A couple of you sent met Joss Whedon’s big interview with The Daily Beast, in particular this paragraph, in which Whedon, who made his name with a supernaturally powerful female character, and has dedicated this phase of his career to a genre where women are too often limited to playing girlfriends, victims, or support staff, talks about the consistent marginalization of superheroines:

Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, “You see? It can’t be done.” It’s stupid, and I’m hoping The Hunger Games will lead to a paradigm shift. It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, “My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,” and I thought, “Yeah, of course they were.” I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

I’ve been glad to hear about Whedon’s plans to add Scarlet Witch to the team in The Avengers 2, making her the first woman with superpowers in Marvel’s franchise. And I’d love to see him make a movie that’s more broadly gender-conscious in the way The Avengers was in small moments, like when Bruce Banner, having become the Hulk, move to backhand Black Widow, or when Loki tried to rile her up with anatomical insults. What will it mean to the male Avengers, including the rather old-fashioned Captain America, to have a teammate who isn’t just a competent but human fighter, but as powerful as they are, and powerful in ways that defy their relatively scientific understanding of their powers much in the way Thor’s existence does? What will it mean for Black Widow and Maria Hill to be working with another woman, and one who is significantly more physically powerful than they are? Will they be friends, or rivals? How will Scarlet Witch’s presence change the dynamics between the heroes themselves and S.H.I.E.L.D.? Making a feminist super-hero movie, as Whedon well understands, isn’t just about throwing a woman in there and pretending that her powers and expected gender roles interact in the same way they do for men, whether it’s in their own heads, or the way other people react to them.

The Avengers director and Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, who graduated from Wesleyan University in 1987, when his commencement speaker was Bill Cosby, returned to his alma mater this weekend to give an address of his own. It’s not an exceedingly long speech, but it’s a smart one, and I was struck by three particular insights that seem useful both for people who are graduating into these particular circumstances—and for anyone who is going into a creative profession.

1. You will not ever achieve complete peace: One of the most difficult transitions in adulthood is from an environment where your performance gets regular, affirming feedback in the form of grades, and where you get regular opportunities to recharge, to one where you have to have an internal sense of your own success and progress, and where you have to decide for yourself when you’re in danger of burnout and need a break. For today’s graduates, I can also imagine that with jobs hard to find, and economic independence even further off, it’s easier to assign extremely high value to things like getting a job, finding a relationship, or even moving out of your parents’ house that are important to feeling independent and successful, but that are really the beginnings of building a life, not the end point of it. As Whedon put it on a larger scale:

To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in. It’s not just parroting your parents or the thoughts of your learned teachers. It is now more than ever about understanding yourself so you can become yourself.

I talk about this contradiction, and this tension, there’s two things I want to say about it. One, it never goes away. And if you think that achieving something, if you think that solving something, if you think a career or a relationship will quiet that voice, it will not. If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better.

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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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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.

I’ve been generally bullish on Zack Snyder’s forthcoming Superman reboot, Man of Steel, or as I’ve been jokingly calling it given the long shots of waves and broody atmosphere of the trailers, Terrence Malick’s Superman. So I was excited to see this latest trailer in the form of a calmly-voiced demand from General Zod (Michael Shannon), demanding that Clark Kent be turned over to him:

It’s also a reminder that while Marvel’s done a much better job of developing its full roster of heroes into a gigantic franchise that runs in multiple tracks that converge into event pictures like The Avengers, DC has its rival beat all hollow when it comes to the development of generally frightening and distinct villains. Marvel’s villains have tended to relatively cartoonish and disposable. Iron Man has faced off against Obadiah Stane, who despite Jeff Bridges’ generalized acting chops was a relatively generalized industrialist, the Ten Rings, who were relatively generic jihadists, and Ivan Vanko a reasonably generic Former Soviet Bloc Crazy With Eccentric Teeth. Captain America went up against the Red Skull in The First Avenger, and the bonkers makeup didn’t do much to conceal that Hugo Weaving’s villain schtick has seen better days. Only Thor has had a truly worthy adversary in his half-brother Loki, but it took two movies for him to morph from standard-issue petulance to achieve his “brain like a bag full of cats,” an unsettling combination of imbalance and precise manipulation.

DC, by contrast, has been extraordinarily lucky to have Christopher Nolan designing its villains for the better part of the last decade in his Batman films, which have anchored the DC franchise even as Marvel seemed ascendant. The Scarecrow may have been the least of Nolan’s creations, but it was an unsettling performance that made the best possible use of Cillian Murphy’s sharp, almost pretty features. As the Joker, Heath Ledger was so unsettling and so fully committed to the role that it remains uncomfortable to watch him. And if The Dark Knight Rises made some miscalculations in the handling of Bane, it provided Anne Hathaway with a career-shifting role that let her be sensual and angry in ways she’s never been on film before. These villains are indelible, rather than disposable—I think, not matter how unsettled they make us feel, they’re characters we’d happily spend time with on their own, and certainly ones who offer specific insight into facets of Batman’s personality and mission in a way Marvel villains rarely have. We’re still a long way from knowing how Man of Steel will shake out, but DC’s been wise to know that you can’t know superheroes without knowing their nemeses, and that’s a strong insight DC will have on its side as it tries to play catchup to its own rival.

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.

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.