And why, in a country trumpeting itself as the world’s supreme diplomatic model, do we so often relish depictions of impotent democratic institutions that can be rescued only by extralegal superheroes? Are these stories safety valves for the stresses of democracy, or do they represent a yearning for something other than democracy? And why do women and people of color, who have made significant strides in civil rights, continue to remain almost wholly subordinate in a mythscape where communities must always be rescued by physically powerful white men?
– John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett (2002: 7–8)
We were dealing with the greatest heroes and the greatest villains. We were dealing with the greatest novel material there ever was. Across this world stage were these great out-size characters. A battle of the giants. When you say ‘epic,’ yes, we are dealing with epic-sized people and epic-sized events.
– Frank Capra (qtd. in Bailey 2004: 125)
I.
Just as The Avengers in the summer of 2012 was designed to both reconcile the disparate origin stories which had largely comprised Phase One and introduce the films of Phase Two, Avengers: Age of Ultron had a similarly difficult task three years later: to bring together the variegated narrative strains of the Phase Two films and establish a context for what would become Phase Three, which began with Captain America: Civil War released the following year in 2016. Furthermore, Joss Whedon’s return to the MCU was expected to meet, if not exceed, the tremendous financial and cultural impact of The Avengers. It was undoubtedly a considerable challenge and one, writing after the fact, that many regarded the film did not meet, even Whedon himself in a series of frank interviews conducted while publicising the film, exchanges which he later admitted regretting (see Van Syckle 2016). Even though Age of Ultron made $1.4 billion dollars at the world-wide box office which led to it being the third-highest earning film of the year, second only to Jurassic World (2015) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), the fact that it was not the biggest film of the year as its predecessor had been, and that reviews were generally positive rather than the frequently jubilant reaction to The Avengers led to the sense that the film was regarded as something of a disappointment. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone called it ‘a whole summer of fireworks packed into one movie. It doesn’t just go to 11, it starts there’ (2015); and Chris Nashawaty at Entertainment Weekly wrote, ‘Still, my real beef with these movies – and this one in particular – is how same-y they’ve started to feel. Each time out, everything is at stake and nothing is at stake’ (2015). These comments and the perception that the film had not quite lived up to its potential are certainly an indication of how far the financial bar has been raised and continues to be raised, for not only the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but also the majority of ‘tent pole’ summer releases, where, given their escalating budgets, expectations are incredibly high. There were also lingering rumours of friction between Joss Whedon and Marvel Studios, creative differences similar to the likes of which had led Patty Jenkins to leave Thor: The Dark World and Edgar Wright to leave Ant-Man. There is evidence of this in the final film: in its undeveloped plot strands, unevenness of tone and the inability to balance its large cast with the success Whedon had achieved in The Avengers. Despite these issues, Age of Ultron is an important addition to the MCU and makes a significant contribution to its ongoing mythos, introduces important new characters and the consequences of its narrative choices have a considerable impact on the Phase Three films which were to follow. The film also is, arguably, the fullest approximation of Marvel’s political ideology and what we have previously described as the Stark Doctrine. The mythology that it embodies and contributes to is a particularly American one, which was called the ‘American Monomyth’ by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in their book of the same name (1977). In their later book, The American Monomyth (2002), they maintain that American incarnations of heroic narratives differ considerably from Joseph Campbell’s accounts of common mythological tropes in his now iconic The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), as they focus not on initiation, but instead redemption:
The monomythic hero claims surpassing concern for the health of the community, but he never practices citizenship. He unites a consuming love of impartial justice with a mission of personal vengeance that eliminates due process of law. He offers a form of leadership without paying the price of political relationships or responding to preferences of the majority. In denying the ambivalence and complexity of real life, where the moral landscape offers choices in various shades of gray rather than in black and white, where ordinary people muddle through life and learn to live with the many poor choices they have made, and where the heroes that do exist have feet of clay, the monomyth pictures a world in which no humans really live. It gives Americans a fantasy land without ambiguities to cloud the moral vision, where the evil empire of enemies is readily discernible, and where they can vicariously (through identification with the superhero) smite evil before it overtakes them. (2002: 48)
Writing six years before the release of Iron Man and at the very start of the superhero renaissance, Lawrence and Jewett effectively describe key aspects of the MCU, and the superhero film as a whole, in a single paragraph, for the simple reason that the genre continues to replay and perpetuate deeply embedded mythological values which have become formative aspects of American identity.
The ‘11’ that Peter Travers writes of is the film’s extended James Bond-esque prologue in the mountain forests of the fictional Eastern European country of Sokovia which opens the film. Whereas The Avengers had spent a large amount of its running time bringing its superheroes together, Whedon gives audiences another iconic tie-in image in which they are all pictured in the same frame within the first two minutes of the film, even presenting the action in extreme slow motion to give us a moment to admire the synchronicity of its franchise coordination, the status of the Avengers at the apex of contemporary pop culture, and underline the fact that they are now a fully formed and cohesive unit. The shot was described by Jordi Costa, writing in El Pais, as ‘a sculptural group that eternalises the characters in full battle [which does not miss] the conceptual implications of his [Whedon’s] specific baroque gestures’ (2015). The moment will be referenced again in the film’s credits more than two hours later in the form of an actual sculpture of the Avengers made from marble. There is no waiting for the Hulk to smash (which took twenty-six minutes in The Incredible Hulk, and approximately one hour and sixteen minutes in The Avengers), as in Age of Ultron he is shown ‘hulking out’ and crashing his way through the last remaining HYDRA base in the aftermath of the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier in the film’s opening moments. The tone is quickly established as much lighter than the majority of the previous MCU films and Stark’s banter is more pronounced than it has ever been, with jokes about Captain America’s language, impromptu interactions with HYDRA henchmen, and fairly blatant sexual innuendo.
The base is the location of Baron Von Strucker’s research laboratory, which has been using the mysterious power generated by Loki’s sceptre to perform ethically ambiguous experiments on human beings (as opposed to those we are asked to understand as distinctly moral performed on Steve Rogers back in The First Avenger).1 The film reveals that all but two of those experimented on have died, leaving only the Maximoff twins, Wanda and Pietro, alive. Wanda is known in the comics as Scarlett Witch due to her telekinetic powers and Pietro is called Quicksilver, because of his superhuman speed, but they are never referred to by these names in the film. While Sokovia is a suitably exotic location for the film’s prologue, it holds more significance for Age of Ultron as Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver are both Sokovian, and the film will return there for its climax, the Battle of Sokovia, during which an entire city will be detached from the ground and lifted into the sky, threatening the world with an extinction level event.2
It is clear from the way it is visually represented and cues in the film’s dialogue that Sokovia has been the site of repeated wars and even American military intervention in the recent past. Agent Hill remarks: ‘Sokovia’s had a rough history. Nowhere special, but it is on the way to everywhere special.’ These observations, the Serbian spoken by civilians, Cyrillic writing (for example supermarket/супер маркет; police/полиција; optician/Оптичар; a pub/ПАБ, and a bakery/ПЕКАРА, among others), and scenes of anti-American protests code Sokovia as being reminiscent of Kosovo in the late 1990s. Two MCU films in the future, in Captain America: Civil War, the ex-Sokovian intelligence officer Helmut Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) will call his own country a ‘failed state’ a term which was regularly applied to Kosovo during and after what is referred to as the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001). Sokovia’s depiction as a pitiful Eastern Europe country in need of liberating and saving by heroic American forces is similar to the portrayal of many countries in zones of instability around the world by Hollywood cinema over the decades. However, when Stark sends in the Iron Legion, his army of Iron Man suits with advanced AI, to evacuate the city, telling the residents in English rather than Sokovian, ‘We wish to avoid collateral damage and will inform you when this current conflict is resolved’, the population do not welcome them as we might have expected (as Iron Man was welcomed by civilians in Afghanistan in Iron Man and Captain America was in Germany in The Avengers), but throw debris at the metallic figures, and in the background one can see several examples of anti-Iron Man graffiti, and banners which read ‘иди из Соковиja’ (‘Out of Sokovia’). A deleted scene included on the Blu-ray release of the film shows a remarkable mural of Captain America’s face with the anglicised Serbian word ‘Fasišta’ scrawled across it, a stark contrast to the effusively grateful global graffiti acknowledging the debt the world owed the superheroes featured at the end of The Avengers. Agent Maria Hill informs Captain America that the Maximoffs were orphaned at the age of ten when a shell collapsed their apartment killing their parents, but it is only later from Pietro himself that we hear the full story. The Maximoff family were having dinner when their building was hit by a Stark branded bomb (evoking the Afghanistan set prologue of Iron Man) which failed to detonate, leading them to spend anxious hours waiting for help which never arrived. As Wanda says in her broken English, ‘We wait for two days for Tony Stark to kill us…’. Therefore, it seems that it is American intervention in Sokovia that has prompted the Sokovians’ mistrust of the Avengers and the Maximoff twins to volunteer for Strucker’s experiments, and one wonders if it was their deep-seated hatred of Stark that led them to be the only ones to survive. Agent Hill is dismissive of their motives but Captain America, in a rare moment of moral equivalence in the MCU asks, ‘Right. What kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on them to protect their country?’
Tony Stark finds Loki’s sceptre in Strucker’s basement laboratory and as he reaches for it Scarlett Witch uses her powers to induce some sort of vision in him which becomes central to the film’s narrative and appears to be a projection of his deep-seated fears and anxieties. In scenes very reminiscent of his PTSD-influenced nightmares in Iron Man 3, he sees the Avengers decimated after another Chitauri invasion: Black Widow, Thor and Hawkeye are dead, and the Hulk’s giant corpse hangs limp, grotesquely pierced by several large metallic spikes. Captain America’s iconic shield lies broken on the floor, ripped in two next to its owner’s lifeless body. As Tony moves towards him, Cap reaches up and asks, as if with his dying breath, ‘You could have saved us. Why didn’t you do more?’ Stark’s narcissistic vision, in which he once again is the only person who can save humanity, will compel him to undertake his own ethically dubious experiments and ultimately create the film’s antagonist, the malicious and advanced sentient robot known as Ultron, actions he will refuse to apologise for throughout the film. Even later after he knows that Scarlett Witch was involved and that she has given his fellow Avengers similarly twisted visions, he still claims that, ‘I wasn’t tricked, I was shown, it wasn’t a nightmare, it was my legacy’ in a return to the motif which had played such an important role in the Iron Man trilogy. As the scene ends both of the Maximoff twins are shown standing behind Stark and could have easily prevented him from taking the sceptre, but instead Scarlett Witch merely smiles as she knows that Stark has within him the capacity to destroy not only himself, but the rest of the Avengers too.
After their success in destroying the final HYDRA base the Avengers return to what was formerly Stark Tower in New York, now renamed the Avengers Tower. As the camera glides over Grand Central Terminal near the Tower’s base it passes over a monument which has replaced Jules-Félix Coutan’s Glory of Commerce shown destroyed in The Avengers. The new statue is dedicated to the heroes of the Battle of New York, but it is not the exploits of the Avengers that are memorialised, rather, in an allusion to 9/11, the ordinary, everyday heroes like the firemen, soldiers, police officers and a mother and child who participated in the Chitauri invasion three years before. The Avengers celebrate their Sokovian victory alongside numerous other civilians among whom are several World War II veterans (including Stan Lee who served in the Signal Corps, then known as the Training Film Division), continuing the connections the MCU has often established between the adventures of their very modern heroes and World War II. When Thor drinks from a flask containing alcohol from ‘barrels built from the wreck of Grunhal’s fleet’ he warns the veterans that it is ‘not for mortal men’ to which Stan Lee’s character replies: ‘Neither was Omaha Beach, blondie!’ The superheroes are shown to have developed a genuine bond and an easy-going rapport with one another best revealed in the after-party scene which shows them all in a rare off-duty moment playfully discussing who might be worthy enough to lift Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir. Each of the heroes takes a turn, with the exception of Black Widow who tells them: ‘That’s not a question I need answered.’ The film’s light-hearted tone continues with Stark’s teasing of Barton, who was injured in the Sokovia prologue, with, ‘We won’t hold it against you if you can’t get it up’. Bruce Banner, in an indication of how comfortable he now feels around his fellow Avengers, even pretends to ‘Hulk out’, something it seems hard to imagine the same character having done when played by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk or even by Ruffalo himself at the time of The Avengers. The scene ends with Captain America’s attempt to lift the hammer which produces a definite wobble, shot in the same frame as Thor’s momentarily very anxious face.
It initially seems that Stark has matured as he had been shown to at the end of Iron Man 3: he asks for Thor’s permission to run tests on the sceptre and playfully defers to Cap as ‘the boss’ with the aside that he is the one who pays for everything, designs everything and generally makes ‘everyone look cool’. But when he discovers that the advanced artificial intelligence contained within the sceptre might hold the key to a project he has been working on, one which could prevent his apocalyptic vision from ever coming true, he is revealed to have not changed so much at all. Stark’s plan is to make a robotic AI so powerful that it would make the existence of the Avengers unnecessary, an act that he describes in suitably Reaganesque terms, evoking the Star Wars Missile Defence system (formerly known as the Strategic Defense Initiative), as a ‘suit of armour around the world’ which will enable ‘peace in our time’ (itself a fairly potent allusion to Neville Chamberlain’s pre-World War II proclamation after signing the Munich Agreement [1938] with Hitler). In interviews Downey Jr. made these connections explicit:
With The Avengers, Tony was becoming a team player and with Iron Man 3, it was him transcending his dependency on the tech that’s keeping him alive. So I thought, ‘Okay, now what?’ But there’s all this unfinished business. There’s the matter of a certain wormhole that opened over New York and the imminent threat that still implies, so Tony has turned his attentions more toward a bit of a post-Reagan era, Star Wars-type notion and he likes to call it Ultron. (Qtd. in Collinson 2015)
Stark’s confidante, Bruce Banner, suggests that this is something they should discuss with the rest of the Avengers, but Stark refuses telling him they do not have time ‘for a city hall debate’ or what he defines as ‘the man was not meant to meddle medley’. Although Ultron is created shortly after, the film gives Stark a get out clause: they were running extensive tests but they apparently did not commit to actioning the programme and later Stark asks Banner, ‘Were we even close to an interface?’ The AI that is created is very different to the one Stark envisioned and while the early Iron Man films had seen Stark struggling with his relationship with his deceased father, Age of Ultron sees him become a father himself.
Ultron (voiced by James Spader) joins the ranks of many malicious robots in the history of the science fiction genre: like Maria in Metropolis (1927), HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), VIKI in I, Robot (2004) and even the duplicitous Ava in Ex Machina (2015) released in the same year as Age of Ultron. As we see ‘him’ being ‘born’ Ultron is shown accessing the internet, witnessing in seconds centuries’ worth of man’s inhumanity to man presented in flashes on the screen which ends with footage from Iron Man, of Stark demonstrating the Jericho Missile to the grateful American military in Afghanistan. Ultron first appeared in the comics more than forty years before in Avengers #55 originally published in 1968, but his new millennial guise is very different, as one might expect, given the remarkable advances in technology in the almost fifty years since. He is able to acquire and access any information from around the world via the internet, digitally alter any bank account and even transfer his consciousness from machine to machine. When the Avengers find out what he has done Stark refuses to offer an apology for his creation, and he even laughs when they criticise him, saying ‘It is funny. It’s a hoot that you don’t get why we need this!’ Stark has again returned to the equilibrium state we observed in our discussion of the Iron Man trilogy and again forgotten the lessons the Yinsen had revealed to him in the caves of the Kunar Province. In the director’s commentary on the Blu-ray release of the film, Joss Whedon proposed, somewhat tongue in cheek one might add, ‘We have a problem…and that problem is Tony…Tony Stark is the villain’. Of course, the film cannot pursue this idea with any substance, as despite his often irresponsible behaviour, the MCU has always endorsed Stark’s brand of rule-breaking, individualistic heroism as the summit of twenty-first-century masculinity. Stark is undoubtedly flawed in a range of interesting ways, but what he pursues is something greater than himself, and by the end of its narrative Age of Ultron will even suggest that he was right to create Ultron after all, despite the massive levels of destruction that it leads to. Later, when Stark again justifies his decision to Captain America with the question, ‘Isn’t that the mission? Isn’t that why we fight? So we can win the fight, so we get to go home?’, the intonation Downey Jr. adopts in his delivery of the line seems a deliberate reference to the seven American propaganda films in the series known as Why We Fight (1942–45) directed by Frank Capra (and frequently co-directed by Anatole Litvak) made during World War II. Robert Neimi stated that these films were extremely influential in how Americans came to view the conflict, both at the time and in the years since, and that they presented ‘a decidedly Manichean – but largely accurate – view of the world in which the Axis powers represent barbarism and slavery and the Allied powers stand for civilisation and freedom’ (2006: 72). Whedon’s film, and the MCU as a whole, subsumes this moral clarity into the diegetic frames of its own post-9/11 world in a similar way to how William J. Bennett did in his book titled Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism which insisted that America was ‘a beacon of freedom’ (2002: 151) a term we have heard uttered before in the MCU, and that the United States has ‘brought more justice to more people than any nation in the history of mankind; that our open, tolerant, prosperous, peaceable society is the marvel and envy of the ages’ (ibid.).
In Ultron’s first scene in the film, which comes right after the Avengers’ playful interaction around Mjölnir, he notifies them quite directly of his purpose. Like many advanced robots in the history of the science fiction genre he decides that humanity cannot be trusted to act in its own best interests and must therefore be eradicated. With the Avengers being ‘Earth’s mightiest heroes’ (as Stark described them in The Avengers), they are the greatest embodiments of all that needs to be destroyed and, as Ultron informs them, ‘You are all killers’. But of course, Ultron’s criticisms, like most of those from previous antagonists throughout the MCU, are easy to dismiss as they come from a genocidal and quite clearly insane robot. Whedon gives Ultron the aside, which becomes a thematic motif, from Pinocchio (1940), ‘I had strings on me but now I’m free, they are no strings on me’ (with the actual line and tune layered over from the original) which complements the Frankenstein allusions at the film’s centre.
Executive Producer Victoria Alonso remarked that Ultron emerges as ‘almost the alter ego of Tony Stark’ (qtd. in Johnston 2015: 158), which is certainly true, but the relationship between the two is presented as something much more than that: Ultron is Stark’s offspring who he refers to as ‘junior’ and even tells Ultron: ‘You’re gonna break your old man’s heart.’ When Thor subsequently comments ‘Nobody has to break anything’, Ultron quickly adds, ‘Clearly you’ve never made an omelette’ – to which Stark responds, ‘Beat me by one second!’ The robot’s caustic one-liners are undoubtedly a manifestation of aspects of Stark’s own acerbic character, a process which Michael O’Sullivan refers to as Ultron as having ‘assimilated many of Tony Stark’s mannerisms’ (2016: 22). Ultron’s criticisms of Captain America, in particular, are very reminiscent of Stark’s from The Avengers where he informed Cap: ‘Everything that’s special about you came from a bottle!’ Ultron sneers at Cap and contemptuously refers to him as ‘God’s righteous man’ who only pretends that he ‘can live without war’. Later Scarlet Witch even compares Stark and Ultron directly: ‘Ultron can’t tell the difference between destroying the world and saving it. Where do you think he gets that?’
Just as Tony Stark had a complicated relationship with his own father, Ultron similarly has issues with Tony, and when the South African arms dealer Klaue (Andy Serkis) dares to say to Ultron that ‘You’re one of Stark’s!’, the robot becomes so enraged he cuts off the man’s arm and asks him: ‘You think I’m one of Stark’s puppets?’ Ultron had gone to Klaue with his new recruits, Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch, to access his reserves of the world’s strongest metal, Vibranium, only found in the mysterious Kingdom of Wakanda (the home of the Black Panther, who is introduced in Captain America: Civil War). Stark denies doing business with Klaue and insists that, ‘This was never my life’, but when Ultron remarks to Klaue, ‘Keep your friends rich and your enemies rich and wait to find out which is which’ it is this which prompts Klaue to make the connection between father and son, implying more intimacy between Klaue and the self-proclaimed billionnaire, playboy and philanthropist, than Stark had suggested. Stark’s refusal to accept responsibility for Ultron, acknowledge Klaue, and his subsequent rejection of the Maximoff twins’ story of how their parents were killed, is a denial of a responsibility and culpability which has marked the character from his very first introduction in Iron Man despite his epiphany and apparent rejection of ‘zero accountability’.
In the ensuing battle between the Avengers and Ultron, Scarlett Witch forces Thor, Captain America and Black Widow to experience their own vision just as Tony Stark had in the film’s prologue in Sokovia. It is hard to say what they are exactly: hallucinations, nightmares, projections of their worst fears, or even moments ‘dredged from their darkest memories’ (O’Sullivan 2016: 1). After claiming they will not affect him because of his godlike status, Thor hallucinates a celebration in the halls of Asgard with his friend Heimdall in attendance. The scene quickly turns from light-hearted revelry to something altogether more sinister as Heimdall accuses the God of Thunder of being a ‘destroyer’ and telling him ‘see where your power leads…to Hel!’ (a reference to the Asgardian afterworld where those who are evil go after death). Thor’s fear is that he will not be a worthy leader and the scene hints at the future apocalyptic direction of Thor: Ragnarok, which would feature Hela (Cate Blanchett), the Asgardian goddess of death, and the destruction of not only Mjölnir, but the whole of Asgard. Black Widow’s vision is equally personal as it recreates her time in the Red Room, a place which, by then, had been explored in more detail in Marvel’s Agent Carter ‘The Iron Ceiling’ (1.05), where she was forced to undergo brutal and dehumanising training in order to become a cold-hearted master spy and assassin. It culminates in a scene which shows the murder of an unarmed man and alludes to a forced hysterectomy to mark her graduation from the programme. In Captain America’s, he is reunited, very briefly, with a young Peggy Carter for the date they never were able to have, referred to in those poignant last lines of The First Avenger. As with Thor, the scene starts out joyfully, this time in a dance hall on V.E. Day (Victory in Europe Day) with Peggy assuring him that ‘the war’s over, Steve, we can go home, imagine it’. But Cap’s face reveals that he knows these are things that he can never really have and the scene turns darker when those present begin to attack one another for no reason while Cap watches, and Peggy disappears, leaving him, once again, alone. Shortly afterwards Scarlett Witch uses her mind-control powers on Bruce Banner too, turning him into a red-eyed, enraged and uncontrolled Hulk. We never learn what Banner’s visions are comprised of, but the implication is that the scenes of mass destruction and devastation in Johannesburg, South Africa, which follow, where the Hulk goes on a full rampage, might be his worst fear literalised.
The Hulk scene in Johannesburg is the first time the destructive potential of the Hulk has been seen throughout the movie and is an exact dramatisation of what General Ross had stated the Hulk was capable of back in The Incredible Hulk in 2008. Stark and Banner had planned for this contingency in their co-creation of the Veronica programme, a satellite able to deploy Stark’s Mark XLIV armour, known as the Hulkbuster suit, built in an effort to match the Hulk’s prodigious strength. Stark initially attempts to pacify his friend by reminding him, ‘You’re Bruce Banner!’ but this only makes the Hulk angrier and later Bruce himself says, returning to a theme expressed earlier in this book: ‘The world just saw the Hulk, the real Hulk for the first time.’ Hulk’s rampage is spectacularly destructive and Whedon even gives him a Snorricam shot (sometimes referred to as a reverse-point-of-view shot) used extensively by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee to represent extreme states of disorientation and disassociativeness. The sequence is undoubtedly an example of what Richard Corliss called ‘disaster porn’ and many of the images seem to self-consciously evoke 9/11 and what Karen Randell described as the ‘lexicon of 9/11’. On the director’s commentary for Age of Ultron, Whedon commented that it was imperative that the film portray ‘real damage and that we say, “You don’t just bust up a city and nobody pays for it”’. However, the price that Whedon mentions here seems to be largely absent as throughout the sequence not a single person is shown to be killed, seriously injured or even hurt, and the same is true for the even larger Battle of Sokovia which concludes the film. As if reacting, in some way, to criticisms levelled at Man of Steel, released in the previous year, which seemed to never pause for even a moment to consider the impact of its scenes of destruction on the civilians of Metropolis, Stark is shown to be very aware of innocent bystanders throughout, as he has been since the Stark Expo in Iron Man 2, and as he and the Hulk are about to crash into one huge building, the film shows him use J.A.R.V.I.S. to scan it quickly to make sure no one is inside. Agent Hill, watching the global news reporting the incident, says, ‘There’s been no official call for Banner’s arrest, but it’s in the air’, an issue concerning the accountability of superheroes which will become the central narrative event of Captain America: Civil War.
In the aftermath, the Avengers flee to a safe house which is revealed to contain Hawkeye’s secret family: his pregnant wife, Laura (Linda Cardellini) and two children. This idyllic scene with its bucolic rural homestead, replete with American flag waving conspicuously on the porch and an actual white picket fence, acts as a reminder to the Avengers of what they are fighting for, but also what some of them have lost, or what they might never be able to have. Cap is shown standing uncomfortably in the threshold of the doorway in a pose very similar to that of Ethan Edward’s (John Wayne) at the dénouement of John Ford’s The Searchers, as Peggy’s ‘we can go home…’ echoes over the diegetic sound of Barton’s children playing. Cap finds that he cannot go back inside and he turns with his iconic shield prominently placed on his back, walking away while still framed by the doorway. Like Wayne’s Ethan, a similarly iconic figure of American masculinity, Cap is trapped between two worlds as Age of Ultron subtly evokes the mythological demands the American Monomyth still places on its heroes in 2015, as it did in both 1868, the year in which The Searchers is set, and in 1956, the year of its release.3
It might be regarded as somewhat problematic that what is to be found at Barton’s homestead is implied to be such an aspirational pinnacle for those onscreen and beyond, as its vision of normalcy is a dated concept for twenty-first century American (and global) culture. Unfortunately the characterisation of Laura adds little to the MCU’s limited depiction of women, as even though Whedon has been frequently praised for the strength of the female roles he has created in the past, which has seen him described as having an ‘ongoing feminist project – a dialogue about gender politics, sexuality, and control of the body’, especially those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Various, 1997–2003) and Firefly, arguably, there is little of distinction in his two Avengers outings to support this (see Schultz 2014: 357). Laura is relegated to looking after (and bearing) children, staring out the window waiting for her husband to return, both figuratively and literally keeping the home fires burning, and the interaction between Black Widow and Banner which take place at the homestead, in which they have an intimate discussion about the future of their relationship, proved to be one of the most widely discussed moments in the film on its release. Banner expresses the idea that because of his condition it would be impossible for them to have what Barton has, and that he is indeed the ‘monster’ he has been accused of being since The Incredible Hulk. Natasha empathises and reveals to him the details of her forced hysterectomy in the Red Room, which was alluded to in her earlier Scarlett Witch-induced vision, ending her account with the question, ‘Still think you’re the only monster on the team?’ It was this conversation and indeed this question which caused something of a furore among fans and became so heavily criticised that it seemed to be instrumental in Joss Whedon’s decision to leave social media. In an open letter to Whedon, Sara Stewart at Indiewire asked, ‘Did we really need Natasha to have a mini-breakdown over the fact that she can’t have children?’ (2015). She also asked, ‘Haven’t we gotten to a point where the one lonely female superhero in our current landscape can just pursue the business of avenging without having to bemoan not being a mother?’ (ibid.). These negative reactions coincided with anger at Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans jokingly referring to Black Widow as a ‘slut’ during a video interview and Mark Ruffalo’s Facebook post complaining about the lack of availability of Black Widow toys for him to purchase for female members of his family (see Towers 2015; Ungerman 2015). Meredith Woerner and Katharine Trendacosta, writing for io9, asked a similar question:
Fig. 22: Captain America feels ill at ease in Barton’s idyllic homestead in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) as Joss Whedon recreates the final iconic image of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)
How is it okay to say this about Black Widow – someone who, to be very clear, has not hooked up on screen in any of the movies – but no one’s going ‘Tony Stark? Yeah, he’s a total slut.’ We actually have seen that on screen. As a thing that actually happened. He may have reformed and found his one and only – but Tony’s badass boast in the first Avengers movie is ‘Billionaire playboy philanthropist.’ He gets ‘playboy’ as an accolade, but the Black Widow is somehow a slut. (2015)
As briefly explored previously, Black Widow does offer partial challenges to some of the most regressive aspects of the MCU’s depiction of women, but has never been given anything approximating equal narrative agency (a fact emphasised by the lack of her own solo movie in Phases One through Three) and has repeatedly been defined by her emotions in ways that characters like Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner and Thor have not. Whedon’s The Avengers offered tantalising hints at the ‘red’ in her ‘ledger’: allusions to Dreykov’s daughter, Sao Paulo and the hospital fire, but Age of Ultron chooses to manifest her greatest anxiety as her forced sterilisation and despair about not being able to be a mother. This is further problematised by the awkwardness of the maternal role she is forced to play in the film, in particular with the Hulk lullaby sequences and humorous lines like, ‘I’m always picking up after you boys!’ which, of course, are tongue in cheek, but perhaps have not been appropriately earned through the depth of her characterisation. It is also revealing that later she is the only Avenger to be captured by Ultron on Sokovia and even though she is widely acknowledged as a super spy and master assassin, it is Bruce Banner who rescues her. Not his alter ego the Hulk, but the meek, mild-mannered and personable scientist Bruce Banner who tells her, ‘I’m here to get you to safety’.
In an effort to defeat the Avengers, Ultron attempts to create an improved version of himself in Seoul, South Korea, utilising the Mind Gem found in Loki’s sceptre and Klaue’s vibranium, but he is prevented in scenes which also show Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver turning against him when they finally become aware of his real plan to destroy humanity. Stark is then faced with another dilemma; should he complete the creation of the being Ultron started, which will be named Vision, who could possibly help them defeat the murderous robot, or would he be repeating the same mistake as he made before? Banner even suggests: ‘I’m in a loop, I’m caught in a time loop, this is exactly where it went wrong!’ Captain America orders him to ‘Shut it down! You don’t know what you’re doing’, but once again Stark refuses to listen to anyone and goes ahead with the process. Despite their fears, it is quickly clear that Stark was indeed right, as Vision emerges as one of the most virtuous of all the superheroes, even later shown to be able to lift Thor’s hammer, a true sign of worthiness. In doing so, as much of the MCU has done, Age of Ultron legitimises and endorses Stark’s impulsive actions and in Vision’s integrity even his decision to make Ultron, even though the robot was evil, is also retroactively endorsed.
III.
The film’s climax, the Battle of Sokovia, is certainly the largest-scale action sequence of the MCU films throughout Phases One and Two. Its expansive and largely CGI-driven nature is perhaps one of the main reasons (alongside Downey Jr.’s reputed $40 million salary) why the film was said to have cost $250–$300 million, with some estimates as high as $330 million (see Sylt 2014). It definitely would not have been possible without the advances in computer-generated imagery which have been instrumental in the emergence of the genre to prominence in recent years and if the Marvel Cinematic Universe has a single sequence which could be called ‘disaster porn’ then the Battle for Sokovia is it. To emphasise the raised stakes of the extinction level event they are facing Tony Stark informs the team, ‘No way we all get through this…there’s gonna be blood on the floor’. Earlier Captain America had remarked ‘Every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die. Every time’, but the film will show not a single innocent civilian injured, harmed or killed onscreen, nor will any be mentioned, even though in the following year Captain America: Civil War revealed that the financial cost of the Battle of Sokovia was $477 billion dollars and one hundred and seventy-seven people died. From the very start an emphasis is placed on the rescue of civilians and Captain America reminds everyone, ‘Our priority is getting them out…all they want is to live their lives in peace’. John C. McDowall, writing about The Avengers, but in an idea equally as applicable to Age of Ultron, suggested, ‘Its violence is not portrayed in terms either of complex causalities or of bloody, unpredictable and harrowing loss and tragic catastrophism – it is the clear cut war of good against evil, and therefore, in a sense, “the good war” in which everything works out and the good wins in an anaemic happy ending’ (2014: 65). Thus, as we have seen throughout the MCU, American interventions abroad are driven by altruism and remain casualty free, even in apocalyptic situations. It is also quite clear that the majority of those the film shows as being in peril are women and children, who require rescuing by heroic males in ways which Susan Faludi asserted had defined American popular culture responses to 9/11 in which ‘the most showcased victims bore female faces’ (2007: 5). These images were deliberately structured to feature women adopting more traditional roles which ignored the female first responders, fire-fighters and police officers in an act she described as a concerted attempt to restore ‘the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it’ which ‘belongs to a longstanding American pattern of response to threat, a response that we’ve been perfecting since our original wilderness experience’ (2007: 151, 13). Arguably we have seen the MCU since Iron Man perpetuate many of these same stereotypes and Age of Ultron offers one of its most vivid examples.
The Avengers keep telling each other about how dangerous what they are doing is, and even Ultron tells them, ‘You can’t save them all!’, but they do…until it is revealed in Captain America: Civil War that actually they did not. As the situation becomes insurmountable, Black Widow informs Cap that it is impossible for them to save all the civilians, just as Rhodes had once informed Stark in Iron Man 3, but it is an idea he refuses to acknowledge regardless of the seemingly futile nature of their predicament. Cap’s intransigence might be seen here as pronounced as Tony Stark’s, and Black Widow’s assertion that ‘there’s no math here’ is a plea for pragmatism which goes ignored in favour of his refusal to accept any scenario that does not involve a complete win. When it becomes apparent the only thing they can do is blow up the huge rock the city is on in the sky which would kill all those on it including the superheroes, but save the whole world, Cap refuses. Fortunately, Nick Fury arrives with a giant helicarrier and loads the Sokovian civilians on it one by one, saving them all, meaning that Cap is not forced to deal with the consequences of his obstinancy. Fury’s heroic entrance leads Quicksilver to ask, ‘This is S.H.I.E.L.D.?’ to which Cap replies, ‘This is what S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to be’, marking the transition that the Sokovian twins have made from despising Tony Stark (and by extension America) to joining the Avengers, conveniently forgetting that it was Stark who created Ultron, just as the film has already forgotten that Scarlett Witch had directly caused the Hulk to rampage in Johannesburg, which will not be mentioned again in Age of Ultron, nor will it be in Captain America: Civil War. Scarlett Witch, unlike Stark, at least expresses remorse at her actions, telling Hawkeye ‘We did this’. It is revealing that, out of all the superheroes, it is Scarlett Witch who suffers some sort of psychological breakdown during the Battle of Sokovia, starting a process of her infantilisation which will become even more conspicuous in Captain America: Civil War, yet another example of how female characters, even when they possess great powers, prove unable to cope with them and are both burdened and marginalised. When she retreats to a small house during the battle, unable to continue the fight, she reveals her frailties to Hawkeye (the man who has recently been revealed as a father) and it is hard to imagine his remark, ‘I can’t do my job and babysit’ being directed to her brother Quicksilver, who is not coded as a child even though he is her twin and despite the fact Scarlett Witch is arguably the most powerful of all the superheroes. In Civil War this process continues when Steve Rogers and Tony Stark argue over what is best for her, leading to her complaining to the latter: ‘You locked me in my room!’
Fig. 23: The majority of those who need to be rescued throughout the MCU are women and children. Here in Avengers: Age of Ultron, civilians on the streets of Sokovia wait to be saved by noble and altruistic American superheroes
What are we to make of the absolute refusal to portray or acknowledge the deaths or even injuries of civilians across the first two Phases of the MCU? It is not as if the superhero genre is unable to do this: witness the deaths of the innocent Belgian civilians in Veld in Wonder Woman, killed by poison gas; or the hospitable Munson family who invite Wolverine, Professor X and Laura (X-23) into their farmhouse in Logan, only to be all killed; or the many innocents attending the American football game in The Dark Knight Rises who are killed when Bane detonates a bomb under Gotham City Stadium. But Age of Ultron, like all MCU films before it, refuses to harm civilians onscreen. Might this be seen as a literalisation of what has been described as the ‘Zero Factor’ (sometimes referred to as a ‘no body bags policy’)? The idea that US military interventions abroad must result in as close to zero American casualties as possible, with indigenous civilians coming a distant second, something which has characterised America’s pursuit of asymmetrical warfare in the twenty-first century (see Rogers 2000). It also might be considered as a manifestation of the ‘victory culture’ described by Tom Engelhardt in his volume The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Nation (1997) which had defined America’s participation in World War II but had been challenged by the vagaries of the Cold War, in particular the moral uncertainties of the conflicts in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Engelhart was one of many to see its return in the aftermath of 9/11 and the early years of the ‘War on Terror’, as once again large portions of America felt convinced in their moral superiority and the righteousness of their cause. Yet, as Engelhardt observes, this certitude was unable to be sustained as the reality of the conflict became apparent:
The question of whether a revivified war story could reanchor victory culture in American consciousness seems settled, not because its elements, which run deep in our history, have ceased to exist, but because it has proved impossible to force out of consciousness the quarter-century of that story’s dissolution. Its boundaried and triumphant ‘innocence’ cannot be ‘recalled’ in the same way that the knowledge of the making of atomic weapons cannot be forgotten. (2007: 300–1)
One might argue that this moral certainty lost in the real world was able to be maintained in many American popular films in this era, films which view the world from an exclusively American perspective and refuse to consider the lives of others in their narratives. The MCU reaffirms and reconsolidates the sancity of the US mission abroad in its committed portrayal of both this ‘Zero Factor’, ‘Victory Culture’ and in the representation of its heroes’ virtuous and altruistic extrajudicial conflicts around the globe which always result in total victory. In Age of Ultron, when it appears that an innocent life will be lost, the film quickly assures us that no such thing will happen, as in when Cap is shown to make a rare mistake and accidentally drops a car with an attractive young female Sokovian in it, only for Thor to catch it from below as a moment of fallibility and vulnerability is disavowed. Instead of throwing debris at the Avengers, as they had done at the Iron Legion at the start of the film, the Sokovians now welcome them, grateful for their heroic intervention, but perhaps unaware it was Tony Stark who has directly caused this chaos and everything they endure.
Age of Ultron perpetuates some of the most enduring myths of American heroes and American interventions around the globe as much of the MCU has done since 2008. Ultron earlier remarked that the Avengers were ‘tangled in strings’ and they are, but in a very different way to how the malevolent robot had suggested. The Avengers embody a vision of how America has come to see itself in a similar way to how Ty Solomon, in The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses, asserted that ‘the meaning of “America” and the “United States” is a tangle of meanings that brings together the various significations and investments in “democracy,” the “free world,” “leading a free-world,” “freedom,” “defender,” and so on…[and it is] those strings of signifiers that construct the American subject’ (2015: 151). The very American superheroes of the MCU are strictly defined and contained by the ideology and beliefs of the culture which created them. It is this which determines that the film rewards Cap for his intransigence, just as categorically as it endorses Stark’s irresponsible individualism, or that it portrays women, even if they are superheroes, as overly emotional and require saving (both physically and emotionally) by their male counterparts. Age of Ultron shows that American power is as beneficent as it is virtuous, and that violence is redemptive and righteous. In this way, the film has demonstrated how it and the MCU films at large function as modern-day incarnations of mythic narratives which resolve complicated problems for their audiences just as the western genre was often able to before it. As we have seen, Age of Ultron offers a deliberate reference to The Searchers, but Whedon’s film cannot attempt even the partial criticisms of American mythology that Ford’s film did in 1956, where it’s hero, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, is certainly mythologised but also challenged in the portrayal of his relentless and obsessive drive to find his kidnapped niece Debbie. Douglas Pye contended that The Searchers ‘detaches us from Ethan so that we are required to perceive the neurotic and irrational nature of his attitudes and actions’ (1996: 229), and, one might ask, are there any such moments in Age of Ultron or other films in the MCU? A point at which we might be asked to doubt the sanctity of the superheroes and their mission? In Whedon’s film, might this be Stark’s creation of Ultron? Or Cap’s refusal to consider a more pragmatic plan during the apocalyptic Battle of Sokovia? But, of course, both moments of ethical ambiguity are disavowed by later events which prove its heroes were right after all in a way that all similar moments are abrogated throughout the MCU.
Karen Randell is quite correct to write that Age of Ultron does not reward the Avengers with a ‘collective victory moment’ (2016: 138) within its diegesis, but it provides them, and audiences, with something even more substantial in its final images, a two-minute-long credit sequence comprised of twenty-seven separate shots of a sculpture of the Avengers immortalised and memorialised in marble, showing their victory over Ultron, reminiscent of the statue of the first responder heroes of the Battle of New York near the foot of the Avengers Tower and a callback to that extreme slow motion shot in Sokovia at the start of the film. However, the Avengers statue is, quite fittingly, given their transcendence to mythological status, very much in the Graeco-Roman Neoclassical mode and one designed to look, as visual effects creative director Jeremy Lasky stated, like ‘something larger than life that you might see in a European plaza’ (qtd. in Failes 2015). More specifically, Laskey and his team suggested that they ‘were inspired by the 9/11 imagery of first responders and the Iwo Jima sculpture’ (see experience-perception.com), amalgamating 11 September 2001 and World War II into a single image, something the Marvel Cinematic Universe has done with its triumphalist narratives since 2008, which have never failed to consolidate and reify very American views of the world in each and every instalment.4
Fig. 24: The consecration of the mythic status of the Avengers in the form of a marble statue ‘inspired by the 9/11 imagery of first responders and the Iwo Jima sculpture’ after the Battle of Sokovia in Avengers: Age of Ultron
1 Strucker is also mentioned in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Season Two episodes like ‘The Writing on the Wall’ (2.07), ‘Aftershocks’ (2.11) and ‘The Frenemy of My Enemy’ (2.18).
2 The character of Quicksilver appeared simultaneously in two superhero franchises: here played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and in X-Men Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) by Evan Peters as an American teen who discovers Magneto is his father.
3 It might be considered significant that the door does not close on Cap as it does on John Wayne’s Ethan, as Cap’s journey is not yet over. In Captain America: Civil War he develops a romantic relationship with Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp), Peggy’s niece.
4 Igor Holmogorov, writing in the Russian daily newspaper Izvestia, described the film as an ‘American national epic. The Greeks had the Iliad, the French have The Song of Roland, we [Russia] have the epics, the Americans have Marvel comics about the superhero team, led by Captain America, which embodies the ideal American values. Despite the seeming European non-seriousness of the genre, we have the quintessence of American national self-consciousness…The Americans created a really strong national myth in which the global domination of the US is justified by the fact that American superheroes protect the world from monstrous global threats’ (2015).