Genre criticism takes for granted that most works fall within one and only one genre with genre mixing the exception rather than the norm…The superhero genre seems capable of absorbing and reworking all other genres.
– Henry Jenkins (2009: 17)
What has changed is not male power as such, but its form, its presentation, its packaging. In other words, while it is apparent that styles of masculinity may alter in very short time spans, the substance of male power does not.
– Arthur Brittan (1989: 2)
Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man are the tenth and twelfth instalments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Ant-Man being the concluding film of Phase Two coming after Avengers: Age of Ultron (discussed in chapter eight). Both are arguably important and transitional films for the franchise as they introduce wholly new characters and offer deviations from what many had come to expect from the genre. By 2014 criticisms of the sheer number of superhero films being released were increasing, as were speculations as to how long the genre might be able to sustain such levels of popularity with audiences. Steven Spielberg, one of the central architects of blockbuster cinema in the four decades since the release of Jaws in 1975 commented that, like the western before it, the superhero film could not go on indefinitely:
We were around when the western died and there will be a time when the superhero movie goes the way of the western. It doesn’t mean there won’t be another occasion where the western comes back and the superhero movie someday returns. Of course, right now the superhero movie is alive and thriving…There will come a day when the mythological stories are supplanted by some other genre that possibly some young filmmaker is just thinking about discovering for all of us. (Qtd. in McMillan 2015)
Spielberg is, of course, correct in his assertion that genres fall in and out of favour with audiences and there is no reason to assume that the superhero film will be any different. One of the keys to its continued success has been its ability to diversify and encompass other genres while remaining recognisably within the parameters of its own, whether, as we have already seen, this might be The Avengers embodying the traits of a war film, the tropes of the fantasy film which are a key part of Thor, or the conspiracy thriller elements which go a long way towards defining Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The two films featured in this chapter are similar attempts to expand and diversify the superhero film while remaining a recognisable part of the Marvel brand: Guardians of the Galaxy is clearly influenced by the rich history of the space opera and Ant-Man is a heist film which happens to feature a superhero. Both draw on these respective genres in ways which enable their own narratives to seem vibrant and engaging at a time when concerns were being raised about the superhero film’s reversion to formula. They are also the two most explicitly comedic films in the MCU in Phases One and Two and the most self-consciously postmodern: both filled with witty pop culture allusions and playfully intertextual narrative devices that were largely absent from the Phase One films. Ant-Man references films like Titanic, TV shows like Thomas The Tank Engine (1984–) and includes sounds from the ATAT Walker in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in its audio mix, and Guardians of the Galaxy mentions a diverse range of texts from the 1980s: films like Footloose (1984) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and television shows like Full House (ABC, 1987–95) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987–94) in a nostalgic film which views an intergalactic space adventure through the prism of its protagonist’s memories of his childhood on Earth.
They are also the two films that were regarded as the riskiest propositions for the MCU in Phase Two given the relative obscurity of their central characters, which led many to speculate they would both struggle to find an audience (see McMillan 2014). The director of Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League (2017), Zack Snyder, was dismissive of Ant-Man and, reacting directly to Steven Spielberg’s comments quoted above stated: ‘I feel like he’s right. But I feel like Batman and Superman are transcendent of superhero movies in a way because they’re Batman and Superman. They are not just, like, the flavour of the week Ant-Man, not to be mean, but whatever it is. What is the next, Blank-Man?’ (qtd. in Khatchatourian 2015). However, both Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man exceeded expectations at the box office, the former ending up being one of the biggest box office successes of the year, earning $773 million world-wide, and both were positively reviewed (considerably more so than Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice).
This chapter will be an exploration of how far these two films offer deviations from the superhero genre, but at the same time interrogate their depictions of masculinity as they both provide two excellent examples of the diversity of models of the representation of men offered by contemporary American film. The superhero film, as Suzanne Kord and Elizabeth Krimmer have suggested, is ‘centrally concerned with concepts of masculinity’ (2011: 109) and we have considered what might be described as these more malleable dimensions of what it means to be a ‘real man’ in the MCU on occasion throughout this volume: in how Captain America’s more traditional brand of masculinity is updated to encompass, at the same time, variations of the modern, more sensitive new man archetype; or how Thor has been shown to both embody aspects of what Susan Jeffords (1994) called the hard-bodied hero, but also present a vulnerability and empathy not connected with this more traditional model. Debates concerning the evolution of masculinity in the 1990s and into the 2000s were frequently concerned with how far the dominant hegemonical masculine modes were in a state of crisis (see Brittan 1989; Easthope 1992; Segal 2001; Peberdy 2011) and some of the most interesting films of the era like Fight Club, Falling Down (1993) and American Beauty (1999) are able to portray the perceptions of these shifting coordinates onscreen. This book asserts that much of the discourse surrounding this crisis was itself largely ideologically motivated and, somewhat paradoxically, resulted not in the limitation of the spectrum of masculinities offered to men, but, in actual fact, a broadening of them in the way that it offered a freedom from some of the constraints imposed on what Western culture had hitherto defined as what constitutes a ‘real man’. So, while Anthony Easthope might be correct to argue that, ‘men live in the dominant version of masculinity…they themselves are trapped in structures that fix and limit masculine identity. They do what they have to do’ (1992: 7; italics in original), the characterisations of many of the heroes in the MCU are demonstrative of trends in contemporary American film that offer men a much wider range of complexities than were ever offered before, or have ever been offered to women. As Lynne Segal has argued, masculinity is ‘always in crisis’ (2001: 239; emphasis added) and this crisis, which Peter Quill and Scott Lang, the white heterosexual males at the centre of the two films explored in this chapter, certainly undergo variations of, becomes part of the formative constituents of what defined masculinity in the first decades of the new millennium on the cinema screen and in Western culture at large.
‘There’s one other name you may know me by…’: Negotiating Peter Quill’s Identity and Masculinity in Guardians of the Galaxy
The heroes of myth embody something like the full range of ideological contradictions around which the life of culture revolves, and their adventures suggest the range of possible resolutions that the culture’s lore provides.
– Richard Slotkin (1992: 14)
Earth 1988. A young boy, Peter Quill, sits in a hospital, waiting to see his terminally ill mother, Meredith, perhaps for the last time. Sitting quietly, he listens to a mix-tape given to him by her on his 1979 Sony TPS-L2 Walkman cassette player, blocking out the world around him with her music. The songs contained within it will not only become a key part of the film’s diegetic and non-diegetic soundtrack, but also a significant thematic element in its narrative, much more so than in any superhero film before or since, with the exception of the film’s sequel Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2. Ushered to his mother for a final audience, he is presented with the gift of a second mix-tape with her plea to ‘open it up when I am gone’. She tells him how much he looks like his father who was ‘an angel…composed out of pure light’, comments which at the time seem nonsensical, but are later revealed in the sequel to be very close to the truth. In her last moments, she holds out her hand to Peter, but the young boy is overcome with grief and refuses, instead he flees out of the hospital into the darkness of the night. Out of nowhere a beam of light and a space ship emerges from the sky, as if from a Steven Spielberg film like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the likes of which Peter may well have watched a few years before with his mother and the atmosphere of which James Gunn strives to emulate throughout Guardians of the Galaxy. The ship sucks up the now orphaned Peter inside it and the last sound we hear are his cries for his mother.
Twenty-six years later and thus in the diegetic year of 2014, the year of the film’s release, we meet the man Peter has become, a selfish yet good-natured mercenary who prefers to be referred to as the ‘legendary outlaw’ Star-Lord, but is often disappointed when people refuse to recognise him or call him by that name. In an introduction deliberately reminiscent of the opening scenes of another Spielberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Quill looks for a mysterious object on a long-abandoned planet called Morag, whose oceans only briefly recede every three years to reveal hidden areas of land. Peter still listens to his mother’s first mix-tape, but has been unable to bring himself to open the second. It remains unspoken, but his devotion to it is a way of retaining a connection to his mother and his childhood on Earth. James Gunn has remarked: ‘The tape is really the character of Quill’s mother…The Walkman and the compilation tape inside of it is the heart of the film’ (qtd. in Grow 2014).1 Later, when a blue-skinned alien prison guard takes the Walkman from him and listens to ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ (1968) by Blue Swede, Peter yells at him not just that the Walkman is his, but ‘That song belongs to me!’ and risks his life to get it back. On Morag he is searching for a mysterious artefact, as Indiana Jones once looked for the fertility idol among the Hovitos in Peru, but the tone of Guardians of the Galaxy abruptly shifts just six minutes into the film when Peter places the Walkman on his head and the 1974 song ‘Come and Get Your Love’ by Redbone fills the soundtrack. The hitherto dark and gloomy Morag is now enlivened by the incongruity of the 1970s rock song appearing in a film which identifies itself so readily as a space opera as well as a superhero film, as it is by Peter’s exuberantly unselfconscious dancing, his use of an unwilling rat-like creature (an Orloni) as an impromptu microphone and even a smoothly orchestrated horizontal slide almost exactly the same as Tom Cruise’s from Risky Business (1984), released four years before his abduction. It is these unlikely juxtapositions, the adroitly balanced tonal shifts and the film’s irreverent postmodernism which emerge as the defining aspects of Guardians of the Galaxy and serve to distinguish it from much of the MCU and other films of the superhero genre.2
The early scenes of James Gunn’s film show Peter to be a somewhat vain and rather egocentric protagonist, offering parallels to the pre-epiphanic states of the narcissistic Tony Stark, Stephen Strange and the arrogant Thor. Peter is shown to have had sexual relations with Bereet the red-skinned Krylorian, but forgets both her name and that she is even in his ship, and later boasts of his conquests of several aliens: a ‘smoking-hot Rajak girl’, a Kree girl, and an A’askavarian, even though they have ‘tentacles, and needles for teeth’, and he seems to initially only care about the money he will make from the sale of the Orb he finds on Morag (which he has ‘stolen’ from his mentor Yondu [Michael Rooker]), even when he learns of its tremendous destructive power. However, whether the film endorses Peter’s behaviour or criticises it, as Gamora does calling out his ‘pelvic sorcery’, is up to audiences to decide. Peter is muscular and handsome, but Chris Pratt introduces an element of vulnerability and an Everyman quality to the character through his sense of humour, clumsiness and the ineptness of his braggadocio even in these early stages which mark him as quite distinct from what we have characterised as the hypermasculine model often found in the genre.
It is when Peter finds himself embroiled in an intergalactic conflict between two alien species, the Kree and the Xandarians, who have been at war for millennia, that he is forced to reconsider his attitude. While the war was finally brought to an end by a fragile peace treaty, one fanatical Kree, the antagonist of the film, Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), refuses to accept that it is over and embarks on a genocidal spree to eradicate the Xandarians from the galaxy, referring to them and their culture as a ‘disease’. The Kree are a harsh and unforgiving people and Ronan is an overtly masculine figure who sees weakness as a sin, sharply contrasted to that of the progressive Xandarians who are shown to be a caring, multicultural and liberal culture, home to twelve billion people, self-consciously portrayed as a utopia that Earth should aspire to become in the future. The Xandarians are led by their female Nova Prime, Irani Rael (Glenn Close), who demands that the Kree condemn Ronan’s actions, but they refuse. Ronan says: ‘They call me terrorist, radical, zealot because I obey the ancient laws of my people the Kree and punish those who do not!’ While Jeffrey Brown’s suggestion that ‘for all of its light-hearted comedy and escapist space adventure, Guardians of the Galaxy also revisions 9/11 with a rag-tag team of heroic victims, led by a white American male, saving an alien planet from a fanatical terrorist. The film’s central bad guy, Ronan the Accuser, is a thinly veiled symbol of the all-encompassing Middle-Eastern Other that stands as a constant threat to the West’ (2016: 76) is not entirely convincing, Ronan’s characterisation provides the distant intergalactic conflict, a familiar element of the space opera, with a new millennial clash of civilisations resonance.
It is these deviations from the formula of the superhero film and its densely-layered world which separates Guardians of the Galaxy from many films of the genre, with almost every frame full of detail to the extent that audiences still continued to find elements within it for years after its release (see Peters 2016). Its environment is futuristic, but it has a palpable lived-in quality reminiscent of the early films in the Star Wars franchise. This emphatic embrace of retro-pop space culture offers audiences not the nostalgia for the 1930s or 1950s of George Lucas’s original trilogy of films (1977–83), but the 1970s which marked both Peter and director James Gunn’s (b. 1970) youth. Gunn manages to effectively balance this earthiness with the more dynamic and vibrant colourful palette of pulp science fiction. He commented:
I like keeping the grittiness of it but I wanted to bring back some of the color of the 1950s and ’60s. You know, pulp science fiction movies and inject a little bit more of that pulp feel into things. So, that’s where I think that comes from. There’s the pulp mixed with the grittiness and that’s been throughout the whole movie – the beauty mixed with the ugliness. (Qtd. in Sciretta 2014b)
Indeed, Gunn’s bricolage of influences is decidedly postmodern in design both visually and narratively: drawing from such disparate sources as the already-mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but also Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Barbarella (1968), The Right Stuff (1983) and Black Hawk Down, all of which Gunn returned to in interviews (see Faraci 2014; Hunt 2014; Sciretta 2014b). Like Star Wars, a film from which it draws so much inspiration, it is a space opera; in fact, it is, according to Gunn, ‘one thousand percent space opera’ (qtd. in Faraci 2014), who also said:
This was intentionally my version of Star Wars. When I was first considering doing the movie, the chance to make something like that was one of the things that get me on board. Not just Star Wars, but Raiders of The Lost Ark, and other movies like that. The stuff I loved as a kid. I wanted to make a movie that made people feel the way they made me feel. (Qtd. in Hunt 2014; emphasis added)
Gunn’s remarks articulate his desire that Guardians of the Galaxy function as more than just a homage to the formative films of his youth, but an attempt to recreate the feelings which they inspired in him for a new generation of audiences.3 Its chief points of nostalgia begin with Peter Quill’s Walkman and the film’s period soundtrack, but they are primarily located in the prism of his childhood on Earth which permeates Peter’s intergalactic experience, as, like Captain America, he is also a man ‘out of time’. There is a distinct sense that he is living out his childhood fantasies in reality within the diegetic frames of the film, even in his desire to be referred to as Star-Lord, rather than Peter, the true meaning of which is not revealed until the film’s final moments. The fact that these pop culture references are largely meaningless to those around him, but very familiar to audiences, makes up a large portion of the film’s humour: whether it might be naming his space ship, the Milano, after the actress he had a crush on from Who’s The Boss (ABC, 1984–92), referring to an ‘outlaw’ by the name of John Stamos, an actor in the family comedy Full House, calling a Sakaarian guard a ‘Mutant Ninja Turtle’, or shots of his personal quarters on the ship which reveal he has decorated it with Garbage Pail Kids and Scratch N’Sniff stickers, trading cards from the TV show Alf (NBC 1986–90), and even a Troll doll.4 This almost dizzying range of postmodern references might be regarded as part of the malaise of modern culture that some have seen as suggestive of a lack of originality and creativity, but others have argued that they are ‘aesthetic symptoms of far more profound developments in postmodern society as a whole’ (Booker 2007: xviii). So while the nostalgia of Lucas’s Star Wars: A New Hope and American Graffiti (1973) have been understood by many as an attempt to realise and recreate the 1950s which remains for many Americans ‘the privileged lost object of desire’ (Jameson 1984: 67), 1980s-influenced films like Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Super 8 (2011) and It (2017), and television shows like Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–) and The Goldbergs (ABC, 2013–) attempt to recapture a sense of innocence around the childhood experiences of their creators and large sections of their intended audiences, which extend far beyond the teen audiences often associated with the genre.
When Peter is arrested and sent to an intergalactic prison known as the Kyln, it is there he gets to know the four other characters who will later be referred to as the ‘guardians of the galaxy’: a talking raccoon-like mammal by the name of Rocket, a giant tree-beast called Groot, a green-skinned female assassin called Gamora, and the muscular and taciturn Drax, whose family had been murdered by Ronan. Like Drax, each of them are marked by the trauma of their past (except Groot whose background remains unrevealed): Gamora’s entire race, the Zehoberi people, were killed by Thanos in front of her when she was a child, who then adopted her, raising to be one of the most feared killers in the galaxy. Rocket, whose real name is 89P13, was tortured and genetically altered, and he is not the last of his people, but the only one of his kind, eloquently describing his predicament with the line, ‘Ain’t no thing like me ‘cept me’. They are all examples of what Francis Pheasant-Kelly described as the ‘wounded hero’, the likes of which became so prominent in post-9/11 American film and they join the ranks of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and even, to a lesser extent, Steve Rogers (2013: 144). The group are initially only sarcastically referred to as the ‘guardians of the galaxy’ by Ronan, but later come to earn the evocative sobriquet and, to their own surprise, find a sense of purpose and belonging among each other that each had thought lost.
Much of the film’s comedic elements derive from its expressive linguistic wordplay: from Peter’s surprisingly risqué joke about what a blacklight might reveal if used in his spaceship (‘like a Jackson Pollack painting’), to his final ‘trolling’ of Yondu at the end of the film with the very personal gift of an actual Troll doll, both as a joke, a gift and an apology for lying to the man he says was ‘the closest thing I had to a family’.5 Groot’s extremely limited vocabulary – only the words ‘I am Groot’ – has a variety of meanings extrapolated from it throughout the course of the film, including ‘We need to save them’, ‘they are the only friends we have’, ‘they are ungrateful’ and ‘it’s better than eleven percent’ among others.6 One places the pronoun ‘his’ in inverted commas because of Rocket’s throwaway line instructing Groot to ‘Learn genders, man!’ when he tells the endearing treelike character to place a bag over ‘his’ (Peter’s) head which Groot does not seem to understand, implying that his species have no gender (although the character is referred to as ‘he’ throughout the film). This wordplay continues with the characterisation of Drax who comes from a planet with no understanding of simile and metaphor, so when Peter puts a finger to his throat indicating that he will be able to finally get his revenge and kill Ronan, he too is unable to understand what it means. When Rocket explains, ‘His people are completely literal, metaphors are going to go over his head’, even this is misconstrued and Drax responds with, ‘Nothing goes over my head, my reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.’ The whole team struggles with Peter’s references to 1970s and 1980s American culture, the most memorable of which, and the one that inspired a legion of memes, is when Peter relates to Gamora a ‘legend’ from his planet about the inspirational value of dance. When he tells her ‘It’s called Footloose and in it a great hero named Kevin Bacon teaches an entire city with sticks up their buts that dancing, well, is the greatest thing there is’, her first question is ‘Who put the sticks up their butt?’ but later as they go into the film’s final battle Gamora proudly tells Peter, ‘We are just like Kevin Bacon!’ One might speculate that one of the reasons Guardians of the Galaxy was able to engage with a broad variety of audiences are these witty metatextual references which are very different to the majority of those found in contemporary American films, which most often refer to what are, at the time, current pop culture events and have the tendency to date quickly. Those contained in James Gunn’s film do not date in such a way, because they already are dated and mine a general fascination for all things connected to 1970s and 1980s culture.
Fig. 20: The eponymous heroes of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): “a thief, two thugs, an assassin and a maniac”
When Ronan takes possession of the Orb and attempts to use it in his genocidal war against the Xandarians, only needing to touch the surface of the Xandar with it to see the whole planet destroyed, Peter’s first instinct is to flee, but he changes his mind and gives a speech about them being ‘losers’ heavily reminiscent of The Goonies (1985) ‘our time’ speech: ‘I look around at us. You know what I see? Losers. I mean like folks who have lost stuff. And we have, man we have. All of us. Our homes, our families, normal lives.’ Rocket asks him, ‘What are you, some saint all of a sudden?’ echoing the comments made by Rhodes to Stark in Iron Man and Loki to Thor at the climax of Thor. Peter’s emotional growth had started earlier in the film with his decision to risk his life to save Gamora in space, but it is this moment where he decides to put aside his selfishness and take a stand for something, a decision he boils down to as ‘the choice between giving a shit and not giving a shit’. It is fitting that it is from then on people finally recognise him as Star-Lord, first Ronan’s henchman Korath, but also the Xandarian Rhomann Dey (John C. Reilly) and Gamora, each of whom had previously refused to refer to him by that name. Peter’s brand of masculinity offers just as much of a paradox as we have seen with many of the superheroes in the MCU: he is a white heterosexual male the likes of which have filled American screens as the apex of popular culture for a century, but on the other hand, his is a multi-dimensional one which involves the acceptance of, on the surface at least, vulnerability, empathy and humility. Peter is quite removed from the hard-bodied males to be found in American movies of the 1980s when he was abducted in the penultimate year of Reagan’s presidency, but the film shows that even in space the responsibility for saving the galaxy still falls to a white heterosexual American man. The film is a vigorously nostalgic text on a variety of levels, but it is not nostalgic for the hypermasculinity of performers like Stallone and Schwarzeneggar whom Jeffords suggested stood for ‘not only for a type of national character – heroic, aggressive, and determined – but for the nation itself’ (1994: 2) and who also returned to the screens in the decade after 9/11, often together, in films like The Expendables (2010), The Expendables 2 (2012) and Escape Plan (2013). However, at the same time it is a film which, as much of popular cinema does, pushes the experiences of women to ‘the margins’ (King 2000: 108) and tells a story about men. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Guardians of the Galaxy has the lowest percentage of female-speaking characters across Phases One and Two of the MCU, with only six women who utter a line of dialogue in the entire film: Meredith Quill, Bereet, Nebula, Gamora, Nova Prime and Corrina. The other women which populate its narrative, none of whom have a speaking role, are referred to in the credits as things like Pretty Xandarian, Sad Woman with Horns, Sad Krylorian Girl, Corpsman Dey’s Wife, Crying Xandarian Citizen or Tortured Pink Girl. This seems to cast doubt on the sincerity of director James Gunn’s 2016 comments that, ‘I am sick of stories where there are a bunch of fully realized male characters and one female character, whose primary characteristic is simply being “the girl” or the personality-less object of some man’s affections’ in a different light (qtd. in Baker-Whitelaw 2016). While it is true that these men (including Rocket) demonstrate that the hypermasculine model is now regarded as inadequate in a variety of ways and the film offers in its place a more flexible mode of masculinity, its representation of women is decidedly problematic.7
The eponymous characters of Guardians of the Galaxy never refer to each other explicitly as a family until the film’s sequel (although Gamora alludes to it once), but one might argue that it earns the use of the term due to the strength of their bond and the richness (for the genre) of their characterisations, especially if contrasted to the egregious scene in Suicide Squad where Diablo (Jay Hernandez) is seen to shout to his fellow anti-heroes, ‘I lost one family. I can’t lose another!’ in a film that does not warrant the use of the term in any shape or form. This bond is articulated in what might be the film’s most moving moment, as Groot elects to give his life to save his new family and in the only time in the film he says something other than ‘I am Groot’ he tells them all, ‘We are Groot’. Groot’s ‘death’ is followed by an audacious callback to Footlose, as Peter distracts Ronan with, of all things, a demand for a dance off, one of several moments given to Quill that it seems hard to imagine any other superhero in the MCU doing, the other most notable perhaps being his remark, ‘There’s a little bit of pee coming out of me right now’. He grabs the Orb knowing that it will probably kill him, but hoping it will at least save the entire planet.8 In the film’s final gesture of togetherness, the guardians of the galaxy earn their name and refuse to let Peter face his ordeal alone, by linking hands, and somehow find themselves able to contain the Orb’s power. In doing so Ronan is defeated by the very qualities of cooperation, community and emotion that he regards as weakness, and so far beneath him. During the sequence, Peter sees a vision of his mother on her deathbed, but this time agrees to her original plea to ‘take my hand’ and in doing so he is able to acknowledge her death and her loss, and come to terms with his past and his place in the world. In the aftermath of the battle, he finally opens the letter she had written to him twenty-six years before which poignantly reveals, in another of example of the film’s wordplay, that the name she called him as a child was ‘my little Star-Lord’.
About the space opera Gary Westfahl has written: ‘To remain at the forefront of science fiction, which esteems freshness and originality, space opera must continuously reinvent itself’ (2003: 198), an assertion that could be just as readily applied to the superhero film. What James Gunn achieves with Guardians of the Galaxy is a dynamic reinvigoration of the genre by fusing it with the space opera and embracing the iconic films of his youth in ways beyond merely paying homage to them. It is able to transcend many of the parameters of the the superhero film and in some ways more traditional understandings of what constitutes hegemonic masculinity, but it still remains entrenched in the dominant ideology of the culture in which it is made.
‘It’s not about saving our world, it’s about saving theirs’: The Redemption of the Father in Ant-Man
These films depend upon similarly contrived scenarios that recuperate failing fatherhood through enactment of paternal protectiveness in extreme circumstances, whereupon the reconstitution of a normative familial unit is not the point of the protagonists’ narrative journey, so much as the revalidation of his initially derogated fatherhood. These extreme scenarios depict the redemption of inadequate fathers, deflecting feminist critiques of masculinity, by positing the male’s fulfilment of the role of father-protector as compensating for domestic and personal failings…
– Hannah Hamad (2013: 250)
As we have seen on numerous occasions throughout this volume so far the MCU and the superhero genre as a whole has displayed a questionable tendency to prioritise the experiences of men in their narratives and in the process largely erase the experiences of women, sometimes figuratively, but often quite literally. This can be seen in the MCU as early as Iron Man and Iron Man 2, where Howard Stark plays an integral part in Tony Stark’s life, but his mother, Maria, barely merits a mention; in The Incredible Hulk, Betty’s father, General Ross, is a central character, but her mother is entirely absent; in both Thor and Thor: The Dark World it is Odin who plays a prominent role, while Frigga is killed off in scenes which are designed to do little more than provide a motivation for Thor’s future actions. Even in Guardians of the Galaxy, while Peter Quill’s mother appears in the opening scene and remains a lingering presence, the film is much more about fathers and father figures: bad ones (like Thanos and Ronan), traumatised ones (like Drax), ambiguous ones (like Yondu) and absent ones like Peter’s, who was revealed to be the Celestial Ego (Kurt Russell) and given a central role in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2.9 It is clear to see that these are not isolated examples, but rather foundational tenets on which the MCU and the superhero genre is based. Ant-Man emerges as one of the most vibrant of the Phase Two films, but it is also one of the most egregious examples of what Robert Walser has termed, ‘exscription’; that is, the exclusion of females from popular narratives, or the ‘total denial of anxieties through the articulation of fantastic worlds without women’ (2014: 110).
Ant-Man was actually one of the original films to be discussed at the first Marvel Studios panel back in 2006, even prior to the release of Iron Man, which featured Kevin Feige, Jon Favreau and the film’s then director, Edgar Wright, who had been connected to the property since as early as 2003. Wright stayed with Ant-Man for more than a decade, but on 23 May 2014 Marvel Studios announced that he was no longer contributing to the project, citing ‘differences in their vision of the film’ (qtd. in Sims 2014) as the reason for his departure. Evangeline Lilly, who played Hope van Dyne in the film, suggested in interviews that Wright’s vision had deviated too far from the thematically and aesthetically consistent world Marvel had endeavoured for so long to create and it was this which led to him leaving the film:
I saw with my own eyes that [after Wright left] Marvel had just pulled the script into their world. I mean, they’ve established a universe, and everyone has come to expect a certain aesthetic [and] a certain feel for Marvel films…It just would have taken you away from this cohesive universe they’re trying to create. And therefore it ruins the suspended disbelief that they’ve built. (Qtd. in Vary 2014)
Like Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man also begins with a 1980s-set prologue and as with Gunn’s space opera, the scene goes a long way towards establishing many of the film’s recurring thematic motifs. In Washington DC in 1989, inside the still-being-built S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters known as the Triskelion (which audiences had only recently seen destroyed in The Winter Soldier), genius inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) storms through the building and the first words of the film are his: ‘Stark!’ Standing in front of a panel comprised of Mitchell Carson (S.H.I.E.L.D. Head of Defense), Peggy Carter (still played by Hayley Atwell) and Howard Stark, he demands to know why S.H.I.E.L.D. have gone behind his back and tried to replicate his invention, the Pym Particle. Stark informs the audience that the Pym Particle is a ‘miracle’ and ‘the most revolutionary science ever developed’, but it is something Pym is unwilling to share as he knows how powerful it is and does not trust S.H.I.E.L.D. to utilise it as ethically as it would be used in his hands. Carson insists that Pym consider the bigger picture, as the Cold War and the United States needs ‘a soldier’ like him, but Pym refuses, preferring to define himself as ‘a scientist’. Stark then tells him to ‘act like one!’ as for Howard Stark (and later his son), scientists invent technology and do not necessarily ruminate on the consequences of how it might be used. The prologue ends with Pym’s promise that, ‘As long as I am alive nobody will ever get that formula’ and the film which follows will portray the challenge he faces keeping his word and the threat to the world if he does not.
Hank Pym is one of the film’s central characters and the original Ant-Man, but he is not its protagonist, as the narrative moves briskly from 1989 to the present day and Pym is shown to be looking for a younger man to carry on the Ant-Man mantle. He believes he may have found him in Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) even though Lang was sentenced to five years in San Quentin Penitentiary for breaking and entering, grand larceny and stealing approximately $4 million from the international cyber security and data storage conglomerate, Vista Corp. Despite his prison sentence, Lang’s motives are shown to be altruistic as he only committed the crime after learning that the company was taking millions of dollars from its customers, so he broke in and transferred all the money back to the victims. The casting of Rudd, an actor with a primarily comedic background, like Chris Pratt who played Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy (they even starred together in Parks and Recreation [NBC, 2009–15]), brings an improvisatory tone to the series largely absent since Iron Man 2. Lang finds life after prison difficult, as even though he has a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering, as a former convict the only work he can secure is as a teller at Baskin and Robbins, but even they fire him when they learn about his criminal past.
Pym sees something of his own situation reflected in Lang’s predicament. Just as Pym became estranged from his daughter Hope after the death of her mother, Lang struggles to reconnect with his infant daughter, Cassie. When they finally meet, Pym tells Lang, ‘Before Hope lost her mother [Janet Pym] she used to look at me like I was the greatest man in the world. Now she looks at me and there’s just disappointment. It’s too late for me, but not for you.’ Hope refuses to call Hank ‘dad’ and she even led the board of his own company against him, an act which saw him replaced by his arrogant protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who becomes the film’s antagonist. Hope and Pym only reconnected, in a limited way, after Hope learned that Cross was embarking on dangerous experiments in order to replicate the Pym Particle. Similarly, Lang has to prove himself to his ex-wife Maggie, his daughter, and everyone around him that he is worthy of being a father and can function as a responsible member of the community. Both mothers, Janet Pym and Maggie, are marginalised, with Janet being killed off in flashback (and never even showing her face either then or in family photos in the Pym house) acting only as motivation for the breakdown of the relationship between father and daughter, and Maggie, who has even less screen time than her new husband Paxton (who tells Scott, ‘You don’t know the first thing about being a father!’), who is portrayed as cold and lacking empathy, refusing to allow Scott to see Cassie or even attend the child’s birthday party.
It is perhaps fitting that as the first of the MCU’s central protagonists to be a father (with the exception of Hawkeye in Avengers: Age of Ultron whose family are shown onscreen, but play a much smaller role), Scott Lang’s (and also Hank Pym’s) paternal plight is portrayed in ways that had become familiar to new millennial audiences as two of many fathers (or father figures) similarly challenged by questions concerning their masculinity and patriarchal status in the era: like Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) in Taken, John Creasy (Denzel Washington) in Man on Fire (2004), Tom Stall/Joey Cusack (Viggo Mortensen) in A History of Violence (2005), to name but a few. Dramatisations like these have been regarded by many as an embodiment of the prevailing fears and anxieties concerning the perceived erosion of paternal power and privilege, as Nicola Rehling in her book Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema observed: ‘In the last few decades, fears about how absent fathers damage their sons have been endlessly articulated in the US and British media, as well as neo-conservative and neo-liberal political rhetoric, with the supposition being that only a restoration of paternal authority will heal male pain and, by extension, the ailing social body’ (2009: 65). Each of the men in these aforementioned films have their masculinity tested by events in the narrative and are offered the opportunity of reconstituting it (and in doing so re-establishing traditional patriarchal order) through the redemptive acts of violence they are ‘reluctantly’ forced to participate in as they protect or often rescue, not the sons mentioned by Rehling above, but the young girls in their charge. While they are each personal stories, their plights should be taken as standing for broader cultural tendencies, as Donna Perbedy has argued: ‘Fatherhood is equated with nationhood and considered to be an inherent part of masculinity; if the central position of the father to the family is threatened, the threat constitutes a direct attack on the US, and its absence critically damages men and male identity’ (2011: 125).
Fig. 21: The redemption of the father: Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) discuss the similarities of their plight in Ant-Man (2015)
Pym suspended his relationship with Cross because he saw too much of the dark side of his own personality in him. However, unlike in the comics where Pym has been shown as, on occasion, a domestic abuser and an alcoholic, the film refuses to portray him as anything other than a grieving and misunderstood genius who is just as virtuous as Scott Lang. Both characters are tasked by the narrative with seeking redemption, but it is quite clear that they have done very little which they need to redeem themselves for: flashbacks show that Pym was not responsible for his wife’s death and his only crime is the distance the traumatic loss created between him and Hope. Scott might have served a prison sentence, but his was a Robin Hood-like crime striking back at the capitalist corporate machine and, according to the information the film provides us with, not at all for personal gain.
Evangeline Lilly’s Hope makes an interesting addition to the MCU’s roster of female characters and she has every attribute that might make her a suitable candidate for being a superhero, were she not a woman. She is intelligent, determined, strong, and is even shown to be physically able to beat Lang in a fight. Yet she is defined by her relationship with her father and infantilised in the process as Hank Pym refuses to allow her to use the Ant-Man suit, worried about her safety after the death of her mother, even though she is obviously more qualified than Lang. Pym’s choice of Scott over Hope is a richly suggestive one, and audiences are asked to decide whether it is illustrative of the MCU’s prioritisation of men and the masculine experience over that of women with a frequency that was decidedly problematic, or a commentary on it. Furthermore, Hope is often equated with Lang’s daughter, the six-year-old Cassie: Pym says to Lang, ‘This is your chance to earn that look in your daughter’s eyes’, the one he has lost in his relationship with Hope, who is now a woman in her mid-thirties. He continues, ‘It’s not about saving our world it’s about saving theirs’, an awkward but familiar distinction between the world of the white male hero and that of the female sphere where females, regardless of their age, exist not to rescue, but to be rescued.
In the run up to the film’s release Marvel’s fictional diegetic news organisation WHIH World News, which had first appeared at the Stark Expo in Iron Man 2, then seen at the Battle at Culver University in The Incredible Hulk, before featuring regularly in both the films and the televisual branch of the MCU in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., released three news promos for the film posted online on 2, 7 and 16 July 2015, fronted by Christine Everheart, the journalist featured in Iron Man and Iron Man 2 and, as the most interesting paratexts do, the reports offer some interesting engagements with the film’s narrative. The third and final of the segments features an interview with Scott Lang live from prison in which WHIH World News is revealed to be a subsidiary of Vista Corp, the same company who Lang stole from and their reporting is obviously biased against his case. Christine attacks Lang calling him a ‘self-proclaimed whistle blower’ and Lang admits that he took ‘service charges’ from the burglary, implying that his crime might not have been as entirely altruistic as the film’s narrative would have us believe.10 Christine also says Lang has ‘a few high-profile burglaries already on record’ which are never mentioned in the film, nor are they denied by Lang, but would help us understand why Lang is considered such a master thief rather than a novice even though the film mentions only one burglary. These elements, if they had been a part of the central narrative of Ant-Man, would have made Lang’s character more complicated and are further evidence of the MCU’s inability to embrace moral ambiguity in its superheroes.11
Cross is driven increasingly unstable by his prolonged exposure to the recreated Pym Particle and becomes desperate to prove himself to his father figure Pym in a way that recalls Loki’s desire to earn the respect of Odin. When he learns that Pym has replaced him with a new surrogate son, it is Lang who then becomes the target of his ire and the film’s final battle between Ant-Man and Cross, now wearing the Yellowjacket suit, provides Lang with the opportunity to prove himself as a man and as a father that he has been looking for and is fittingly set mostly in his infant daughter Cassie’s bedroom where Cross had gone to take revenge on the man who has taken his place. To defeat him Lang is forced to enter the atomic realm by shrinking himself, the same process which had ‘killed’ Pym’s wife decades before, a place where ‘all concepts of time and space become irrelevant’. However, whereas Janet Pym remained trapped inside, Lang hears Cassie’s cries of ‘Daddy!’ and is able to return in a way that Janet Pym was not: because men in the MCU are braver and more resourceful than women, and they simply love their children more. Their combined successful defeat of Cross enables Lang and Pym to both redeem themselves in the eyes of their families and the law, marking Scott’s transformation and reacceptance into the family unit where he is now literally welcomed back to the family table and is able to see Cassie whenever he likes (and is also rewarded by being given a romance with Hope). At the same time, Hank Pym’s relationship with Hope is revived as she once again appears to have opened up and let her father into her life and, according to the conventions of Hollywood film, is able to call him ‘Dad’ again. The film’s end credits stinger shows Hank Pym finally reluctantly acknowledging that Hope is more than capable of being a superhero and he offers her the Wasp suit once worn by her mother. Shortly after the release of Ant-Man Marvel announced that a sequel was in development to be called Ant-Man and the Wasp (2019), which, as we have already noted, would be the first MCU film to have a female character as the lead with their name in the title. Hope’s diegetic response to being given the suit was perhaps echoed by that of many women in the audience in the year of the film’s release: ‘About damn time!’
Notes
1 Additionally, Gunn’s musical choices offer metaphorical connections to the onscreen action in the form of David Bowie’s ‘Moonage Daydream’ (1971) which plays as we are introduced to the bizarre ‘planet’ Knowhere, the rebellious punk-inflected ‘Cherry Bomb’ (1976) by the Runaways as the team form for a heroic group shot (which Gunn undercuts by showing Rocket adjusting his underwear, Gamora yawning and Peter scratching his nose), or ‘O-o-h Child’ (1970) by the Five Stairsteps as the song which Peter uses to challenge Ronan to a dance-off at the film’s climax. This process becomes even more apparent in the sequel with musical selections like George Harrison’s polytheistic anthem ‘My Sweet Lord’ (1970) heard as the film arrives at Ego’s planet (which is also Ego himself). About this choice, Gunn remarked, ‘And there’s this big creation myth about how he came about and it was kind of lined up with that. I’ve always been into Hindu creation myths and there’s some similarities there’ (qtd. in Hiatt 2017). ‘Brandy’ (1972) by Looking Glass is used by Ego as a metaphor for his and Peter’s status as outsiders who cannot be tied to those around them. Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ (1977) is used twice, once when the group splits up and again at the climax when they come back together again to defeat Ego. Gunn commented that the song ‘is about the Guardians, at least in the way we use it’ (ibid.).
2 These tonal shifts are a key part of James Gunn’s signature filmmaking style and are apparent in his directorial debut, Slither (2006) and his second film, the darkly comedic superhero movie Super (2010) in which the unremarkable Frank Darbo (Rainn Wilson) embarks on a life of crime-fighting when he becomes the Crimson Bolt. Darbo attacks anyone who contravenes his strict moral code, even those who cut the line in a queue for a movie theatre, leaving them with his memorable catchphrase ‘Shut up, crime!’
3 When Steven Spielberg, who had been somewhat critical of the genre, was asked in 2016 what his favourite superhero film was, he replied: ‘I love the Superman of Richard Donner, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and the first Iron Man, but the superhero film that impressed me most is one that does not take itself too seriously, Guardians of the Galaxy.’ He continued: ‘I left with the feeling of having seen something new in movies, without any cynicism or fear of being dark when needed’ (qtd. Kyriazis 2016). These comments led James Gunn to say, ‘This is the greatest compliment I’ve ever received. I’m teary-eyed right now. No one has influenced Guardians [of the Galaxy] more’ (ibid.).
4 The sequel contains references to Knight Rider (NBC, 1982–86), Cheers (NBC, 1982– 93), the video game Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Various, 1983–85), The Smurfs (NBC, 1981–89) and the actress Heather Locklear who Peter might have seen in T.J. Hooker (Various, 1982–86).
5 While Peter’s joke about Jackson Pollack (1912–56) is one of the funniest moments of the film, one might ask whether Peter, who left Earth as a small boy in 1988 and seems to have had no contact with Earth culture since, would know enough about the painter’s work to make the remark.
6 In Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 it is also taken to mean ‘They were looking at me funny’, ‘I’m glad you don’t want me to wear this hat’, ‘He called me twig’ and most memorably ‘Welcome to the fucking Guardians of the Galaxy!’
7 In a humorous aside which perhaps belies the seriousness of these discrepancies, in a presentation entitled ‘Super Daddy Issues, Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Superhero Films’, Kara Kvaran suggested, referring to the fact that three of the superheroes of the MCU were named Chris, ‘The best way to be a superhero is to be a blonde white guy named Chris’ (qtd. in Coventry 2015).
8 Ronan’s attack on Xandar was said to contain the highest onscreen body count in the history of film, as opposed to offscreen deaths, with around 80,000 Nova Corps pilots being killed in the attack. The figures for Guardians of the Galaxy were 83,871, nearly fifteen times higher than those of the second-placed film Dracula Untold (2014) (see Go Compare 2016).
9 Yondu Udonta gets the most interesting arc in Guardians of the Galaxy and the sequel, a testimony to Gunn’s writing and Rooker’s charismatic performance. Yondu’s affection for Quill is very clear in the first film and in the second he sacrifices himself for the man he regards as his son with the simple but poignant line, delivered in Rooker’s Alabama-inflected drawl, telling Peter, ‘He [Ego] may have been your father, boy, but he wasn’t your daddy’. Over Yondu’s funeral the Cat Stevens song ‘Father and Son’ (1970) plays.
10 In the MCU-set comic book prologue Ant-Man. Scott Lang: Small Time (2015) more details are revealed about the Vista Corp robbery which are entirely absent from the film. Lang is explicitly shown to steal jewellery and clothes, which also casts him in a very different light to that shown in Ant-Man.
11 On the commentary track included on the Blu-ray release of the film Paul Rudd alludes to a vague sense of dissatisfaction about this and asserts he would have liked to have seen more of an exploration of what he describes as Scott Lang’s ‘questionable moral code’.