in just about every superhero film in the last decade. (Adding insult to injury is the fact that Batman's self-sacrifice is nothing of the sort; though he tells the other characters that he is embarking on a suicide mission, he knows that he has a chance of survival and has merely chosen to fake his death. The film, in its fetishizing of this "death," completely ignores this inconvenient wrinkle.)
At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Blake, who has spent the film as Batman's de facto apprentice, laments to Gordon that no one will know who truly saved Gotham. This is such a whiny thing to say that it's unbelievable--who cares who saved the city or whether they're acknowledged? Surely what's important is that the city was saved, and surely that's all a true hero would care about? But Gordon himself seems to be of Blake's mind--the last thing he says to Batman before sending him off to what he thinks is his death is that Gotham deserves to know who saved it. The conclusion that both Gordon and Blake reach is that Gotham knows who its hero is--it's Batman, whether or not the city knows that Bruce Wayne was the man behind the mask. And indeed, Gotham unveils a statue of Batman in one of the film's final scenes, even as Blake, who has resigned from the police force (because, he says, he now feels that the system is preventing him from doing good), discovers the Batcave and becomes the new Batman. But this is only to reinforce the mealy-mouthed conclusion to which the Nolans' have brought their vision of Batman the Great Man. The truly authoritarian, Frank Miller-style Batman doesn't care about the public's accolades--nor, indeed, their condemnation. He acts because he believes his strength and competence give him the authority to act and the ability to know which act is right, regardless of what the public or government think of him or try to do to him. A work like Miller's The Dark Knight Returns forces its readers to face up to the inherent fascism of such a worldview, and challenges them to either fall in line or get out of the way. The Nolans, on the other hand, want to have their cake and eat it too. Their Batman, Blake's Batman, and even Bruce Wayne's Batman are all Batmen in desperate need of approval. They want a moral authority that transcends government and the will of the people, but they also want the government and the people to like and appreciate them.
As objectionable as I find the Great Man fetishism of the Nolans' Batman films, I might have still respected it had they, like Miller, taken it to its logical conclusion, but instead the Nolans' Batman trilogy concludes not with an examination of Batman's right to act, but with a reinforcement of the notion that it is tragic that his actions are not properly appreciated. In this scheme, the persecution that Batman suffers isn't just the cost of doing business, but a necessary component of his apotheosis. Like Jesus on the cross, he has to be mocked and tormented by a small-minded mob before he turns around and magnanimously saves them all. What The Dark Knight Rises amounts to is a great, self-pitying cry of You'll see, one day I'll be dead and then you'll be sorry. I'm mainly sorry that I didn't stop with the previous film.
I was prepared, in other words, for The Dark Knight Rises to be an excellent story with a contemptible message. But what Nolan, along with brother and collaborator Jonathan, has delivered is so much more disappointing. The Dark Knight Rises is a flabby, talky film, prone to pounding in its points with a hammer, then repeating them several times to catch up the slow audience members. It has a silly plot whose twists, with one notable exception, are telegraphed well ahead of time, and which hangs together only because the film as a whole is too dreary to arouse the kind of scrutiny that would lay bare its many plot holes. Most of these flaws can, indeed, be traced back to the Nolans' determination to reinforce their Randian vision of Batman as the only person who can restore Gotham to its glory. Most noticeably, the film bogs down in its final third because the Nolans whisk Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) away from the beleaguered city for months so that he can gain enlightenment and return to Gotham even more heroic than he left it--a process that is achieved by having various Magical Foreign People spew repetitive cod-philosophy at him while he has a training montage. But the Nolans also undercut this theme, in ways that, far from granting it the complexity it so desperately needs, only serve to neuter it. In the end, the Nolans seem to lack the courage of their convictions.
In the early scenes of The Dark Knight Rises, there's almost a sense that the Nolans are about to back off from the high-handedness of The Dark Knight's ending. In the eight years since that night, the sainted and hollow memory of Harvey Dent has been used to clean Gotham's streets, but only by stripping away the civil rights of those deemed criminal, and the architect of this process, Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), is sick with himself over the lie that he's promulgated. What soon becomes clear, however, is that rather than feeling shame at having lied to the people of Gotham, or at having sold them the fantasy of a savior, what irks Gordon is the fact that he's sold them the wrong savior, and that Batman remains maligned and despised. As if to drive home the theme of unappreciated heroism, we learn in the film's opening scene that the mayor is planning to fire Gordon. "He's a hero," Gordon's gladhanding, politically-savvy second in command protests. "A war hero. This is peacetime," he's told. Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, is a shut-in, his body ruined by his crimefighting escapades, his mind still reeling from the loss of his lover Rachel. He's the subject of sneering rumor and speculation, not least from the board of his company, whose fortune he's squandered on a clean fusion project that he later shut down with no results. He did this, we soon learn, to keep the technology out of the hands of those who could turn the reactor into a bomb. This echoes the subplot in The Dark Knight in which Bruce builds a machine that can spy on anyone in Gotham, then destroys it after one use because no one should have such unlimited power, and nor is it the only instance of such thinking in The Dark Knight Rises--by the end of the film, the revelation that Bruce has bought yet another company, or concealed yet another technological development, to keep it out of the wrong hands, feels almost like a running joke. The film, of course, means it entirely in earnest, and accepts that Bruce not only has the right but the authority to decide which technologies are safe enough for the general public to use.
Far from toning down The Dark Knight's message, then, The Dark Knight Rises takes it to even further extremes. This isn't simply Batman having the moral authority to act as judge and jury on Gotham's criminals. This is Batman--and Bruce Wayne--as John Galt, the mysterious, reclusive, omni-competent, super-rich industrialist who is the only hope for the future. The Dark Knight Rises extends Batman's authority past crime, into technological progress, and even into social welfare--when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Officer Blake, a Batman believer who is one of the first to uncover signs of the film's villain, starts his investigation by following up the murder of a homeless teen, he learns that the boy was kicked out of his group home because the cash-strapped Wayne Foundation has stopped funding it. In other words, it's not just the police that needs to be augmented by a caped crusader, but every level of government that must be replaced by private enterprise and private philanthropy. And when that private benefactor is mocked, derided, hobbled in his efforts to keep his community safe and even hunted down for those efforts--why, then he will retreat from his obligations, and the result will be disaster.
That disaster comes, fittingly enough, in the form of a people's revolution--or rather, this being that sort of movie, in the form of a revolution that claims to be on the people's behalf but is really a force of evil. Bane (Tom Hardy, wasted under a mask that conceals most of his face and in a role that demands little of him but an imposing physique), the last surviving member of the League of Shadows, the villains of Batman Begins, arrives in Gotham seeking revenge. He steals Bruce Wayne's fortune, defeats and disables Batman, and converts that dangerous fusion reactor from a few paragraphs ago into a nuclear bomb. This he uses to hold the entire city hostage, an act that he describes as the liberation of Gotham's citizens--from a corrupt government, from Commissioner Gordon's lies about Harvey Dent, and from the oppression of the moneyed classes--but which is really a preamble to the bomb's inevitable explosion. What follows is equal parts Communist and French revolutions, with Gotham's rich and powerful rousted from their homes and marched into show trials as enemies of the people--in a court which is presided over by Batman Begins's deranged (and, when last seen, committed) villain, Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who looms over the accused from atop a pile of desks.
Now might be a good time to stop and boggle at the fact that the Nolans' Batman films are renowned for their realism. The image of Crane perched on those desks is a reassuringly Alice in Wonderland-ish touch, a hint that we're meant to take the city's sudden descent into Jacobinism with a grain of salt. Alas, it's but a brief reprieve from the po-faced seriousness with which The Dark Knight Rises otherwise serves up this plot. The Dark Knight managed to make comic book characters and plots seem organic to the real world because it injected a single irrational player--the Joker--into a system whose other participants, cops and criminals alike, were rational, and therefore had no idea how to approach a force whose choices and motivations they couldn't fathom. The Dark Knight Rises fills Gotham with these irrational players--not just Bane but an army of henchmen who seem to have no recognizably human reactions or emotions, and will gladly die at Bane's command--and has them do ridiculous, cartoonish things--Bane traps Gotham's entire police force in the city's sewers, and then instead of killing them he keeps them prisoner for months, at the end of which they march out, uniforms barely mussed, ready to fight Bane's forces--all while pretending that this is a meaningful political statement.
A silly premise might have been forgivable if the film had developed its implications in interesting ways, but, much like The Legend of Korra last month, The Dark Knight Rises uses its villain as a means of avoiding those implications. Both stories are ostensibly about the cities they are set in and the battle for their soul, and yet those cities--their culture, their norms, and most of all their people--are curiously absent. Like Korra's Amon, Bane claims to be acting on behalf of the city's underclass, and establishes a policy of violent persecution against the upper classes. And as we were in Korra, we are kept entirely in the dark on the question of how the people of Gotham feel about this. Do they support Bane? Do they oppose him? Do they think he has the right idea but the wrong methods? Are they, as seems most likely, divided between these options according to their social status in the pre-occupation world? The Dark Knight Rises ignores all these questions. The people responsible for Gotham's suffering are only Bane and his followers (whose ranks are not, as far as we can tell, swelled by Gotham's have-nots), and the people responsible for stopping him are only the few policemen who managed to evade Bane's trap, the authority figures whom he has deposed--no civilians join the resistance. Anyone who does not fall into either of these groups is completely ignored.
Gotham spends months under Bane's rule--months that you'd expect to have a profound impact on the social, psychological, and cultural life of the city--but upon his defeat all we see are its citizens stepping out of their homes (as if they'd spent all that time indoors), ready to resume their lives as if the very fabric of their society hadn't been ripped to shreds. What's interesting is that the Nolans had an opportunity here to reinforce their authoritarian message and show why Batman is necessary--because when stripped of both their white knight, the lie of Harvey Dent, and their dark knight, the citizens of Gotham turn to Bane, a false savior. The film could have shown us Gothamites turning on one another, informing on their neighbors and signing up to do Bane's bidding--the nightmare scenario that justified Batman's choice to take responsibility for Harvey Dent's crimes. Instead, the Nolans prefer to serve up a fantasy of docile, patient goodness, of a populace content to wait for Batman to save it without doing anything--good or evil--on its own behalf.
Since Bane is planning to blow up Gotham, his claims of populism are easily dismissed--can be taken, in fact, as an attack against the very notion of popular, anti-capitalist protest. Even more disappointing, however, is the fact that The Dark Knight Rises squanders the opportunity to address the class struggle in a more nuanced way, through the character of Catwoman. For a lot of Batman fans, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight had to clear an impossible hurdle in the form of Jack Nicholson's turn as the character in Tim Burton's Batman. For me, the iconic Batman villain performance is Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman, and I was very nervous to see what the Nolans and Anne Hathaway would make of the character--not least because, let's face it, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan have a woman problem. It's not as pronounced as Aaron Sorkin's or Steven Moffat's--the Nolans' women are generally competent, rarely hysterical or weepy, and have interests other than landing a husband--but it has nevertheless marred most of their films, in which women are either love interests (often dead ones), or minor plot tokens with little in the way of personality or motivations. So it was something of a surprise to discover that Hathaway's Selina Kyle, though she doesn't hold a candle to the scary intensity of Pfeiffer's performance, is one of the Nolans' best female characters (and my favorite part of the film), followed close behind by Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate, the visionary who contracts with Bruce to build the fusion reactor. Both women have their own agenda and aspirations which are given their own space in the narrative, not just as they reflect on the hero's journey or his feelings--the first time this has been true of a woman in a Nolan film since Carrie-Ann Moss's character in Memento. Hathaway's Selina, in particular, has her own arc of growth over the course of the film, and she is also the one who gets to defeat Bane (though only after it's revealed that he is actually the film's secondary villain). At the film's end, she is the only character in the cast whose further adventures I'd like to learn about.
All that said, the cost of this compelling character arc is that Catwoman's rough edges are filed off, and with them her politics. Perhaps wisely given their track record with female characters, the Nolans choose to veer away from the angry feminist slant that Burton gave Catwoman, and instead make her a class warrior. A jewel thief, she justifies her crimes simply by the fact that she steals from those who have so much, and tells Bruce Wayne that "you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us." Unlike Bane, Selina says things like this in earnest, and also unlike him, she is for the most part a sympathetic character, whose moments of villainy are usually the result of straitened circumstances rather than malice, and whose bitterness over having been dealt a bad hand that has forced her to make increasingly bad choices shines through her disaffected mask and lends moral authority to her views. Through her, then, the film could have given us another perspective on the class struggle that Bane sparks, one that could have suggested that he is playing on a legitimate grievance. Instead, the film uses the earnestness of Selina's convictions to dismantle them. When she sees the violence that has accompanied Bane's revolution, the suffering of the rich whom she had previously reviled, Selina repents of her desire for revolution, and by the end of the film she is fighting by Batman's side to defeat Bane. The message here is clear--capitalism, however predatory, is still better than the alternative--and it's Selina's own believability as an enemy of capitalism that helps to sell it. What's more, the fact that she's positioned as a love interest for Bruce Wayne--the very representative of everything she despises--helps to undercut Selina's convictions, which are overpowered by her affections for Bruce. One can't help but compare this turnaround to Pfeiffer's last scene in Batman Returns, in which she tells Batman "I would love to live with you in your castle ... I just couldn't live with myself." That Catwoman had the strength to give up what she wanted for the sake of her beliefs; the Nolans' Catwoman doesn't.
Of course, by the time this turnaround happens, Batman himself has backed away from the authoritarianism, the Randian dogma, that permeated the first half of the film. The crux of Bruce's long sojourn away from the city (which is the reason that Bane's occupation of Gotham lasts so long despite the fact that the film can't convincingly portray the effects of such an ordeal, and indeed glosses over most of that period as far as Gotham is concerned) is that he is courting death. This echoes Albert's repeated admonitions in the film's first half, and indeed the tone of the entire film is slanted to both warn us and lead us to expect Batman's death. In case we weren't clear on just what kind of death he's heading towards, the film has Selina offer to leave Gotham with Bruce, because "you don't owe these people any more. You've given them everything." "Not everything. Not yet," is his reply. And if that were not enough, the film's surprise villain stabs Batman in the side. That's right. After three films, including one of most critically lauded superhero film in years, and a mass of critical and fannish buzz building up to a consensus on the uniqueness and depth of the Nolans' vision for Batman, their final statement on the character is: Batman as Jesus. The same tired, unoriginal, hokey theme that has shown up in just about every superhero film in the last decade. (Adding insult to injury is the fact that Batman's self-sacrifice is nothing of the sort; though he tells the other characters that he is embarking on a suicide mission, he knows that he has a chance of survival and has merely chosen to fake his death. The film, in its fetishizing of this "death," completely ignores this inconvenient wrinkle.)
At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Blake, who has spent the film as Batman's de facto apprentice, laments to Gordon that no one will know who truly saved Gotham. This is such a whiny thing to say that it's unbelievable--who cares who saved the city or whether they're acknowledged? Surely what's important is that the city was saved, and surely that's all a true hero would care about? But Gordon himself seems to be of Blake's mind--the last thing he says to Batman before sending him off to what he thinks is his death is that Gotham deserves to know who saved it. The conclusion that both Gordon and Blake reach is that Gotham knows who its hero is--it's Batman, whether or not the city knows that Bruce Wayne was the man behind the mask. And indeed, Gotham unveils a statue of Batman in one of the film's final scenes, even as Blake, who has resigned from the police force (because, he says, he now feels that the system is preventing him from doing good), discovers the Batcave and becomes the new Batman. But this is only to reinforce the mealy-mouthed conclusion to which the Nolans' have brought their vision of Batman the Great Man. The truly authoritarian, Frank Miller-style Batman doesn't care about the public's accolades--nor, indeed, their condemnation. He acts because he believes his strength and competence give him the authority to act and the ability to know which act is right, regardless of what the public or government think of him or try to do to him. A work like Miller's The Dark Knight Returns forces its readers to face up to the inherent fascism of such a worldview, and challenges them to either fall in line or get out of the way. The Nolans, on the other hand, want to have their cake and eat it too. Their Batman, Blake's Batman, and even Bruce Wayne's Batman are all Batmen in desperate need of approval. They want a moral authority that transcends government and the will of the people, but they also want the government and the people to like and appreciate them.
As objectionable as I find the Great Man fetishism of the Nolans' Batman films, I might have still respected it had they, like Miller, taken it to its logical conclusion, but instead the Nolans' Batman trilogy concludes not with an examination of Batman's right to act, but with a reinforcement of the notion that it is tragic that his actions are not properly appreciated. In this scheme, the persecution that Batman suffers isn't just the cost of doing business, but a necessary component of his apotheosis. Like Jesus on the cross, he has to be mocked and tormented by a small-minded mob before he turns around and magnanimously saves them all. What The Dark Knight Rises amounts to is a great, self-pitying cry of You'll see, one day I'll be dead and then you'll be sorry. I'm mainly sorry that I didn't stop with the previous film.
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