Daredevil and the Real City in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
It is perhaps telling that the hands-down most intense scene in the new Marvel series Daredevil is one in which the secondary protagonist -- Karen, an ordinary woman -- and the secondary antagonist -- Wesley, a man with access to power, but not powerful himself -- confront one another across a table. The series itself is bloated with fighty mcfight, each episode longer than the last and each action scene more baroque, but the real story of the show seems to be constantly escaping from the confines of the show's own chosen genre in puzzlingly unintentional ways.
Let me back up. I attended a lecture last Thursday about the War on Poverty, about how framing it as a law-and-order initiative helped get it passed in 1965 but also quickly turned it into a tool for surveilling and criminalizing the black underclass, as job training and education funding petered out but police funding kept on strong over the years. There was a lot of meat there about concept of poverty as pathology, and police surveillance, and how having integrated child services and school and juvenile records on any given bored teenager helps frame that teenager as a pre-criminal, a felony waiting to happen. It being a lecture, and primarily focused on legislation and crime statistics, it did not go into topics like post-war urban white flight, or redlining, or the urban planning debacles of the post-war, pre-Reagan era. But I went into the weekend with it in my mind: what is the city in the collective imagination? What makes it a city you love, and what makes it a city you would walk away from? How does the existence of one schema of the city -- the criminal one -- preclude your noticing the real, different, still-functional city right in front of you?
So the first question that occurred to me, watching Daredevil, was "What is the real city of this show?" Not only in the John Clute sense of whether it's really Atlanta pretending to be New York (in fact, they filmed in New York, although I think they got a bit too clever about specific locations), but in the sense of which New York we're talking about. Because despite all the current cell phones, the imagery of the show is deeply rooted in a time long past, if indeed this particular New York ever existed at all.
Firstly, it's a story about white working class childhoods in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. (Fisk's forty years ago, and Matt's much less plausibly in the middle 90s.) But everyone approaches the city with the same basic mindset, as if even the thirtysomething characters still thought of New York as the Bronx Zoo of the 70s. Wesley, that minor villain, who isn't even from New York, talks about piles of garbage in the streets as if the sanitation strike never ended. The drug of choice is heroin, a seriously retro trend. Matt is constantly going on about how ordinary people can't get a break, but he means working class ordinary, not the working and jobless poor, whom we never meet. (There's one woman on rent control -- talk about retro!) Fisk holds a whole press conference to talk with distaste about the "crime and poverty" he sees, but like, dude, where is that crime coming from? Even in this era of inequality, violent crime has been trending downward for decades, and hit new lows in Manhattan in particular. The only crime on the streets is the crime Fisk put there.
(Never mind the ugly connections of poverty, crime, and race. This is a universe that doesn't address those connections. Everything is individual, and is never meant to be understood as part of a larger pattern.)
So Fisk the evil developer causes crime, lowers property values, and buys up the land accordingly. We're meant to believe, right to the end I think, that he's planning a bunch of luxury condoes, a whole neighborhood of opulent eyesore One 57s, but I got to the last episode still wondering, maybe he intended to put in a nuclear plant? Or a Disney World? Or something more creative and more difficult to do than condoes, god, what a cliche, and what a shitty business plan. Pro tip, Fisk: you don't need secrecy or shadows or a vast web of corruption and murder to be a real estate developer in New York. Hell, you're better off without those things, especially the murder, because real estate development is a sure thing compared to human trafficking or the heroin trade.
This weird dichotomy runs through the whole series: money on the one hand and violence on the other. Cops and reporters and politicians are corrupted; and witnesses and conspirators and bystanders are killed. But the two don't work hand-in-hand, not really: people buy into luxury towers where they feel safe, not where crime remains high. Fisk necessarily has to stop his own crime if he wants his urban development plan to make a profit. If I believed Daredevil meant to be a show about how a Stringer Bell figure decided to go legit, and maneuvered clumsily from illegal to legal business, it might be compelling and interesting. But the show doesn't even make the distinction, and seems unclear on the idea that Fisk could easily, effortlessly be a loathsome monster without being a crime lord at all.
Indeed, what does Fisk even DO as a crime lord? Mostly, he seems to finance other people in their crime, and take a cut. Well shit, son, all of Wall Street is doing that! And they do it without breaking a sweat, or any heads. Or any laws. What's wrong with you that you don't know that!
[Compare Daredevil to Arrow, another story of urban vigilantism. The first season's explicit targets are all businessmen, one-percenters, people the law can't reach: Oliver Queen is the son of privilege carrying justice to his own kind. So much so that Diggle and Felicity have to argue him into addressing street crime at all! Because on Arrow, street crime is a symptom of the larger problem -- poverty -- and Oliver aims, clumsily at first and then with increasing clarity, at the people who cause and exploit poverty. He is successful at redressing upper-class wrongs, of course, because he knows that world, and many of its players, so intimately. He is so successful that he traces the roots of one-percenter arrogance all the way to his own doorstep, and exposes his own mother's complicity.]
And what of Matt Murdock, our hero? I realized a couple of episodes in that not only are we in a comic-book universe (however dimly lit), which means that Matt's unbelieveable non-visual perception isn't just plot-convenient mystical hoodoo, it might be an actual outcome of exposure to the nefarious Chemicals that caused his blindness years ago. (Talk about your corruption! Who drives a truck full of hazmats around a residential neighborhood, and does that badly at securing the cargo? This isn't Texas, you know!) (Also, talk about your corruption. Battlin' Jack Murdock never met a fisticuff he couldn't put his face in front of, but it never occurred to him to sue, and ensure his son's future by means other than suicidal ones??) I say, we're in a comic-book universe, with various shout-outs I only recognized afterwards, and secondary characters in the story because they have to be, not because they serve a necessary narrative purpose.
Matt Murdock is a fantastically angry man who seems to think that he has no other outlet for that anger than to beat the everliving shit out of people. In his day-job, he is conservative and soft-spoken, and then at night, his fighting is remarkably tactile, sometimes literally bare-knuckle, un-armed combat despite the glorious array of weapons his enemies bring against him. He is the sort of man who would literally take a knife to a gun fight, both because he seems to believe that the ability to take a licking -- a Murdock trait -- will preserve him against actual death, and because his whole approach to large-scale evil is shockingly small-scale and... naive. Evil is laughing behind its hand at him, and his inability to think big. Even in a universe that stacks the deck in his favor -- visceral crimes, violent crimes, crimes with obvious screaming victims -- he comes across as some kind of pathetic weirdo, banging his head against one particular wall because he can't see the whole maze he's trapped in.
Which is to say, this comic-book universe has a passing relationship with our universe, but what we see in Daredevil makes me wonder very deeply: what IS this New York they're living in? What is the world-texture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Has anybody tried to alert Steve Rogers to what's going on in these old-timey Manhattan neighborhoods, so like his Brooklyn of the 30s? Does Tony Stark turn up his nose at Fisk's fundraisers as an arriviste's pretensions? Does Fisk ever look at skyscraper-builder Stark and say, "Hey, if he can fund his own army of special agents, why can't I...?"
I don't think we're meant to worry about that. But New York really isn't that big, and it isn't that obscure. How can we be expected to compartmentalize these parts of the same universe, in the same city? It's not possible that Fisk is blowing up buildings on West 44th in three-part harmony while the Avengers play checkers on East 42nd, probably high up enough in their tower that they can see the flames, and nobody has anything to say about it.
This may be why the confrontation between Karen (the hero, not the one with ESP and a glass jaw) and Wesley (the villain, not the one with the angsty, self-justifying backstory) is such a showpiece. It's in Episode 11, most of the way through the run, and it's fairly ordinary as these things go. Karen's an obstreperous investigator, having run afoul of Fisk's apparatus of evil once already, and nerved by it. Wesley is a smooth operator, all silk and sharp glasses, able to translate into English but never forced to try to pronounce a foreign language. He is the chief architect of the banal language of Fisk's corruption, down to calling him "my employer" rather than using his name. Wesley is the sort who will order violence, and watch someone else do violence, but eschews such unpleasantness himself.
Caught out in the midst of an emergency, Wesley acts alone and kidnaps Karen to interrogate her about what she's dug up. He sits her at a table in an empty room and shows her a weapon -- a weapon we've seen him borrow; it is beneath him to carry one himself -- and pulls all of his intimidation tricks in a cool, controlled voice and without a drop of sweat. Karen is terrified, furious, cornered, righteous. She has acted with foolish bravery, and knows it, and can't regret it. She is messy, hair askew, nose snotty, even her feet splayed under the table, the opposite of Wesley's smooth impenetrability.
What does Karen do? She picks up the weapon. Wesley scoffs at her and tells her he is not stupid enough to have loaded it and left it within her reach. And Karen, in the real fantasy of speaking truth to power, she pulls the trigger anyway, and shoots Wesley right through his tuxedo jacket, to their mutual surprise. He didn't think she would dare, and bluffed her; she didn't think it was loaded, but was desperate enough to try anything.
It's a great scene. She hates him, and he condescends to her, and she makes him eat it. (Proooobably she didn't need to shoot him seven times, but, well.) He doesn't say a word as he falls back in his chair, and Karen has to figure out how to react by herself.
It's awful, of course. She cries; she drinks; she destroys the evidence and saves her own life. She climbs into the shower and scrubs her body assiduously, although she's got no bruises and avoided any blood spray. It's the one scenario of vigilantism that works in the whole series, because it's impulsive, a split-second decision, an adamant act of self-preservation. Matt Murdock dresses up like an S&M dancer every night and goes out looking for skulls to smash because it makes him feel better; but ordinary Karen, afraid, uncertain, ambivalent: she is the hero vigilante of this story.
I don't think Daredevil realizes that, though.
I have moved mostly over to Dreamwidth. Please comment there if you can.
Let me back up. I attended a lecture last Thursday about the War on Poverty, about how framing it as a law-and-order initiative helped get it passed in 1965 but also quickly turned it into a tool for surveilling and criminalizing the black underclass, as job training and education funding petered out but police funding kept on strong over the years. There was a lot of meat there about concept of poverty as pathology, and police surveillance, and how having integrated child services and school and juvenile records on any given bored teenager helps frame that teenager as a pre-criminal, a felony waiting to happen. It being a lecture, and primarily focused on legislation and crime statistics, it did not go into topics like post-war urban white flight, or redlining, or the urban planning debacles of the post-war, pre-Reagan era. But I went into the weekend with it in my mind: what is the city in the collective imagination? What makes it a city you love, and what makes it a city you would walk away from? How does the existence of one schema of the city -- the criminal one -- preclude your noticing the real, different, still-functional city right in front of you?
So the first question that occurred to me, watching Daredevil, was "What is the real city of this show?" Not only in the John Clute sense of whether it's really Atlanta pretending to be New York (in fact, they filmed in New York, although I think they got a bit too clever about specific locations), but in the sense of which New York we're talking about. Because despite all the current cell phones, the imagery of the show is deeply rooted in a time long past, if indeed this particular New York ever existed at all.
Firstly, it's a story about white working class childhoods in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. (Fisk's forty years ago, and Matt's much less plausibly in the middle 90s.) But everyone approaches the city with the same basic mindset, as if even the thirtysomething characters still thought of New York as the Bronx Zoo of the 70s. Wesley, that minor villain, who isn't even from New York, talks about piles of garbage in the streets as if the sanitation strike never ended. The drug of choice is heroin, a seriously retro trend. Matt is constantly going on about how ordinary people can't get a break, but he means working class ordinary, not the working and jobless poor, whom we never meet. (There's one woman on rent control -- talk about retro!) Fisk holds a whole press conference to talk with distaste about the "crime and poverty" he sees, but like, dude, where is that crime coming from? Even in this era of inequality, violent crime has been trending downward for decades, and hit new lows in Manhattan in particular. The only crime on the streets is the crime Fisk put there.
(Never mind the ugly connections of poverty, crime, and race. This is a universe that doesn't address those connections. Everything is individual, and is never meant to be understood as part of a larger pattern.)
So Fisk the evil developer causes crime, lowers property values, and buys up the land accordingly. We're meant to believe, right to the end I think, that he's planning a bunch of luxury condoes, a whole neighborhood of opulent eyesore One 57s, but I got to the last episode still wondering, maybe he intended to put in a nuclear plant? Or a Disney World? Or something more creative and more difficult to do than condoes, god, what a cliche, and what a shitty business plan. Pro tip, Fisk: you don't need secrecy or shadows or a vast web of corruption and murder to be a real estate developer in New York. Hell, you're better off without those things, especially the murder, because real estate development is a sure thing compared to human trafficking or the heroin trade.
This weird dichotomy runs through the whole series: money on the one hand and violence on the other. Cops and reporters and politicians are corrupted; and witnesses and conspirators and bystanders are killed. But the two don't work hand-in-hand, not really: people buy into luxury towers where they feel safe, not where crime remains high. Fisk necessarily has to stop his own crime if he wants his urban development plan to make a profit. If I believed Daredevil meant to be a show about how a Stringer Bell figure decided to go legit, and maneuvered clumsily from illegal to legal business, it might be compelling and interesting. But the show doesn't even make the distinction, and seems unclear on the idea that Fisk could easily, effortlessly be a loathsome monster without being a crime lord at all.
Indeed, what does Fisk even DO as a crime lord? Mostly, he seems to finance other people in their crime, and take a cut. Well shit, son, all of Wall Street is doing that! And they do it without breaking a sweat, or any heads. Or any laws. What's wrong with you that you don't know that!
[Compare Daredevil to Arrow, another story of urban vigilantism. The first season's explicit targets are all businessmen, one-percenters, people the law can't reach: Oliver Queen is the son of privilege carrying justice to his own kind. So much so that Diggle and Felicity have to argue him into addressing street crime at all! Because on Arrow, street crime is a symptom of the larger problem -- poverty -- and Oliver aims, clumsily at first and then with increasing clarity, at the people who cause and exploit poverty. He is successful at redressing upper-class wrongs, of course, because he knows that world, and many of its players, so intimately. He is so successful that he traces the roots of one-percenter arrogance all the way to his own doorstep, and exposes his own mother's complicity.]
And what of Matt Murdock, our hero? I realized a couple of episodes in that not only are we in a comic-book universe (however dimly lit), which means that Matt's unbelieveable non-visual perception isn't just plot-convenient mystical hoodoo, it might be an actual outcome of exposure to the nefarious Chemicals that caused his blindness years ago. (Talk about your corruption! Who drives a truck full of hazmats around a residential neighborhood, and does that badly at securing the cargo? This isn't Texas, you know!) (Also, talk about your corruption. Battlin' Jack Murdock never met a fisticuff he couldn't put his face in front of, but it never occurred to him to sue, and ensure his son's future by means other than suicidal ones??) I say, we're in a comic-book universe, with various shout-outs I only recognized afterwards, and secondary characters in the story because they have to be, not because they serve a necessary narrative purpose.
Matt Murdock is a fantastically angry man who seems to think that he has no other outlet for that anger than to beat the everliving shit out of people. In his day-job, he is conservative and soft-spoken, and then at night, his fighting is remarkably tactile, sometimes literally bare-knuckle, un-armed combat despite the glorious array of weapons his enemies bring against him. He is the sort of man who would literally take a knife to a gun fight, both because he seems to believe that the ability to take a licking -- a Murdock trait -- will preserve him against actual death, and because his whole approach to large-scale evil is shockingly small-scale and... naive. Evil is laughing behind its hand at him, and his inability to think big. Even in a universe that stacks the deck in his favor -- visceral crimes, violent crimes, crimes with obvious screaming victims -- he comes across as some kind of pathetic weirdo, banging his head against one particular wall because he can't see the whole maze he's trapped in.
Which is to say, this comic-book universe has a passing relationship with our universe, but what we see in Daredevil makes me wonder very deeply: what IS this New York they're living in? What is the world-texture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Has anybody tried to alert Steve Rogers to what's going on in these old-timey Manhattan neighborhoods, so like his Brooklyn of the 30s? Does Tony Stark turn up his nose at Fisk's fundraisers as an arriviste's pretensions? Does Fisk ever look at skyscraper-builder Stark and say, "Hey, if he can fund his own army of special agents, why can't I...?"
I don't think we're meant to worry about that. But New York really isn't that big, and it isn't that obscure. How can we be expected to compartmentalize these parts of the same universe, in the same city? It's not possible that Fisk is blowing up buildings on West 44th in three-part harmony while the Avengers play checkers on East 42nd, probably high up enough in their tower that they can see the flames, and nobody has anything to say about it.
This may be why the confrontation between Karen (the hero, not the one with ESP and a glass jaw) and Wesley (the villain, not the one with the angsty, self-justifying backstory) is such a showpiece. It's in Episode 11, most of the way through the run, and it's fairly ordinary as these things go. Karen's an obstreperous investigator, having run afoul of Fisk's apparatus of evil once already, and nerved by it. Wesley is a smooth operator, all silk and sharp glasses, able to translate into English but never forced to try to pronounce a foreign language. He is the chief architect of the banal language of Fisk's corruption, down to calling him "my employer" rather than using his name. Wesley is the sort who will order violence, and watch someone else do violence, but eschews such unpleasantness himself.
Caught out in the midst of an emergency, Wesley acts alone and kidnaps Karen to interrogate her about what she's dug up. He sits her at a table in an empty room and shows her a weapon -- a weapon we've seen him borrow; it is beneath him to carry one himself -- and pulls all of his intimidation tricks in a cool, controlled voice and without a drop of sweat. Karen is terrified, furious, cornered, righteous. She has acted with foolish bravery, and knows it, and can't regret it. She is messy, hair askew, nose snotty, even her feet splayed under the table, the opposite of Wesley's smooth impenetrability.
What does Karen do? She picks up the weapon. Wesley scoffs at her and tells her he is not stupid enough to have loaded it and left it within her reach. And Karen, in the real fantasy of speaking truth to power, she pulls the trigger anyway, and shoots Wesley right through his tuxedo jacket, to their mutual surprise. He didn't think she would dare, and bluffed her; she didn't think it was loaded, but was desperate enough to try anything.
It's a great scene. She hates him, and he condescends to her, and she makes him eat it. (Proooobably she didn't need to shoot him seven times, but, well.) He doesn't say a word as he falls back in his chair, and Karen has to figure out how to react by herself.
It's awful, of course. She cries; she drinks; she destroys the evidence and saves her own life. She climbs into the shower and scrubs her body assiduously, although she's got no bruises and avoided any blood spray. It's the one scenario of vigilantism that works in the whole series, because it's impulsive, a split-second decision, an adamant act of self-preservation. Matt Murdock dresses up like an S&M dancer every night and goes out looking for skulls to smash because it makes him feel better; but ordinary Karen, afraid, uncertain, ambivalent: she is the hero vigilante of this story.
I don't think Daredevil realizes that, though.
I have moved mostly over to Dreamwidth. Please comment there if you can.