Many people who witnessed the event [11 September 2001] suffered nightmares and psychological trauma. For those who viewed it intensely, the spectacle provided a powerful set of images that would continue to resonate for years to come, much as the footage of the Kennedy assassination, iconic photographs of Vietnam, the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, or the death of Princess Diana in the 1990s provided unforgettable imagery.
– Douglas Kellner (2004: 54)
I.
For Tony Stark and the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe nothing was the same after New York. The aftermath of the Chitauri invasion led by Loki featured in The Avengers flows through the films and television programmes in Phase Two without exception. The unprecedented success of The Avengers ensured that the Marvel Studios experiment had become one of the most successful franchises in film history with the six films comprising Phase One generating $3.8 billion at the world-wide box office and those from Phase Two would go on to make $5.2 billion. This did not mean the series would not be presented with challenges as it moved forward, but that it would not have the uncertainty that it had faced during the production of Iron Man, a character who had gone from something of a second-tier figure to the most successful superhero in the world by the end of 2013. In the wake of the success of The Avengers, Marvel announced an ambitious slate of productions for Phase Two which would be comprised of another six films: Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World in 2013, followed by Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, with Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man to complete the phase in 2015. After the achievements of Phase One, Marvel Studios remained aware that the films each needed to appeal to audiences in their own right, but also continue to grow the Marvel brand and offer variations on the superhero genre, a market which was growing more crowded with every year that passed. Each of the six films in Phase Two offers deviations from the genre: Iron Man 3 is a superhero film, as one might expect, but it also contains elements of a thriller that had not been seen before in the MCU, Thor: The Dark World is a fantasy film with palpable aspects of melodrama and comedy, Ant-Man is a heist film with a superhero at its centre, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a conspiracy thriller deliberately evocative of those from the 1970s like Three Days of the Condor and Marathon Man (1976). Due to its success, Marvel was also ready to gamble on less familiar properties like their ambitious space opera Guardians of the Galaxy, which was definitely the riskiest proposition in the MCU at the time of its release, featuring a cast of characters virtually unknown to the general public. This did not go uncommented upon in trade magazines (see, for example, McMillan 2014). Yet ultimately the film earned $777 million at the world-wide box office, which made it, at the time, the third-highest earning of any Marvel film, behind only Iron Man 3 and The Avengers. From a production point of view the success of The Avengers generated an increased interest in the MCU and a financial boost to the films made after which came to be referred to as the ‘Avengers Effect’ (see Stewart 2013). Thus Thor: The Dark World had a thirty-one percent larger domestic opening than its predecessor Thor (leading to a global take of $644.7 million compared to $449.3 million of the first) and even more remarkably Iron Man 3 made $1.215 billion globally, nearly double the $624 million of Iron Man 2 released just three years before in 2010.
For the first film in Phase Two it undoubtedly made financial and thematic sense to return to the character who had made this all possible, Iron Man. Marvel also continued its intriguing choices for directors by turning to Shane Black, who had been one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, but had only one directorial credit to his name, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), which had starred Robert Downey Jr. in what many had seen as his comeback film after his incarceration. What Black perhaps lacked in directorial credits he made up for in fan cachet and the closeness of his relationship with Downey Jr. who by then had emerged as the cornerstone and figurehead of the MCU’s success. Black brings his characteristic acerbic sensibilities to the superhero genre, with his witty one liners, subversion of cliché and a deconstruction of many of the genre’s central tenets, in particular hotly debated revisions to the character of the Mandarin, who had initially appeared in the comics in Tales of Suspense #50 in 1964, which seemed to be as loved by some as it was hated by others.
The film opens with Tony Stark’s deliberately self-referential and stumbling narration:
A famous man once said, ‘We create our own demons’. Who said that? What does that even mean? Doesn’t matter. I said it ‘cause he said it. So now, he was famous and it was basically said by two well-known guys. I don’t…uhh…I’m gonna start again. Let’s track this from the beginning…
The uncertain nature of the voice-over is similar to the one employed by Black and Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and will only later make sense in the post-credits stinger which reveals that Tony Stark is actually on the therapist’s couch recounting the film’s events. The therapy motif is a relevant one given that Iron Man 3 discloses fairly early on that Stark is suffering from pronounced symptoms of PTSD after the events in New York and in the course of the narrative will go on something of a psychological journey which culminates in an acknowledgement of his past and his status as a superhero, bringing the Iron Man trilogy to a close.
The ‘beginning’ that Stark refers to is a flashback to New Year’s Eve in Bern, Switzerland in 1999, several years before the epiphany which led him to become the Iron Man in the mountains of Afghanistan. Black transports the audience back to the last year of the twentieth century by way of the Italian Europop group Eiffel 65’s 1999 chart-topping ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’, which playfully contrasts with the bombastic Alan Silvestri score of The Avengers and the hard rock anthems that Jon Favreau’s tenure as the director of the series often turned to. These prefatory moments offer glimpses of the former crass and distinctly unpolitically correct Tony before his literal and figurative change of heart. Drunk both on alcohol and his own sense of self-importance he brushes off Ho Yinsen, the man who will play a considerable role in his future, to seduce the beautiful and talented biologist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) who has pioneered an experimental regenerative treatment known as Extremis, which has the potential to decode human DNA and thereby eradicate all forms of disease. In a couple of offhand exchanges Stark’s brilliance is revealed to both her and to the audience, and it is his drunken scribble of formula that he leaves on a business card which he learns years later enabled her to complete her research. Hansen is one of the ‘demons’ he talks of, but it is the nebbish Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and his Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.) that Stark refers to most of all. Stark agrees to meet Killian on the roof at midnight to listen to his business proposal, but rather callously stands him up. These seemingly inconsequential encounters lead to key events later in his life, as Stark comments: ‘I had just created demons and I didn’t even know it…I never thought they would come back to bite me. Why would they?’ At this stage Stark is blissfully ignorant about his role in the world, unaware of the fact that his weapons of mass destruction are being used in war zones around the globe and unaware of Chalmers Johnson’s concept of ‘blowback’ in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2002), an idea which came to define many people’s attitude to American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era.
Back in the film’s post-Battle of New York present, Stark is suffering from PTSD, something Obadiah Stane had claimed he had after his kidnapping in Iron Man, but a condition which he seems to actually have now, the symptoms of which are shown to be anxiety attacks, traumatic nightmares and trouble sleeping (he mentions he has been awake for seventy-two hours). While in a restaurant with his friend James Rhodes he has a full-blown panic-attack triggered even by the mention of New York by a young fan, which coincides with his unconscious scribble of ‘help me’ on a child’s picture of him. At first, he is reluctant to recognise that what he is experiencing might be a psychological issue given the stigma still attached to mental health problems in contemporary Western culture (especially among men), and looks for a physiological explanation like poison or heart attack, but later he acknowledges to Pepper (who now lives with him): ‘Nothing’s been the same since New York…You experience things and then they’re over and you still can’t explain them.’
The Iron Man suit itself becomes an extension of this psychological trauma, evoking how Stark once described it and himself as ‘one and the same’ in Iron Man 2. As a result of his PTSD-induced intimacy issues he controls the suit remotely in an effort to convince Pepper that he is present when he is unable to be near her, and, when responding to one of his intense nightmares of the alien invasion, the suit itself almost attacks her. Later, when he is stranded in Tennessee he informs the young boy who becomes his companion, Harley, that the Iron Man suit is ‘in pain, he’s been injured…leave him alone’ when he is clearly talking about himself. For the purpose of its narrative, the film has Stark become aware of his own physical and emotional vulnerability and his place in the MCU after the events of The Avengers, where Stark (and the rest of the world) was forced to acknowledge not only the existence of, as Stark says, ‘gods, aliens…other dimensions’ but the fact that he is, in his own words, ‘just a man in a can’. Stark will have his ‘can’ taken away from him for large sections of Iron Man 3 as he is forced to rely on his intelligence and his wits alone for the first time since Afghanistan, and it is this which proves him to be a real superhero. Yet while the film initially prioritises Stark’s physical and emotional vulnerability, this becomes problematised by the fact that Iron Man 3, emerges as something of a paradox, as the Phase Two MCU films become increasingly casual in their portrayal of violence and destruction, a trend which culminates in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
As Stark continues to process his personal trauma, America at large is being wracked by events of a decidedly contemporary nature, seemingly perpetrated by a terrorist going by the name of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) who has been orchestrating bombings all over the country and abroad (the real-life Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait).1 On a series of live televised addresses the Mandarin asks the nation, ‘Some people call me a terrorist, I consider myself a teacher. America, ready for another lesson?’ With his Arabic beard and robes he is quite different to the Asian roots of the original comic book character, but seems to embrace very prevalent Middle Eastern new millennial stereotypes. His video message contains footage of chanting Arab crowds, hooded figures kneeling before being executed and burning effigies of the American president intercut with 1950s Americana and the shopping channel, playing on very real post-9/11 US fears and anxieties with imagery very similar to that discussed by Jack Shaheen in his study Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2009). Shaheen argued that Hollywood films have perpetuated the same reductive and racist stereotypes for almost a hundred years:
Arab Muslims are fanatics who believe in a different god, who don’t value human life as much as we do, they are intent on destroying us (the [W]est) with their oil or with their terrorism; the men seek to abduct and brutally seduce our women; they are without family and reside in a primitive place (the desert) and behave like primitive beings. The women are subservient – resembling black crows – or we see them portrayed as mute, somewhat exotic harem maidens. (Qtd. in Harrickton 2008)
The visceral thematic resonance of the ‘War on Terror’ proved difficult to resist for many popular films in the post-9/11 era both inside and outside of the superhero genre and, as we have seen, the MCU returned to it frequently. Andrew Johnson has written: ‘Over the past decade, no other event has seeped into our cinema more thoroughly, from political thrillers that focus directly on the War on Terror to blockbuster escapism inspired by the overseas conflicts that resulted’ (2013). In the world of the superhero comic, Mike Grell has asserted that, ‘Because 9/11 happened, we spun that into the storylines that actually dealt with terrorism and potential terrorist attacks on New York, and what would you do if you were a guy like Tony Stark? How far would you go to defend your people, your city, your country, the people that you loved?’ (qtd. in Mangels 2008: 96). The first terrorist bombing physically seen onscreen in Iron Man 3 is at the iconic Mann’s Chinese theatre, in Hollywood, California, and it is Stark’s friend and bodyguard Happy Hogan who is one of many that gets caught in the blast. Deliberately filmed to resemble a real-life suicide bomb attack and function as one within the film’s diegesis, it is revealed later to have been perpetrated by one of several wounded ex-US soldiers who have participated in the unstable Extremis programme designed by Aldrich Killian and Maya Hansen.
Despite his health problems and issues with the government in Iron Man 2, Stark offers to help with the Mandarin, but, as Rhodes states, after the previous events in the MCU especially the ‘incident’ in New York, the government want to be seen as dealing with their own problems of domestic security and that ‘we [the United States] need to look strong’. He calls the Mandarin ‘not superhero business’ but ‘American business’, however the MCU has shown little real distinction between the two. In connection to this Rhodes has had his superhero name changed from War Machine to Iron Patriot as the name ‘tested well with focus groups’ and ‘sends a better message’ than the ‘too aggressive’ sounding War Machine. Searching for the location of the Mandarin, Iron Patriot (whom the Mandarin describes as President Ellis’s ‘red, white and blue attack dog’) is sent to two locations in Pakistan, a process he calls a ‘little knock and talk…making friends’. In one he appears to be welcomed by the burqa-wearing seamstresses, but his uncomfortable ‘You’re free…if you weren’t before. Iron Patriot on the job. You’re welcome?’ is exactly the kind of dark humour that has characterised Shane Black’s work since Lethal Weapon (1987).
Incensed by the bombings, and in particular by Happy Hogan being left in a coma, Stark is compelled to confront the Mandarin directly with a challenge which evokes George W. Bush’s ill advised ‘Bring em on’ message to Iraqi insurgents (see Loughlin 2003). Stark insists that ‘There’s no politics here, just good old revenge. There’s no Pentagon, it’s just you and me, and on the off chance you’re a man, here’s my home address…’. As a direct result of this the Mandarin sends attack helicopters to destroy Stark’s Malibu mansion and when it collapses it drags him to the bottom of the ocean leading Pepper and rest of the world to believe that he is dead. In the aftermath, Stark finds himself stranded in Rose Hill, Tennessee, which had been the site of the first Mandarin bombing, with no access to money, technology or resources. Earlier he had joked with Maya Hansen, ‘Please don’t tell me there’s a twelve-year-old kid waiting in the car that I’ve never met’, but in Rose Hill he becomes a temporary surrogate father to the neglected Harley Keener. What could have been a clichéd plot development in which Stark ‘finds himself’ through his relationship with the boy, emerges, in Black’s hands, as something more interesting as evidenced by Stark’s line to Harley having learned that the boy’s young father had left, ‘which happens…Dads leave, no need to be a pussy about it’. Given what he has seen of the Mandarin, Stark presumes (perhaps as we audiences also do) that the enigmatic terrorist leader is to be located somewhere in the Middle East or Asia. He speculates ‘North Africa, Iran, Pakistan, Syria?’, but is surprised to find out that he is actually in Miami and in the film’s much debated twist, not really a terrorist at all, but an unemployed and drug-addicted British actor called Trevor Slattery hired by the real villain of the film, Aldrich Killian, to be a front for his schemes. The film’s genuinely startling reveal shows the film not to have been perpetuating Arab stereotypes at all but, in actual fact, satirising and deconstructing them. In showing the Mandarin to have been a ‘custom made terror threat’ calculated to resemble just how we have come to expect terrorists to look and behave post-9/11, the film satirises our new millennial fears of the Other with his Asian robes, Arabic beard and speeches decrying American imperialism. As in the original Iron Man the villain seems to be a terrorist from the Middle East, only to have it revealed that the real bad guy was a middle-class American white man and CEO of a large multi-national company. Killian turned to Maya Hansen’s research after being humiliated by Stark on New Year’s Eve back in 1999, weaponising the Extremis virus and then orchestrating a series of bombings in order to monopolise the market in global weapons manufacture, showing him to be as much of a product of the ‘War on Terror’ as Iron Man himself. Killian says, ‘You simply rule from behind the scenes. Because the second you give them a face, a Bin Laden, a Gaddafi, a Mandarin, you hand the people a target.’ He continues: ‘this time tomorrow I’ll have the West’s most powerful leader in one hand, and the world’s most feared terrorist in the other: I’ll own the ‘War on Terror’…create supply and demand.’ Killian’s outlandish plan is to assassinate President Ellis live on television on a Roxxon Norco oil tanker and have him replaced by the AIM-friendly Vice President Rodriguez (Miguel Ferrer). The film goes to great lengths to distinguish Killian, a bad scientist, from the likes of Stark, but Stark’s fortune was built on profiting from global wars not so long before. Even Pepper comments, as she rejects Killian’s request that Stark Industries purchase a stake in Extremis, ‘That’s exactly what we used to do’. The film’s immersion in the post-9/11 geopolitical arena was challenged by the likes of Manohla Dargis for the way it ‘invokes Sept. 11 and dodges it’ leading to it being called ‘at once inherently political and empty’ (2013). Dargis’s perspective was no doubt fuelled by the proximity of the film’s release to the Boston Marathon bombings, which had occurred just two weeks before. She continued: ‘But Mr. Black [the film’s director] and his colleagues, like other filmmakers who use the iconography of Sept. 11 and its aftershocks, want to have it both ways. They want to tap into the powerful reactions those events induced, while dodging the complex issues and especially the political arguments that might turn off ticket buyers’ (ibid.).
Fig. 16: While he initially appears to be a caricature, the Bin Ladenesque Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), emerges as a satire of the terrorist Other during the ‘War on Terror’ era in Iron Man (2013)
When both Pepper and the president are kidnapped, Stark is faced with the hero’s predicament of who to save. The stakes are raised even further when thirteen innocent people are thrown from Air Force One and J.A.R.V.I.S. (Stark’s artificial intelligence programme which helps him control his suit which stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) informs Stark that, based on the laws of physics, he will only be able to save four. Stark is faced with the perennial superhero dilemma, which Stephen Faller labelled as the ‘false dichotomy choice’ (2010: 259), in which superheroes are seemingly forced to decide between saving one innocent party or another, before in the end figuring out a way to save both (see Raimi’s Spider-Man, Superman Returns et al.). The playful manner of the scene and the lack of peril in spite of the seemingly raised stakes is indicative of the tone which becomes increasingly more prominent in the MCU throughout Phase Two. Unlike the Gulmira sequence in Iron Man which featured no witty one-liners, the Air Force One rescue and the Roxxon sequence which follows are full of humorous banter between Stark and Rhodes. These decisions seem to go against comments made by Shane Black before he became affiliated with the MCU when he suggested, in a 2009 interview with the Guardian, that
If someone fires a gun in a movie, it should always be a big deal. I don’t like movies where someone shoots at someone else but they just run away and manage to dodge the bullet. Or people are all firing at each other continuously for 10 minutes. You need shock and impact and a genuine sense of peril whenever violence takes place. (Qtd. in Delaney 2009)
But this ‘genuine sense of peril’ is entirely absent from Iron Man 3. Even though early scenes were suggestive of Stark’s vulnerability, they are disavowed quite comprehensibly in the narrative which follows in which he is portrayed as almost indestructible. A pointed illustration of this comes just after he has saved all thirteen passengers on Air Force One and pauses on a bridge to admire his achievement, only to be hit by a passing truck, leaving the audience to believe, just for the briefest of moments, that Stark is dead…before a quick cut reveals that he was remotely piloting the suit the whole time and even further from harm than we had even realised.
In the film’s spectacularly orchestrated climax on the oil tanker, Rhodes and Stark take on an army of Extremis soldiers, initially even without their own suits, as Stark has proven that his real identity and even his status as a superhero lies not with the ‘tin can’, but the man inside it.2 Killian is shown to have kidnapped Pepper and infected her with the Extremis virus and when she hangs from a high beam on the oil tanker Stark calls for her to have faith in him and take his hand. In a rare moment of doubt about an MCU hero, she seems to refuse to trust him and when she apparently falls to her death for the first time in the trilogy Stark is shown to have failed someone he has attempted to rescue. But, as we have seen many times before in the MCU, this sense of precarity is a brief one; just a few minutes later she returns, now with her own superpowers and between the two of them they dispose of Killian. The idea that life in Hollywood cinema is fragile is just a momentary illusion; only in a Hollywood film could someone experience the trauma of the violent death of a loved one, just for it to be disavowed moments later and normalcy be reconstituted.
Like generations of mythopoetic American heroes before him Stark has been redeemed through violence and his PTSD is seemingly erased in the process. The film ends by bringing to a conclusion Stark’s journey that had started back in 2008 as he finally has the shrapnel removed from his heart and no further need of the miniature arc reactor in his chest. Its final line of dialogue is ‘I am Iron Man’, the very same words that ended the first film, but with a very different meaning for the character five years later. The post-credits stinger reveals that Stark had been recounting his story to not just any therapist, but Dr. Bruce Banner himself. Stark says, ‘Thank you, by the way, for listening. There’s something about just getting it off my chest and putting it out there in the atmosphere instead of holding this in…’, only for the film to disclose that Banner had fallen asleep and missed the whole story. On waking up, he apologises and tells Stark, ‘I’m not that kind of doctor, I don’t have the…temperament’.
‘You told your dad about me!?’: The problematic representation of women in Thor: The Dark World
This volume has dedicated little time and space to the discussion of the representation of women in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and this is primarily because women play a very small role in the films throughout Phases One and Two. As indicated in the introduction, female characters rarely occupy the privileged and dynamic spaces of the series and tend to be at best marginalised, at worst objectified, sexualised and infantilised. There is a superficial patina of progressivism in the way that women are given meaningful job titles: in the Iron Man trilogy Pepper Potts becomes the CEO of Stark Industries; in The Incredible Hulk we are informed that Betty Ross is a renowned cellular biologist; and in Thor that Jane Foster is an celebrated astrophysicist, which some have mistakenly identified as positive representation. In their description, these professions sound as if they might be empowering to the women who occupy them, but in the course of the narratives they are rarely given the opportunity to demonstrate their intellect and individuality commensurate to these titles and, in actual fact, are shown as having a severely restricted life outside of their relationships to their partner whose name is, in all three cases mentioned above, also the name of the films they feature in. Pepper Potts might be described by Tony Stark as having the responsibility of running ‘the largest tech conglomerate on Earth’ (Avengers: Age of Ultron) but she does little more than react to and be rescued by him throughout the course of the Iron Man films. We are told that Betty Ross is a brilliant scientist and Joseph Walderzak calls her ‘a hero, a partner’ (2016: 159), but the film never shows her doing any substantial research, she is rescued several times in The Incredible Hulk, and does not seem to exist outside of her relationships with Banner, her father and her boyfriend Leonard Samson. Aside from these slightly more central characters, the MCU is littered with minor female characterisations who are treated even more poorly. Christine Everheart in Iron Man and Iron Man 2 is referred to as ‘trash’ by Pepper and is on the receiving end of Stark’s comment about ‘Doing a piece for Vanity Fair’, while Stark himself is lauded for his sexual profligacy; a beautiful female private (played by Natalie Dormer and called Lorraine in the credits) in Captain America: The First Avenger, tells Cap ‘the women of America, they owe you their thanks, and seeing as they’re not here…’, before dragging him behind a book case to kiss him. The very fact that these patterns are so prevalent in the most successful film franchise ever made is troubling, but it is even more disturbing that they are part of broader trends in cultural representation in the new millennial decades which have prided themselves on their political progressivism.
Of course, there are partial complications to this throughout the MCU, like Agent Peggy Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger, Maria Hill in The Avengers, Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy, and most clearly Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow introduced in Iron Man 2, before becoming one of the Avengers after. Peggy Carter is an engaging character in her own right, but in her restricted screen time and the fact that she only exists in relation to Steve Rogers and his narrative means that her character is unable to develop in the film as much as it does in the television series, Marvel’s Agent Carter. Gamora is resourceful and tough, but even though she is called a ‘living weapon’ she is saved by Peter Quill on multiple occasions in a film which is undoubtedly his story rather than anyone else’s. Black Widow is the closest to a central female character the MCU provided audiences with in Phases One and Two across her four film appearances, but her portrayal also emphasises the contradictions at the heart of seemingly empowered women in the genre. She is shown to be physically and intellectually capable, it is she who shuts down the Tesseract at the end of The Avengers and she outfights Hawkeye in the same film, but she is also depicted as more physically, psychologically and emotionally vulnerable than any of her team mates. In The Avengers, it is Black Widow who needs to be protected by Cap’s shield when a car explodes on the streets of New York, as even Hawkeye is able to quickly take cover behind a car, and it is she who whimpers and cowers after being exposed to the Hulk for the first time in a way none of the other Avengers do. As Jeremiah Favara has written, ‘At times, Black Widow is shown to be more than capable of defending herself; she knocks out Hawkeye in a fight, she bests/tricks Loki, and is the only Avenger that is able to harness alien technologies in the final fight scene. Yet at other times, Black Widow is shown to be vulnerable and in need of protection; when encountering the Hulk, for example, Black Widow is helpless only to be saved at the last minute by Thor’ (2016: 179). The Avengers contains intriguing allusions to her past, but they remain only allusions as she was not given a solo film throughout Phases One, Two and Three. Even within her film appearances she is certainly marginalised and problems arose around specific moments of her character development (see Avengers: Age of Ultron and the forced sterilisation discussed in chapter eight) and depictions of her in combat are sexualised in ways that are never applicable to men (see Purse 2011b). As Sherry Ginn, the editor of Marvel’s Black Widow from Spy to Superhero: Essays on an Avenger with a Very Specific Skill Set, has suggested, she remains the most compelling of the MCU women and even though the character as presented in the MCU is ‘not without her faults…Nevertheless, she has characteristics that make her a superhero in her own right’ (2017: 4).
It might be relevant to pause for a moment to consider the ages of the women who play these roles within the MCU as opposed to their male counterparts, as they reveal a continuation of the disparity between male and female performers which has characterised the American film industry for decades. The most egregious examples of this perhaps being the infamous romantic pairings of Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment (1999), with their thirty-nine-year age gap, or that of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963) with twenty-five years between them, or Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in Six Days and Seven Nights (1998) with twenty-seven years, and the twenty-one years between Annabelle Wallis and Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017). Rather than isolated occurrences, these are part of trend which has defined Hollywood since the very birth of the medium (see Herman and Sender 2015). In the MCU, Edward Norton (b. 1969) is eight years older than Liv Tyler (b. 1977); Mark Ruffalo (b. 1967) is seventeen years older than Scarlett Johansson (b. 1984); Paul Bettany (b. 1971) is seventeen years older than Elizabeth Olsen (b. 1989); Paul Rudd (b. 1969) is nine years older than Evangeline Lilly (b. 1979), Chadwick Boseman (b. 1976) is seven years older than Lupita Nyong’o (b. 1983). Robert Downey Jr. (b. 1965) has been paired with Gwyneth Paltrow (six years his junior, b. 1972), Leslie Bibb (nine years his junior, b. 1974) and Rebecca Hall (seventeen years his junior, b.1982) and is shown attempting to instigate a relationship with Kate Mara (twenty-two years his junior, b. 1983) and Scarlett Johanson (twenty-one years his junior, b. 1984). There are exceptions to this, but they are rare and the age differences are slight: Natalie Portman (b. 1981) is two years older than Chris Hemsworth (b. 1983), Hayley Attwell (b. 1982) is a year older than Chris Evans (b. 1981) and Zoe Saldana (b. 1978) is a year older than Chris Pratt (b. 1979).
This discrepancy can also be seen in the initial ages when actors first play their character in the series: Robert Downey Jr. was forty-three when he first played Iron Man in 2008, Paul Rudd was forty-five in Ant-Man in 2014, Don Cheadle forty-six in Iron Man 2 in 2010, Edward Norton was thirty-nine when he played the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk in 2008 and Mark Ruffalo was forty-five when he played the same role in The Avengers in 2012, and finally Chris Evans was thirty at the time of Captain America: The First Avenger 2011. The only actor in his twenties when he first played a MCU superhero in Phase One was Chris Hemsworth who was twenty-nine in Thor in 2011. As not a single MCU film from Phases One or Two have a woman as the lead character named in the title, the comparative process is slightly more complicated. However, Scarlett Johansson was twenty-six when she first appeared as Black Widow in Iron Man 2 in 2010, Hayley Atwell was twenty-nine in Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011, Elizabeth Olsen was twenty-five in Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2014, Zoe Saldana was thirty-six in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014 and Karen Gillan twenty-seven in the same film. It should be noted that this is without considering the range of aging yet still active and virile patriarchal figures the MCU provides audiences with, like Nick Fury played by Samuel L. Jackson who was sixty when Iron Man was released and in his seventies by the time of Captain Marvel, Anthony Hopkins who was seventy-five at the time of Thor, William Hurt who was fifty-eight for The Incredible Hulk, Jeff Bridges who was fifty-nine at the time of Iron Man, Stellan Skarsgård who was sixty during Thor, and Michael Douglas who was seventy at the release of Ant-Man. What aging and similary dynamic matriarchal figures does the MCU offer in Phases One and Two with comparative screen time and influence? Only the likes of Rene Russo, who played Frigga in Thor, who was fifty-six at the time, Jenny Agutter who was sixty in The Avengers in 2012, or Glenn Close who was fifty-eight at the time she played Irani Rael in Guardians of the Galaxy. None of these characters have anywhere near the narrative centrality of the likes of Nick Fury, Odin, Thaddeus Ross, Obadiah Stane, Erik Selvig or Hank Pym.3
Another way it becomes clear how far women have been marginalised in the MCU and across the American film industry is through a statistical analysis of the frequency of male- or female-speaking roles in films. A range of institutions and individuals have conducted research in this area, the most prominent of which are those undertaken by ‘The Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative’ at USC Annenberg, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film. As one might expect, their findings prove uncomfortable reading in an age in which there has emerged a general consensus in the media that there are more roles for women than there have ever been before, both in front of and behind the camera, with films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Hunger Games franchise (2012–15) and Wonder Woman being cited as evidence for this supposed shift (see Scott and Dargis 2014). Furthermore, this has also prompted a backlash in some quarters, a process described as a ‘feminist takeover’ by Rachel Lefler (2015). However, this understanding is not supported at all by the findings of the aforementioned studies which proves such assertions to be anecdotal rather than empirical. For example, the 2017 USC Annenberg study titled ‘Inclusion in the Director’s Chair?: Gender, Race, & Age of Film Directors Across 1,000 Films 2007–2016’ revealed that there are almost twenty-four male directors for every one female director in Hollywood, that female directors’ careers are not as long as those of men and that they are offered dramas rather than other genres (see Smith et al. 2017). In front of the camera, research indicates that, on average, taking into account the top hundred grossing films of the year, women occupy only approximately between 28–33% of speaking roles; additionally, when considering the action and adventure genres (in which the superhero film is included) this percentage decreases to closer to 20% (see Smith et al. 2015a). Females were considerably more likely than males to be shown in sexy attire (27.9% of females vs. 8% of males), featured nude (26.4% of females vs. 9.1% of males), or referred to as physically attractive (12.6% of females vs. 3.1% of males) (see Smith et al. 2015b). Considering one particular year in detail, 2015, the year in which the MCU released Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man, as illustrative of these general trends, in the top hundred grossing films male characters received approximately twice the amount of screen time (28.5% compared to 16%), men were 71% of protagonists (females comprised 29% of protagonists) and women occupied only 4% of directors, 11% of writers, 3% of cinematographers, 19% of producers, 14% of editors (see Lauzen 2016). Neither of the MCU films produced in 2015 come anywhere close to even the average of 28–33% of speaking roles being taken by women observed above and neither does a single film across Phases One or Two, with only Iron Man 3 having more than 25% of its speaking characters women. Particularly egregious examples in Phase One include The Incredible Hulk (12.2%) and Thor (15%), and in Phase Two Ant-Man (14%) and, somewhat surprisingly, Guardians of the Galaxy (10.7%), which has the lowest percentage of female-speaking characters in Phases One and Two.4 The Incredible Hulk, in its 112-minute running time, features only five female characters that even speak and only three of those are named in the credits: Betty Ross, Martina (who has a single line of dialogue in untranslated Portuguese), Major Kathleen Sparr, an unnamed woman selling clothes in the market and an unnamed newsreader. In case one might regard this as an aberration, consider the fact that in Thor only Jane, Darcy, Sif, Frigga and two unnamed nurses speak, and in Iron Man (19.1%) eight women speak and only five of these are named: Pepper, Christine Everheart, Ramirez (the soldier in the Humvee at the start), and two television newsreaders, real-life Zoriana Kit and fictional Amira Ahmed (the three others are two stewardesses and a mother in Gulmira). Captain America: The First Avenger (17.5%) has only two females who are even named onscreen: Agent Peggy Carter and Mandy, a girl at the World of Tomorrow exhibition, who does not speak a single line of dialogue.5
With this context provided, this sub-chapter is an exploration of the transformation of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster between Thor and its sequel Thor: The Dark World, which may or may not have been the reason for Portman’s comment in 2016 that she was ‘done’ with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (see Han 2016). It was reported by the Hollywood Reporter that the Academy Award-winning performer was dissatisfied with the film’s original director Patty Jenkins being removed from the project and the creative direction the film took as a result (see Masters 2011). Jenkins would have been the MCU’s first female director and indeed the first female director of a major superhero blockbuster in 2013, which she then became four years later anyway when she took the helm of the critically and commercially succesful Wonder Woman for the DCEU in 2017. In the DVD commentary for Thor: The Dark World her replacement Alan Taylor stated, ‘Natalie’s character brings something fresh to a female heroine in the picture. She’s an intelligent scientist’; and Kevin Feige added, ‘She advances the action, she’s really integrated into the action’, but these assertions reveal a substantial disconnection from the film itself which provides a superlative example of the questionable portrayal of women across the MCU. The suggestion is that the series promotes a superficial level of female empowerment, at the same time as participating in their marginalisation and objectification and thus functions as a reification of heteronormative patriarchal culture and its reactionary values.6
Thor: The Dark World, released in October 2013, is both the sequel to Kenneth Branagh’s Thor and a continuation of the narrative of The Avengers, beginning as it does with Loki being brought back in chains to Asgard after the failed Chitauri invasion of New York. It received mixed reviews on its release, many of which echoed Mick LaSalle’s comments that, ‘Bigger is not always better. Thor: The Dark World pumps up the action and special effects and loses some of the human element that made the original Thor’ (2013), or Amy Nicholson’s contention that, ‘Lacking Iron Man’s wit, the Hulk’s brains, and the Captain’s ideals, he’s [Thor] in peril of going poof himself if the franchise doesn’t figure out how to capitalize on its most glorious hero’ (2013). The film is widely regarded as being one of the lesser entries in the MCU, although it does have a significant fan following, much of which is connected to the continued presence of Tom Hiddlestone playing Loki for the third time.7 In the period between The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World Hiddlestone had further endeared himself to MCU fans by appearing dressed in full Loki regalia at the 2013 Comic-Con, gleefully repeating his two most often quoted (and memed) lines of dialogue from The Avengers, but retailoring them for the Comic Con audience:
Humanity…look how far you have fallen. Lining up in the sweltering heat for hours. Huddling together in the dark…Like beasts! I am Loki, the last god – and I am burdened with glorious purpose. Stand back, you mewling quim. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for a place in this chamber. In this meagre palace of Midgard the arena they call Hall H. Where are your Avengers now? Say my name!
In Thor, the eponymous hero was shown growing from an arrogant and impetuous youth into a worthy heir to the throne of Asgard and Thor: The Dark World continues to portray this development. Like the first film, its emotional centre is the oedipal dynamic between the two brothers, Thor and Loki, and their aging father Odin. While Thor has been quick to proclaim his father’s abilities as both a king and a parent, Alan Taylor, who had until then been more recognised for directing episodes of Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–) than his work on feature films, offered an alternative perspective: ‘Odin is called the All-Father but he is one of the worst parents I have ever met…Their father has so completely screwed up their childhood. You don’t tell two boys that they’re both meant to be king, but only one will achieve it!’ (qtd. in Moore and Javins 2013: 174).8 The throne itself will later be destroyed by the film’s primary antagonist, the bland and unshaded villain Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) who is from the race of Dark Elves once thought eradicated by Odin’s grandfather, Bors. Many years before Malekith was cast out and on his return seeks revenge, but he lacks anything resembling a personality even compared to Laufey, king of the Frost Giants, from the previous film. The film derives its title from the fact that Malekith wishes to usher in a new era, a Dark World, and hopes to use a mysterious substance known as the Aether, one of the six Infinity Stones spread throughout the MCU, to achieve it.
It is Jane Foster, Thor’s human girlfriend, who accidentally comes into contact with this Aether and sets the plot in motion. In the first film Jane had been one of the slightly more interesting female characters in Phase One, especially compared to the likes of Pepper Potts and Betty Ross. She did fulfil the role of the adoring girlfriend and was infantilised by her clumsiness, but she was also introduced as a dedicated and talented astrophysicist shown working and researching, she was not required to be saved by Thor and was not overtly sexualised by either her clothes or her demeanour. In the two years Thor has been away heroically fighting battles all across the nine realms, we are informed that Jane has been doing little more than pining for him in his absence. Darcy chastises her for ‘moping around in your pyjamas, eating ice cream and obsessing about you know who’, the uncomfortable implication being that she is unable to function, continue her research, or even her life without him. She is re-introduced to the audience on a date with the genial Richard (Chris O’Dowd) having relocated to London, but it is clear to see that, like Betty dating Leonard Samson in The Incredible Hulk, she could never be satisfied with anyone other the film’s hero, who she fears has deserted her after the events of the first film. Jane does not know, but we the audience do, that Thor’s destruction of the Bifrost Bridge at the climax of Thor to save the race of Frost Giants from Loki’s genocide, had made it impossible for him to return to her.
When Jane and Darcy visit an unexplained ‘stable gravitational anomaly’ they find a truck floating in the air, somehow impervious to the rules of gravity, which reminds them both of what they had experienced just before meeting Thor in New Mexico in the first film. Jane instructs Darcy ‘Don’t touch anything!’…but this is exactly what she does herself, only to be pulled through a portal into another realm and infected with the Aether. With the mysterious substance coursing through her body she is given what appears to be super powers, but they also lead her to faint whenever they are triggered, meaning she spends several long minutes in the film shot as an attractively framed literal sleeping beauty. Additionally, as a conduit for the remarkable powers of the Aether she is transformed into an object fought over for much of the film’s narrative by Thor and Malekith, as the strength and determination she displayed in the first film are replaced by her becoming effectively a ‘damsel in distress’ who needs to be frequently rescued not just by Thor, as one might expect, but by other characters like Loki, Frigga and even Erik Selvig. Learning of her plight, somehow Thor returns to Earth only to be comedically slapped twice by Jane demanding to know why he did not come back before, in one of several examples of the character being primarily defined by her emotions rather than her intellect. Her subsequent journey to Asgard leads to an intriguing reversal of the fish out of water narrative of the first film, now instead with Asgard shown through Jane’s human eyes, but Odin is revealed to be distinctly unhappy at her presence. When the once resolute and determined female scientist hears that Thor has discussed her with his father she blushes like a teenager and asks, ‘You told your dad about me!?’ Odin’s dismissive line on seeing her, even when she is in the same room, is ‘She does not belong here in Asgard any more than a goat belongs at a dining table’. Thor protests that ‘She’s strong in ways you’d never even know’, but Alan Taylor’s film presents little evidence of this and Jane is transmogrified from an intelligent and resourceful scientist to a flighty and overly emotional girlfriend, who tells Thor, ‘I like the way you explain things!’ and the audience that, ‘Physics is gonna go ballistic!’ While Thor has brought Jane to Asgard to cure her, there is a lingering suspicion that the prospect of her having powers is such a monstrous idea that the narrative demands that they must be removed as quickly as possible in a very similar way to how Pepper Potts was treated in Iron Man 3 after she became infected with the Extremis virus.
Jane is not the only female character to undergo a regression from the original film. Sif, one of the Warriors Three, is treated quite differently to her male counterparts and has herself deteriorated since Thor. Branagh’s film had portrayed her as strong and independent, clearly in love with Thor but reluctant to reveal it. In the sequel it is Sif and not her male compatriots who is teased about not being in control by Thor in the film’s opening battle, it is her costume that accentuates her form and her pining for Thor becomes much more explicit, even though she knows he has chosen another partner. In contrast, Volstagg is obese and comical, but never weak or emotionally vulnerable and neither are Fandral or Hogun. In the first film, Thor’s mother, Frigga, was shown as too weak to hardly even raise a sword in the throne room with Laufey the Frost Giant king, but in the sequel she is provided with a heroic moment as she bravely fights back against Malekith in order to save Jane; yet she is killed in the familiar trope of the death of a female providing source of motivation for the hero. So, while Craig Kyle is able to assert that Frigga is ‘even more important’ (qtd. in Moore and Javins 2013: 194) than Odin, she is still one of a range of mothers in the MCU who are marginalised if not literally erased from the narrative.
Fig. 17: Thor and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in Thor: The Dark World (2013), a film in which she finds herself objectified, marginalised and infantilised throughout
In the wake of Frigga’s death Thor and his father have an argument as how to best proceed in their fight with Malekith, a moment which is decidedly reminiscent of their disagreement in the first film over how to deal with the threat of the Frost Giants, although now their roles have been reversed. It is Thor who suggests the path of reason and Odin who wants to stand and fight ‘to the last drop of Asgardian blood!’ Thor even questions his father’s judgement – ‘Then how are you different to Malekith?’ – but it is a false comparison as Odin is wracked by grief and has shown himself to be a wise and honourable man in both Thor films, whereas Malekith is a one-dimensional pantomime-like villain. Nevertheless, Thor goes against his father once again, but this time in the best interests of Asgard. It is then he lets Loki out of prison because he needs his help in order to defeat Malekith. When Loki meets Jane, the woman he had threatened with implied rape in the first film, she slaps him around the face as she had done Thor, with a cry of ‘That was for New York!’, the metaphorical equivalent of punching Osama Bin Laden in the aftermath of 9/11 (which Captain America actually did in issue one of the comic Freedom 3 [2006]). Thor knows that he cannot trust his brother, but hopes that their shared desire for revenge will prevail. When they finally confront Malekith it seems that Loki has betrayed Thor again and cuts off his hand, claiming that ‘All I ever wanted was you and Odin dead at my feet!’ but it is revealed to be part of their ruse and they attack the leader of the Dark Elves together. Jane seems terrified at this turn of events and as oblivious to their strategy as Pepper seemed to have been of Tony’s plan to give her the Iron Man suit during the Mandarin’s attack on his mansion in Iron Man 3. During the battle, it is Loki who saves Jane and then seemingly sacrifices himself for his brother. A tearful Thor informs him, ‘I’ll tell father what you did today’ but Loki says, ‘I didn’t do it for him…’ In the history of the MCU’s fake deaths through Phases One and Two, Loki’s is the shortest, as within three minutes this too is revealed to have been part of his scheme.
With the Aether removed from Jane she is now effectively superfluous as a character and the stage is set for the film’s climax in Greenwich, London, a fitting choice due to its historic connections to both time and space.9 In this sequence it is not Jane who takes the lead in helping Thor as one might expect given her expertise, but Erik Selvig who has recently been released from a psychiatric institution. As Walderzak remarks, ‘it is Erik who understands and provides an explanation to the audience of the gravitational convergence, despite Jane’s focus on the subject’ (2016: 160). Jane does participate in the battle at Greenwich and it is her computations which help them realise where the teleportation devices they use against Malekith should be placed, but she is given an ‘oops!’ moment when she accidentally teleports Darcy and Ian (Darcy’s own intern) and later she is saved by Selvig when the Dark Elves attack them. After Malekith has been defeated by Thor’s noble act of sacrifice for the sake of the galaxy, Jane too offers to sacrifice herself, but in a very different way to those performed by male heroes in film after film in the MCU since Iron Man. Seeing that an unconscious Thor is in the path of Malekith’s falling ship, she tries to pull him free but realises she will not be able to, so she decides to cover him (an immortal god) with her very human body, willing to die for her man. However, as we have come to expect, the sacrifice is not a real one and she is saved for the second time in the space of a few minutes by Selvig who cleverly uses the device to teleport Malekith’s ship to another world. Why it could not have been Jane’s ingenuity that saved Thor or her colleagues remains unclear, but it is in the film’s post-credits scene that she is rewarded for her behaviour throughout the film with the ultimate in heteronormative reification, a passionate kiss the likes of which Robin Wood memorably referred to as the ‘ideological straightjacket’ of Hollywood cinema (1998: 37). In one final twist, another symbolic gesture of her superfluousness, Jane’s face is hidden from the camera during their embrace and in the film’s audio commentary director Alan Taylor revealed that Natalie Portman was not present for the scene and in fact was replaced, unbeknownst to the audience, by Hemsworth’s real-life wife, Elsa Pataky.
1 In one of the many connections we have seen drawn between the superhero film and the western throughout the MCU, the Mandarin recounts the story of the real-life Sand Creek Massacre and offers parallels between it and his attack on the Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait. In 1864 a 700-strong force of Colorado territory Militia attacked a peaceful Native American settlement killing between seventy and one hundred and sixty-three Indians. The Mandarin says, ‘the US military waited until the friendly Cheyenne braves had all gone hunting, waited to attack and slaughtered the families left behind and claim their land’. The Sand Creek Massacre has been regularly recreated in western film from Tomahawk (1951) to the Vietnam-era Soldier Blue (1970) and Little Big Man (1970).
2 This is the primary lesson that Tony Stark helps the young Peter Parker learn in the narrative of Spider-Man: Homecoming, where he informs him, ‘If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it’. After Stark takes away the hi-tech Spider-Man suit he designed from him, Parker proves himself to be a real hero by thwarting the plans of the salvage contractor-turned-weapons designer Adrian Toomes aka the Vulture.
3 Tilda Swinton was fifty-five when she played the Ancient One in the Phase Three film Doctor Strange and Marisa Tomei was fifty-one at the time of Captain America: Civil War in 2016.
4 These figures are reflected in the failure of some of the MCU films (for example Ant-Man, The Avengers, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America: The First Avenger and Doctor Strange) to pass what is referred to as the Bechdel Test, named after the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which requires that a film must contain two named female characters who talk about something other than a male character.
5 As a benchmark, one should probably turn to Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, which certainly raised the bar in a number of ways for the representation of women in the genre. It earned $103 million during its opening weekend, the highest for a female director and highest for a female-led comic book film. Its global opening weekend of $228 million was more than the combined entire box office of the two other female comic book superhero films before: Elektra (2005; $56 million) and Catwoman (2004; $82 million). Yet even Woman Woman, which begins with an extended all female sequence set on the island of Themyscira, only has 34% of its speaking characters as women.
6 The poor characterisation of Jane Foster led to her name being used by script-reader Ross Puttman in his @femscriptintros project on Twitter. Puttman takes ‘female character descriptions out of screenplays, changes all names to ‘Jane’ (to protect the innocent), and then sends them out 140 characters at a time. The result is a parade of one-note, superficial notes that describe characters’ looks, but rarely anything about them’ (Watercutter 2016).
7 Thor: The Dark World is the worst reviewed film in the franchise according to both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, followed by Iron Man 2.
8 In the comic book Thor: The Dark World Prelude (2013) Iron Man is shown to ask Thor during the Battle of New York whether he has seen any episodes of Game of Thrones. He adds, ‘It’s like you but instead of a magic hammer they have dragons and sex’.
9 In what I would regard as the film’s most powerful time and space anomaly Thor: The Dark World was one of several American films produced in 2013 to be awarded the status of ‘British’ by the British Film Institute after they passed the ‘cultural test for film’. Films like Saving Mr Banks, Jack the Giant Slayer, Fast and Furious 6, The Dark Knight Rises and Wrath of Titans were all awarded British status in 2013 and the Best British Film at the BAFTA that year was controversially awarded to Gravity (2013).