Slum Landlords of the Marvel Universe

A few years ago, I wrote about the habitual desire of Hollywood to destroy the world.  The article's focus was not solely on the disaster porn aspect of a country transfixed on images of the old world crumbling and being rescued by the guard that had failed to prevent its collapse, but also on the specific need to market new products to its audience at exactly these moments of mass destruction.

In this piece, I singled out Joss Whedon's The Avengers, that year's summer blockbuster that is still to date one of the highest grossing films of all-time, as indicative of the kind of film that punishes its universe severely for the follies of godlike protagonists without showing the ensuing repercussions of this catastrophic destruction.  I stand by most of my critiques in the article, but the dynamic has since shifted slightly in the Marvel universe.

I've no illusions that Whedon himself might have read the piece  (I'm almost certain he didn't), but the Marvel universe film and television projects that have launched in the wake of The Avengers have focused rather unexpectedly on coming to terms with the wreckage of that Avengers film.  This is particularly true of the first season of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D television show.  The show's main protagonist, Phil Coulson, was killed in The Avengers (he's the one they ultimately avenge), but is here resurrected somewhat mysteriously and haunted by the experience of his own death.  Elsewhere, the world is adjusting with equal parts terror and trepidation to the fact that there are now these things with superpowers roaming around with the capability of doing immense damage.  Twin agencies, each with some degree of institutional backing and malevolent intent, compete to be the ones to harness these weaponized humans.  The heroes of the story are seen roaming through wreckage for alien artifacts and other ephemera that may be alternately useful or harmful.  Scorched earth is implied and occasionally present, but overall life continues.  Unlike our real post-9/11 world, the entire apparatus of global defense does not seem to dominate daily motions, but operates largely in a clandestine matter behind the scenes.

Elswehere, in Iron Man 3, Tony Stark has been visibly traumatized by the "Battle of New York", struggling to shake the unease of how his attempts to outmanuever his enemies' weapons capabilities only seems to result in arming them more intensely.  Here, trauma is personalized in the eyes of someone with great power and great responsibility.  Heaven is the head that wears the crown, et al., but not exactly a People's History of the Marvel Universe.

The new Netflix series Daredevil, though barely even tangential to the world of The Avengers examines the damage perhaps the furthest.  The series, developed by frequent Whedon collaborator Drew Goddard, takes place entirely in a ravaged Hell's Kitchen, NYC, a locale still in the process of rebuilding after the alien invasion in the Avengers.    Hell's Kitchen here has essentially been de-gentrified, with organized crime elements coming in to terrorize the already-distraught community.  At the center of the storyline is a wealthy businessman named Wilson Fisk who wants to buy up all the affected real estate, purge the poverty caste out, and rebuild the city using a seemingly unlimited amount of capital garnered through both legal and extralegal means.

The allusion here seems not to be to post-9/11, as The Avengers would suggest, but to post-Katrina New Orleans where politicians like Richard Baker were remarking that "Finally we cleaned up public housing in New Orleans.  We couldn't do it, but God did it.".  In many ways, Fisk takes the same approach as Baker, offering buyouts for new condo space and then setting fire to the buildings that the rabble won't leave like a slum landlord and wholesale developer rolled into one.  Daredevil also wisely implicates both the corporate and state authorities for their responsibility in leaving the damage unattended, instituting what in a post-2008 economy would be known as "recovery without recovery".

Daredevil is in many ways a very flawed and simplistic narrative.  It hits on income inequality and wealth disparity as one of its central tenets, but can only remark on these through glaring contrasts of absolute evil and morally-compromised good (Daredevil's Matt Murdock is a nearly-lapsed Catholic who still regularly consults his local priest).  Furthermore, its treatment of its female leads as well as its consistent use of torture as a valid information extracting tool make it, to use the cliched term, problematic at best.

To its merit though, it's only in the shot at the top of this page, which appears briefly as a former newspaper reporter is looking through his old stories, that Marvel ever even acknowledges that there was indeed mass loss of life in the alien invasion of the Avengers.   A notion that's been mummified into a picture frame, the word "final" central in the frame and the bottom scroll already moving past it to talk about "cleanup" rather than any psychic impact or immediate changes to the sociopolitical landscape.  Cleanup on Aisle 6.  Sweep this mess right under the rug and move on.  Though Daredevil's working class tenants of the ruins of Hell's Kitchen can't move on.  They still live here.

For a series in which trauma and atrocity are so often exploited for narrative gravitas, these stories still do have quite a knack for averting their eyes, perhaps distracted by their own spectacles.  I'm not asking for Marvel to issue its own "Treme", but for an era in which drooling fanboys demand A+ ratings from critics for a series of films that finally take comic books seriously, a 10% reduction in hand-to-hand combat scenes to focus on fallout could have a huge impact on the millions of people watching, who  also may be  reeling from their own participation in the shock doctrine.

** I have not yet seen Age of Ultron, so I can't comment on it yet.