From the first teaser ABC has released for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the show about the humans who work with the superheros Marvel is telling stories about in its feature films, like the Iron Man series and the forthcoming The Avengers 2, it’s clear the network wants you to know two things about its new drama. First, there’s a lot of punching people in the face, which makes sense, given that the characters are regular human beings rather than superpowered ones, and Marvel’s profits aside, it would be extremely expensive to do the kind of special effects that mark the action in the movies for the small screen every week.

Second, Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), one of the best creations of the franchise, who showed up as a dorky but insistent civil servant in Iron Man, taking on the thankless job of tracking down emerging superheroes, and who was thought to have been killed by super-villain Loki in The Avengers is actually alive and in charge. Simply from a character development perspective, putting Coulson at the heart of the show is a good sign. He was a really terrific original addition to the superhuman universe, a patient, surprisingly funny, likable liaison to a strange new world, and it’ll be good to see him get to wrangle S.H.I.E.L.D. agents without needing to put up with the whims of a Tony Stark or live under the shadow of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (the scenery-chomping Samuel L. Jackson). Maybe there will be some subtlety amidst the punchings:

But as enthusiasm for this project kicks off, it’s also worth looking at Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a story about corporate interdependence. ABC, which has substantially built its brand on shows that appeal to women, like the nighttime soaps Revenge and Nashville, has Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on its roster because it and Marvel have the same parent company in Disney. One of the logical main characters in the show should have been Maria Hill, Fury’s subordinate, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. with a rich backstory in Marvel comics who was played by Cobie Smulders in The Avengers. Especially given some of the scenes of Hill disagreeing with actions made by her superiors that were cut from The Avengers, it would have been particularly interesting to see Hill have a larger role in the show, and potentially to see her pursue those rifts between herself and Fury, and her doubts about her own actions in the battle against an alien invasion that was the centerpiece of that movie. But Smulders isn’t available because CBS renewed How I Met Your Mother, the hit romcom sitcom that she’s has starred in since 2005, even though this was expected to be the last season of that show. In other words, this may be a show that a lot of us are excited to get. But it’s not necessarily the show that would have been made in perfectly independent conditions, for a partner network that has experience with action, and with the real freedom to integrate characters from the Marvel universe.

At Deadline today, Editor In Chief Nikki Finke has an extensive report on the contract negotiations for The Avengers 2, with a particular focus on Robert Downey Jr.’s quest to earn himself a bigger payday in the wake of Iron Man 3. She writes:

I’ve learned he’s already made $35 million from the actioner, which grossed $680 million worldwide in its first 12 days. He should exceed his biggest payday to date — that $50M from The Avengers which I’ve learned was more like $70M-$80M now that the film is all in. But it’s really Avengers 2 where he’ll clean up big-time — if he wants to reprise the role. He’s hinting to some media it may be time to retire Tony Stark. And saying to other outlets that Marvel better show him more money for Avengers 2. ”I don’t know,” he said on The Daily Show. ”I had a long contract with them and now we’re gonna renegotiate.” (“You are Iron Man! You are!” cheered Jon Stewart.) I’ve learned that Marvel and therefore owner Disney are going to run into big trouble on that sequel because the upfront pay, backend compensation, break-even points and box office bonuses aren’t pinned down yet for several big stars and castmates. This is major hurdle that Walt Disney Co Chaiman/CEO Bob Iger hasn’t even mentioned to Wall Street or shareholders though he’s already been hyping Avengers 2 for more than a year now.

First and foremost Marvel does not have Downey in place yet. ”They need him, and they don’t have him. He’s got a lot of leverage,” one insider tells me.

Whether Marvel needs Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man from a business perspective is one matter. Whether they need him for creative reasons is another one entirely.

Iron Man, released in 2008—a relatively recent date, though one that feels positively ancient given the changing role of superheroes in popular culture in general and Marvel’s dominance of this dominating genre in particular—was the first movie in Marvel’s current exercise in multiple-movie, multi-genre long-form storytelling. That didn’t necessarily mean that the character of Iron Man, inveterate tinkerer and playboy Tony Stark, had to be the cornerstone of that story. But he worked, in part because the funny, self-absorbed Tony allowed Marvel to run a wet rag over the very crowded chalkboard of prior movie superheroes. Rather than a blandly noble guardian in the mold of Superman, or a campy guy in a cape, as Batman was all too frequently on screen before Christopher Nolan got to him, Tony was a reluctant, self-interested hero, someone was more enamored of the badass nature of his trauma-acquired powers than interested in how he could use them for the greater good, who frequently made himself a target and ventured into the fray only when his interests were directly threatened.
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This post discusses plot points from Iron Man 3 in extensive detail.

“A famous man once said we all create our own demons,” Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) says at the beginning of Iron Man 3. The backlash theory of terrorist attacks on the United States and its interests has become somewhat popular in culture in recent years, most notably in Showtime’s drama Homeland, in which the death of a child in a drone strike inspires an American prisoner of war to become a suicide bomber. But Iron Man‘s extensive critique of the war on terror—a major subject of the film, along with eighties movie tropes, domestic harmony, and fan culture—takes a different and more radical tack, suggesting that the threat of violence by terrorist actors may be real, but the War on Terror is an invention that both terrorists and terrorized participate in.

Iron Man 3 begins in 1999, on a New Year’s Eve where Tony Stark’s conduct has two fatal consequences. First, he rejects a pitch from Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a brilliant but hopeless nerd whose use of a cane, unkempt self-presentation, and transparent eagerness, offend Tony’s sense of cool. “She’ll take both,” Tony tells Killian, who offers up his business cards to Tony and to Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a biologist who Tony is taking back to her room for the evening. “One to throw away, and one not to call.” In a bit of high school cruelty, Tony tells Killian he’ll meet him on the roof of the hotel, and then maroons him there, making an enemy. Killian will return fourteen years later with suits and big ideas, and the intent to go after, at least, Tony’s now-girlfriend, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Second, he talks science with Maya, who is pioneering a radical new technology that allows plants to regenerate themselves, but that is encountering some problems, and then sleeps with her. The first is a rather more intimate act then the second, especially after Tony leaves Maya with part, but not all, of a solution to the flaw in her project, and then becomes the person who doesn’t call.

Both of them reappear in Tony’s life fourteen years later for reasons that appear to be unrelated to larger events. After Loki’s attack on New York, Tony is personally traumatized. But the United States is distracted by what seems like it ought to be considered a comparatively minor threat: the appearance of a human terrorist who calls himself the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), and likes to deliver pretentious lectures through hacked television signals and internet connections before bombing targets like a military church. There’s a general sense of insecurity. “The human element of human resources is our greatest point of vulnerability,” Tony’s former driver Happy (Jon Favreau), now running security at Stark Industries, tells Pepper. “We should start phasing it out immediately.” And the United States’ primary response has been the aggressive deployment of Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), who in his own Tony-designed suit, is jetting around the world like the fantasy of how a drone should work, preventing American troops from harm, but still providing human judgement in targeting and decisions to fire.
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Watching the trailer for Thor: The Dark World that was released yesterday, I was struck by a sense of how annoyed I would be if my boyfriend went missing for an exceedingly long time, and then showed up only to port me to an alternate universe without even giving me time to let my kicky astronomy colleague Darcy know where I was going. And it got me thinking about what women are allowed to do—or at least what movie studios think audiences will be psyched to see women doing—in trailers for the action movies that will be released this year.

Thor: The Dark World: If you’re a lady in Asgard, you apparently get to be anxious, get kidnapped, and walk around tables. On the upside, you also get to be in battle, which is a great setting for having your hair whip artfully around your face.

Fast and Furious 6: Appear in black-and-white surveillance photos. Be counted among the crew when the gang gets back together. Hang out with The Rock in a professional capacity. Attend parties where they wear miniskirts. Hang from jeeps. Shoot guns. Specifically at Vin Diesel. Have fist-fights in subway stations.

Man of Steel: Kal-El’s mother gets to be pessimistic about her son’s chances on earth. A neighbor lady gets to be perceptive about his abilities. Faora gets to stand near General Zod, though it’s a blind-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance considering she’s supposed to be a significant villain. And in a rare exception, Lois Lane gets to talk about her reporting.

On Thursday night’s Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt played a Star Wars-loving Pawneean who mounted an epic filibuster under a little-known provision of the rules governing the City Council. It’s a great meta cameo for a guy who’s a nerd icon. But watching the whole thing, which Parks and Rec wisely released online several days in advance of the episode’s air date, I got to thinking that Oswalt’s pitch for a new Star Wars movie, which would mash up Thanos, and Tony Stark, and the X-Men, not to mention Robot Chewbacca actually says a lot about the state of nerd franchises as geek culture has taken over the world and become big business:

Oswalt’s grand mashup speaks to the mass enthusiasm that has made comic book movies and science fiction franchises such generally dependable moneymakers for studios despite the significant upfront costs required to make and to market them. But it’s also a reminder that there is enormous corporate consolidation of geek properties, particularly in Disney, which owns Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and in the form of J.J. Abrams, who now controls both the Star Trek franchise and the core narrative of the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. These companies—and Abrams and Joss Whedon, is acting as an overall creative consultant of the Marvel movie universe—are absolutely capable. But this consolidation does represent a narrowing of perspectives.

And in Oswalt’s monologue, the things that fit together about all of these universes is their gee-whiz elements, their Infinity Gauntlets and jets and X-Wings and Iron Man suits. They’re all worlds in which amazing things can occur, of course. But this kind of enthusiasm strikes me as besides the point, and makes me a little sad. X-Men is an engine for exploring ideas about collective identity, about genetics as a source of identity, about the Holocaust, about the regulation of extraordinary abilities. The toys are extras, not the point. Ditto for Star Trek, where things like warp drives and beaming are a way of getting the characters rapidly into a lot of different situations that are about opening up everything from interracial relationships to the question of whether artificial intelligences have rights. If those ideas get lost in the rise of geek culture as a massively consumed corporate product, we’re losing a lot of what made those franchises so deeply engaging, and objects of such deep identification and debate in the first place.

Corporate consolidation, in other words, is the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s granted beloved geek figures like Abrams and Whedon enormous amounts of control over Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, and Power. But we’re at a critical point where we’ll see if the concentration of all of that creative and financial power actually lets science fiction and fantasy conquer pop culture in all of its multifarious inventiveness, or if it just means that a narrow, relatively homogenized set of stories and set of characters takes over the world, bringing a narrow set of ideas with it.

Inspired by Teju Cole, who has begun writing microfictions that make famous literary characters the target of drone strikes, and Bones‘ recent episode in which a terrorist hacked a drone and aimed it at an Afghan girls’ school, I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about the depictions of remote killing devices in our culture, popular and otherwise. And when I saw the trailer for Iron Man 3, I was struck by an idea: is Tony Stark so compelling to us because he and his Iron Man suits are a fantasy of the way that drone warfare is actually supposed to work?

It’s an idea that’s heightened by the idea, clearly suggested by the trailer, that Tony has gone from dissing Congressional committees to working directly for a President of the United States who’s been elected almost solely on a platform of aggressive action in defense of American security. The question of how superheroes would be regulated or controlled has been an open one around the edges of many of the movies in The Avengers franchise. Joss Whedon’s movie suggested that there was some sort of intergovernmental council in charge of making decisions about superhero deployment, but it was also clear that Nick Fury had the ability, if not the authority, to shrug off their decisions. Iron Man 3 looks like it will tackle Stark’s work for the president much more directly.

And what is it that Tony Stark does for the President? His primary job is to hunt down a terrorist called the Mandarin, and to prevent him from causing more damage to American interests. In pursuit of that goal, Tony swoops in to save people who have been blown out of jets by the Mandarin. As we’ve seen since the first movie, he also appears out of the sky, suddenly and without much warning, much like a drone, to kill people. Except, and this is where the fantasy comes in, he’s got targeting technology that means he can shoot just villains, rather than their victims, even if they’re being held hostage. With Iron Man technology, you don’t have to worry about obliterating a wedding party or killing American teenagers. The person piloting the technology, Tony Stark himself, is both directly in the war zones where he kills people on behalf of the government, so he can make decisions based on information he’s seeing in person, rather than from behind computer monitors, a remove that hasn’t prevented real-life drone pilots from getting burned out or diagnosed with PTSD. But unlike, say, the SEAL team that we sent in to kill Osama bin Laden, and no matter how many times we see Tony pull off his face mask and look dazed, as Iron Man he’s not really at physical risk: both the franchise and our dream of his capabilities demand it.
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That Joss Whedon’s upcoming S.H.I.E.L.D. show is in development at ABC is less a matter of it being a fit for the network, which focuses heavily on female-centric and family dramas, and more a matter of corporate synergy, now that that ABC and Marvel are both owned by Disney. At the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena yesterday, ABC president Paul Lee got asked how an action show will fit into his lineup, particularly after the cancellation of Last Resort, the fairly gender-balanced thriller about the crew of a nuclear submarine. His answer was less than fully revealing, in part because he only has a script, rather than a full pilot—much less multiple episodes. He explained:

Marvel has the ability to bring the whole family around it. The truth about Joss is he has some great relationships in it. So there are a lot of really funny
male/female relationships, some very flirtatious ones that go through it. But it’s also Joss, too, and it’s Marvel, and there’s a lot of action to it. So we haven’t yet seen the pilot. We fast-tracked that before the others. We are going to see it a lot earlier than the others. And we are very hopeful that that’s going to move forward to series, and we will build our marketing campaign early for it. But we do see that as a possibility of a show that we can bring both men and women and kids to.

I am frankly really glad that Lee is talking about S.H.I.E.L.D. as a show that should attract women and families as part of its basic genetics, rather than as as a bonus to go with a core dudebro demographic. But for that to be meaningful—and it’s very different to get women to tune in to an ongoing show than for us to accept a one-off three hours of a movie where we’re in a decided minority—I think he and Whedon have to think about what’s missing from the depictions of women in The Avengers right now, and Marvel has to be willing to let them have at least some flexibility in terms of broadening both the character base and tone of the show.

And one thing that’s missing right now? Aelationships between men and women in this universe that aren’t flirtatious. The Avengers right now is a franchise where female characters are dating their bosses, acting as honey traps, emotionally close to other coworkers in a way that suggests they’re basically in love, or crushing hard on their superheroic fellow soldier only to lose him to entombment in ice. This is not a good argument that men and women can be friends. You’d think that it’s a task so hard as to require superheroics.

I wrote earlier in the day that, given James Gunn’s blog post in which he objectifies a ton of superheroines in rather crude terms, and makes homophobic remarks about the idea of people being sexually attracted to male superheroes, he owed the public an explanation of the post itself, and of how it differs from his vision for the team he’ll be presenting in Guardians of the Galaxy and female superheroines in general. He’s done half of that in gracious Facebook post tonight, in which he writes:

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all.

People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time. I promise to be more careful with my words in the future. And I will do my best to be funnier as well. Much love to all – James

I’m particularly glad to see him acknowledge that, if the post was an attempt at satire, something a lot of his defenders claimed, that it was ineffective, and that calling it a satire didn’t deflect legitimate criticisms of the work. And I think this incident is an important reminder: if you’re actually an “an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised,” and you have a serious platform, then that’s something you have to keep in mind whenever you’re speaking publicly. That should be a spur for your humor and your satire to be smarter. If you’re called out for violating your own principles, your first reaction should be to listen, and to hold yourself to a high standard. It would be terrific for Gunn to use this incident to lay out those principles for his supporters, many of whom are using his apology as proof that people who were upset about the initial post are overreacting and should shut up.

And I’d still appreciate him laying out his vision for Guardians and how he’ll handle any female superheroes who are part of the movie, and delineate the differences between the attitudes in that post and his creative plans. If this is an opportunity to push Marvel to rectify some of its serious lack of diversity in the past, it’s a productive moment. I’m glad Gunn’s responded with some insight and class. I hope his script for and direction of Guardians of the Galaxy reflects that same statement of his values.

When word came down in August that Guardians of the Galaxy, the planned 2014 Marvel movie about an oddball group of superheroes including an interstellar raccoon and a talking tree, was actually a backdoor introduction of Carol Danvers, the badass Air Force pilot who is now Captain Marvel, I was ridiculously excited. It’s long past time that Marvel added a female superhero (as opposed to simply a well-trained human woman) to the on-screen Avengers lineup, Danvers’ military pedigree would lend her some interesting synergy with Captain America, and she’d be a fascinating way to get a well-credentialed action actress like Katee Sackhoff into the franchise. But since folks have uncovered an old blog post by James Gunn, who is both writing and directing the movie, I’ve gone from enthusiastic about the project to straight-up terrified about it.

The post is Gunn reporting the results of a poll he did with readers about which superheroes they’d like to have sex with. It was deleted—and you can see why—but it’s available in Google Cache. And while I don’t necessarily oppose the idea of this kind of poll—superheroes are designed to be fantasies—the way Gunn wrote up the results reveals some pretty horrifying ideas about superheroines, both inside the bedroom and outside of it.

On Emma Frost, described as the woman of choice for “those men who love rude bitches,” Gunn says “What I love about Emma is the practical attire she wears while adventuring. Certainly, if I were a woman fighting giant monsters I’d want to wear some awesome breast-mushing halter top, a pair of panties, and thigh highs.” On my beloved She-Hulk, “I ever were in the mood to be dominated and treated like a little bitch, by someone who is green, then She-Hulk would almost certainly be the way to go.” Then there’s this little bon mot “Disco Dazzler, Rave Dazzler, and Punk Rock Dazzler, they all have one thing in common – a friggin’ GREAT vagina.” On Kitty Pryde: “I wrote her back [on Twitter], but neglected to mention that I wanted to anally do her. I won’t even mind if Lockheed is in the room, staring at me with a creepy look the whole time.” There’s slut-shaming of Batgirl: “Being a teen mom and all, you know she’s easy. Go for it.” There are nasty objectification fantasies, like this one of Spider-Woman: “The whole time I’m fucking her I can’t get her face out of my mind as the Skrull leader who tried to conquer the world. I know it’s not her fault, but I just can’t help it. So I finish on her face to help block out the painful memories.” A lot of “this woman is messed-up so she’s sexy,” a la Cassandra Cain: “Cassandra’s father taught her how to kill people when she was eight. Which means she has the ultimate daddy issues. Which means she’s just my type.”

Then, there’s the charming homophobia! On Gambit: “My girlfriend voted for this Cajun fruit. I think she’s looking to have a devil’s three way with the two of us. The idea of my balls slapping against Gambit’s makes me sick to my stomach.” The charming observation of Batwoman that “This lesbian character was voted for almost exclusively by men. I don’t know exactly what that means. But I’m hoping for a Marvel-DC crossover so that Tony Stark can “turn” her. She could also have sex with Nightwing and probably still be technically considered a lesbian.”

Maybe it should be comfort to us that of his potential heroine, Carol Danvers, Gunn only says “Carol Danvers dropped 13 points from her position last year. It’s a surprise to me as she is, along with Emma Frost and the Black Cat, one of the most consistently sexualized characters in the Marvel Universe,” though if he thinks her sexualization is one of the more telling things about her character, the fact that he doesn’t have specific fantasies about her may not count for very much. One of the most telling remarks Gunn makes is about Starfire: “The picture above is why, by the age of nine or ten, comic books had ruined real women for me forever.” In this post, he repeatedly mentions his girlfriend, so that doesn’t seem entirely true. But I do think that he and Disney should have to explain why these kinds of attitudes haven’t ruined him from being the kind of person who’s actually suited to introduce the first Marvel superheroine to an audience that includes men who are capable of reading superwomen as more than templates for sexual fantasies, and women who are eager to see themselves reflected on screen.

As I was reading through the coverage of the announcement that Star Wars Episode VII will be arriving in movie theaters in 2015, I clicked on over to my friend Alex Knapp’s post on the subject on Forbes. And then I lowered my head slowly and repeatedly to my desk. It’s not that I think Alex’s ideas for storylines for a new trilogy are bad ones—they definitely aren’t. But it was that the post fell prey to a symptom I’m finding more and more deadly in criticism these days: the idea that we should just hand the keys to all pop culture over to Joss Whedon and sit back and enjoy the ride.

It’s not that I dislike Whedon, or many of the products he’s given us over the years. But I think there’s something disturbing about the idea that Joss Whedon is good at everything, or that the things that Joss Whedon is excellent at are necessarily the best things that our mass culture can do. It’s a homogenizing impulse—I shudder to think of a world with one dominant action movie sensibility, especially one that particular. And it ignores the fact that for all of Whedon’s strengths, he has weaknesses, a number of which would be particularly tricky for a revitalized Star Wars franchise.

It’s worth remembering, for example, that Whedon’s main accomplishment is revitalizing and critiquing the horror genre, and that he’s actually weak when it comes to one of the most important components of truly transcendent action filmmaking. He often seems relatively indifferent to actual action sequences. The fights in Buffy and Angel (which I’m working my way through now) are almost deliberately indifferent and schlocky in a way that robs tension from them. Matchups may be exciting because of their outcomes, like Buffy sending Angel to Hell, but not because of any clash of styles, or often, any real sense that the outcome itself is at stake. Dollhouse was more attuned to standard-issue training montages than any particular difference in style. Like Buffy, River Tam’s fight scenes in Firefly and Serenity are plausible because of things we’ve told that have been done to her, and she wins because that’s integral to the story’s needs. We don’t see the decisions or things other than the generic martial arts skills she has, that give her an advantage and let her think her way out of corners, because she’s never really in any. If anything, I’d say Whedon has an interest in the artificiality of action sequences, which lends itself to valid critiques of genre conventions, but not always to fight choreography that stands on its own.

The action sequences in The Avengers are somewhat more distinctive than his previous batting average, are mostly better because they involve the Hulk, a fighter who can be used with particular wit and violence, or amusing team-ups of fighters, rather than because Whedon got much better at choreographing actual duels. I shudder to think what Whedon would do with a lightsaber duel—why not at least call in a wuxia action choreographer, given the potential of the Force to shape duels, like Yuen Woo-ping, who did the amazing fights in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon?

Then, there’s Whedon’s witty banter addiction and his approach to sexuality, both of which I think are strengths for him almost all the time, in part because he has a smart sense of scenarios where they fit, among them group dynamics or emotional situations that need to be deescalated. Whedon’s characters often use references or wit to defuse situations or to distance themselves from difficult emotions. I love Buffy telling Angel “I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I’m ready. I’m cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.” But that’s not remotely the same thing as Han Solo leaning in to tell Princess Leia “I’m nice men.” The line is an abstraction, but to totally different effect. The menu of movies available to us needs both cuteness and sensuality, lines that deflect and others than pull characters closer to greater intimacy.
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