Avengers Assemble! - Critical Perspectives On The Marvel Cinematic Universe (PDFDrive)

¾VENGERSA S S E M B L E !
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
TERENCE McSWEENE Y
AV E N G E R S A S S E M B L E !
AVENGERS
ASSEMBLE!
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
TERENCE M C SWEENEY
WALLFLOWER PRESS
LONDON & NEW YORK
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CO N T EN TS
Acknowledgements vii
Prologue: The Heroes We Need Right Now?:

Explaining ‘The Age of the Superhero’ 1
Introduction: Superheroes in the New Millennium
and ‘The Example of America’ 14
PHASE ONE
1 ‘That’s how Dad did it, that’s how America does it … and
it’s worked out pretty well so far’: The Stark Doctrine in
Iron Man and Iron Man 2 41
2 Allegorical Narratives of Gods and Monsters: Thor and
The Incredible Hulk 72
3 State Fantasy and the Superhero: (Mis)Remembering
World War II in Captain America: The First Avenger 97
4 ‘Seeing … still working on believing!’: The Ethics and Aesthetics
of Destruction in The Avengers 109
PHASE TWO
5 ‘Nothing’s been the same since New York’: Ideological
Continuity and Change in Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World 129
6 ‘The world has changed and none of us can go back’:
The Illusory Moral Ambiguities of the Post-9/11 Superhero
in Captain America: The Winter Soldier 150
7 Blurring the Boundaries of Genre and Gender in Guardians
of the Galaxy and Ant-Man 167
8 ‘Isn’t that why we fight? So we can end the fight and go home?’:
The Enduring American Monomyth in Avengers: Age of Ultron 186
v
THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE ON TELEVISION
9 ‘What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for?’: The MCU on the Small Screen
in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter 207
10 The Necessary Vigilantism of the Defenders: Daredevil
Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist 223
Conclusion: ‘Whose side are you on?’: Superheroes Through

the Prism of the ‘War on Terror’ in Captain America: Civil War 237
Epilogue: The Superhero as Transnational Icon 262
Filmography 269
Bibliography 273
Index 302
vi
AC K N OW L ED G EM EN TS
Every project presents its own unique set of challenges and this one has been no
different. The words on the page are mine, but they would not have found their
way there without the help and support of too many people to mention here.
I would like to thank the wonderful staff and students at my own institu-
tion, Southampton Solent University, especially Donna Peberdy and Darren
Kerr, for their continued support, and Stuart Joy who has always been a source
of wise counsel. Also, the staff of two remarkable libraries: the Vere Harmsworth
Library at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute where some
of the writing of this manuscript was done during my tenure as Visiting Research
Fellow in 2015–16, and those at the Queen Mary University of London where I
was fortunate enough to have a similar position in 2016–17.
Special thanks are always reserved for my family, not just my loving wife,
Olga, but my two beloved sons. Harrison: your love of writing, even from such a
young age (I Hate Shark!), has always moved me and I look forward to seeing the
writer you will become in the future. Wyatt: your unconditional love of super-
heroes has been inspirational and I hope one day you might read this book and
remember the golden years during which it was written. I wish they could have
lasted forever.
vii
Dedicated to Lewis, Billy, Jimmy,
Harrison, Wyatt and Nancy Lou
The only real superheroes

PR O LO G U E
The Heroes We Need Right Now?:

Explaining ‘The Age of the Superhero’
Due to the fact that superheroes have been perpetually subject to revisionism,
they become symptomatic signifiers of contemporary consciousness and thus can
serve as embodiments of specific needs in a given time.
– Johannes Schlegel and Frank Habermann (2011: 33–4)
People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can’t do that as
Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed;
but as a symbol … as a symbol I can be incorruptible … I can be everlasting…
– Bruce Wayne, Batman Begins (2005)
We are living in the age of the superhero and we cannot deny it. The subject of this
book, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), is the most financially successful
film series ever produced, with earnings of more $12 billion at the international
box office since 2008, comfortably surpassing rivals like the James Bond (1962–)
and Star Wars (1977–) franchises, even though they have both existed for decades
longer.1 The image of the superhero is now one of the most pervasive in contem-
porary global popular culture: whether we like it or not, it is they that serve as
examples for our children, who play with their likenesses and aspire to be them,
it is their imposing personages we use as a barometer to measure our real-world
figures and even ourselves by, and it is films about them which fill multiplexes all
THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 1

over the world, topping the box office from Argentina to Zimbabwe. It does not
matter whether we call this phenomenon a ‘resurgence’ (Chermak et al. 2003: 11)
or a ‘renaissance’ (Greene and Roddy 2015: 2) or describe their return as lead-
ing to a superhero decade (see Gray and Kaklamanidou 2011: 1) or a ‘cultural
catastrophe’, as renowned graphic novelist Alan Moore suggested (qtd. in Flood
2014) – it is here.
Since around the year 2000 there have been hundreds of superhero films
and television shows produced all around the globe, but it is undoubtedly their
American incarnation that has emerged as the most prominent, the most suc-
cessful and the most influential example of the form. Selecting almost any
summer at random in the last ten years allows us to see the substantial impact
the genre has had on the marketplace: 2008, the date of the first MCU films, Iron
Man and The Incredible Hulk, also saw the release of The Dark Knight, Hancock,
Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Punisher: War Zone and Wanted, to name just a
few. Three of them, The Dark Knight, Iron Man and Hancock, were in the top ten
grossing films of the year. Eight years later in 2016 the genre showed no sign of
losing its popularity, despite many predicting that market saturation would have
an impact on its appeal (see McMillan 2014; Khatchatourian 2015), and four of
the highest grossing films worldwide were from the superhero genre: Captain
America: Civil War, Deadpool, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide
Squad, with Doctor Strange and X-Men: Apocalypse appearing just outside the
top ten. The combined international gross of just these six American superhero
films alone totalled almost $5 billion dollars.2
It was certainly not always like this. While superheroes have been on the
cultural landscape since Superman (who made his debut in June 1938), Batman
(May 1939) and Captain America (March 1941) first graced the pages of their
respective comic books, and had periodically reached the television and cinema
screens in the subsequent decades, the three Salkind-era Superman films (1978–
1983) and the Burton/Schumacher-era incarnation of Batman (1989–1992;
1995–1997), culturally and commercially impactful on their release though they
were, did not inspire the veritable wave of additions to the genre the likes of
which we are currently experiencing. Throughout the 1980s until the phenom-
enal success of Batman (1989) only one other superhero film made it into the top
ten US domestic box office, Superman II (1981), and in the whole of the 1990s
a superhero film only appeared in the top ten three times and never in the top
five: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Batman Returns (1992) and Batman
Forever (1995). Yet the first decades of the new millennium have seen a prolifera-
tion of superhero films and television shows like never before.
Why then has the superhero genre, which, it should be noted, is one of the
only truly American film genres, alongside the gangster film and the western,
2 AV E N G E R S A S S E M B L E !
re-emerged so emphatically in recent years? The answer to this question is a
complicated one which requires an interrogation of technological, industrial,
economic and ideological perspectives. In short, as the title to this prologue sug-
gests, the superhero film returned because it was needed. It was needed by the
American film industry, which saw declining ticket sales throughout this period
in spite of record-breaking grosses and it seemed to be needed by audiences who
turned to superheroes in two of the most turbulent decades in living memory
(see Cowden 2015). Might Brian Kaller have been right then when he asserted
in his article entitled ‘Why We Need Superheroes’ (2016) that ‘In troubled times,
Americans turn to the heroic ideal’? Joss Whedon, the director of The Avengers
(2012) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), which each made more than a billion
dollars at the box office, was only joking when he stated in his director’s commen-
tary accompanying the Blu-ray release of The Avengers, that ‘We saved movies’,
but his remark does have an element of truth to it. In an age where people have
stopped going to the cinema as frequently as they used to, they returned to it in
droves for the superhero film. There is a straightforward reason for this financial
success, but it is one which does not entirely explain why the genre re-emerged
and has been unequivocally embraced by audiences in recent years.
Simply put, recent additions to the superhero genre have been able to tran-
scend en masse the demographic audience usually associated with films of this
type. So, although it is convenient to say, as many do, that it is an infantile genre
which only appeals to children and teenagers, as David Cronenberg did, stat-
ing that it is ‘adolescent in its core. That has always been its appeal, and I think
people who are saying, you know, [The] Dark Knight Rises [2012] is supreme cin-
ema art, I don’t think they know what the fuck they’re talking about’ (qtd. in
Zakarin 2012b) or Susan Faludi who, in her indispensable volume The Terror
Dream: Fear and Fantasy in the Post-9/11 Era, argued that the superhero only
appeals to ‘someone, typically a prepubescent teenage boy, who feels weak in the
world and insufficient to the demands of the day and who needs a Walter Mitty
bellows to pump up his self-worth’ (2007: 51), significant evidence points to the
contrary. A film like The Avengers does not make $623 million at the US box of-
fice, plus $896 million at the global box office, then a quarter of a billion on DVD
and Blu-ray sales in the US alone by selling tickets only to juveniles. In fact, as
Nikki Finke (2012) at Deadline reported, the demographic for Joss Whedon’s
film was extremely diverse, with its audience divided exactly in half: fifty percent
under twenty-five years old and fifty percent over. It skewed towards males, as
one might expect, with sixty percent of its audience being male, but forty percent
of those who bought tickets were female. Chief of Distribution at Disney, Dave
Hollis, was quite right to say, ‘We were clearly an option for everyone’ (qtd. in
Stewart 2012). Disney executives had every reason to be ecstatic at the box office

success of The Avengers having purchased Marvel Entertainment just three years
before in 2009 for $4 billion dollars. Like their equally high-profile acquisitions
of Pixar ($7.4 billion; 2006) and Lucasfilm ($4 billion; 2012), these transactions
consolidated Disney’s position as the world’s leading entertainment brand and
in 2016 the MCU films were central in enabling Disney to break the $7 billion
global box office record, which had never been achieved by a single studio before
(see Sweney 2016).
If the levels of revenue stopped there for a film like The Avengers the sta-
tistics would be remarkable enough, but the figures mentioned above do not
take into account global digital rentals and purchases, television rights and, even
more importantly, subsidiary revenue streams like video games, comic books
and other merchandising products connected to the film and its characters,
about whom Jan Füchtjohann wrote, ‘with their iconic costumes [they] func-
tion exactly like Coca-Cola – as easily identifiable, sold everywhere and hence
valuable brands’ (2011). The business of movie-making in the last twenty years
has transformed from a state in which the film itself functioned as the primary
revenue-generating product in the industry to it being just one part of an ex-
tensive multi-media tapestry, the metaphorical steel ball in the pinball machine
that Thomas Elsaesser described in his article, ‘The Blockbuster: Everything
Connects, But Not Everything Goes’; writing in 2001 Elsaesser could not have
anticipated the MCU, but he did see how the American film industry had begun
to be increasingly defined by the interconnection of diverse markets to an extent
it had never been before:
The principle behind it would be something like this: you launch with great force
the little steel ball, shoot it to the top, and then you watch it bounce off the differ-
ent contacts, pass through the different gates, and whenever it touches a contact,
your winning figures go up. The media entertainment business is such a pinball
machine: the challenge is to ‘own’ not only the steel ball but also as many of the
contacts as possible because the same ‘ball’ gets you ever higher scores, that is,
profits. The contact points are the cinema screens and video stores, theme parks
and toy shops, restaurant chains and video arcades, bookstores and CD record
shops. (2001: 18)
The result of this is, in financial terms concerning the Marvel Cinematic Universe
alone, a multi-billion-dollar industry which sometimes earns in the region of $2
billion per year at the box office, but also billions more in merchandising on
top of that (see Graser 2015), because, unlike what David Cronenberg and Susan
Faludi would have us believe, in actual fact, the appeal of the superhero ‘tran-
scends age, gender and ethnicity’ (Robin Korman, qtd. in Palmeri 2012).
There are other more technological and industrial reasons for the rise of the
superhero film to prominence as the genre came to both embody and define a
range of contemporary film production, distribution and exhibition practices.
The genre has ridden the crest of a wave of technological developments, both
benefitted from and driven advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI), a
symbiotic relationship Yvonne Tasker described as one in which ‘the reinvig-
oration of superhero action depends on and has in turn facilitated significant
advances in digital imagery’ (2015: 181). So while in 1978 Richard Donner’s
Superman was advertised with the tagline ‘You’ll believe a man can fly’ and the
film was at the vanguard of special effects for its time, advances in CGI now
allow filmmakers, for the first time ever, to put superheroes onscreen the way
they were originally envisioned in their comic books: whether it is the dynami-
cally realised exotic environments of Asgard (Thor), Wakanda (Black Panther)
and Sakaar (Thor: Ragnarok), spectacular battles in cities (real and imagined)
like New York (The Avengers), Xandar (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Sokovia
(Avengers: Age of Ultron), the creation of entirely computer-generated characters
with supramimetic precision that are able to seamlessly interact with the physi-
cal presence of live actors on set, as in the cases of the Hulk, Ultron, Rocket and
Groot (full grown, baby and teen), or where CGI is now able to replace char-
acters without the audience even being aware of it to have them accomplish
physically impossible action sequences like those performed by Stephen Strange
and Karl Mordo in Doctor Strange, or Spider-Man and Iron Man in Spider-Man:
Homecoming. CGI is now also used to convincingly de-age performers, enabling
actors to play themselves in flashbacks to the past, something which allowed the
then fifty-year-old Robert Downey Jr. to portray his twenty-something self in
Captain America: Civil War, the sixty-five-year-old Kurt Russell to play himself
at the turn of his thirties, around the time of his iconic roles in Escape From
New York (1981) and The Thing (1982), in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, or the
seventy-something Michael Douglas to play the character of Hank Pym in 1989
in Ant-Man, recreating exactly how he looked two years after Wall Street (1987)
and Fatal Attraction (1987). Douglas joked about this technology being able to
give him the opportunity to star not in a sequel to Romancing the Stone (1984)
and Jewel of the Nile (1985), but a prequel, and it is perhaps reasonable to specu-
late that this will become more common in the future given the high-profile use
of CGI to bring deceased performers back to life in films like Furious 7 (2015)
and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) (see Stolworthy 2015). These practices
have defined the tendency of modern blockbusters to prioritise image, action
and spectacle over narrative which has been described by some as a return to
the ‘cinema of attractions’, Tom Gunning’s categorisation of trends in the early
decades of cinema history to directly solicit ‘spectator attention, inciting visual

curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle – a unique event’
(1990: 58), a description which, without a doubt, could just as well be applied to
the contemporary blockbuster.3
The global market for these American films has also changed in ways which
have benefitted the proliferation of the superhero genre and others which pri-
marily rely on spectacle. The sequel paradigm which defined Hollywood film
production from the 1980s to the early 2000s is now seen as progressively out-
dated for larger brands in an age where the ‘universe’ model is considered a
more compatible long-term business strategy. One could argue that this idea of
a shared universe in which separate films exist in the same diegetic world can be
seen as early as the original Universal monster cycle (1931–48), but in the wake
of the success of the MCU many studios began to experiment with the form:
like the expansion of the cinematic Star Wars universe from the main series,
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), to include the so called ‘Anthology Series’
titles set in the same world like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star
Wars Story (2018), and Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’ franchise that began with The
Mummy (2017) and was planned to be the start of an intertwined six-film series
before disastrous reviews and disappointing box office figures for the first instal-
ment threw the whole project into disarray. This process has even necessitated
the emergence of new terminology to delineate its intricacies: an evolution from
simple terms like remake, sequel and prequel, to the more complicated lexicon
of reboot, re-imagining, sidequel, midquel, interquel and stealth sequel (see
Jolin 2012).4 These complexities led Peter Vignold in his Das Marvel Cinematic
Universe Anatomie einer Hyperserie to argue that the MCU
can no longer be fully understood as a linear film series, rather it forms a hi-
erarchical structure of encircling hyperseries and series within series that are
interconnected. The result is a potentially endless franchise that so far has suc-
cessfully escaped the almost inevitable narrative exhaustion encountered by
almost every other linear series, and with it has established itself in a compara-
tively short time as an economically dominant model. (2017: 10)
A large amount of this increasing revenue is due to the expanding influence of

global markets which have grown exponentially since 2008, the largest and most
important being China, but the list of countries impacting on growing box office
receipts for American films is diverse: from India to Venezuela, Nigeria to Peru,
five countries which were described in Variety in 2016 by Eric Schwartzel as ‘the
five fastest-growing markets’ in the world. Only $15 million of Iron Man’s gross
came from China, but by the time of Iron Man 3 this had increased to $121 mil-
lion. This extraordinary success was certainly not a one off; The Avengers made
$86.3 million of its $1.5 billion there and Avengers: Age of Ultron would go on
to make $240 million of its $1.4 billion in China also. However, even these huge
numbers were overshadowed by the success of The Fate of the Furious (2017),
the eighth film in the Fast and Furious franchise (2001–), which made nearly
$400 million in China, almost twice as much as it earned in the United States.
These figures clearly indicate the growing importance of the Chinese market
for American films which has resulted in a range of Chinese-American co-pro-
ductions like The Great Wall (2016) and Kong: Skull Island (2017), films having
scenes specifically shot in China (see Transformers: Age of Extinction [2014] and
Iron Man 3), or having their narratives altered to appeal to Chinese audiences
(see World War Z [2014]).5
So, the American film industry might have needed and even came to be de-
fined by the superhero film in this era, but what might it have been about these
films in particular which led them to resonate so powerfully with audiences, not
just in the United States, but all over the world? Might their principal appeal
be the escapist, wish-fulfilment fantasies of their narratives? Could American
audiences (and those around the globe) have been seeking solace from the tem-
pestuous realities of their day-to-day lives in the decades impacted upon by the
‘War on Terror’ and the global financial crisis? Or might it be the case, as Peter
Coogan argues in Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, that ‘Superheroes are
the closest our modern culture has to myths’? (2006: 124) Undoubtedly, it is
possible to discern a great deal about a society from its heroic mythology, those
exemplary figures it selects to be a manifestation of its highest values. While the
ancient Greeks had tales of Hercules, Achilles and Odysseus, and late-nineteenth
century America turned to mythologised portraits of Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett
and Jesse James, through the mid-twentieth century and into twenty-first, con-
temporary Western culture found its heroic ideals embodied in superheroes
like Superman, Batman and Captain America. Danny Fingeroth, in Superman
on the Couch, goes back even further to seek antecedents for these characters
who have always endorsed prevailing cultural values, to the likes of the Ancient
Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk (writings on whom were found on
Babylonian stone tablets dated as early as 18th century BC) and Biblical heroes
like Samson and David, which he calls the ‘precursors of superheroes’ (2004: 16).
Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, envisioned his most famous character as
a modern-day demi-god, stating ‘I conceived a character like Samson, Hercules,
and all the strong men I have ever heard of rolled into one’ (qtd. in Reynolds
1992: 9). Thus, the original incarnations of Superman and Captain America,
as Chris Rojek suggested, ‘present idealized representations of American her-
oism and the defence of justice’ (2001: 25) on the eve of America’s entry into
World War Two, and characters like the Fantastic Four (November 1961), the

Fig. 1: The heroes we need right now? The superhero as an articulation of contemporary
mythology in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
Incredible Hulk (May 1962), Iron Man (March 1963), Spider-Man (August
1963) and the X-Men (September 1963) were, according to Matthew Costello,
‘born under the mushroom cloud of potential nuclear war that was a corner-
stone of the four-decade bipolar division of the world between the United States
and the USSR’ (2009: 1). The narratives of the new millennial American super-
heroes explored in this monograph similarly provide a cultural battleground on
which a war of representation is waged. Their backdrop, one which forms them,
nourishes and sustains them, is the post-9/11 period, as the discourse of what
became referred to as the ‘War on Terror’ era emerged quite clearly, and not coin-
cidentally, as the dominant themes of the revivified superhero genre. American
superhero films very rarely explicitly mention the events of 11 September 2001
and the ‘War on Terror’, but they self-consciously evoke them almost obsessively,
both as thematic motifs and also visually in their detailed recreations of its mise-
en-scène. The ‘War in Terror’ and 9/11 are embedded within the frames of films
like Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (2005–2012), the X-Men series (1999–),
the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) (2013–) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
where they are restaged and refought in allegory by very American heroes
like Batman, Wolverine, Iron Man, Captain America, Superman and Wonder
Woman, projected through the prism of the superhero genre in reassuringly pal-
liative narratives which John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett have called a
‘mythic massage’ (1977: xiii) and Charmaine Fernandez refers to as ‘therapeutic
intervention’ (2013: 1).
In this way, one should regard the superhero film as the descendent of that
other truly American genre, the western, which, for a number of decades, was
one of the most popular genres during the Classical Hollywood era. It has large-
ly retreated from our cinema and television screens today, with some notable
exceptions; nevertheless the western and its evocative frontier mythology still
remain a culturally resonant motif in debates about American ideology and
identity. The genre’s themes and that which they portray as normative behav-
iour are not too far removed from those promulgated by the superhero film: in
both, ‘real men’ are those who are strong, self-reliant, courageous and resolute,
simplistically drawn bad guys are there to be vanquished, women are to be saved
and adored, the law is inherently unreliable, and the only answer to a problem,
regardless of what it might be, is righteous and redemptive violence. Just as im-
portantly, both genres are primarily about the experiences of the same group, as
what Jane Tompkins wrote of the western is equally true of the superhero film,
that its lead characters are primarily ‘male, and almost all of the other characters
are men’ (1992: 38).
Part of the former appeal of the western and the current popularity of the su-
perhero film is undoubtedly their malleability. They are able to mould themselves
into a variety of sub-genres and moods, and they both, as Barry Keith Grant
observed, take ‘social debates and tensions and cast them into formulaic narra-
tives, condensing them into dramatic conflicts between individual characters,
heroes and villains, providing familiar stories that help us “narrativize” and so
make sense of the large abstract forces that effect our lives’ (2012: 4). In its long
history, the western has been able to subsume diverse variations into its cen-
tral narrative and visual parameters: from gritty and realistic tales, to comedic
and even musical variations of the genre, both in film and on television. In the
same way, superhero texts of the new millennium have also had a considerable
range: from light-hearted and fantastical (Fantastic Four [2005] and Sky High
[2005]), more grounded and quasi-realistic (Special [2006] and Defendor [2009]),
quirky and offbeat (Hellboy [2004] and Deadpool [2016]), period-set (Wonder
Woman [2017] and Captain America: The First Avenger [2010]), adult-oriented
(Watchmen [2009] and Logan [2017]), animated (The Incredibles [2004] and The
LEGO Batman Movie [2017]) to parodic and comedic (Kick Ass [2010] and The
Green Hornet [2010]), even an entry into the Found Footage cycle (Chronicle
[2012]).
After 9/11, several commentators used the western as shorthand for asser-
tions about what American brands of justice might resemble in response. Dianne
Amrie Amann wrote that President George W. Bush had ‘swaggered onto the
foreign-policy scene like a latter-day Matt Dillon [from the TV series Gunsmoke,
CBS, 1955–75] aiming to shoot down the supposed menace of international en-
tanglement’ (qtd. in Lawrence and Jewett 2003: 12). Bush seemed to embrace this
idea about himself and even channelled the iconic figures of John Wayne and
Clint Eastwood with his repeated evocations of the Old West: only one week after
9/11 he demanded that Osama Bin Laden be taken ‘dead or alive’ (see Harnden

2001) and he also said that the best way to find terrorists was to ‘smoke them
out’ (qtd. in Knowlton 2001). In 2002 he suggested that, ‘Contrary to my image
as a Texan with two guns at my side, I’m more comfortable with a posse’ (qtd.
in Bumiller). However, it was the superhero that many seemed to turn to more
and more frequently as a frame of reference as the decade progressed. Peggy
Noonan wrote that after seeing Bush at Ground Zero in New York she expected
him to ‘tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his chest’ (2003) and some of
Bush’s rhetoric did seem reminiscent of the genre: his quest to ‘rid the world of
the evil-doers [in] a monumental struggle of good versus evil’ (2002) or a pledge
to ‘wage a war to save civilization itself’ with a cause that is ‘just and victory
is ultimately assured’ (2001e). President Obama was frequently envisioned as a
superhero during his election campaign (see Gopolam 2008), but almost as of-
ten as a supervillain by his political opponents, including, most memorably, the
image of him as Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, by Firas Alkhateeb (see Borrelli
2009). In similar ways, the larger than life figure of Donald Trump became a
malleable icon for those on both sides of the political spectrum and his election
victory in 2016 was even directly blamed, by more than one person, on the su-
perhero film itself (see Hagley 2016; Melamid 2017). In an episode of Real Time
with Bill Maher (HBO, 2003–) broadcast on 19 May 2017, host Bill Maher stated
that Hollywood’s obsession with superhero films was responsible for the rise in
popularity of Trump in language more colourful than that used by John Shelton
Lawrence and Robert Jewett in The American Monomyth (1977), but expressing
very similar sentiments:
If you’re asking, what’s the problem? The problem is that superhero movies im-
print this mindset that we are not masters of our own destiny, and the best we can
do is sit back and wait for Star-Lord and a fucking raccoon to sweep in and save
our sorry asses. … Forget hard work, government institutions, diplomacy, invest-
ment. We just need a hero to rise, and so we put out the Bat Signal for one man
who could step in and solve all of our problems very quickly. And that’s how we
got our latest superhero: Orange Sphincter.
This monograph maintains that the superhero has largely replaced the western
hero in the cultural imaginary and performs a very similar cultural function as
it once did. Instead of being raised on western serials screened almost perpetu-
ally on television and playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in the backyard, today’s
generations are raised on superhero narratives, and children now play with (and
as) Iron Man, Superman, Batman, Captain America and Spider-Man.6 Despite
the retreat of the western genre from the forefront of popular culture, its mythol-
ogy and the frontier narrative remains a vital part of the American experience,
Fig. 2: The superhero film as the descendent of the western. Here in Logan (2017), one of
its most explicit articulations, an aging Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) holds up an X-Men
comic book while Shane (1953) plays in the background
as Geoff King commented: ‘The traditional generic western may be in a state

of near terminal decline, but many aspects of the mythic or ideological narra-
tive that animated it remain alive and well in Hollywood’ (2000: 2). The western
has become subsumed into the superhero genre and can be seen quite clearly
in many of its films, whether explicitly in Logan, which draws extensively and
artfully from Shane (1953) and Unforgiven (1992), or implicitly in films like Iron
Man, Avengers: Age of Ultron and the rest of the MCU. 7
This idea of what might have been needed by American culture in the post-
9/11 era is particularly relevant for the superhero film above all genres as it
emerges as one of its central motifs to an extent it had never been before. In
Spider-Man (2002), one of the first films in this superhero renaissance and a
film very much marked by 9/11 in terms of its themes and iconography, but one
which never mentions the event by name, thereby establishing a paradigm that
will be followed, for the most part, by superhero films throughout the decade,
Peter Parker’s Aunt May suggests: ‘We need a hero, courageous, sacrificing peo-
ple, setting examples for all of us. Everybody loves a hero, people line up for
‘em, cheer for them, scream their names.’ Raimi’s film provided audiences with
the single most influential line of dialogue in the genre in the two decades af-
ter, one which has been linked by many not just to fictional superheroes, but to
America as a whole: ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ (see Peltonen
2013). In Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006) Lois Lane wins a Pulitzer Prize
for her article, ‘Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman’ and she later asks the
iconic hero, ‘How could you leave us like that? I moved on. So did the rest of
us. That’s why I wrote it. The world doesn’t need a saviour. And neither do I…’
In The Avengers, after more than sixty years frozen in the ice, a newly revived

Captain America is reluctant to put on his old red, white and blue uniform as he
has seen how much the world has changed since 1945. He asks Agent Coulson,
‘Aren’t the Stars and Stripes a little old-fashioned?’, to which Coulson responds,
‘With everything that is happening and things coming to light people just might
need a little old-fashioned’. It is Christopher Nolan’s genre-redefining Batman
trilogy which offers the most sustained meditation on this theme. In Batman
Begins Rachel Dawes tells Bruce Wayne, ‘Maybe someday, when Gotham no lon-
ger needs Batman, I’ll see him [Bruce Wayne] again’; and in the sequel, The Dark
Knight, the Joker lectures Batman about the capricious nature of the residents
of Gotham City by telling him, ‘They need you right now, but when they don’t,
they’ll cast you out, like a leper!’ But it is from Lieutenant James Gordon that
the title of this prologue is derived, as at the climax of The Dark Knight Batman
accepts being framed for the murder of Harvey Dent in order to allow the resi-
dents of Gotham City to continue believing in Dent’s integrity, even though it
is a lie. Gordon suggests it is the appropriate course of action ‘because he’s the
hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now’. It is my contention
that the return of the superhero in the first decades of the new millennium can
be explained, to a significant extent, by the fact that it was the superhero that the
United States needed in the fractious post-9/11 period. Outside the frames of the
screen in the aftermath of 9/11, Jack Valenti, the then Head of Motion Picture
Association of America, certainly felt that America needed the movies then more
than ever before. He stated, ‘Here in Hollywood we must continue making our
movies and our TV programmes. … The country needs what we create’ (2001;
emphasis added). An interrogation of what the Marvel Cinematic Universe of-
fered audiences in this era and what they might have to say about the times in
which they were made is the subject of this monograph.
Notes
1 The MCU has also earned considerably more than other franchises which began in the
first decade of the twenty-first century like the Harry Potter series (2001–), The Fast
and Furious series (2001–), The Lord of the Rings (2001–2014) and the Transformers
(2007–) series.
2 In fact, 2017 was one of the biggest years for the superhero genre with Wonder
Woman, Logan, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2, The LEGO
Batman Movie, Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League topping the box office all over the
world on their release.
3 Despite the seemingly contemporary nature of these assertions, they have been
around for decades. As early as 1986 Tom Gunning wrote, ‘Clearly in some sense re-
cent spectacle cinema has reaffirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what
might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects’ (1990: 70). See also
Wanda Strauven’s The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (2006).
4 A sidequel is a sequel that takes place at the same time as a previous film i.e. The
Bourne Legacy (2012); a midquel or an interquel is a sequel which is set during a gap
in a previously completed film series i.e. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story; and a stealth
sequel is a film which is not marketed as a sequel but is revealed to be one during the
course of its narrative, as in Split (2017). The universe model can be very lucrative, but
can also collapse after one poorly received film, as ambitious plans for franchises to
follow Ghostbusters (2016) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) disappeared.
5 This marked growth in earnings around the globe can be tracked in country after
country. In Venezuela and India, two of the markets mentioned in Schwartzel’s ar-
ticle (2016), Iron Man made $1.9 million and $2 million respectively; just a few years
later Iron Man 3 made $12.4 million and $12.2 million in the same locations.
6 Intriguingly, this transition is commented on directly in Spider-Man: Homecoming
by Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) who goes on to become the charismatic villain
the Vulture. In the film’s prologue, set in the aftermath of the Battle of New York
that was the climax of The Avengers, the Toomes Salvage Company are shown to be
contracted to clean up the city. When he sees a picture of the Avengers drawn by a
child he remarks: ‘Things are never gonna be the same now. … You got aliens, you got
big green guys tearing down buildings. When I was a kid I used to draw cowboys and
indians.’
7 The director of Logan, James Mangold, introduced a special screening of Shane at
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater on 7
October 2013, with the following comment, ‘The best western films (and this is an
example of the very best) are not centered on nostalgia, are not historical in nature
(the moment in history when these films took place is largely a manufacture of imagi-
nation). The best of these films create a landscape that has evolved into an American
mythology, one as resonant and evocative as religious parables, Japanese Samurai
tales and the Greek Gods of Olympus’ (qtd. in Coleman 2017).

INTRODUCTION
Superheroes in the New Millennium

and ‘The Example of America’
To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our

troops defend, because there is no force in the world more powerful than the
example of America.
– President Barack Obama (2009)
We of the twenty-first century, although unable to believe in the literal reality

of such heroes, nevertheless still dream our myths onward, clothing them in
modern dress. … We dream them onward, give them colorful costumes, and
pseudoscientific origins, but we no longer consider them real. Or do we?
– Don LoCicero (2007: 229)
This book is a critical exploration of the range of films and television shows
which are commonly referred to as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Starting with
the release of Iron Man in May 2008, Marvel Studios endeavoured to create a
cohesive narrative in which the characters and events portrayed reside within
the same diegetic world. While this had been commonplace in comic books for
decades, in the film industry, at the time, it was largely unprecedented. As a body
of work the MCU emerges as a remarkable range of case studies, representative
both of the changes that swept through the film and television industries during
the period and of how profoundly immersed in the tumultuous political climate
of the era new millennial American cinema became.
Although popular film and television shows are often dismissed as shallow
frivolities with the assertion that ‘popular culture, or at least the part of it trans-
mitted by the mass media, tends to “go in one eye and out the other”’ (Gans 1999:
xiii), a considerable amount of critical writing has argued that media texts have
a much more complicated relationship with the cultures that produce them and,
in actual fact, can be regarded as striking encapsulations of the shifting ideologi-
cal coordinates of their eras. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in their
ground-breaking volume The American Monomyth called this lingering belief
in the superficiality of popular culture the ‘bubblegum fallacy’ (see 1977: 1–22),
and even though it is something that has been comprehensively refuted in the
decades since, it remains pervasive. Many have contended that, on the contrary,
popular films (and other visual media) are able to bear witness to, record and
even engage with the ideological currencies of their times (see Kracauer 1947 and
Kaes 2011 on Weimar-era German cinema; Starck 2010 on Cold War American
science fiction). For example, writers like Robin Wood, Peter Lev, Michael Ryan
and Douglas Kellner argue that the volatile political climate of 1970s America
became viscerally materialised within the frames of films from a wide variety of
genres like Dirty Harry (1971), Chinatown (1974), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), Star Wars: A New
Hope (1977), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) and
many others. These films do much more than reflect the prevailing cultural dis-
course; in fact, they contribute to it in a range of palpable and compelling ways.
Notable monographs like Robin Wood’s Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan
(1986), Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner’s Camera Politica: The Politics and
Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (1990) and Peter Lev’s American Films
of the 1970s: Conflicting Visions (2000) postulate that it is naïve to regard some-
thing as culturally impactful as popular film only as disposable entertainment.
Not only can we discern that ‘the ideology of the contemporary Hollywood film
is therefore inseparable from the social history of the era’ (Ryan and Kellner
1990: 7), but also that the richly textured and dynamic tapestry of these films
should be understood as ‘key moments of a debate on what America is and what
America should be’ (Lev 2000: 185).
In a very similar way to this, this volume asserts that the films produced
by the American film industry in the first decades of the twenty-first century
provide a vivid testimony to an era David Holloway argued was defined by a
‘national security crisis, an imperial crisis, a crisis in capitalist democracy and
governance, a crisis in the relationship between the US and Europe, multiple
crises in the frameworks and institutions of international law and order (notably
SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 15

the UN and NATO), as well as a series of military and humanitarian crises’
(2008: 6). Of course, American films which explicitly depict aspects of the ‘War
on Terror’ like United 93 (2006), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and American Sniper
(2014), the global financial crisis like Up in the Air (2009), Margin Call (2011)
and The Big Short (2016), or issues of race relations like 12 Years a Slave (2013),
Fruitvale Station (2013) and O.J.: Made in America (2016), are those most often
connected by commentators and audiences to the discourse of the era. However,
one must also consider popular films like those from the science fiction, horror
and action genres, which, while often critically marginalised, frequently emerge
as potent cultural artefacts. As Anton Kaes maintains, this is a complicated pro-
cess which means ‘repositioning films within the cultural production of a time
and a place, but also appreciating them as complex appropriations of the world
and unique interpretations (not reflections) of historical experience’ (2011: 6).
In this way I maintain that the superhero genre should be considered as an
articulation and manifestation of contemporary cultural mythologies.1 Here we
must understand the term mythology in the Barthesian sense as a participa-
tory cultural discourse which Richard Slotkin called ‘a complex of narratives
that dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, re-
ducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors…
[which] provides a scenario or prescription for action, defining and limiting the
possibilities for human response to the universe’ (1973: 6). If it is self-evident
that concepts of national identity are a product of a narrativisation process, as
Benedict Anderson described in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections
on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983), what better approximation of
this is there than popular cinematic narratives embraced by the public at large?2
I argue then that national cinemas are to be understood as the product of an
Institutional State Apparatus (ISA) in the Althusserian sense and even super-
ficially simplistic seeming popular films emerge as powerful examples of what
Frederic Jameson called highly ‘socially symbolic acts’ (1981: 20).
It is within these parameters, given their considerable financial success, in-
tense levels of popularity and acute cultural impact that this monograph situates
the films and television shows of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU pro-
vides us with a range of affective texts which function as an embodiment of their
era in a range of ways, viewing the turbulent political and social climate of the
new millennial decades through the prism of the superhero genre, and in so doing
present us with a materialisation of ideological discourse intrinsic to the period.
This book considers how the mythopoetic narratives of the MCU legitimise en-
during fantasies of American exceptionalism in the post-9/11 era by frequently
returning to the moral binarisms that defined World War II and the Cold War
in the cultural imaginary; in doing so they participate in the perpetuation and
consolidation of configurations of American identity not just within the US but,
given their international impact, all around the globe.
While this monograph intends to argue that the MCU is incontrovertibly a
product of the era in which it was made, it is imperative to be wary of simplistic
connections which writers like Geoff King (2016) have warned of. Elsewhere, I
have called this process ‘9/11 apophenia’ (McSweeney 2014: 23), using the term
to illustrate the desire to see direct causality between the events of the ‘War on
Terror’ and cinematic texts produced in the ensuing years, which, in fact, might
not be there. In this respect, one might regard that Tom Pollard reaches too far in
his volume Hollywood 9/11 Superheroes, Supervillains and Superdisasters, when
he insists there is a ‘subtle yet distinct post 9/11 message’ (2011: 44) in Robert
Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007), which apparently equates the three monsters Beowulf
defeats with Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’: Iraq, North Korea and Iran. Even Francis
Pheasant-Kelly, in her excellent Fantasy Film Post 9/11 (2013), which persuasive-
ly situates the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the ‘War on Terror’ era, might be
considered as reading a little too much into one of the several Afghanistan-set
scenes in Iron Man. Before he becomes the eponymous hero of the film’s title,
Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) visits the Kunar Province in Afghanistan which
was then regarded by some as ‘the deadliest place on earth to be an American’
(Maxwell 2013: iv) and a location firmly associated with what Jason Burke (2011)
called ‘the 9/11 Wars’ in his book of the same name. The year of the release of Iron
Man and the one preceding it saw a wave of Iraq- and Afghanistan-set combat
films including (but not limited to) In the Valley of Elah (2007), Redacted (2007),
Stop-Loss (2008) and The Hurt Locker (2008), the vast majority of which had un-
derperformed so substantially at the box office that to set one’s film in Iraq or
Afghanistan was widely regarded as ‘box office poison’ (Everhart 2009). As Stark
demonstrates his new range of weapons of mass destruction, suggestively titled
the ‘Freedom Line’, to the grateful American military for whom he is the pri-
mary supplier (a role which sees him hailed as both ‘visionary, genius, American
patriot’ and the ‘merchant of death’ in a sense embodying some of the central
paradoxes of the film), Pheasant-Kelly suggests that ‘the camera then cuts to the
onlooking military personnel, whose caps are swept off by the blast’s shockwave
(the resultant dust clouds reminding viewers of media footage at the Twin Towers
collapse)’ (2013: 148). Iron Man (and Iron Man himself) is a product of the ‘War
on Terror’, both literally and figuratively, but the connections here are too explic-
itly drawn. Instead, I will argue that Iron Man, featuring a character described by
Bradford Wright as ‘the most political of Marvel’s superheroes’ (2003: 222), and
the MCU films as a whole, function as a manifestation of some of the prevailing
fears and fantasies which defined the era. Thus, just as comic book icons like
Superman, Batman, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor (first appearance August

1962) and Iron Man are intrinsically connected to the times in which they were
first created, the new millennial incarnations of these characters are immersed
in the geopolitical climate of the post-9/11 decades. This is evident not only in the
Afghanistan-set opening of Iron Man, the first film of what Marvel Studios called
Phase One (2008–12), but in the film’s subsequent representation of the mili-
tary industrial complex and in Iron Man’s virtuous extra-judicial incursions into
Afghanistan (‘I had my eyes opened … I saw young Americans killed by the very
weapons I created to defend and protect them. And I saw that I had become part
of a system that is comfortable with zero accountability’). This process continues
in the representation of the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk, once an icon of the Cold
War, but in the MCU updated to configure distinctly new millennial articula-
tions of American military power, surveillance and influence (‘That man’s body
is the property of the US Army!’). It can also be seen in the allegorical narrative
of Thor, (‘A wise King never seeks out war. But he must always be ready for it…’)
in which many saw the Bush administration reflected (see Arnold 2011; Mills
2013). This cultural battleground is also evident in the MCU’s nostalgic portrayal
of World War II in Captain America: The First Avenger (‘General Patton has said
that wars are fought with weapons but are won by men. We are going to win
this war because we have the best men!’), which despite being fantastical, depicts
the conflict in a very similar way to the likes of Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Saving
Private Ryan (1998) and Fury (2014), films that have actively participated in the
erasure of the complicated and troubling realities of the war in favour of a reifica-
tion of the ‘greatest generation’ rhetoric which has come to define how it has been
remembered ever since.
Phase One of the MCU culminated in The Avengers in which the characters
from the five previous individual films, often referred to as the Avengers Prime,
were united in something more than a sequel, rather in a cinematic ‘mega event’
(Kevin Feige qtd. in Surrell 2012: 13) to prevent the Asgardian God Loki and his
invading army of Chitauri from taking over the world in what becomes known
throughout the diegetic universe of the MCU as the Battle of New York.3 If even
one of the previous stand-alone adventures had been a financial failure, it would
have thrown the entire MCU experiment into jeopardy; yet The Avengers had the
biggest opening weekend in the history of American film at the time with over
$200 million dollars at the US box office alone, almost its entire budget recouped
in one weekend.4 Philip French was dismissive of the film in The Observer where
he wrote, ‘Karl Marx could have been anticipating 9/11 and this movie when he
said that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce’ (2012), but he was one
of several cultural commentators who drew sustained connections between the
film and the events of 11 September 2001 (see Brody 2012; Hoberman 2012). The
Avengers is one of many science fiction films of the new millennium which have
filled their screens with barely coded images and situations self-consciously de-
signed to evoke 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’, a fact that was commented on in the
United States and abroad. Kyle Buchanan, writing for the The Vulture, felt obliged
to ask, ‘Is It Possible to Make a Hollywood Blockbuster Without Evoking 9/11?’
(2013) and Thomas Sotinel, writing in Le Monde, observed that The Avengers was
one of many films to embed itself within ‘the images of that day [which] have
now become motifs of American popular cinema’ (2012).5
The Battle of New York is deliberately constructed as a 9/11-style event within
The Avengers, but also in terms of its aftermath in both the films and the televi-
sion shows which followed. Marvel’s Phase Two (2013–15) began with Iron Man 3
which saw Tony Stark suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) as the direct result of his experiences in New York and the emergence of
the Bin Laden-esque terrorist called The Mandarin (‘Some people call me a ter-
rorist … I consider myself a teacher. America, ready for another lesson?’), which
was followed by Captain America: The Winter Soldier as the titular character
is forced to come to terms with the moral vagaries of the twenty-first century,
confronting intrusive governmental policies in a narrative which for many was
explicitly connected to cultural discourse surrounding America’s domestic
and international security and surveillance policies in the era (see Eddy 2014;
Edelstein 2014).
This volume argues that MCU provides audiences with wish-fulfilment fan-
tasies that operate on both personal and national levels. It offers us powerful
individual fantasies about who we could be: stronger, faster, more virile and more
attractive (which are literalised within the diegesis in the cases of Steve Rogers,
Bruce Banner and Peter Quill), but also fantasies of empowerment on the global
stage. This is not a new assertion with regard to the relationship between cinema
and national identity: witness how the James Bond franchise (1962–) has fre-
quently been read as an illusory allohistorical fantasy of continued preeminence
in the international sphere which ignores Britain’s readily apparent declining
geopolitical status (see Chapman 2007; Baron 2009); or how the paramnesiac
romances of Hindi commercial cinema elide and obfuscate real-life political and
social instabilities (see Kaur and Sinha 2005; Dayal 2014). In this respect, popular
films are to be understood as heterotopic narratives, that is, physical representa-
tions (whether conscious or unconscious) of what society considers its idealised
dimensions, which, in the case of the superhero film, reimagine a crisis-filled
era through the comforting and nostalgic prism of a largely reactionary genre.
They alleviate and assuage real-world anxieties in a process defined by Lawrence
and Jewett as a ‘mythic massage [that] soothes and satisfies. It imparts the re-
laxing feeling that society can actually be redeemed by anti-democratic means’
(1977: xiii). This is why a great many superheroes are explicitly, and accurately,

connected to the ideologies of the countries which produce them, resulting in
them emerging as what Jason Dittmer describes as nationalist superheroes in
his book Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives,
and Geopolitics (2012).
Superhero films, then, should be understood as performing a cultural func-
tion for audiences, whether they are intended to by their creators or not, in a very
similar way to how American cinema has played a prominent role in the way
many conflicts have become remembered in the cultural imaginary, whether we
consider World War II (1939–45), as previously mentioned, or the Vietnam War
(1955–75), which was comprehensively remodelled and reshaped by Hollywood
to fit more readily into American concepts of itself, its global role and its place in
the history of the twentieth century. Therefore, while the public at large consid-
ered films like Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), The Deer Hunter (1978)
and Apocalypse Now to be critical of the Vietnam War, their primary ideological
function was actually to ‘address and alleviate this trauma in order to restore
American self-belief and credibility’ (Westwell 2014: 57) as they rewrite the
conflict as a noble failure fought for honourable reasons. These films do what
popular American cinema has done since its inception and, as André Bazin sug-
gested, manage ‘in an extraordinarily competent way, to show American society
just as it wanted to see itself’ (2014: 143).
It should be noted that, at the time of writing, the MCU has spanned the
administrations of three American presidents. Iron Man and The Incredible
Hulk were released in the final months of the George W. Bush administration
(2001–2009), and the third film, Iron Man 2 (2010), until the fourteenth, Doctor
Strange (2016), were produced during Barack Obama’s presidency (2009–2017).
Ben Walters saw Obama reflected in the MCU as early as Iron Man 2 and called
Stark’s struggles with what it might mean to be a superhero in the new millenni-
um as ‘the first superhero film of the Obama era’ (2010). While Push, Watchmen,
X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Defendor (all 2009) are chronologically the first
superhero films released during the Obama administration, Walters is perhaps
partially right to offer a distinction between some of the Bush-era superhero
films which were quite often ‘about the use and abuse of power’ and those of the
Obama era which ‘suggests a country anxious and uncertain about what lies at its
core and beyond its reach, and with a taste for the comforts of nostalgia’ (ibid.).
At one point in Iron Man 2 Stark picks up an image of Iron Man designed in the
style of Shepard Fairey’s iconic ‘Hope’ poster which Peter Schjeldahl called ‘the
most efficacious American political illustration since “Uncle Sam wants you”’
(2009) and turns to Pepper Potts telling her he is ‘tired of the liberal agenda’. The
comment is ambiguously presented, but might be seen as referring to the grow-
ing sense of ‘disconnect between the expectations created by Obama’s campaign
rhetoric and the reality of how he governed’ (Savage 2015: 108) which was already
evident by the time of the film’s release. Two years later The Avengers was one
of many Hollywood films released in 2012, rightly or wrongly, to be called an
example of ‘Obama Cinema’ alongside Lincoln, Django Unchained, The Hunger
Games, Beasts of the Southern Wild and many others (see, also, Izo 2014).6 These
interpretations of The Avengers were not restricted to the United States and were
indeed global, with the likes of Oliver Delcroix in Le Figero, titling his review
of the film ‘The Avengers: le film étendard des années Obama’ (2012) and Luis
Martínez, writing in El Mundo, ‘Obama, contado por Hollywood’ (2013).7 A.O.
Scott and Manohla Dargis suggested Joss Whedon’s film
might have been called ‘Team of Rivals’ — the title of the book, by Doris Kearns
Goodwin, that was one of the sources for Lincoln. And Joss Whedon’s Marvel
costume party is, like Mr. Spielberg’s historical costume drama, largely about
an urgent response to a political crisis. It is also about community organizing,
as Fury mobilizes a fractious group of individuals whom he must persuade to
pursue a set of common interests. As such, The Avengers may be the exemplary
Obama Era superhero movie, replacing the figure of the solitary, shadowy pala-
din with a motley assortment of oddballs and, despite the title, focusing less on
vengeance than on interplanetary peacekeeping. (2012)
In May 2017 Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 (2017) became the first MCU film
of the Trump presidency, but even by then several films released during the first
hundred days of Trump’s administration like Logan, Get Out, Kong: Skull Island
and The Boss Baby (all 2017), had already been connected by some to the discourse
of the incipient Trump era.8 By April 2017 Trump himself had become subsumed
into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with fairly explicit allusions to him and his
administration in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. In the episode ‘Identity and
Change’ (4.17) broadcast on 11 April 2017, inside the alternate computer reality
known as the Framework, Leopold Fitz, in that world a high-ranking member
of HYDRA, states, ‘Believe me, we will defeat these terrorists and we will make
our society great again!’, and later in ‘All the Madam’s Men’ (4.19), broadcast on
25 April 2017, Coulson refers to HYDRA’s lies as ‘alternative facts’, just three
months after Counselor to the President, Kelly Conway, infamously coined the
neologism in an episode of Meet the Press (NBC, 1947–) on 22 January 2017.
So, while Iron Man, the film which started the MCU, is just a superhero
film, it is also a product of the ideological system in which it was produced
and, as Tanner Mirrlees convincingly argues, reinforces three separate but in-
terconnected aspects of American power: ‘US economic power (as a Hollywood
blockbuster and synergistic franchise), US Military power (as a DOD-Hollywood

co-produced militainment) and cultural power (as a national and global relay
for US imperial ideologies)’ (2014: 5). Like many American films (and much,
although not all, of the MCU), Iron Man received both privileged access and
extensive material in exchange for its favourable representation of the US mili-
tary, the cultural implications of which are investigated in detail in works like
David L. Robb’s Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the
Movies (2004), Tricia Jenkins’ The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film
and Television (2012) and Matthew Alford and Tom Secker’s National Security
Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood (2017).
These authors explore how texts like Pearl Harbor (2001), Black Hawk Down
(2001), The Kingdom (2007), Act of Valour (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), Zero
Dark Thirty, and 24 (Fox, 2001–10) are provided with substantial governmental
support which then has a demonstrable impact on how the military or agen-
cies like the FBI or the CIA are portrayed onscreen.9 Perhaps the most pertinent
example of this relationship is the 1980s Bruckheimer/Simpson production and
Cold War power fantasy Top Gun (1986) which, according to a variety of sourc-
es, had a substantial impact on Navy recruitment figures after May 1986 due to
its glamourisation of the subject matter (see Suid 2002: 500). About the film,
Douglas Kellner has written, ‘Top Gun positions the audience in ways to induce
spectators to identify or sympathize with its politics; while many of us may resist
these positions and may not buy into their ideologies, we must actively resist the
text itself’ (1995: 80). For many, Top Gun might seem to be ‘just a movie’, but it
is quite clear to see how it is a product of the ideological system in which it was
made at a very particular time in American history; furthermore, it functions
not just as a reflection of these times, but an active participant in them in a way
that this volume will suggest is true for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was no
coincidence that nearly twenty years later in 2003 it was Top Gun that Karl Rove,
Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush adminis-
tration, seemed to be evoking when he orchestrated Bush’s landing on the deck
of the USS Abraham Lincoln which was followed by the now infamous ‘Mission
Accomplished’ speech. In a similar way, the films of the MCU bind audiences to
their own ideological perspectives, which also have real-world ramifications. If
it is true, as Neal Curtis wrote in his volume Sovereignty and Superheroes, that
‘rather than simply being read as allegorical representations of real-world issues,
the comics themselves make a direct contribution to the culture from which they
arise, and that in a very important way make their own contribution’ (2016: 5),
what might we conclude then about the power of popular film, with its affective
cinematic mechanisms, its privileged status and its truly global impact? Almost a
year before the release of Iron Man, after the production shot scenes at the histor-
ic Edwards Airforce Base in California, Captain Christian Hodge, the Defense
Department’s project officer for the film, stated that ‘the Air Force is going to
come off looking like rock stars’ and Master Sergeant Larry Belen, superinten-
dent of technical support for the air pilot school, directly evoked the iconic 1986
Tom Cruise film when he suggested, ‘I want people to walk away from this movie
with a really good impression of the Air Force, like they got about seeing the
Navy in Top Gun’ (qtd. in Miles 2007).10
On a broader level, the MCU has produced narratives which reify notions
of American exceptionalism in the wake of the ‘monstrous dose of reality’
(Sontag 2001) that was 9/11. They are a body of films which articulate, as Godfrey
Hodgeson suggests, ‘the idea that the United States is not just the richest and
most powerful of the world’s more than two hundred states but also the most
politically and morally exceptional’ (2009: 10). This book asserts that the trauma
of 9/11 and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’ posed such powerful challenges to some
of the essential tenets on which American identity is based, that these events had
to be rewritten, reframed and replayed in ways more conducive to how America
sees itself. This master narrative which emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 was
one promulgated by the Bush administration but was readily embraced by the
media and it was one which centralised some potent and formative myths about
American identity in its reconfiguration of America as a reluctant superpower,
the continuation of the enduring underdog/world’s number one paradox, the le-
gitimisation of the use of American military force for good around the globe,
the belief in World War II as an unambiguous ‘good war’, the marked certainty
of America’s moral superiority (and lack of moral equivalency) and the nobil-
ity of America’s divinely ordained mission abroad.11 While these ideas are not
unique to the new millennium, they can be seen as a reaffirmation of an America
that is still ‘the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not
now have freedom’ (Ronald Reagan, 1981), on ‘the right side of history’ (Barack
Obama, 2015),12 as ‘the indispensable nation [which is able to] see further into
the future’ (Madeline Albright, on an episode of The Today Show [NBC, 1952–],
19 February 1998) and ‘the world’s best hope for peace and freedom’ (George
W. Bush, 2001b) at a time of national crisis.13 These very motifs find themselves
strikingly replicated in the MCU and even function as some of the undergirding
tropes of its entire narrative framework. Yet this understanding of American
identity is quite profoundly disconnected from the real world and is a manifesta-
tion of what Donald Pease calls ‘The United States of Fantasy’ in his book The
New American Exceptionalism (2009: 1) and is described as ‘the imperial logic
of the American Dream’ by Jim Cullen in Democratic Empire: The United States
Since 1945 (2016: xiii). However, they are foundational identificatory mecha-
nisms embraced by Americans and perpetuated in cultural texts and discourse
in a range of ways.

The films of the MCU emerge as embodiments of national fantasies and con-
solidate a range of decidedly American views on the world to the extent that a
more comprehensive literalisation of American exceptionalism would be hard
to find. In the films of the MCU the United States is at the centre of the world,
both its global leader and also the world’s primary victim of acts of violence (see
Grieder 2009). It is for this reason, as well as the obvious nature of cultural rel-
evance, that the vast majority of the superheroes within the MCU are American,
most obviously so in the case of Steve Rogers/Captain America, who Matthew
Costello memorably described as ‘an avatar of American ideology’ (2009: 13),
but also Tony Stark/Iron Man who Bryn Upton suggested ‘is America after 9/11’
(2014: 33; emphasis added). Even the Norse God of Thunder, Thor, who in spite of
being from Asgard (one of the nine worlds of Norse mythology), emerges as dis-
tinctly American in the way he is constructed, both in the Americanisation of his
values and Asgard’s depiction as a proto-American Empire. Kenneth Branagh’s
Thor opens with Odin’s characterisation of Asgard as being a ‘beacon of hope
shining across the stars’, heavily reminiscent of remarks made by many about
America over the decades. For George H. W. Bush, America was ‘the last beacon
of hope and strength around the world’ (1992), Barack Obama called America
‘the engine of the global economy and a beacon of hope around the world’ (2010)
and George W. Bush stated in his address to the nation on the day after 9/11 that
‘America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom
and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining’
(2001c). These allusions and a narrative which follows an impetuous and vain
young man on a journey to maturity led to many reviews with pun-laden titles
like ‘The Summer’s New Hero: Thor-Ge W. Bush’ (Singer 2011) and ‘Blockbuster:
Bush v. Thor’ (Stewart 2011). Thor, like the majority of MCU texts, functions
as a powerful wish-fulfilment fantasy which represents how many Americans
chose to view the world after 9/11. However, as Susan Faludi asserted, ‘No doubt,
the fantasy consoled many. But rather than make us any safer, it misled us into
danger, damaging the very security the myth was supposed to bolster. There are
consequences to living in a dream’ (2007: 289).
These new millennial superheroes embody values and traits explicitly
coded as American, just as many heroic figures in Hollywood cinematic his-
tory have themselves been seen as representations of American values: from
the fictional construct that is ‘John Wayne’ (see Wills 1999; Noonan 2001) to
Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo (see Tasker 1993; Jeffords 1994) in the culturally
impactful Rambo franchise (1982–). These synechdocal icons are to be read as
embodying perceived national characteristics and their bodies as a symbolic bat-
tleground for competing visions of America. J. Bowyer Bell even regarded these
two particular figures as being the most symptomatic cinematic creations in
Fig. 3: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) as legitimisation of enduring fantasies of American
exceptionalism in the turbulent new millennial decades
American film history, stating, ‘Rambo is a Hollywood artefact and John Wayne
was a Hollywood actor but each reflects haltingly actual American hopes and
fears’ (1999: 245). Susan Jeffords wrote that the hard-bodied icons of masculinity
which dominated the cinema screens in the 1980s, actors like Stallone, Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris, ‘came to stand not only for a type of na-
tional character – heroic, aggressive, and determined – but for the nation itself’
(1994: 25). In a similar way, superhero films emerge as a barometer for attitudes
towards national identity but also endorse what a culture regards as its norms of
gender, sexuality and race. In the wake of 9/11 writers like Peggy Noonan called
for a remasculinisation of both the individual and the nation in her demand
that America return to a more traditional brand of masculinity which she saw
embodied in the figure of John Wayne in an article called ‘Welcome Back, Duke:
From the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues’ (2001). Noonan called for a
reappearance of the kind of men who
push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge
up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be
safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen.
They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men
who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever takes its
place. (Ibid.)
Might the emergence of the superhero genre itself be a manifestation of this re-
turn? It is the bodies of a culture’s heroic figures and the way they are constructed
on film, as Lisa Purse suggested, that become of primary importance in the way
they are perceived by audiences. She wrote, ‘This body is a physically empowered

one, strong, agile and resilient, asserting itself in the field of action and risk, and
thus acts out fantasies of empowerment that are inherently literalised and physi-
calised, rather than abstracted’ (2011: 3). In the same way, the bodies of Tony
Stark, Bruce Banner, Thor, Peter Quill and Captain America are richly symbolic
significatory systems pregnant with meaning and association just as Wayne’s and
Stallone’s were to the discourse of their own respective eras. However, as we will
see, the MCU heroes can be seen to display a more unstable and variegated depic-
tion of masculinity, although no less hegemonic, which Yann Roublou defined as
the ‘complex masculinities’ of the post-9/11 era (2012: 76).
Noonan’s use of Wayne is both relevant and ironic in the case of Captain
America, given John Wayne’s now central role in American cultural memory of
World War II (despite the ambiguity of his war record) and the fact that Captain
America would have been his (albeit imaginary) contemporary. Yet Noonan’s
understanding of ‘John Wayne’ is just as fictional as the character of Captain
America and the other MCU superheroes who are explored in the pages of this
book, each of which offers insights into, among other things, changing articula-
tions of what cultures define as masculine values.14 In the MCU these changes
are seen most clearly in the effectively drawn contrast between Tony Stark’s new
millennial cynicism and Cap’s ‘old-fashioned’ ideals when they are first paired
onscreen in The Avengers and come to a head in Captain America: Civil War.
Both men, even with their differences, can be read as a concerted attempt to
reclaim American national identity in the wake of 9/11 in very specific ways and
primarily through the regenerative powers of violence which Richard Slotkin
classified as the definitive ‘structuring metaphor of the American experience’
(1973: 5). In fact, as one might expect, not a single film across the MCU explic-
itly challenges the idea that righteous violence is the path to redemption.15 In
Iron Man 3 Tony Stark’s PTSD seems to disappear only after he overcomes his
nemesis Aldrich Killian; the only way Bruce Banner can come to terms with his
dissociative disorder seems to be through confronting and beating Abomination
in The Incredible Hulk; and Thor’s rites of passage narrative in Thor is only com-
pleted when he commits a heroic act of self-sacrifice in battle and vanquishes
his enemies. In Captain America: Civil War, a film which challenges some of the
central tenets of the genre, Black Widow asks Captain America, ‘Do you really
want to punch your way out of this?’, ostensibly suggesting that diplomacy might
be worth pursuing, only to reveal that violence seems to be, once again, the only
answer to his dilemmas in the way that both the genre, and the culture which
produced it, demands.
Even those superheroes who are not American are portrayed as having been
Americanised or convinced by the superiority of what we might call the ‘American
experience’: Black Widow aka Natasha Romanoff, the Russian secret agent,
identifies leaving Russia and the KGB and joining S.H.I.E.L.D. as ‘going straight’
(Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and the Sokovian twins Quicksilver and
Scarlett Witch, aka Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, begin Avengers: Age of Ultron
seeking revenge on Tony Stark for his role in the death of their parents, only
to end it joining the Avengers and by extension embracing the United States of
America. This transformation occurs after seeing American beneficence and al-
truism first-hand in the form of the virtuous Captain America and the Avengers’
intervention in Sokovia, a fictional Eastern European country coded as being
reminiscent of Kosovo circa 1991–2001, even though their decision will later re-
sult in the death of one of them and the persecution and internment of the other.
Avengers: Age of Ultron and the MCU as a whole, embodies the fantasy of how
America sees itself on the global stage and one which empowers American and
international audiences to do the same. Just as large parts of John Wayne’s body
of work (see in particular The Searchers [1956] and The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valence [1962]) and Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985) and Rambo: First Blood Part II
(1985) literalised American fantasies by reconsolidating essential myths about its
supposed values and national character, the MCU functions in exactly the same
way, although as a response to very particular crises of national identity which
emerged in the wake of the trauma of 9/11.
The morally unambiguous mission to save Sokovia from an event directly
caused by Tony Stark mentioned above is just one of many examples through-
out the MCU of extra-judicial interventions in foreign countries which, until
Captain America: Civil War, were almost always portrayed as entirely moral,
necessary and effective: from Tony Stark’s altruistic sojourn to Afghanistan,
through the liberation of Europe in World War II-set Captain America: The First
Avenger, to the rescue of civilians in modern-day Germany in Avengers Assemble
and Greenwich, London in Thor: The Dark World. In their International Politics
and Film: Space, Vision and Power (2014), Sean Carter and Klaus Dodds cor-
rectly assert that this unsanctioned behaviour is portrayed as entirely necessary:
‘in order to secure justice or otherwise, the superhero is required because s/he is
able to operate beyond the law and this is made possible, in part, because they are
tolerated, even encouraged, by grateful city authorities and/or national govern-
ments’ (2014: 55–6). This becomes most effectively articulated in the exculpatory
globe-hopping storylines featured in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC,
2013–), where the titular parastatal agency is firmly presented as an international
organisation, but it is resolutely American in its construction, values and how it
chooses to exercise its considerable power in which the heroes prevent disasters
and save lives in countries all over the world, week after week, year after year.
One is tempted to refer to this as a variation of what has been called ‘trauma tour-
ism’ (see Tumarkin 2005; Rothe 2011), but what I will refer to as ‘virtual terror

tourism’. The practice of setting scenes in exotic locations which have frequently
experienced real-life trauma and inviting spectators to revel in spectacularly or-
chestrated violence only for the benefit of portraying their American heroes in
a positive light is evidence of the pronounced symbolic hierarchy of American
popular film and, just as dubiously, masks a lack of moral equivalency for the
actions of the heroic figures which populate these narratives. Thus in Gulmira
in 2008 Stark is an unproblematic American hero saving women and children in
an Afghanistan which is portrayed in a similar way to many of the combat films
which emerged from the ‘War on Terror’ era, as ‘a space of threat to America,
a space that must be contained and controlled with military might’ (Mirrlees
2014: 8) and a new millennial frontier for American men to prove both their
masculinity and their altruism, in a land populated only by victims to be saved
and savages to be killed. The ramifications of these extended extra-judicial in-
cursions and the often catastrophic damage they result in were rarely addressed
in the films throughout Phases One and Two (although sometimes mentioned
in the television branch of the MCU) until the beginning of Phase Three and
Captain America: Civil War, which seemingly confronted several previously un-
spoken taboos from the superhero genre at the same time: their endorsement of
vigilantism (‘while a great many people see you as heroes … there are some who
would prefer the word vigilantes’), the America-centric nature of the heroes, and
the collateral damage their activities frequently caused (‘What would you call a
group of US-based enhanced individuals who routinely ignore sovereign borders
and inflict their will wherever they choose and who frankly seem unconcerned
about what they leave behind?’). Captain America: Civil War, the thirteenth film
in the MCU, offers a rare critique of the actions of these heroes which proves to
be not so easily disregarded. Criticisms are present in other films in the MCU
prior to this, but the fact that they most often come from the villains themselves
means they have little resonance and are easily ignored by audiences, like those
of Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) in Iron Man 2 who tells Tony Stark, ‘You come
from a family of thieves and butchers’, or Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) in
Spider-Man: Homecoming who asks Peter Parker, ‘How do you think your buddy
Stark paid for that tower or any of his little toys? Those people Pete, those peo-
ple up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. They don’t
care about us. We build their roads and fight all their wars…’; or the Red Skull
in Captain America: The First Avenger, who suggests, ‘Arrogance may not be a
uniquely American trait, but I must say, you do it better than anyone!’ (see also
Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3, Loki in The Avengers and Ultron in Avengers: Age
of Ultron).
The use of real-life locations, with their recognisable landmarks and asso-
ciations, prove extremely relevant to how the MCU depicts the world. Unlike
its counterpart, the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), the MCU films (and com-
ics) are all primarily set in real-world cities, most importantly and frequently
New York, whereas the DCEU films are set in fictional cities across the US like
Superman’s Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham. While Christopher Nolan’s ver-
sion of Gotham in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises
(three films made before the DECU began with Man of Steel [2013]) might have
been deliberately filmed to resemble (and evoke) New York (see Dargis 2012),
the MCU has New York itself as its central location: it is where Stark Tower (lat-
er known as the Avengers Tower) resides in Manhattan; it is where the Hulk
fights Abomination on the streets of Harlem; it is where Daredevil prowls the
rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen at night; it is where Captain America wakes up after
seventy-five years in the ice, confronted by the technology of the modern world
in Times Square, and it is the location of the attack of Loki’s interstellar army.
This has been a key aspect of Marvel’s comic narratives since the 1960s and led
Peter Sanderson to write, ‘This was all in keeping with Stan Lee’s intentions for
his Marvel revolution: if the heroes had real personalities and realistic problems
in life, then they should live in a real city and work in a realistic place’ (2007: x).
As Matthew Costello correctly argued, ‘By placing its heroes in the real city [of
New York] Marvel created a closer link between the world of the superheroes and
the world of the readers’ (2009: 11).16
It is my contention that this superhero renaissance offers quite clear articula-
tions of particularly American fantasies in the wake of 9/11 and during the ‘War
on Terror’. The historical events which are described by this term arguably mark
a new phase in America’s conception of itself which, in turn, become manifested
in many of the cultural texts it produced. This new phase is not to be consid-
ered an endorsement of the simplistic aphorism ‘9/11 changed everything’, but
Fig. 4: Two iconic superheroes and global brands come together above the streets of New York in
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) as Robert Downey Jr. returned to the role of Tony Stark for the
eighth time since 2008

that these events were used to construct a narrative concerning American iden-
tity politics which had been profoundly unstable during the administrations of
George H. W. Bush (1989–93) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001), who had each offered
their own conceptions of what a new American identity might be comprised of
after the binarisms of the Cold War narrative ended in 1989. In his book The End
of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, first
published in 1995, Tom Engelhardt wondered what might happen to America
at the end of the Cold War, asking, ‘Is there an imaginable “America” without
enemies and without the story of their slaughter and our triumph?’ (2007: 15).
When he returned to this idea more than ten years later, in an afterword to a
new edition of the same book entitled ‘Victory Culture, the Sequel: Crashing and
Burning in Iraq’, he observed a return to this Manichean mindset through the
use of rhetoric and imagery that ‘would sound familiar indeed to an older gener-
ation of Americans. [George W. Bush’s] approach would prove to be so effective,
however, only because the images, the language, the history he evoked – includ-
ing those memories of Pearl Harbor – had already risen chaotically to collective
(and media) consciousness as those two great towers in New York came tumbling
down’ (2007: 306). The ‘images, the language, the history’ that Engelhardt re-
fers to is the master narrative of the ‘War on Terror’ that the administration of
George W. Bush (2001–9) chose to construct with a sense of moral clarity that
regularly evoked the eschatological certainties of both the Cold War and World
War II. These comparisons were even offered in the very language employed,
from its evocation of the ‘Total War’ of World War II and the ‘axis of evil’, to
the repeated comparisons between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to
Adolf Hitler. As Bush said, ‘In a second World War we learned that there was
no isolation from evil. We learned that some crimes are so terrible that they of-
fend humanity itself. And we resolved that the aggressions and the actions of the
wicked must be opposed early, decisively, and collectively, before they threaten
us all. That evil has returned, and that cause is renewed’ (2001f). These historical
analogies are comforting to those who embrace them, but dangerously obfusca-
tory in their simplistic approaches to complicated geopolitical events.
Just as World War II provided the Bush administration with a framework for
its ‘War on Terror’ narrative, it functions as just as potent a conceptual schema for
the mythopoetic drive of the MCU, most significantly perhaps in the iconic fig-
ure of Captain America, who, as Robert Weiner suggests, differs from Superman,
who ‘comes to America, and finds the American Dream – Captain America is the
American Dream’ (2009: 10; emphasis added). Captain America’s construction
as a synechdocal embodiment of American values and ideals within the MCU is
first present in Captain America: The First Avenger, a film which re-remembers
World War II as it should have been rather than as it was, in an affirmation of
Benedetto Croce’s assertion that ‘All history is contemporary history’ (qtd. in
Woolf 2011: 463). The film’s recreation of World War II portrays America as a
bastion of freedom and liberty in its depiction of a multi-racial American mili-
tary, a virtuous and righteous war fought for only altruistic reasons against an
ignoble enemy, at a time in which disenfranchisement, segregation, internment
and lynching were still common across the United States of America, historical
truths which do not fit the way the country perceives itself in the twenty-first
century and are elided from its popular narratives. Although one might suggest
that The First Avenger is ‘only’ a fantasy film and has no obligation to represent
World War II accurately, its depiction of the war is not too different to the one
offered by such films as Saving Private Ryan, U-571 (2000) and more recently
Fury, which for the most part, embrace the ‘greatest generation’ rhetoric that
has been pervasive in how America remembers the conflict. World War II is fre-
quently evoked by the lingering presence of Tony Stark’s father, Howard Stark
(who is portrayed as a young man in The First Avenger and the short-lived tele-
vision series Marvel’s Agent Carter), and in Afghanistan, before his epiphany,
Tony Stark states, ‘That’s how Dad did it, that’s how America does it … and it’s
worked out pretty well so far’. The references and allusions to Nazi Germany con-
tinue throughout the series and one of the most notable occurs in The Avengers
when Loki (who Coulson refers to as an ‘Asgardian Mussolini’ in ‘Pilot’ (1.01) of
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) visits Berlin in a scene which deliberately evokes
the Holocaust (see chapter four).
As trauma discourse became a pervasive aspect of twenty-first-century
American (and global) culture, the traumatised hero became absolutely central
to the superhero film: Tony Stark is accused of having PTSD in Iron Man, but
actually shown to have it in Iron Man 3; Captain America suffers from some
form of psychological trauma when he wakes up in 2011; and Peter Quill aka
Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax the Destroyer and Rocket Raccoon, collectively the
eponymous Guardians of the Galaxy, bond over their shared trauma which
enables them to find an unexpected surrogate family unit. The iconic green-
skinned Incredible Hulk seems to be the clearest articulation of these trauma
narratives in the MCU films, although whether it is true, as John C. McDowall
asserts, ‘That Bruce Banner is played by three different actors, in a series of “re-
boots”, speaks to broader uncertainties as to how Hulk as an individual character
resonates with post-9/11 audiences steeped in defences of democracy from exter-
nal threats’ (2014: 244) is debatable. This recasting process is not unique to the
post-9/11 era, although given the proliferation of remakes and reboots in the new
millennial years it is more frequent than ever. However, it is certainly ironic that
the one character to be recast so frequently happens to be the one with conspicu-
ous symptoms of dissociative disorder. The evolution of the Hulk post-9/11 is

itself a particularly interesting one: from Ang Lee’s divisive Hulk (2003), to Louis
Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk, followed by his well-received portrayal in both
Joss Whedon films The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron. What is clear is
that these modern iterations of Bruce Banner and his monstrous alter ego (which
many have regarded as a projection of his Id) are each as connected to the ‘War
on Terror’ decades as the original was to the nuclear-era anxieties in which he
was formed.
Indelibly connected to this, one of the key parameters of the new millen-
nial superhero text is the lean towards realism that the genre embraced in this
period, which one might term the veristic turn of the superhero genre post-9/11,
a practice often traced to the success of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy
(2005–12) and even referred to by some as the ‘Nolanisation’ of the genre (see
Seroword 2015). The assertion here is not that superhero texts are realistic in
the usual definition of the term, but that they are grounded in reality to a much
greater extent than the majority of superhero films made before, and that per-
haps, as David Goyer the screenwriter of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman:
Dawn of Justice suggested, they ‘could happen in the same world in which we live’
(qtd. in Dyce 2012). This is not to argue that there was some sort of overnight
paradigmatic shift, but that the diegetic worlds the majority of modern super-
heroes reside in are quite distinct from the fantasies of the Donner-era Superman
films or the Burton/Schumacher-era Batman. This turn towards ‘reality’ is not
unprecedented in American genre cinema; as Leo Braudy has observed, many
stagnant genres over the years have become revivified with an ‘injection, usually
of “realism”’ (2002: 111). Grant Morrison, the award-winning comic book writer,
observed this change and stated:
Stories had to be about ‘real’ things. As a result, more and more Marvel Comics,
including my own, had scenes set in the Middle East onboard hijacked aircraft.
The emphasis veered away from escapist cosmic fantasy, nostalgia and surrealism
toward social critique, satire, and filmic vérité wrapped in the flag of shameless
patriotism. (2011: 355)
Morrison also maintains that this process is a reaction to the real-world geo-
political arena that is one of the central arguments of this book. He states, ‘With
no way to control the growing unreality of the wider world, writers and artists
attempted to tame it in fictions that became more and more ‘grounded’, down-
to-earth, and rooted in the self-consciously plausible’ (2011: 348). Post-9/11
heroes became humanised, flawed and more vulnerable than ever before, facing
ethical dilemmas their twentieth-century cinematic counterparts rarely came
across. Yet as paradoxical as it sounds, this turn towards realism is itself part
of a mythologisation process. As John Fiske reminds us, realism is just as much
an aesthetic conceit as other modes of artistic expression: ‘The conventions of
realism have developed in order to disguise the constructedness of the “reality”
it offers, and therefore of the arbitrariness of the ideology that is mapped onto it.
Grounding ideology in reality is a way of making it appear unchallengeable and
unchangeable, and thus is a reactionary political strategy’ (2010: 36).
Despite their intense levels of popularity, American superheroes have pro-
voked wide-ranging disapproval from many quarters. These arguments, some of
which are very persuasive, range from the genre being suitable only for children
and teens, that superhero texts are simplistic, perpetuate stereotypes, are ethical-
ly dubious and tend to embody reactionary values. Indeed, one can find these as
early as Frederic Wertham’s now much derided Seduction of the Innocent (1954).
Given that, like the majority of popular American films, the superhero is created
and embedded within capitalist, corporate-owned enterprises, it should come
as no surprise that the genre habitually adopts and inculcates dominant ideo-
logical perspectives on issues of race, gender and sexuality. One of the primary
criticisms directed at the MCU has been its lack of diversity in narratives which
centralise the experiences and heroism of white heterosexual men. The MCU
does feature African-American superheroes (see Falcon, War Machine, Black
Panther and Luke Cage, etc) and female superheroes (see Black Widow, Scarlett
Witch and Jessica Jones, etc), but they are undoubtedly secondary characters by
quite some margin and, in the case of women, they are frequently defined by
their vulnerability, whether that is physically, psychologically or emotionally.
In the MCU films, characters like Jane Foster, Betty Ross and Pepper Potts are
given superficially important professions (astrophysicist, cellular biologist and
CEO respectively), but they tend to function only for what they can offer the man
who is at the centre of the narrative and whose name is, more often than not, also
the title of the film. As in most mainstream blockbusters the women in these
films are either sex objects, victims to be saved or rewards for the heroism of their
men. If the women are superheroes they tend to be given traits and powers char-
acterised as specifically ‘female’ which are even often encoded into their names,
hence the likes of Black Widow and Scarlett Witch. There have been some rare
voices who have praised the representation of women in the MCU, like Joseph
Walderzak in his interesting essay ‘Damsels in Transgress: The Empowerment of
the Damsel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’, where he contends
Rescues become so abundant in a film [Iron Man 3], in which Tony is frequently
powerless, that it allows for Pepper’s heroics to be obscured or perhaps reduced to
suggestions of mere tokenism. Yet, any such claims prove fallacious when consid-
ered in the context of Pepper’s consistent heroism, success, and centrality to the

plot. Her donning of the iron man suit and temporary physical empowerment are
not fleeting enactments of tokenism but, rather, conspicuously symbolic forms of
the exact type of power she has wielded throughout her appearances in the MCU.
(2016: 159)
Walderzak’s assertions are problematic to say the least. While it is true Pepper
Potts wears the Iron Man suit, it is only in one scene for less than sixty seconds
and it is given to her (seemingly to her surprise) by Stark in order to save her
and then taken away just as quickly.17 When she is given potentially superheroic
status and powers, these too are removed from her, as are the powers which are
accidentally given to Jane Foster in Thor: The Dark World released in the same
year. In both cases the idea of the girlfriend of the superhero being his physical
equal is something seemingly so repulsive within the diegetic frames of the films
that they are depicted as having to be removed almost immediately in order to
save them (see Frankel 2017: 158). Furthermore, Pepper is saved at least once by
Stark in each film in the Iron Man trilogy (sometimes twice), is hardly allowed to
exist outside of her relationship to the protagonist, and is quite far from central
to the plot. We can observe that the MCU promotes a superficial level of female
empowerment, at the same time as participating in marginalisation and objec-
tification and therefore functions as a reification of heteronormative patriarchal
culture and its values. That is not to say that complications to this do not exist,
especially in the TV shows, like Agent Peggy Carter from Marvel’s Agent Carter,
Melinda May and Daisy ‘Skye’ Johnson from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and
Jessica Jones and Elektra Natchios from Jessica Jones and Daredevil respectively.
Yet it is important to note that all of these women are impossibly beautiful, slim,
heterosexual and (mostly) white. In the cinematic realm, Black Widow has prov-
en central to these debates, and she is undeniably an interesting and formidable
character with a complicated history. She is intellectually and physically able (she
even bests Hawkeye in The Avengers), but in the course of her exploits she often
needs to be saved in ways that her male counterparts do not and some aspects
of her characterisation have resulted in extreme disapproval from fans (in par-
ticular the forced sterilisation referred to in Avengers: Age of Ultron discussed in
chapter eight).
What are we to make of the fact that in its first fifteen cinematic outings the
MCU did not have one film with either a black or a female superhero as the title
character? Nor did any of these films feature a single LGBT character? This was
something that writer-director James Gunn was asked about on the release of
Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 and his answer was somewhat disingenuous. He
stated, ‘There’s a lot of characters in the MCU and very few of them have we delved
into what their sexuality is [sic], whether it’s gay or straight or bisexual, we don’t
really know. So, I imagine that there are probably, you know, gay characters in
the Marvel Universe we just don’t know who they are yet’ (qtd. in Zeldin-O’Neill
and Swaby 2016). The ‘very few’ that Gunn is talking about cannot include the
likes of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Thor, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov, Clint
Barton, Scott Lang or Peter Quill, Gamora, Drax or Yondu Udonta, all of whom,
are shown to be clearly heterosexual, as are every single character that is seen hav-
ing a romantic relationship onscreen, not just on Earth, but all over the galaxy.
The closest the MCU comes to a non-heterosexual character, at the time of writ-
ing, is in its televisual branch in the form of the long-forgotten Joey Gutierrez
(Juan Pablo Raba), a gay construction worker who discovers he is an Inhuman
in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. who appeared for six episodes in Season Three
before disappearing, and the slightly more interesting, although not exactly cen-
tral, Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), who appeared in episodes of Daredevil,
Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and The Defenders.18
In this regard it is important to acknowledge then that Guardians of the
Galaxy was the first MCU film to have a female screenwriter (Nicole Pearlman),
Black Panther, the eighteenth film in the MCU, the first to have a director of co-
lour (Ryan Coogler) and the first to have a black actor as protagonist (Chadwick
Boseman), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), the twentieth film in the MCU, was
the first film to feature a female character in its title, followed by the second the
year after, Captain Marvel (2019), which was also the first film to be directed by a
woman in the MCU, co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.19
In spite of this, the MCU, like all popular culture texts, is not monolithic or
homogenous in its ideological approaches and the films often emerge as more
interesting than they appear on the surface. The ways in which products of the
American film industry might be able to offer criticisms of the ideological system
they are a part of was explored by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni through-
out their work, and for the purposes of this book most specifically in ‘Cinema/
ideology/criticism’ (1977). They acknowledge that film is an ISA (Institutional
State Apparatus) in the Durkheimian and Althusserian sense that contributes to
the reinforcement of hegemonic power systems, but they also experiment with
seven groups of classifications which offer varying degrees of interaction with
the ideological system that films are intrinsically a part of. From films in which
dominant ideologies are perpetuated in ‘pure unadulterated form’ (1977: 5), to
those ‘which at first sight seem to belong firmly within the ideology and to be
completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous
manner’ (1977: 7) and those which might offer ‘an internal criticism … which
cracks the film apart at the seams’ (ibid.). The contours of the MCU illuminate
both the limitations and the potentialities of modern blockbuster cinema, and
whether they unambiguously embrace dominant ideological perspectives or are

able to offer ‘an internal criticism … which cracks the film apart at the seams’ is
one of the central questions of this monograph. Might the MCU offer counter-
hegemonic dramatisations of some of the central paradoxes at the heart of the
American experience as the weight of their cognitive dissonance on the frames
of their films is too great to bear? Are the criticisms of the Military Industrial
Complex in Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk superficial or sus-
tained? Is Captain America’s disillusionment with contemporary American
values a convincing one, or rather just an endorsement of the conservative and
nostalgic idea that the past was somehow better than the present? Does the USA
PATRIOT Act-inspired narrative of Captain America: Civil War offer genuine
insights into the era, or does it only provide us with the superficial patina of
social criticism which is then erased and elided by the end of the film? Do they,
as Slavoj Žižek suggests, articulate ‘a trend in contemporary cinema of texts and
audiences alike mocking deep-seated beliefs, yet continuing to sustain them,
which serves to reify and strengthen dominant ideology’? (2013: 71). All these
examples are evidence of Michael Wood’s assertion in America in the Movies, Or,
‘Santa Maria, it Had Slipped My Mind’, that ‘Films offer a rearrangement of our
problems into shapes which tame them’ (1975: 18). Avengers Assemble! Critical
Perspectives on the Marvel Cinematic Universe explores and interrogates many
such contestory moments throughout the MCU, which are often fleeting, but do
provide insights into the culture of which they are a formative part. Rather than
simply providing texts which enable Americans to ‘escape from the very real hor-
rors of international unrest and terrorism whose epic moment was September 11,
2001’ (Roberts 2004: 210), the MCU films are actually deeply immersed in and
engage with their own historical moment.
Notes
1 Arthur Asa Berger has written that ‘there is a fairly close relationship, generally, be-
tween a society and its heroes; if a hero does not espouse values that are meaningful
to his readers, there seems little likelihood that he will be popular’ (1972: 151).
2 As Hayden White suggests, this process is ideological by its very nature: ‘What wish
is enacted, what desire is gratified, by the fantasy that real events are properly repre-
sented when they can be shown to display the formal coherency of a story?’ (1980: 8).
3 9/11 was also described as a ‘mega-event’ by Douglas Kellner in his volume From 9/11
to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy (2003: 41).
4 To put the success of The Avengers into perspective, its opening weekend of
$207,438,708 was only matched by ten other American films released that year in the
entirety of their domestic box office run.
5 Given these sustained and very deliberate allusions to 9/11 it might be seen as strange
that it is not entirely clear if 9/11 actually happened within the MCU. Certainly, there
is an extensive American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as shown in Iron
Man and many characters in the series happen to be veterans who served there (Sam
Wilson, Frank Castle and Lance Hunter). There are mentions of Osama Bin Laden:
one by Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3 who contends, ‘You simply rule from behind the
scenes. Because the second you give them a face, a Bin Laden, a Gadaffi, a Mandarin,
you hand the people a target’, and another in the Season One finale of Marvel’s Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘The Beginning of the End’ (1.22) where Ian Quinn asks a group of
generals he is offering Cybertek technology to, ‘How much did you spend to get Bin
Laden?’ but not, to my knowledge, an explicit mention of 11 September 2001. As real
world aside, Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley, writing in The Atlantic, calculated
the cost of killing Bin Laden, for which they factor in the cost of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, to have been a phenomenal $3 trillion.
6 Intriguingly, the films do not make it explicitly clear who is the president of the United
States at the time of The Avengers. White House Press Secretary under Obama, Jay
Carney, appears in the film and Obama is mentioned fairly frequently in the Netflix
series Luke Cage, but in 2013 Iron Man 3 introduced its own fictional President,
Matthew Ellis (William Sadler).
7 In English, Delcroix’s article would be titled ‘The Avengers: the Flagship of Obama’
and Martínez’s ‘Obama, as Told by Hollywood’.
8 Stephan Zacharek in an article called ‘Shane, with claws and bloodlust to spare’
wrote, ‘It’s as if Mangold – he also co-wrote the script with Michael Green and Scott
Frank – had looked into a crystal ball during production and seen a crisp vision of
the postelection despair many Americans would be feeling in the early days of 2017.
There’s no doubt but that Logan, with its focus on persecuted outsiders, is tapping the
mood of at least half of the country now’ (2017: 50). John Patterson’s review of Get Out
in the Guardian was titled, ‘Get Out: The First Great Paranoia Movie of the Trump
Era’ (2017).
9 Much has been written about Zero Dark Thirty from this perspective (see Chaudhuri
2014; McSweeney 2014; Westwell 2014; Savage 2015).
10 Phil Strub, entertainment liaison at the Department of Defense, suggested, ‘The
relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon has been described as a mutual
exploitation. We’re after military portrayal, and they’re after our equipment’ (qtd. in
Weisman 2014).
11 Noam Chomsky wrote, ‘Among the most elementary of moral truisms is the principal
of universality: we must apply to ourselves the same standards as we do to others, if
not more stringent ones. It is a remarkable comment on Western intellectual culture
that this principle is so often ignored and, if occasionally mentioned, condemned as
outrageous’ (2007: 3).
12 As David Graham observes, Bill Clinton also used this expression frequently; in fact,

twenty-one times in public while in office (2015).
13 It is important to note that many leaders of other countries feel that they too are on
the right side of history. Nikita Khruschev, First Secretary of the Communist Party
of Soviet Union, famously remarked on 18 November 1956 to a team of twelve NATO
envoys, ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side, we will bury you!’ Similar
claims have been made in recent years by representatives of Turkey and the People’s
Republic of China (see Shambaugh 2016; Walderman and Caliskan 2017).
14 Kirk Douglas said that he once told John Wayne, ‘It’s all make-believe, John. It isn’t
real. You’re not really John Wayne, you know.’ But that John Wayne ‘just looked at me
oddly. I had betrayed him’ (qtd. in Freeman 2017).
15 Doctor Strange might be considered an intriguing exception to this as Stephen
Strange’s final victory over both Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelson) and Dormammu, ‘the
destroyer of worlds’, is achieved by Strange using his intellect.
16 At the premier of Suicide Squad David Ayer memorably yelled ‘Fuck you, Marvel!’ at
the crowd (qtd. in Hawks 2016). Other examples of this rivalry were more elegantly
constructed, as in the humourous reveal in The LEGO Batman Movie that the pass-
word to Batman’s computer is ‘Ironmansucks’.
17 In 2016 Shane Black, the writer and director of Iron Man 3, revealed that he had
originally planned that the villain of the film would be a woman, but he was told by
Marvel executives that the company would prefer a man. He said, ‘We had finished
the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying “that cannot stand and
we’ve changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toy won’t sell
as well if it’s a female”’ (qtd. in Robinson 2016).
18 In this climate fans were often required to create their own narratives about non-
heterosexual characters and relationships, many of which explore the bond between
Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, or Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson. See https://www.
fanfiction.net/comic/Marvel/.
19 The only female director of a mainstream superhero film until Patty Jenkins’ Wonder
Woman (2017) was Lexi Alexander who directed Punisher: War Zone.
PHASE ONE
C H A PT ER O N E
‘That’s how Dad did it, that’s how

America does it … and it’s worked out
pretty well so far’: The Stark Doctrine in
Iron Man and Iron Man 2
I think it’s no coincidence that since September 11 [2001] superhero movies have
really … starting with Spider-Man people have really gravitated towards these
simple good against evil stories. Now, five or six years later, they’ve tried to cap-
ture some of the imagery and anxiety that I know we feel as Americans and then
to have the fantasy of this guy that can come in and thoughtfully take care of,
or get rid of the bad guys and save the good guys. It’s part of the escapism that I
think people are looking for as they go to the movies to take their mind off of their
problems for two hours.
– Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man and Iron Man 2 (qtd. in Carnevale n.d.)
American contributions to international security, global economic growth, free-

dom, and human well-being have been so self-evidently unique and have been so
clearly directed to others’ benefit that Americans have long believed that the US
amounts to a different kind of country. Where others push their national inter-
ests, the US tries to advance universal principles.
– Jessica Mathews (2015)
THE STARK DOCTRINE 41

The Marvel Cinematic Universe began with the release of Jon Favreau’s Iron
Man in May 2008. A decade and billions of dollars later it is easy to forget that
the film was a considerable gamble for the newly-formed studio. While Iron Man
had been a major part of the comic world since 1963, he was considered by many
to be a ‘second string’ superhero compared to the iconic figures of Superman,
Spider-Man and Batman, each of whom had made an indelible mark on popular
culture (see Boucher 2006). The Iron Man property had languished in so-called
‘development hell’ for a number of decades with actors like Nicolas Cage and
Tom Cruise and directors such as Joss Whedon and Len Wiseman attached to
the project at various times. When it was announced that the film would star
Robert Downey Jr. and be directed by Jon Favreau, industry insiders and large
sections of the fan community were surprised. Downey Jr. had long been re-
garded as one of the most talented and charismatic performers of his generation,
but persistent drug- and alcohol-related problems had led to his incarceration
and, for a brief time, his virtual exclusion from the film industry. Favreau had
established himself as a director with something of an Indie sensibility with his
critically acclaimed debut Made (2001), produced on a budget of $5 million, be-
fore moving into more family-oriented fare like Elf (2003) and Zathura (2005).
Zathura might have had elements of science fiction, but there was little in any
of these films to suggest that he might be an appropriate choice for a large-scale
superhero blockbuster like Iron Man with a budget which, including marketing,
would be close to $200 million and might well decide the fate of the fledgling
film studio.
While Superman and Captain America came of age during World War II and
even emerged as the quintessential symbolic figures of American identity and
values in that era, Iron Man was originally very much a product and an icon of
the Cold War, whom Matthew Costello described as ‘the most ardent of Marvel’s
Cold Warriors’ (2009: 63). First appearing in Tales of Suspense #39 in March
1963, Iron Man is the alter ego of the billionaire weapons manufacturer and
playboy Tony Stark. In this first edition, published just two years after President
Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address warning of the encroaching
impact of the Military Industrial Complex, six months after the Cuban Missile
Crisis, and seven months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
Stark is shown demonstrating his hi-tech weapons to the grateful American
military in Vietnam when he is kidnapped by the warlord Wong-Chu aka the
Red Terrorist who demands that Stark make weapons for him. Throughout the
1960s Iron Man battled characters with similarly suggestive names like the
Red Barbarian, the Red Ghost, the Mandarin, Bullski the Merciless (Titanium
Man) and the Crimson Dynamo in triumphalist narratives which emphasised
American technological and moral superiority over the Soviet Union and its
allies.1 Nearly fifty years after this first appearance, the new millennial cinemat-
ic reinvention of the character in 2008 has his origin story transplanted to the
equally turbulent post-9/11 climate, and the jungles of Vietnam are replaced by
the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan.2 Yet even though the timeframe and
location is changed, the events surrounding his kidnapping and the political
worldview established are essentially very similar. Iron Man embraces the pre-
requisite kinesthetic pleasures of the blockbuster, but at the same time emerges
as something of a contestory mythopoetic fantasy of how America sees itself in
both its rejection and perpetuation of hegemonic master narratives of American
identity.
After the flickering red and white logo of Marvel Studios, one which would
become so familiar to viewers over the next decade, Iron Man opens with a line
of three US military Humvees making their way along a dusty desert road with
a panoramic view of snow-capped mountains in the background and a title card
which reads ‘Kunar Province, Afghanistan’. Setting and opening the film in one
of the prime significatory spaces associated with the ‘War on Terror’ is a striking
statement of intent on the part of Favreau and Marvel Studios and a conscious at-
tempt to situate the MCU in something approximating the ‘real world’ instead of
a more generic fantasyscape the likes of which had routinely been the settings of
superhero films prior to the twenty-first century.3 On the film’s diegetic and non-
diegetic soundtrack ‘Back in Black’ (1980) by hard rock group AC/DC blasts, a
band and a type of music which became heavily associated with the American
military in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. J. Martin Daughtry, the author
of Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq, even
reported that in Iraq American soldiers would ‘jack their iPods into the LRAD
[long range acoustic devices], and blast AC/DC and other loud music at groups
of Iraqis whom they wanted to disperse’ (2015: 242).4
In the back of one of the Humvees is Tony Stark, not yet Iron Man, still only
billionaire playboy and genius weapons manufacturer, CEO of Stark Industries
and provider of weapons of mass destruction to the appreciative American mili-
tary. In fact, Stark is in Afghanistan to demonstrate his new ‘Freedom Line’ of
weapons which see him referred to as a man who ‘has changed the face of the
weapons industry by ensuring freedom and protecting America and her interests
around the globe’.5 Stark cuts an incongruous figure in his immaculately tailored
suit, drinking expensive single-malt scotch on the rocks, chatting amiably to US
soldiers in battle fatigues who are clearly enamoured by his celebrity status. In
1963 Stan Lee created Stark to be an amalgamation of Howard Hughes and Errol
Flynn, but in the MCU era Stark is something of an Elon Musk-type figure with
more than a little of Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, both of whom made cameo
appearances in the sequel Iron Man 2 (see Lee and Mair 2002: 160).6

With Stark’s confession to the soldiers in the Humvee that he did indeed sleep
with all twelve Maxim cover girls (with the help of a set of twins at Christmas),
it is immediately apparent how far Downey Jr.’s spontaneously talented and ego-
tistical screen persona has interwoven with Stark’s. Favreau made it very clear on
several occasions that he felt there was a distinct imbrication between the two,
and that this was one of the primary reasons he sought to cast Downey Jr., initial-
ly against the wishes of many Marvel Studios executives. Favreau commented:
The best and worst moments of Robert’s life have been in the public eye. He had
to find an inner balance to overcome obstacles that went far beyond his career.
That’s Tony Stark. Robert brings a depth that goes beyond a comic book character
who is having trouble in high school, or can’t get the girl. (qtd. in Bowles 2007)
Favreau’s remarks, of course, are directed at Peter Parker/Spider-Man and by

implication the demographic who have traditionally gone to see films of the su-
perhero genre. Iron Man, with its cast of several Academy Award winners and
nominees like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard and Robert
Downey Jr., attempts to reconfigure the genre and appeal to a broader audience
by the quality of its cast and by situating its narrative in a more grounded and
less overtly cartoonish world.7
The spirited interactions between Stark and the soldiers are interrupted when
their convoy comes under heavy fire from individuals coded onscreen and de-
scribed in the Guidebook to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Marvel’s Iron Man as
‘terrorists’ (O’Sullivan 2015a: 9). The soldiers he had been chatting to and taking
pictures with moments before are all killed in front of him and Stark only man-
ages to scramble away from the vehicle just before it explodes. The sequence is
filmed with the frenetic and jarring hand-held camera technique which became
an indelible part of cinematic language during the decade in a variety of genres,
which I have elsewhere called ‘the quintessential new millennial marker of au-
thenticity’ (McSweeney 2014: 48). The Kunar Province itself, where the opening
of Iron Man is set (although it was actually filmed in California), was the loca-
tion of some of the fiercest fighting in the war in Afghanistan and it was the site
of both the Navy SEAL mission Operation Red Wings (June–July 2005) which
was later dramatised in the film Lone Survivor, as well as the deployment site of
the soldiers featured in the documentary Restrepo (2010) and its sequel Korengal
(2014). Stark turns to his right only to see a missile land next to him; he has just
enough time to see his own Stark Industries logo written on its side before it
detonates.8
When Stark comes to he realises he has been captured by the terrorists and is
being filmed with a video camera. The formerly cocky and arrogant billionaire is
shaken and confused by an intrusion of the Real into his hitherto privileged life.
While Stephen Prince in Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism argues
that the captors ‘are generic bad guys, nonspecific, not identifiable as Islamists’
(2009: 62), their beards, masks, posture and the threatening tone of their untrans-
lated words certainly codes them as such and they fit firmly in Jack Shaheen’s
(1994) taxonomy of Arabs on the Hollywood screen under ‘Terrorists’. By May
2008 when the film was released such imagery had become disturbingly familiar
to American audiences in the form of several high-profile kidnappings like those
of American citizens Daniel Pearl (d. 2002), Eugene Armstrong (d. 2004) and
Nicholas Berg (d. 2004). In the first three minutes of Iron Man, its protagonist
has been shown to be kidnapped and seemingly about to be beheaded in a film
designed to not only sell movie tickets, but also action figures and Burger King-
branded kids’ meals all around the globe. It is an arresting opening for audiences
who, prior to 9/11, had been used to the escapist fantasies of superheroes and a
disconnection from anything approximating the real world in the cartoonish
aesthetic of the Burton and Schumacher-era Batman or the Christopher Reeve-
era Superman (1978–87). While this tone would become progressively diluted
in the MCU films which followed it over the next decade, Iron Man locates the
series in a clearly recognisable post-9/11 environment, one that it would remain
firmly immersed in throughout the decade and beyond.
The film then abruptly cuts to ‘Las Vegas, 36 hours earlier’, before Stark’s
kidnapping and as he is about to be presented with an award by his friend and
Department of Defense Liaison, Lt. Colonel James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes (Terrence
Howard), for Stark’s status as a ‘visionary, genius [and] American patriot’. The
accolade is given to Stark in particular for his role in designing smarter weapons,
advanced robotics and satellite targeting for the US military and, presumably,
Fig. 5: The kidnapping of Tony Stark in Afghanistan places Iron Man (2008) in a very different
world to the majority of superhero films prior to the 2000s

given his visit to the Kunar Province and the film’s timeline, for their use in the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, much to the chagrin of Rhodes, who
calls Stark a ‘real patriot’, he is not present to collect the award; instead he is
found gambling alongside several beautiful women in the Caesar’s Palace casino.
As a signifier of both his extreme wealth and his decadence, a deleted scene from
the film included on the Blu-ray release shows him place a $3 million dollar bet
on a single roll of the roulette wheel. Outside he is confronted by another beau-
tiful woman who is ‘pre-screened’ by his bodyguard and driver Happy Hogan
(played by the film’s director Jon Favreau), the Vanity Fair journalist Christine
Everheart (Leslie Bibb), who challenges him on the ethics of his profession which
has seen him labelled not just as a ‘visionary’ and a ‘genius’ but also the ‘merchant
of death’ and ‘the most famous mass murderer in the history of America’. Stark
responds with the justification, ‘It’s an imperfect world, but it’s the only one we’ve
got. I guarantee you, the day weapons are no longer needed to keep the peace, I’ll
start making bricks and beams for baby hospitals.’ Stark’s cynicism is absolutely
a product of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century, but much of his
beliefs about the sanctity of both his role and by extension the global role of the
United States (the two are presented as intimately connected) comes from the
connections he draws between himself and his father, Howard Stark, who had
participated in the Manhattan Project (1942–46). Stark repeats a saying that he
attributes to his father, ‘peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy’,
but it is one that is really a variation of US President Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘speak
softly and carry a big stick’, which some have suggested has defined American
foreign policy since the turn of the twentieth century (see Bacevich 2003). With
the very first film of the MCU, Marvel Studios sought to create not just a unified
cinematic universe, but a history and a mythology which bleeds in and out of the
real world when required. Stark’s cognitive dissonance that his (and America’s)
weapons unambiguously keep the peace allows him to rationalise his work as
a global arms manufacturer, but in less than thirty-six hours’ time, as we have
already seen, his worldview will be challenged by a revelatory traumatic event
when he comes to experience what Chalmers Johnson memorably classified as
‘blowback’ in the deserts of Afghanistan in his book Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire (2002).
Despite his pronounced egotism and the fact that he is a weapons manufac-
turer and very much of the establishment, Stark is nevertheless one of the genre’s
most engaging characterisations. Tom Hart, writing in New Statesman in 2015,
even observed that on paper Stark’s background makes him sound not like a
superhero, but actually a super villain: ‘He’s an arms dealer. He’s a narcissist.
He’s a billionaire. He’s irresponsible. He’s vain. He’s arrogant. He has a robotic
exoskeleton.’9 Stark’s appeal, to a large extent, is based on his rebellious attitude,
charisma and his genius, but also his prodigious wealth and the fact that he lives
a glamourous and hedonistic lifestyle that many would aspire to. The Iron Man
artist and illustrator Paul Ryan categorised this wish-fulfilment aspect as one
of the central tenets of the character’s allure. He said, ‘Tony Stark was every-
thing little boys wanted to be. He had money, toys and beautiful women. What
more could little testosterone-charged adolescents ask for? For that matter, what
grown men wouldn’t envy Tony Stark?’ (qtd. in Mangels 2008: 57). Whether it is
his opulent and futuristic Malibu mansion (which happens to contain the bronze
sculpture ‘L’Homme qui marche’ by Alberto Giacometi sold at auction in 2010 for
US$107.3 million), his fleet of luxury automobiles or his private airfield and plane
(staffed by beautiful stewardesses who happily pole dance for him), he is a veri-
table paean to consumer capitalism and a vivid personification of the American
Dream.10 Even though he inherited his company and his wealth from his father,
the film goes to great lengths to indicate that he is a self-made man and is thus an
embodiment of the belief that in America with hard work and ingenuity one can
achieve anything. Later, Stark’s lifestyle and his accumulation of wealth is briefly
cast in a different light by the man who saves his life in the Tora Bora-like cave in
Afghanistan and shares his prison cell, Ho Yinsen (Shaun Toub), who calls Stark
‘a man who has everything and nothing’. The loquacious Stark, who usually has
a witty rejoinder to everything, has no answer to Yinsen’s observation, perhaps,
because he knows that it is true.
From the US Stark flies to Afghanistan via Bagram Air Base to demonstrate
the ‘Freedom Line’ to the American military. Like the Kunar Province, Bagram
had by 2008 become heavily associated with the ‘War on Terror’ as the site of
the controversial Parwan Detention Facility, where the Bush administration in-
carcerated those they elected to describe as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ rather
than ‘prisoners of war’ in order to abrograte their rights to habeas corpus and
restrict the application of the Geneva Convention.11 Favreau’s Bagram, however,
is modern, bright and well organised, and it is where a group of American and
Afghanistani generals eagerly await Stark’s weapons presentation during which
he asks them, ‘Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask
for both?’ Even his terminology intimately connects him to the ‘War on Terror’:
‘Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain and I personally guarantee you
the bad guys won’t even want to come out of their caves.’ As Susanne Kord and
Elisabeth Krimmer wrote in Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities: Gender,
Genre, and Politics, ‘Finding excuses to invade foreign countries is indeed an apt
description of Bush-era foreign policy, and the fact that Tony throws in a porta-
ble, fully equipped bar to clinch the deal serves to underline the implied critique’
(2013: 107). Indeed, Stark’s casual flippancy about the destructive potential of his
weapons is because he remains secure in the belief that they are being used for

the forces of good, that is, by the United States of America. Once again Stark con-
nects the American geopolitical landscape of the ‘War on Terror’ era to World
War II and the ‘greatest generation’ of his father: ‘That’s how Dad did it, that’s
how America does it … and it’s worked out pretty well so far.’ Turning his back to
the detonating missile he holds his arms up to the military spectators as the dust
rushes towards them in a demonstration of ‘shock and awe’ for those both within
and outside the film’s diegesis. Stark’s toast – ‘To peace’ – after the explosion then
is an ironic one and he knows it, and in the Humvee shortly before it is attacked
he comments, ‘I’d be out of a job with peace’.
With this we are returned to the film’s prologue, as the narrative then reveals
that Tony has been captured by Raza (Faran Tahir), the leader of an Al Qaeda-
esque terrorist organisation called the Ten Rings (even their logos are similar),
who wants Stark to make WMDs for him just as Wong-Chu did in Vietnam back
in 1963 in Tales of Suspense #39. For the first time Stark is confronted with the
reality of his role as a weapons manufacturer as Raza is in possession of hundreds
of Stark Industries weapons and Yinsen reports that the Ten Rings are his ‘loyal
customers’ which both evokes and quickly disavows the extensive American
military support provided to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan throughout the
1980s in their war against the Soviet Union, in a similar way to how this same act
was largely erased from the master narrative of the ‘War on Terror’. When Stark
refuses, he is tortured and even seems to experience something approximating
waterboarding in a reversal of the CIA practices which were much debated post-
9/11. Rather than merely alluding to ‘the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects’
(Pheasant-Kelly 2013: 148), the film suggests, as many American films and tele-
vision shows did in this era, that when acts of torture or ‘enhanced interrogation’
are committed against US citizens they are barbaric and monstrous, but when
used by Americans they are both lawful and effective (see such films as Act of
Valour and Taken [2008] and TV shows like 24).
It is revealed that Stark is only alive because he has been saved by Yinsen who
has placed a battery in his wounded chest to prevent shrapnel reaching it, and his
subsequent literal and symbolic change of heart has distinctly metaphoric prop-
erties which becomes both a recurrent visual and thematic motif throughout
many of his appearances in the MCU.12 Stark had met Yinsen some years before
at a conference in Switzerland (which will later be dramatised in the opening
to Iron Man 3), but he does not remember him as, in one of many examples of
Stark’s selfishness, egocentrism and cognitive dissonance, he is capable of ignor-
ing or forgetting everything that does not revolve around him. Yet his kidnap,
injury and the revelation that the Stark Industries weapons he designed have been
used to kill American soldiers, have shaken the foundations of his worldview,
something akin to an intrusion of the Lacanian Real, which Žižek described as,
‘the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality – the Real
in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers
of reality’ (2013: 5–6).13 It is primarily for these reasons the MCU incarnation of
Stark has been referred to the ‘perfect post-9/11 hero’ by Tom Pollard (2011: 92).
Francis Pheasant-Kelly is quite right then to assert, as we will see is the case on
many occasions, that Stark (and superheroes like him) becomes a surrogate for
the audience and even an embodiment of aspects of national identity, writing
that his trauma is reflective of ‘the physical and psychological damage inflicted
on the United States by 9/11’ (2013: 144) (see also Dittmer 2012; Hassler-Forrest
2012). Similarly, Sean Carter and Klaus Dodds argue that the characterisation of
Stark demands him to be read as more than simply a character in a film, and they
assert that ‘Stark’s hubris, and more generally that of America as well, was cruelly
exposed in Afghanistan’ (2014: 56). Stark’s transition from fervent believer and
‘true patriot’ to doubter and critic became a familiar one in post-9/11 cinema (see
Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah, Douglas Freeman in Rendition [2007],
Roger Ferris in Body of Proof [2008] and Stanley Phillips in Grace is Gone [2007]),
as many characters such as these experienced traumatic episodes which funda-
mentally changed their worldview.
Instead of building the missiles that Raza orders him to, Stark constructs a
militarised arc reactor (based on his father’s original plans, thereby connecting
them even further) and the first iteration of the Iron Man suit in a rudimentary
and bulky design: revealing Iron Man to be quite literally a product of the ‘War
on Terror’. Yinsen is a without a doubt a ‘good Arab’ stereotype, but the brief mo-
ment where he tells Stark of his homeland in Gulmira is one of the rare occasions
the film pauses to consider those ‘precarious lives’ that Judith Butler described
in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). Yinsen is killed
during the escape when he sacrifices himself to ensure Stark’s plan works and his
final words to Stark are ‘Don’t waste it … don’t waste your life…’ in a vivid echo
of Captain John Miller’s (Tom Hanks) dying words to James Francis Ryan (Matt
Damon) at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan: ‘Earn this … earn
it.’ Albert Auster proposed that Miller’s injunction was deliberately formulated
to reach beyond the frames of the screen and this might also be applied to Iron
Man and its audiences in the new millennium:
Although a command directed at Ryan and implicitly his generation that did re-
turn from the war, ‘earn this’ is also a command that resonates far beyond Ryan’s
generation to the baby boomers and Generations Y and Z. Indeed, every genera-
tion of Americans must somehow deserve the sacrifices made at Omaha Beach
and other battles in World War II. Captain Miller’s dying words make it possible
for future generations to turn the Depression/World War II generation into the

embodiment of American ideals of self-sacrifice for the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. (2005: 212)
The films of the MCU return to World War II frequently (literally in the case of
Captain America: The First Avenger) to provide a moral compass for its diegetic
universe and beyond. Yet its depiction of World War II as a ‘mythic summit of
national virtue’ (Hoogland-Noon 2004: 341) is through the comforting prism of
the uncomplicated moral binarism it has conveniently been remembered as; of
an unambiguous war of good versus evil, fought for justice and honour rather
than the complicated geopolitical conflict that it actually was. Iron Man places
Tony Stark in the more politically divisive ‘9/11 Wars’, but the MCU rewrites
these conflicts through the prism of World War II by recreating its supposed
moral certainties. In fact, the MCU goes back even further than this by portray-
ing Afghanistan as a metaphorical new millennial frontier, something that Geoff
King argued is a prominent feature of contemporary American popular cinema,
asserting that, ‘Contemporary frontier narratives establish oppositions between
the moment of the frontier – sharp, clear-cut, “authentic” – and a dull, decadent
or corrupting version of “civilisation”’ (2000: 5). It is only on this new frontier,
freed from the decadence of his hedonistic lifestyle, that Stark is truly able to
find himself and become the man he was destined to be. While Lisa Purse in
Contemporary Action Cinema asserts that Afghanistan is ‘quickly brushed aside’
(2011a: 154), this is not entirely true, as its presence lingers and Stark will return
there later in the film to prove himself once again in what perhaps is the film’s
most important sequence, the rescue in Gulmira.
During his escape, Iron Man destroys the Stark Industries weapons stockpile
in Raza’s camp and then returns home to the US after three months in captivity.
To the surprise of his assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and his col-
league and mentor Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), he immediately demands two
things: an impromptu press conference and an ‘American cheeseburger’ which
he devours onscreen with its Burger King logo rather conspicuously evident to
the audience.14 In a pointed illustration of one of the myriad of ways the life of
Downey Jr. has informed the construction of the MCU version of Stark, just a
few years before in 2005 he had thanked Burger King for providing him with a
major stepping stone on his route to sobriety, but not in ways that would encour-
age sales of the Burger King Iron Man toy range that were produced to coincide
with the release of the film:
I have to thank Burger King. … It was such a disgusting burger I ordered. I had
that, and this big soda, and I thought something really bad was going to happen. I
thought I might have a heart attack or have to go to the hospital. So I reached out
to some people and said: ‘I’m really in trouble. I need to curl up for four days and
get all this out of my system.’ (qtd. in Anon. 2005)
At the conference Stark announces his retirement from the arms manufacturing
industry. He tells the crowd, ‘I had my eyes opened … I saw young Americans
killed by the very weapons I created to defend and protect them. And I saw that I
had become part of a system that is comfortable with zero accountability.’ Stark’s
experience in Afghanistan has led to this epiphany and the recognition of the
lives of others, but it is not the lives of all others that he has been compelled to rec-
ognise.15 In spite of his apparent sincerity, it is only the lives of young American
soldiers lost that he mentions and not the hundreds of thousands killed or dis-
placed in Iraq or Afghanistan during the ‘War on Terror’, a conflict in which he
has been shown to have actively participated in. As Cristobal Giraldez Catalan
has observed, ‘Nothing is mentioned about the indigenous children and women
who have suffered as a result of his weapons trading. Thus, the benevolent Arab
is invisible in this film’ (2008). In this way, the film establishes a hierarchy and
sense of subjectivity that becomes one of the defining tropes of the MCU. So
although the film does acknowledge the destructive potential of America’s par-
ticipation in the 9/11 wars, it absolves Stark of personal responsibility as he was
apparently unaware of how his weapons were being used and refuses to portray
or acknowledge the devastation and destruction perpetrated on those indigenous
peoples living in the region.16 Stark’s public apology and partial disavowal of his
past is similar to that of Jason Bourne’s to his former victims at the conclusion of
The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and is a tacit recognition of responsibility which
provides audiences with the fictional catharsis of the US apologising for its ag-
gressive foreign policy of the era without ever actually doing so during the Bush
administration, which was in its last months by the time the film was released.
Interestingly, Stark’s change of heart is initially vehemently rejected by those
close to him, so far does it depart from their preconceived views about both their
role and America’s global responsibility and prerogative, which according to
Stane, ‘keeps the world from falling into chaos’. Yet Stane courts chaos as an
iron monger (the name of the character in the comic but never attributed to him
in the film) in his sponsorship of what Naomi Klein outlines in her volume The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008) released in the same year
as Iron Man.17 Stane’s reaction is a predictable one given that he is soon after re-
vealed to be the primary antagonist of the film, had even actually ordered the Ten
Rings to kidnap and murder Stark in the Kunar Province of Afghanistan, and
now declares Stark to be suffering from PTSD in order to take control of Stark
Industries. Somewhat surprisingly the sympathetic Pepper Potts and Rhodes re-
act the same way: Potts threatens to quit her job, to which Stark responds, ‘You

stood by my side all these years while I reaped the benefits of destruction. And
now that I’m trying to protect the people I put in harm’s way you’re going to
walk out on me?’ Rhodes finds Stark’s decision to discontinue making weapons
of mass destruction for the American military such a disgusting idea that he
asks with derision ‘You a humanitarian now or something?’ and then suggests
Stark needs some ‘time to get your mind right’. Instead of offering a critique of
the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), as it seems to do on the surface, Stane
is presented as a bad apple and Stark is largely disavowed of responsibility, as
Mirrlees has observed: ‘The potential of this framing of the U.S. MIC to become
a structural critique of militarised capitalism, however, is not realised. Iron Man
individualises the MIC in Stark and Stane’ (2014: 11).18
Stark’s first real mission as Iron Man in his newly streamlined red and gold
Mark III suit (a colour scheme borrowed from the 1932 Ford Flathead Roadster
a photograph shows him working on with his late father) is back to the frontier
of Gulmira in Afghanistan, the home town of the man who had earlier sacrificed
himself to ensure Stark’s escape, Ho Yinsen. Stark is compelled to act when he
is confronted by images of atrocities committed there and a news report which
states:
With no political will or international pressure, there’s very little hope for these
refugees. … Around me, a woman begging for news on her husband, who was
kidnapped by insurgents, either forced to join their militia … Desperate refugees
clutch yellowed photographs, holding them up to anyone who will stop. A child’s
simple question, ‘Where are my mother and father?’
This is certainly how many Americans viewed the conflict in Afghanistan and
Iraq during the first half of the new millennial decade. In polls carried out in
May 2003 around eighty percent of Americans supported the war; by July 2008
this figure had lowered to sixty-eight percent; just five years later in December
2013 CNN was reporting that the war in Afghanistan was the most unpopular in
US history.19 It is in this scene we see very clearly established what we might call
the Stark Doctrine which continues throughout his appearances in the MCU.
Repulsed by his own image and how he has been a party to such a thing, he
shoots at his reflection, obliterating the glass and then flies to Gulmira hoping
to put things right in the first example of the truly global reach of American
superheroes throughout the MCU. The subsequent sequence adopts a much
more restrained tone than many later MCU films, which become filled with pro-
gressively more and more one liners and witty banter, particularly from Stark
himself. There are no wisecracks as he takes on Raza’s men, shown led by the
cruel Abu Bakar (Sayed Badreya). An award-winning Egyptian filmmaker and
actor, Badreya, has frequently expressed frustration at the limited roles available
in the American film industry for actors of Arabic descent like him. In one in-
terview, he commented, ‘Well, I hijack an airplane in Executive Decision [1996]. I
blew up places in True Lies [1994]. I, I kidnapped people. I done everything – bad
[sic]’ (qtd. in Gladstone and Garfield 2008).20 The Ten Rings are shown abducting
women and children and forcing men to join their ranks, continuing the film’s
portrayal of Arabs as either vile terrorists or helpless natives with seemingly little
room for any characterisations in between (see Shaheen 2009). Stark’s rescue of
the children in particular evokes the images of Iraq and Afghanistan depicted in
many American films about combat in the ‘War on Terror’ era where their lib-
eration emerges as a symbol of American humanity and beneficence. The scene
also offers us one of the best examples of a recurring motif in the MCU, that of
the superhero as heroic cowboy figure. In fact, the whole Gulmira episode is a
potent manifestation of Geoff King’s work on contemporary embodiments of the
frontier narrative in Hollywood film, about which he has asserted, ‘This version
of the renewed frontier experience produces the appearance of enemies that are
unambiguously defined and against which a clear definition of virtuous self can
be articulated’ (2000: 19). In Gulmira, Stark is a lone cowboy metaphorically rid-
ing into battle against savages and Rhodes will later (in the sequel Iron Man 2)
even refer to Stark’s ‘lone gunslinger act’. The film’s cinematography even accen-
tuates these connections in a variety of ways: one remarkable shot directly evokes
a western duel with Stark adopting the classic gunfighter pose like something
straight out of a John Ford or Sergio Leone film as he faces off against his vin-
dictive dark-skinned adversaries. In Afghanistan in the Cinema Mark Graham
stated:
If there is a common denominator in all of these Hollywood films, it would be

their obsessive resonance with that curiously American blend of racism, impe-
rialism and misogyny: the frontier myth. Afghanistan fades into a palimpsest
beneath this mythic framework of desert plains, lone riders, native tribes, and the
merciless struggle for definition between the civilised self and the savage other.
(2010: 54)
While Iron Man is one of the only films in the MCU to directly portray
Afghanistan, this quintessentially American brand of frontier mythology and all
the ideological associations contained within it becomes one of the central nar-
rative motifs of the series. In Gulmira Stark dispatches his terrorist enemies just
as he had done the communists in the jungles of Vietnam in the early years of his
appearances in the comic book, revealing the ideological, moral and military su-
periority of America just as emphatically now as it did then. Matthew Costello’s

Fig. 6: Iron Man as a cowboy figure shown in the classic gunslinger pose, rescuing women and
children while bringing American justice to the lawless frontier of Afghanistan in Iron Man
comments about Stark’s early interventions in Vietnam might be equally applied

to those in Afghanistan, as in both Americans are ‘virtuous, free individuals on
a progressive global mission to defend the world’ (2009: 58).
The Stark Doctrine, then, can be seen as an embrace of the idea of the moral
superiority of Tony Stark, and by association the United States, and both the
responsibility and the prerogative to intervene whenever it is regarded as appro-
priate or necessary, with little or no consideration of matters of international law.
In this way of course, the Stark Doctrine is not too far removed from the Bush
Doctrine which was defined by Marvin Astrada in his book American Power
After 9/11 as one of pre-emption, prevention, primacy and democracy promotion,
secure in the belief ‘that American civilization is the highest achievement and
aspiration for mankind’ (2010: 2). The MCU embraces this ideology as categori-
cally as Lamont Colucci did in his unselfconsciously-titled Crusading Realism:
The Bush Doctrine and American Core Values After 9/11, where he suggested,
‘The 9/11 attacks provided the impetus, the reason, and the need for a presidency
on the road to Assertive Nationalism to embrace the totality of its own beliefs in
mankind, God, justice, philosophy and therefore policy’ (2008: 173).
The technologically advanced Iron Man suit also promulgates another myth
about the pre-eminence of American warfare in the twenty-first century, that
its weapons technology is able to target enemies and kill efficiently and mor-
ally without any collateral damage, and that those it kills are only ever ‘the bad
guys’ who unequivocally deserve it. This, of course, is a problematic abstention
from reality achieved only by erasing the painful truth of the thousands of civil-
ians killed and wounded as the result of American military operations in the
‘War on Terror’ era. The Gulmira sequence, and indeed the entire film, posi-
tions audiences to see events exclusively from Tony Stark/Iron Man’s perspective
and specifically through his futuristic HUD (head-up display) which is shown to
use complicated threat-recognition software, offering us a striking and visceral
example of what E. Anne Kaplan described as the ‘imperial gaze’ in her book
Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (1997), as Stark/
Iron Man successfully dispatches the bad guys, leaving women and children
completely unharmed and grateful to their American liberator. Scenes like these
reinforce dominant social structures and ideas about America’s role in the world,
as Dan Hassler-Forest argued in his Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in
the Neoliberal Age: ‘Like the uncanny images of smart bombs flying down the
chimneys of targeted buildings in the first Gulf War, or the “Shock and Awe”
tactics of the Rumsfeld doctrine in the more recent military conflict, Iron Man’s
use of high-tech weaponry is depicted as something that is possible without civil-
ian casualties’ (2012: 183). This is ultra-modern in the case of Iron Man (and Iron
Man), but the trope is a perennial one in depictions of American heroes and was
explored by Lawrence and Jewett about another iconic American hero, the Lone
Ranger, who ‘never kills anyone. With superhuman accuracy, his silver bullets
strike the hands of threatening bad guys – evoking a mere “yow!” or “my hand!”.
Yet their evil powers are neutralised … the Lone Ranger’s powers insure that he
inflicts minimal injury’ (2002: 40). After defeating all of Raza’s men, Iron Man
leaves the villainous Bakar to the Gulmirans themselves with a cry of ‘He’s all
yours!’ as the camera shows what seems like the whole village moving threaten-
ingly towards Bakar in what the film would have us believe is Afghan justice
‘having received the American saviour’s consent’ (Catalan 2008).
In Stark’s entirely moral and successful, yet completely unlawful intervention
in Gulmira the MCU sets a precedent to which it will adhere throughout the film
series to follow, that these intercessions are entirely normalised, depoliticised
and even reified. It is also relevant that Stark’s extra-judicial role is implicitly
endorsed by the military and that the US armed forces are themselves absolved
of responsibility for the events in Gulmira which necessitated Iron Man’s mis-
sion in the first place. In a throwaway line of dialogue as to why the military were
not allowed to help the Gulmirans a US soldier explains, ‘They [the terrorists]
were using human shields. We never got the green light.’ Mirrlees has proposed
that
Iron Man thereby gives popular credence to the post-9/11 liberal imperialist idea
that the US has a responsibility, obligation or mission to use its military’s power
[to] liberate or save other peoples living in other countries that are suffering from
some kind of oppression. As an allegorical figure of the US state, Iron Man’s pro-
tagonist Stark personifies the US’s exceptionalist state of exception. To secure
America, Stark must play by his own rules and pursue goals he deems just, free of
external constraints of his power. (2014: 10)

After several other adventures, Stark confronts his true nemesis and quasi-
father figure Stane, who has taken to wearing stolen and ‘improved’ Iron Man
technology, in the film’s spectacular climax, fittingly initially on the Howard
Stark Memorial Parkway. This is the first example of what became quite common
in Phase One of the MCU, of metallic-suited, CGI creations fighting each other.
However, Carter and Dodds saw more to the battle when they wrote, ‘Ostensibly
this is between Stark’s Iron Man and Stane’s Iron Monger, but the showdown
could also be read as one between competing visions of the role of the US in the
world, embodied in these assemblages of body and machine’ (2014: 57). To finally
beat Stane, Stark is forced to seemingly sacrifice himself in one of the most fa-
miliar motifs in American popular culture (and one that is frequently returned
to through the MCU); but it is a false sacrifice that will very rarely result in the
actual death of the hero, and functions primarily as a symbol of his masculinity,
heroism and patriotism (see King 2012).
In the film’s conclusion, Stark attends another press conference in the same
location as the first where he is advised by Special Agent Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D.
(played by Clark Gregg who has little more than a cameo role in Iron Man, which
will expand to something much more considerable as MCU continues) to read a
prepared statement which indicates that Iron Man is in fact Stark’s bodyguard,
an excuse which allowed the comic book incarnation of Stark to hide his real
identity for decades. However, Downey Jr.’s version of Stark, perhaps due to the
character’s narcissistic tendencies, is unable to prevent himself revealing the
truth to the world, and the film ends abruptly with his delivery of the now iconic
line ‘I am Iron Man’, thereby establishing a precedent in the MCU that very few
of their superheroes (unlike their DCEU counterparts) will have a secret identity
and the usual secret identity narratives play very little part in the series.21
It is clear to see that the film is deeply immersed in the tumultuous geo-po-
litical arena of the ‘War on Terror’ era in which it was made, as much as Nolan’s
genre-defining Dark Knight trilogy. Iron Man is much more than a disposable
pop culture text and offers a rich set of paradoxes which, in many ways, are char-
acteristic of the ideological discourse of the era. It simultaneously criticises the
military industrial complex and by extension US hegemony and aggressive for-
eign policy, but at the same time it rehabilitates the role of a more nuanced use
of American technology and military in the form of Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit
and his humanitarian interventions in Afghanistan. Therefore, Hassler-Forest
is quite correct in his assertion that the film offers ‘a particular fantasy of mili-
tarized agency’ which ‘trades casually in these familiar Orientalist stereotypes’
(2012: 95), and yet Pheasant-Kelly is equally correct to advocate that its nar-
rative attempts ‘the questioning of US political ethics after the events of 2001’
(2013: 144).22 Catalan’s assertion that ‘The social texture of Iron Man presents a
particularly disturbing fantasy during this time of American military occupa-
tion. On a daily basis one hears of a rising Iraqi or Afghan civilian death count
and extraordinary devastation; Iron Man transforms these tragedies into live
cinema spectacle’ (2008) is as accurate as W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz’s observation
in American History Goes to the Movies that the film is
more than a simplistic comic book narrative about the transformation of playboy
and weapons designer Tony Stark into a superhero, Iron Man presents a complex
story about American involvement in the Afghanistan War. Favreu’s [sic] film
is thus a provocative story about contemporary American foreign policy in the
aftermath of September 11, and the longstanding debate regarding advancing
American interests or American ideals in global geopolitics. (2011: 257)23
That the film might provoke such paradoxical reactions is, perhaps, a confirma-
tion of its efficacy and the unresolved contradictions which are often a hallmark
of contemporary Hollywood film. As the first film in the MCU, Iron Man estab-
lishes both a comprehensively realised diegetic universe and a vivid engagement
with the era in which it was made. It established the nascent MCU as being set
in the ‘real world’ rather than a fantastic and cartoonish landscape, in a reality
where 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ actually happened. Yet the kinesthetic plea-
sures of the MCU elide and obfuscate any sustained counter-hegemonic content
in its reiteration of American exceptionalism.
‘God bless America and God Bless Iron Man!’: The Hubris of Tony
Stark in Iron Man 2
Prone to self destructive tendencies … text book narcissism … recruitment as-

sessment for Avengers Initiative. Iron Man, yes … Tony Stark, not recommended.
– From the report compiled by Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow)
on Tony Stark in Iron Man 2
Just two years after the remarkable financial and critical success of Iron Man,
which made in excess of $600 million worldwide and was the second larg-
est domestic box office earner of 2008 (behind another superhero film, The
Dark Knight), John Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. returned with Iron Man 2,
the third film in the MCU after The Incredible Hulk (explored in chapter two).
Despite the success of Iron Man, the longevity and stability of the MCU in 2010
was by no means guaranteed.24 Iron Man 2 bears all the hallmarks of a modern
sequel in the blockbuster age: from its expanded production budget (from $140
to $200 million), significantly larger cast of characters, to its more extensive use

of special effects and even greater levels of action and spectacle. While it does
retain aspects of the character development and spontaneity which had endeared
many to the original film, there is a distinct sense that it went into production
without a completed script, something that is becoming more and common in an
age where release dates are often announced before a screenplay is even written.25
On the whole, Iron Man 2 was well received by the critics on release and it was
even more financially successful than its predecessor ($623 million worldwide),
but there has been a subsequent backlash regarding the film’s perceived failures
to the extent where it has become regarded as the one of the lesser entries in the
MCU to date. Richard Corliss described it as ‘a cluttered, clattering toy story’
(2010) and Kirk Honeycutt as a film full of ‘noise, confusion, multiple villains,
irrelevant stunts and misguided story lines’ (2010). Corliss and Honeycutt raise
valid points, but just like the first film and the rest of the MCU, Iron Man 2 is
profoundly connected to the era in which it is made and it develops many of the
thematic motifs established in Iron Man. It continues to explore and negotiate,
sometimes in quite an explicit fashion, perceptions of national identity through
the figure of Tony Stark/Iron Man, in particular aspects of military agency and
masculinity through the representation and ultimate erasure of vulnerability and
the reaffirmation of hegemonic male power. As its predecessor did, it introduces
elements of criticism that are once again negated in favour of a Slotkin-esque
redemption through violence narrative the likes of which has characterised pop-
ular American cinema for decades. Instead of Obadiah Stane’s quasi-father figure
antagonist, Iron Man 2 presents us with two dark mirrors of Tony Stark for Iron
Man to do battle with: the maverick and prodigiously talented Russian weapons
inventor Anton Vanko (Mickey Rourke), who has a history with the Stark family,
and the oleaginous Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), CEO of Hammer Industries,
who has replaced Stark as chief weapons advisor to the US military after Stark’s
retirement in the first film. The screenwriter of Iron Man 2, Justin Theroux, de-
scribed both of them as being a ‘shadow version’ of Tony Stark (see Sciretta 2010;
Weintraub 2010). At the same time as this, the film explores Stark’s relationship
with his deceased father, the Stark family legacy (and by extension an American
legacy) and the idea that Tony Stark’s most formidable enemy might not be a rival
weapons manufacturer, but actually himself.
The film begins six months after Stark revealed to the world that he was
Iron Man at the climax of the first film and in the meantime he has become ‘the
world’s first celebrity superhero’ (O’Sullivan 2015b: 7), heralded as a saviour by
much of the world (a newspaper headline reads ‘Iron Man stabilizes East-West
Relations’), and awarded Time Magazine’s prestigious ‘Person of the Year’.26 The
film’s opening shot shows him leaping out of an airplane dressed in the new
Mark IV suit to the sound of yet another AC/DC song, this time ‘Shoot to Thrill’
(1980), as explosions burst all around him. The audience perhaps wonders if he is
back in Afghanistan once more, before he lands … revealing himself to actually
be in Flushing Meadows, New York and the star attraction of the Stark Industries
Expo being held for the first time since 1974. Standing at centre stage, flanked by
beautiful dancing girls in matching red, white and blue Iron Man outfits known
as the ‘Ironettes’, the adoring crowd chant his name over and over, as he outlines
his hubristic vision of the future in a world in which Iron Man replaces Uncle
Sam as the symbol of America.
I’m not saying I’m responsible for this country’s longest run of uninterrupted
peace in 35 years! I’m not saying that from the ashes of captivity, never has a phoe-
nix metaphor been more personified! I’m not saying Uncle Sam can kick back on
a lawn chair, sipping on an iced tea, because I haven’t come across anyone man
enough to go toe to toe with me on my best day! It’s not about me. It’s not about
you, either. It’s about legacy, the legacy left behind for future generations.
Iron Man had already considered what Stark’s legacy might be through Ho
Yinsen telling him ‘What you saw is your legacy Stark, your life’s work in the
hands of those murderers’ and Tony’s comment to Stane, ‘I don’t want a body
count to be our legacy’, but this idea is placed at the centre of Iron Man 2.27 With
the pyrotechnics, the rockets, explosions, shot and originally screened in IMAX,
one might argue that the Expo is a manifestation of Stark’s prodigious ego and,
while he protests that the Expo is not about him, Pepper tells him that it is his
‘ego gone crazy’ and he seems to have forgotten many of the insights Yinsen
revealed to him in the caves of Afghanistan in the first film. This convenient
process of Stark forgetting the lessons of the previous films will become one of
Fig. 7: The Stark Expo in Iron Man 2 (2010) emerges as a manifestation of Stark’s hubris and his
very particular vision of America’s future

the essential tenets of his portrayal in the MCU, as at the beginning of each sub-
sequent film Stark seems to return to his pre-Afghanistan, pre-epiphany state,
perhaps in an acknowledgement that audiences prefer the arrogant and cavalier
Stark, which is undeniably more interesting than his ‘humanitarian’ incarnation.
Stark’s reset is reminiscent of the device formerly used in sitcoms in which each
new episode, roughly speaking, disregards the events of the previous, a process
which is commonly referred to as a ‘total reset’ (see Newman and Levine 2011)
and described as ‘an existential circle’ by Mick Eaton (1978: 74).
Stark interrupts his speech to play a recorded message from his father taken
from the last Stark Expo in 1974. Even though Howard Stark has been dead since
1991 (in circumstances that will be more fully explored in Captain America: Civil
War six years later), as we have seen, he is very much a part of his son’s life: in the
arc reactor that sustains him and even the choice of the colour of the iconic Iron
Man suit.28 Howard announces: ‘Everything is achievable through technology,
better living, robust health and for the first time in world history: the possibil-
ity of world peace.’ Like his father, Tony seems to aspire to world peace, but his
vision is a very particular one which sees US power and hegemony perpetuated
around the globe with Iron Man as its national and corporate figurehead. Tony’s
relationship with his long-dead father is central to Iron Man 2 and to the film’s
vision of American exceptionalism and scientific progress in what Jason Dittmer
has observed as the superhero functioning as ‘as an icon of American technologi-
cal innovation and the hierarchies of domination it permits’ (2010: 122).
Stark’s consideration of his family legacy is more relevant to him than it
might have been due to the fact that the chemical Palladium (Pd), which powers
the miniature arc reactor in his chest and therefore keeps him alive, has proven
to be toxic to his system and is slowly poisoning him to death. The narrative
which follows will present him with what seems on the surface to be a chal-
lenge to this sense of hubris and self-importance which is evocatively portrayed
in these opening scenes. Yet Stark’s and the film’s cognitive dissonance proves
revealing both of the cultural climate in which the film is made and the prevail-
ing ideological perspectives consolidated by the MCU. The film will show him to
be arrogant, misguided and dangerous but he remains the film’s largely unam-
biguous hero; it is to him we remain ideologically sutured and his irresponsible
behaviour is ultimately endorsed and even celebrated throughout the narrative
of Iron Man 2 which will conclude with him vanquishing the bad guys, getting
the girl and even receiving a medal from the US government by the end credits.
After his dramatic appearance at the Expo, Stark is called to testify before
the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington for the Weaponized Suit
Defense Program Hearings which are to decide the fate of the Iron Man suit. In
scenes reflective of real-life American military concerns about the technological
progress of rival nations, the committee, presided over by the sardonic Arlen
Spector-like Senator Stern (Gary Shandling), expresses worries that US power
will be superseded by other nations appropriating technology similar to Stark’s
and because Stark is a private citizen he is not to be trusted to act in the best in-
terests of the nation, and therefore wants to requisition the Iron Man technology
and place it in the hands of the US military. The rival weapons contractor Justin
Hammer suggests that ‘Stark has created a sword with untold possibilities and
yet he insists it’s a shield, he asks us to trust him while we cower behind it’. Stark
refuses, arguing that the Iron Man is not a suit but rather a ‘hi tech prosthesis’
and, in a particularly American declaration, that it is a part of him, ‘I am Iron
Man, the suit and I are one’. Even though this scene is played primarily for co-
medic effect its real-world resonances are palpable, evoking fears of an intrusive
USA PATRIOT Act and also Colin Powell’s testimony to the United Nations in
2003 which was broadcast live on C-SPAN as Stark’s testimony here is shown to
be too.29
Stern and Hammer argue that there might very well be other nations devel-
oping similar technologies and, in a video recording, two parts of the so-called
Axis of Evil – Iran and North Korea – are shown. Initially the video images
showing these threats seem to be very real and Hammer states (in language
which echoes Powell’s claims in 2003), ‘This has been corroborated by our allies
and local intelligence on the ground indicating that these suits are quite pos-
sibly, at this moment, operational’. That is until Stark commandeers the screens
with the aside ‘time for a little transparency’, to reveal that Iran and North Korea
are actually decades from manufacturing similar technology and that Hammer
himself was even working with these rogue states, a term returned to frequently
by the Bush administration. The defining testimony in front of the committee
actually comes from Stark’s friend James Rhodes who walks into the room with
his back to the screen, momentarily hiding the fact that he is played by a differ-
ent actor after contract disputes saw Don Cheadle replace Terrence Howard who
had played the character in Iron Man. Cheadle’s first line as Rhodes is directed
both at Stark within the film’s diegesis and audiences outside the frames of the
screen: ‘It’s me, I’m here, deal with it.’30 Rhodes’ unwilling testimony, his reluc-
tance to prematurely ‘reveal these images to the general public at this time’ and
the fact he is forced by Stern to read only a brief extract out of context from his
extensive report evokes and even satirises Powell’s hearing in its language and its
use of footage to show how insubstantial evidence is used in an attempt to sway
public opinion, which led to Pheasant-Kelly’s assertion that the scene ‘parodies
the justification for the invasion of Iraq’ (2013: 149). Rhodes reads, ‘As he does
not operate within any definable branch of government, Iron Man presents a
potential threat to the security of both the nation and to her interests’ and while

this is shown to be true on a number of occasions, it is thoroughly swept aside by
the film’s glamourisation of Stark and his narrative arc of redemption through
violence.
The audience is positioned to cheer on Stark’s defiant attitude through his
belittling of the odious Stern (who is later revealed to be a HYDRA agent in
Captain America: The Winter Soldier), despite Stern’s demands that an unac-
countable and unelected CEO in possession of a WMD be under some sort of
control being entirely reasonable; but the way the events are framed they ap-
pear to be an affront to liberty and justice. Yet they are the very same demands
made in the context of Captain America: Civil War six years later in which Tony
Stark will reverse his opinion and agree not only with the intervention of the US
government, but also the United Nations. Stern is the first in a long line of venal
government officials throughout the MCU which practically demands that Stark
(and his fellow superheroes) takes the law into his own hands in a moral crusade
of unlawful but righteous vigilante justice. Stark’s profoundly libertarian asser-
tion that he has ‘privatised world peace’ and his pointed refusal to comply with
the government’s demands saw him labelled as a ‘Randian hero’ by Kyle Smith in
The New York Post (2010) and embraced by Hugo Schmidt in a review at The Atlas
Society titled ‘A Capitalist Superhero?’ (2010).31
The film’s other primary villain is also a dark mirror of Tony Stark, the dis-
graced Russian scientist Ivan Vanko (who had been imprisoned for fifteen years
for attempting to sell plutonium to Pakistan, which does not seem too differ-
ent to Stark’s company selling WMDs to the terrorist network, the Ten Rings),
introduced in the film’s credits sequence. Mickey Rourke brings his customary
intensity to the role which saw him spend time in the infamous Butyrka prison
in Moscow as part of his preparation (see Warmoth 2009). Like Tony, Vanko
is influenced by his own father, Anton, who was a research scientist alongside
Howard Stark after the end of World War II, but was deported in 1963 after being
accused of espionage. In spite of his flaws (which are explored more extensively
in Marvel’s Agent Carter), Howard Stark is seen as an example of a maverick
American creative genius, but the only equivalent the film offers us from Russia
is morally bankrupt. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) later comments, ‘Anton saw
it [the arc reactor technology] as a way to get rich’. Vanko senior’s dying words to
his son are ‘That should have been you’ and Ivan seeks revenge on the family he
thinks robbed him of his birth right as Favreau offers him up as a half-hearted
image of what Stark perhaps could have become had his circumstances been dif-
ferent.32 This use of Russia in the film is the first of many throughout the MCU
which frequently reverts to simplistic Cold War binarisms transplanted into the
‘War on Terror’ narrative in which American film once again began to portray
Russia as a growing threat to global peace and security in films like Salt (2010), A
Good Day to Die Hard (2013) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) (see Kurutz
2014). Russia plays an insidious and prominent role as early (chronologically
speaking) as Dr Johann Fenhoff and Dottie Underwood’s plan to use the Howard
Stark-invented ‘Midnight Oil’ to wreak havoc on New York in 1946 in Marvel’s
Agent Carter; in the Russian separatists that launch an ICBM at the United States
in a flashback to 1989 in Ant-Man; in Black Widow’s traumatic experiences in
the Red Room orphanage, in Georgi Luchkov the crooked and gullible Russian
general at the start of The Avengers; in the heroin and human trafficking crimi-
nal exploits of the Ranskakov brothers in Daredevil; or the Inhuman assassin
general Androvich who tries to assassinate the Russian Prime Minister Dimitri
Olshenko in Marvel’s Agent’s of S.H.I.E.L.D. in (3.13) ‘Parting Shot’, to name just
a few. Each are characterised either by their perfidy, maniacal nature or their buf-
foonishness, and sometimes even a combination of all three.
Stark and Vanko finally come face to face at the Monaco Grand Prix where the
Russian attacks him with seemingly the whole world watching live on television
in what is suggested to be a terrorist attack by MSNBC which reports that Vanko
is a ‘terror suspect’ and leads to the United States Department of Homeland
Security raising the terror alert from yellow to red. Just a few days before at the
committee hearing Stark had promised the American public that no nation had
any technology comparable to his own advanced Iron Man suit, but Vanko’s two
electric whips powered by a miniature arc reactor are exactly like Stark’s. Tony
manages to defeat him, but Vanko informs him that he had intended for all this
to happen and that his very appearance would be enough to bring Stark down
and ruin his legacy. Stark is ignorant about Vanko and his family name and even
remarks he could have sold his technology to ‘North Korea, China, Iran’. He
even casually gives Vanko advice about how to improve it (which his adversary
actually adopts later), but Vanko tells him: ‘You come from a family of thieves
and butchers, and like all guilty men, you try to rewrite your history, to forget all
the lives the Stark family has destroyed. … If you could make God bleed, people
would cease to believe in him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will
come.’ There will be many characters who make similar criticisms of Stark’s ac-
tions throughout the MCU (see Pietro and Wanda Maximoff from Avengers: Age
of Ultron, and Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3, among others), but most of these
assertions are negated by coming from villains, or else they are swept away by
the narrative of the films. Yet many of them, including Vanko’s, have an element
of truth about them. Vanko explicitly connects Iron Man and heroes like him to
mythology in his comment that Stark has come to be a godlike figure to many
and that by having his vulnerability revealed for all to see, the public will reject
him and what he represents. But the idea that our heroes might truly be vulner-
able or even responsible for their actions is too problematic, and every single film

in the MCU without exception concludes with the reconstitution of masculine
authority and patriarchal normalcy.
When Stark hears that Vanko’s father, Anton, had once worked alongside
his own he dismisses it, just as he forgot about Yinsen’s teachings, and Pepper’s
birthday, and did not concern himself about weapons being made in his name
that were being used in conflicts all around the world. However, Vanko’s warn-
ing that the ‘the sharks will come’ is quickly proven correct as Stark’s reputation
and that of Stark Industries is severely damaged. First Senator Stern appears on
MSNBC almost crowing that ‘the genie is out of the bottle and this man has no
idea what he’s doing. He thinks of the Iron Man weapon as a toy!’, then television
hosts Christine Amanpour on CNN and Bill O’Reilly during The O’Reilly Factor
(FOX News, 1996–2017) are severely critical of him: Amanpour asks, ‘His con-
tinuing erratic behaviour may lead many people to ask themselves, can this man
still protect us?’ and O’Reilly states, ‘When Mr Stark announced he was indeed
Iron Man he was making a promise to America. We trusted that he would look
out for us. He obviously did not.’
This pressure on Tony combined with his deteriorating health turns him to
alcohol in a nod to the famous arc in the Iron Man comics known as ‘Demon in
the Bottle’ (The Invincible Iron Man, #120–29, 1979), culminating in a birthday
party scene in his Malibu mansion which he sincerely believes may be his last.
Fully dressed as Iron Man during the celebration, he urinates in his suit and uses
his repulsor beams to entertain the beautiful women in the crowd by shooting
at champagne bottles and watermelons. The scene is primarily played for laughs,
very differently to its much darker dramatisation in the comic, where it is one
of the events which enabled Stark to realise he is, in fact, an alcoholic. It is this
irresponsibility, combined with Vanko’s revelations, that lead the government to
finally forcefully intervene and decide to remove the Iron Man technology from
Stark. Their chosen representative is Stark’s best friend Rhodes who tells Tony,
‘You don’t deserve to wear one of these’ (a line that Tony Stark will repeat almost
verbatim to Captain America at the conclusion of Captain America: Civil War
about his shield). The morning after, having hit rock bottom (or as close as a film
made for families will allow its protagonist to go) Stark is handed a briefcase by
Nick Fury that belonged to his father with which, he is informed, he will be able
to solve his health problems. In a moving and understated scene Tony interacts
with film footage of the long-dead Howard Stark, the man he had always thought
had no real feelings for him but who he now sees telling him: ‘What is and always
be my greatest creation … is you.’ Tony uses his father’s research to create a new
element, which Howard had discovered many years before, but due to the limita-
tions of the technology of his time could not physically build. The new element
is shown to generate more than enough power to run the reactor in Tony’s chest
and is not corrosive to his system, saving his life and allowing him to continue
to be the Iron Man.33
The film’s two villains, Hammer and Vanko, work together as Iron Man 2
builds to its climax, Hammer using his extensive riches, influence and resources
to get Vanko out of prison in order to make weapons for him, not in a decrepit
Moscow flat, but using state of the art technology in Hammer’s New York labora-
tory. Just as Tony is obsessed with his legacy so is Hammer, and while Hammer
says he wants Vanko’s technology to put him ‘in the Pentagon for the next
twenty-five years’, it seems that his real reason is far closer to Vanko’s own, to hu-
miliate Stark and destroy his reputation, leading him to remark, ‘you go after his
legacy, that’s what you kill’. The new Hammer drones, secretly made by Vanko,
are displayed at the Stark Expo where the film had begun, in a presentation called
‘In defence of peace’ which continues the motif of American power being used
globally in the name of protection, but here shown as being perverted by the
likes of the selfish Hammer as opposed to the now selfless Stark.34 As thirty-two
of the new drones take the stage, each said to cost $123.7 million dollars, there
seems to be approximately four billion dollars’ worth of military hardware as
part of the presentation, even without the arrival of the centrepiece, the rede-
signed Iron Man suit, piloted by Rhodes and now going by the more aggressive
name of War Machine, featuring even more destructive weaponry than Stark has
(see Axe 2011).35 As one might expect, the presentation soon goes awry as Vanko
commandeers the drone technology, and even Rhodes’ suit, ordering the ma-
chines to attack the crowd. The scene is significant because it marks the start of
the practice of superheroes fighting unambiguous hordes of computer-generated
bad guys (which will be replicated frequently in the form of Chitauri, Ultron’s
robots and Dark Elves, among others). In another trend that will become com-
mon throughout the MCU, while there is much chaos, shooting and explosions,
not a single civilian is shown to be killed or even hurt.36
Rhodes and Stark put aside their differences for the greater good (Rhodes
even apologises to Stark, ‘I should have trusted you more’) and unite to fight
Vanko as the film eschews character interaction and replaces it with an extended
action scene as the genre demands, again between battling men in CGI metallic
suits. As one critic commented, ‘As for the actual grand finale, Downey Jr. and
Cheadle seem like they’re already network gaming the PS3 release instead of fac-
ing any actual threat’ (Pinkerton 2010). Despite his litany of poor judgement calls
and his egregious use of the Iron Man suit, on defeating Vanko Stark is congratu-
lated by all those around him including being rewarded with the consummation
of his relationship with Pepper (who is saved at the end of the film by Stark as
she was at the end of Iron Man) and even given the Army’s Distinguished Service
Medal, one very rarely given to civilians, by Senator Stern in a dénouement

which endorses and legitimises Stark’s vigilantism and provides us with a perfect
example of what Guy Westwell has suggested was a common trait in post-9/11
films which function ‘in service of hegemonic renewal’ (2014: 14).37 The two Iron
Man films at the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe establish patterns of
how the series interacts with American ideology and society. They both endorse
profoundly America-centric views of the world, what Judith Butler called a ‘first-
person narrative’ (2006: 7), but inconsistencies and paradoxes sometimes remain
visible. Even though Stark is undoubtedly a hero, he is also profoundly selfish
and undeniably immature, even after his epiphany. He is certainly a far cry from
the virtuous Superman in either the Donner version, the rebooted Singer, or even
the conflicted but morally pure character featured in Snyder’s Man of Steel. It is
maybe for these reasons that Tony Stark/Iron Man (and also the flawed figure
of Batman) connected with audiences at a time when cinematic incarnations of
Superman seemed to struggle. Might audiences be forced to acknowledge Iron
Man’s refusal to recognise the lives of others in its overwhelming drive to glam-
ourise Tony Stark’s transformation and heroic status? Or is this painful reality
swept away in the film’s exhilarating and sustained justification of extra-judicial
violence? Might they begin to question Stark’s pronounced recklessness and hu-
bris in Iron Man 2? Or is this too erased in the film’s self-congratulatory and
exculpatory narrative of redemption through violence? Jon Favreau’s opinion
about the politics of Iron Man and Iron Man 2 were revealed in an interview with
Edward Douglas at SuperHeroHype:
We really went out of our way to try to avoid make (sic) it polarizing as far as what
the politics represent, but instead try to maintain an emotional reflection of the
fear of our times, and then to have Iron Man step in and not be somebody who
could offer a simple solution, but instead be a guy who seemed singularly suited
for the challenges of our day. A guy who didn’t represent overwhelming military
might, but also didn’t represent pacifism or isolationism, instead a guy who could
go in as a one-man army and separate the good guys from the bad guys and attack
the people who are bringing the justice to the world while preserving innocent
human life and leaving a very small military footprint where we’re involved, so
it’s sort of an unrealistic fantasy. (Qtd. in Douglas 2008)
Even when Iron Man 2 ends though, it does not really end. Just as the first Iron
Man concluded with a post-credits teaser introducing Nick Fury with the now
iconic line of dialogue, ‘Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe. You
just don’t know it yet’, informing Tony Stark and the audience that Iron Man was
the beginning of a much larger experiment and that other superheroes existed
in this diegetic world, the films which followed it would not just be sequels, but
a part of a coherent and developing shared universe often with their own mid-
credits and post-credits ‘tag’ or ‘stinger’ which have become such a part of the
MCU experience that audiences have, as Matthias Stork asserted, become ‘almost
Pavlovian trained’ (2014: 84) to expect them.38 In 2008 this was virtually unheard
of, but as the years progressed they have become a relatively common part of the
blockbuster experience. They participate in the creation of this shared universe
by sometimes introducing the next film (see Loki’s plan in the Thor stinger), or
new characters (see Thanos in the tag attached to The Avengers, Quicksilver and
Scarlett Witch at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or the Collector
at the end of Thor: The Dark World), unifying characters and events (as in Tony
Stark’s appearance at the end of The Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner’s at the end of
Iron Man 3 and Thor’s at the end of Doctor Strange), or leave the audience with
memorable vignettes that sometimes lead to the creation of popular memes (as
in the Shawarma scene at the end of The Avengers and dancing baby Groot at
the end of Guardians of the Galaxy). This reached a new level in 2017 with the
inclusion of five separate post-credit scenes in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2,
plus additional moving portraits during the credit scroll (one of which featured a
dancing Jeff Goldblum who would appear as the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok
later that year), which encompass all of the variations described above. What
they all demonstrate, without exception, is that the MCU films are not single
entities, nor are they sequels in the traditional sense of the term, rather they are
part of a cohesive and developing whole which encourages participation (and,
very importantly, multiple viewings) with film franchises to a degree not asked
before of audiences. The post-credits teaser of Iron Man 2 features only four
words of dialogue and shows Agent Coulson arriving in New Mexico, the ‘Land
of Enchantment’, overlooking a large crater in the middle of which sits Mjölnir
the mythical hammer from Norse legend. With Coulson informing Nick Fury,
‘Sir, I found it’ he teases the appearance of Thor, the God of Thunder in a film
that was released almost exactly a year later on 6 May 2011 and which is one of
the subjects of the next chapter.
Notes
1 Stan Lee later regretted the pronounced anti-communism of the early Iron Man
stories (see Wright 2003: 223). As the 1960s progressed the comics questioned Tony
Stark’s (and by extension America’s) motives and by the 1970s he was expressing
doubts about Vietnam, US foreign policy and his own role in the Cold War.
2 Adi Granov has observed, ‘The story of Iron Man has been rebooted a few times to
make him more relevant to the times … unfortunately the political climate in the
world has always been able to suit the threat that originally served as the backdrop for

the comic. Weapons and those who design them seem as controversial and relevant
today as they were during the Cold War, so it’s not too much of a stretch to transpose
Tony Stark from the 1960s into today’ (qtd. in Mangels 2008: 109).
3 In the novelisation by Peter David, Tony Stark’s is shown to muse, ‘Not for the first
time, he wonders why in the world anyone would willingly live here, to say nothing
of using vicious terrorist tactics to defend the right to do so. … If anything, people
should be fighting for the opportunity to get the hell out of there’ (2008: 2).
4 Jon Favreau suggested the reason they used this music was, ‘We had to find the atti-
tude and that’s why we paid through the nose for heavy metal music that you’ve never
seen in another superhero movie. That’s why we open with ‘Back in Black’. That’s why
it’s Robert Downey Jr. This had to have attitude and be rock ‘n’ roll and in your face’
(qtd. in Douglas 2008).
5 Several military operations in the ‘War on Terror’ era had the word ‘freedom’ at-
tached to them. Aside from ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (2001–14) which was the
official name adopted by the US government for the Global War on Terrorism it-
self, ‘Operation Falcon Freedom’ (December 2004) and ‘Operation Bell Hurriyah’
(October 2007) which when translated from Arabic means ‘Enjoy Freedom’.
6 Jon Favreau wrote the Time Magazine ‘100’ entry for Elon Musk in 2010. In March
2017 Musk issued a suitably Stark-like proposal that he would solve the energy crisis
in South Australia within one hundred days or do it for free (see Hunt 2017).
7 At the time of the release of Iron Man Jeff Bridges had been nominated four times
for an Academy Award; he won for Crazy Heart (2009). Gwyneth Paltrow won for
Shakespeare in Love (1998), Terrence Howard was nominated for Hustle & Flow
(2005), and Robert Downey Jr. was nominated for Chaplin (1993) and later for Tropic
Thunder (2009).
8 The opening convoy ambush scene described here was filmed between 3–5 April
2007. Just a few days later on April 8 seven NATO soldiers were killed in car bomb-
ings in southern Afghanistan.
9 Several interviews with Stan Lee reveal that he was well aware of this aspect of Tony
Stark’s characterisation. He said, ‘It was the height of the Cold War. The readers – the
young readers – if there was one thing they hated it was war, it was the military, or, as
Eisenhower called it, the military-industrial complex. So I got a hero who represented
that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer. He was providing
weapons for the army. He was rich. He was an industrialist. But he was a good-looking
guy and he was courageous … I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character
that nobody would like – that none of our readers would like – and shove him down
their throats and make them like him’ (qtd. in featurette on Iron Man DVD).
10 According to David Cross at Movoto, a real estate blog, Stark’s Malibu mansion was
thought to be worth $117.2 million dollars in 2008 (n.d.). Stan Lee called Stark the
‘quintessential capitalist’ (qtd. in Lee and Mair 2002: 160).
11 Alex Gibney’s Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) is
about the experience of several prisoners there.
12 In just a few of the examples from Iron Man: Tony describes the ‘Freedom Line’ as ‘a
generation of weapons with this [the Jericho missile] at its heart’; Pepper gives Tony
the original miniature arc reactor which was in his chest inscribed with ‘Proof that
Tony Stark has a heart’; about his intervention in Gulmira Stark says ‘I know in my
heart that it’s right’; and Tony’s decision to turn his back on the military industrial
complex leads Obadiah to lament, ‘it breaks my heart’.
13 A similarly traumatic incident changes the worldview of the narcissistic yet brilliant
surgeon Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Doctor Strange; although like
Stark’s, Strange’s epiphany is often forgotten when the narrative requires it.
14 In their volume Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film and the Politics of Representation
(2014), Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson and Mark Bernard suggest that, ‘These part-
nerships not only provide film studios and food companies with nearly unlimited
opportunities for advertising and cross-promotion, but are also ideologically charged
and provide a platform for Western corporate supremacy’ (2014: 54). In the specific
section on Iron Man they write about this scene and conclude: ‘Thus, the film pro-
motes U.S. weapons and Whoppers and underscores American superiority in both
arenas’ (ibid.).
15 According to Robert Downey Jr. much of this press conference speech was written by
Shane Black who would later go on to direct Iron Man 3 (see Burlingame 2012).
16 Stark’s comments that, ‘I saw that I had become part of system that is comfortable
with zero accountability’ also bleed into the real world. Many critics of the actions of
the United States in the decade asserted that ‘zero accountabilty’ was one of the defin-
ing, yet unacknowledged, attributes of the Bush Doctrine (see Parry 2008; Friedman
2014).
17 Klein also connects this to the western frontier narrative in interesting ways: ‘What
we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier con-
stantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up’
(2008: 242).
18 See Durham (2015) for more details on how American companies like Halliburton,
Thales, Lockheed Martin, etc generated huge profits from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
19 See Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei, ‘Washington Post Poll May 1, 2003 Gallup
Poll’, ‘Afghanistan’, and ‘CNN Poll: Afghan War arguably most unpopular in US
History’ (2013).
20 His role as Mustaafa Marzoke in AmericanEast (2008) was a rare film to challenge
this stereotype.
21 The main exceptions to this are Daredevil in the Neflix series and Spider-Man in
Spider-Man: Homecoming.

22 Anthony R. Mills returns to this paradox in his reading of the film: ‘On the one hand,
it seems to repeat a well-known mythic pattern in which helpless dark-skinned for-
eigners must be rescued by a strong white American, acquiescing to the duality of
savage and civilised and to the myth of white superiority. On the other hand, it evi-
dences a profound change in the person of Tony Stark’ (2013: 176).
23 Martin Flanagan, Andrew Livingstone and Mike McKenny in The Marvel Studios
Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia Universe suggest that the film ‘condemns risky,
individualistic capitalism’ and offers an ‘attempt at progressivism’ (2016: 82, 178).
Carter and Dodds argue, ‘The film thus begins to raise questions about the ethics
of the global trade, the connections between key industries in the US economy and
global terror, and the possibilities of a more beneficent role for modern technology in
international affairs’ (2014: 57).
24 On the director’s commentary for Iron Man 2, recorded in 2010, Favreau commented,
‘This is Marvel, one movie goes down and all of them go own. It’s a lot of responsibil-
ity.’ In another interview recorded some years later in 2016 Favreau recalled, ‘There
was a lot of pressure because if that first film had failed, the IP was collateral. … If
we didn’t make money, they could have lost the rights to all their characters’ (qtd. in
Gallaway 2016).
25 This was later confirmed by Favreau himself: ‘Often times we’re rewriting right up
until, you know, right on the day that we’re shooting it we’re rewriting on it. The script
wasn’t completely locked until we actually wrapped photography last week’ (qtd. in
Weintraub 2009).
26 In the real world, the Time magazine ‘Person of the Year’ in 2010 was that other bil-
lionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg.
27 Iron Man refers to Stark’s legacy on two further occasions: the Apogee award sug-
gests that the ‘Freedom Line’ of weapons represents ‘a new era for his [Tony Stark]
father’s legacy’ and Stane informs him: ‘This is your legacy [the Iron Man suit]. A
new generation of weapons. With this [the miniature arc reactor] at it’s heart.
Weapons that will help steer the world back on course. Put the balance of power in
our hands.’
28 In Iron Man 2 and subsequent appearances the middle-aged Howard Stark is played
by Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) actor Tony Slattery and not Gerard Sandler who played
him in photographs in Iron Man.
29 There are also connections to the Howard Hughes Hearings (1947) which led to
William Bradley at The Huffington Post calling Downey Jr.’s incarnation of Stark a
‘postmodern Howard Hughes’ (2010).
30 Several roles have been recast within the MCU: not only the Hulk, Howard Stark and
Rhodes but also Fandral (played by Josh Dallas in Thor and then by Zachary Levi in
Thor: The Dark World) and Thanos (played by Damian Poittier in The Avengers and
after by Josh Brolin).
31 Stark’s criticism of the government for even thinking of taking away his private prop-
erty and his motto ‘peace through strength’ also saw the film described as ‘a virtual
love letter to Ronald Reagan’ (Boot 2010). About this scene Bryn Upton wrote that
Stark ‘represents the great libertarian impulse that has been growing in America
since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan stated that the government was the problem,
not the solution’ (2014: 34). The novelisation by Alexander Irvine adds one further
interesting line from Stern: ‘The Iron Man suit is the most powerful weapon on the
face of the earth. … Yet you use it to sell tickets to your theme park’ (2010: 26).
32 In a deleted scene Vanko is shown to capture Pepper at the end of the film. Tony says
‘Why don’t you let her go? She’s not like us she’s normal, we’re the same.’ To which
Vanko replies, ‘We will only be the same when you lose everything’. Yet the film is
unable to suggest they might be equal in any significant way. Mickey Rourke subse-
quently expressed his disappointment for these very same reasons. He stated, ‘I try
to find the moments where [the villain is] not that cliched, evil bad guy and it’s a big
fight. I had it on Iron Man and they won. It was going to work for Marvel and them
breaking [Jon] Favreau’s balls and wanting just a one-dimensional villain’ (qtd. in
Brew 2011).
33 The comic series which is an official part of the MCU states that Stark unsuccessfully
tries to register the element under the name of Baddassium. See The Avengers Prelude:
Nick Fury’s Big Week, Volume 8.
34 When Hammer introduces each type of drone the anthem of each branch of the
military is played: for example, the US Army’s ‘The Army Goes Rolling Along (The
Caisson Song)’ and the US Navy’’s ‘Anchors Aweigh’.
35 The novelisation by Alexander Irvine expands on this with the line ‘It [the display
of drones] was a power fantasy come to life, a general’s dream of theater dominance
walking on stage. It was the expression “force multiplier” redefined forever’ (2010:
219).
36 During the confrontation at the Expo a young boy wearing an Iron Man costume
raises his hand to shoot at one of the drones before being rescued by Tony Stark. In
the weeks preceeding the release of Spider-Man: Homecoming Tom Holland, the actor
playing Peter Parker/Spider-Man, confirmed that the young boy, according to Kevin
Feige, was Peter himself (see David 2017).
37 Frank Capra, Robert McNamara and the suffragist Anna Howard Shaw being a few
of the notable exceptions.
38 In Spider-Man: Homecoming the stinger process is affectionally sent up as after
a very long credit scroll Captain America appears for a final PSA (Public Service
Announcement) to inform audiences that ‘Sometimes patience is the key to victory,
sometimes it leads to very little and it seems like it’s not worth it and you wonder why
you waited so long for something so disappointing…’

C H A PT ER T WO
Of Gods and Monsters:

The Allegorical Narratives of Thor
and The Incredible Hulk
The Americanisation of the God of Thunder: From ‘Boy Emperor’

to the Rightful King of Asgard in Thor
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and
significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
– John Burroughs (1913: 184)
In recent years a range of books, like Don LoCicero’s Superheroes and Gods: A
Comparative Study from Babylon to Batman (2007), Grant Morrison’s Supergods:
Our World in the Age of the Superhero (2012) and Ben Saunders’ Do Gods Wear
Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes (2012), have persuasively argued
that superheroes do not only endorse prevailing societal values and behaviours,
but also function as godlike figures for the cultures that produce them. Although
they are often viewed in this way in the diegetic world of the Marvel Cinematic
Universe, Thor, the Asgardian god of Thunder, one of the subjects of this chapter,
is the only one of the Avengers Prime to be, quite literally, a god. Martin Arnold’s
Thor: Myth to Marvel (2011a) charts the rich history of Thor from his origins in
Old Norse and Scandinavian texts like the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (c.13th
century) where he was the god of the air, fertility and the ‘protector of mankind’,
through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when he became a source of
inspiration for a variety of Romantic poets and nationalist movements, even into
the first half of the twentieth century which saw him appropriated as a nation-
state god by Nazi Germany (2011a: 135). Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was a considerable
gamble for the newly formed Marvel Studios, but the character of Tony Stark and
his metallic alter ego are, as we have seen, somewhat grounded in the quasi-realis-
tic environment of the twenty-first-century United States. The characterisation of
Thor, given his roots in Scandinavian mythology, the fact that he possesses super-
natural powers and is an actual god brought their own challenges in adapting the
character to the cinema screen for the first time in his Marvel history.
The empyreal status of the Asgardians remains somewhat ambiguous
throughout the MCU. In The Avengers both Agent Coulson and Nick Fury re-
fer to them as ‘gods’, as does Loki, Thor’s mischievous and malevolent younger
brother. Yet in Thor, Fandral, one of the Warriors Three, offers a slight distinction
in his remarks to Thor when he observes, ‘the mortals worship you as a god’. In
Thor: The Dark World, after the remarkable Battle of New York, the disgraced
Loki returns in chains in front of his father Odin where he explains his actions: ‘I
went down to earth to rule as a benevolent god, just like you do…’ But Odin dis-
agrees, telling him, ‘We are not gods! We’re born, we live, we die, just as humans
do.’ This ambiguity of their celestial nature often becomes a source of humour as
in when an inebriated Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) ends his night of drunken
revelry with Thor by telling him, ‘I still don’t think you’re the God of Thunder,
but you ought to be!’, or when Captain America denies Thor’s divinity in The
Avengers as he leaps from a quinjet informing Black Widow: ‘There’s only one
God ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that…’1
Like Iron Man, Marvel’s Thor was also originally conceived during the
Cold War era, first appearing even before Tony Stark in Journey into Mystery
#83 (August 1962). Also like his metallic counterpart, and despite his Asgardian
other worldly status, Thor was frequently closely associated with American val-
ues and foreign policy in this era. Martin Arnold commented that the character
was ‘transformed into an articulation both of an anxious male sexuality and of
a parallel nervousness regarding American foreign policy’ (2011a, back cover).
Throughout his comic book run during the Cold War Thor participated in sever-
al real-world conflicts where his political perspectives were decidedly American
and even went to Vietnam on more than one occasion. In 1965’s Journey into
Mystery #117 he roars at communist commander Hu Sak, ‘To communism, then
– may it vanish from the face of the earth and the memory of mankind’.2 The
MCU iteration of Thor is similarly a decisive man of action, a hard-bodied hero
THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 73

the likes of which Susan Jeffords considered emblematic of US self-image in Hard
Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, where she wrote, ‘The depic-
tion of the indefatigable, muscular, and invincible masculine body became the
lynchpin of the Reagan imaginary; this hardened male form became an emblem
not only for the Reagan Presidency but for its ideologies and economies as well’
(1994: 25). But Thor, as a product of the new millennium, is portrayed as some-
thing more than this. Like many masculine figures of the era he emerges as a
conflation of both hard-bodied and more sensitive new man archetypes which
characterised the discourse of the period.
Thor’s godhood must have proved difficult to reconcile with the broader
narrative sweep of the MCU in 2011, but it is effectively embraced by director
Kenneth Branagh rather than ignored in a film which confronts the confluence
between science and fantasy, myth and reality throughout. The film begins with
the stentorian tones of Anthony Hopkins’ Odin, Thor’s father, the king of Asgard
and the All-Father, in a voice-over which addresses this in its very first moments:
Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe.
Some worlds man believed home to their Gods. Others they knew to fear. From a
realm of cold and darkness came the Frost Giants, threatening to plunge the mor-
tal world into a new ice age. But humanity would not face this threat alone. Our
armies drove the Frost Giants back into the heart of their own world. The cost
was great. In the end, their king fell, and the source of their power was taken from
them. With the last great war ended, we withdrew from the other worlds and
returned home to the Realm Eternal, Asgard. And here we remain as a beacon of
hope, shining out across the stars. And though we have fallen into man’s myths
and legends, it was Asgard and its warriors that brought peace to the universe.
The woman that becomes Thor’s lover, the astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie
Portman) (formerly a nurse in the original comics), suggests, by paraphrasing
Arthur C. Clarke, that these two areas can be reconciled as ‘magic’s just science
we don’t understand yet’ (see Clarke 1973: 21, fn 1). Thor tells her: ‘Your ances-
tors called it magic and you call it science. Well, I come from a place where they
are one and the same thing.’ The film goes to considerable lengths to blend the
two with the help of its scientific advisors: Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at
the California Institute of Technology and the author of From Eternity to Here
(2010), and Kevin Hand, a NASA astrobiologist, who lend a patina of authen-
ticity to the film with its mentions of Einstein-Rosen bridges and subtle aurora
(see Kakalios 2010; Hill 2013). Even acclaimed popular scientist Neil deGrasse
Tyson took to Twitter to speculate that based on his calculations Thor’s famous
hammer Mjölnir, if it is made of neutron-star matter as Odin states in Thor (he
says it was ‘forged in the heart of a dying star’), would weigh ‘as much as a herd
of 300-billion elephants’ (2013). The film manages to reconcile high fantasy and
science fiction in its portrayal of Asgard, a place which is technologically ad-
vanced (capable of interplanetary travel and has a fleet of futuristic space jets)
but its residents still use swords and shields, dress in medieval garb and speak in
Shakespearean-affected tones which Tony Stark will later joke in The Avengers
resembles ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ with the aside to Thor, ‘Doth mother know
you weareth her drapes?’ At the same time Branagh is able to undercut this melo-
dramatic sweep with a rich vein of humour, as the film is the most broadly comic
addition to the MCU until Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man in 2014.3 In the
course of the narrative, as well as participating in several spectacular battles, the
mighty Thor will be run over twice by Jane Foster and even tasered by her wise-
cracking assistant Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings).
Instead of the Iraq-set opening of Iron Man, the narrative of Thor begins in
Asgard on the bright and sunny day of Thor’s coronation where he is due to as-
cend to the throne in place of his aging father. The film quickly codes Thor as
arrogant and overly confident, with his show-boating for the crowd and self-enti-
tled winking. Asgard, with Thor as its primary representative, is self-consciously
constructed as representative of the United States of America and Odin’s de-
scription of it as a ‘beacon of hope, shining out across the stars’ is reminiscent of
many pronouncements in the last two hundred years concerning America’s self-
proclaimed role around the globe, the exact phrase being used by both Ronald
Reagan and Richard Nixon in their inauguration speeches, and a variation of
which could be heard in that of Donald Trump’s contention, in his own, that
the American way of life will ‘shine as an example… We will shine for everyone
to follow’ (2017). As Edwin J. Feulner and Brian Tracey wrote in The American
Spirit: Celebrating the Virtues and Values That Make Us Great, ‘Throughout our
history, we [the United States of America] have served as a beacon of hope to op-
pressed men and women everywhere’ (2012: 53). The residents of Asgard are no
longer the blue-eyed blondes of Nordic mythology, but a harmonious multi-racial
society with even some of their prominent figures of Asian (Tadanobu Asano as
Hogun, later revealed to be of Vanir) or African (Idris Elba as Heimdall) descent.
Vincent M. Gaine has stated that, ‘This creates a sense of universalism in Asgard,
preventing it from appearing as a Northern European version of the heavenly
realm’ (2016: 40). Since 1962 Marvel has participated in the Americanisation of
Thor, initially in the comics but even more so in his MCU incarnation. This is
visible in the peaceful and utopian multi-racial community of Asgard, but even
more so in the characterisation of Thor himself through his embodiment of
what Hagley and Harrison described as ‘the American warrior ethos’ (2012) and
what many regard as the supposedly quintessential American values of equality,

freedom and justice Asgard advocates. This Americanisation had reached such
an extent by 2011 that Martin Arnold argued that we had reached ‘the end of the
meaningful story of the reception of Thor, as the interest is no longer in the Norse
myth or the history of Thor as a God who was once believed in, but rather the ex-
otic Norse trappings that the mass pop industry can endlessly recycle’ (2011a: 65).
Unbeknownst to the peaceful Asgardians enjoying their privileged lives, a
small number of their perennial enemies, the Frost Giants, mount a surprise at-
tack on the long thought impenetrable Asgard. While their attempt is quickly
repulsed by a large enchanted metallic being called the Destroyer, the arrogant
and impulsive Thor is incensed and wants immediate revenge. He demands
that the Asgardians should ‘march into Jotunheim [the home world of the Frost
Giants] as you [Odin] once did! Teach them a lesson! Break their spirits, so they
would never dare try to cross our borders again!’ Thor cannot understand the po-
tential ramifications of his proposed actions or the lives that will be lost on both
sides if they restart hostilities, and the wiser Odin urges caution and diplomacy
in place of war, remarking that ‘it is the action of but a few, doomed to fail’. Odin
has maintained a fragile peace between the two races for many years and states
that they cannot begin a conflict, which could lead to the deaths of tens of thou-
sands, just because of the actions of a few who may not represent the whole. The
events and exchange between Thor and Odin, with its lines of dialogue like ‘This
was an act of war!’ and ‘You know not what your actions would unleash’, were
read by some as a veiled commentary on the political landscape of the post-9/11
environment, and Anthony R. Mills was one of many who saw real-world con-
nections in the portrayal of Thor’s pride and hubris, stating: ‘It is difficult not to
consider our contemporary political context when observing the stark contrast of
Thor’s and Odin’s on the appropriate response to the Frost Giants’ actions’ (2013:
180). Thor’s argument that a pre-emptive strike on the Frost Giants is ‘the only
way to ensure the safety of our borders’ and will end the war before it had hardly
begun is a striking manifestation of the Bush Doctrine in a film that was de-
scribed by Peter Labuza, author of Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in
American Film (2014), as ‘playing heavily on some George Bush parallels’ (2011)
and which prompted a range of reviews with titles like ‘The Summer’s New Hero:
Thor-Ge W. Bush’ (Singer 2011) and ‘Blockbuster: Bush v. Thor’ (Stewart 2011).
Convinced that he knows better and after being expertly manipulated by his
brother Loki (who later learns to his dismay that he is adopted and of Frost Giant de-
scent), Thor goes against his father’s wishes and leads a raiding party to Jotunheim
where he confronts their king, Laufey, who tells him, ‘Your father is a murderer
and a thief’, the very same accusation Ivan Vanko had made about Howard Stark
in Iron Man 2 released in the previous year.4 Just as Vanko’s assertions about Stark
senior were shown to be false, Laufey’s charges are also unfounded as Odin is
portrayed as a benevolent and sage monarch who tells his sons, ‘A wise King must
never seek out war, but always be ready for it’, and the Frost Giants are little more
than crudely barbaric and war-like caricatures. Laufey’s aside to Thor, ‘You long
for battle, you crave it. You’re nothing but a boy trying to prove himself a man’,
suggests he knows the petulant prince better than Thor knows himself and evokes
Chalmers Johnson’s memorable description of George W. Bush as a ‘boy emperor’
(2004: 283). Seeing the gravity of their situation and the fact that they are hope-
lessly outnumbered, the Warriors Three (Fandral, Lady Sif and Volstagg) plead
with Thor to reassess his ill-advised plan and for a moment he seems to recon-
sider, before Laufey goads him into battle by impugning his masculinity, ‘Run
back home, little Princess!’ revealing that, even for gods, the worst insult is to cast
doubt on one’s masculinity and be compared to a woman.5
Despite their exceptional fighting prowess, it is clear that the Asgardians are
outnumbered and outmatched, but at the moment of defeat Odin appears astride
his mythical eight-legged horse Sleipnir. Thor calls to him, ‘Father! We’ll finish
them together!’ in a vivid manifestation of how many thought George W. Bush
regarded war in Iraq.6 Odin ignores his son and pleads with Laufey, ‘These are
the actions of a boy, treat them as such’, the second time in the space of a few
minutes that Thor is called a boy. But Laufey refuses and the clash of civilisations
between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants has begun again. On their return
Fig. 8: Odin’s description of Asgard as ‘a beacon of hope shining across the stars’ is at the centre of
Thor (2011); an allegory for America in the first decades of the twenty-first century?

to Asgard, father and son once more argue as Thor tells Odin, ‘There won’t be
a kingdom to protect if you are afraid to act! The Jotuns must learn to fear me.’
Odin is disgusted by Thor’s behaviour and decides to remove all of his powers,
his beloved hammer, Mjölnir, and banish him to Earth. What Thor dramatises
may not be an accurate relationship of the one between the Bushes, father and
son, or the real motivation for the war in Iraq, but it is certainly the way it was
perceived by the public at large and it is also the one portrayed in both Oliver
Stone’s W. (2008) and Jacob Weisberg’s best-selling The Bush Tragedy (2008).7
Darren Franich commented: ‘The Thunder god invades a land he knows nothing
about, a classic war hawk maneuver; chastened by his elders, he has to learn how
his actions have consequences’ (2013).8
In the post-9/11 period it became fairly common for the Bush administration
and frequently George W. Bush himself to be represented in allegory in film and
television texts of the era: from the likes of Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi, 2004–9)
(see Kaveney and Stoy 2010), through to Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) (see
Jenkins 2015: 120–1), the Saw franchise (2004–) (see Kellner 2009: 7–9), and
even in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in George Romero’s Land of the
Dead (2005) (see McSweeney 2010). In the superhero genre, Justine Toh regarded
Batman Begins not just as an allegory for the Bush era, but for George W. Bush
himself: ‘In this frame, Batman’s righteous task is to clean up Gotham by re-
moving its corrupt elements, a fictional parallel for the righteousness of the US’s
campaign to promote democracy in the Middle East’ (2010: 132).
Exiled to Earth and finding himself in the New Mexico town of Puente
Antiguo, Thor has been stripped of his life of privilege in a similar way to what
Tony Stark had been in Iron Man and what Bruce Banner experiences in The
Incredible Hulk, discussed later in this chapter. It is here that he must learn hu-
mility and what it is to be a real hero among humans like the scientists Jane
Foster and Erik Selvig who initially, and somewhat understandably, do not be-
lieve he is a Norse God. When Thor discovers that Mjölnir is nearby, in scenes
which had been teased at the end of Iron Man 2, he is convinced that if reunited
with his mythical hammer he will be able to fight his way out of trouble, as he has
done all of his life. It is surrounded by S.H.I.E.L.D. security guards led by Agent
Phil Coulson (whom Thor calls ‘son of Coul’) and watched over from above by
Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and Thor makes his way towards it accompanied by
thunder and lightning, with composer Patrick Doyle’s orchestral score swelling
to a triumphant crescendo … only to find that he is unable to pick it up, and that
he has yet to understand the lesson his father wished to impart. Seemingly re-
signed to his fate he allows himself to be caught by S.H.I.E.L.D. and Coulson who
immediately presumes him to be American and asks where he received his train-
ing: ‘Pakistan, Chechnya, Afghanistan?’ While in captivity his brother Loki, who
has now usurped the Asgardian throne, appears and tells Thor that their father
is dead and that Thor can never again return to Asgard. Loki explains his father’s
decision with the evocative line: ‘Our people need a sense of continuity in order
to feel safe in these difficult times.’
Having finally been appropriately humbled, Thor comes to the realisation,
with the help of his new romantic interest Jane and friend Erik, that true strength
derives from more than physical prowess and when Loki sends the Destroyer to
Puento Antiguo to kill him once and for all, the ensuing battle is framed as remi-
niscent of a western standoff like those in High Noon (1952), The Good, the Bad
and the Ugly (1966) and Chisum (1970), each of which are, not uncoincidentally,
also set in New Mexico. Thor, who had earlier been quite content to destroy an
entire race, helps evacuate the town of innocents, finally putting the lives of oth-
ers before his own and pleads with his brother: ‘Whatever I have done to wrong
you, whatever I have done to lead you to do this, I am truly sorry, but these people
are innocent. Taking their lives will give you nothing. So take mine and end this.’
Thor’s offer to sacrifice himself is, of course, a familiar convention in Western
popular culture and will be frequently returned to in the MCU, although it is
one that will very rarely result in an actual sacrifice.9 Indeed, the notion of a
quasi-christomimetic self-sacrifice recurs so frequently in American cinema that
it has become one of its foundational tropes. Yet its valorisation, while the very
same sacrifices of those of the Other are declared to be monstrous and inhuman,
is problematic. Thor’s ‘death’ at the hands of the Destroyer and his subsequent
rebirth, and in particular the way that it is framed, situates him alongside a range
of christomimetic figures in contemporary American science fiction and fantasy
films like Neo from The Matrix (1999), Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings trilogy
(2001–3), the eponymous E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and James Cole from
12 Monkeys (1995). Adele Reinhartz has written that such is the pervasiveness
of this pattern that ‘any film that has redemption as a major theme (and this
includes many, if not most, recent Hollywood movies) is liable to use some Jesus
symbolism in connection with the redemptive hero figure’ (2003: 189). This is
heavily ironised, of course, by the fact that Thor is an actual god and accord-
ing to Norse mythology predates Jesus (see Lindow 2002: 22) and the fact that
the MCU is avowedly secular in its construction, with only fleeting references
and allusions to a Judeo-Christian God. Those looking for religious meanings
in the franchise have had to primarily rely on allusions and subtext rather than
any explicit comments provided by its characters or the text (see McAteer 2016;
Saunders 2016). The actor playing Loki, Tom Hiddlestone, felt that this malleabil-
ity was one of the reasons contemporary superhero films have resonated not just
in the United States, where they are conceived and produced, but with cultures
all over the globe: ‘Superhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology,

through which these truths [about the human condidition] can be explored. In
our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths,
superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams
and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out’ (2012). Odin, sens-
ing his son’s growth all the way from his Odinsleep in Asgard, responds with a
single tear and it is this which brings Thor back to life, returning his powers and
once again giving him the right to wield Mjölnir.
As previously mentioned, Thor certainly is a hard-bodied hero the likes of
which defined the 1980s, according to Jeffords, and perhaps the return of the more
traditional type of masculinity that writers like Peggy Noonan and Kim DuToit
asked for, but in Chris Hemsworth’s portrayal of the character, this hypermas-
culine mode is represented as fundamentally flawed, revealing the complicated
and frequently paradoxical nature of new millennial masculinity. Thor is a man
of action, a warrior and protector, but his initial decisiveness and appetite for vio-
lence are explicitly connected to his hubris and lack of self-awareness. It is only
after his epiphany (as we have seen with Tony Stark) as he demonstrates compas-
sion and is shown to be able to acknowledge humility and weakness, traits which
have been historically coded as feminine and thus traditionally antithetical for
action heroes, that the film asks us to recognise that he becomes a true hero. Far
from being ‘dumb movies for dumb people’ (Tasker 1993: 6) the action genre, the
codes and conventions of which the superhero film is profoundly immersed in,
provides us with a striking cultural barometer. As depictions of idealised mascu-
linities were embodied in figures like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Chuck Norris in the 1980s, then shifted to the likes of Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt
and Keanu Reeves in the 1990s, the ascendance of stars like Chris Hemsworth,
Chris Evans, Chris Pratt and Robert Downey Jr., each of whom starred in an
MCU film in this period, offer more complex, but still hegemonical articulations
of masculinity in the new millennial decades which this monograph will return
frequently to.
The battle between Thor and Loki comes to a climax with Thor’s return to
Asgard as a new man. Loki had planned to kill his biological father Laufey and
the entire race of Frost Giants in a startling act of genocide of his own people, all
in order to prove himself to his step-father Odin as a worthy successor. However,
Loki has yet to learn the lesson that Thor has on Earth, that even though they
possess immense power and are virtually immortal, Asgardians are not inher-
ently superior to humans or any other species. Loki asks Thor a similar question
to that which Rhodes asked Stark after his epiphany in Afghanistan: ‘What is
this new-found love for the Frost Giants?’ It is one that will be repeated several
times throughout the MCU by those who have not experienced a life-changing
traumatic event which enables them to see compassion and empathy not as a
weakness but as a strength, while at the same time, it should be observed, dis-
patching almost countless numbers of simplistically framed enemies. After Loki
threatens Jane Foster with implied rape (‘When we are finished here, I will pay
her a visit myself!’), Thor overcomes him in a battle which resonates because of
their relationship (something the MCU will struggle to match after), and both his
method of combat and his perspective are altered, as he is shown to refuse to use
his hammer against his brother and acts only in defence. Defeated and silently
denied with a dismissive gesture from his ‘father’ Odin, Loki’s last act of defiance
is to refuse their offer of help as he lets go of Odin’s spear, falling into the cosmos
to an uncertain future.
Like many other superhero films in the era, Thor presents us with a fantasti-
cal reimagining of reality: Iron Man rewrites the conflict in Afghanistan as a
humanitarian undertaking and Thor shows a vain and impetuous leader recog-
nising the error of his ways (‘I had it all backwards, I had it all wrong’). Thor’s
second act of sacrifice is to forfeit his own happiness to save the race of the Frost
Giants that he had once shown such scorn for, by destroying the Bifrost Bridge
to save them and perhaps never being able to return to Earth and his love Jane
Foster again. This act of altruism is central to the understanding of the American
monomyth, which has encoded within it the idea that America’s wars and inter-
ventions abroad are never undertaken for selfish reasons, but only ever for the
good of mankind and that the global superpower carries with it a burden of re-
sponsibility that no one can ever truly understand (see Colucci 2008). The lessons
Thor has learned throughout the course of the narrative will stand him in good
stead for the apocalyptic battle he will face in The Avengers, in which his brother
Loki will return to play no small part. But Thor’s emotional growth continues
in that film and in his second solo outing, the underwhelming Thor: The Dark
World, and his character will not be ‘reset’ as we have seen (and will continue to
see) with Tony Stark. While Martin Arnold might have been correct to suggest
that by the end of the first decade of the new millennium ‘the reception history
of the Thunder God is, in any meaningful sense, at an end’ (2011a: 160), the very
same period saw his rebirth as an American icon and a key part of the evolving
Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Making a ‘monster into a hero’: The Incredible Hulk
How do you make a monster into a hero and still maintain the monster’s essential
element of menace – yet combine that with a personality that audiences would
come to love, or at least be fascinated by? And, on top of that, how do you make
such a creature a hero?
– Danny Fingeroth (2004: 123)

Despite an inauspicious start in the comics which saw the character cancelled
after only six issues published between May 1962 and March 1963, the Incredible
Hulk has been one of Marvel’s most popular creations and even one of the rare
superheroes to have had a live-action syndicated TV show, with the fondly
remembered The Incredible Hulk (CBS, 1978–82). The original comic book incar-
nation of the Hulk was just as much a creation of the Cold War as the characters
of Iron Man and Thor, and given that he was the result of a gamma radiation
blast at a nuclear testing facility, he is, like Iron Man, both literally and figura-
tively a product of the conflict. This has led to the Hulk frequently being read
as an articulation of Cold War fears and anxieties concerning the nuclear age
in a similar way to how that other iconic cinematic monster, Godzilla, has been
(see Inuhiko 2007; Darowski and Darowski 2015). Like the Japanese mega-lizard,
part of the Hulk’s enduring appeal is undoubtedly that he has often blurred the
line between hero and monster. In Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, Peter
Coogan explores how the Hulk’s original 1960s comic narrative was one of the
first to actually invert one of the established tropes of the genre and turn ‘super-
powers from a blessing to a curse, an innovation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in
the Silver Age. Without that heroic sacrifice, the Hulk is just a monster, and so
the Hulk film is not a superhero film but a monster movie’ (2006: 11). Indeed,
Lee’s inspiration came from two classic Gothic literary texts: Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1886) about which he commented: ‘We would use the concept of
the Frankenstein monster but update it. Our hero would be a scientist, trans-
formed into a raging behemoth by a nuclear accident. And – since I was willing
to borrow from Frankenstein, I decided I might as well borrow from Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde as well – our protagonist would constantly change from his normal
identity to his superhuman alter-ego and back again’ (qtd. in DeFalco 2003: 7).
Almost fifty years after his first appearance in the comic much of the drama in
Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk, the second film in the MCU, and Hulk’s
subsequent appearances in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron and beyond,
stems from this juxtaposition between monstrous and human, control and chaos.
Released in the same summer as Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk appeared
only five years after Ang Lee’s divisive Hulk (2003) produced by Universal
Pictures with only limited involvement from Marvel, which, although it made
$245 million at the global box office, was considered as something of a finan-
cial disappointment when it failed to have the commercial or cultural impact
of the Batman or Spider-Man films which its producers had undoubtedly hoped
for given the high profile nature of the character. Lee’s version seemed to have
both delighted and disappointed fans in equal measure on its release: with many
admiring its attempt to bring a sense of psychological complexity to an often
simplistic genre, while others regarded it as too cerebral and pretentious for a
superhero film. Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk is simultaneously a sequel to Lee’s
film, a reboot of the Hulk franchise, while at the same time being a continua-
tion of the broader MCU narrative, a process which led to producer Gale Hurd
describing the film neologistically as a ‘requel’ (qtd. in Weintraub 2008a). Prior
to the turn of the new millennium this reboot process would often take a decade:
for example, the eight years between Batman & Robin (1997) and Batman Begins
(2005), or the nineteen between Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) and the
aptly-named Superman Returns (2006). However, in a film industry increasingly
defined by annual additions to franchises (or in the case of Marvel sometimes
triannually) the process is much faster than ever before: hence Batman was
portrayed by Christian Bale in the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman
trilogy The Dark Knight Rises and then rebooted only four years later, played by
Ben Affleck in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Spider-Man was portrayed
by Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3 (2007) and then by Andrew Garfield in The
Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) before being
played by Tom Holland in Captain America: Civil War (2016), three actors play-
ing the same role in major studio films in less than ten years.
Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk replaces all members of the previous cast, but
seems to continue the narrative from Lee’s version (with one or two caveats) in-
corporating some aspects of Hulk at the same time as eschewing others to enable
itself to fit into the then fledgling MCU. In interviews Leterrier, who had been
known before The Incredible Hulk for his kinetic and fast-paced action films like
The Transporter (2002) and Unleashed (2005), revealed an affection for Lee’s in-
terpretation of the character, but also suggested how his version might differ:
I really do love Ang’s movie because as a director, as all of you guys, you’ve seen
the cinema in Ang’s movie. It’s beautiful. It’s a great movie. But if you’re 7 years
old, 8 years old, you’re totally lost in Ang’s movie so I wanted to give it like more
of like an overall approach. You didn’t have to be a fan knowing the Hulk story
to love this movie – hopefully, my movie, or to be 7 and 13 and a boy to like this
movie. I wanted to make it like a broader and like a general – more general – kind
of a movie. (Qtd. in Weintraub 2008b)
While Leterrier’s remarks imply a film more self-consciously aimed at a younger

audience, its star (and uncredited co-writer) Edward Norton saw much more to
the project, stating ‘that’s why these things [superhero films] endure, because
they’re kind of modern, pop revisitings of that myth of stealing power from the
universe. There’s a lot of great stories of people reaching beyond what is permit-
ted – like Icarus or Proteus’ (2007). Norton’s version of the script which is widely

available online, dated 13 May 2007, even begins with an epigraph taken from
the work of Joseph Campbell, ‘We have only to follow the thread of the hero
path, and where we had thought to find an Abomination, we shall find a God…
And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world’ (originally,
1949: 18). Norton’s words and his choice of epigraph indicate a desire to make a
very different film to that which Leterrier described, not one aimed primarily at
seven- to thirteen-year-old boys, but one which resonates with an understand-
ing of the mythic role of contemporary superheroes. This divergence of aims is
very palpable in the finished film and might explain Norton’s dissatisfaction
with the final result which led to him distancing himself from the project and
a very public falling out with Marvel’s president of production Kevin Feige. The
film released at the cinemas removes much of the character development and
philosophical musings of Norton’s script (the Blu-ray release also contained a
remarkable seventy minutes’ worth of deleted scenes) to concentrate more on
action and spectacle, often to the film’s detriment, but still finds time to state that
the Hulk (and later Abomination’s) is ‘godlike’.
It might be considered fitting, for a variety of reasons, that of all of the
Avengers Prime it was the Hulk that came to be played by three different actors
in the space of just nine years; certainly because of Bruce Banner’s Dissociative
Identity Disorder (DID), but also because of the pronounced range of variations
the comic book Hulk has gone through since 1962, which led Danny Fingeroth
to write that the Hulk ‘probably holds the record of personality changes for one
character’ (2004: 126). In different versions throughout his history the Hulk is
sometimes able to talk and sometimes not, he is intermittently intelligent but at
other times a mindless beast not even conscious of his actions, and his strength
seems to vary from incarnation to incarnation. Leterrier’s film is full of many
affectionate ‘Easter eggs’ which reference these different versions of the charac-
ter and it is the CBS television series that receives the most frequent homages:
from the sporadic use of Joe Harnell’s iconic ‘Lonely Man’ (which ended every
episode of the television show), to having Lou Ferrigno, who played the Hulk in
the series, as a security guard (who also voices the only six words the Hulk will
speak in the film ‘Leave Me Alone’, ‘Hulk Smash’, and ‘Betty’), and showing an
episode of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (ABC, 1969–72) starring Bill Bixby,
the original Banner, on a television screen in Banner’s apartment. This method
of including Easter eggs in contemporary popular films has evolved from being a
minor diversion to one of the myriad of ways multimedia companies seek to en-
courage fans to consider themselves as active participants in evolving franchises
and, just as importantly, return to the films again and again, a process Henry
Jenkins called ‘participatory culture’ which ‘contrasts with older notions of pas-
sive media spectatorship’ in his influential volume Convergence Culture: Where
Old and New Media Collide (2006: 3).
This variability is also apparent in the diversity of readings of the Hulk char-
acter which have emerged since the 1960s, which prompted James N. Gilmore
and Mattias Stork to suggest that the Hulk is ‘potent with images and iconogra-
phies harbouring polysemous meanings’ (2014: 12). Hulk’s condition has been
read as connected to the nuclear anxieties during which he was originally cre-
ated (see Darowski and Darowski 2015), to fears of emasculation and crises of
US national identity in the wake of Vietnam and the rise of feminism (see Eaton
2013), as a countercultural icon on American college campuses during the 1960s
(see Duncan and Smith 2013), for bipolar disorder (see Power and Dalgleish 2016:
298; Wooton 2012), and even as a metaphor for black rage (see Kleefeld 2014;
Burch n.d.). Like many MCU films, and in particular our reading of Thor in this
chapter, The Incredible Hulk is what David Holloway categorises as an ‘allegory
lite’ in which ‘controversial issues can be safely addressed because they must be
‘read off’ other stories by the viewer; while the ‘allegory’ is sufficiently loose or
‘lite’, and the other attractions on offer are sufficiently compelling or diverse, that
viewers can enjoy the film without needing to engage at all with the risky ‘other
story’ it tells’ (2008: 83). While it is quite correctly the nuclear age that most
commentators have turned to in their interpretation of the roots of the charac-
ter – as Joseph and John Darowski have observed, ‘Born in the mushroom cloud
of a nuclear explosion, the Incredible Hulk may seem like the perfect character
to embody the complexities and ambiguities of the atomic age’ (2015: 7) – the
Marvel Cinematic Universe version of the Hulk is profoundly immersed in the
fractious post-9/11 decade. About this incarnation of the Hulk, Tom Pollard was
correct to assert, ‘In times of national trauma, film audiences find superheroes
like the Incredible Hulk especially attractive. This character serves as a perfect
post 9/11 superhero because his superpowers flow from his anger’ (2011: 82). Fear,
anger and trauma are placed at the centre of The Incredible Hulk as they were
in many new millennial popular culture texts, an era when the concept of their
political role in modern society became widely discussed. Many asserted that
America found itself living in a culture of fear which seemed to revolve around
the phrase the ‘War on Terror’ itself and a range of studies found that anger
rather than terror was the defining emotion many Americans felt after the events
of 11 September 2001 (see Kluger 2010). The Hulk is portrayed as a distinctly
post-9/11 weapon of mass destruction that the military, personified by the ob-
sessive General Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), seeks to control. In perhaps
the film’s most memorable line of dialogue Ross tells his team of soldiers: ‘That
man’s [Bruce Banner] whole body is the property of the US army.’ The Hulk’s
body emerges as the site of a battle between Ross and Banner, but even within
for Banner himself in his struggle to control his own anger and find his place in

the world after his traumatic accident. The cultural battleground of Leterrier’s
version are those fears and anxieties uniquely pertinent to the post-9/11 era: the
encroaching powers of the Military Industrial Complex, the intrusions of the
government into civil liberties, American interventions overseas and the shifting
parameters of new millennial masculinity, issues which, though they are rarely
addressed by name in the film, linger within the frames of not only The Incredible
Hulk but the majority of the MCU.
The relationship between The Incredible Hulk and its predecessor, Ang Lee’s
Hulk, is effectively established in Leterrier’s imaginative credits sequence which
replays the events of the first film with the new cast and several engaging changes
of emphasis. Instead of being accidentally caught in a gamma radiation experi-
ment as he had been in Lee’s version, Banner is now shown deliberately testing
the process on himself with a self-assured wink (just like Thor winks at the crowd
on his inauguration day) at his scientist girlfriend Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), a far
cry from Eric Bana’s portrayal of Banner as a tortured soul even before his life-
changing accident. The Hulk has generally been perceived as ‘the personification
of intense emotion and unresolved conflicts residing within the troubled psyche
of Bruce Banner’ (Patrick and Patrick 2008: 222), but here in the MCU Banner
seems compos mentis until the traumatic incident which leads to the creation of
his monstrous alter ego. In Lee’s version Banner was working on the regeneration
of cells for medical purposes; here Banner believes he is working purely on gam-
ma radiation resistance experiments, but Ross later reveals that the military was
duping him into participating in the reproduction of the Super Soldier Serum
from World War II which led to the creation of Captain America (discussed in
chapter three). The credits sequence shows the experiment going catastrophically
wrong causing Banner to transform into the Hulk, initially only shown from the
first-person perspective through Hulk’s eyes. Betty is injured as the result of the
Hulk’s inability to control himself and this emerges as one of the film’s recurring
motifs, the lengths that Banner goes to ensure she (and later other civilians) will
not be hurt because of his actions ever again. The credits montage shows the ex-
tent of Ross’s global search for Banner/Hulk which becomes progressively more
and more unhinged as the film continues: newspaper headlines chart a list of his
sightings, mentioning a ‘green monster’, and maps show that the hunt for Banner
extends through Asia, Africa and even the Middle East where his status as a
weapon of mass destruction would have coincided with the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and in particular the American search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed
stockpile of weapons.
The sequence ends with Banner snapping back to consciousness, revealing
the credits to have been a traumatic conflation of memory and dream. Trauma,
as it has been in many new millennial superhero films, and particularly so of the
MCU, is placed at the centre of The Incredible Hulk and while it is not explored
with the psychological complexity of Lee’s version, it emerges as the defining
aspect of Edward Norton’s (and later Mark Ruffalo’s) interpretation of the char-
acter. In Iron Man, Stark’s traumatic experience in Afghanistan changed his life
irrevocably and the same is shown to be true for Banner, yet his is a trauma which
repeats every time he is forced to transform into the Hulk. Even when he is not
the Hulk, flashes of his Hulk experience (which he seems to not be conscious of
at this stage) return to him in a distinctly traumatic form in episodes where he
is unable to discern what is real from that which is memory, in what Norton’s
script describes in an appropriately Deleuzian fashion as ‘MEMORY IMAGES’.
When Betty asks him what it feels like to be the Hulk he, as most versions of the
character do, struggles to find words to express it. He says, ‘It’s like someone has
poured a litre of acid into my brain’. Banner in Lee’s version had provocatively
suggested that it was ‘like a dream about rage, power and freedom’ and later in
The Avengers (when Banner is played by Mark Ruffalo) he will describe it as ‘I’m
exposed… Like a nerve… It’s a nightmare…’.
One conspicuous difference between Norton’s Hulk (which will repeat in
Ruffalo’s portrayal) and previous incarnations of the character is the shift from
him being prompted to transform into the Hulk by becoming angry to, in the
MCU version, changing into the Hulk due to the elevation of his heart rate.10
In the television series Banner’s transformations were always the result of him
becoming angry, which became more outlandish as the series progressed and
writers sought for excuses to bring the Hulk onto the screen. As a result Banner
‘Hulks out’ when he does not have the correct change for a phone booth in ‘Never
Give a Trucker an Even Break’ (1.09), when he is locked in a steam room by bul-
lies in ‘Killer Instinct’ (2.08), by a loud ringing bell in ‘The Confession’ (2.20)
and when he is attacked by bees in ‘Prometheus, Part One’ (4.01). In the MCU it
is made very clear that it is not only anger that prompts his transformation, but
stress, fear, frustration, exertion and in one scene, which is primarily played for
laughs but is inescapably tragic, romantic interplay between Banner and Betty
which he has to stop with the line, ‘No. No. I can’t… I can’t get too excited.’
Looking for mechanisms to maintain a measure of control over his mental state,
Banner experiments with techniques to control his heart rate throughout, in par-
ticular a Brazilian Aikido instructor, who tells him in broken English that ‘Fear
no good. Emotion and control’, and the use of a heart-rate monitor on his wrist as
a conveniently visual cue for audiences to recognise how close he is to changing.
Having done away with the need to show Hulk’s origin by placing it in the
opening credits, The Incredible Hulk is free to pursue what happens to Banner
after he goes on the run from the authorities and attempts to live ‘off the grid’.
The narrative formally begins in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil with a title informing

us that it has been one hundred and fifty-eight days since his last ‘incident’. It is
no coincidence that Banner has relocated to the crowded spaces of Rocinha, Rio’s
largest favela and Leterrier employs a range of attractively framed helicopter
shots to glide over multiple times, revealing the chaotic beauty of its architecture.
Banner attempts to blend in with the six million people who live there, learning
Portuguese by watching dubbed versions of Sesame Street (1969–) on television.
Leterrier was quite clear about why he chose to locate Banner in the favela: ‘We
needed a place in the world where Banner could truly disappear… [the favela]
… is madness… It is a place that is a little at the margins of the law, with so
many people packed in together’ (qtd. in Spanakos 2011: 18). The globe-hopping
narratives of the MCU (and the majority of American blockbuster films) rarely
pause to offer meaningful engagements with their foreign locations; rather they
function as little more than exotic backgrounds for action sequences while at the
same time endorsing and legitimising extra-judicial American incursions and
perpetuating racial stereotypes (see Heise 2012; Jones 2015).
It is in Rio that Banner experiences, to a certain extent, as Thor and Tony
Stark have been shown to, the lives of others. Banner works as a poorly-paid day
labourer in a Pingo Doce soda bottling plant (a fictional Marvel-created brand
which reappears some years later in Ant-Man), lives in a rundown flat, and later
when he is homeless he is forced to beg on the streets for food. Antony Peter
Spanakos writes: ‘While in Brazil, Banner displays an orientation towards rec-
ognition reflective of a US search for understanding and respect of the other in
coming to terms with itself, a self that has become unrecognisable as ethics have
not developed as quickly as technology’ (2011: 19). Yet of course, as the film’s
virtuous American hero, he can never really be shown to be one of them, as he
is distanced from the Other by his narrative centrality, his good looks, humility
and his prodigious intellect: he is modestly able to fix the broken factory ma-
chines when asked to by the grateful manager, he is able to build complicated
scientific machinery in his ramshackle flat with bits and pieces sourced from
garbage very much how Tony Stark was able to prove his brilliance in the caves
of Afghanistan, and he stands up for his beautiful co-worker, Martina (played by
Brazilian model Débora Nascimento), when she is harassed by local thugs.
It is revealed that Banner has relocated to Brazil in order to discover a cure
for his condition, hoping to either find a way to control his state or be rid of it by
using a rare flower only to be found in the Amazon jungle. Unfortunately for him
he accidentally cuts himself while working in the factory, causing his blood to in-
advertently drip into a bottle of Pingo Doce soda which later infects a man in the
United States with gamma radiation poisoning.11 It is this which allows General
Ross to finally locate him and he sends a team of elite soldiers led by the aging
British-Russian Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth). Ross is keenly aware that Banner does
not belong in the favelas of Rio and offers a very specific order, ‘Get our agency
people looking for a white man at that bottling plant!’ The resulting mission itself
is clearly immersed in very specific new millennial ‘War on Terror’ discourse
when it is described by Ross as a ‘snatch and grab, live capture’ and Banner as ‘a
fugitive from the US government who stole military secrets’. Five years after the
release of The Incredible Hulk, the 2013 Snowden revelations concerning NSA
spying practices revealed that thousands of heads of state had been spied on,
including the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (2011–16). Glenn Greenwald
suggested,
That the US government – in complete secrecy – is constructing a ubiquitous spy-

ing apparatus aimed not only at its own citizens, but all of the world’s citizens, has
profound consequences. It erodes, if not eliminates, the ability to use the internet
with any remnant of privacy or personal security. It vests the US government with
boundless power over those to whom it has no accountability. It permits allies of
the US – including aggressively oppressive ones – to benefit from indiscriminate
spying on their citizens’ communications. It radically alters the balance of power
between the US and ordinary citizens of the world. And it sends an unmistakable
signal to the world that while the US very minimally values the privacy rights of
Americans, it assigns zero value to the privacy of everyone else on the planet.
(2013; emphasis in original)
It is clear that Ross and Blonsky, both from within the military industrial com-
plex, are framed as the film’s antagonists: Ross is another one of the MCU’s errant
father figures (much like Stane in Iron Man) and Blonsky is a dark mirror the
likes of which appear frequently in the genre. This is quite a contrast to the roots
of the Hulk character who, in the early years of his existence during the Cold
War, primarily fought against Communist villains. These early battles against
villainous ‘reds’ portrayed ‘American moral, technological, and scientific superi-
ority at several points, while portraying the Communist enemy as manipulative,
cowardly, and inferior’ (Darowski and Darowski 2015: 10). The villains in The
Incredible Hulk are all American and all from the Military Industrial Complex as
they are in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, but the films are careful to depict those re-
sponsible as isolated individuals, rather than the system as a whole being at fault.
When placed in the hands of someone more ‘moral’, like Stark or Banner (and as
we will see in the next chapter, Steve Rogers), advanced weaponised technology
(even Weapons of Mass Destruction) can and even must be used for the greater
good. It is important to note that Stark, Banner and Rogers, or more accurately
their alter egos Iron Man, Hulk and Captain America, are portrayed as reluctant
heroes and defensive weapons, who only use their powers when it is necessary to

protect civilians, as opposed to the likes of Ross and Stane who seek to use them
to instigate conflicts all over the globe, often for very selfish reasons but almost
always under the guise of national security.
Blonsky’s men target Banner in the favela seemingly unconcerned about the
presence of civilians and after a chase through crowded streets and across roof-
tops, they corner him in the bottling factory where he works. It is only then,
twenty-six minutes into film, that we see the Hulk for the first time. Having not
been told what to expect, Blonsky’s men are unsurprisingly shocked at the ap-
pearance of the Hulk and are then quickly overpowered as their conventional
weapons are shown to be entirely useless against something so powerful. Evading
the military, the Hulk flees only to wake up, transformed back into Banner, no
longer in Rio or even Brazil, but thousands of miles away in Guatemala. From
there a destitute Banner, stripped of his first-world status (if only for a limited
time, like Stark in Afghanistan, Bruce Wayne in China in Batman Begins and
Danny Rand in K’un-Lun in Iron Fist), hitchhikes through Mexico where he begs
for money on the streets of Chiapas.
The aging military man Blonsky is keenly aware that he is no match for
something as incredible as the Hulk, so Ross inducts him into an experimental
programme, a discontinued offshoot of the Super Soldier Programme which cre-
ated Captain America, designed to increase his speed, strength and agility. The
ethics of unchecked experimentation become a recurring motif in the MCU and
those who seek to use science for their own personal gain (like Samuel Sterns,
Blonsky and Ross in The Incredible Hulk, Stane in Iron Man, Hammer and Vanko
in Iron Man 2, and many others) are contrasted with those who seek to use it for
the greater good (in The Incredible Hulk, Banner but of course Tony Stark and lat-
er Hank Pym in Ant-Man). The Incredible Hulk shows that powers obtained from
science magnify already present qualities: therefore, Blonsky becomes harder
and crueller because he was like that anyway (when asked how he feels by one of
his men, he replies ‘like a monster’) but Banner, even in his uncontrolled Hulk
guise, is capable of protecting innocents, because he is virtuous in his original
unchanged state.
Seeking to retrieve his research, Banner returns to the site of his original
trauma, Willowdale in Virginia, the home of Marvel’s fictional Culver University
(where we are informed both Erik Selvig and Andrew Garner in Marvel’s Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D. also taught) having walked all the way from Brazil through
Guatemala and Mexico to the United States in seventeen days. Reluctantly re-
united with Betty, as he knows the dangers he continues to face and does not
want to involve her, he is again confronted by Ross and a newly enhanced
Blonsky. After first using a Tony Stark-designed non-lethal long-range acoustic
device (LRAD) Blonsky and Hulk engage in hand-to-hand combat. For a while
Fig. 9: Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) struggles to control the monster within in The Incredible
Hulk (2008)
Blonsky is even able to keep up with Hulk, before his hubris gets the better of
him and Hulk smashes him into a tree, seemingly leaving him for dead. In these
scenes Banner is shown as deeply reluctant to transform both because he loathes
the process and also because he fears that he cannot control it. It is here that Ross
reveals the extent of his desire to capture Banner and that he will put innocent
civilians in danger, even his daughter, when he orders helicopter gunships to
target the Hulk. When Betty gets caught in the crossfire and is about to be killed
it is only the Hulk that saves her, demonstrating that he is indeed conscious of
his actions in some way.
The figure of the Hulk has often been connected to debates concerning mascu-
linity throughout the history of the reception of the character and The Incredible
Hulk presents us with two very distinct types of man in a similar way to that
articulated in Thor: the more traditional, macho, hypermasculine model person-
ified by the likes of Blonsky and Ross, which is shown to be fundamentally flawed
throughout, and the new millennial sensitive ‘new man’ embodied in Betty’s new
boyfriend, the psychiatrist Leonard Samson (Ty Burrell). This paradigm is also
shown to have its problems, as despite his earnestness, Samson is framed as rath-
er weak, ineffectual and is entirely ignored by Betty as soon as Banner returns. It
is only Banner who is able to reconcile these two seemingly paradoxical strains
of masculinity in one person: he is sensitive, intelligent and virtuous, a man un-
afraid of action even in his unchanged form. But, of course, his transformations

into his alter ego enable him to protect Betty and other innocents in ways Banner
alone would never be able to do. It is this which makes the character of Banner/
Hulk the perfect conduit for what many regard as the wish-fulfilment fantasy
appeal of the superhero genre, as it becomes acted out in the film itself. While
audiences might aspire to be like Thor, Iron Man or even the Hulk, Banner gets
to see this realised within the diegetic frames of the film and is able to become the
Hulk in our place. Edward Norton described this process as the ‘great fantasy you
have when you don’t feel empowered, that you have this lurking monster within
you that’s going to come out to defend you if people hassle you… It’s a fantasy a
lot of teenagers can relate to! Not just teenagers…’ (2008). The casting of Edward
Norton as Banner might then be seen as either ironic or one of the reasons he was
drawn to the material as Norton’s interpretation accentuates the split-personality
theme which has come to dominate his career in films like Primal Fear (1996),
Fight Club (1999) and Leaves of Grass (2009). Like Tyler Durden in Fight Club,
itself a powerful treatise on the crisis of masculinity, the Hulk has been read by
many writers as a projection of a rampant and out of control id which is uncon-
strained by social mores (see Comtois 2009). Kevin Feige stated that this was one
of the reasons Marvel wanted Norton for the role, ‘Edward has got that duality
down pat – look at Primal Fear or Fight Club. I think that was the big draw to us
and to him with the project’ (qtd. in De Semlyen 2008: 66). As already noted, in
the creation of the Hulk Stan Lee drew from Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
and if it is correct, as Freud surmised, that ‘The ego represents what we call reason
and sanity, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions’ (qtd. in Reef 2001:
106), one might ask what doctors Jekyll and Banner are able to do in the form of
their alter egos that their ordinary selves are not? The answer to this in Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde seems fairly unambiguous: through the transgressive character of
Hyde, Jekyll is able to free himself from the stultifying morality of the Victorian
era and indulge in licentious behaviour that he would never be able to participate
in or even acknowledge in his respectable daily life (see Rose 1996). In the case of
the MCU incarnation of Banner and Hulk, this is complicated somewhat as there
is very little sexual dimension to the character, although of course this might be
because he is not allowed to express this in a family film (but this certainly makes
us see the ‘I can’t…’ scene in a different light). Might Banner’s transformation to
the Hulk be more about the power with which it affords him to reject those who
would seek to infringe on his rights as a citizen, an issue of particular relevance
in the post-9/11 era, when he finds himself targeted, restrained and pursued by
a military industrial complex that refuses to recognise his personhood? Like in
many MCU films his heroism is a burden, later described as a ‘terrible privilege’
by Tony Stark in conversation with Banner (who is then played by Mark Ruffalo)
in The Avengers. Leterrier and Norton, given their angst-ridden interpretation of
the character, cannot bring themselves to allow Banner to express that he might
actually enjoy the power and liberation of being the Hulk (which does happen
in Lee’s version), but the film does provocatively imply that on some levels it
might actually be the Hulk who is the real identity and Banner who is the mask.
In this understanding, the Hulk allows him to be that which he really wants to
be, behave how he truly wishes, unrestrained by contemporary mores and social
values. As Michael Brewer wrote of the comic version of the Hulk, but which can
just as accurately be applied to the films,
Most terrible of all for Bruce Banner is the dawning realisation that the Hulk
isn’t a separate entity at all. The bestial hulk represents the hidden dark side of
Banner’s own subconscious mind, the angry and aggressive persona Banner has
always feared and repressed. Suddenly the habits and safeguards of a lifetime
are inadequate. Morality, cooperation, acceptance, reason, compromise – all the
bricks that build a civilised society – are shattered and scattered by the fury of the
Hulk. (2004: 28)
This understanding, which Banner only comes to in the final image of the film,
reveals that his search for a cure might be ultimately futile, as he cannot erase
that which is an integral part of his own identity.
Having been defeated by the Hulk twice, Blonsky overdoses on the serum
(which he ingests by drinking samples of Banner’s blood) and transforms into
the monstrous Abomination, before going on a rampage through Harlem, New
York. Blonsky’s latent irresponsibility and immorality becomes magnified in
both his monstrous appearance and behaviour. It is only then that Banner, who
until then had seen his condition as something to be eradicated, realises that
he might be able to do good as the Hulk. What separates Banner from Blonsky
and Ross are his feelings of empathy and his acceptance of responsibility for his
actions (‘We made this thing [the Abomination], all of us’). Like Stark and Thor
and many (though not all) of the MCU heroes, Banner has undergone a profound
change because of his traumatic experiences, which transforms him physically,
but just as importantly, emotionally and psychologically.
The film’s conclusion lacks the dramatic impact of the ending of Thor, where
audiences had been able to become invested in the emotional triangle between
Thor, Loki and Odin. Here Marvel sidelines the charismatic performances
of Norton and Roth in favour of two CGI creations fighting on the streets of
Harlem, with the scale of the destruction considerably larger than that of the fi-
nal confrontation between Stane and Iron Man, the start of a process that would
continue, for the most part, in Marvel films with every year that passed. Even
though the CGI is impressively detailed, it is hard to care about the actions of the

two in a sequence which feels more akin to a video game. As one might expect,
Hulk finally overcomes Abomination but is prevented from killing him by Betty,
who reminds him of his humanity and that to kill him would be reducing him-
self to his level.
If the early Marvel films are indeed to be seen, as Spanakos suggested, ‘post-
September 11 fantasies of self-preservation’ (2011: 15), The Incredible Hulk poses
questions about the relationship between superheroes and the state that the MCU
will meditate on as the series progresses and which will build to a climax in
Captain America: Civil War, a film which will not feature the Hulk, but will see
the return of General Ross. Banner is a tortured and traumatised hero, much like
Stark, and they are both examples of Pheasant-Kelly’s ‘wounded hero’ the likes
of which became so prominent in post-9/11 films, both inside and outside of the
superhero genre (2013: 144). While the original Hulk was a Frankenstein’s mon-
ster created by the nuclear age, his MCU incarnation is consciously framed as a
WMD created by the Military Industrial Complex, the impact of which will con-
tinue to be explored in both The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Banner is
a very human figure, even in his Hulk guise, and after his defeat of Abomination,
he again runs, this time to the wilds of Bella Coola in a remote cabin in the
wilderness of British Columbia, Canada. As he had tried unsuccessfully to in
Rio, he attempts to control his heart rate. As the camera shows it reaching two
hundred beats per minute there is a close-up of his face: his eyes turn red and he
seems to have a hint of a smile, before the shot abruptly cuts to black. Audiences
ask themselves ‘Does this mean he is finally able to control it?’ Norton’s original
script explicitly features the question ‘Was that a flash of a smile?’ (2007: 115) and
Peter David’s novelisation of the film features the line, ‘His lips twitched with the
tiniest hint of a smile’ (2008b: 128). It is a question that is not fully answered un-
til the end of The Avengers four years later and this element of control, or rather
lack of it, will be key to the character as he progresses through the MCU films.
However, these future appearances of Bruce Banner/the Hulk did not feature
Edward Norton playing the character, reportedly due to creative differences be-
tween himself and Marvel Studios, and he was replaced by Mark Ruffalo who
described the Hulk, with tongue firmly in cheek, as, ‘my generation’s Hamlet’
(qtd. in Jensen 2012).
As only the second film in the MCU proper, the connective tissues which
would go on to define the franchise are tentatively and not entirely convincingly
in place and the film struggles to find an appropriate tone throughout which is
no doubt largely the result of competing visions of what Leterrier, Norton and
Feige wanted to see on the screen. Leterrier’s assertion in the director’s com-
mentary that, ‘We all decided together that this was a world without superheroes,
this is the first time everybody sees that’ are contradicted by the film’s explicit
mentions of the Super Soldier programme and even the appearance of Tony Stark
himself in what would be the equivalent of the post-credits stinger in the rest
of the MCU, here placed during the body of the film and even before the scene
in the wilderness. Stark enters a bar where Ross is drowning his sorrows in the
aftermath of the Hulk versus Abomination battle and asks the General, ‘What
if I told you we were putting a team together?’ Two years later by the time of
the release of Iron Man 2, as we have already seen, it was clear that this was not
the direction that Marvel Studios intended to take the overarching narrative of
the MCU when it was revealed that Stark is initially rejected from the Avengers
Initiative. In 2011 Marvel attempted to ‘retcon’ this in one of the series of short
films released by Marvel which were termed One-Shots, The Consultant, which
showed that it was all part of a S.H.I.E.L.D. ruse to annoy Ross to make sure he
does not release Blonsky, so Stark was sent on purpose to make sure that this
did not happen. Louis D’Esposito, the co-president of Marvel Studios, admitted
as such with his statement, ‘some things we had to correct’ (qtd. in Surrell 2012:
10). Regardless, the two subjects of this chapter, The Incredible Hulk and Thor,
are origin stories and the building blocks upon which the future of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe was built. After the successful introductions of Iron Man,
Hulk and Thor, there remained only one more member of the Avengers Prime to
bring to the screen and, despite his iconic status and popularity since his creation
in 1941, he proved to be the most challenging of all.
Notes
1 In the pilot episode (1.01) of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Grant Ward observes, ‘I
don’t think Thor’s technically a god’ to which Maria Hill replies, ‘Well, you haven’t
been near his arms’. In the first fifteen MCU films the closest one gets to a ‘real’ god is
Ego, the Celestial and Star-Lord’s father, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and even
he qualifies his status as a god with ‘a small g’.
2 Thor also went to San Diablo, a thinly-veiled substitute for Cuba, during the Cold
War and fought against a Castro-like villain called The Executioner in June 1965
Journey into Mystery #117.
3 It has been observed that the interactions between Odin, Loki and Thor in their
Marvel iterations have a distinctly Shakespearean dimension to them (see Fingeroth
2004: 37). In fact, many speculated this was precisely the reason that Marvel se-
lected Branagh to direct the film. In interviews Branagh went to significant lengths
to downplay the Shakespearean connections, but they do seem quite pronounced.
Shakespeare’s Henry V, an adaption of which Branagh directed in 1989 starring
himself, is a template for Thor in its portrayal of a young king and his trials and tribu-
lations in a journey towards maturity. Anthony Hopkins concurred in his description

of the film as ‘a superhero movie, but with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in’ (qtd. in
Carroll 2010).
4 Interestingly, in Norse mythology, Laufey was Loki’s mother and not his father. No
doubt this change amused audiences in Iceland where Laufey is still a fairly common
female name and the film was one of the most popular of the year.
5 Laufey’s insult is a knowing reference to Þrymskviða, a poem from the Poetic Edda in
which Thor is forced to dress up as the goddess Freya to retrieve his hammer Mjölnir
from a giant. Thor complains, ‘You’ll all mock me and call me unmanly if I put on a
bridal veil’ (Crossley-Holland 1980: 70).
6 In 2002 George W. Bush was said to have remarked of Saddam Hussein, ‘After all, this
is the guy who tried to kill my dad’ (qtd. in King 2002).
7 In what might be considered as a strange coincidence and/or evidence of the lack of
roles for actors of Middle Eastern descent, Oliver Stone’s W. features Sayed Badreya
as Saddam Hussein, the same Egyptian actor who played Abu Bakar in Iron Man.
8 Martin Arnold also commented on Thor directly in an article called ‘Thor the Movie:
Politics with a Hammer’ that ‘In this case, the issue is national salvation or, to put it
another way, the problems of twenty-first century American foreign policy… And its
story of an unmotivated invasion by a son who feels empowered by birthright to con-
quer the evildoers that embarrassed his father adds a clever subtext about American
foreign policy’ (2011b).
9 Some of the rare actual sacrifices in the MCU are Yinsen Ho’s for Tony Stark in Iron
Man, Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Yondu Udonta’s for Peter Quill at
the climax of Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2.
10 The Banner in the television show was an extremely empathetic incarnation of the
character and his origin was very different to the comic and both Lee’s and Leterrier’s
films. Bixby’s Banner was researching into the phenomonen of how some people are
able to tap into extreme reserves of strength at stressful moments after he was un-
able to save his wife in a car crash. Discovering that it was gamma radiation which
prompted this change in normal individuals Banner blasted himself with excessive
doses which led to his unique condition.
11 This is the second of what would become ubiquitous Stan Lee cameos. In Iron Man he
played a man mistaken for Hugh Heffner by Tony Stark on the red carpet for the Stark
fundraiser. In 2017, responding to a fan theory which had been gaining momentum
for some years, Kevin Feige seemed to imply that all his characters might be the same
person and that he is a Watcher, an alien race that observes key events throughout the
galaxy (see McMillan 2017).
C H A PT ER T H R EE
State Fantasy and the Superhero:

(Mis)Remembering World War II in
Captain America: The First Avenger
Significant to this role is Captain America’s ability to connect the political proj-
ects of American nationalism, internal order, and foreign policy (all formulated
at the national or global scale) with the scale of the individual, or body. The char-
acter of Captain America connects these scales by literally embodying American
identity, presenting for readers a hero both of, and for, the nation.
– Jason Dittmer (2005: 627)
I.
Despite being known as ‘the First Avenger’, Captain America aka Steve Rogers
was actually the last of the Avengers Prime to receive an origin film in the MCU
in the form of Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger, the penultimate
film in Marvel’s ambitious Phase One. While this was Captain America’s first
onscreen appearance, his arrival had been foreshadowed on several occasions:
both in Iron Man with the Easter egg of his iconic red, white and blue shield
hidden in the background of Tony Stark’s workshop, in Iron Man 2 with Stark’s
casual use of the shield as an impromptu wedge during one of his many experi-
ments, but also in the inclusion of a variation of the Super Soldier Serum in The
(MIS)REMEMBERING WORLD WAR II IN CAPTAIN AMERICA 97

Incredible Hulk. Stark’s disrespectful use of Captain America’s symbolic weapon
anticipates the conflict which will be depicted between the two in The Avengers,
continues in Avengers: Age of Ultron and comes to a dramatic climax in Captain
America: Civil War, where Captain America’s irony-free patriotism and old-fash-
ioned values are shown to be far removed from the acerbic wit, scepticism and
moral flexibility of a character like Tony Stark. The creation of Iron Man and the
Hulk, as we have seen, has been updated many times over the decades, but Steve
Rogers has always remained a product of World War II and his origin is so firmly
associated with the conflict that it is unlikely that it could ever be successfully al-
tered. His connection to the enduring mytho-poetic resonance of World War II, a
conflict which Cynthia Webber explained produces a ‘rich vein of moral certain-
ties that the United States mines at moments of its greatest moral uncertainty’
(2006: 29), might have been why Thomas Foster regarded the character as the
perfect antidote to twenty-first-century cynicism. He suggested it was ‘precisely
this immediate symbolic burden, this allegorical flatness and lack of psycholog-
ical depth, and this lack of distance between character and nation, that make
Captain America a perfect 9/11 icon for a culture dominated by cynical reason’
(2005: 262). When Captain America was ‘killed’ in the comic books in 2007, fan
reaction was mixed to say the least and Joe Simon, his original co-creator stated,
‘It’s a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now’ (qtd. in Shapiro 2011;
emphasis added). The ‘now’ to which Simon refers are the turbulent first decades
of the new millennium and it is fitting then that both Marvel Studios and the
diegetic universe of the MCU turned to Captain America once again in one such
real-world era of ‘moral uncertainty’. The return to more traditional forms of
masculinity had been called for, as we have already noted, by the likes of Peggy
Noonan and Kim DuToit who regarded 9/11 as something of a wake-up call for
all that had gone wrong in America in the second half of the twentieth century,
and there could be no better example of this than Captain America, who has been
an enduring and iconic figure in the world of comic books and popular culture
since his first appearance on 10 March 1941, where he was famously pictured
on the front cover punching Adolf Hitler and fighting Nazis nine months before
Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II (see Noonan 2001; DuToit
n.d.). Nicholas Yanes’ description of him as ‘the meridian example of pro-war at-
titudes in World War 2 era comic books’ (2009: 53) is an apt one for a character
who was originally explicitly created to function as a propagandistic figure both
inside and outside of the panels of the original comic book. Jack Kirby, the other
person responsible for the creation of Cap, said that he ‘was created for a time
that needed noble figures’ (qtd. in Goulart 1993: 4). In fact, alongside Superman
there has been no more potent symbol of what many perceive as quintessential
American values than Captain America in popular culture and the character has
also been described as ‘the ideological center of the Marvel universe’ (Costello
2009: 66). Even the very weapon that he uses and the costume he wears function
as synechdocal emblems of these values: the use of a defensive shield instead of an
offensive weapon is symbolic of Captain America’s, and by extension America’s,
enduring belief in its role of the protector of liberty and defender of innocents
around the globe. It is for these very reasons that Jason Dittmer (2012) consid-
ers Captain America (and other heroes like him) as superlative examples of
‘nationalist superheroes’ because of their pronounced connection to and an em-
bodiment of the values of the country they were created in and come to represent.
This has been viewed very critically by some: John McTiernan, who, in his own
way, contributed more than most in the 1980s to the evolution of modern action
cinema through films like Die Hard (1988) and Predator (1987), denounced the
superhero genre, and in particular Captain America, in an interview with the
French edition of Premiere in July 2016: ‘Captain America, I’m not joking… The
cult of American hyper-masculinity is one of the worst things to have happened
to the world during the last fifty years. Hundreds of thousands of people have
died because of this idiotic delusion. So how is it possible to watch a film called
Captain America?!’ (qtd. in West 2016).
While the integration of the fantastical character of Thor into the predomi-
nantly ‘real world’ diegetic narratives of the MCU proved a challenge, reconciling
such an iconic figure of World War II like Captain America, one often associated
with jingoistic patriotism and American triumphantalism, to the post-9/11 era
was perhaps an even greater one. Unlike the starkly drawn moral binaries that
World War II has provided storytellers with in the decades since, in recent years
the United States has been viewed with much more scrutiny around the globe
and so when the puny Steve Rogers, yet to become Captain America, says ‘I don’t
want to kill anyone, I don’t like bullies I don’t care where they are from’, it is
an ironic suggestion for international audiences in an era in which America is
regarded by some as the ‘bully of the free world’ (see Wills 1999) and by others
as the biggest threat to global peace (see Huntingdon 1999). Thus, John Shelton
Lawrence and Robert Jewett were right to ask the question, writing prior to the
release of the film but after 9/11, in a foreword to Captain America Complex:
The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism, what direction or relevance the character
might have after the events of 11 September 2001: ‘Since Captain America’s writ-
ers traditionally compelled him to engage in the discourses of power within his
eras, consider the strong implications of his playing a role in the Global War on
Terrorism. Remaining true to his own character, as well as the genre conven-
tions, how could he fight in this war?’ (2003: v). They use the term ‘the Captain
America Complex’ to define the complicated relationship between American na-
tional self-identification processes and foreign policy, indicating that the phrase

encompasses ‘the uneasy fusion of two kinds of roles. Should America be the
“city set upon a hill” that promotes the rule of law even when faced with difficult
adversaries? Or should it crusade on the military plane of battle, allowing no law
or institution to impede its efforts to destroy evil?’ (2003: xiii).
Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger consciously strives to avoid
the problematic and divisive politics of the post-9/11 era by setting the majority
of its narrative, apart from a brief prologue and epilogue, during World War II.
Yet this itself causes a range of complex issues about how its vision of the war is
constructed from very modern perspectives. In spite of the presence of fantasti-
cal elements like HYDRA, the Tesseract and the Red Skull, its World War II is
one very familiar to American audiences and one which has been routinely rec-
reated in American films since Sands of Iwo Jima, through Saving Private Ryan
and more recently Fury, films which have dramatised World War II as it would
like to be remembered by American culture at large rather than, in any meaning-
ful sense, how it actually was. These films construct a ‘good war’ fought by the
‘greatest generation’ in which US forces are unambiguously heroic and moral,
and the Axis forces of Germany, Japan and Italy are unquestionably evil, in a
mythic conflict in which America wins almost alone and sacrifices a great deal
for very little in return. In Captain America: The First Avenger the war is won
because, as Colonel Chester Philips (Tommy Lee Jones) states, ‘General Patton
has said that wars are fought with weapons but they are won by men. We are go-
ing to win this war, because we have the best men.’ But, as many historians have
argued, this is very far from the truth. In actual fact, the most critical aspect of
US power was
an economic base that staggered its opponents. Germany and Japan could boast
of considerable productive prowess, all the more impressive for an ability to func-
tion under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies. And German as well
as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent
into battle. (Many observers consider their army with which Germany invaded
the Soviet Union, an ally it turned on in 1941, the finest the world has ever seen.)
But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bot-
tomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself, but its allies, with
whatever it took to win. By 1943, most informed leaders of both Germany and
Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the
seemingly bottomless US capacity for war-making. (Cullen 2017: 6)
Yet this military and capacity is not mythopoetic enough for American identity
politics and comments like Colonel Phillips’ are platitudes which have become
transmogrified into facts in the cultural imaginary and embodied in fictional
American soldiers like Sgt. John M. Stryker (John Wayne) in Sands of Iwo Jima,
Captain Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) in The Great Escape (1963), Captain John
H. Miller (Tom Hanks) in Saving Private Ryan, and Sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’
Collier (Brad Pitt) in Fury. In these films, and many like them, total military and
economic dominance is metamorphosed into narratives about plucky soldiers
outgunned and outmanned, but never outfought. As Marilyn Young has stated,
the war is understood ‘as a long, valiant struggle that the United States fought
pretty much on its own, winning an exceptionally clean victory that continues
to redeem Americans under arms anywhere, at any point in history’ (2005: 178),
whereas in actual fact it might be more truthful to assert, as Jim Cullen did, that
the United States ‘risked the least and gained the most from World War II’ (2017:
xix). Several writers have criticised this simplistic depiction of World War II and
argued that films like Saving Private Ryan have endorsed and reconsolidated an
alluring vision of a ‘just war’ and American altruism which led Debra Ramsay
to assert that Spielberg’s film offers a ‘nostalgic view of the Greatest Generation
[which] cannot be separated from nostalgia for the war itself’ (2015: 98). The First
Avenger does something comparable, rewriting the war in a range of compelling
and affective ways, primarily by viewing the conflict through the prism of the
twenty-first century in its portrayal of harmonious multicultural communities,
American beneficence and moral superiority. In doing so it joins the ranks of a
multitude of American films which erase and misremember those unpalatable
aspects of the war, in a process which James Berger described as the elision of
‘the actual and evident imperfections of American history’ (1999: 134), offering
instead another example of the ‘mythic massage’ that popular media texts are
able to perform in their appropriation of cultural memory (Lawrence and Jewett
2002: 116).
II.
The First Avenger begins in June 1943, eighteen months after the attacks on Pearl
Harbor, with the diminutive Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) desperate to join the
armed forces and serve his country, but finding himself rejected again and again
due to his slight frame and numerous health problems. Steve is inspired to join up
because he knows it is the right thing to do and that everyone is doing their bit. A
newsreel announcer declares, ‘War continues to ravage Europe but help is on the
way. Every able-bodied young man is lining up to serve his country… Our brave
boys are showing the Axis powers that the price of freedom is never too high.’
Rogers wants to join the 107th Infantry like his father before him who fought in
World War I, and it is the unit recently joined by his best friend James ‘Bucky’
Barnes (Sebastian Stan). The film gives us thirty minutes with this ‘skinny Steve’

before he becomes Captain America, but it is important for audiences that he
always remains ‘skinny Steve’ at heart, not just in this film but throughout his
future appearances in the MCU. It is this determination, earnestness and sense
of duty that brings him to the attention of Dr Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) at
the World Exposition of Tomorrow who signs him up for the experimental Super
Soldier programme, which goes by the name of Operation Rebirth, that finally
gives him the opportunity to serve his country.
Steve Rogers, even prior to becoming Captain America, embodies the belief
that World War II was a noble war fought for justice and freedom, not a compli-
cated geopolitical enterprise of conflicting rivalry, land, influence and economic
interests. This socio-political reality has become progressively diluted into the
public’s understanding of a war in which the US was a beacon of liberty, stand-
ing up for freedom, both for itself and for those around the globe and the Axis
powers were categorically evil, each with designs to enslave the world. In a quiet
dialogue exchange at Camp Lehigh where Steve is being trained, the German
exile Erskine tells Steve, ‘Hitler uses his fantasies to inspire his followers … with
the marching and the big show and the flags’, speaking to a man who will, very
soon, inspire his own nation … while wearing a flag on his shield and a large
‘A’ on his head in what Brian Hack memorably described as a ‘eugenic make-
over’ (2009: 80). Erskine speaks to particular American fantasies of beneficent
power being used only for good and the enduring paradox of the USA desirous
of seeing itself simultaneously as the world’s number one and a plucky underdog.
While Captain America is undoubtedly being created as an offensive weapon
in the war, the process is referred to as a defensive one and ‘the first step on the
path to peace’. Erskine persuades the reluctant Colonel Philips to choose Steve
Rogers, among all the potential recruits, ‘Because a strong man who has known
power all his life may lose respect for that power, but a weak man knows the
value of strength’. Erskine is framed very much like Yinsen Ho in the caves of
Afghanistan in Iron Man, right down to the similarity of their deathbed pleas:
in place of Yinsen’s ‘earn this’ Erskine silently points at Steve’s heart, remind-
ing him of their conversation: ‘Stay who you are, not a perfect soldier but a good
man.’ However, unlike Stark and despite his diminutive status, Steve was already
heroic before his physical transformation in Project Rebirth, which significantly
enhances his physical characteristics, but leaves his essential qualities of good-
ness and decency exactly the same. So, although Steve is a more traditional form
of masculine hero, even in the 1940s he embodies aspects of the new man arche-
type in his sensitivity and emotional vulnerability.
Captain America’s antagonist in The First Avenger is his most famous and
enduring one, the Red Skull, one of the most literal examples of the dark mir-
ror referred to in the previous chapters. The Red Skull retrieves the powerful
Tesseract from the town of Tønsberg in Norway (which had briefly featured in
Thor) and, with the help of his colleague Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), proceeds to
transform it into a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). Even though Hugo
Weaving delivers a charismatic performance, the Red Skull is a pantomime-like
villain who would not have been out of place in Captain America comics circa
1941 and a disappointingly one-dimensional villain after the Machiavellian al-
lure of Tom Hiddlestone’s Loki in Thor. In an effort to depoliticise the film, Nazis
are almost entirely erased from its narrative, aside from a few brief mentions,
and Cap is shown to fight against the less politically sensitive HYDRA through-
out the film instead, which prompted German film critic Robert Cherkowski to
suggest that the film dramatises ‘the last just war in which the US took part. But
even this war … is still depoliticized and played out in the fields of fantasy …
[and does not] show a single swastika’ (n.d.). Whether this is done with an eye on
the international box office is hard to discern, but in some countries (for example
Russia, Ukraine and South Korea) the film was released only as The First Avenger
rather than Captain America: The First Avenger. What the film does imply is
that if a pure of heart American participates in Erskine’s experiments his innate
sense of goodness will create an altruistic hero, but if a German does it he will
emerge as abhorrently evil, conveniently ignoring how close Captain America
fits the image of an Aryan ideal himself. This potent image and Erskine’s earlier
comment about ‘the marching and the big show and the flags’ is dramatical-
ly realised in the film’s two-and-a-half-minute United Service Organisations
(USO)-themed musical number accompanying David Zippel and Alan Menken’s
Irving Berlinesque ‘The Star Spangled Man’ which wittily evokes both the war-
time musicals of the era like Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and The All-Star Bond
Rally (1945), and at the same time reproduces early Captain America iconogra-
phy: from the changing shapes of his shield to showing him punch Hitler in the
face on the stage replete with children interacting with the show as if it were a
pantomime calling to Cap, ‘He’s behind you!’
Captain America’s involvement with the USO had been instigated by Senator
Brandt (Michael Brandon), chronologically the first in a long line of self-serving
politicians in the MCU (see also Stern in Iron Man 2 and Senator Christian Ward
in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) offering him a different way to contribute to
the war effort with the question, ‘Son, do you want to serve your country on the
most important battlefield in the war?’ This battlefield is not fighting Nazis over-
seas as Steve had originally hoped, but as part of the USO selling war bonds to
the public. The musical number intercuts Steve holding babies and signing auto-
graphs with images of both children and G.I.s reading comics about his exploits.
In 1942 a remarkable fifteen million comics a week were sold across the United
States, a level of popularity that has never been approximated since (see Wright

Fig. 10: Captain America (Chris Evans) is a synechdocal figure representative of what are regarded as
quintessential American values in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
2003: 31). Brandt’s aid explains to Steve, ‘You sell a few bonds, bonds buy bullets
… bullets kill Nazis, bang bang boom!’, but the film portrays Steve’s participation
in the process as distinctly unmasculine and even shameful. Steve is informed
that bond sales are boosted by ten percent in every city he visits, an achievement
in itself, but still Colonel Phillips refers to him dismissively as a ‘chorus girl’ and
Agent Peggy Carter, with whom by now he has fallen in love, sees him as ‘a danc-
ing monkey’. However, the centrality of the sale of war bonds to the US war effort
is hard to underestimate; between 1941 and 1945 World War II cost the United
States government in excess of $250 billion, approximately forty-five percent of
which was paid for by taxes with the rest being raised in eight separate war bond
drives sold to eighty-five million people (see Kimble 2006). The implication being
that the only way for a real man to serve one’s country is by killing its enemies,
ignoring, as Hollywood films have done for decades, the hard work and sacrifices
of many millions of civilians during the conflict. The sequence ends with Rogers
taking the USO tour to Azzano in Italy in November 1943 and performing for
servicemen from the 107th infantry, the unit he had earlier aspired to join, who
prove to be not as enamoured with him as the children and young women state-
side were; they even throw fruit at him, yelling ‘Nice boots Tinkerbell!’
The Azzano sequence is noteworthy for other reasons too, as in the crowd
and also in subsequent missions, it is clear to see that the vision of the US army
during World War II The First Avenger wishes to project is one of a desegregated
military with white and black soldiers serving alongside one another. Nearly a
million African-Americans joined the armed forces in World War II in a variety
of capacities but they served entirely separately, had separate training facilities
and even had separate blood supplies (see Wynn 2010; Controvich 2015). The
only black soldiers fighting in Europe at this time were segregated including the
famous Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division who fought in Italy from
1944 until the end of the war. This is not the only time the film shows such scenes
of racial harmony, which conveniently ignores or erases the unpalatable reali-
ties of the African-American experience of World War II, as have the majority
of films about the conflict, as earlier in the film black and white Americans are
shown sharing recruitment stations, and black and white children are shown
happily playing on the streets together. Charles M. Blow, writing in The New
York Times stated, ‘But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated American
Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I
know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it’s almost cus-
tomary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink’ (2011).
Later when Cap forms his elite unit, the Howling Commandoes, it features
an African-American, Private Gabriel ‘Gabe’ Jones and a Japanese-American,
Private James ‘Jim’ Morita, who we are informed served in the US Army Nisei
Squadron. While a considerable number of Japanese-Americans fought during
World War II they were forbidden from being deployed in the Pacific Theatre,
whereas no such restrictions were placed on Italian-Americans or German-
Americans who fought on the Western Front, and all Japanese-American men
not in the armed forces were automatically given 4C status as an ‘enemy alien’.
Around 110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned by the United States gov-
ernment due to fears of anti-American activities and sabotage, an act President
Reagan later apologised for as part of the Civil Liberies Act of 1988 when Congress
stated that the internment was a decision based on ‘race prejudice, war hyste-
ria, and a failure of political leadership’ and ordered reparations paid to every
surviving internee. This mistreatment of both African-Americans and Japanese-
Americans is entirely erased from the film and even when implied it is treated
as something of a joke. On being rescued from a HYDRA cell he is being held
in with Jim Norita, Timothy ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan turns to the Asian-American
with a look of suspicion on his face and asks, ‘What, are we taking everybody?’
to which Norita replies, ‘I’m from Fresno, ace’. The seemingly offhand choice
of Fresno is also an intriguing one which may or may not be coincidental, but
in 1942 North Fresno was the location of the Pinedale Assembly Centre, an in-
terim facility for the relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps and
perhaps somewhere to which Morita’s family and friends could have been sent.
These unpleasant truths about World War II offer conspicuous challenges to how
it has come to be remembered, as an unambiguous war for freedom fought by all
Americans as equals. Dugan’s reaction is one of the more truthful moments in a
film set in an era when Japanese characters in comics were routinely caricatured
with fangs, buckteeth, hunched backs, and drawn with yellow skin.1 There could
have been a scene in The First Avenger in which Captain America protests about

Fig. 11: The racial diversity featured in Captain America: The First Avenger is one of many
examples of how American cinema, according to Bazin, has historically refused to portray
American society as it is, but rather ‘just as it wanted to see itself’
the racial inequality of his era, where he advocates his support of the Double-V
campaign (the drive to promote for equality for African-Americans in the US) or
protests against the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, but the film chooses
to ignore these aspects of American history, instead presenting us with a vision
of the ‘good old days’ which never really existed outside of film, literature and
our collective imagination.2 The First Avenger might only be a fantasy film but it
is symptomatic of an American cultural attitude to history and how Americans
use the past to create meaning in the present, while at the same time as using
the present to images of the past (see Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998). The years
between 1942 and 1945 are remembered as a period when the United States was
fighting for freedom around the globe, but the fact that it was, at the same time,
subjugating large sections of its own people becomes largely forgotten, because
such facts do not easily reconcile with the vision America has created of itself.
After he fails to save his best friend Bucky on one of their missions, an act
which will return in consequential ways in Captain America: The Winter Soldier,
Cap redoubles his efforts to destroy the HYDRA bases all over Europe. When
he comes face to face with the Red Skull in the final base in the Swiss Alps, the
Skull asks him, ‘What makes you so special?’ and his answer is very revealing,
‘Nothing … I’m just a kid from Brooklyn’. It is imperative that Cap, despite his
prodigious talents, remains identified as an ordinary person with the implication
that anyone, were they virtuousness and hardworking enough, could have been
in his place: a more powerful evocation of the American dream would be hard to
find, as Jackson Sutliff concurred, describing him as ‘the American dream made
flesh’ (2009: 121). When he discovers that the Red Skull has used the Tesseract to
construct WMDs which are aimed at Chicago, Boston and New York, Cap man-
ages to destroy the first two but the one directed at New York remains stuck in the
HYDRA ship, the Valkyrie. In an act of supreme self-sacrifice, he elects to pilot
the ship into the ground in order to prevent thousands of civilians being killed.
In scenes which have been read as evoking the events of 9/11, on the radio with
Peggy, Cap says, ‘This thing’s moving too fast and it’s heading for New York…
There’s not gonna be a safe landing but I can try and force it down.’ Sukhdev
Sandhu, writing in The Telegraph, wrote that, ‘Only towards the end is there a
whiff of genuine terror: a scene in which an aeroplane heading for New York
plummets to earth briefly revives disconcerting memories of United 93’ (2011). It
is interesting that Sandhu equates the sequence not to 11 September 2001 or the
crash of Flight United 93, but Paul Greengrass’s film, United 93 (2006). It is not
that director Joe Johnston deliberately recreates the scene from the earlier film
or perhaps even that he was self-consciously comparing the two events, but that
notions of heroic sacrifice for the good of the nation act as the very apex of heroic
masculinity now as much as they did during World War II. Like Thor at the cli-
max of his film and Iron Man at the climax of his, Steve elects to voluntarily give
up his life for the greater good, as this is what American heroes do. As in United
93 the moment of impact is too traumatic to bear witness to, so The First Avenger
cuts directly to 8 May 1945 and the V.E. Day celebrations suggesting Cap’s sacri-
fice, and those of many like him, was not in vain.
The film concludes with a brief but resonant coda, as Rogers is shown to wake
up in what appears to be a small room in 1940s New York with a seemingly
live baseball game playing on the radio revealing that, yet again, the MCU has
offered audiences a heroic sacrifice which does not end in an actual sacrifice.
But it seems wrong to Steve: there is something odd about the nurse’s behaviour
and he informs the audience that he had attended that baseball game in person.
Suspecting foul play, he runs onto the streets of New York outside … only to find
himself not in 1945, but 2011. The rest of Captain America’s appearances in the
MCU will be in the modern era and his struggle to reconcile himself to the dif-
ferences between the two will be the central dramatic arc for his character. Until
then the goals of Captain America and the government he was working for were
one and the same, Colonel Phillips had been hard on him but they had shared
a clearly defined mission, to defeat the Nazis and HYDRA. The modern world,
as portrayed in the MCU, is shown to be, on the surface at least, much more
complicated and even his friends and colleagues like Tony Stark, Nick Fury and

Black Widow frequently display ambiguous moral compasses. The film ends with
a close up of his face, now ninety-three but having not aged a day, cast adrift in
a world in which everything he knew has been taken from him. He utters just a
single understated line and one of the most human moments of the MCU thus
far: ‘I had a date…’
Notes
1 Somewhat revealingly the actor playing Jim Morita, Kenneth Choi, is not of Japanese
but of Korean descent. However, given the relative paucity of roles for Asian-
Americans in American film and television his career has been littered with films
in which he plays not only Koreans, but both Chinese and Japanese characters: from
his Fujimoto in Harsh Times (2005), Chester Ming in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013),
to Henry Lin in Sons of Anarchy (FX, 2008–14) and Judge Lance Ito in The People
v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (FX, 2016). Choi reappeared in Spider-Man:
Homecoming as Principal Morita, with a picture of what one presumes to be either his
father or his grandfather, James, in his office.
2 Just as the film struggles to reconcile its twenty-first-century view of race from the
1940s by erasing it from the film, The First Avenger raises and then refuses to ex-
plicitly mention the Holocaust in its narrative. For many contemporary Americans,
the Holocaust now counterfactually has been altered from a difficult-to-process
fact learned during and after the war to now being one of the reasons the war was
fought for in the cultural imaginary and ‘like the story of D-Day a central part of
[the American] victory narrative and celebration’ (Bodnar 2010: 221). It is alluded to
in Captain America: The First Avenger in a newspaper headlines read ‘Nazis retake
Zhitomir’ in an allusion to the Zhitomir Pogrom. Dr Erskine is never confirmed to be
Jewish but the death of his family in Dachau in 1937 is mentioned in the MCU comic
book Captain America: The First Vengeance (2011). It can also be seen in the reactions
of an elderly couple when ‘skinny Steve’ visits a cinema where a disrespectful bully
shouts at the newsreel. The couple are obviously visually coded coded as being Jewish
and the film’s script describes the moment as ‘Steve looks across the aisle. A YOUNG
WOMAN watches the screen, tears welling. She clearly has a man overseas. Across
the aisle, a middle-aged Jewish couple looks somber’ (Markus and McFeely 2014: 13).
C H A PT ER F O U R
‘Seeing … still working on believing!’:

The Ethics and Aesthetics of Destruction
in The Avengers
Once we loved movies where tall buildings exploded or burned to the ground.
Now we don’t like those so much. And then again, now we do.
– Jeffery Melnick (2009: 18)
Arguably, being vicariously traumatised invited members of a society to con-

front, rather than conceal, catastrophes, and in that way might be useful. On the
other hand, it might arouse anxiety and trigger defense against further exposure.
– E. Anne Kaplan (2005: 87)
I.
After the two origin stories released in 2011, Thor and Captain America: The First
Avenger, Marvel released only one film in 2012, The Avengers, the final film in
Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the culmination of four years
of world-building and the five films discussed so far in this volume.1 The film
had the largest opening weekend in the history of American cinema at the time,
taking over $200 million dollars at the US box office and going on to gross more
than one and a half billion dollars worldwide, making it the most successful
of the year and the third-biggest film of all time behind only James Cameron’s
Avatar (2009) and Titanic (1997).
THE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF DESTRUCTION IN THE AVENGERS 109

The task of reconciling these disparate heroes into a single film, at the same
time adding two more protagonists, Black Widow (who had appeared in Iron
Man 2) and Hawkeye (who had appeared briefly in Thor), was handed to director
Joss Whedon. Despite being a high-profile figure in the television industry, The
Avengers was only Whedon’s second feature film after the modestly budgeted
Serenity (2005), the cinematic expansion of his critically acclaimed but short-
lived Firefly (Fox, 2002–3). Perhaps the reason he was chosen by Marvel Studios
was his proven track record of crafting intelligent, ensemble science fiction nar-
ratives and his elevated status within the fan community. The Avengers functions
as a sequel to each of the three previous origin films (The Incredible Hulk, Thor
and Captain American: The First Avenger), the continuation of Tony Stark’s nar-
rative arc from Iron Man and Iron Man 2, the conclusion of Phase One, and
an introduction to Phase Two, which would begin the following year with Iron
Man 3. Each character gets their own personal narrative thread which returns
to many of the themes discussed in previous chapters: Steve Rogers struggles
to come to terms with his place in the modern world; Tony Stark continues to
learn about the moral responsibilities of a superhero; Thor about brotherhood
and the value of being part of a team; and Bruce Banner (now portrayed by Mark
Ruffalo) reconciles himself with his alter ego, who he refers to hypocoristically
throughout the film as ‘the other guy’, and even, as the audience slowly comes to
understand, about controlling his emotions.
Given the huge impact of Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark/Iron
Man, which had resulted in the actor going from having trouble securing in-
surance bonding on films like The Singing Detective (2003) and Woody Allen’s
Melinda and Melinda (2005), to becoming one of the biggest film stars in the
world, it was natural to assume that his character would be primus inter pares in
The Avengers (see Lax 2009: 57). This is true to a certain extent, but it is Captain
America who emerges as the emotional and moral fulcrum of Whedon’s film.
The Avengers does contain a range of spectacular action scenes, including a cli-
mactic 45-minute-long sequence referred to throughout the MCU in the future
as the Battle of New York, which are, of course, prerequisite for the genre, but
it also features more intimate scenes of character development than one would
expect from a big-budget blockbuster. Much to Whedon’s credit, he strives to put
the humanity of the characters in the foreground of the film which, as a result,
gives the action sequences a greater sense of meaning rather than merely an ex-
cuse for extravagant spectacle. Whedon commented: ‘People think it’s all about
the mission, but it’s all about the team, really. When you do a film like this you
have to make sure each character matters as much as the others, but in a different
way. That was something that was really important to me. Making sure everyone
mattered’ (qtd. in Hundley n.d.).
We have seen in previous chapters how the MCU has been intrinsically
connected to the times in which it is made: whether we consider Iron Man’s
explicit connections to the Military Industrial Complex in the ‘War on Terror’
era, the status of Thor and The Incredible Hulk as post-9/11 allegories, or Captain
America’s complicated relationship to how World War II has come to be re-
membered by American culture at large. This pattern continues in The Avengers,
which is very much a product of the ‘War on Terror’ and even views, quite ex-
plicitly on occasion, the central alien attack on New York through the prism of
the events of 11 September 2001. Several critics drew attention to these connec-
tions and J. Hoberman even asserted that the film ‘recasts 9/11 in the Bush years’
dominant movie mode, namely the comic book superhero spectacular – albeit
with a heavy dose of irony and added stereoscopic depth… Bombs away: The
Avengers is 9/11 as you’ve never seen it!’ (2012). Aside from being consciously
visually designed to evoke 9/11, the Battle of New York also functions as a ‘9/11
moment’ within the narrative of the MCU with long-term narrative ramifica-
tions throughout Phase Two and beyond. As Senator Ellen Nadeer will later say
in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘Broken Promises’ (4.09), with an eye on the
phrase’s now powerful associations to 11 September 2001, ‘everything changed
that day’. In Iron Man 3, released the year after, Tony Stark suffers from no-
ticeable symptoms of PTSD after the traumatic events he both witnesses and
experiences during The Avengers, and even says, ‘Nothing’s been the same since
New York’ before confronting a terrorist known as The Mandarin who is, on the
surface at least, explicitly constructed as an Osama Bin Laden analogue as much
as Ra’s al Ghul was in Batman Begins.2 The aftermath of the Battle of New York
becomes a backdrop for the events of the Netflix series Daredevil (2015–) and
Captain America’s growing mistrust of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Captain America: The
Winter Soldier. The Battle of New York itself might be regarded as an example of
what Richard Corliss (2009) has called ‘disaster porn’, a term he originally used
to describe the Roland Emmerich disaster film 2012 (2009) and the tendency
of large-scale Hollywood films of the era to present spectacularly orchestrated
scenes of destruction and devastation which audiences were invited to both mar-
vel at and revel in. Corliss’s criticism was one of many to emerge around the same
time which raised concerns about whether the presentation of such scenes for
the amusement of audiences raised ethical quandaries in the aftermath of 9/11, a
period in which images of planes colliding with skyscrapers, tall buildings col-
lapsing, debris falling from the skies and scenes of dust-caked, panicked crowds
fleeing disaster became an indelible part of the cinematic landscape. Films like
The Day After Tomorrow (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), Transformers (2007),
Cloverfield (2008) and 2012 fill their screens with barely-coded images and
situations which seem so self-consciously designed to evoke 9/11 and the ‘War

on Terror’ that Kyle Buchanan felt compelled to ask, ‘Is It Possible to Make A
Hollywood Blockbuster Without Evoking 9/11?’ (2013).
II.
The Avengers begins with the line, ‘The Tesseract has awakened’, an object that
had provided continuity between the Phase One MCU films, appearing briefly
in Odin’s throne room in Thor before becoming more prominently featured in
Captain America: The First Avenger when the Red Skull used it to arm his legion
of HYDRA soldiers. Although it has been called a MacGuffin (see Surrell 2012:
44) it emerges as much more important for the film’s narrative than this: de-
scribed by Black Widow as having ‘the potential energy to wipe out the planet’
and being ‘the key to unlimited sustainable energy’ by Nick Fury, who orders
it to be used to create weapons, later referred as WMDs by Bruce Banner, in an
act decidedly similar to those of the Red Skull during World War II. It is these
experiments that function as the catalyst for the events of The Avengers as Thor
later informs Fury: ‘Your work with the Tesseract is what drew Loki to it … and
his allies. It is a signal to all the realms that Earth is ready for a higher form of
war!’ While S.H.I.E.L.D. does not understand the properties of the Tesseract,
Nick Fury determines that the use of it is necessary in order to keep the world
safe given that he now knows, after the events of Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor
and The Incredible Hulk, that super-powered beings and even aliens exist, and
are a potential threat to the Earth. Yet unbeknownst to him the Tesseract is also
a door which Loki uses to transport his army of invading aliens, the Chitauri,
to New York. When he realises the extent of the danger the world faces, Nick
Fury restarts the discontinued Avengers Initiative, against the recommendations
of the World Security Council, suggesting: ‘These people [the Avengers] may be
isolated, unbalanced even, but I believe with the right push they can be exactly
what we need.’ Throughout the course of the narrative the Avengers will be called
‘freaks’, by World Security Council member Gideon Malick (Powers Boothe),
‘lost souls’, by Loki, and a ‘ticking time bomb’, by Bruce Banner himself, but
these very American superheroes prove to be the only thing capable of saving the
Earth when no one else can.
Having quickly and efficiently established its apocalyptic stakes, the film’s
protatic stage is comprised of bringing the superheroes together, not just from
all over the globe, but even the galaxy, in the case of the Norse god Thor, a task
which proves to be as much of a challenge within the film’s diegesis for Nick Fury
as it must have been for writer/director Joss Whedon. Black Widow is retrieved
from an active mission in Russia to recruit Bruce Banner, who has relocated to
the poverty-stricken slums of Kolkota, India (via a soundstage in New Mexico)
where he has found some sort of solace treating patients there, similar to how he
had lost himself in the favelas of Rio in The Incredible Hulk. Just as those scenes
in The Incredible Hulk emerged as problematic, the sequence in India with its
refuse and livestock-filled alleyways, ripped sheets in doorways and televisions
on the street proves equally culturally insensitive. Producer Jeremy Latcham la-
belled these scenes ‘a very realistic version of India’ (qtd. in Anon. 2012), but
others were not so complimentary, including award-winning Indian actress and
producer Rituparna Sengupta, who wrote: ‘Kolkata has a rich culture and heri-
tage, and a filmmaker should respect that. There are two scenes about India and
they only show slums. It could have been done in better taste’ (qtd. in Pulver
2012). As Anandra Mitra observed in her volume India on the Western Screen:
Imaging a Country in Film, TV, and Digital Media they are emblematic of the
‘slum and leprosy’ motif that is characteristic of the way Hollywood films tend
to portray India, which has ‘become the dominant representation of the [Indian]
space on the Western screen’ (2016: 65). These scenes are certainly representative
of how American film in general, not just the MCU, luxuriates in the perpetua-
tion of crudely drawn national stereotypes that are primarily designed to reveal
inherent qualities of goodness in their American heroes: in the case of Rio and
Kolkata, they emphasise Banner’s altruism and his intellect (he is able to speak
Portuguese and Bengali), or in Afghanistan, Iron Man Stark’s selfless heroism,
his masculinity and his morality (see Spanakos 2011: 19). Ruffalo’s Banner is
quite distinct from Norton’s portrayal of the character (and Eric Bana’s before
him) and his sensitive, vulnerable and decidedly human interpretation found a
level of appreciation with both reviewers and fans to an extent the previous in-
carnations were unable to achieve. Ruffalo’s understated and empathetic screen
persona enables him to do more with a single line concerning Banner’s failed
suicide attempt – ‘I got low. I didn’t see an end … so I put a bullet in my mouth,
and the other guy spit it out’ – than Leterrier and Norton were able to do in an
extended two-and-a-half-minute-long scene which was removed from the final
cut of The Incredible Hulk and can be seen only on an extra for the Blu-ray re-
lease. Like The Incredible Hulk before it, The Avengers seems to recognise the
existence of the previous Hulk film, but also departs from it. Banner comments,
‘The last time I was in New York, I kinda broke Harlem’, referring to the climactic
battle with Abomination in The Incredible Hulk. But the nature of the gamma
radiation experiment which caused his unique condition is altered, as Coulson
later tells Captain America, ‘Banner thought gamma radiation might hold the
key to unlocking Erskine’s original formula’, a deviation from General Ross’s
manipulation of the character. Leterrier’s film ended on a moment of ambiguity
about whether Banner was able to control his rage and in The Avengers charac-
ters speculate as to whether he is able to do so or not: Black Widow asks him if

he practices yoga and Tony Stark asks him directly, ‘What’s your secret? Mellow
jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?’ The answer to their question is only
revealed more than an hour later, during the climax of the film in the Battle of
New York.
Tony Stark is also unenthusiastic about joining what he sarcastically de-
scribed as Nick Fury’s ‘super secret boy band’ in Iron Man 2 and still harbours
a certain amount of resentment after being called ‘volatile’ and ‘self-obsessed’.
Following his desire to contribute more to the world than blowing things up, in
the time between Iron Man 2 and The Avengers, Stark has become a leading figure
in the field of sustainable energy. He is still his cynical and wisecracking self, but
he is shown to have settled down and started a relationship with Pepper Potts.
The character who has undoubtedly gone through the most profound change is,
of course, Steve Rogers. Having woken up nearly seventy years after the end of
World War II at the climax of The First Avenger, he is understandably alarmed at
how much the world has changed. Steve is shown to have lost his sense of purpose
in the transition from the apparent moral clarity of World War II which is re-
placed with the ethical vagaries of the ‘War on Terror’ era in which The Avengers
is set, where even his friends and colleagues Nick Fury and Black Widow are
known for their secrets and subterfuge. Cap says to Nick Fury, ‘They say we won
– they didn’t tell me what we had lost’, referring quite explicitly to the changes
which America has undergone since the Total War of World War II he had par-
ticipated in and even came to embody. When Fury reluctantly admits to Captain
America, ‘We’ve made some mistakes along the way … some very recently’, his
comment lingers. Is he talking about the use of the Tesseract to create WMD
within the film’s diegesis, or America’s ill-considered and ill-conceived post-9/11
‘War on Terror’?
Of all the characters from the modern era, The Avengers connects Captain
America most closely to Agent Coulson, who in the space of five films went from
a minor player with a handful of lines in Iron Man to a key character and sub-
sequently the star of the television show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Coulson
has frequently functioned as the audience surrogate in the Marvel Cinematic
Universe, and Whedon himself said, ‘that’s what Clark Gregg embodies: the
Everyman’ (qtd. in Mellor 2013). The narrative of The Avengers humanises him
even further by giving him a first name (to Tony Stark’s incredulity) and even
mentioning a girlfriend, a cellist in Portland, in preparation for his ‘death’ in a
subsequent decisive moment in the narrative of The Avengers.3 Like Cap, Coulson
has old-fashioned notions about heroism and purpose which are embodied in
his nostalgic collection of vintage World War II-era Captain America trading
cards. When Cap is tasked with putting on his old uniform for the upcoming
mission against Loki he looks at his own iconic costume, coloured red, white and
blue, and asks Coulson, ‘Aren’t the Stars and Stripes a little old-fashioned?’ But
Coulson knows that, in the wake of Loki’s attacks and the apocalyptic battle that
is still to come, everything has changed. He states: ‘With everything that is hap-
pening and things coming to light people just might need a little old-fashioned.’
There is significance to Coulson’s use of the term ‘old-fashioned’, which will
be repeated later by Nick Fury in his description of the idea of people working
together to become something greater as an ‘old-fashioned notion’. It is an idea
that the MCU returns to frequently, that things were better in ‘the good old days’.
Whedon suggested this about the film: ‘It’s about the idea – which is very old-
fashioned – of community, of people working for each other. That’s gone away.
The Avengers, for me, is about bringing that back’ (qtd. in Breznican 2012). This
contrast is particularly evident in the differences between Captain America’s
understanding of what constitutes heroism, compared to Stark’s new millennial
cynicism. World War II has been a lingering presence in the MCU since Tony
Stark’s frequent elicitations of his father in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, but it is
a very particular view of the conflict that is evoked, a distinctly ‘mythologised
view of the Second World War’ (Guffey 2014: 286) that the MCU emphatically
suggests current generations could and should learn from. This continues quite
strikingly with Loki’s arrival in, of all places, Stuttgart in Germany to retrieve
material to make a second supernatural weapon of mass destruction. In an os-
tentatious display of power he demands the German crowd kneel before him,
informing them that he will free them from their obsession with the very idea of
freedom, which he calls ‘life’s glorious lie’ adding ‘you were made to be ruled’.4
The crowd all fall to their knees except one white-haired old man, the implication
being that he is a survivor of the Holocaust who has seen such tyranny before.
‘There are always men like you’, he calls out to Loki, with the non-diegetic music
providing a suitably affective lilting folk melody. The Norse God turns his weap-
on on the old man seeking to make an example of him but, as his supernatural
blast of energy fires, Captain America arrives just in time to protect the old man
with his shield. Captain America gazes up at Loki with disdain and says, ‘The last
time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everyone else, we ended
up disagreeing’. There is no ostensible reason for the scene to be set in Germany
other than to continue these sustained allusions to World War II. As Ensley F.
Guffey contended, ‘the old man and Captain America are contemporaries. For
both, memories of World War II and Nazi Germany are far more present than
for anyone else in the crowd’ (2014: 286; italics in original). Guffey is correct
to point this out, but perhaps does not take it far enough, as while to us audi-
ences the events of World War II happened more than seventy years ago, for Cap
they are much closer physically and emotionally: for him Coulson’s cards are not
vintage, they are contemporary and the war is not a distant memory, but very

much a part of his present.5 In the ensuing battle Captain America is shown quite
clearly to struggle against the Asgardian god Loki and it is only when Iron Man
arrives in his Mark IV suit, with his coming heralded by ‘Shoot to Thrill’ blast-
ing out of Black Widow’s quinjet after he commandeers the PA system, a stark
contrast to the Franz Shubert String Quartet Number 13 in A Minor, D. 804, Op.
29 (‘Rosamunde’) that had played in the scene a few moments before, that he is
subdued. Stark and the visibly shaken Cap are civil to each other in their first
scene together, exchanging only the greetings ‘Mr Stark’ and ‘Captain’, but it is a
level of courtesy that does not last for long.
Although Loki is quickly apprehended and imprisoned on the giant heli-
carrier (in a prison cell actually built to contain the Hulk) it emerges that the
Avengers are deeply conflicted in their approaches, a fact which becomes the
source of much of the film’s drama. On his arrival, Thor expresses the desire to
take Loki back to his realm where he will face ‘Asgardian justice’ but for Captain
America and Iron Man it is necessary that he stays on Earth to help them locate
the Tesseract and prevent the imminent Chitauri invasion. While Steve Rogers
and Tony Stark agree about the importance of keeping Loki in their custody, they
disagree about practically everything else. It is important to note that Rogers
was raised and came of age during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(1933–45) in an era where people, in the cultural imaginary at least, generally
expressed more faith and respect for their governmental institutions and repre-
sentatives, and he even received his powers from a state-sponsored programme
and participated in a war which demanded sacrifice of all those that participated
in it. Stark, as we explored previously, is more of a neoliberal, even Randian icon
who places individual rights before the prerogatives of the government, which has
largely been portrayed as incompetent if not duplicitous throughout the MCU.
It is clear that the cynical Stark associates the idealistic Cap with the establish-
ment that he has come to deride, and initially sees him as something of a naïve
lackey with outdated and inflexible values. There is also considerable evidence
that Stark projects anxieties about his relationship with his father onto Rogers
(‘That’s the guy my dad never shut up about?’). For his part, Steve Rogers regards
Stark as an embodiment of all that has gone wrong with the United States during
the time he was ‘away’, with his cynicism and lack of moral accountability.6 As
Samira Nadkarni argues, ‘The simultaneous presence of Captain America and
Iron Man creates a temporal play in which the events of World War II and 9/11
are made co-incident. This brings into focus the “Greatest Generation” myth that
grew in the aftermath of World War II and the US’s current position as a global
superpower in the aftermath of those events’ (2015: 16). Captain America doubts
that someone like Stark would sacrifice himself for his country, as many did dur-
ing World War II, even Cap himself. He tells Stark, ‘The only thing you really fight
for is yourself. You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire
and let the other guy crawl over you.’ Stark has a witty rejoinder for this, as he
has for most things, ‘I think I would just cut the wire…’. Despite his many faults,
Stark is one of the most self-aware of new millennial superheroes and recognises
the absurdity of what he calls the ‘terrible privilege’ of their situation, a phrase
more readily used to describe the burden of hegemonic superpowers than super-
heroes (see Chambliss 2012). The film then will seek to reconcile these seemingly
contrasting perspectives by providing them with an apocalyptic challenge which
demands they put aside their differences for the greater good, find a compromise
and both evolve into more than they were before.
Their internal conflict is brought to an end by Loki who, it transpires, has
deliberately allowed himself to be caught in order to provoke disharmony among
the heroes, then manages to escape after Banner finally changes into the Hulk for
the first time in the film after seventy-six minutes of screen time. Loki ‘murders’
Coulson, an act which finally motivates the heroes to put aside their differences
and come together for the common good after Fury hands Cap Coulson’s vin-
tage trading cards, now blood-stained, telling him they were found on his lifeless
body. However, moments later Agent Hill reveals to the audience that the cards
were not on Coulson at all when he died and that Fury had only said they were
in order to galvanise Captain America and the group into action. Although
Fury’s methods throughout the film have been questionable, the film shows that
such transgressions are sometimes required in order to ensure that the right and
necessary thing is done. Captain America never seems to learn of Fury’s act of
legerdemain but in a rare moment of moral relativity he remarks that Fury has
‘got the same blood on his hands as Loki does’, but it is an assertion that has little
weight, even though it is uttered by the film’s hero, after what we have already
seen and are about to see.7
III.
The stage is then set for the heroes to meet Loki and his intergalactic army in a
protracted 45-minute battle above and through the streets of New York, full of
fleeing civilians, crashing debris and falling structures. In the aftermath of 9/11
there was a relatively brief pause concerning the frequency of how often New
York was attacked in Hollywood film, which had regularly perpetrated great
crimes on the city in the guise of earthquakes, tidal waves, bombs, meteors and
even alien invasions and giant apes in films like King Kong (1976), Independence
Day (1996), Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998). In November 2001 Peter
Matthews, in an article entitled ‘Aftermath’, predicted that such films would be-
come forgotten relics of a bygone era:

For a long time to come, there will be little appetite for the entertainment staples
of bombs, plane crashes and burning buildings, since to enjoy such kinetic ex-
citement affectlessly seems a violation of the dead. Temporarily, the whole idea
of entertainment becomes obscene – or at least those versions that offer clean,
airbrushed carnage for fun and profit. Escapism in all its cultural forms might
be said to rest finally on a denial of the fact of death. Now it cannot be denied,
and that circumstance threatened to shake popular cinema to its roots. (2001: 20)
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear to see that this ‘long time to come’ did
not prove to be such a long time at all, as within a few years scenes of disaster
and carnage returned to the city in even more spectacular fashions than they
had been depicted before, often with a deliberate eye on the specific iconography
associated with that day (see in particular Cloverfield, Spider-Man, I am Legend
[2007] and Knowing [2009]). Karen Randell offered a list of these motifs adopted
by American films which she appropriately called the ‘lexicon of 9/11’ (2016: 141):
There is in these movies a repetitive set of sounds: helicopter blades; emergency

services sirens; screaming and shouting; particularly the phrase ‘Oh my God’;
and a repetitive set of images: aerial shots of a devastated modern city; vertically
falling high-rise tower blocks; emergency responders, particularly fire-fighters;
stunned, injured people; people running from dust clouds; falling debris and
falling paper. These effects echo and often replicate the images of 9/11 in extraor-
dinary detail in a way that is not seen in more realist cinema. (2016: 138)
To these one might add the implementation of cinematic techniques which em-
phasise and accentuate a degree of realism (hand-held shaky camera work, dust
specks on the camera lens); transfixed crowds gazing up, unable to tear their eyes
away from the sheer scale of the destruction; and the vocalisation of disbelief
at what they are experiencing, like the cameraman Hud in Cloverfield who ex-
claims ‘Did you see that?!’ and ‘Are you guys seeing this shit right now?!’ These
visual and aural signifiers are embedded in many post-9/11 American blockbust-
er films and are a key part of how the MCU portrays large-scale destruction. The
Avengers does not explicitly mention 9/11, but the range of imagery it employs
consciously evokes it in what we might regard as a palimpsestuous relationship
with that day that many American films adopted in the decade after. This com-
plicated interrealation between texts and the myriad of influences which form
them was interrogated in the work of Sarah Dillon in The Palimpsest: Literature,
Criticism, and Theory, where she described the concept as ‘an inventive process of
creating relations where there may, or should, be none’ (2007: 83). On the surface,
there seems to be no apparent connection between the alien invasion featured
in The Avengers and the events of 9/11, but Manohla Dargis was one of many
commentators to speculate on American cinema’s compulsion to return to this
evocative imagery as a convenient short-hand for trauma and a dubious source of
entertainment, suggesting that it was remarkable ‘just how thoroughly Sept. 11
and its aftermath have been colonized by the movies’ (2013). These connections,
which Dillon refers to as ‘an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated
texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhab-
iting each other’ (2007: 4) are not always deliberate on the part of their creators,
although they often are. On one of the extras included on the DVD release of
Cloverfield called ‘Wall of Dust’, members of the crew frequently specifically dis-
cuss 9/11 and it influence on the film. Special Effects Coordinator David Waine
states, ‘We’re doing a wall of dust, basically it’s supposed to be the leading edge of
the building exploding and collapsing just like in the Trade Towers’, and Niamh
Murphy, the film’s Textile Artist says, ‘We looked through a lot of 9/11 photos
and we noticed certain things like some people were completely covered and they
looked just utterly vulnerable’. In Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, the di-
rector himself stated, ‘I think 9/11 reinformed everything I’m putting into [the
film]… We now know what it feels like to be terrorised’ (qtd. in Abramowitz
2005: E26). Joss Whedon, in the director’s commentary for Avengers: Age of
Ultron, observed, ‘Even now, many years later, the last thing we want to do is
egregiously evoke the specter of 9/11. Being callous about that is unthinkable…’.
What is particularly significant about The Avengers is the fact that it argu-
ably marks a turning point in terms of how this 9/11 imagery is represented in
American film. In 2005 Geoff King correctly identified a distinction between
pre-9/11 and post-9/11 disaster films, arguing that whereas pre-9/11 films invited
audiences to take guilt-free, vicarious pleasure in their spectacles of devasta-
tion in ‘enjoyable fantasies of destruction, enjoyable precisely because they can
safely be indulged in the arena of fantasy’ (2005: 49), science fiction and disaster
cinema of the post-9/11 era presented spectators with much more challenging ‘re-
makes’ of 11 September 2001, both in their striking replications of the aesthetic
of 9/11 and in the traumatic situations the characters find themselves in. By the
time of the production of The Avengers, which filmed some of its sequences in
New York in September 2011 almost exactly ten years after 9/11, a new phase
was undoubtedly emerging which departed from King’s classification with its
more explicit and sustained evocations of 9/11. Writing in 2005 King had yet to
be exposed to the more unambiguous 9/11 imagery featured in the likes of War
of the Worlds, Cloverfield, Knowing and The Dark Knight. The Avengers, released
in 2012, marks a point of divergence and heralds a range of films, like Iron Man
3 and Man of Steel, Olympus Has Fallen (2013), White House Down (2013), and
San Andreas (2015), which appropriate the imagery associated with 9/11 with a

Figs. 12–15: Scenes
of destruction
and devastation
deliberately
designed to evoke
9/11, like those
shown here in The
Avengers (2012),
became a recurring
visual motif in
American cinema
after 2001
fascination which borders on the obsessive.8 This shift was widely observed by
many commentators in the United States and abroad: Jordan Hoffman stated
that ‘Marvel Movies Are Bringing 9/11 Back to Pop Culture, and It’s Still Too
Soon’ (2014), J. Hoberman titled his review of Joss Whedon’s film, ‘The Avengers:
Why Hollywood is no longer afraid to tackle 9/11’ (2012), and in Italy, Marco
Luceri, writing in Corriere Fiorentino, asserted that the film was to be considered
a reaffirmation of American primacy that was ‘strongly shaken not only in po-
litical, economic, social, but also cultural terms’ by 9/11, but that The Avengers
‘seems like a new, roaring, declaration of war’ (2012).
This relationship is a particularly complicated one for a culture that was com-
pulsively drawn to the events of 9/11, characterised by the injunction to ‘Never
Forget’, but was at the same time deeply reluctant to represent them onscreen,
due to the fact they were widely regarded as too traumatic to recreate in fiction,
and only three high-profile American films in the fifteen years after portray the
day as it happens: United 93, World Trade Center (2006) and Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close (2011). At exactly the same time as this, as Dana Heller asserted
in her book The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity,
America at large ‘both participated in, and bore witness to, a rapid transforma-
tion of the World Trade Center attacks into commodities aimed at repackaging
turbulent and chaotic emotions, reducing them to pious, quasi-religious nation-
alism’ (2005: 6). We might consider the appropriation of 11 September 2001 into
Randell’s ‘lexicon of 9/11’ as another example of Heller’s proposition and while
American cinema proved reluctant to tackle 9/11 directly, the event became sub-
sumed into genre cinema in film after film which, as Francis Pheasant-Kelly has
bserved, ‘draws attention to real traumatic events (often by the death of charac-
ters and the destruction of buildings), but simultaneously disavows them, partly
because of fantasy’s implausibility, but also through the pleasurable experience of
its aesthetic disarray’ (2013: 14). What this reveals about the relationship between
collective cultural trauma and depictions of it on the cinema screen is ambigu-
ous. Does vicarious trauma invite an interrogation of it ‘in that way might be
useful’ or does it ‘trigger defense against further exposure’? (Kaplan 2005: 87).
What is clear is that the narrative of The Avengers performs a very similar cul-
tural function as those films that explicitly depict the events of 11 September
2001, United 93, World Trade Center and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (a
film which was was described by Andrea Peyser, writing for the New York Post,
as ‘9/11 porn’ for its appropriation of cultural trauma and its use of the unidenti-
fied ‘falling man’), which are self-consciously designed to appear ideologically
neutral on the surface, removing themselves from historical and political context
to adopt an apolitical guise, but they offer mythologised portraits of an America
populated by honest, everyman heroes, individuals who selflessly put aside their

differences and come together in defence of their nation at a time of great need,
very similar to the citizen superheroes on the streets of New York in The Avengers.
It is in the Battle of New York where each of the Avengers prove themselves to
one another and to the world. Faced with symbolically and literally a manifesta-
tion of George W. Bush’s contention that, ‘Like generations before us, we have
a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom’ (2004), they run towards
the dust clouds and the destruction, rather than away from it unlike the crowds
of innocent civilians. This unity is strikingly visualised in the film’s famous tie-
in shot, a remarkable 40-second-long unbroken image which flies through the
streets of New York mid-battle as the heroes are shown working together for the
first time. It is a moment which works both on a thematic level, but also signifies
the extent to which the MCU has brought together and unified these separate
brands into one film, and, as Matthias Stork suggests, ‘It further functions self-
referentially, as an in-text commentary on how Marvel sought to aesthetize its
new superhero marketing concept and establish its own brand of the superhero
movie: the conventional genre film, repackaged on a larger scale, as a cycle’ (2014:
80). The tie-in shot is followed by them appearing in the same frame for the first
time, in front of Grand Central Station, where they all stand together under what
remains of Jules-Félix Coutan’s clock statue of Mercury flanked by Hercules and
Minerva known as ‘Glory of Commerce’ (1914). The presentation of these im-
ages is significant as it is only through their formation as team that they are able
to defeat Loki and the Chitauri with their embrace of old-fashioned notions of
community and self-sacrifice, ideas that Stark had been disdainful of towards
the start of the film. Banner returns to the fight, finally revealing to the audience
his secret … that he is ‘always angry’. His assertion is somewhat ambiguous, but
the implication is that by living in a constant state of anger he is able to control
it, rather than it controlling him, and an acknowledgement that Banner and the
‘other guy’ are now one. He is also, for the first time in the MCU, allowed to enjoy
the use of his powers onscreen, as evidenced by his smile after being ordered by
Captain America to ‘smash’, as they are now unambiguously being used in the
service of good. Like the Hulk, Cap is shown to have found a renewed sense of
purpose, as despite the bureaucracy and the political machinations he has ob-
served, the potentially apocalyptic event has shown him that he is still needed
and that his old-fashioned brand of heroism can be inspirational, even in the
cynical modern era.
However, to make things even harder for them it is not just the Chitauri and
Loki that they are forced to contend with. Fearful that the situation in New York
has become untenable, the World Security Council (made up from representa-
tives all over the globe) override Fury’s wishes and order a nuclear weapon to
be targeted at New York. The film is critical of the motives of the WSO, a body
self-consciously designed to be reminiscent of the United Nations, an institution
that American cinema has been unwaveringly critical of (see Black Hawk Down,
Behind Enemy Lines [2001], Tears of the Sun [2003]).9 It is only then that Stark
accepts Rogers’ earlier challenge to be the guy that ‘lays down on the wire’ and
‘make the sacrifice play’ by diverting the nuclear weapon through the Chitauri
wormhole even though, as Cap tells him, it is ‘a one way trip’. Therefore, the
battle ends with Iron Man sacrificing himself in a way that Captain America said
he would never be able to do, a new generation of hero embodying the spirit of
the ‘greatest generation’, and in the process unifying both. Thus, we can see how
the film offers a wish-fulfilment fantasy by rewriting the ‘War on Terror’ through
the prism of the superhero film, a vision in which
The buildings didn’t fall. We didn’t have to go to war, because we could shut the
border between our world and the one from which our enemies came. We didn’t
even have to conduct a mop-up operation or interrogate detainees because when
that portal closed, the invaders collapsed like toys… It’s a dream of resilience and
clean war… where we can end the war in a day; where we can avoid doing griev-
ous harm to ourselves and our values in the process. (Rosenberg 2012)
The palliative nature of this fantasy is clear as events transpire as we wished they
could have been rather than how they actually were, something that Todd Van
Der Werff argued that American popular cinema has been doing on an endless
loop since 11 September 2001: ‘In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, America
turned to superpowered heroes to rewrite that day so that it ended as one where
nobody had to die’ (2016). Van Der Werff is correct to point this out and in the
film not a single person is shown to die, nor are they in any scene which evokes
9/11 throughout the MCU.
The film’s connections to 9/11 continue in the aftermath of the attack which
will frequently be referred to as ‘the incident’ or ‘the event’ as the MCU moves
forward, as if it were too traumatic to mention by name. The news features a
candlelight vigil and a range of survivors talking about their experiences of the
day: one says, ‘It’s just really great knowing that they’re out there. That someone’s
watching over us’; another states, ‘I don’t exactly feel safer with those things out
there’; and a third, ‘It just seems like there’s a lot they’re not telling us’. While each
of the comments are reactions to fictional superheroes saving New York from an
intergalactic threat, they are certainly suggestive of the range of responses the
international community (and American citizens themselves) have had towards
the United States throughout the first decade of the new millennium.10 These
scenes emphasise that it is not just US citizens who are grateful to their American
saviours, but those from all over the globe: there is a Tony Stark lookalike on the

Indian subcontinent, a memorial board which seems to be located somewhere in
Southeast Asia, a smiling woman clad in a sari who happily holds up a picture
of the Hulk and the MSNBC headline reads: ‘Aftermath: The world responds to
alien attack.’ The Avengers participates in the broader ideological mission of the
superhero genre in the era, one which may not have been a conscious decision on
the part of filmmakers, but nevertheless becomes one of its formative and under-
girding tropes. As Jeffrey Brown has argued,
Superhero films are a means to collectively deal with the trauma of 9/11 and sym-
bolically help make sense of the world again. Superheroes represent an effort to
rewrite and reconfirm the belief in American exceptionalism. Specifically, the
superhero genre counters fears of a nation that has grown soft, weak, and vulner-
able, instead offering a narrative of toughening up, of remasculinizing America.
As men who have been defined by trauma, just as America has, the superhero is
able to rise up and prove himself stronger than any threats. (2017: 64)
Without mentioning the events of 11 September 2001 on a single occasion, the

transgenerational heroism of The Avengers, set against the backdrop of a meta-
phorical recreation of that day, leads to it becoming one of the most significant
American films of what is now referred to as post-9/11 American cinema.
Notes
1 In the United States the film was called The Avengers, but in the UK it was released
with the title Marvel’s Avengers Assemble due to copyright reasons concerning the
fondly remembered television show The Avengers (ITV, 1961–68) and the disastrous
cinematic adaption of it, The Avengers (1998).
2 Batman Begins writer David S. Goyer made this comparison explicitly clear when he
stated, ‘We modelled him after Osama bin Laden. He’s not crazy in the way that all
the other Batman villains are. He’s not bent on revenge; he’s actually trying to heal
the world. He’s just doing it by very draconian means’ (qtd. in Ryan 2005).
3 The cellist from Portland who is referred to in a throwaway line here is returned to
in Marvel’s Agent’s of S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘The Only Light in the Darkness’ (1.19) where her
name is revealed to be Audrey Nathan.
4 In 2014 Tom Hiddlestone’s email to Joss Whedon after reading the script was pub-
lished. Hiddlestone wrote: ‘Thank you for writing me my Hans Gruber [the iconic
villain from Die Hard played by Alan Rickman]. But a Hans Gruber with super-magic
powers. As played by James Mason … It’s high operatic villainy alongside detached
throwaway tongue-in-cheek; plus the ‘real menace’ and his closely guarded suitcase
of pain… He gets battered, punched, blasted, side-swiped, roared at, sent tumbling
on his back, and every time he gets back up smiling, wickedly, never for a second los-
ing his eloquence, style, wit, self-aggrandisement or grandeur, and you never send
him up or deny him his real intelligence…’ (qtd. in Acuna 2014).
5 The Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline wiki suggests that Captain America crashes
his plane into the sea on 4 March 1945 and that he is awoken from the ice on 17 April
2012, so when he meets Loki in Stuttgart on 3 May 2012 it has only been three weeks
of physically aware time for him.
6 Some writers saw something further to the conflict between Rogers and Stark. In
an intriguing piece by Derek S. McGrath called ‘Some Assembly Required: Joss
Whedon’s Bridging of Masculinities in Marvel Films’ The Avengers’ he asserts that
the friction between Stark and Rogers is primarily ‘sexual tension’ (2016: 141) as dem-
onstrated by lines of dialogue like ‘I’m thinking I want you to make me!’
7 The pilot episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns to whether the Avengers
were made aware of Fury’s lie about Coulson’s cards when Agent Hill remarks that
they never found out because ‘they’re not level seven’ in ‘Pilot’ (1.01).
8 Given this relationship it is interesting to note that the film only shot in the actual
New York for a few days and instead created a simulacrum of the city digitally inside
the computers of Industrial Light and Magic (see Fraser 2012).
9 In Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. one of their number, Gideon Malick, is revealed to
be a high-ranking member of HYDRA. Interestingly, it was also the World Security
Council that led the Pentagon to remove its support for the film. Phil Strub, the
Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, stated, ‘We couldn’t reconcile the unreal-
ity of this international organization and our place in it… To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D.
answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.?’ (Ackerman 2012).
10 The Hollywood Reporter consulted disaster experts at Kinetic Analysis Corp. who
speculated that the destruction wreaked on New York in the film would have cost
$60–70 billion worth of damages and $90 billion in clean up costs, with an overall
cost of $160 billion. In comparison, the real-world recovery operatations for 9/11 and
Hurricane Katrina cost $83 billion and $90 billion respectively (see Zakarin 2012a).
Four years later in Captain America: Civil War in the run up to what becomes known
as the Sokovia Accords it is revealed that the cost of the Battle of New York was of-
ficially ‘only’ $18.8 billion with seventy-four casualties.

PHASE TWO
C H A PT ER FIV E
‘Nothing’s been the same since

New York’: Continuity and Change in
Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World
Many people who witnessed the event [11 September 2001] suffered nightmares
and psychological trauma. For those who viewed it intensely, the spectacle pro-
vided a powerful set of images that would continue to resonate for years to come,
much as the footage of the Kennedy assassination, iconic photographs of Vietnam,
the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, or the death of Princess Diana
in the 1990s provided unforgettable imagery.
– Douglas Kellner (2004: 54)
I.
For Tony Stark and the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe nothing was
the same after New York. The aftermath of the Chitauri invasion led by Loki
featured in The Avengers flows through the films and television programmes in
Phase Two without exception. The unprecedented success of The Avengers en-
sured that the Marvel Studios experiment had become one of the most successful
franchises in film history with the six films comprising Phase One generating
$3.8 billion at the world-wide box office and those from Phase Two would go on
to make $5.2 billion. This did not mean the series would not be presented with
challenges as it moved forward, but that it would not have the uncertainty that
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN IRON MAN 3 AND THOR: THE DARK WORLD 129
it had faced during the production of Iron Man, a character who had gone from
something of a second-tier figure to the most successful superhero in the world
by the end of 2013. In the wake of the success of The Avengers, Marvel announced
an ambitious slate of productions for Phase Two which would be comprised of
another six films: Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World in 2013, followed by
Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, with
Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man to complete the phase in 2015. After the
achievements of Phase One, Marvel Studios remained aware that the films each
needed to appeal to audiences in their own right, but also continue to grow the
Marvel brand and offer variations on the superhero genre, a market which was
growing more crowded with every year that passed. Each of the six films in Phase
Two offers deviations from the genre: Iron Man 3 is a superhero film, as one
might expect, but it also contains elements of a thriller that had not been seen
before in the MCU, Thor: The Dark World is a fantasy film with palpable aspects
of melodrama and comedy, Ant-Man is a heist film with a superhero at its cen-
tre, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a conspiracy thriller deliberately
evocative of those from the 1970s like Three Days of the Condor and Marathon
Man (1976). Due to its success, Marvel was also ready to gamble on less familiar
properties like their ambitious space opera Guardians of the Galaxy, which was
definitely the riskiest proposition in the MCU at the time of its release, featur-
ing a cast of characters virtually unknown to the general public. This did not
go uncommented upon in trade magazines (see, for example, McMillan 2014).
Yet ultimately the film earned $777 million at the world-wide box office, which
made it, at the time, the third-highest earning of any Marvel film, behind only
Iron Man 3 and The Avengers. From a production point of view the success of
The Avengers generated an increased interest in the MCU and a financial boost
to the films made after which came to be referred to as the ‘Avengers Effect’ (see
Stewart 2013). Thus Thor: The Dark World had a thirty-one percent larger domes-
tic opening than its predecessor Thor (leading to a global take of $644.7 million
compared to $449.3 million of the first) and even more remarkably Iron Man 3
made $1.215 billion globally, nearly double the $624 million of Iron Man 2 re-
leased just three years before in 2010.
For the first film in Phase Two it undoubtedly made financial and thematic
sense to return to the character who had made this all possible, Iron Man. Marvel
also continued its intriguing choices for directors by turning to Shane Black, who
had been one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood throughout the
1980s and early 1990s, but had only one directorial credit to his name, Kiss Kiss
Bang Bang (2005), which had starred Robert Downey Jr. in what many had seen
as his comeback film after his incarceration. What Black perhaps lacked in direc-
torial credits he made up for in fan cachet and the closeness of his relationship
with Downey Jr. who by then had emerged as the cornerstone and figurehead
of the MCU’s success. Black brings his characteristic acerbic sensibilities to the
superhero genre, with his witty one liners, subversion of cliché and a deconstruc-
tion of many of the genre’s central tenets, in particular hotly debated revisions to
the character of the Mandarin, who had initially appeared in the comics in Tales
of Suspense #50 in 1964, which seemed to be as loved by some as it was hated by
others.
The film opens with Tony Stark’s deliberately self-referential and stumbling
narration:
A famous man once said, ‘We create our own demons’. Who said that? What does
that even mean? Doesn’t matter. I said it ‘cause he said it. So now, he was famous
and it was basically said by two well-known guys. I don’t… uhh… I’m gonna start
again. Let’s track this from the beginning…
The uncertain nature of the voice-over is similar to the one employed by Black
and Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and will only later make sense in the post-
credits stinger which reveals that Tony Stark is actually on the therapist’s couch
recounting the film’s events. The therapy motif is a relevant one given that Iron
Man 3 discloses fairly early on that Stark is suffering from pronounced symptoms
of PTSD after the events in New York and in the course of the narrative will go on
something of a psychological journey which culminates in an acknowledgement
of his past and his status as a superhero, bringing the Iron Man trilogy to a close.
The ‘beginning’ that Stark refers to is a flashback to New Year’s Eve in Bern,
Switzerland in 1999, several years before the epiphany which led him to become
the Iron Man in the mountains of Afghanistan. Black transports the audience
back to the last year of the twentieth century by way of the Italian Europop
group Eiffel 65’s 1999 chart-topping ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’, which playfully con-
trasts with the bombastic Alan Silvestri score of The Avengers and the hard rock
anthems that Jon Favreau’s tenure as the director of the series often turned to.
These prefatory moments offer glimpses of the former crass and distinctly un-
politically correct Tony before his literal and figurative change of heart. Drunk
both on alcohol and his own sense of self-importance he brushes off Ho Yinsen,
the man who will play a considerable role in his future, to seduce the beautiful
and talented biologist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) who has pioneered an ex-
perimental regenerative treatment known as Extremis, which has the potential
to decode human DNA and thereby eradicate all forms of disease. In a couple
of offhand exchanges Stark’s brilliance is revealed to both her and to the audi-
ence, and it is his drunken scribble of formula that he leaves on a business card
which he learns years later enabled her to complete her research. Hansen is one
of the ‘demons’ he talks of, but it is the nebbish Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce)
and his Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.) that Stark refers to most of all. Stark
agrees to meet Killian on the roof at midnight to listen to his business proposal,
but rather callously stands him up. These seemingly inconsequential encounters
lead to key events later in his life, as Stark comments: ‘I had just created demons
and I didn’t even know it… I never thought they would come back to bite me.
Why would they?’ At this stage Stark is blissfully ignorant about his role in the
world, unaware of the fact that his weapons of mass destruction are being used
in war zones around the globe and unaware of Chalmers Johnson’s concept of
‘blowback’ in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2002),
an idea which came to define many people’s attitude to American foreign policy
in the post-9/11 era.
Back in the film’s post-Battle of New York present, Stark is suffering from
PTSD, something Obadiah Stane had claimed he had after his kidnapping in
Iron Man, but a condition which he seems to actually have now, the symptoms of
which are shown to be anxiety attacks, traumatic nightmares and trouble sleep-
ing (he mentions he has been awake for seventy-two hours). While in a restaurant
with his friend James Rhodes he has a full-blown panic-attack triggered even by
the mention of New York by a young fan, which coincides with his unconscious
scribble of ‘help me’ on a child’s picture of him. At first, he is reluctant to recog-
nise that what he is experiencing might be a psychological issue given the stigma
still attached to mental health problems in contemporary Western culture (espe-
cially among men), and looks for a physiological explanation like poison or heart
attack, but later he acknowledges to Pepper (who now lives with him): ‘Nothing’s
been the same since New York… You experience things and then they’re over
and you still can’t explain them.’
The Iron Man suit itself becomes an extension of this psychological trauma,
evoking how Stark once described it and himself as ‘one and the same’ in Iron Man
2. As a result of his PTSD-induced intimacy issues he controls the suit remotely
in an effort to convince Pepper that he is present when he is unable to be near her,
and, when responding to one of his intense nightmares of the alien invasion, the
suit itself almost attacks her. Later, when he is stranded in Tennessee he informs
the young boy who becomes his companion, Harley, that the Iron Man suit is ‘in
pain, he’s been injured… leave him alone’ when he is clearly talking about him-
self. For the purpose of its narrative, the film has Stark become aware of his own
physical and emotional vulnerability and his place in the MCU after the events of
The Avengers, where Stark (and the rest of the world) was forced to acknowledge
not only the existence of, as Stark says, ‘gods, aliens … other dimensions’ but the
fact that he is, in his own words, ‘just a man in a can’. Stark will have his ‘can’
taken away from him for large sections of Iron Man 3 as he is forced to rely on his
intelligence and his wits alone for the first time since Afghanistan, and it is this
which proves him to be a real superhero. Yet while the film initially prioritises
Stark’s physical and emotional vulnerability, this becomes problematised by the
fact that Iron Man 3, emerges as something of a paradox, as the Phase Two MCU
films become increasingly casual in their portrayal of violence and destruction,
a trend which culminates in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
As Stark continues to process his personal trauma, America at large is being
wracked by events of a decidedly contemporary nature, seemingly perpetrated by
a terrorist going by the name of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) who has been or-
chestrating bombings all over the country and abroad (the real-life Ali Al Salem
airbase in Kuwait).1 On a series of live televised addresses the Mandarin asks the
nation, ‘Some people call me a terrorist, I consider myself a teacher. America,
ready for another lesson?’ With his Arabic beard and robes he is quite different
to the Asian roots of the original comic book character, but seems to embrace
very prevalent Middle Eastern new millennial stereotypes. His video message
contains footage of chanting Arab crowds, hooded figures kneeling before be-
ing executed and burning effigies of the American president intercut with 1950s
Americana and the shopping channel, playing on very real post-9/11 US fears
and anxieties with imagery very similar to that discussed by Jack Shaheen in his
study Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2009). Shaheen argued
that Hollywood films have perpetuated the same reductive and racist stereotypes
for almost a hundred years:
Arab Muslims are fanatics who believe in a different god, who don’t value human
life as much as we do, they are intent on destroying us (the [W]est) with their oil
or with their terrorism; the men seek to abduct and brutally seduce our women;
they are without family and reside in a primitive place (the desert) and behave
like primitive beings. The women are subservient – resembling black crows –
or we see them portrayed as mute, somewhat exotic harem maidens. (Qtd. in
Harrickton 2008)
The visceral thematic resonance of the ‘War on Terror’ proved difficult to resist for
many popular films in the post-9/11 era both inside and outside of the superhero
genre and, as we have seen, the MCU returned to it frequently. Andrew Johnson
has written: ‘Over the past decade, no other event has seeped into our cinema
more thoroughly, from political thrillers that focus directly on the War on Terror
to blockbuster escapism inspired by the overseas conflicts that resulted’ (2013).
In the world of the superhero comic, Mike Grell has asserted that, ‘Because 9/11
happened, we spun that into the storylines that actually dealt with terrorism and
potential terrorist attacks on New York, and what would you do if you were a guy
like Tony Stark? How far would you go to defend your people, your city, your
country, the people that you loved?’ (qtd. in Mangels 2008: 96). The first terrorist
bombing physically seen onscreen in Iron Man 3 is at the iconic Mann’s Chinese
theatre, in Hollywood, California, and it is Stark’s friend and bodyguard Happy
Hogan who is one of many that gets caught in the blast. Deliberately filmed to
resemble a real-life suicide bomb attack and function as one within the film’s
diegesis, it is revealed later to have been perpetrated by one of several wounded
ex-US soldiers who have participated in the unstable Extremis programme de-
signed by Aldrich Killian and Maya Hansen.
Despite his health problems and issues with the government in Iron Man 2,
Stark offers to help with the Mandarin, but, as Rhodes states, after the previous
events in the MCU especially the ‘incident’ in New York, the government want
to be seen as dealing with their own problems of domestic security and that ‘we
[the United States] need to look strong’. He calls the Mandarin ‘not superhero
business’ but ‘American business’, however the MCU has shown little real dis-
tinction between the two. In connection to this Rhodes has had his superhero
name changed from War Machine to Iron Patriot as the name ‘tested well with
focus groups’ and ‘sends a better message’ than the ‘too aggressive’ sounding
War Machine. Searching for the location of the Mandarin, Iron Patriot (whom
the Mandarin describes as President Ellis’s ‘red, white and blue attack dog’) is
sent to two locations in Pakistan, a process he calls a ‘little knock and talk …
making friends’. In one he appears to be welcomed by the burqa-wearing seam-
stresses, but his uncomfortable ‘You’re free … if you weren’t before. Iron Patriot
on the job. You’re welcome?’ is exactly the kind of dark humour that has charac-
terised Shane Black’s work since Lethal Weapon (1987).
Incensed by the bombings, and in particular by Happy Hogan being left in
a coma, Stark is compelled to confront the Mandarin directly with a challenge
which evokes George W. Bush’s ill advised ‘Bring em on’ message to Iraqi insur-
gents (see Loughlin 2003). Stark insists that ‘There’s no politics here, just good
old revenge. There’s no Pentagon, it’s just you and me, and on the off chance
you’re a man, here’s my home address…’. As a direct result of this the Mandarin
sends attack helicopters to destroy Stark’s Malibu mansion and when it collapses
it drags him to the bottom of the ocean leading Pepper and rest of the world to
believe that he is dead. In the aftermath, Stark finds himself stranded in Rose
Hill, Tennessee, which had been the site of the first Mandarin bombing, with
no access to money, technology or resources. Earlier he had joked with Maya
Hansen, ‘Please don’t tell me there’s a twelve-year-old kid waiting in the car that
I’ve never met’, but in Rose Hill he becomes a temporary surrogate father to
the neglected Harley Keener. What could have been a clichéd plot development
in which Stark ‘finds himself’ through his relationship with the boy, emerges,
in Black’s hands, as something more interesting as evidenced by Stark’s line
to Harley having learned that the boy’s young father had left, ‘which happens
… Dads leave, no need to be a pussy about it’. Given what he has seen of the
Mandarin, Stark presumes (perhaps as we audiences also do) that the enigmatic
terrorist leader is to be located somewhere in the Middle East or Asia. He specu-
lates ‘North Africa, Iran, Pakistan, Syria?’, but is surprised to find out that he is
actually in Miami and in the film’s much debated twist, not really a terrorist at
all, but an unemployed and drug-addicted British actor called Trevor Slattery
hired by the real villain of the film, Aldrich Killian, to be a front for his schemes.
The film’s genuinely startling reveal shows the film not to have been perpetuating
Arab stereotypes at all but, in actual fact, satirising and deconstructing them.
In showing the Mandarin to have been a ‘custom made terror threat’ calculated
to resemble just how we have come to expect terrorists to look and behave post-
9/11, the film satirises our new millennial fears of the Other with his Asian robes,
Arabic beard and speeches decrying American imperialism. As in the original
Iron Man the villain seems to be a terrorist from the Middle East, only to have it
revealed that the real bad guy was a middle-class American white man and CEO
of a large multi-national company. Killian turned to Maya Hansen’s research
after being humiliated by Stark on New Year’s Eve back in 1999, weaponising the
Extremis virus and then orchestrating a series of bombings in order to monopo-
lise the market in global weapons manufacture, showing him to be as much of
a product of the ‘War on Terror’ as Iron Man himself. Killian says, ‘You simply
rule from behind the scenes. Because the second you give them a face, a Bin
Laden, a Gaddafi, a Mandarin, you hand the people a target.’ He continues: ‘this
time tomorrow I’ll have the West’s most powerful leader in one hand, and the
world’s most feared terrorist in the other: I’ll own the ‘War on Terror’ … create
supply and demand.’ Killian’s outlandish plan is to assassinate President Ellis
live on television on a Roxxon Norco oil tanker and have him replaced by the
AIM-friendly Vice President Rodriguez (Miguel Ferrer). The film goes to great
lengths to distinguish Killian, a bad scientist, from the likes of Stark, but Stark’s
fortune was built on profiting from global wars not so long before. Even Pepper
comments, as she rejects Killian’s request that Stark Industries purchase a stake
in Extremis, ‘That’s exactly what we used to do’. The film’s immersion in the
post-9/11 geopolitical arena was challenged by the likes of Manohla Dargis for
the way it ‘invokes Sept. 11 and dodges it’ leading to it being called ‘at once inher-
ently political and empty’ (2013). Dargis’s perspective was no doubt fuelled by the
proximity of the film’s release to the Boston Marathon bombings, which had oc-
curred just two weeks before. She continued: ‘But Mr. Black [the film’s director]
and his colleagues, like other filmmakers who use the iconography of Sept. 11
and its aftershocks, want to have it both ways. They want to tap into the powerful
Fig. 16: While he initially appears to be a caricature, the Bin Ladenesque Mandarin (Ben Kingsley),
emerges as a satire of the terrorist Other during the ‘War on Terror’ era in Iron Man (2013)
reactions those events induced, while dodging the complex issues and especially
the political arguments that might turn off ticket buyers’ (ibid.).
When both Pepper and the president are kidnapped, Stark is faced with the
hero’s predicament of who to save. The stakes are raised even further when thir-
teen innocent people are thrown from Air Force One and J.A.R.V.I.S. (Stark’s
artificial intelligence programme which helps him control his suit which stands
for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) informs Stark that, based on the laws
of physics, he will only be able to save four. Stark is faced with the perennial su-
perhero dilemma, which Stephen Faller labelled as the ‘false dichotomy choice’
(2010: 259), in which superheroes are seemingly forced to decide between saving
one innocent party or another, before in the end figuring out a way to save both
(see Raimi’s Spider-Man, Superman Returns et al.). The playful manner of the
scene and the lack of peril in spite of the seemingly raised stakes is indicative of
the tone which becomes increasingly more prominent in the MCU throughout
Phase Two. Unlike the Gulmira sequence in Iron Man which featured no witty
one-liners, the Air Force One rescue and the Roxxon sequence which follows
are full of humorous banter between Stark and Rhodes. These decisions seem to
go against comments made by Shane Black before he became affiliated with the
MCU when he suggested, in a 2009 interview with the Guardian, that
If someone fires a gun in a movie, it should always be a big deal. I don’t like mov-
ies where someone shoots at someone else but they just run away and manage
to dodge the bullet. Or people are all firing at each other continuously for 10
minutes. You need shock and impact and a genuine sense of peril whenever vio-
lence takes place. (Qtd. in Delaney 2009)
But this ‘genuine sense of peril’ is entirely absent from Iron Man 3. Even though
early scenes were suggestive of Stark’s vulnerability, they are disavowed quite
comprehensibly in the narrative which follows in which he is portrayed as al-
most indestructible. A pointed illustration of this comes just after he has saved
all thirteen passengers on Air Force One and pauses on a bridge to admire his
achievement, only to be hit by a passing truck, leaving the audience to believe,
just for the briefest of moments, that Stark is dead … before a quick cut reveals
that he was remotely piloting the suit the whole time and even further from harm
than we had even realised.
In the film’s spectacularly orchestrated climax on the oil tanker, Rhodes and
Stark take on an army of Extremis soldiers, initially even without their own suits,
as Stark has proven that his real identity and even his status as a superhero lies
not with the ‘tin can’, but the man inside it.2 Killian is shown to have kidnapped
Pepper and infected her with the Extremis virus and when she hangs from a high
beam on the oil tanker Stark calls for her to have faith in him and take his hand.
In a rare moment of doubt about an MCU hero, she seems to refuse to trust him
and when she apparently falls to her death for the first time in the trilogy Stark
is shown to have failed someone he has attempted to rescue. But, as we have seen
many times before in the MCU, this sense of precarity is a brief one; just a few
minutes later she returns, now with her own superpowers and between the two
of them they dispose of Killian. The idea that life in Hollywood cinema is fragile
is just a momentary illusion; only in a Hollywood film could someone experi-
ence the trauma of the violent death of a loved one, just for it to be disavowed
moments later and normalcy be reconstituted.
Like generations of mythopoetic American heroes before him Stark has been
redeemed through violence and his PTSD is seemingly erased in the process. The
film ends by bringing to a conclusion Stark’s journey that had started back in
2008 as he finally has the shrapnel removed from his heart and no further need of
the miniature arc reactor in his chest. Its final line of dialogue is ‘I am Iron Man’,
the very same words that ended the first film, but with a very different meaning
for the character five years later. The post-credits stinger reveals that Stark had
been recounting his story to not just any therapist, but Dr. Bruce Banner him-
self. Stark says, ‘Thank you, by the way, for listening. There’s something about
just getting it off my chest and putting it out there in the atmosphere instead of
holding this in…’, only for the film to disclose that Banner had fallen asleep and
missed the whole story. On waking up, he apologises and tells Stark, ‘I’m not that
kind of doctor, I don’t have the … temperament’.
‘You told your dad about me!?’: The problematic representation
of women in Thor: The Dark World
This volume has dedicated little time and space to the discussion of the represen-
tation of women in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and this is primarily because
women play a very small role in the films throughout Phases One and Two. As
indicated in the introduction, female characters rarely occupy the privileged and
dynamic spaces of the series and tend to be at best marginalised, at worst objec-
tified, sexualised and infantilised. There is a superficial patina of progressivism
in the way that women are given meaningful job titles: in the Iron Man trilogy
Pepper Potts becomes the CEO of Stark Industries; in The Incredible Hulk we are
informed that Betty Ross is a renowned cellular biologist; and in Thor that Jane
Foster is an celebrated astrophysicist, which some have mistakenly identified as
positive representation. In their description, these professions sound as if they
might be empowering to the women who occupy them, but in the course of the
narratives they are rarely given the opportunity to demonstrate their intellect
and individuality commensurate to these titles and, in actual fact, are shown
as having a severely restricted life outside of their relationships to their partner
whose name is, in all three cases mentioned above, also the name of the films
they feature in. Pepper Potts might be described by Tony Stark as having the re-
sponsibility of running ‘the largest tech conglomerate on Earth’ (Avengers: Age of
Ultron) but she does little more than react to and be rescued by him throughout
the course of the Iron Man films. We are told that Betty Ross is a brilliant sci-
entist and Joseph Walderzak calls her ‘a hero, a partner’ (2016: 159), but the film
never shows her doing any substantial research, she is rescued several times in
The Incredible Hulk, and does not seem to exist outside of her relationships with
Banner, her father and her boyfriend Leonard Samson. Aside from these slightly
more central characters, the MCU is littered with minor female characterisations
who are treated even more poorly. Christine Everheart in Iron Man and Iron
Man 2 is referred to as ‘trash’ by Pepper and is on the receiving end of Stark’s
comment about ‘Doing a piece for Vanity Fair’, while Stark himself is lauded for
his sexual profligacy; a beautiful female private (played by Natalie Dormer and
called Lorraine in the credits) in Captain America: The First Avenger, tells Cap
‘the women of America, they owe you their thanks, and seeing as they’re not
here…’, before dragging him behind a book case to kiss him. The very fact that
these patterns are so prevalent in the most successful film franchise ever made is
troubling, but it is even more disturbing that they are part of broader trends in
cultural representation in the new millennial decades which have prided them-
selves on their political progressivism.
Of course, there are partial complications to this throughout the MCU,
like Agent Peggy Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger, Maria Hill
in The Avengers, Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy, and most clearly Natasha
Romanoff aka Black Widow introduced in Iron Man 2, before becoming one of
the Avengers after. Peggy Carter is an engaging character in her own right, but
in her restricted screen time and the fact that she only exists in relation to Steve
Rogers and his narrative means that her character is unable to develop in the
film as much as it does in the television series, Marvel’s Agent Carter. Gamora
is resourceful and tough, but even though she is called a ‘living weapon’ she is
saved by Peter Quill on multiple occasions in a film which is undoubtedly his
story rather than anyone else’s. Black Widow is the closest to a central female
character the MCU provided audiences with in Phases One and Two across her
four film appearances, but her portrayal also emphasises the contradictions at
the heart of seemingly empowered women in the genre. She is shown to be physi-
cally and intellectually capable, it is she who shuts down the Tesseract at the end
of The Avengers and she outfights Hawkeye in the same film, but she is also de-
picted as more physically, psychologically and emotionally vulnerable than any
of her team mates. In The Avengers, it is Black Widow who needs to be protected
by Cap’s shield when a car explodes on the streets of New York, as even Hawkeye
is able to quickly take cover behind a car, and it is she who whimpers and cow-
ers after being exposed to the Hulk for the first time in a way none of the other
Avengers do. As Jeremiah Favara has written, ‘At times, Black Widow is shown
to be more than capable of defending herself; she knocks out Hawkeye in a fight,
she bests/tricks Loki, and is the only Avenger that is able to harness alien tech-
nologies in the final fight scene. Yet at other times, Black Widow is shown to be
vulnerable and in need of protection; when encountering the Hulk, for example,
Black Widow is helpless only to be saved at the last minute by Thor’ (2016: 179).
The Avengers contains intriguing allusions to her past, but they remain only al-
lusions as she was not given a solo film throughout Phases One, Two and Three.
Even within her film appearances she is certainly marginalised and problems
arose around specific moments of her character development (see Avengers: Age
of Ultron and the forced sterilisation discussed in chapter eight) and depictions
of her in combat are sexualised in ways that are never applicable to men (see
Purse 2011b). As Sherry Ginn, the editor of Marvel’s Black Widow from Spy to
Superhero: Essays on an Avenger with a Very Specific Skill Set, has suggested, she
remains the most compelling of the MCU women and even though the character
as presented in the MCU is ‘not without her faults… Nevertheless, she has char-
acteristics that make her a superhero in her own right’ (2017: 4).
It might be relevant to pause for a moment to consider the ages of the women
who play these roles within the MCU as opposed to their male counterparts, as
they reveal a continuation of the disparity between male and female performers
which has characterised the American film industry for decades. The most egre-
gious examples of this perhaps being the infamous romantic pairings of Sean
Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment (1999), with their thirty-nine-
year age gap, or that of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963)
with twenty-five years between them, or Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in
Six Days and Seven Nights (1998) with twenty-seven years, and the twenty-one
years between Annabelle Wallis and Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017). Rather
than isolated occurrences, these are part of trend which has defined Hollywood
since the very birth of the medium (see Herman and Sender 2015). In the MCU,
Edward Norton (b. 1969) is eight years older than Liv Tyler (b. 1977); Mark
Ruffalo (b. 1967) is seventeen years older than Scarlett Johansson (b. 1984); Paul
Bettany (b. 1971) is seventeen years older than Elizabeth Olsen (b. 1989); Paul
Rudd (b. 1969) is nine years older than Evangeline Lilly (b. 1979), Chadwick
Boseman (b. 1976) is seven years older than Lupita Nyong’o (b. 1983). Robert
Downey Jr. (b. 1965) has been paired with Gwyneth Paltrow (six years his junior,
b. 1972), Leslie Bibb (nine years his junior, b. 1974) and Rebecca Hall (seventeen
years his junior, b.1982) and is shown attempting to instigate a relationship with
Kate Mara (twenty-two years his junior, b. 1983) and Scarlett Johanson (twen-
ty-one years his junior, b. 1984). There are exceptions to this, but they are rare
and the age differences are slight: Natalie Portman (b. 1981) is two years older
than Chris Hemsworth (b. 1983), Hayley Attwell (b. 1982) is a year older than
Chris Evans (b. 1981) and Zoe Saldana (b. 1978) is a year older than Chris Pratt
(b. 1979).
This discrepancy can also be seen in the initial ages when actors first play
their character in the series: Robert Downey Jr. was forty-three when he first
played Iron Man in 2008, Paul Rudd was forty-five in Ant-Man in 2014, Don
Cheadle forty-six in Iron Man 2 in 2010, Edward Norton was thirty-nine when he
played the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk in 2008 and Mark Ruffalo was forty-five
when he played the same role in The Avengers in 2012, and finally Chris Evans
was thirty at the time of Captain America: The First Avenger 2011. The only actor
in his twenties when he first played a MCU superhero in Phase One was Chris
Hemsworth who was twenty-nine in Thor in 2011. As not a single MCU film from
Phases One or Two have a woman as the lead character named in the title, the
comparative process is slightly more complicated. However, Scarlett Johansson
was twenty-six when she first appeared as Black Widow in Iron Man 2 in 2010,
Hayley Atwell was twenty-nine in Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011,
Elizabeth Olsen was twenty-five in Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2014, Zoe Saldana
was thirty-six in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014 and Karen Gillan twenty-seven
in the same film. It should be noted that this is without considering the range of
aging yet still active and virile patriarchal figures the MCU provides audiences
with, like Nick Fury played by Samuel L. Jackson who was sixty when Iron Man
was released and in his seventies by the time of Captain Marvel, Anthony
Hopkins who was seventy-five at the time of Thor, William Hurt who was fifty-
eight for The Incredible Hulk, Jeff Bridges who was fifty-nine at the time of Iron
Man, Stellan Skarsgård who was sixty during Thor, and Michael Douglas who
was seventy at the release of Ant-Man. What aging and similary dynamic ma-
triarchal figures does the MCU offer in Phases One and Two with comparative
screen time and influence? Only the likes of Rene Russo, who played Frigga in
Thor, who was fifty-six at the time, Jenny Agutter who was sixty in The Avengers
in 2012, or Glenn Close who was fifty-eight at the time she played Irani Rael in
Guardians of the Galaxy. None of these characters have anywhere near the nar-
rative centrality of the likes of Nick Fury, Odin, Thaddeus Ross, Obadiah Stane,
Erik Selvig or Hank Pym.3
Another way it becomes clear how far women have been marginalised in the
MCU and across the American film industry is through a statistical analysis of
the frequency of male- or female-speaking roles in films. A range of institutions
and individuals have conducted research in this area, the most prominent of
which are those undertaken by ‘The Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative’
at USC Annenberg, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and the
Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film. As one might expect, their
findings prove uncomfortable reading in an age in which there has emerged a
general consensus in the media that there are more roles for women than there
have ever been before, both in front of and behind the camera, with films like
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Hunger Games franchise (2012–15) and
Wonder Woman being cited as evidence for this supposed shift (see Scott and
Dargis 2014). Furthermore, this has also prompted a backlash in some quarters,
a process described as a ‘feminist takeover’ by Rachel Lefler (2015). However,
this understanding is not supported at all by the findings of the aforementioned
studies which proves such assertions to be anecdotal rather than empirical. For
example, the 2017 USC Annenberg study titled ‘Inclusion in the Director’s Chair?:
Gender, Race, & Age of Film Directors Across 1,000 Films 2007–2016’ revealed
that there are almost twenty-four male directors for every one female director in
Hollywood, that female directors’ careers are not as long as those of men and that
they are offered dramas rather than other genres (see Smith et al. 2017). In front
of the camera, research indicates that, on average, taking into account the top
hundred grossing films of the year, women occupy only approximately between
28–33% of speaking roles; additionally, when considering the action and adven-
ture genres (in which the superhero film is included) this percentage decreases to
closer to 20% (see Smith et al. 2015a). Females were considerably more likely than
males to be shown in sexy attire (27.9% of females vs. 8% of males), featured nude
(26.4% of females vs. 9.1% of males), or referred to as physically attractive (12.6%
of females vs. 3.1% of males) (see Smith et al. 2015b). Considering one particular
year in detail, 2015, the year in which the MCU released Avengers: Age of Ultron
and Ant-Man, as illustrative of these general trends, in the top hundred grossing
films male characters received approximately twice the amount of screen time
(28.5% compared to 16%), men were 71% of protagonists (females comprised 29%
of protagonists) and women occupied only 4% of directors, 11% of writers, 3% of
cinematographers, 19% of producers, 14% of editors (see Lauzen 2016). Neither
of the MCU films produced in 2015 come anywhere close to even the average
of 28–33% of speaking roles being taken by women observed above and neither
does a single film across Phases One or Two, with only Iron Man 3 having more
than 25% of its speaking characters women. Particularly egregious examples in
Phase One include The Incredible Hulk (12.2%) and Thor (15%), and in Phase Two
Ant-Man (14%) and, somewhat surprisingly, Guardians of the Galaxy (10.7%),
which has the lowest percentage of female-speaking characters in Phases One
and Two.4 The Incredible Hulk, in its 112-minute running time, features only
five female characters that even speak and only three of those are named in the
credits: Betty Ross, Martina (who has a single line of dialogue in untranslat-
ed Portuguese), Major Kathleen Sparr, an unnamed woman selling clothes in
the market and an unnamed newsreader. In case one might regard this as an
aberration, consider the fact that in Thor only Jane, Darcy, Sif, Frigga and two
unnamed nurses speak, and in Iron Man (19.1%) eight women speak and only
five of these are named: Pepper, Christine Everheart, Ramirez (the soldier in the
Humvee at the start), and two television newsreaders, real-life Zoriana Kit and
fictional Amira Ahmed (the three others are two stewardesses and a mother in
Gulmira). Captain America: The First Avenger (17.5%) has only two females who
are even named onscreen: Agent Peggy Carter and Mandy, a girl at the World of
Tomorrow exhibition, who does not speak a single line of dialogue.5
With this context provided, this sub-chapter is an exploration of the trans-
formation of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster between Thor and its sequel Thor: The
Dark World, which may or may not have been the reason for Portman’s comment
in 2016 that she was ‘done’ with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (see Han 2016).
It was reported by the Hollywood Reporter that the Academy Award-winning
performer was dissatisfied with the film’s original director Patty Jenkins being
removed from the project and the creative direction the film took as a result (see
Masters 2011). Jenkins would have been the MCU’s first female director and in-
deed the first female director of a major superhero blockbuster in 2013, which she
then became four years later anyway when she took the helm of the critically and
commercially succesful Wonder Woman for the DCEU in 2017. In the DVD com-
mentary for Thor: The Dark World her replacement Alan Taylor stated, ‘Natalie’s
character brings something fresh to a female heroine in the picture. She’s an in-
telligent scientist’; and Kevin Feige added, ‘She advances the action, she’s really
integrated into the action’, but these assertions reveal a substantial disconnec-
tion from the film itself which provides a superlative example of the questionable
portrayal of women across the MCU. The suggestion is that the series promotes
a superficial level of female empowerment, at the same time as participating in
their marginalisation and objectification and thus functions as a reification of
heteronormative patriarchal culture and its reactionary values.6
Thor: The Dark World, released in October 2013, is both the sequel to Kenneth
Branagh’s Thor and a continuation of the narrative of The Avengers, beginning as
it does with Loki being brought back in chains to Asgard after the failed Chitauri
invasion of New York. It received mixed reviews on its release, many of which
echoed Mick LaSalle’s comments that, ‘Bigger is not always better. Thor: The
Dark World pumps up the action and special effects and loses some of the human
element that made the original Thor’ (2013), or Amy Nicholson’s contention that,
‘Lacking Iron Man’s wit, the Hulk’s brains, and the Captain’s ideals, he’s [Thor]
in peril of going poof himself if the franchise doesn’t figure out how to capital-
ize on its most glorious hero’ (2013). The film is widely regarded as being one of
the lesser entries in the MCU, although it does have a significant fan following,
much of which is connected to the continued presence of Tom Hiddlestone play-
ing Loki for the third time.7 In the period between The Avengers and Thor: The
Dark World Hiddlestone had further endeared himself to MCU fans by appear-
ing dressed in full Loki regalia at the 2013 Comic-Con, gleefully repeating his
two most often quoted (and memed) lines of dialogue from The Avengers, but
retailoring them for the Comic Con audience:
Humanity … look how far you have fallen. Lining up in the sweltering heat for
hours. Huddling together in the dark… Like beasts! I am Loki, the last god – and
I am burdened with glorious purpose. Stand back, you mewling quim. The bright
lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for a place in this
chamber. In this meagre palace of Midgard the arena they call Hall H. Where are
your Avengers now? Say my name!
In Thor, the eponymous hero was shown growing from an arrogant and impetu-
ous youth into a worthy heir to the throne of Asgard and Thor: The Dark World
continues to portray this development. Like the first film, its emotional centre is
the oedipal dynamic between the two brothers, Thor and Loki, and their aging
father Odin. While Thor has been quick to proclaim his father’s abilities as both
a king and a parent, Alan Taylor, who had until then been more recognised for
directing episodes of Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–) than his work on feature
films, offered an alternative perspective: ‘Odin is called the All-Father but he is
one of the worst parents I have ever met… Their father has so completely screwed
up their childhood. You don’t tell two boys that they’re both meant to be king, but
only one will achieve it!’ (qtd. in Moore and Javins 2013: 174).8 The throne itself
will later be destroyed by the film’s primary antagonist, the bland and unshaded
villain Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) who is from the race of Dark Elves once
thought eradicated by Odin’s grandfather, Bors. Many years before Malekith was
cast out and on his return seeks revenge, but he lacks anything resembling a
personality even compared to Laufey, king of the Frost Giants, from the previous
film. The film derives its title from the fact that Malekith wishes to usher in a new
era, a Dark World, and hopes to use a mysterious substance known as the Aether,
one of the six Infinity Stones spread throughout the MCU, to achieve it.
It is Jane Foster, Thor’s human girlfriend, who accidentally comes into con-
tact with this Aether and sets the plot in motion. In the first film Jane had been
one of the slightly more interesting female characters in Phase One, especial-
ly compared to the likes of Pepper Potts and Betty Ross. She did fulfil the role
of the adoring girlfriend and was infantilised by her clumsiness, but she was
also introduced as a dedicated and talented astrophysicist shown working and
researching, she was not required to be saved by Thor and was not overtly sexual-
ised by either her clothes or her demeanour. In the two years Thor has been away
heroically fighting battles all across the nine realms, we are informed that Jane
has been doing little more than pining for him in his absence. Darcy chastises
her for ‘moping around in your pyjamas, eating ice cream and obsessing about
you know who’, the uncomfortable implication being that she is unable to func-
tion, continue her research, or even her life without him. She is re-introduced to
the audience on a date with the genial Richard (Chris O’Dowd) having relocated
to London, but it is clear to see that, like Betty dating Leonard Samson in The
Incredible Hulk, she could never be satisfied with anyone other the film’s hero,
who she fears has deserted her after the events of the first film. Jane does not
know, but we the audience do, that Thor’s destruction of the Bifrost Bridge at the
climax of Thor to save the race of Frost Giants from Loki’s genocide, had made it
impossible for him to return to her.
When Jane and Darcy visit an unexplained ‘stable gravitational anomaly’
they find a truck floating in the air, somehow impervious to the rules of gravity,
which reminds them both of what they had experienced just before meeting Thor
in New Mexico in the first film. Jane instructs Darcy ‘Don’t touch anything!’
… but this is exactly what she does herself, only to be pulled through a portal
into another realm and infected with the Aether. With the mysterious substance
coursing through her body she is given what appears to be super powers, but they
also lead her to faint whenever they are triggered, meaning she spends several
long minutes in the film shot as an attractively framed literal sleeping beauty.
Additionally, as a conduit for the remarkable powers of the Aether she is trans-
formed into an object fought over for much of the film’s narrative by Thor and
Malekith, as the strength and determination she displayed in the first film are
replaced by her becoming effectively a ‘damsel in distress’ who needs to be fre-
quently rescued not just by Thor, as one might expect, but by other characters like
Loki, Frigga and even Erik Selvig. Learning of her plight, somehow Thor returns
to Earth only to be comedically slapped twice by Jane demanding to know why
he did not come back before, in one of several examples of the character being
primarily defined by her emotions rather than her intellect. Her subsequent jour-
ney to Asgard leads to an intriguing reversal of the fish out of water narrative of
the first film, now instead with Asgard shown through Jane’s human eyes, but
Odin is revealed to be distinctly unhappy at her presence. When the once reso-
lute and determined female scientist hears that Thor has discussed her with his
father she blushes like a teenager and asks, ‘You told your dad about me!?’ Odin’s
dismissive line on seeing her, even when she is in the same room, is ‘She does
not belong here in Asgard any more than a goat belongs at a dining table’. Thor
protests that ‘She’s strong in ways you’d never even know’, but Alan Taylor’s film
presents little evidence of this and Jane is transmogrified from an intelligent and
resourceful scientist to a flighty and overly emotional girlfriend, who tells Thor,
‘I like the way you explain things!’ and the audience that, ‘Physics is gonna go
ballistic!’ While Thor has brought Jane to Asgard to cure her, there is a lingering
suspicion that the prospect of her having powers is such a monstrous idea that
the narrative demands that they must be removed as quickly as possible in a very
similar way to how Pepper Potts was treated in Iron Man 3 after she became in-
fected with the Extremis virus.
Jane is not the only female character to undergo a regression from the original
film. Sif, one of the Warriors Three, is treated quite differently to her male coun-
terparts and has herself deteriorated since Thor. Branagh’s film had portrayed
her as strong and independent, clearly in love with Thor but reluctant to reveal it.
In the sequel it is Sif and not her male compatriots who is teased about not being
in control by Thor in the film’s opening battle, it is her costume that accentuates
her form and her pining for Thor becomes much more explicit, even though she
knows he has chosen another partner. In contrast, Volstagg is obese and comical,
but never weak or emotionally vulnerable and neither are Fandral or Hogun. In
the first film, Thor’s mother, Frigga, was shown as too weak to hardly even raise a
sword in the throne room with Laufey the Frost Giant king, but in the sequel she
is provided with a heroic moment as she bravely fights back against Malekith in
order to save Jane; yet she is killed in the familiar trope of the death of a female
providing source of motivation for the hero. So, while Craig Kyle is able to assert
Fig. 17: Thor and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in Thor: The Dark World (2013), a film in which
she finds herself objectified, marginalised and infantilised throughout
that Frigga is ‘even more important’ (qtd. in Moore and Javins 2013: 194) than
Odin, she is still one of a range of mothers in the MCU who are marginalised if
not literally erased from the narrative.
In the wake of Frigga’s death Thor and his father have an argument as how
to best proceed in their fight with Malekith, a moment which is decidedly remi-
niscent of their disagreement in the first film over how to deal with the threat of
the Frost Giants, although now their roles have been reversed. It is Thor who sug-
gests the path of reason and Odin who wants to stand and fight ‘to the last drop
of Asgardian blood!’ Thor even questions his father’s judgement – ‘Then how are
you different to Malekith?’ – but it is a false comparison as Odin is wracked by
grief and has shown himself to be a wise and honourable man in both Thor films,
whereas Malekith is a one-dimensional pantomime-like villain. Nevertheless,
Thor goes against his father once again, but this time in the best interests of
Asgard. It is then he lets Loki out of prison because he needs his help in order
to defeat Malekith. When Loki meets Jane, the woman he had threatened with
implied rape in the first film, she slaps him around the face as she had done Thor,
with a cry of ‘That was for New York!’, the metaphorical equivalent of punching
Osama Bin Laden in the aftermath of 9/11 (which Captain America actually did
in issue one of the comic Freedom 3 [2006]). Thor knows that he cannot trust his
brother, but hopes that their shared desire for revenge will prevail. When they
finally confront Malekith it seems that Loki has betrayed Thor again and cuts off
his hand, claiming that ‘All I ever wanted was you and Odin dead at my feet!’ but
it is revealed to be part of their ruse and they attack the leader of the Dark Elves
together. Jane seems terrified at this turn of events and as oblivious to their strat-
egy as Pepper seemed to have been of Tony’s plan to give her the Iron Man suit
during the Mandarin’s attack on his mansion in Iron Man 3. During the battle,
it is Loki who saves Jane and then seemingly sacrifices himself for his brother.
A tearful Thor informs him, ‘I’ll tell father what you did today’ but Loki says, ‘I
didn’t do it for him…’ In the history of the MCU’s fake deaths through Phases
One and Two, Loki’s is the shortest, as within three minutes this too is revealed
to have been part of his scheme.
With the Aether removed from Jane she is now effectively superfluous as a
character and the stage is set for the film’s climax in Greenwich, London, a fitting
choice due to its historic connections to both time and space.9 In this sequence
it is not Jane who takes the lead in helping Thor as one might expect given her
expertise, but Erik Selvig who has recently been released from a psychiatric in-
stitution. As Walderzak remarks, ‘it is Erik who understands and provides an
explanation to the audience of the gravitational convergence, despite Jane’s focus
on the subject’ (2016: 160). Jane does participate in the battle at Greenwich and
it is her computations which help them realise where the teleportation devices
they use against Malekith should be placed, but she is given an ‘oops!’ moment
when she accidentally teleports Darcy and Ian (Darcy’s own intern) and later
she is saved by Selvig when the Dark Elves attack them. After Malekith has been
defeated by Thor’s noble act of sacrifice for the sake of the galaxy, Jane too offers
to sacrifice herself, but in a very different way to those performed by male heroes
in film after film in the MCU since Iron Man. Seeing that an unconscious Thor
is in the path of Malekith’s falling ship, she tries to pull him free but realises she
will not be able to, so she decides to cover him (an immortal god) with her very
human body, willing to die for her man. However, as we have come to expect, the
sacrifice is not a real one and she is saved for the second time in the space of a
few minutes by Selvig who cleverly uses the device to teleport Malekith’s ship to
another world. Why it could not have been Jane’s ingenuity that saved Thor or
her colleagues remains unclear, but it is in the film’s post-credits scene that she is
rewarded for her behaviour throughout the film with the ultimate in heteronor-
mative reification, a passionate kiss the likes of which Robin Wood memorably
referred to as the ‘ideological straightjacket’ of Hollywood cinema (1998: 37). In
one final twist, another symbolic gesture of her superfluousness, Jane’s face is
hidden from the camera during their embrace and in the film’s audio commen-
tary director Alan Taylor revealed that Natalie Portman was not present for the
scene and in fact was replaced, unbeknownst to the audience, by Hemsworth’s
real-life wife, Elsa Pataky.
Notes
1 In one of the many connections we have seen drawn between the superhero film and
the western throughout the MCU, the Mandarin recounts the story of the real-life
Sand Creek Massacre and offers parallels between it and his attack on the Ali Al
Salem airbase in Kuwait. In 1864 a 700-strong force of Colorado territory Militia
attacked a peaceful Native American settlement killing between seventy and one
hundred and sixty-three Indians. The Mandarin says, ‘the US military waited until
the friendly Cheyenne braves had all gone hunting, waited to attack and slaughtered
the families left behind and claim their land’. The Sand Creek Massacre has been
regularly recreated in western film from Tomahawk (1951) to the Vietnam-era Soldier
Blue (1970) and Little Big Man (1970).
2 This is the primary lesson that Tony Stark helps the young Peter Parker learn in
the narrative of Spider-Man: Homecoming, where he informs him, ‘If you’re noth-
ing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it’. After Stark takes away the hi-tech
Spider-Man suit he designed from him, Parker proves himself to be a real hero by
thwarting the plans of the salvage contractor-turned-weapons designer Adrian
Toomes aka the Vulture.
3 Tilda Swinton was fifty-five when she played the Ancient One in the Phase Three film
Doctor Strange and Marisa Tomei was fifty-one at the time of Captain America: Civil
War in 2016.
4 These figures are reflected in the failure of some of the MCU films (for example
Ant-Man, The Avengers, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America: The First
Avenger and Doctor Strange) to pass what is referred to as the Bechdel Test, named af-
ter the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which requires that a film must contain two named
female characters who talk about something other than a male character.
5 As a benchmark, one should probably turn to Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, which
certainly raised the bar in a number of ways for the representation of women in the
genre. It earned $103 million during its opening weekend, the highest for a female
director and highest for a female-led comic book film. Its global opening weekend of
$228 million was more than the combined entire box office of the two other female
comic book superhero films before: Elektra (2005; $56 million) and Catwoman (2004;
$82 million). Yet even Woman Woman, which begins with an extended all female
sequence set on the island of Themyscira, only has 34% of its speaking characters as
women.
6 The poor characterisation of Jane Foster led to her name being used by script-reader
Ross Puttman in his @femscriptintros project on Twitter. Puttman takes ‘female
character descriptions out of screenplays, changes all names to ‘Jane’ (to protect the
innocent), and then sends them out 140 characters at a time. The result is a parade of
one-note, superficial notes that describe characters’ looks, but rarely anything about
them’ (Watercutter 2016).
7 Thor: The Dark World is the worst reviewed film in the franchise according to both
Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, followed by Iron Man 2.
8 In the comic book Thor: The Dark World Prelude (2013) Iron Man is shown to ask
Thor during the Battle of New York whether he has seen any episodes of Game of
Thrones. He adds, ‘It’s like you but instead of a magic hammer they have dragons and
sex’.
9 In what I would regard as the film’s most powerful time and space anomaly Thor: The
Dark World was one of several American films produced in 2013 to be awarded the
status of ‘British’ by the British Film Institute after they passed the ‘cultural test for
film’. Films like Saving Mr Banks, Jack the Giant Slayer, Fast and Furious 6, The Dark
Knight Rises and Wrath of Titans were all awarded British status in 2013 and the Best
British Film at the BAFTA that year was controversially awarded to Gravity (2013).
C H A PT ER S IX
‘The world has changed and none of

us can go back’: The Illusory Moral
Ambiguities of the Post-9/11 Superhero
in Captain America: The Winter Soldier
It’s hard to make a political film that’s not topical. That’s what makes a politi-
cal thriller different from just a thriller. And that’s what adds to the characters’
paranoia and the audience’s experience of that paranoia. But we’re also a very pop-
culture-obsessed and we love topicality, so we kept pushing to [have] scenes that,
fortunately or unfortunately, played out [during the time that Edward] Snowden
outed the NSA. That stuff was already in the zeitgeist. We were all reading the
articles that were coming out questioning drone strikes, pre-emptive strikes, civil
liberties – [Barack] Obama talking about who they would kill… We wanted to
put all of that into the film because it would be a contrast to [Captain America]’s
greatest-generation [way of thinking].
– Anthony Russo (qtd. in Lovece 2014)
Captain America’s heroic persona changed as the culture’s needs and expecta-
tions of a hero changed. The level of complexity of the hero’s character, his moral
viewpoint, is altered as society alters. But as the society becomes better educat-
ed and more aware of those ambiguities, the mythic character must reflect the
awareness of those ambiguities in some way.
– Jeffrey S. Lang and Patrick Trimble (1988: 169)
I.
On its release in April 2014 Captain America: The Winter Soldier was widely re-
garded in the mainstream press as being Marvel’s most political movie to date. In
fact, reviews seemed almost contractually obliged to mention its sustained im-
mersion in the fractious politics of the ‘War on Terror’ era. Many reviews echoed
Ty Burr’s suggestion that the film was ‘torn between patriotic ideals and harsh
post-9/11 realpolitik’ (2014) or David Edelstein’s description of it as ‘a bracing,
old-style conspiracy thriller made extra-scary by new technology and the in-
creasingly ugly trade-offs of a post-9/11 world’ (2014). However, more than just
depicting these issues, the film was said by many to be particularly challenging
in how they were represented. This, arguably, reached a peak when two articles at
popular film websites made almost exactly the same claim: Ryan Lambie at Den
of Geek asked whether Captain America: The Winter Soldier was ‘2014’s most
subversive superhero film?’ (2014) and Darren Franich, writing at Entertainment
Weekly, titled his ‘The real, subversive politics of Captain America: The Winter
Soldier’ (2014). What might have led the film to be described so frequently in such
terms? The superhero, as we have seen, and as writers like Dan Hassler-Forest and
Jason Dittmer have persuasively argued, is predominantly a reactionary figure
whose narratives tend to inculcate and legitimate dominant ideological values.
The Winter Soldier does indeed situate itself amid some of the defining political
issues of the new millennial decade, yet what Lambie and Franich refer to as the
‘subversive’ perspective of its narrative offers similar paradoxes to that which we
have already observed throughout this monograph: in Tony Stark’s rejection of
the Military Industrial Complex only to embody and legitimate extra-judicial
American intrusion into Afghanistan; in the redemptive violence offered in both
Thor and The Incredible Hulk; or the heroic transgenerational last stand in New
York in The Avengers, a film described by Richard Brody as a ‘post-9/11 revenge
fantasy’ (2012). In a similar way to this, The Winter Soldier offers a range of topical
critiques of contemporary America, while at the same time embracing a mytho-
poetic vision of what are commonly regarded as quintessential American values.
This process was classified by Jason Dittmer as one in which ‘superheroes are not
reflections of, but are instead (along with many other elements) co-constitutive of
the discourse popularly known as American exceptionalism’ (2012: 10).
The Winter Soldier is partially based on Ed Brubaker’s 2005 Captain America
series of the same name, but reimagines and integrates it with the broader on-
going MCU narrative, and encompasses many of the formative elements of
the 1970s conspiracy thriller cycle seen in American films like Three Days of
the Condor, Marathon Man and The Parallax View (1974). These texts have been
characterised by scholars such as Barna William Donovan as addressing ‘the very
THE ILLUSORY MORAL AMBIGUITIES OF THE POST-9/11 SUPERHERO 151

real international and financial concerns of the day’ (2011: 77) like the Gulf of
Tonkin incident (1964), the leaking of the Pentagon Papers (1971), the Watergate
scandal (1972–74), and the Pike Committee (1975–76). The Winter Soldier does
something very similar to this, but turns its attention towards a range of key
post-9/11 events and debates: from the pervasiveness of contemporary sur-
veillance culture, data mining, governmental duplicity and the need for more
transparency from the intelligence community, to targeted killing, the ethics of
pre-emptive strikes, the USA PATRIOT Act and the balance between collective
security and individual rights. Around the time in which the script was being
written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, WikiLeaks was in the pro-
cess of releasing thousands of previously secret files concerning the daily realities
of the ‘War on Terror’: like that of the footage entitled Collateral Murder which
showed the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike by two US AH-64 Apache helicopters
(published in April 2010), 9,200 sensitive documents pertaining to the Iraq War
(in July 2010) and the United States diplomatic cables leak (in November 2010)
among many others. At the same time the public became aware of high profile
whistle-blowers like Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, who was charged and then
found guilty of five counts of espionage (July 2013), and Edward Snowden, a con-
tractor for the United States government, who passed on thousands of classified
documents to journalists before fleeing to Russia where he was granted tempo-
rary asylum (June 2013).1 The film’s focus on issues very much connected to these
events made it seem prescient when it was released in the summer of 2014, but as
Joe Russo, the film’s co-director, stated, ‘It was all in the ether, it was all part of
the zeitgeist. The Snowden stuff actually happened while we were shooting’ (qtd.
in Lovece 2014). Thus, reviews and opinion pieces with titles like ‘Winter Soldier:
Snowden superheroics’ (Harris n.d.), ‘Captain America and the age of Snowden’
(Willmore 2014) and ‘Is Captain America: The Winter Soldier a Post-Snowden
Superhero Movie? Not quite’ (Eddy 2014) were commonplace, and not just re-
stricted to the United States, as for once commentators and reviewers discussed
a superhero film’s political perspectives almost as much as its spectacular action
sequences (see also Amarillo 2014; Salva 2014; Schlüter 2014).2
II.
The opening scene of The Winter Soldier shows Steve Rogers on a morning jog,
with the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and even the White
House shown rather conspicuously in the background. It is no coincidence
that the film associates Rogers with these landmarks, not just because he is an
iconic figure himself, but because he is an embodiment of a very particular type
of American identity, a set of ‘old-fashioned’ values which the MCU has shown
many in the first decades of the new millennium have come to regard as out-
dated. As we saw at the end of The First Avenger and throughout The Avengers,
Rogers is struggling to come to terms with life in the modern era. In The First
Avenger his adversaries were the unambiguously evil HYDRA and the Nazis; in
The Avengers, while his enemies were also clearly defined (Loki and the Chitauri),
the machinations of the World Security Council and S.H.I.E.L.D. complicated
his role somewhat, when even the motives of his close friends and colleagues
were revealed to be more questionable. Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., had
been shown to favour extreme levels of secrecy and an embrace of what he re-
fers to in The Winter Soldier as ‘compartmentalisation’ which we had already
seen in The Avengers with his pursuit of HYDRA technology and his lies about
finding Coulson’s blood-stained vintage cards on the agent’s dead body. The in-
scrutable superspy Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, who is as much a product
of the sceptical new millennial world as Rogers is of the 1940s, is defined by her
cynicism and moral fluidity, which is strikingly different to the patriotism of
Captain America’s former comrades the Howling Commandos and Cap’s own
view of how his government, and those who represent it, should behave. As if to
emphasise these contrasts, Black Widow picks up Captain America from his jog,
during which he has met another veteran Sam Wilson (who will later become
the superhero Falcon), and jokingly asks both of them, ‘Either one of you know
where the Smithsonian is? I’m here to pick up a fossil…’.
His symptoms are not as obvious as Tony Stark’s in Iron Man 3, but Steve
Rogers does seem to be suffering from some form of trauma, and even though
he jokes about all that he has lost – ‘All the guys from my barbershop quartet
are dead…’ – it is clear to both the audience and Sam, who now works for the
Veteran’s Association, that Rogers is suffering. As one might expect they are both
too stoic to actually discuss their feelings, but they can agree that the beds are too
soft after ‘coming home’ compared to ‘over there’, a shared unspoken acknowl-
edgement of the similarities between the battlefields of the ‘War on Terror’ for
Sam and those in World War II for Captain America. When Cap does visit the
VA he overhears a group of former soldiers talking about their experiences after
the end of their tour of duty; a young woman recounts: ‘A cop pulled me over last
week, he thought I was drunk. I swerved to miss a plastic bag… I thought it was
an IED.’ Sam’s response is directed as much to Cap as it is to the veterans of Iraq
and Afghanistan that he stands in front of: ‘Some stuff you leave there, other stuff
you bring back. It’s our job to figure out how to carry it…’
Steve Rogers’ apartment is testimony to the ‘stuff’ that he has brought back
with him and a marker of his sense of cultural and temporal dislocation. It is
decorated with period 1940s furnishings reminiscent of that which was forced
upon him in the coda of The First Avenger, but this time by his own hand.3 In

Fig. 18: Visiting an exhibition dedicated to his life and death in the Smithsonian Institute,
Steve Rogers struggles to find his place and his purpose in the modern era in Captain America:
The Winter Soldier (2014)
a deleted scene, Steve is shown leafing through the files of his former Howling
Commandos, all of whom are now dead. The camera lingers on that of his best
friend, Bucky Barnes, whose death Cap felt personally responsible for in The First
Avenger. In a literalisation of Black Widow’s joke about his status as a ‘fossil’, he
is shown visiting the actual Smithsonian Institute where there is an exhibit dedi-
cated to his life entitled ‘Living legend and symbol of courage’ among other icons
of American cultural history like Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the
X-15, the fastest aircraft ever made. Here the camera also remains on an image of
Bucky with the description of the two of them as being ‘best friends since child-
hood … inseparable in the school yard and on the battlefield’, in preparation for
the film’s dramatic reveal later. Walking through an exhibit dedicated to his own
life (and death) is a Borgesian experience for Rogers and the scene makes it clear
that Cap’s past, and even his own identity, do not entirely belong to him any-
more. He may be a ‘symbol to the nation’ but he is alone and isolated in a culture
where he feels he does not belong and no longer has a purpose.
Much of Cap’s anxiety is concerned with how much the world has changed
and what he is being now asked to do in the name of national security, some of
which goes against his conscience. When he recounts his concerns to the elderly
Peggy Carter (still played by Hayley Atwell), now in her nineties and suffering
from some form of dementia, he tells her, ‘For as long as I can remember I just
wanted to do what was right. I guess I am not quite sure what that is anymore.’
Peggy’s response is ‘You saved the world … we rather mucked it up’. It is this
juxtaposition between the ‘greatest generation’ rhetoric endorsed by the first
film (and throughout the MCU) and what is shown to be the moral compro-
mises of the new millennial decades which provides much of the film’s dramatic
friction.
In an attempt to familiarise himself with everything he has missed Cap is
shown to have compiled a list of things that people have suggested to him have
been important cultural and historic events in the years that he ‘lost’. A brief
close up insert of his notebook shows the handwritten words: Moon Landing,
Berlin Wall (up and down), Star Wars/Trek, Thai food, and Steve Jobs (Apple),
among other things. Adding to these Sam Wilson offers his own, Marvin Gaye’s
1972 album Trouble Man with the comment, ‘Everything you missed jammed
into one album’. Sam’s assertion is something of a throwaway line, but it is one
which resonates with the central assertion of this book, that popular cultural
artefacts are able to embody the times in which they are made in a range of ways.
In a compelling example of how the modern blockbuster is self-consciously
designed to function as a transnational cultural artefact, the filmed insert was
varied in different distribution markets. So, for the film’s release in Russia the list
contained Yuri Gagarin, the poet and singer Vladimir Vysotsky and the beloved
Soviet-era romantic drama Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1980); in South
Korea it featured Oldboy (2004), Ji-Sung Park and the 2002 World Cup; whereas
in Brazil it had racing driver Ayrton Senna, the award-winning actor Wagner
Moura and the singer and TV presenter Xuxa. Furthermore, the fact that these
inserts were voted for by online audiences is another pertinent example of Henry
Jenkins’ participatory culture (2006: 3). They are also part of a sustained attempt
by Marvel Studios to mediate the inherent jingoism that has been associated with
the character of Captain America, a process that was only partially successful
with The First Avenger, but much more effective in The Avengers and The Winter
Soldier: to self-consciously sell Captain America as not just an American hero,
but a global one.
III.
Captain America’s anxiety concerning his role is embodied in the film’s first dra-
matic mission on the S.H.I.E.L.D. vessel, the Lemurrian Star, which has been
hijacked by pirates in the Indian Ocean led by the French-Algerian ex-DGCE
(General Directorate for External Security) Georges Batroc, who is said to be at
the ‘top of INTERPOL’s Red Notice’. What Cap initially presumes to be a rescue
mission becomes more complicated when he discovers the ship is not off course,
as he has been told, but trespassing and is actually a mobile satellite-launch
platform. When Cap calls to Black Widow for assistance he learns that, unbe-
knownst to him, she has been given a secondary mission to retrieve confidential
S.H.I.E.L.D. files by Nick Fury, in an example of his ‘compartmentalisation’, an
action which could have compromised the safety of the hostages. Returning to
the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters in the Triskellion in Washington DC on the banks

of the Potomac river, Captain America confronts the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
with his discovery, to which Fury responds: ‘I didn’t want you doing anything
you weren’t comfortable with. Agent Romanoff is comfortable with anything.’
Fury’s evocation of the idea of compartmentalisation, which he describes as ‘no-
body spills the secrets, because nobody knows them all’, is one of the film’s many
sustained connections to the current geopolitical environment: throughout the
George W. Bush and then the Barack Obama administration compartmen-
talisation emerged as a key policy in the how state secrets were kept under the
umbrella term SCI or ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information’. These practices
became widely discussed after the STELLARWIND leak on 27 June 2013 which
was shown to have authorised such practices as warrantless wiretapping, data
mining and call recording. The leaks revealed to the public for the first time the
extent of the collection of metadata (in the form of phone and email records) that
nine major internet companies had been ordered to turn over to the NSA in bulk
which was reported to be, by October 2011, in excess of two hundred million
internet communications each year. In further revelations, it was also revealed
that these practices were paid for by the tax payers themselves as part of a hidden
‘black budget’. In the year before the release of The Winter Soldier taxpayers spent
$10.3 billion on NSA surveillance, a figure 53% higher than it was in 2004. As
Charlie Savage has observed, ‘It became clear that twenty-first century technol-
ogy coupled with a virtually unlimited budget in the post-9/11 era were helping
to grow the American government’s surveillance arm into a leviathan. It was also
clear that the surveillance story, even more than other areas of national security
legal policy, was really one single narrative that spanned the Bush-Cheney and
Obama administrations’ (2015: 169).
Fury reveals to Cap the extent of the World Security Council’s plans and the
reason for their secrecy: Project Insight, the construction of three huge next-
generation aircraft known as helicarriers which are able to adopt continuous
suborbital flight around the globe, each of which is armed with weapons capable
of pre-emptively targeting one thousand hostiles per minute. These extreme
measures were only able to be undertaken because of the heightened fears after
the Battle of New York featured in The Avengers. In a line of dialogue that evokes
the real-world increases in security characterised by the USA PATRIOT Act after
the attacks on 9/11, Fury states, ‘After New York I convinced the World Security
Council we needed a quantum surge in threat analysis. For once we’re ahead of
the curve.’ The interaction between Fury and Captain America which follows
is perhaps one of the most resonant moments in the film as Fury informs him:
‘The satellites can read a terrorist’s DNA before he steps outside his spider hole.
We’re gonna neutralise a lot of threats before they happen’; to which Cap coun-
ters: ‘Thought the punishment usually came after the crime?’ But Fury has his
Fig. 19: Captain America and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) discuss Project Insight in Captain
America: The Winter Soldier, a film which thoroughly mines the fears and anxieties of the ‘War
on Terror’ in the course of its narrative
own answer: ‘We can’t afford to wait that long.’ Their brief debate about the ethics
and efficacy of these security measures, as much of the MCU has been, is firmly
immersed in the turbulent events of the post-9/11 decade and is similar to the
one many were having in the United States after 9/11 when the USA PATRIOT
Act was considered by some as a regrettable but necessary measure to protect
a nation under threat and others as an unconstitutional encroachment on civil
liberties. Cap makes his own feelings clear about the prospect with a single sug-
gestive line: ‘This isn’t freedom … this is fear.’
Shortly after, perhaps in part prompted by Cap’s questions, Fury raises some
of his own concerns about Project Insight to the man leading its development,
his friend and the Secretary of Defense Alexander Peirce (Robert Redford),
which results in Fury being targetted by the mysterious assassin known only
as the Winter Soldier. Before he ‘dies’, Fury hands Cap a memory stick with the
warning, ‘Don’t … trust … anyone’. Now branded a ‘fugitive from S.H.I.E.L.D.’
and on the run from the authorities who inform the public that he is a traitor,
Cap visits an underground bunker in his old World War II-era training facil-
ity in Camp Lehigh looking for answers. What he discovers there is the film’s
paradigm-shifting reveal and certainly the biggest twist in Phase Ones and Two
of the MCU; that HYDRA, the organisation led by the Red Skull in The First
Avenger and thought to have been destroyed by Cap’s sacrifice at the end of the
film, have infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. as a ‘glorious parasite’ and gained a global posi-
tion of enormous power since 1945. Furthermore, it is Arnim Zola (Toby Jones),
whose consciousness has been uploaded onto a computer, that has orchestrated
HYDRA’s ascent. Zola is shown to have been one of many German scientists
invited into the USA in the aftermath of World War II as part of the real-life
Operation Paperclip (1945) which saw the relocation of more than a thousand

Nazi scientists with strategic value, like ‘the father of rocket science’ Werner von
Braun, Arthur Rudolph and Kurt H. Debus. While President Truman officially
ordered that no former members of the Nazi Party were to be included in the pro-
gramme many were given false records in order for them to assist with science
and military developments which were thought to be vital to enable America
to win the Cold War. This development led to von Braun going from selecting
individuals from the Buchenwald concentration camp for his experiments on
the V-2 rocket to appearing on an episode of Walt Disney’s Disneyland (ABC,
1954–58), ‘Man in Space’ (1.20) in 1955, not much more than ten years later (see
Jacobsen 2014), an uncomfortable reality that has been largely erased from the
agreed-upon American master narrative of the Cold War. Zola tells Cap that ‘For
seventy years HYDRA has been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war, and when
history did not cooperate … history was changed’, flashing onscreen a selec-
tion of ‘crises’ from the second half of the twentieth century and the start of the
twenty-first, including images of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Muammar Gaddafi,
Daniel Ortega, the Iranian Revolution, Hugo Chavez and even Julian Assange on
the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012, the implication being that each
were sponsored by HYDRA to promote disharmony and instability around the
globe.4 He continues: ‘HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally
ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security.’ To this end, Project Insight is
not just able to control traffic lights and security cameras, but it can break into
peoples’ phones, read tweets, and as Agent Jasper Sitwell later informs Cap, gain
access to ‘bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, emails, phone calls,
your damn SAT scores!’ The helicarriers contain a predictive algorithm designed
by Zola himself, who has read the twenty-first century like a ‘digital book’, in
order to recognise potential threats and dispose of them.
The choices of which world events and personalities to display onscreen as
representative of HYDRA’s malevolent intrusions into global affairs are reveal-
ing of the film’s ideological perspectives and, on close inspection, it is a political
worldview that is far from ‘subversive’ as it was described by Ryan Lambie and
Darren Franich in the articles referred to at the beginning of this chapter. As
much of the MCU has done, The Winter Soldier endorses the prevailing idea that
American foreign policy and its reluctant involvements abroad during the twen-
tieth century and into the twenty-first have been inherently beneficent and noble,
an idea that to anyone with even a cursory awareness of the history of the post-
World War II era is problematic to say the least and demonstrates a profound
disconnection from the historical reality of American interventions into places
like Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959), the Dominican Republic (1961),
Vietnam (1965), Chile (1970), Grenada (1983), Bosnia (1992) and Iraq (1990 and
2003), to name but a few.5 It is only through a highly subjective and ideologically
motivated prism that one can still view the Cuban Missile Crisis as solely the
result of perfidious Soviet belligerence instead of complicated Cold War brinks-
manship caused just as much by aggressive American foreign policy as by
Russian provocation. The Winter Soldier asks us to regard the Iranian Revolution
(1979) as an unambiguously evil threat to global stability and freedom, instead
of the result of, among other things, a century or more of imperialist interfer-
ence by the US and the UK into the affairs of a sovereign country. The inclusion
of Julian Assange, a complicated and richly contradictory figure who has been
described as a ‘martyr for free speech’ (Frank La Rue qtd. in Hall 2010) by some
and by others as the head of a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’ (Peter King qtd. in
McCullagh 2010), as what we are asked to understand as an agent of HYDRA,
responsible for fomenting dispute and crisis around the world is not suggestive
of a film that is subversive, but rather a conservative treatise which regards all of
those that might be considered ‘America’s ideological enemies’ (Luttwak 1993:
45) in the real world as sponsored by a conflation of the descendants of the Nazis
and the Soviet Union. While HYDRA is initially and frequently associated with
the Nazis in World War II, as the MCU narrative has progressed it has grown
to also encompass both Soviet-era (1922–91) and modern Russia, and the term
‘hydra’ itself was frequently connected to the Soviet Union, even after its dis-
solution, in descriptions of ‘hydra-headed communism’ (Buckley 2002: 233).6 As
further evidence of the convenient fluidity of these associations, in recent years
Stan Lee defined HYDRA as being ‘sort of like ISIS today. There are so many of
them. And if you kill a few, it doesn’t mean anything. There are more’ (2016b:
xv). The most interesting figure to be included in Zola’s HYDRA sequence is
perhaps the one least familiar to contemporary audiences, the Nicaraguan
President Daniel Ortega (1985–90, 2007–). Through the 1980s Ortega, the head
of the SNLF (Sandinista National Liberation Front), was vociferously demon-
ised by the United States press and government, primarily due to his attempts to
expel American interests, both political and economic, from his country. More
than a decade later, in 1996, the International Court of Justice ruled that the US
had repeatedly violated international law by supporting forces opposed to Ortega
known as the Contras. A panel of ten out of thirteen judges from all over the
globe concluded that ‘by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying
the Contra forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and
paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua, has acted, against the Republic
of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not
to intervene in the affairs of another State’ (ICJ 1986). Yet it was a decision reject-
ed by the United States government, and US Ambassador to the United Nation
Jeanne Kirkpatrick called the International Court of Justice ‘semi-legal, semi-
juridical, semi-political body, which nations sometimes accept and sometimes

don’t’ (qtd. in Scott 2012: 90).7 This is not to say that those figures included in
the HYDRA sequence in The Winter Soldier are not responsible for transgres-
sions of international law themselves, which of course, in many cases, they most
definitely are, but that what they all share, and one might surmise why they were
chosen, is their challenge to an America-centric view of the world and this is why
they are simplistically branded by the film as agents of chaos and destruction.8
It is revealed to be none other than Alexander Peirce who is the central archi-
tect of HYDRA’s plan, the man who Fury observes, once refused a Nobel Peace
Prize because ‘peace was not an achievement … but a responsibility’. Peirce is
deliberately framed as a Bush era neo-conservative the likes of which regularly
filled the screens of Hollywood films as antagonists in the first decades of the
new millennium (see Ward Abbot, Noah Vosen and Alexander Conklin in the
original Bourne trilogy [2002–7], Admiral Alexander Marcus in Star Trek: Into
Darkness [2013] and Dreyfus in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes [2014] for promi-
nent examples) and this is why many might have considered the film to be critical
of contemporary American security policies.9 Peirce is wholly convinced of the
appropriateness of what he is doing and is prepared to sacrifice twenty million
people to bring order to the lives of seven billion. He tells Fury: ‘It’s the next
step, Nick. If you have the courage to take it.’ Peirce uses an anecdote about his
experiences in Bogota, Colombia, to justify his use of pre-emptive methodol-
ogy, in which the ELN (National Liberation Army) rebels captured hostages at
the US embassy, one of which was his daughter, and Nick Fury ignored his di-
rect orders and saved the hostages with direct military action. Echoing the Bush
Doctrine, Peirce suggests that sometimes rules must be broken in order to do
what is right and reminds Fury that diplomacy is ‘a holding action, a band aid’
and that ‘you didn’t ask … you just did what needed to be done’. The captivity
narrative and the prospect of rescuing a young American woman in peril became
one of the defining thematic motifs of post-9/11 American cinema in popular
culture texts like Taken and 24, and Peirce returns to the trope again in his bid
to convince the WSC of the efficacy of HYDRA’s plan (see also Faludi 2007).
He asks Councilman Singh a question which evokes the Ticking Time Bomb
scenarios popularised by Alan Dershowitz after 9/11; ‘What if Pakistan marched
into Mumbai tomorrow and you know they were going to drag your daughter
into a soccer stadium for execution and you could just stop it with the flick of a
switch?’ (see Dershowitz 2008). This angle has proven a pervasive one for those
articulating a belief in the efficacy of torture or enhanced interrogation, a process
which has been largely discredited in serious scientific studies (see O’Mara 2015;
Schiemann 2015). In the first week of his presidency, Donald Trump was prompt-
ed to return to this idea in an interview with claims I would suggest formed more
by media depictions of torture than by analysis of this aforementioned research,
with Sean Hannity on Hannity (26 January 2017). Hannity suggested, ‘I would
ask [American journalist] David Muir, if they kidnapped your kid and you have
one of the kidnappers, what would you do to get the location of your child?’ To
which Trump responded, ‘Or would you want him to talk in 48 hours from now
by being nice to him, OK? … And by that time, it’s too late’ (qtd. in Slattery 2017).
Peirce emerges as the architect of HYDRA’s plan but it is the Winter Soldier, a
shadowy assassin initially described as a ‘ghost story’, who has somehow carried
out ‘two dozen assassinations over fifty years’ in service of HYDRA’s goals, that
is Captain America’s central adversary. When they finally meet, after a running
battle through the streets of Washington deliberately reminiscent of Michael
Mann’s Heat (1995), the film reveals that the Winter Soldier is in fact James
‘Bucky’ Barnes, Cap’s best friend who he had thought long dead, but who had
been captured by HYDRA in 1945 and brainwashed very much like Raymond
Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate (book, 1959; film, 1962) a name Tony Stark
will later refer to the character by in Captain America: Civil War.10 The Winter
Soldier had subtly reminded audiences of Bucky’s importance to Steve Rogers
without giving away his identity in the Smithsonian Institute and in a flash-
back to the aftermath of Steve’s mother’s funeral during which Bucky told his
friend ‘I’m with you til the end of the line…’. In a franchise which has been often
criticised for the shallowness of its villains, the emotional connection between
Rogers and Barnes gives the film a tangible resonance and is perhaps the reason
why it was returned to once again as one of the driving narrative mechanisms of
Captain America: Civil War.
With the heroes and the audience now aware of the stakes involved, the film
shifts from a conspiracy thriller into a mission film, with Captain America,
Falcon, Black Widow, Maria Hill and a still-living Nick Fury (having revealed
that he faked his death) tasked with preventing the three Project Insight helicar-
riers from killing millions across the globe and installing HYDRA in control
of the world. It is then that Cap returns to the Smithsonian for a final time to
retrieve his World War II-era uniform; a more obvious plea for a return to old-
fashioned ideals in a film set in the tumultuous ‘War on Terror’ era would be hard
to find. After infiltrating the Project Insight base, Cap gives a rousing speech to
patriotism and freedom worded very similarly to the newsreel featured in The
First Avenger:
If you launch those helicarriers today, HYDRA will be able to kill anyone that
stands in their way … unless we stop them. I know I’m asking a lot, but the price
of freedom is high; it always has been. And it’s a price I’m willing to pay. And if
I’m the only one, then so be it. But I’m willing to bet I’m not.
Cap is fully prepared to sacrifice himself, as he did once before in The First

Avenger, and he asks others do to the same with an evocation of the Total War of
World War II. Cap and his team manage to switch the pre-arranged helicarrier
targets, so instead of shooting at innocents on the ground they fire at and de-
stroy each other, in an ironic reversal of the asymmetrical power relationship of
drone warfare which came to increasingly characterise military operations in the
Obama era. In a rare occasion of a superhero refusing to fight at the climax of the
film, which is almost always ended by a physical battle between the protagonist
and antagonist, Cap drops his shield telling Bucky he will not continue, and that
he is with him ‘til the end of the line…’. At first Bucky refuses to acknowledge his
friend and continues to strike him repeatedly in one of the most brutal moments
across the MCU films, but when Cap falls unconscious into the Potomac river, he
saves his life before disappearing with the ruins of the Triskellion shown burning
in the background. At the same time, Peirce is killed but not before Black Widow
uploads all of HYDRA’s and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secrets onto the internet, an act which
will leave her own carefully guarded past exposed for the whole world to see. It
is important to note that the film shows that the only way to destroy HYDRA is
not to physically defeat the organisation, but to make their secrets public, and
this act with its connections to the likes of Manning, Snowden and Assange, is
viewed as one of tremendous heroism within the film’s narrative at a time when
the country was divided about the actions of these real-world figures. In the af-
termath, Black Widow is shown in front of a senate committee where she, and her
fellow heroes are accused of ‘laying waste’ to the US intelligence network, but she
is unrepentant and secure in her belief that she will not be imprisoned ‘because
you [the US government and the world] need us. Yes, the world is a vulnerable
place and yes, we help make it that way, but we’re also the ones best qualified to
defend it…’.
IV.
Since the film frames itself as a conspiracy thriller and borrows so heavily from
Three Days of the Condor it seems appropriate to compare the endings of the
two. The Winter Soldier concludes with the successful dispatch of Peirce (shot
in the heart rather than brought to trial), the destruction of the three Project
Insight helicarriers (which are shown to cause no deaths of innocents onscreen),
and the unqualified redemption of the film’s eponymous hero. In Three Days of
the Condor, for the CIA analyst on the run Joe Turner (Robert Redford), there
is no such conclusive resolution. In constant danger, he passes on his story of a
clandestine CIA plot to take over oilfields in the Middle East, to the press, but
it is not clear whether they will publish it or not given the tremendous power of
those it will implicate. The film’s final shot is Turner as he walks away anxiously
looking over his shoulder, with an uncertain freeze frame which Michael Ryan
and Douglas Kellner describe in Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary American Film as a ‘note of ambiguity characteristic of the
mid-seventies’ (1990: 100).11 Even though The Winter Soldier borrows from the
conspiracy thriller cycle of the 1970s it is able to encompass little of its ideologi-
cal challenges to the status quo and it, like the vast majority of the MCU, ends
on a moment of triumphant violent redemption. As Martin Flanagan, Andrew
Livingstone and Mike McKenny argue, these references to the 1970s conspira-
cy cycle are ‘imported more as a calculated referential risk, addressing the hip
consumption patterns of an audience able to recognize codes of post-Cold War
films’ (2016: 111), than a meaningful attempt to engage with the fears and anxiet-
ies of the time in which the film was made. The Winter Soldier is critical of the
practices of HYDRA, which are little more than hyper-allegorised extensions
of real-world new millennial debates, but its underlying message is a reification
of American foundational mythic values represented by (and embodied within)
Captain America, a character who has long been considered as expressing the
‘divergence between American ideals and American practice’ (Dittmer 2005:
642).
The film’s critical thrust and Cap’s primary role is to offer the idea that
America is more than its institutions, and that it is its core values and principles
which makes America great and distinguishes it from every other country. This
type of criticism was described by Benton Bond as ‘redemptive anti-American-
ism’ and he wrote: ‘The message of redemptive anti-Americanism comes from
a peculiar apex where the ideas of the most virulently anti-American voices are
mixed with jingoistic and nationalistic pro-Americanism. Thus, a distinctive
anti-American voice emerges: one that celebrates America in a fallen Captain
and lashes out against the America that fell him’ (2013: 77). So the film adopts a
superficially critical patina at the same time as embracing a mythopoetic vision
of what makes America unique, an idea itself steeped in mythology, embody-
ing an illusion that there is a tangible great America to return to. This was
undoubtedly part of Donald Trump’s appeal in his successful 2016 Presidential
election campaign, two years after The Winter Soldier was released, in which
he criticised that which America had become, primarily under the presidency
of Barack Obama, but promised to ‘make America great again’ by returning to
these very same illusory core values and principles. Trump stated in his victory
speech on 9 November 2016, ‘Working together, we will begin the urgent task
of rebuilding the nation and renewing the American dream’. Both Trump’s
campaign and The Winter Soldier articulate a concerted desire for a return to
‘the good old days’ (a line Sam Wilson actually uses in the film), yet they do not
offer an answer as to where might one find these them outside of the cultural

imaginary. Might they be located in the 1940s in which Captain America was
first conceived? But this is certainly an era marked by profound social inequal-
ity, disenfranchisement and segregation, even though it is now remembered
through the comforting lens of a nostalgic prism, a fact which was compre-
hensively challenged by Norman Finkelstein in The Way Things Never Were:
The Truth about the ‘Good Old Days’, a book which thoroughly undermines
the reality behind the idea that the 1940s were ‘a happy and carefree time for
everyone in America’ (1995: 1).
Despite his seeming rigidity Captain America has emerged as a surprisingly
malleable figure, co-opted in the new millennium by those on both sides of the
American political spectrum, as likely to be found appearing at Tea Party rallies
across the country as at liberal events like Jon Stewart’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’
in Washington DC on 30 October 2010. Bob Calhoun at Salon asked, ‘Would he
[Captain America] be a New Deal Democrat slinging his mighty shield for new
public works programs or would he be rallying with the Tea Party to lower taxes
on billionaires and gut Medicare? Whose Captain America is he anyway?’ (2011)
The Captain America of the MCU is similarly flexible and this was the reason
why many were able to see their own political ideology reflected in The Winter
Soldier. For those on the right side of the political spectrum the film criticises the
intrusive policies of Big Government, standing up for those ‘real Americans’ who
feel they have been forgotten and let down by the Obama administration. This is
why prominent Republican commentator Glenn Beck was able to suggest:
This should teach Hollywood… Here’s a movie that not only is good but tells a
pro-American story. This one even has a political point to it. Even the director is
coming out and saying, ‘Yeah, I’m trying to make a point here that killing people
with drones, with some committee or the president saying yeah, we can just kill
those people because they’re a problem, spying on them, collecting their data is
wrong.’ That’s what Captain America is about. (2014)
At the same time, those on the left side of the political spectrum can just as eas-
ily read the film as being about the excesses of the Bush administration in the
aftermath of 9/11 and Captain America as standing up for what their vision of
America should be (see Franich 2014; Lambie 2014). Captain America: The Winter
Soldier is justifiably one of the most well regarded films in the MCU and even,
alongside Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, in the genre as a whole, but
claims, like those of Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly and Ryan Lambie
of its supposedly ‘subversive’ nature are an indication of the seeming inability
of genre to offer narratives that are able to challenge the times in which they are
made in anything more than superficial ways.
Notes
1 In the week after the release of The Winter Soldier, the Guardian and the Washington
Post were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for their coverage of the
Snowden leaks.
2 Ignacio Andrés Amarillo reviewing the film for the Argentinian newspaper El Litoral
wrote that, ‘For many South Americans, Captain America is a symbol of imperialism’
and that the film was immersed in the ‘post-Bush and post-Snowden era’ (2014).
3 In one of the richly textured moments which indicates the care and attention to de-
tail often employed in the MCU films, a brief shot of Cap’s bookcase reveals what
Cap has been reading since his return: including All The President’s Men (1974) by
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Vietnam War memoir Dispatches (1977) by
Michael Herr, Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and
Freedom (2008) by Lieutenant General William G. Boykin and Barack Obama: The
Making of the Man (2012) by David Maraniss.
4 The alternate storyboard design for this by Philip Keller and James Rothwell also
includes President Kennedy, what appears to be the ‘hanging chad’ controversy from
the 2000 presidential election, and footage of the Howard Hughes senate hearings in
1947.
5 As Noam Chomsky reminds us, ‘The US is the only country that was condemned
for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council
resolution calling on states to observe international law’ (2001: 44).
6 For its release in Russia the film was titled Первый мститель: Другая война, which
translates into English as The First Avenger: The Other War.
7 The United States is certainly not alone in refusing to accept the ICJ rulings: a small
selection of examples are rejections due to nuclear testing (France, 1974), fishing
rights (Iceland, 1974; Japan, 2014), and territorial possession (Argentina, 1977; South
Africa, 1990; Israel, 2004).
8 Each of those chosen to be agents of HYDRA can be explored in a similar way and
should be done so in more space than we have here. Gaddaffi was called the ‘mad
dog of the Middle East’ by Ronald Reagan (qtd. in Bearman 1986: xvi), but he too is
a complicated figure. Undoubtedly his cruel dictatorship led to terrible human rights
abuses and deaths, but he is acknowledged as overseeing the transformation of Libya
from one of Africa’s poorest nations into one of its very richest and he was lauded by
both the Soviet Union (who awarded him the Order of Lenin in 1971) and Nelson
Mandela, who called him ‘my brother’ (qtd. in Gwaambuka 2016), primarily for his
anti-imperialist stance which saw him emerge as a figurehead against American
intervention on the African continent. For many Americans Hugo Chavez was a ‘ty-
rant who forced the people of Venezuela to live in fear’ (Ed Royce qtd. in Watkins
2013), but he also played a central role in promoting Venezualan independence and

nationalised industries in the face of severe opposition and pressure from the United
States.
9 The casting of Robert Redford as Peirce, given his off-screen persona as a supporter of
liberal concerns and his status as an all-American symbol in his own right, resonates.
The decision to cast him was influenced by his role as Joe Turner in Sydney Pollack’s
Three Days of the Condor, a film from which The Winter Soldier draws heavily for in-
spiration. It also should not be forgotten that Redford was once in contention for the
role of Superman in Richard Donner’s original Superman (1978) (see Rossen 2008:
78).
10 Most American presidents since the publication of Richard Condon’s novel in 1959
have been described by their political opponents as a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ for one
reason or another. These assertions gained significant traction in 2017 in the light of
accusations of links between the Trump administration and Russia (see Boot 2017).
11 See also the psychological breakdown of Jack Terry (John Travolta) at the end of Blow
Out (1981) or the murder of the protagonist Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) in The
Parallax View (1974).
C H A PT ER S E V EN
Blurring the Boundaries of Genre and

Gender in Guardians of the Galaxy
and Ant-Man
Genre criticism takes for granted that most works fall within one and only one
genre with genre mixing the exception rather than the norm… The superhero
genre seems capable of absorbing and reworking all other genres.
– Henry Jenkins (2009: 17)
What has changed is not male power as such, but its form, its presentation, its
packaging. In other words, while it is apparent that styles of masculinity may alter
in very short time spans, the substance of male power does not.
– Arthur Brittan (1989: 2)
Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man are the tenth and twelfth instalments
of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Ant-Man being the concluding film of
Phase Two coming after Avengers: Age of Ultron (discussed in chapter eight). Both
are arguably important and transitional films for the franchise as they introduce
wholly new characters and offer deviations from what many had come to expect
from the genre. By 2014 criticisms of the sheer number of superhero films being
released were increasing, as were speculations as to how long the genre might be
able to sustain such levels of popularity with audiences. Steven Spielberg, one of
the central architects of blockbuster cinema in the four decades since the release
BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES OF GENRE AND GENDER 167

of Jaws in 1975 commented that, like the western before it, the superhero film
could not go on indefinitely:
We were around when the western died and there will be a time when the super-
hero movie goes the way of the western. It doesn’t mean there won’t be another
occasion where the western comes back and the superhero movie someday re-
turns. Of course, right now the superhero movie is alive and thriving… There will
come a day when the mythological stories are supplanted by some other genre
that possibly some young filmmaker is just thinking about discovering for all of
us. (Qtd. in McMillan 2015)
Spielberg is, of course, correct in his assertion that genres fall in and out of fa-
vour with audiences and there is no reason to assume that the superhero film
will be any different. One of the keys to its continued success has been its ability
to diversify and encompass other genres while remaining recognisably within
the parameters of its own, whether, as we have already seen, this might be The
Avengers embodying the traits of a war film, the tropes of the fantasy film which
are a key part of Thor, or the conspiracy thriller elements which go a long way
towards defining Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The two films featured in
this chapter are similar attempts to expand and diversify the superhero film while
remaining a recognisable part of the Marvel brand: Guardians of the Galaxy is
clearly influenced by the rich history of the space opera and Ant-Man is a heist
film which happens to feature a superhero. Both draw on these respective genres
in ways which enable their own narratives to seem vibrant and engaging at a time
when concerns were being raised about the superhero film’s reversion to formula.
They are also the two most explicitly comedic films in the MCU in Phases One
and Two and the most self-consciously postmodern: both filled with witty pop
culture allusions and playfully intertextual narrative devices that were largely
absent from the Phase One films. Ant-Man references films like Titanic, TV
shows like Thomas The Tank Engine (1984–) and includes sounds from the AT-
AT Walker in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in its audio mix, and Guardians of
the Galaxy mentions a diverse range of texts from the 1980s: films like Footloose
(1984) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and television shows like Full House
(ABC, 1987–95) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987–94) in a nostalgic film
which views an intergalactic space adventure through the prism of its protago-
nist’s memories of his childhood on Earth.
They are also the two films that were regarded as the riskiest propositions
for the MCU in Phase Two given the relative obscurity of their central charac-
ters, which led many to speculate they would both struggle to find an audience
(see McMillan 2014). The director of Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of
Justice and Justice League (2017), Zack Snyder, was dismissive of Ant-Man and,
reacting directly to Steven Spielberg’s comments quoted above stated: ‘I feel like
he’s right. But I feel like Batman and Superman are transcendent of superhero
movies in a way because they’re Batman and Superman. They are not just, like,
the flavour of the week Ant-Man, not to be mean, but whatever it is. What is
the next, Blank-Man?’ (qtd. in Khatchatourian 2015). However, both Guardians
of the Galaxy and Ant-Man exceeded expectations at the box office, the former
ending up being one of the biggest box office successes of the year, earning $773
million world-wide, and both were positively reviewed (considerably more so
than Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice).
This chapter will be an exploration of how far these two films offer devia-
tions from the superhero genre, but at the same time interrogate their depictions
of masculinity as they both provide two excellent examples of the diversity of
models of the representation of men offered by contemporary American film.
The superhero film, as Suzanne Kord and Elizabeth Krimmer have suggested,
is ‘centrally concerned with concepts of masculinity’ (2011: 109) and we have
considered what might be described as these more malleable dimensions of what
it means to be a ‘real man’ in the MCU on occasion throughout this volume:
in how Captain America’s more traditional brand of masculinity is updated to
encompass, at the same time, variations of the modern, more sensitive new man
archetype; or how Thor has been shown to both embody aspects of what Susan
Jeffords (1994) called the hard-bodied hero, but also present a vulnerability and
empathy not connected with this more traditional model. Debates concerning
the evolution of masculinity in the 1990s and into the 2000s were frequently
concerned with how far the dominant hegemonical masculine modes were in
a state of crisis (see Brittan 1989; Easthope 1992; Segal 2001; Peberdy 2011) and
some of the most interesting films of the era like Fight Club, Falling Down (1993)
and American Beauty (1999) are able to portray the perceptions of these shifting
coordinates onscreen. This book asserts that much of the discourse surrounding
this crisis was itself largely ideologically motivated and, somewhat paradoxically,
resulted not in the limitation of the spectrum of masculinities offered to men,
but, in actual fact, a broadening of them in the way that it offered a freedom
from some of the constraints imposed on what Western culture had hitherto
defined as what constitutes a ‘real man’. So, while Anthony Easthope might be
correct to argue that, ‘men live in the dominant version of masculinity … they
themselves are trapped in structures that fix and limit masculine identity. They
do what they have to do’ (1992: 7; italics in original), the characterisations of
many of the heroes in the MCU are demonstrative of trends in contemporary
American film that offer men a much wider range of complexities than were ever
offered before, or have ever been offered to women. As Lynne Segal has argued,

masculinity is ‘always in crisis’ (2001: 239; emphasis added) and this crisis, which
Peter Quill and Scott Lang, the white heterosexual males at the centre of the two
films explored in this chapter, certainly undergo variations of, becomes part of
the formative constituents of what defined masculinity in the first decades of the
new millennium on the cinema screen and in Western culture at large.
‘There’s one other name you may know me by…’: Negotiating

Peter Quill’s Identity and Masculinity in Guardians of the Galaxy
The heroes of myth embody something like the full range of ideological contra-
dictions around which the life of culture revolves, and their adventures suggest
the range of possible resolutions that the culture’s lore provides.
– Richard Slotkin (1992: 14)
Earth 1988. A young boy, Peter Quill, sits in a hospital, waiting to see his termi-
nally ill mother, Meredith, perhaps for the last time. Sitting quietly, he listens to a
mix-tape given to him by her on his 1979 Sony TPS-L2 Walkman cassette player,
blocking out the world around him with her music. The songs contained within it
will not only become a key part of the film’s diegetic and non-diegetic soundtrack,
but also a significant thematic element in its narrative, much more so than in any
superhero film before or since, with the exception of the film’s sequel Guardians
of the Galaxy: Vol. 2. Ushered to his mother for a final audience, he is presented
with the gift of a second mix-tape with her plea to ‘open it up when I am gone’.
She tells him how much he looks like his father who was ‘an angel … composed
out of pure light’, comments which at the time seem nonsensical, but are later
revealed in the sequel to be very close to the truth. In her last moments, she holds
out her hand to Peter, but the young boy is overcome with grief and refuses, in-
stead he flees out of the hospital into the darkness of the night. Out of nowhere a
beam of light and a space ship emerges from the sky, as if from a Steven Spielberg
film like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982), the likes of which Peter may well have watched a few years before with his
mother and the atmosphere of which James Gunn strives to emulate throughout
Guardians of the Galaxy. The ship sucks up the now orphaned Peter inside it and
the last sound we hear are his cries for his mother.
Twenty-six years later and thus in the diegetic year of 2014, the year of the
film’s release, we meet the man Peter has become, a selfish yet good-natured
mercenary who prefers to be referred to as the ‘legendary outlaw’ Star-Lord,
but is often disappointed when people refuse to recognise him or call him by
that name. In an introduction deliberately reminiscent of the opening scenes
of another Spielberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Quill looks for a mysterious
object on a long-abandoned planet called Morag, whose oceans only briefly re-
cede every three years to reveal hidden areas of land. Peter still listens to his
mother’s first mix-tape, but has been unable to bring himself to open the second.
It remains unspoken, but his devotion to it is a way of retaining a connection to
his mother and his childhood on Earth. James Gunn has remarked: ‘The tape
is really the character of Quill’s mother… The Walkman and the compilation
tape inside of it is the heart of the film’ (qtd. in Grow 2014).1 Later, when a blue-
skinned alien prison guard takes the Walkman from him and listens to ‘Hooked
on a Feeling’ (1968) by Blue Swede, Peter yells at him not just that the Walkman is
his, but ‘That song belongs to me!’ and risks his life to get it back. On Morag he is
searching for a mysterious artefact, as Indiana Jones once looked for the fertility
idol among the Hovitos in Peru, but the tone of Guardians of the Galaxy abruptly
shifts just six minutes into the film when Peter places the Walkman on his head
and the 1974 song ‘Come and Get Your Love’ by Redbone fills the soundtrack.
The hitherto dark and gloomy Morag is now enlivened by the incongruity of the
1970s rock song appearing in a film which identifies itself so readily as a space
opera as well as a superhero film, as it is by Peter’s exuberantly unselfconscious
dancing, his use of an unwilling rat-like creature (an Orloni) as an impromptu
microphone and even a smoothly orchestrated horizontal slide almost exactly the
same as Tom Cruise’s from Risky Business (1984), released four years before his
abduction. It is these unlikely juxtapositions, the adroitly balanced tonal shifts
and the film’s irreverent postmodernism which emerge as the defining aspects of
Guardians of the Galaxy and serve to distinguish it from much of the MCU and
other films of the superhero genre.2
The early scenes of James Gunn’s film show Peter to be a somewhat vain and
rather egocentric protagonist, offering parallels to the pre-epiphanic states of the
narcissistic Tony Stark, Stephen Strange and the arrogant Thor. Peter is shown
to have had sexual relations with Bereet the red-skinned Krylorian, but forgets
both her name and that she is even in his ship, and later boasts of his conquests
of several aliens: a ‘smoking-hot Rajak girl’, a Kree girl, and an A’askavarian, even
though they have ‘tentacles, and needles for teeth’, and he seems to initially only
care about the money he will make from the sale of the Orb he finds on Morag
(which he has ‘stolen’ from his mentor Yondu [Michael Rooker]), even when he
learns of its tremendous destructive power. However, whether the film endorses
Peter’s behaviour or criticises it, as Gamora does calling out his ‘pelvic sorcery’,
is up to audiences to decide. Peter is muscular and handsome, but Chris Pratt
introduces an element of vulnerability and an Everyman quality to the character
through his sense of humour, clumsiness and the ineptness of his braggadocio
even in these early stages which mark him as quite distinct from what we have
characterised as the hypermasculine model often found in the genre.

It is when Peter finds himself embroiled in an intergalactic conflict between
two alien species, the Kree and the Xandarians, who have been at war for millen-
nia, that he is forced to reconsider his attitude. While the war was finally brought
to an end by a fragile peace treaty, one fanatical Kree, the antagonist of the film,
Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), refuses to accept that it is over and embarks on a
genocidal spree to eradicate the Xandarians from the galaxy, referring to them
and their culture as a ‘disease’. The Kree are a harsh and unforgiving people
and Ronan is an overtly masculine figure who sees weakness as a sin, sharply
contrasted to that of the progressive Xandarians who are shown to be a caring,
multicultural and liberal culture, home to twelve billion people, self-conscious-
ly portrayed as a utopia that Earth should aspire to become in the future. The
Xandarians are led by their female Nova Prime, Irani Rael (Glenn Close), who
demands that the Kree condemn Ronan’s actions, but they refuse. Ronan says:
‘They call me terrorist, radical, zealot because I obey the ancient laws of my peo-
ple the Kree and punish those who do not!’ While Jeffrey Brown’s suggestion
that ‘for all of its light-hearted comedy and escapist space adventure, Guardians
of the Galaxy also revisions 9/11 with a rag-tag team of heroic victims, led by a
white American male, saving an alien planet from a fanatical terrorist. The film’s
central bad guy, Ronan the Accuser, is a thinly veiled symbol of the all-encom-
passing Middle-Eastern Other that stands as a constant threat to the West’ (2016:
76) is not entirely convincing, Ronan’s characterisation provides the distant in-
tergalactic conflict, a familiar element of the space opera, with a new millennial
clash of civilisations resonance.
It is these deviations from the formula of the superhero film and its densely-
layered world which separates Guardians of the Galaxy from many films of the
genre, with almost every frame full of detail to the extent that audiences still
continued to find elements within it for years after its release (see Peters 2016). Its
environment is futuristic, but it has a palpable lived-in quality reminiscent of the
early films in the Star Wars franchise. This emphatic embrace of retro-pop space
culture offers audiences not the nostalgia for the 1930s or 1950s of George Lucas’s
original trilogy of films (1977–83), but the 1970s which marked both Peter and
director James Gunn’s (b. 1970) youth. Gunn manages to effectively balance this
earthiness with the more dynamic and vibrant colourful palette of pulp science
fiction. He commented:
I like keeping the grittiness of it but I wanted to bring back some of the color
of the 1950s and ’60s. You know, pulp science fiction movies and inject a little
bit more of that pulp feel into things. So, that’s where I think that comes from.
There’s the pulp mixed with the grittiness and that’s been throughout the whole
movie – the beauty mixed with the ugliness. (Qtd. in Sciretta 2014b)
Indeed, Gunn’s bricolage of influences is decidedly postmodern in design
both visually and narratively: drawing from such disparate sources as the al-
ready-mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark and Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
but also Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Barbarella (1968), The
Right Stuff (1983) and Black Hawk Down, all of which Gunn returned to in in-
terviews (see Faraci 2014; Hunt 2014; Sciretta 2014b). Like Star Wars, a film from
which it draws so much inspiration, it is a space opera; in fact, it is, according to
Gunn, ‘one thousand percent space opera’ (qtd. in Faraci 2014), who also said:
This was intentionally my version of Star Wars. When I was first considering do-
ing the movie, the chance to make something like that was one of the things that
get me on board. Not just Star Wars, but Raiders of The Lost Ark, and other movies
like that. The stuff I loved as a kid. I wanted to make a movie that made people feel
the way they made me feel. (Qtd. in Hunt 2014; emphasis added)
Gunn’s remarks articulate his desire that Guardians of the Galaxy function as
more than just a homage to the formative films of his youth, but an attempt to
recreate the feelings which they inspired in him for a new generation of audi-
ences.3 Its chief points of nostalgia begin with Peter Quill’s Walkman and the
film’s period soundtrack, but they are primarily located in the prism of his child-
hood on Earth which permeates Peter’s intergalactic experience, as, like Captain
America, he is also a man ‘out of time’. There is a distinct sense that he is living
out his childhood fantasies in reality within the diegetic frames of the film, even
in his desire to be referred to as Star-Lord, rather than Peter, the true meaning
of which is not revealed until the film’s final moments. The fact that these pop
culture references are largely meaningless to those around him, but very familiar
to audiences, makes up a large portion of the film’s humour: whether it might
be naming his space ship, the Milano, after the actress he had a crush on from
Who’s The Boss (ABC, 1984–92), referring to an ‘outlaw’ by the name of John
Stamos, an actor in the family comedy Full House, calling a Sakaarian guard a
‘Mutant Ninja Turtle’, or shots of his personal quarters on the ship which reveal
he has decorated it with Garbage Pail Kids and Scratch N’Sniff stickers, trading
cards from the TV show Alf (NBC 1986–90), and even a Troll doll.4 This almost
dizzying range of postmodern references might be regarded as part of the mal-
aise of modern culture that some have seen as suggestive of a lack of originality
and creativity, but others have argued that they are ‘aesthetic symptoms of far
more profound developments in postmodern society as a whole’ (Booker 2007:
xviii). So while the nostalgia of Lucas’s Star Wars: A New Hope and American
Graffiti (1973) have been understood by many as an attempt to realise and recre-
ate the 1950s which remains for many Americans ‘the privileged lost object of

desire’ (Jameson 1984: 67), 1980s-influenced films like Gunn’s Guardians of the
Galaxy, Super 8 (2011) and It (2017), and television shows like Stranger Things
(Netflix, 2016–) and The Goldbergs (ABC, 2013–) attempt to recapture a sense of
innocence around the childhood experiences of their creators and large sections
of their intended audiences, which extend far beyond the teen audiences often
associated with the genre.
When Peter is arrested and sent to an intergalactic prison known as the Kyln,
it is there he gets to know the four other characters who will later be referred to
as the ‘guardians of the galaxy’: a talking raccoon-like mammal by the name of
Rocket, a giant tree-beast called Groot, a green-skinned female assassin called
Gamora, and the muscular and taciturn Drax, whose family had been murdered
by Ronan. Like Drax, each of them are marked by the trauma of their past (ex-
cept Groot whose background remains unrevealed): Gamora’s entire race, the
Zehoberi people, were killed by Thanos in front of her when she was a child,
who then adopted her, raising to be one of the most feared killers in the galaxy.
Rocket, whose real name is 89P13, was tortured and genetically altered, and he
is not the last of his people, but the only one of his kind, eloquently describ-
ing his predicament with the line, ‘Ain’t no thing like me ‘cept me’. They are all
examples of what Francis Pheasant-Kelly described as the ‘wounded hero’, the
likes of which became so prominent in post-9/11 American film and they join
the ranks of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and even, to a lesser extent, Steve Rogers
(2013: 144). The group are initially only sarcastically referred to as the ‘guardians
of the galaxy’ by Ronan, but later come to earn the evocative sobriquet and, to
their own surprise, find a sense of purpose and belonging among each other that
each had thought lost.
Much of the film’s comedic elements derive from its expressive linguistic
wordplay: from Peter’s surprisingly risqué joke about what a blacklight might
reveal if used in his spaceship (‘like a Jackson Pollack painting’), to his final ‘troll-
ing’ of Yondu at the end of the film with the very personal gift of an actual Troll
doll, both as a joke, a gift and an apology for lying to the man he says was ‘the
closest thing I had to a family’.5 Groot’s extremely limited vocabulary – only the
words ‘I am Groot’ – has a variety of meanings extrapolated from it throughout
the course of the film, including ‘We need to save them’, ‘they are the only friends
we have’, ‘they are ungrateful’ and ‘it’s better than eleven percent’ among others.6
One places the pronoun ‘his’ in inverted commas because of Rocket’s throwaway
line instructing Groot to ‘Learn genders, man!’ when he tells the endearing tree-
like character to place a bag over ‘his’ (Peter’s) head which Groot does not seem
to understand, implying that his species have no gender (although the character
is referred to as ‘he’ throughout the film). This wordplay continues with the char-
acterisation of Drax who comes from a planet with no understanding of simile
Fig. 20: The eponymous heroes of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): “a thief, two thugs, an assassin
and a maniac”
and metaphor, so when Peter puts a finger to his throat indicating that he will be
able to finally get his revenge and kill Ronan, he too is unable to understand what
it means. When Rocket explains, ‘His people are completely literal, metaphors
are going to go over his head’, even this is misconstrued and Drax responds with,
‘Nothing goes over my head, my reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.’ The whole
team struggles with Peter’s references to 1970s and 1980s American culture, the
most memorable of which, and the one that inspired a legion of memes, is when
Peter relates to Gamora a ‘legend’ from his planet about the inspirational value
of dance. When he tells her ‘It’s called Footloose and in it a great hero named
Kevin Bacon teaches an entire city with sticks up their buts that dancing, well, is
the greatest thing there is’, her first question is ‘Who put the sticks up their butt?’
but later as they go into the film’s final battle Gamora proudly tells Peter, ‘We are
just like Kevin Bacon!’ One might speculate that one of the reasons Guardians of
the Galaxy was able to engage with a broad variety of audiences are these witty
metatextual references which are very different to the majority of those found in
contemporary American films, which most often refer to what are, at the time,
current pop culture events and have the tendency to date quickly. Those con-
tained in James Gunn’s film do not date in such a way, because they already are
dated and mine a general fascination for all things connected to 1970s and 1980s
culture.

When Ronan takes possession of the Orb and attempts to use it in his genocidal
war against the Xandarians, only needing to touch the surface of the Xandar with
it to see the whole planet destroyed, Peter’s first instinct is to flee, but he changes
his mind and gives a speech about them being ‘losers’ heavily reminiscent of
The Goonies (1985) ‘our time’ speech: ‘I look around at us. You know what I see?
Losers. I mean like folks who have lost stuff. And we have, man we have. All of
us. Our homes, our families, normal lives.’ Rocket asks him, ‘What are you, some
saint all of a sudden?’ echoing the comments made by Rhodes to Stark in Iron
Man and Loki to Thor at the climax of Thor. Peter’s emotional growth had started
earlier in the film with his decision to risk his life to save Gamora in space, but it
is this moment where he decides to put aside his selfishness and take a stand for
something, a decision he boils down to as ‘the choice between giving a shit and
not giving a shit’. It is fitting that it is from then on people finally recognise him
as Star-Lord, first Ronan’s henchman Korath, but also the Xandarian Rhomann
Dey (John C. Reilly) and Gamora, each of whom had previously refused to re-
fer to him by that name. Peter’s brand of masculinity offers just as much of a
paradox as we have seen with many of the superheroes in the MCU: he is a white
heterosexual male the likes of which have filled American screens as the apex of
popular culture for a century, but on the other hand, his is a multi-dimensional
one which involves the acceptance of, on the surface at least, vulnerability, empa-
thy and humility. Peter is quite removed from the hard-bodied males to be found
in American movies of the 1980s when he was abducted in the penultimate year
of Reagan’s presidency, but the film shows that even in space the responsibility
for saving the galaxy still falls to a white heterosexual American man. The film is
a vigorously nostalgic text on a variety of levels, but it is not nostalgic for the hy-
permasculinity of performers like Stallone and Schwarzeneggar whom Jeffords
suggested stood for ‘not only for a type of national character – heroic, aggressive,
and determined – but for the nation itself’ (1994: 2) and who also returned to
the screens in the decade after 9/11, often together, in films like The Expendables
(2010), The Expendables 2 (2012) and Escape Plan (2013). However, at the same
time it is a film which, as much of popular cinema does, pushes the experiences
of women to ‘the margins’ (King 2000: 108) and tells a story about men. As men-
tioned in the previous chapter, Guardians of the Galaxy has the lowest percentage
of female-speaking characters across Phases One and Two of the MCU, with only
six women who utter a line of dialogue in the entire film: Meredith Quill, Bereet,
Nebula, Gamora, Nova Prime and Corrina. The other women which populate
its narrative, none of whom have a speaking role, are referred to in the credits
as things like Pretty Xandarian, Sad Woman with Horns, Sad Krylorian Girl,
Corpsman Dey’s Wife, Crying Xandarian Citizen or Tortured Pink Girl. This
seems to cast doubt on the sincerity of director James Gunn’s 2016 comments
that, ‘I am sick of stories where there are a bunch of fully realized male charac-
ters and one female character, whose primary characteristic is simply being “the
girl” or the personality-less object of some man’s affections’ in a different light
(qtd. in Baker-Whitelaw 2016). While it is true that these men (including Rocket)
demonstrate that the hypermasculine model is now regarded as inadequate in a
variety of ways and the film offers in its place a more flexible mode of masculin-
ity, its representation of women is decidedly problematic.7
The eponymous characters of Guardians of the Galaxy never refer to each
other explicitly as a family until the film’s sequel (although Gamora alludes to it
once), but one might argue that it earns the use of the term due to the strength of
their bond and the richness (for the genre) of their characterisations, especially if
contrasted to the egregious scene in Suicide Squad where Diablo (Jay Hernandez)
is seen to shout to his fellow anti-heroes, ‘I lost one family. I can’t lose another!’
in a film that does not warrant the use of the term in any shape or form. This
bond is articulated in what might be the film’s most moving moment, as Groot
elects to give his life to save his new family and in the only time in the film he
says something other than ‘I am Groot’ he tells them all, ‘We are Groot’. Groot’s
‘death’ is followed by an audacious callback to Footlose, as Peter distracts Ronan
with, of all things, a demand for a dance off, one of several moments given to
Quill that it seems hard to imagine any other superhero in the MCU doing, the
other most notable perhaps being his remark, ‘There’s a little bit of pee coming
out of me right now’. He grabs the Orb knowing that it will probably kill him, but
hoping it will at least save the entire planet.8 In the film’s final gesture of togeth-
erness, the guardians of the galaxy earn their name and refuse to let Peter face
his ordeal alone, by linking hands, and somehow find themselves able to contain
the Orb’s power. In doing so Ronan is defeated by the very qualities of coopera-
tion, community and emotion that he regards as weakness, and so far beneath
him. During the sequence, Peter sees a vision of his mother on her deathbed, but
this time agrees to her original plea to ‘take my hand’ and in doing so he is able
to acknowledge her death and her loss, and come to terms with his past and his
place in the world. In the aftermath of the battle, he finally opens the letter she
had written to him twenty-six years before which poignantly reveals, in another
of example of the film’s wordplay, that the name she called him as a child was ‘my
little Star-Lord’.
About the space opera Gary Westfahl has written: ‘To remain at the forefront
of science fiction, which esteems freshness and originality, space opera must con-
tinuously reinvent itself’ (2003: 198), an assertion that could be just as readily
applied to the superhero film. What James Gunn achieves with Guardians of the
Galaxy is a dynamic reinvigoration of the genre by fusing it with the space op-
era and embracing the iconic films of his youth in ways beyond merely paying

homage to them. It is able to transcend many of the parameters of the the super-
hero film and in some ways more traditional understandings of what constitutes
hegemonic masculinity, but it still remains entrenched in the dominant ideology
of the culture in which it is made.
‘It’s not about saving our world, it’s about saving theirs’:
The Redemption of the Father in Ant-Man
These films depend upon similarly contrived scenarios that recuperate failing
fatherhood through enactment of paternal protectiveness in extreme circum-
stances, whereupon the reconstitution of a normative familial unit is not the
point of the protagonists’ narrative journey, so much as the revalidation of his
initially derogated fatherhood. These extreme scenarios depict the redemption of
inadequate fathers, deflecting feminist critiques of masculinity, by positing the
male’s fulfilment of the role of father-protector as compensating for domestic and
personal failings…
– Hannah Hamad (2013: 250)
As we have seen on numerous occasions throughout this volume so far the MCU
and the superhero genre as a whole has displayed a questionable tendency to
prioritise the experiences of men in their narratives and in the process largely
erase the experiences of women, sometimes figuratively, but often quite literally.
This can be seen in the MCU as early as Iron Man and Iron Man 2, where Howard
Stark plays an integral part in Tony Stark’s life, but his mother, Maria, barely
merits a mention; in The Incredible Hulk, Betty’s father, General Ross, is a central
character, but her mother is entirely absent; in both Thor and Thor: The Dark
World it is Odin who plays a prominent role, while Frigga is killed off in scenes
which are designed to do little more than provide a motivation for Thor’s future
actions. Even in Guardians of the Galaxy, while Peter Quill’s mother appears
in the opening scene and remains a lingering presence, the film is much more
about fathers and father figures: bad ones (like Thanos and Ronan), traumatised
ones (like Drax), ambiguous ones (like Yondu) and absent ones like Peter’s, who
was revealed to be the Celestial Ego (Kurt Russell) and given a central role in
Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2.9 It is clear to see that these are not isolated ex-
amples, but rather foundational tenets on which the MCU and the superhero
genre is based. Ant-Man emerges as one of the most vibrant of the Phase Two
films, but it is also one of the most egregious examples of what Robert Walser has
termed, ‘exscription’; that is, the exclusion of females from popular narratives, or
the ‘total denial of anxieties through the articulation of fantastic worlds without
women’ (2014: 110).
Ant-Man was actually one of the original films to be discussed at the first
Marvel Studios panel back in 2006, even prior to the release of Iron Man, which
featured Kevin Feige, Jon Favreau and the film’s then director, Edgar Wright,
who had been connected to the property since as early as 2003. Wright stayed
with Ant-Man for more than a decade, but on 23 May 2014 Marvel Studios an-
nounced that he was no longer contributing to the project, citing ‘differences
in their vision of the film’ (qtd. in Sims 2014) as the reason for his departure.
Evangeline Lilly, who played Hope van Dyne in the film, suggested in interviews
that Wright’s vision had deviated too far from the thematically and aesthetically
consistent world Marvel had endeavoured for so long to create and it was this
which led to him leaving the film:
I saw with my own eyes that [after Wright left] Marvel had just pulled the script
into their world. I mean, they’ve established a universe, and everyone has come to
expect a certain aesthetic [and] a certain feel for Marvel films… It just would have
taken you away from this cohesive universe they’re trying to create. And therefore
it ruins the suspended disbelief that they’ve built. (Qtd. in Vary 2014)
Like Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man also begins with a 1980s-set prologue
and as with Gunn’s space opera, the scene goes a long way towards establish-
ing many of the film’s recurring thematic motifs. In Washington DC in 1989,
inside the still-being-built S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters known as the Triskelion
(which audiences had only recently seen destroyed in The Winter Soldier), ge-
nius inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) storms through the building and
the first words of the film are his: ‘Stark!’ Standing in front of a panel comprised
of Mitchell Carson (S.H.I.E.L.D. Head of Defense), Peggy Carter (still played by
Hayley Atwell) and Howard Stark, he demands to know why S.H.I.E.L.D. have
gone behind his back and tried to replicate his invention, the Pym Particle. Stark
informs the audience that the Pym Particle is a ‘miracle’ and ‘the most revolu-
tionary science ever developed’, but it is something Pym is unwilling to share
as he knows how powerful it is and does not trust S.H.I.E.L.D. to utilise it as
ethically as it would be used in his hands. Carson insists that Pym consider the
bigger picture, as the Cold War and the United States needs ‘a soldier’ like him,
but Pym refuses, preferring to define himself as ‘a scientist’. Stark then tells him
to ‘act like one!’ as for Howard Stark (and later his son), scientists invent tech-
nology and do not necessarily ruminate on the consequences of how it might be
used. The prologue ends with Pym’s promise that, ‘As long as I am alive nobody
will ever get that formula’ and the film which follows will portray the challenge
he faces keeping his word and the threat to the world if he does not.
Hank Pym is one of the film’s central characters and the original Ant-Man,

but he is not its protagonist, as the narrative moves briskly from 1989 to the
present day and Pym is shown to be looking for a younger man to carry on the
Ant-Man mantle. He believes he may have found him in Scott Lang (Paul Rudd)
even though Lang was sentenced to five years in San Quentin Penitentiary for
breaking and entering, grand larceny and stealing approximately $4 million
from the international cyber security and data storage conglomerate, Vista Corp.
Despite his prison sentence, Lang’s motives are shown to be altruistic as he only
committed the crime after learning that the company was taking millions of dol-
lars from its customers, so he broke in and transferred all the money back to the
victims. The casting of Rudd, an actor with a primarily comedic background,
like Chris Pratt who played Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy (they even
starred together in Parks and Recreation [NBC, 2009–15]), brings an improvisa-
tory tone to the series largely absent since Iron Man 2. Lang finds life after prison
difficult, as even though he has a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering, as a
former convict the only work he can secure is as a teller at Baskin and Robbins,
but even they fire him when they learn about his criminal past.
Pym sees something of his own situation reflected in Lang’s predicament.
Just as Pym became estranged from his daughter Hope after the death of her
mother, Lang struggles to reconnect with his infant daughter, Cassie. When they
finally meet, Pym tells Lang, ‘Before Hope lost her mother [Janet Pym] she used
to look at me like I was the greatest man in the world. Now she looks at me and
there’s just disappointment. It’s too late for me, but not for you.’ Hope refuses to
call Hank ‘dad’ and she even led the board of his own company against him, an
act which saw him replaced by his arrogant protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll),
who becomes the film’s antagonist. Hope and Pym only reconnected, in a limited
way, after Hope learned that Cross was embarking on dangerous experiments in
order to replicate the Pym Particle. Similarly, Lang has to prove himself to his
ex-wife Maggie, his daughter, and everyone around him that he is worthy of be-
ing a father and can function as a responsible member of the community. Both
mothers, Janet Pym and Maggie, are marginalised, with Janet being killed off
in flashback (and never even showing her face either then or in family photos in
the Pym house) acting only as motivation for the breakdown of the relationship
between father and daughter, and Maggie, who has even less screen time than her
new husband Paxton (who tells Scott, ‘You don’t know the first thing about being
a father!’), who is portrayed as cold and lacking empathy, refusing to allow Scott
to see Cassie or even attend the child’s birthday party.
It is perhaps fitting that as the first of the MCU’s central protagonists to be
a father (with the exception of Hawkeye in Avengers: Age of Ultron whose fam-
ily are shown onscreen, but play a much smaller role), Scott Lang’s (and also
Hank Pym’s) paternal plight is portrayed in ways that had become familiar to
Fig. 21: The redemption of the father: Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Scott Lang (Paul
Rudd) discuss the similarities of their plight in Ant-Man (2015)
new millennial audiences as two of many fathers (or father figures) similarly
challenged by questions concerning their masculinity and patriarchal status in
the era: like Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds,
Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) in Taken, John Creasy (Denzel Washington) in
Man on Fire (2004), Tom Stall/Joey Cusack (Viggo Mortensen) in A History of
Violence (2005), to name but a few. Dramatisations like these have been regarded
by many as an embodiment of the prevailing fears and anxieties concerning the
perceived erosion of paternal power and privilege, as Nicola Rehling in her book
Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular
Cinema observed: ‘In the last few decades, fears about how absent fathers damage
their sons have been endlessly articulated in the US and British media, as well as
neo-conservative and neo-liberal political rhetoric, with the supposition being
that only a restoration of paternal authority will heal male pain and, by exten-
sion, the ailing social body’ (2009: 65). Each of the men in these aforementioned
films have their masculinity tested by events in the narrative and are offered
the opportunity of reconstituting it (and in doing so re-establishing traditional
patriarchal order) through the redemptive acts of violence they are ‘reluctantly’
forced to participate in as they protect or often rescue, not the sons mentioned by
Rehling above, but the young girls in their charge. While they are each personal
stories, their plights should be taken as standing for broader cultural tenden-
cies, as Donna Perbedy has argued: ‘Fatherhood is equated with nationhood and

considered to be an inherent part of masculinity; if the central position of the
father to the family is threatened, the threat constitutes a direct attack on the US,
and its absence critically damages men and male identity’ (2011: 125).
Pym suspended his relationship with Cross because he saw too much of the
dark side of his own personality in him. However, unlike in the comics where
Pym has been shown as, on occasion, a domestic abuser and an alcoholic, the
film refuses to portray him as anything other than a grieving and misunder-
stood genius who is just as virtuous as Scott Lang. Both characters are tasked by
the narrative with seeking redemption, but it is quite clear that they have done
very little which they need to redeem themselves for: flashbacks show that Pym
was not responsible for his wife’s death and his only crime is the distance the
traumatic loss created between him and Hope. Scott might have served a prison
sentence, but his was a Robin Hood-like crime striking back at the capitalist cor-
porate machine and, according to the information the film provides us with, not
at all for personal gain.
Evangeline Lilly’s Hope makes an interesting addition to the MCU’s roster
of female characters and she has every attribute that might make her a suitable
candidate for being a superhero, were she not a woman. She is intelligent, deter-
mined, strong, and is even shown to be physically able to beat Lang in a fight. Yet
she is defined by her relationship with her father and infantilised in the process
as Hank Pym refuses to allow her to use the Ant-Man suit, worried about her
safety after the death of her mother, even though she is obviously more quali-
fied than Lang. Pym’s choice of Scott over Hope is a richly suggestive one, and
audiences are asked to decide whether it is illustrative of the MCU’s prioritisa-
tion of men and the masculine experience over that of women with a frequency
that was decidedly problematic, or a commentary on it. Furthermore, Hope is
often equated with Lang’s daughter, the six-year-old Cassie: Pym says to Lang,
‘This is your chance to earn that look in your daughter’s eyes’, the one he has
lost in his relationship with Hope, who is now a woman in her mid-thirties. He
continues, ‘It’s not about saving our world it’s about saving theirs’, an awkward
but familiar distinction between the world of the white male hero and that of the
female sphere where females, regardless of their age, exist not to rescue, but to
be rescued.
In the run up to the film’s release Marvel’s fictional diegetic news organisation
WHIH World News, which had first appeared at the Stark Expo in Iron Man 2,
then seen at the Battle at Culver University in The Incredible Hulk, before featur-
ing regularly in both the films and the televisual branch of the MCU in Marvel’s
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., released three news promos for the film posted online on
2, 7 and 16 July 2015, fronted by Christine Everheart, the journalist featured in
Iron Man and Iron Man 2 and, as the most interesting paratexts do, the reports
offer some interesting engagements with the film’s narrative. The third and final
of the segments features an interview with Scott Lang live from prison in which
WHIH World News is revealed to be a subsidiary of Vista Corp, the same com-
pany who Lang stole from and their reporting is obviously biased against his
case. Christine attacks Lang calling him a ‘self-proclaimed whistle blower’ and
Lang admits that he took ‘service charges’ from the burglary, implying that his
crime might not have been as entirely altruistic as the film’s narrative would have
us believe.10 Christine also says Lang has ‘a few high-profile burglaries already
on record’ which are never mentioned in the film, nor are they denied by Lang,
but would help us understand why Lang is considered such a master thief rather
than a novice even though the film mentions only one burglary. These elements,
if they had been a part of the central narrative of Ant-Man, would have made
Lang’s character more complicated and are further evidence of the MCU’s in-
ability to embrace moral ambiguity in its superheroes.11
Cross is driven increasingly unstable by his prolonged exposure to the recre-
ated Pym Particle and becomes desperate to prove himself to his father figure
Pym in a way that recalls Loki’s desire to earn the respect of Odin. When he
learns that Pym has replaced him with a new surrogate son, it is Lang who then
becomes the target of his ire and the film’s final battle between Ant-Man and
Cross, now wearing the Yellowjacket suit, provides Lang with the opportunity to
prove himself as a man and as a father that he has been looking for and is fittingly
set mostly in his infant daughter Cassie’s bedroom where Cross had gone to take
revenge on the man who has taken his place. To defeat him Lang is forced to
enter the atomic realm by shrinking himself, the same process which had ‘killed’
Pym’s wife decades before, a place where ‘all concepts of time and space become
irrelevant’. However, whereas Janet Pym remained trapped inside, Lang hears
Cassie’s cries of ‘Daddy!’ and is able to return in a way that Janet Pym was not:
because men in the MCU are braver and more resourceful than women, and
they simply love their children more. Their combined successful defeat of Cross
enables Lang and Pym to both redeem themselves in the eyes of their families
and the law, marking Scott’s transformation and reacceptance into the family
unit where he is now literally welcomed back to the family table and is able to
see Cassie whenever he likes (and is also rewarded by being given a romance
with Hope). At the same time, Hank Pym’s relationship with Hope is revived
as she once again appears to have opened up and let her father into her life and,
according to the conventions of Hollywood film, is able to call him ‘Dad’ again.
The film’s end credits stinger shows Hank Pym finally reluctantly acknowledging
that Hope is more than capable of being a superhero and he offers her the Wasp
suit once worn by her mother. Shortly after the release of Ant-Man Marvel an-
nounced that a sequel was in development to be called Ant-Man and the Wasp

(2019), which, as we have already noted, would be the first MCU film to have a
female character as the lead with their name in the title. Hope’s diegetic response
to being given the suit was perhaps echoed by that of many women in the audi-
ence in the year of the film’s release: ‘About damn time!’
Notes
1 Additionally, Gunn’s musical choices offer metaphorical connections to the onscreen

action in the form of David Bowie’s ‘Moonage Daydream’ (1971) which plays as we are
introduced to the bizarre ‘planet’ Knowhere, the rebellious punk-inflected ‘Cherry
Bomb’ (1976) by the Runaways as the team form for a heroic group shot (which
Gunn undercuts by showing Rocket adjusting his underwear, Gamora yawning and
Peter scratching his nose), or ‘O-o-h Child’ (1970) by the Five Stairsteps as the song
which Peter uses to challenge Ronan to a dance-off at the film’s climax. This pro-
cess becomes even more apparent in the sequel with musical selections like George
Harrison’s polytheistic anthem ‘My Sweet Lord’ (1970) heard as the film arrives at
Ego’s planet (which is also Ego himself). About this choice, Gunn remarked, ‘And
there’s this big creation myth about how he came about and it was kind of lined up
with that. I’ve always been into Hindu creation myths and there’s some similarities
there’ (qtd. in Hiatt 2017). ‘Brandy’ (1972) by Looking Glass is used by Ego as a meta-
phor for his and Peter’s status as outsiders who cannot be tied to those around them.
Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ (1977) is used twice, once when the group splits up and
again at the climax when they come back together again to defeat Ego. Gunn com-
mented that the song ‘is about the Guardians, at least in the way we use it’ (ibid.).
2 These tonal shifts are a key part of James Gunn’s signature filmmaking style and
are apparent in his directorial debut, Slither (2006) and his second film, the darkly
comedic superhero movie Super (2010) in which the unremarkable Frank Darbo
(Rainn Wilson) embarks on a life of crime-fighting when he becomes the Crimson
Bolt. Darbo attacks anyone who contravenes his strict moral code, even those who cut
the line in a queue for a movie theatre, leaving them with his memorable catchphrase
‘Shut up, crime!’
3 When Steven Spielberg, who had been somewhat critical of the genre, was asked
in 2016 what his favourite superhero film was, he replied: ‘I love the Superman of
Richard Donner, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and the first Iron Man, but
the superhero film that impressed me most is one that does not take itself too seri-
ously, Guardians of the Galaxy.’ He continued: ‘I left with the feeling of having seen
something new in movies, without any cynicism or fear of being dark when needed’
(qtd. Kyriazis 2016). These comments led James Gunn to say, ‘This is the greatest com-
pliment I’ve ever received. I’m teary-eyed right now. No one has influenced Guardians
[of the Galaxy] more’ (ibid.).
4 The sequel contains references to Knight Rider (NBC, 1982–86), Cheers (NBC, 1982–
93), the video game Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
(Various, 1983–85), The Smurfs (NBC, 1981–89) and the actress Heather Locklear
who Peter might have seen in T.J. Hooker (Various, 1982–86).
5 While Peter’s joke about Jackson Pollack (1912–56) is one of the funniest moments
of the film, one might ask whether Peter, who left Earth as a small boy in 1988 and
seems to have had no contact with Earth culture since, would know enough about the
painter’s work to make the remark.
6 In Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 it is also taken to mean ‘They were looking at me
funny’, ‘I’m glad you don’t want me to wear this hat’, ‘He called me twig’ and most
memorably ‘Welcome to the fucking Guardians of the Galaxy!’
7 In a humorous aside which perhaps belies the seriousness of these discrepancies, in a
presentation entitled ‘Super Daddy Issues, Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Superhero
Films’, Kara Kvaran suggested, referring to the fact that three of the superheroes of
the MCU were named Chris, ‘The best way to be a superhero is to be a blonde white
guy named Chris’ (qtd. in Coventry 2015).
8 Ronan’s attack on Xandar was said to contain the highest onscreen body count in the
history of film, as opposed to offscreen deaths, with around 80,000 Nova Corps pilots
being killed in the attack. The figures for Guardians of the Galaxy were 83,871, nearly
fifteen times higher than those of the second-placed film Dracula Untold (2014) (see
Go Compare 2016).
9 Yondu Udonta gets the most interesting arc in Guardians of the Galaxy and the se-
quel, a testimony to Gunn’s writing and Rooker’s charismatic performance. Yondu’s
affection for Quill is very clear in the first film and in the second he sacrifices himself
for the man he regards as his son with the simple but poignant line, delivered in
Rooker’s Alabama-inflected drawl, telling Peter, ‘He [Ego] may have been your father,
boy, but he wasn’t your daddy’. Over Yondu’s funeral the Cat Stevens song ‘Father and
Son’ (1970) plays.
10 In the MCU-set comic book prologue Ant-Man. Scott Lang: Small Time (2015) more
details are revealed about the Vista Corp robbery which are entirely absent from the
film. Lang is explicitly shown to steal jewellery and clothes, which also casts him in a
very different light to that shown in Ant-Man.
11 On the commentary track included on the Blu-ray release of the film Paul Rudd al-
ludes to a vague sense of dissatisfaction about this and asserts he would have liked to
have seen more of an exploration of what he describes as Scott Lang’s ‘questionable
moral code’.

C H A PT ER EI G H T
‘Isn’t that why we fight? So we

can end the fight and go home?’:
The Enduring American Monomyth
in Avengers: Age of Ultron
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 deal-
ing 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 inter-
views 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 earn-
ing 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, argu-
ably, 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
THE ENDURING AMERICAN MONOMYTH IN AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON 187

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 commu-
nity, 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 su-
perhero 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 myth-
ological 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 im-
plications 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 ap-
proximately 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 inter-
actions 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 in-
tervention 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 regu-
larly 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 exam-
ples 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 graf-
fiti 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 projec-
tion 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 af-
ter 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 dubi-
ous 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.
II.
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 me-
morialised, 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 vic-
tory 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 es-
tablished 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 rap-
port 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 play-
fully 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 dis-
cuss 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 med-
dle 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 du-
plicitous 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 conscious-
ness 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 nar-
rative 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 mis-
sion? 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 refer-
ence 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 barba-
rism 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’ play-
ful 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 there-
fore 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 through-
out 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 com-
plements the Frankenstein allusions at the film’s centre.
Executive Producer Victoria Alonso remarked that Ultron emerges as ‘al-
most 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 be-
comes 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 connec-
tion between father and son, implying more intimacy between Klaue and the
self-proclaimed billionnaire, playboy and philanthropist, than Stark had sug-
gested. 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 mo-
ments ‘dredged from their darkest memories’ (O’Sullivan 2016: 1). After claiming
they will not affect him because of his godlike status, Thor hallucinates a celebra-
tion 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 hysterec-
tomy 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 nev-
er 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 pow-
ers 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 ‘disas-
ter 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 por-
tray ‘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 con-
tain 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-
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)
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) chil-
dren, 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 be-
ing 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 re-
ferring 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:
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 actu-
ally 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 repeat-
edly 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 tanta-
lising 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 al-
ter 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 ro-
bot, 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 se-
quence 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 imag-
ery 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 get-
ting 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 situ-
ations. 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 provid-
ing 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 do-
ing 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 situ-
ation 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 pro-
nounced 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
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
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 reveal-
ing 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 pos-
sess 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 com-
plaining to the latter: ‘You locked me in my room!’
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 in-
nocent 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 attend-
ing 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 participa-
tion 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 bound-
aried 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 significa-
tions and investments in “democracy,” the “free world,” “leading a free-world,”
“freedom,” “defender,” and so on … [and it is] those strings of signifiers that con-
struct 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 individual-
ism, 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 demonstrat-
ed 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 kid-
napped niece Debbie. Douglas Pye contended that The Searchers ‘detaches us
from Ethan so that we are required to perceive the neurotic and irrational na-
ture 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 abro-
gated 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 call-
back 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 tri-
umphalist 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
Notes
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 franchis-
es: 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 quintes-
sence 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).
THE MARVEL CINEMATIC
UNIVERSE ON TELEVISION
C H A PT ER N I N E
‘What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for?’:

The MCU on the Small Screen in Marvel’s
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s
Agent Carter
The principle S.H.I.E.L.D. was founded upon was pure… Protection. One word.
Sometimes to protect one man against himself, other times to protect the planet
against an alien invasion from another universe … but the belief that drives us all
is the same, whether it’s one man, or all mankind…
– Nick Fury, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘The Beginning of the End’ (1.22)
I.
After the financial and critical success of the Phase One Marvel Cinematic
Universe films and the purchase of Marvel Entertainment by the Walt Disney
Company in 2009, Marvel Studios began exploring the possibility of expand-
ing the MCU onto the small screen. With such a diverse cast of characters and
a decade’s worth of plots to explore already told in the comics, the possibilities
seemed to be almost endless. The densely populated Marvel canon would allow a
television show to draw from, complement and expand the mythology of the film
series which had reached seven releases by the time of the broadcast of the first
episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on 24 September 2013. What Marvel
and ABC attempted was something that had never been done on such a scale
in television history: the creation of a weekly programme which both existed
‘WHAT DOES S.H.I.E.L.D. STAND FOR?’ 207

in its own right, but at the same time was closely interwoven with a film fran-
chise, with both properties running concurrently. As Jeph Loeb, then Head of
Television for Marvel Studios, suggested, ‘We love to tie into the films, and we’re
creating a sort of living jigsaw puzzle that we can add pieces to as we go’ (qtd. in
Benjamin 2015: 209).
This ‘living jigsaw puzzle’ that Loeb described has taken many forms since
2013. Almost every episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. features references
to the events and characters within the film franchise, as in when agent Grant
Ward (Brett Dalton) is said to have scored the ‘highest marks since Romanov’ on
a S.H.I.E.L.D. weapon range in ‘Pilot’ (1.01), or when the psychologist Andrew
Garner (Blair Underwood) is shown to be working at Culver University where
Bruce Banner once conducted research and was confronted by General Ross dur-
ing The Incredible Hulk in ‘One of Us’ (2.13); or Mike Peterson (aka Deathlok)
asks ‘Did I beat Captain America’s time?’ in one S.H.I.E.L.D. training challenge
in ‘The Bridge’ (1.10). One of the central narrative elements of the first season, the
centipede serum, which is said to be a ‘cocktail of the Erskine formula and gam-
ma rays’ in ‘Pilot’ (1.01) but also to contain the Extremis virus from Iron Man
3. At other times characters from the films themselves are featured, like Nick
Fury in ‘0–8–4’ (1.02) and the Season One finale ‘Beginning of the End’ (1.22),
and Maria Hill, Lady Sif and President Matthew Ellis, who have each appeared
multiple times throughout the television series. In one memorable episode at the
start of Season Three, ‘Laws of Nature’ (3.01), President Ellis manages to refer
to the dramatic events of The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thor: The Dark
World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier all in one televised address, as
he informs the world, ‘I don’t need to remind people of the recent catastrophes in
New York, London and most recently Sokovia, tragedies that seem to be grow-
ing in number and scale and the organisations we had in place to protect us,
S.H.I.E.L.D., brought airships raining down in our nation’s capital…’. Events
in the films are not only referenced but integrated into episodes like ‘The Well’
(1.08), which was broadcast the week after the cinematic release of Thor: The Dark
World and dealt with the aftermath of Thor and Malekith’s battle in Greenwich.
The later episodes of the Season Two were shown to build up to the events of Age
of Ultron with mentions of Strucker’s experiments on humans in ‘The Frenemy
of My Enemy’ (2.18) and Coulson’s retrieval of a memory stick in ‘The Dirty Half
Dozen’ (2.19) being key to finding Loki’s sceptre which opens Age of Ultron.
Yet, as previously mentioned, there is a hierarchy across the MCU with the
cinematic branch firmly established as the most important texts and events
which happen within them flowing down towards the television shows, web se-
ries, video games and graphic novels, but very rarely the other way around.1 The
most obvious example of this is the fact that none of the film’s major characters,
the Avengers themselves, appear in anything other than news footage, images
from the films or photographs outside of the cinematic releases. Several high-
profile creative figures in the MCU have praised the television show, but at the
same time been slightly dismissive of it, including Joss Whedon himself, who
directed the pilot episode, but suggested that it was sometimes stuck with ‘left-
overs’ (qtd. in Fitzpatrick 2016).2 It is true that the show focuses primarily on ‘the
peripheral people … the people on the edges of the grand adventures’ (Whedon
qtd. in Wigler 2013), but Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s Agent Carter
and the Netflix television shows Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist
(explored in chapter ten) are able to forge a distinct identity of their own, at the
same time as contributing to what we might refer to as the ‘Marvel Cinematic
Universe experience’ in a range of palpable and compelling ways: whether in
their ability to expand the mythology of the MCU with their extended and ex-
pansive long form storylines, or in the case of the Netflix versions, exploring
more adult-oriented themes. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., with its twenty-two
episodes per season, is able to delve further into the world of the Marvel universe,
linking the film series together in a way it would never be able to achieve given
the inherent time constraints on the cinematic medium compared to its televi-
sion counterpart. It is able to move around the globe on a weekly basis and even
venture to other planets, dimensions and realities, it can go backwards and for-
wards in time in episodes like ‘Purpose in the Machine’ (3.02), which dramatises
early meetings of the HYDRA society in the nineteenth century, or return to
World War II in episodes like ‘Shadows’ (2.01) which brings back characters like
Peggy Carter, ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan and Jim Morita.3
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. also adopts many of the narrative devices of
the film series, with its own televisual version of the stingers or post-credits teas-
ers which come after the final act break and before the end credits of the show, the
most striking of which is perhaps the surprise Nick Fury cameo in ‘Beginning of
the End’ (1.22), or the reveal of Skye’s (also known by then as Quake) vigilante
status in ‘Ascension’ (3.22), or the final episode of Season Four, ‘World’s End’
(4.22), which shows Coulson waking up on a giant space station. With its glossy
televisual aesthetic, extensive action scenes and comparatively large budget,
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is certainly an example of what many have now
come to refer to as ‘Cinematic TV’ (see Nelson 2007: 11). The superhero renais-
sance, as the two following chapters explore, was not just a cinematic one, but
a televisual one too. While during the 1990s superhero-themed TV shows were
extremely rare – Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (ABC, 1993–
97), being one of the very few to achieve success – the first decades of the new
millennium saw a proliferation of them from Heroes (NBC, 2006–10), Smallville
(Various, 2001–11), and Arrow (The CW, 2012–), to The Flash (The CW, 2014–),

Supergirl (CBS, 2015–), Gotham (Fox, 2014–) and many others. Unlike their DC
counterparts, which were disconnected from the film versions and not part of
the DCEU, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s Agent Carter and the likes
of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist are an integral part of the
expansive MCU project.
II.
As the title of the show suggests, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is set around
the fictional organisation of S.H.I.E.L.D. which initially stood for Supreme
Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division when the
agency first appeared in Strange Tales #135 in August 1965. This original comic
book incarnation drew inspiration from the popularity of fictional spy films and
television shows in the 1960s, in particular organisations like U.N.C.L.E. in The
Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964–68) with its antagonists T.H.R.US.H.4 In the
1990s, the acronym remained but instead stood for Strategic Hazard Intervention
Espionage Logistics Directorate, before becoming the much more post-9/11-
sounding Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division,
which is used throughout the MCU. Even though it is a fictional organisation it
is clearly inspired by real-word agencies like the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the
National Security Council, for both its construction and its worldview. In the di-
egetic world of the MCU, S.H.I.E.L.D. emerged from the SSR (Strategic Scientific
Reserve) which was formed in 1940s to battle the Nazis and HYDRA, just as the
CIA has its roots in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which was the US war-
time intelligence agency created in 1942.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is produced and very obviously set in the tu-
multuous new millennial decades, and the series portrays a variety of threats to
both American and global safety which come in many forms: from terrorism,
organised violence and vigilantism, to supernatural enemies, enhanced beings
and even those from other planets. Despite the often intergalactic nature of these
fears, many of them are decidedly of our modern era, an age in which, as Coulson
observes in ‘Eye Spy’ (1.04), ‘between Facebook, Instagram and Flickr, people are
surveiling themselves’. We are frequently informed that S.H.I.E.L.D. is a secu-
rity agency with a global purview, but it is portrayed as a particularly American
organisation in terms of the way it exercises its significant power and even the
use of the word ‘Homeland’ in its title is suggestive of its American status. Just
as the Avengers are American (or at the very least Americanised), so are the vast
majority of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents: America is where its main bases seem to be lo-
cated and while it is said to answer to the United Nations, it is President Ellis
who is ultimately shown to be the figure the agency turns to most frequently
for authorisation. Most importantly, the fears and anxieties which it dramatises
mirror, through the prism of the superhero genre, those of the United States in
the first decades of the twenty-first century. Thus, the subtitle of this chapter,
‘What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for?’, is a multi-layered one, referring both to the
derivation of its acronym and also how the parastatal organisation functions
both within and beyond the diegetic frames of the television show’s narrative. It
is a question which has been explicitly answered by various characters through-
out the show’s run: in the pilot episode Grant Ward suggested, ‘It means we’re
the line between the world and the much weirder world. We protect people from
news they aren’t ready to hear. And when we can’t do that we keep them safe’
(1.01), but for Phil Coulson, who is at the centre of the show and an individual
who had progressed from minor player in Iron Man to one of the central char-
acters of The Avengers, the purpose of S.H.I.E.L.D. is ‘to serve when everything
else fails, to be humanity’s last line of defence, to be the shield…’ in ‘Providence’
(1.18).
Coulson, who according to Clark Gregg did not even have a name in the
script for Iron Man he originally read (see Leane 2016), resonated to such an
extent with fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that his death in The Avengers
inspired a widespread demand that he be brought back into the MCU somehow,
a movement which went by the name of ‘Coulson lives/Fury lies’ (see Asher-
Perrin 2013). The first season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. uses Coulson’s
‘death’ as its central narrative mystery and does not reveal how he was able to
survive his own ‘murder’ at the hands of Loki until the final episode, ‘Beginning
of the End’ (1.22), when audiences learn that he was revived using the dangerous
drug GH25 made from alien DNA as a part of Project T.A.H.I.T.I. Coulson is
understandably greatly traumatised by the process and criticises Fury’s use of the
unstable drug which ‘was created to revive an Avenger in the event of being killed
in battle’ (Benjamin 2014: 3), to which Fury replies ‘Exactly!’, indicating the shift
that Coulson has made from a small role in the MCU to being considered as an
Avenger in his own right. On his return to active service Coulson is charged
with putting together a new team of agents to respond to crises all over the globe
in the aftermath of The Avengers and the wake of the realisation that enhanced
individuals and supernatural beings are real. Prior to his appearances in the tele-
vision show Coulson had received little screen time to explore his character, the
sum of which was his love of vintage Captain America cards and the aside in The
Avengers that revealed he had a girlfriend, the cellist in Portland. In the series,
given his central role, Coulson’s characterisation is expanded: we learn that he
comes from a modest background, was recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. after college and
that he is an only child from Manitowac, Wisconsin, and once worked on classic
cars with his father (just like Tony Stark did with his father Howard) who died

when he was nine. Instead of the Stark family’s red and gold 1932 Ford Flathead
Roadster, the Coulsons worked on a cherry-red 1962 Corvette by the name of
Lola, which Coulson uses the latest experimental technology on to enable it to fly.
The team that Coulson puts together become the co-protagonists of the
show: the British scientists Leo Fitz (Ian De Caestecker) and Jemma Simmons
(Elizabeth Henstridge), the hypermasculine field agent Grant Ward and the pilot/
deputy commander, Melinda May, aka ‘the Cavalry’ (Ming-Na Wen). Coulson
frequently functioned as the audience surrogate in the films, but given his lead-
ership role and the secrets he has access to in the television series this position
is instead given to the final member of the initial team line up, the only one to
begin the narrative not as part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and our way into the world, Skye
(Chloe Bennett), who has been described as ‘the audience’s point-of-view charac-
ter’ (Benjamin 2014: 25). Skye ‘geeks out’ around superheroes just as Coulson did
and even admits to once being one of those ‘sweaty cosplay girls crowding around
Stark Tower’ (1.01) in ‘Pilot’. Skye begins the show as a civilian computer expert
and member of the hacktivist group, the Rising Tide, who distrusts S.H.I.E.L.D.,
but before long comes to realise that they are actually a force for good in the world
and becomes an agent herself. David Higgins classifies her as a character who
‘quickly sacrifices her commitment to radical social and economic justice as she
learns that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s totalitarian interventions are well-meaning and neces-
sary in the face of the omnicrisis posed by alien and superhuman threats’ (2015:
55), thereby mirroring the arcs of characters like Black Widow, Scarlett Witch
and Quicksilver. If we as an audience are not convinced by the empathetic Skye’s
transition, the Rising Tide are thoroughly discredited in Season One before be-
ing erased from the show entirely after revealing that one of their best hackers,
Skye’s former boyfriend Miles Lydon, is both untrustworthy and unprincipled.
He tells Skye, ‘We can’t let them get away with it. Manning, Snowden, Aaron
Swartz. These are modern-day revolutionaries!’ in ‘The Girl in the Flower Dress’
(1.05). But it is shown that he accepted money for information obtained from
his hacking skills which leads to the death of the enhanced individual involved.
Miles’ perfidy is effectively contrasted with the honesty and integrity of people
like Coulson, Fitz and Simmons who risk their lives on a daily basis to save in-
nocents all over the world. By ‘Providence’ (1.18) Skye is able to tell Coulson,
‘You were right all along. Having all this [secret information] out there in the
world makes it too dangerous…’. Later, in Season Two, Skye is revealed to be an
Inhuman herself and rejects her given name, adopting her birth name Daisy, but
is often referred to by her superhero name, Quake, and is described as a ‘walking
weapon of mass destruction’ by the duplicitous Senator Ellen Nadeer in ‘Lockup’
(4.05). Like the majority of women in the MCU, Skye is impossibly beautiful, as
are all the other female co-protagonists in the television show, yet they are given
much more time for character development and as a result often emerge as far
more interesting characters than their female cinematic counterparts.
III.
The pilot episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. quickly establishes that the
series is set in a post-The Avengers world, where the public is now, after the dev-
astation of the Battle of New York, very aware of the existence of superheroes,
enhanced individuals, aliens and even gods. It is Skye’s voice-over which opens
the show and she informs the audience, ‘The secret is out. For decades your or-
ganisation [S.H.I.E.L.D.] stayed in the shadows, hiding the truth. Now we know
they are among us: heroes and monsters. The world is full of wonders.’ Agent
Maria Hill later confirms this view of the new world: ‘Everything’s changing. A
little while ago people went to bed thinking the craziest thing in the world was a
billionaire in a flying metal suit, then aliens invaded New York and were beaten
back by, among others, a giant green monster, a costumed hero from the 1940s
and a God’ (1.01). Just as the Battle of New York was the central event of the
cinematic MCU throughout Phase Two, it is pivotal for its televisual branch too
and many of the episodes of the first season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are
linked to it: from the black-market sale of a Chitauri Neural Link found during
the battle in ‘Pilot’ (1.01), to the mysterious powers given to a group of trauma-
tised fire-fighters who were first responders in New York in ‘FZZT’ (1.06). This
early episode is one of many which seek to distinguish Coulson’s much more
humanistic leadership style from the other authority figures in the MCU, notably
the secretive Nick Fury, but later the authoritarian Agent Victoria Hand (Saffron
Burrows) and Robert Gonzalez (Edward James Olmos). Coulson refuses to leave
one of the fire-fighters alone even though the man is moments away from explod-
ing, telling him, ‘We [S.H.I.E.L.D.] were on the ground with you in New York’. It
is in this episode that, for the first time, Coulson is able to admit to himself that
he too had died during The Avengers, something he had until then been unable
to process.
The first season came under criticism for its slow pace and failure to deliver on
the promise of the initial Whedon-directed pilot. Willa Paskin at Slate called it
‘too self-serious to be really goofy, and yet too fan-boyish to rescue even one hour
of television from mediocrity’ (2013) and Eric Goldman at IGN declared it ‘a fun,
light-hearted, but fairly disposable piece of entertainment’ (2014). The episode
‘End of the Beginning’ (1.16), aired in the same week as the cinematic release of
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and saw the reveal of HYDRA’s infiltration
of S.H.I.E.L.D. spill over into Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in an event which
Colin Harvey described as having ‘mammoth diegetic consequences’ throughout

the MCU (2015: 87). In the next episode, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ (1.17) Agent Grant
Ward, who had been established as one of the focal points of the series and its
handsome, rugged hero, is revealed to be a HYDRA agent having been recruit-
ed in his teens by the charismatic Garrett (Bill Paxton). As in the films, these
events cause many to question S.H.I.E.L.D.’s global role and in the second and
third seasons those agents that remain become fugitives, hunted by those who
see little distinction between Coulson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA. But, as Gail
D. Rosen pointed out, we are never asked to question the commitment of the
core group of agents and even though they might ‘turn from loyal soldiers into
outlaws, but they remain intact as a family devoted to protecting the world, even
in secret’ (2015: 216). Like their superhero counterparts the Avengers, the actions
of Coulson’s team and ‘his’ S.H.I.E.L.D. are unequivocally endorsed throughout
the series and the show rarely pauses to reflect on the nature of such a power-
ful and clandestine organisation. In doing so it reifies the role of powerful and
secretive government agencies in the real world that we are asked to trust un-
equivocally, secure in the knowledge that they are acting in our own interests.
This is emphasised, as the films have been, by the frequent connections drawn
between S.H.I.E.L.D.’s current role and World War II. These become literalised
in the emergence of their enemy Daniel Whitehall, aka Werner Reinhardt, for-
merly a high-ranking Nazi official and HYDRA agent who uses Inhuman DNA
to de-age himself, or when we are informed that modern agents had relations
who fought in World War II. These include Antoine ‘Trip’ Triplett whose grand-
father was one of the original Howling Commandoes, and Robert Gonzalez, the
leader of the ‘real S.H.I.E.L.D.’, who is shown wielding his father’s World War
II-issue Colt M1911A1 and using it to kill members of HYDRA as his father had
done decades before him.
The fact that S.H.I.E.L.D., despite the pretence of being a global agency, is un-
ambiguously American in its formation, membership and construction is rarely
commented on and neither are its frequent global interventions abroad, which
are, for the most part, portrayed unproblematically. These journeys show them
doing good in their role as international police officer in locations as diverse as
Belarus (1.04), Hong Kong (1.05), South Ossetia (1.07), Cuba (1.18), Morocco
(2.03), Puerto Rico (2.09), Bahrain (2.17), Colombia (3.11) and Russia (3.13),
among others. When they are criticised for their actions, the audience knows
that what they have done has always been for the greater good and, as in the film
versions, those who tend to criticise them are shown to be compromised them-
selves. It is portrayed as entirely natural and logical that America would play this
role and when, in episode ‘0–8–4’ (1.02), Coulson’s team visit Peru to retrieve a
mysterious artefact they meet resistance from Camilla Reyes (Leonor Varela), a
former associate of Coulson’s, who tells him ‘You stay in your borders, I’ll stay
Figs 25–28: The global
exculpatory tour of
Marvel’s Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. might
be regarded as an ex-
ample of ‘virtual terror
tourism’, featuring
American superheroes
thanklessly saving
the world in places
as diverse as Peru
(1.02), Cuba (1.18) and
Bahrain (2.17). The
bottom image reads
‘Caucasus Mountains’
but the episode is
primarily set in the
disputed territory of
South Ossetia (1.07)

in mine!’ it is her who seems unreasonable. Reyes’ perhaps understandable re-
luctance to cooperate with the categorically American S.H.I.E.L.D. is portrayed
initially as intransigence and then duplicity, as it is revealed that her government
wants to use the deadly alien weapon found on their soil against the rebels who
oppose them. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. informs us that it is better to leave
these things to an altruistic and beneficent America and Coulson’s assertion that
‘An 0–8–4 supersedes all national claims’ is meant to show that his agency is be-
yond these petty bureaucratic and nationalistic concerns. He suggests to her that
‘borders are disappearing, aliens descended on New York remember?’, revealing
that the events in New York gave his agency the power to transgress interna-
tional law in ways which offer parallels to the shifting ideological coordinates
of America’s global role after 9/11. As it was in the real world, the MCU’s own
9/11 becomes ‘the basis of a universal moral, ethical, and total-war response; all
states must recognise, empathize, and interpret 9/11 as the United States posits’
(Astrada 2010: 23). This global reach is emphasised in a number of ways and al-
most always disavowed or ignored as it is in ‘T.R.A.C.K.S.’ (1.13) when the Italian
law enforcement officer Carlo Rota is shown as displeased with S.H..I.E.L.D.’s in-
terference and tells Coulson, ‘You’re not asking me at all, Agent Coulson. You’re
telling me and my team to step aside!’, but it is later revealed that he is working
for the HYDRA-affiliated Cybertek.
This continues in the very next episode, ‘The Asset’ (1.03), where one of the
antagonists of the first season is introduced, the billionaire inventor and indus-
trialist Ian Quinn (David Conrad). He is shown to have become a naturalised
citizen and resident of Malta to escape the clutches of the United States. It is a
country, which he adds later, ‘Where we are allowed to pursue progress and profit
without the strangulation of regulations that are now choking our world’. Quinn
is a ‘bad’ scientist, one of those who pursue technological advances for selfish
reasons, the likes of which populate the MCU and are distinguished from the
‘good’ scientists like Banner and Stark, Fitz and Simmons. When S.H.I.E.L.D.
are not allowed to mount an operation in Malta because of international law, or
what Skye refers to as ‘stupid rules’, they do so anyway. Quinn questions Skye’s
motivations for joining S.H.I.E.L.D. given her hacktivist background: ‘Don’t you
get it? SHIELD’s against everything you stand for. They’re Big Brother!’ To which
she answers, with a familiar image of how America sees itself: ‘Maybe, but they’re
the nice big brother who stands up for his helpless little brother when he’s getting
beat up.’ While Skye makes the transition to trusting S.H.I.E.L.D., Coulson’s arc
takes him, to a certain extent, the other way, from explicit faith in everything
that the organisation represents to (selectively) questioning it. In ‘The Hub’ (1.07)
he tells Skye how important it is to ‘trust the system’ but by the time of ‘The
Magical Place’ (1.11) he acknowledges that, ‘We need to root out all the secrets’
and by ‘Yes Men’ (1.15) is able to suggest, ‘To hell with any protocols or any code
I used to be bound by!’ It is important to acknowledge that Coulson always goes
against protocol whenever he needs to and is always shown as being correct to
do so, because of the positive results he is able to achieve, as in when he defies
S.H.I.E.L.D. bosses in ‘FZZT’ (1.06) to save Gemma’s life by putting the rest of the
team in great danger, or in ‘The Hub’ (1.07) when he rescues Ward and Fitz from
a suicide mission. He was not able to do this in the films as this maverick role was
occupied by Tony Stark, but in the television series when he is the heroic lead, it
is vital that he question authority as this is simply what American heroes do. The
most interesting and ethically suspect example of this is in ‘T.A.H.I.T.I.’ (1.14)
after Skye has been shot and left for dead by Quinn. Seemingly, the only way to
save her is to get the same GH25 drug which revived him from a secret facility
where it may or may not be kept and which may or may not work on her. The fa-
cility is protected by two S.H.I.E.L.D. guards who refuse to provide Coulson and
his team with access, suspecting subterfuge. When they are unable to inform the
guards of the correct password, Coulson and his team break in and kill both in
order to perhaps find the material to save Skye. It is an action which is never ques-
tioned or mentioned again, and one which is endorsed when Skye is indeed cured
by the drug. This pattern of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s extrajudicial intervention around the
globe carries on through all of the seasons and has been persuasively connected
to the post-9/11 environment by Samira Nadkarni who argues: ‘The viewer is as-
sured that eventually these [the weapons S.H.I.E.L.D. uses after New York] will
no longer be required, and this echoes the rhetoric of American foreign policy
with regard to wars waged after 9/11 regarding the withdrawal of troops after
the purported end of terrorism’ (2015: 2). This is how the MCU views the world:
with the United States as a reluctant operator in global events, but one that is
necessary and entirely moral in its actions, which I have elsewhere characterised
as the ‘necessary intervention’ narrative paradigm (see McSweeney 2014: 87–97),
in which films and television shows present a firmly Western-centric approach
to complex geopolitical affairs. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s role and what it is representative of
evoke what Andrew Bacevich suggests is the ultimate American objective for the
twenty-first century: ‘the creation of an open and integrated international order
based on the principles of democratic capitalism, with the United States as the
ultimate guarantor of order and enforcer of norms’ (2002: 3).5
IV.
This very American view of the world is portrayed just as emphatically in

Marvel’s Agent Carter, the short-lived ABC series revolving around the character
played by Hayley Atwell originally in Captain America: The First Avenger, who

had, by the end of Phase Two featured in four films and episodes of Marvel’s
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Even though it only ran for eighteen episodes, Marvel’s
Agent Carter remains an important addition to the MCU, being the first MCU
project to have a female lead with her name in the title. Shortly after the release of
the ‘One Shot’ called Agent Carter (2013) a full series was ordered by ABC which
was first broadcast in the mid-season break in Season Two of Marvel’s Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. Peggy Carter’s entrance to the MCU had been a memorable one back
in The First Avenger when she punched the sexist recruit Gilmore Hodge in the
face, knocking him to the floor. Hodge had asked her, ‘Are we dancing? Cause I
got a few moves I know you’d like’, and later Peggy had informed Steve Rogers, ‘I
know what that’s like, to have every door shut in your face’. The television series
takes these two moments as the starting point for its narrative which explores
Peggy’s life in the male-dominated post-war world, where things are shown to
have changed quite considerably for her and many millions of American women.
Despite having proved herself as a formidable and resourceful operational agent
during World War II she finds herself relegated to menial tasks like answer-
ing the phones and preparing lunch orders for her far less able male colleagues.
While few women experienced the war like the fictional Peggy Carter, many did
experience a similar change in status and opportunities afforded to them in the
workplace. Peggy’s flatmate, Colleen, talks of ten girls getting the sack in her fac-
tory and being replaced by returning G.I.s. World War II resulted in more than
two million women in the workplace and 400,000 in the services which ‘prompt-
ed popular consideration of gender equality, compelled unionists and employers
to confront their commitments to gender hierarchy, and offered at least some
working women the novel experience of equality’ (Gabin 1995: 108). Not only
is Peggy relegated to the duties of a secretary, but the men belittle her war-time
achievements. Her well-meaning but chauvinist boss Chief Dooley says, ‘Being
Captain America’s liaison brought you into contact with all sorts of people, but
the war’s over’, and another male colleague suggests, ‘I bet Carter knew a lot of
guys during the war’. Peggy is understandably frustrated and explains: ‘During
the war I had a sense of purpose, responsibility, but now I connect the calls and
never get a chance to make them.’ Her colleague, Jack Thompson, explains that it
is ‘the natural order of the universe. You’re a woman. No man will ever consider
you an equal. It’s sad but that doesn’t make it any less true.’ It takes Peggy the
whole of the first season to convince those around her of her abilities in a way
that few real women of the era had the opportunity to do.
Like many characters within the MCU, those in Marvel’s Agent Carter are
shown to be traumatised by their past experiences, in this case through World
War II: Peggy is suffering from grief over the loss of Steve Rogers, Daniel DeSousa
lost his leg and struggles to be recognised beyond his disability, Chief Dooley
Fig. 29: Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) from Marvel’s Agent Carter dramatises her attempt to come
to terms with life after World War II in late 1940s New York and Los Angeles
returned from service only to find that his wife had an affair and his commit-
ment to his job has led to them becoming estranged, and Jack Thompson is feted
as a war hero after having won the Navy Cross for bravery at Okinawa, but we
later learn it is an honour he did not deserve. When Peggy saves Jack’s life, she
learns of his secret, but she does not judge him, even when at the end of the
season he takes credit for the hard work she did in solving their most difficult
case. It is these elements which make Peggy Carter one of the most human of
‘superheroes’ throughout the MCU, not just because she does not possess any
powers, but because of the way her empathy and vulnerability is often shown
to be her greatest strength, a fact that makes her a vivid protagonist. One of the
writers of the series, Tara Butters, suggested that ‘her superpower is the fact that
other people underestimate her. And she often uses that to her advantage, be-
cause she doesn’t have superstrength’ (qtd. in Abrams 2015). Agent Carter is a
rare entrant into the MCU which raises and addresses this issue explicitly within
the context of its narrative, although its extended criticisms of post-war patriar-
chy are framed from the comforting perspective of being set in the distant past,
allowing the writers to feel secure in their understanding of how very different
things supposedly are now, refusing to acknowledge the precarious nature of the
representations of women in the twenty-first-century MCU. So when Carter says
to her chauvinist male colleagues, ‘You think you know me. But I’ve never been
more than what each of you has created. To you, I’m a stray kitten, left on your
doorstep to be protected. The secretary turned damsel in distress. The girl on the
pedestal, transformed into some daft whore’ in ‘Snafu’ (1.07), the sentiments she

articulates could very well be applied to all the MCU women, whether they have
powers (Scarlett Witch) or do not (Pepper Potts, Jane Foster and Betty Ross).
The series draws almost as heavily on the MCU films as Marvel’s Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. and it is the figure of Captain America, as one might expect, who
is a looming presence over Peggy’s experiences. The pilot episode even begins
with shots taken directly from the end of Captain America: The First Avenger
and he is mentioned frequently not just by Peggy but other characters, with
a radio show called ‘The Captain America Adventure Programme’ playing an
exaggerated version of some of his adventures. Peggy shows her disdain for the
serial, which features whimpering damsels in distress for Cap to save and in
one artful scene she beats up a henchman while listening to one such damsel
being saved on the radio show. Peggy reunites the Howling Commandoes in
a mission in Russia which allows the show to explore the Red Room orphan-
age in more detail than it ever was in the film series and even gives the show a
Soviet assassin called Dottie whose abilities parallel Peggy’s own. Christopher
Markus attempted to suggest that there was some sort of parity between Dottie
and Peggy, stating that ‘Peggy should consider that it wouldn’t take her all the
make to make her Dottie’ (qtd. in Rodriguez 2015: 60). But the show, as its cin-
ematic equivalent has always done, could never recognise these connections in
anything other than a superficial fashion. It also gives a central role to a young
Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) and his butler Edwin Jarvis (who will in-
spire Tony Stark to create the AI which will be known as J.A.R.V.I.S.) and the
overarching plot of the first season concerns itself with accusations directed at
Howard Stark that he sold weapons technology to enemies of the United States,
i.e. the Soviet Union. In scenes reminiscent of Iron Man 2 where Tony Stark is
brought before a similar committee, Howard is asked: ‘Did you knowingly sell
military grade technology to enemies of the United States?’ When it looks like
he will be found guilty, even though he is not, he goes on the run and only Peggy
is able to help him clear his name. Stark is shown to have his flaws (like his son),
but he is firmly identified as a patriotic capitalist and entrepreneur the likes of
which have been said to have ‘built America’.
Despite being well reviewed, the show was cancelled due to dwindling audi-
ence figures at the end of its second season: after having premiered with 6.91
million viewers for the pilot episode ‘Now is Not the End’ (1.01) on 6 January
2015, the ironically titled second season finale ‘Hollywood Ending’ (2.10) had a
series low of 2.35 million, which was felt too small by ABC to justify the commis-
sion of a third season. Season Two had relocated to Los Angeles in 1947, but failed
to develop the characters as well as it might have done. Having seemingly solved
Peggy’s second-class status by the end of the first season, the second flirts with
McCarthyism, the Blacklist and racism, but only ever in a very superficial form.
Peggy has a chaste relationship with Jason Wilkes, an African-American scien-
tist, but the show does little by way of exploring post-war racism than have him
called ‘boy’ in a store in the episode ‘Better Angels’ (2.03) and have Stark observe
that he was ‘already a target because of the colour of his skin’. Like how it treated
sexism, Agent Carter is able to frame post-war racism through the comforting
prism of its present to audiences who are apparently secure in the knowledge that
no such disparity exists in the modern world – conveniently ignoring the fact
that in Phases One and Two black superheroes and even black characters were
few and far between.
Notes
1 A rare example of this is the explanation of the mysterious appearance of a helicarrier

at the climax of Age of Ultron which, for those who have not seen the television show,
is just a fortuitous deus ex machina. But for those who have, it is explained how and
why Fury came to have a helicarrier when they all seemed to have been destroyed at
the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
2 This was satirised in the webseries produced by Screen Junkies called Interns of
F.I.E.L.D (2016–) which followed the interns of a secret agency which stood for Field;
Intervention; Espionage; and Logistics Department. In ‘Villians’ (1.01) after the su-
perhero named Staff Sergeant America has defeated his nemesis the Black Skull the
interns are told, ‘The cool part is over with. So, clean up all this crap…’ in a series
which very obviously makes fun of the often peripheral nature of the characters of
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
3 It also has the webseries Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Slingshot (2016) which fea-
tured S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Elena ‘Yo Yo’ Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) set
between Season Three and Season Four in six episodes of between three and six min-
utes long and all made available online on 13 December 2016. A slightly stranger title
was Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Double Agent (2015) which featured someone
employed in the ‘real world’ to retrieve secrets about upcoming episodes of the show
with the cast playing versions of their real selves.
4 Stan Lee confirmed this in interviews (see Goldman 2014). These acronyms stand
for, in order, United Network Command for Law and Enforcement; Technological
Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.
5 One of the best examples of this is S.H.I.E.L.D.’s incursion to Bahrain portrayed
in ‘Melinda’ (2.17) where we learn how Melinda May was given the nickname ‘The
Cavalry’. Coulson initially refuses to allow May to enter a building where many
agents have been kidnapped and taken hostage by the Inhuman Eva Belyakov, telling
her ‘S.H.I.E.L.D. is not authorised for any action’. However, when it is clear that there
is no hope for those inside he tells her ‘Go!’ and May rescues the men, but is forced to

kill Eva and her daughter Katya. Such is the importance of this moment for the series
that the show returns to it as the basis of the alternate reality narrative in Season
Four. In this alternate reality May does not kill Katya and this leads directly to the
Cambridge Incident where she is said to have murdered two hundred and seventy-
nine innocents, a tragedy which sparks the resurgence of HYDRA in that reality.
C H A PT ER T EN
The Necessary Vigilantism of

the Defenders: Daredevil, Jessica
Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist
People needed someone that didn’t require a warrant or a shield to get things
done. Call it a vigilante or a superhero, call it what you will, but like it or not I
finally accepted that that someone had to be me…
– Luke Cage, in Luke Cage, ‘You Know My Steez’ (1.13)
Both Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter were produced
and exhibited by terrestrial television companies and aside from their unique
intertextual links between the ongoing films of the MCU, they are, in some ways,
not too different from how episodic television had been produced and broadcast
since the second half of the twentieth century. The four television shows dis-
cussed in this chapter – Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist – depart
from this formula in a variety of significant ways due to being financed, exhib-
ited and distributed by the media-streaming-service-turned-television-and-film
production-company, Netflix. In the case of Daredevil, the first full season of
thirteen episodes was placed online for those with a Netflix account to access all
at the same time on 10 April 2015, as was Jessica Jones on 20 November 2015, Luke
Cage on 30 September 2016 and Iron Fist on 17 March 2017. The impact of Netflix
on contemporary television audiences and production practices is hard to over-
estimate. Veronique Dupont has suggested that the company ‘has revolutionized
THE NECESSARY VIGILANTISM OF THE DEFENDERS 223

the US television industry several times over [and] totally revamped the relation-
ship Americans have with both TV shows and films’ (2014). Dupont and many
others have argued that this process has fundamentally changed not only the way
television programmes are watched, but even how they are made. This places the
four Netflix/Marvel collaborations alongside other high profile and award-win-
ning productions like House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–), Orange is the New Black
(Netflix, 2013–) and Transparent (Amazon Studios, 2014–) and in the middle
of what has been described both as a ‘binge watch’ (Graves 2015: 227) or ‘on-
demand’ culture by Chuck Tyron in On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and
the Future of Movies (2013). Joe Quesada, then Chief Creative Officer of Marvel
Entertainment, suggested that ‘the Netflix model offers us the advantage of being
able to construct the show in a manner that is very different than a weekly net-
work TV show’. The advantages he saw were that ‘we can sit there and look at 13
episodes and plan it out as a very large movie. It makes seeing the bigger picture
a little bit easier’ (qtd. in Dyce 2014).
Quesada’s assertion is that the ‘Netflix process’, as opposed to more tradi-
tional television production, impacts on both what is able to be shown and how it
is shown. As a result of this, the four television texts discussed in this chapter use
the changing format allowed by Netflix to expand the parameters of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe, in particular using the comparative freedoms afforded to
explore more mature and complicated story arcs than would be possible in the
films and also in the Marvel network television shows. Thus, Daredevil is by far
the most explicitly violent entrant in the entirety of the MCU, featuring story-
lines which focus on drug-trafficking and prostitution and includes scenes of
graphic beatings, beheadings and immolations; and the first season of Jessica
Jones centres around a superhero-inflected domestic abuse drama with explicit
mentions of rape and a sex scene between two superheroes, yet they are set in the
same world of the family-friendly adventures embarked on by Tony Stark, Steve
Rogers and even Rocket Raccoon and Groot. This sense of freedom was com-
mented on by the showrunner of the first season of Daredevil, Drew Goddard:
It felt that we’d have more freedom to make it on the small screen and make it
more adult. Look, if we took the Netflix [show] and put it in theaters, it’s rated
R. And they’re not doing R-rated movies. And we also really got to explore the
character. I feel like Netflix was the best possible home for that, otherwise you’d
end up with a watered-down version. (Qtd. in Singer 2015)
Like many of the Marvel films in Phase Two and beyond, the four Netflix tele-
vision shows offer variations on the superhero genre by adopting distinctly
hybridised narratives. So Daredevil is about a costumed hero cleaning up the
streets of Hell’s Kitchen at night, but at the same time it is also about his alter
ego, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), a blind lawyer who tries to do the same thing
by legal means during the day; Danny Rand (Finn Jones) aka the Iron Fist, is
the billionaire heir to the Rand fortune, but also one of the world’s most gifted
martial artists; Luke Cage (Mike Colter) has superhuman strength and virtually
impenetrable skin, the result of unethical prison experiments conducted on him
after being convicted of a crime he did not commit, but he is also at the centre of
a gritty crime drama with storylines seemingly ripped from very contemporary
headlines which feature references to the likes of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davies,
Eric Garner and the Black Lives Matter movement. Luke, a hoodie-wearing
African-American, who is framed and persecuted after footage of him seem-
ingly attacking a police officer goes viral, resonated both inside and outside of
the MCU on its release in 2016. As one character remarks in the episode entitled
‘You Know My Steez’ (1.13): ‘Most of these guys [superheroes] wear spandex, who
would have thought a black man in a hoodie would be a hero?’ Luke Cage’s roots
in Blaxploitation films of the 1970s make for a very distinctive new millennial
superhero, especially given the MCU’s reluctance to centralise the experiences
of African-American heroes. As Roz Kaveney has articulated, ‘Luke is not just
any African-American character; he was one of the more durable products of
Marvel’s attempt in the 1970s to open out the traditionally whitebread superhero.
He was, specifically, Marvel’s take on the trash-talking, no compromises hero of
the Blaxploitation films’ (2007: 82).
This is not to suggest that the Netflix shows do not perpetuate the domi-
nant ideological values we have already observed, but rather they are able to offer
some challenges to these paradigms much more frequently than the cinematic
branch of the MCU. This complexity primarily (although not always) emerges in
the characterisations of their protagonists. Jessica Jones follows the adventures
of its eponymous super-powered heroine, who is also a private detective, in a
New York-set narrative heavily influenced by the moral ambiguity and visual
aesthetic of film noir, a duality which was acknowledged in the series winning a
Peabody Award which described the show as, ‘one part superhero saga, one part
neo-noir program [which] asks unpopular questions about power and consent,
while constructing vivid and compelling characters’ (qtd. in Anon. 2015). As
Paul Schrader famously asserted, film noir is not ‘defined, as are the western and
gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the subtler
qualities of tone and mood’ (1972: 8). One might argue that ‘tone and mood’ are
as important to Jessica Jones as narrative and plot, and that it is because of this
that Jessica Jones emerges, alongside Peggy Carter, as one of the most human
of the superheroes in all of the MCU. She is truculent, manipulative, trauma-
tised and memorably described by Luke Cage, who makes his first appearance in

Figs. 30–33: The
evocative opening
credits of the four
Netflix Marvel series
make their genre
influences very
clear: the legal/crime
drama of Daredevil,
the film noir stylings
of Jessica Jones, the
Blaxploitation roots
of Luke Cage, and
the martial arts of
Iron Fist
Jessica Jones before having his own show later, as a ‘hard drinking, short-fused
mess of a woman’ in ‘AKA You’re a Winner’ (1.06). Issues of accountability and
culpability which the films had been reluctant to engage with in Phases One and
Two are placed at the foreground of Jessica Jones as she is often unable to help
many of those around her and her actions sometimes result in the deaths of in-
nocents. In the pilot episode, ‘AKA Ladies Night’ (1.01), she proves powerless to
save the parents of Hope Schlottman (Erin Moriarty) from being murdered and
later watches as Hope commits suicide in front of her in ‘AKA 1,000 Cuts’ (1.10),
providing rare examples of Stephen Faller’s ‘false dichotomy choice’ in which the
superhero is not able to save all parties and redeem theirself in the process. In
the Iron Man trilogy and his two appearances in The Avengers and Avengers: Age
of Ultron, Tony Stark is shown onscreen saving every single person he is asked to
(perhaps with the exception of Pepper Potts who refuses to take his hand in Iron
Man 3, but who does not die) and the only person Steve Rogers is unable to save
in The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier, Civil War and his two appearances in
The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, is Bucky Barnes (who later returns),
and even this is not entirely his fault. The comic book version of Jessica Jones
was originally created for the more adult-oriented Max Marvel comic line, which
meant she was ‘at liberty to be foul-mouthed and drunken, and to sleep around’
(Kaveney 2007: 68). Indeed, as something of a statement of intent, the first line in
the first edition of her comic is ‘Fuck!’ in Alias #1 November 2001. In this respect,
Jessica is certainly a noteworthy addition to the female characters in the MCU,
which we have seen as being very limited in terms of the complexity of their
characterisation: her abilities are not at all connected to her gender (see Black
Widow, Scarlett Witch, Lorelei), she does not wear sexually provocative clothing
(Black Widow, Lady Sif), she is not infantilised (Scarlett Witch, Jane Foster), she
is not pushed to the margins of the narrative (Gamora, Hope Van Dyne), nor is
her fighting style sexualised (Black Widow), and furthermore she does not need
a man to save her (Pepper Potts, Betty Ross, Gamora, Scarlet Witch), nor one to
define her (Jane Foster). She is flawed and vulnerable, but these traits make her
more human and a richer character as a result. Whether it is entirely true that
Jessica Jones ‘is a rare show that can truly be said to have a female gaze’ (Seitz
2015) is a matter for audiences to decide, but her rejection of both a traditional
superhero costume and, for much of Season One, even the mantle of being a su-
perhero, marks her as not just a progressive female superhero, but one of Marvel’s
most complex characters regardless of her gender.
This complexity also frequently appears in the characterisations of the an-
tagonists of the Netflix shows who often emerge as just as interesting as the
superheroes who give their name to the programmes themselves. Unlike the one-
dimensional histrionics of the likes of the Red Skull, Darren Cross or Malekith,

Jessica Jones is pitted against the charismatic Kilgrave (David Tennant) who pos-
sesses the power to physically compel people to do exactly what he wants merely
by telling them to do it. This might take the form of something simple like insist-
ing everyone in a crowded restaurant be silent, but more often in sadistic ways
when he forces one victim to give up two kidneys for him after he is injured, or
tells the innocent Ruben to cut his own throat. Much of Jessica’s psychological
trauma and her pronounced feelings of guilt derives from the fact that, before
the start of Season One, she was once Kilgrave’s victim and he had ordered her
to be his sexual partner and then criminal accomplice. While Kilgrave is glee-
fully malevolent, he is decidedly human and the show encourages audiences
to both despise and at times understand him in ways that the film series has
found difficult outside of the characterisations of the beguiling Loki and the em-
pathetic Winter Soldier. Daredevil has an even more interesting antagonist in
the entrepreneur and gang boss Wilson Fiske (Vincent D’Onfrio), who is not a
megalomaniacal pantomime villain, but rather a businessman with extensive re-
sources and sociopathic tendencies. Much of Fiske’s behaviour is monstrous, but
he is also somehow sympathetic, and flashbacks to his childhood depict abuse by
his father, who, the series later reveals, he murdered in order to save his moth-
er. The antagonists in Season One of Luke Cage are also striking: the criminal
cousins, gangster Cornell ‘Cottonmouth’ Stokes (Mahershala Ali) and the more
superficially legitimate, but equally corrupt, politician Mariah Dillard (Alfre
Woodward), who are bound together by their shared criminal upbringing. Both
are shown in flashback to have wanted to leave the life of crime they were born
into, as Cornell dreamed of being a musician and Mariah of pursuing an educa-
tion, but found it impossible to break away from their grandmother’s influence,
even after her death. When Mariah kills Cornell in the episode called ‘Manifest’
(1.07) after he teases her about her childhood abuse at the hands of their uncle, it
is one of the most shocking moments across the MCU, primarily because of the
time and care invested into their characterisations.1
As with Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter, the Netflix
shows also exist very tangibly within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but events
within them also do not impact on the film series. Therefore, in Season One of
Luke Cage there is a teenager selling bootleg DVDs of the New York ‘incident’
on the street corner in ‘Moment of Truth’ (1.01) while telling everyone that they
feature ‘Tony Stark, the big blonde dude with the hammer, the old dude with the
shield, the green monster!’ Later in the season the weapons sold by Cornell and
Willis Stryker are shown to be made from Chitauri metal and manufactured by
Hammer Industries. Flashbacks return to Luke Cage’s time in Seagate prison,
which we have been told earlier is also where Justin Hammer and Trevor ‘the
Mandarin’ Slattery are serving their sentences. In Iron Fist, Danny’s apology to
a mother whose son may have contracted a terminal illness from the pollutants
discharged from a Rand-owned factory is recorded on camera and uploaded to
the internet where it is said to have ‘more YouTube views than that incredible
green guy’ in ‘Immortal Emerges from the Cave’ (1.06). It is perhaps Daredevil
that is the most immersed in tapestry of the MCU: in small details like the front
pages of newspapers which line the walls of journalist Ben Urich’s office which
read ‘Harlem terror: Hulk emerges victorious in destructive uptown battle’ refer-
ring to The Incredible Hulk and ‘Buildings levelled hundreds killed in midtown
battles’ referring to the events of The Avengers in ‘In the Blood’ (1.04) or when
characters ask how Daredevil is able to overcome so many henchmen: ‘If he had
an iron suit or a magic hammer maybe that would explain why you keep getting
your asses handed to you!’ In one of its most subtle allusions Daredevil informs
audiences that Matt Murdock once lived in St. Agnes Orphanage as a child after
the murder of his father, the same place Skye was said to be raised in Marvel’s
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.2
Aside from their connections to the broader MCU, the four Netflix shows are
even more closely bonded to each other: from things like the radio show ‘Trish
Talk’ starring Jessica Jones’ friend Trish Walker (Rachel Taylor) being featured in
both Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, and the lawyer Jeri Hogarth featuring in Jessica
Jones, Daredevil and Iron Fist. The nurse Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) is the
only character to appear in all four separate series: in Daredevil she finds Matt
Murdock seriously injured in a dumpster and rescues him; later she saves a dy-
ing Luke Cage in Jessica Jones; and in Luke Cage she leaves her job and begins to
help the eponymous superhero in his mission to clean up the streets of Harlem,
before embarking on a tentative relationship with him which is interrupted by
his arrest and incarceration at the end of the season. In Iron Fist she befriends
Danny Rand and Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) in their battle to reclaim the
Rand name from first the deceitful Wendell family and then the villainous crime
cartel, the Hand. She does enter into a relationship with both Murdock and Cage,
but she is much more than one of the stereotypical girlfriend roles that the MCU
has routinely offered women and is an intelligent, resourceful and multi-layered
character.
While it might be something of a cliché to suggest that the city in which these
four narratives are set becomes a character in and of itself, New York is even
more vital to each of the four Netflix shows than it is to the cinematic branch
of the MCU. It is where Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk are shown to be have
been raised in flashbacks in Daredevil, and later where they fight for control of
the streets of Hell’s Kitchen; in Iron Fist it is where Danny Rand lives as a child
and then returns after fifteen years, first forced to sleep homeless in the park,
before then once again living and working in opulent skyscrapers like the Stark

Tower-esque Rand Building. New York is where Jessica Jones prowls the streets
at night as a detective and then on her hunt for Kilgrave. Similarly, in Luke Cage
it is Harlem which becomes a battleground for Luke, Cornell ‘Cottonmouth’
Stokes and Mariah Dillard. It is more than just a place for them and its primar-
ily African-American residents, as Mariah insists that ‘Harlem is my birth right.
It’s mine’ in ‘Take it Personal’ (1.10), but for Luke Cage Harlem ‘is supposed to
represent our hopes and dreams. It’s the pinnacle of black art, politics, innova-
tion. It’s supposed to be a shining light to the world. It’s our responsibility to
push forward, so that the next generation will be further along than us’, in ‘You
Know My Steez’ (1.13). It is important to note that the New York portrayed in
the Netflix television shows is not the sanitised version of the city which we have
seen in the film series, but a much more visceral one where crime is rampant and
injustice is endemic, reminiscent, in some ways of the 1970s New York brought to
life in American films of the era like Taxi Driver and Death Wish (1974). It is this
lawlessness which necessitates and legitimises the emergence of the Daredevil,
Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and the Iron Fist in the way that Gotham City seemed to
need Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
Of all the four Netflix shows Luke Cage is the most ardently connected to
real-world fears and anxieties. Given the paucity of African-American super-
heroes in the history of the genre, with only Blade (1998), Catwoman and Hancock
(2008) offering leading roles for black performers in the decade prior to the
MCU, the significance of having the title character of a superhero-themed televi-
sion show as a hoodie-wearing African-American male is quite profound and led
to Joshua Ostroff describing Luke Cage as ‘the most timely TV series since the
Battlestar Galactica reboot took on the war on terror in the wake of 9/11’ (2016).
The star of Luke Cage, Mike Colter suggested, ‘I can’t imagine anything a black
man would want to be more right now than bulletproof’ (ibid.). Outside of Cage
himself, the show offers a wide range of African-American characters, male and
female, in its narrative and also in its evocation of figures from the past and pres-
ent as a tapestry on which the drama takes place: from American Revolutionary
icon Crispus Attucks to Walter Mosely and Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X and James
Baldwin, to the prominent use of a portrait of Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man
as himself, to the fact that all episode titles for the first season are taken from the
titles of songs by the Brooklyn-based hip hop duo Gang Starr. In the process the
show updates Cage from his 1970s Blaxploitation roots to the very contempo-
rary concerns of the African-American community, or as Adilifu Nama, author
of Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011), suggests,
‘Thus there is a direct racial relationship between the meaning of Luke Cage
and the history of black racial formation in America, no matter how many ver-
sions are created of the muscle-bound, skin-as-tough-as-steel ‘Hero for Hire’’
(2011: 66). The programme’s showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker, stated: ‘When the
bullets bounce off Superman there is no social context because the Kryptonian
alien is bulletproof. But when you have a black person with impenetrable skin
and have a bullet bounce off, whether that’s a criminal bullet or a police bul-
let, it adds a whole other swath of political overtures to that interaction’ (qtd. in
Ostroff 2016).
Iron Fist faced something of a critical backlash on its release in March 2017
with critics seemingly falling over themselves to give it the most scathing re-
view. Liz Shannon Miller at Indiewire said, ‘Ultimately, Marvel’s Iron Fist feels
incredibly inessential, even boring at times. It’s a show that doesn’t push for big-
ger themes, doesn’t seek to have its own voice beyond the Buddhist philosophy
spouted by a white guy’ (2017), and Danette Chavez at the A.V. Club said, ‘The
first half of the season is just a checked box. Filler episodes are one thing, but
right now Iron Fist looks like a filler season’ (2017). Iron Fist is not as bad as this
veritable avalanche of negative reviews suggest, but it does suffer from numerous
problems of narrative, tone and characterisation, plus the misfortune of com-
ing after the popular and critically acclaimed Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke
Cage. Danny Rand’s quest to prove himself as the Iron Fist emerges as more in-
substantial than it should be and his antagonists are the theatrical Meachums,
father Harold (David Wenham), and son Ward (Tom Pelphrey). Criticisms were
directed at the centralisation of an affluent white male in a show about mar-
tial arts and even though the character was originally conceived this way when
created in 1974, it is the quality of the show’s writing which makes these sus-
tained examples of cultural appropriation even more problematic: scenes in
which Danny lectures the Asian-American Colleen, who was raised in Japan and
owns her own dojo, about martial arts, Chi and Asian philosophy, prove both ill-
advised and misjudged in the episode ‘Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch’ (1.03).
Similar concerns were raised about Doctor Strange and its narrative featuring a
white Westerner venturing east for enlightenment: in both texts Asian cultures
are seen exclusively through the eyes of a privileged Western male, who proves
himself superior physically, intellectually and morally to his Asian counterparts
without exception.
Like all the Netflix shows, and indeed the majority of the MCU narratives
in general, Iron Fist is immersed in trauma. Danny’s derives from the plane
crash fifteen years before in which he saw his parents die, which he experiences
throughout the series in clumsily-framed flashbacks. Finn Jones suggested: ‘He
has this eternal hope and drive that he’s doing the right thing, but at the same
time he’s essentially suffering from PTSD’ (Anon. 2017a: 116). It might be sug-
gested that PTSD and trauma became one of the defining characteristics of the
new millennial superhero. Of course, trauma has always been a part of superhero

narratives but never to such an extent as it has been in the last two decades. In
the case of Rand its presentation is not entirely convincing: on his return to New
York his bed is too soft for him (as Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson also discuss
in The Winter Soldier) and he obsessively plays the same hip hop music on the
same iPod he had when he crashed (like Peter Quill and his mother’s mix-tape in
Guardians of the Galaxy). More credible is the portrayal of trauma in Jessica Jones
and Daredevil: Jessica’s is also the result of the childhood accident which led to
the death of her mother, father and brother (which she is shown to be actually
partially responsible for) and her persecution by Kilgrave, and Matt Murdock’s
from the loss of his father at the hands of mobsters when he was a child.
Given their street-level existence, as opposed to the more national and glob-
al impact of the characters from the Avengers, and the close relationships the
Netflix superheroes have with their respective communities, vigilantism and its
ramifications becomes a more central aspect of their narratives than it does in
the film versions. Foggy Nelson criticises his friend Matt Murdock when he fi-
nally discovers that he is the Daredevil in ‘Nelson v Murdock’ (1.10) and he asks
him, ‘What are you doing Matt? You are a lawyer. You are supposed to be helping
people!’ Foggy’s most persistent strain of criticism thereafter is to compare Matt
to the criminal Fisk in a trope we have seen returned to frequently in the MCU,
the dark mirror or shadow version of the hero. However, unlike the films this is
given some substance as it is articulated not by a villain, but by one of the show’s
more sympathetic and likable characters. Both Fisk and Daredevil express the
same desire to clean up Hell’s Kitchen and both are willing to transgress the law
to do so. Foggy asks of Matt’s violent methods, ‘How is that any different to the
way he solves problems?’, and when he hears that Matt wants to make New York
a better place says, ‘A better place? That kind of sounds like what Fisk keeps say-
ing’. The connections between Murdock and Fisk, while ultimately disavowed,
are presented in a more sustained fashion than any protagonist/antagonist rela-
tionship throughout the MCU. With their shared vigilante brands of justice and
their dark pasts, each are undoubtedly formed by and revel in violence. Matt’s
masochistic tendencies also seem to strikingly complement Fisk’s brutal sadism.
However, these criticisms are negated, perhaps due to the demands of the genre,
and towards the end of Season One Foggy comes to realise that what Matt does
is necessary after all: that Daredevil is the only one able to stand up for the peo-
ple of Hell’s Kitchen when the law fails them, which the series presents ample
examples of, from Matt beating up a father who sexually abuses his daughter,
preventing a big business like Roxxon from mistreating its workers, or in the case
of Fisk’s ability to avoid punishment for his long list of crimes. By the beginning
of Season Two all ethical doubts concerning what Daredevil does seem to have
been erased: the police are grateful for his help, Foggy assists him with his ‘work’,
and even the Catholic priest, Lantom, tells him ‘I don’t know what you didn’t do
or what you should have done, but the guilt means your work is not yet finished’
in ‘Penny and Dime’ (2.04).
Having seemingly resolved for itself the issue of the morality of Daredevil’s
vigilantism in Season One, Season Two turned its attention to an even more
complicated character, Frank Castle aka the Punisher, who originally had been
a Vietnam veteran in his first Marvel comic appearance in The Amazing Spider-
Man #129 (February 1974), and had already featured in three poorly received
films outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe played by three different actors.
The Netflix MCU incarnation of the character, this time played by the brood-
ingly intense Jon Bernthal, would have such an impact on audiences that he was
later given his own Netflix series, The Punisher, broadcast in 2017. Just as the
first season of Daredevil ran parallel to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and
might well have been called Daredevil Begins, the second season explores simi-
lar territory to that of Nolan’s The Dark Knight, revolving around the central
theme of escalation. It becomes apparent that in the absence of the powerful
Fisk (who was imprisoned at the end of the first season) a variety of criminal
figures have emerged, each vying for power, and the actions of Daredevil have
inspired a range of copycats which leads to escalating levels of violence and vigi-
lantism throughout the city. As if in response to this, a mysterious costumed
vigilante known as the Punisher appears, who, rather than handing criminals
over to the police after apprehending them as Daredevil does, executes them.
Murdock and Foggy’s secretary and legal advocate, Karen Page (Deborah Ann
Woll), wonder if Daredevil’s actions might have been responsible for the emer-
gence of the Punisher and asks ‘Maybe we created him?’ in ‘Dogs to a Catfight’
(2.02), but Matt Murdock refuses to believe there is a connection and expresses
profound disapproval of the Punisher’s extreme methods. Initially the Punisher
is represented almost entirely negatively and he is criticised by not just Murdock,
but also the public, the press and the law, but he becomes progressively more
and more humanised as we learn of his background as the season progresses. It
is revealed that he is a decorated veteran of the war in Afghanistan who might
be suffering from PTSD, and that his family were killed by a drug boss who was
never prosecuted for his crimes. When he comes face to face with Daredevil in
‘New York’s Finest’ (2.03), Punisher insists ‘I’m not a bad guy, Red’ and that ‘the
people I kill need killing!’ He even criticises Daredevil’s code of ethics which
prevents him from what needs to be done, calling him an ‘altar boy’ and telling
him that New York ‘stinks and it smells like shit and I can’t get the stink out of
my nose. I think that this world, it needs men who are willing to make the hard
call’ (in ‘New York’s Finest’ [2.03]).3 After he is finally captured by the police and
placed on trial comments from jurors show the variety of responses to him: some

call him ‘an animal’ or ‘a fascist’, but others refer to him as a ‘hero, doing things
the cops won’t do’ in ‘Semper Fidelis’ (2.04). The trial acts as a turning point in
how the diegetic world sees Castle and how audiences are asked to view him too.
Karen Page is the first to make this transition and she ponders, ‘I keep asking
myself if there’s really a difference between someone who saves lives and some-
one who prevents lives from needing to be saved at all?’ and even Matt changes
his mind due to the extent of the evil that is shown to sweep across the city. He
even remarks, ‘New York needs these people [like the Punisher], we need heroes’.
Later he remarks to Frank, ‘Maybe just this once your way is what its gonna take’
before making the sign of the cross and embarking on a mission together.
Just as MCU films set up their characters in individual films and then brought
them together at the end of Phase One in The Avengers, the same process was
adopted for the four Netflix superheroes, with each given their own season (two
in the case Daredevil) before being brought together in the eight episode mini-
series The Defenders (2017–) broadcast on 18 August 2017. Show runner Marco
Ramirez experienced the same issues Joss Whedon had in bringing very different
characters, visual styles and genre influences together. He remarked, ‘One of the
things early on that I found helpful was not to think about how many differences
[the other series] have but to go the opposite way and think about how much
they have in common’ (qtd. in Li 2017). The Defenders, set in New York, featured
Fig. 34: The Defenders brings together the four Netflix Marvel television shows as The Avengers
once did with their cinematic superheroes: from right to left Luke Cage, Stick (Matt Murdock’s
trainer), Danny Rand, Jessica Jones and Matt Murdock
supporting characters from across all four shows, including Foggy Nelson and
Karen Page from Daredevil, Misty Knight from Luke Cage, Colleen Wing from
Iron Fist, and, of course, the ex-nurse Claire Temple, in a narrative designed to be
a continuation of all the narrative arcs of the previous shows and a self-contained
event in and of itself.
Notes
1 However, at the same time as this Luke Cage features the disappointingly simplistic
and pantomime-like villain Willis ‘Diamondback’ Stryker and Iron Fist the unshad-
ed Meachums, father and son.
2 Each has the prerequisite Stan Lee cameo too: in Luke Cage on a police poster which
says ‘See a crime? Report it!’, in Daredevil (1.13), Jessica Jones and Iron Fist in the same
photo in the police precinct as a decorated police officer.
3 In Taxi Driver Travis Bickle suggests something very similar: ‘All the animals come
out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick,
venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.’

CO N C LU S I O N
‘Whose side are you on?’: Superheroes

Through the Prism of the ‘War on Terror’
in Captain America: Civil War
The most interesting version of the story from the beginning, for us, was not
giving an easy answer. We like complicated storytelling with movies that you
can watch and rewatch, and take different things away from each viewing, so it
was very important for us to craft a narrative where both Tony [Stark] and Steve
[Rogers] were a little bit right and a little bit wrong. Our hope was that you get
to the end of the film and are very torn over which side you’re on. Or if you did
choose a side, maybe someone close to you chose the opposite one.
– Joe and Anthony Russo (qtd. in Hunt 2016)
Who’s in the right – Captain America, the self-sacrificing hero, or Iron Man, the
war profiteer? They’re both right. I think it’s possible to be all kinds of different
people with different personalities and you can all be right. The point is, both of
them do good things. Both of them are good to other people and they make the
world a better place in their own way. Which one I root for depends how you posi-
tion them in the story…
– Stan Lee (2016: xv)
CONCLUSION: ‘WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON? 237

I.
This book concludes with an exploration of the thirteenth film in the Marvel
Cinematic Universe and one of its most important texts. Several films have been
especially significant in the evolution of the MCU: undoubtedly Iron Man, which
started it all in 2008 and established both the stylistic and ideological parameters
of the series; The Avengers, as the ambitious culmination of Phase One and its
ground-breaking unification of diverse identities; Captain America: The Winter
Soldier, as a widely regarded benchmark of quality for the Phase Two films, but
also an affirmation of the series’ continuing commitment to immersing itself in
fractious real-world events; and Guardians of the Galaxy as an indication of the
malleability of the Marvel brand moving forward. Captain America: Civil War,
the topic of this closing chapter, is, as we will see, as important as these films for
a variety of reasons and is, arguably, the defining film in the MCU to date.
Despite the huge financial success of Avengers: Age of Ultron there was some-
thing of a critical backlash directed towards the film which had been building
throughout Phase Two. While it was well received in general, several reviewers
and sections of the fan community had taken issue with what was perceived
as it’s reversion to formula, its tangible lack of peril and its status as ‘disaster
porn’. These criticisms had periodically echoed throughout Phase Two, directed
towards bland antagonists like Aldrich Killian, Malekith and Darren Cross, the
MCU’s refusal to kill off any of its major characters, the seeming lack of inter-
est in pursuing the ramifications of the numerous extra-judicial incursions of
the Avengers around the globe and the resultant destruction which often fol-
lowed in their wake. As if in part as a reaction to these critiques, for the opening
film of Phase Three Marvel turned to one of the most widely read and impor-
tant comic book events of the last few decades, Mark Millar’s Civil War, which
had originally been a seven-issue limited edition story published between July
2006 and January 2007. The comic had its detractors (see Trabold 2006), but
was certainly one of, if not the most, impactful comic releases in recent mem-
ory. Robert Weiner in the foreword to a scholarly study of the series entitled
Marvel Comics’ Civil War and the Age of Terror: Critical Essays on the Comic
Saga wrote that, ‘There are those events in the history of comics that are signifi-
cant and then there are those comic events that are really important’ (2015: 1).
In the same volume, its editor, Kevin Michael Scott, described the full extent of
the allegorisation attempted by the comic’s ambitious narrative which, he as-
serted, contained references to ‘Guantanamo Bay, the fearfulness of American
citizenry, the use of bad criminals to catch worse criminals, the creation of a
new national police force with undefined powers, the redefinition of citizen-
ship, trials without juries [and] incarceration without charges’ (2015: 4). Not all
of these elements mentioned by Scott are central to the film version released in
the summer of 2016 directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, the brothers who had
been responsible for the hugely successful Captain America: The Winter Soldier,
as the coordinates of American film and culture had shifted somewhat almost
exactly ten years later, but many of them are still compellingly realised within
the frames of the film.
In both the comic and the film version, instead of supervillains as the antago-
nists, it is the superheroes themselves led by Captain America on one side and
Iron Man on the other, who participate in an argument about the parameters
of security and freedom, regulation and accountability, which undoubtedly are
both a reflection of and an engagement with some of the defining issues of the
post-9/11 era. On the initial release of the comic and in the years since many
have drawn parallels between its storyline and the tumultuous events of the
new millennial decade: Matthew Costello described Civil War as an explicit ‘al-
legory of the War on Terror’ (2009: 229) and Mark D. White in A Philosopher
Reads … Marvel Comics’ Civil War: Exploring the Moral Judgment of Captain
America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man called it ‘a self-conscious allegory to the
events of September 11 and its aftermath’ (2016: 1). In fact, it is hard to find a
critically reflective piece on the comic series which does not connect it to the
post-9/11 climate in which it was conceived and written.1 Both the comic and the
subsequent film used the evocative question ‘Whose side are you on?’ in their
marketing, asking audiences to pick sides in the debate at the centre of their
narratives, and for many it proved difficult to choose between Tony Stark’s em-
brace of the Superhero Registration Act, which in the film is called the Sokovia
Accords, and Steve Rogers’ equally unequivocal rejection of it.2 Even academics
interpreted the political perspective of the series profoundly differently as the
conflict moved outside of the panels of the comic into its real-world reception
(see Bouie 2014).3 Did the comic’s allegorisation of the divisive post-9/11 era offer
a criticism of Bush-era policies like the USA PATRIOT Act, or an endorsement
of them? Francisco Veloso and John Bateman insisted that the comic should be
understood as a reactionary treatise in which
The entire story arc thus manages to convey that, when Iron Man wins, despite all
the resistance (which ultimately surrenders as a gesture of patriotism, of consid-
ering things from a collective perspective, for the good of society), the necessary
role of the Government has been reaffirmed. There might be problems, but there
are still the means to solve them – that is, they have the cure for the anomalies.
The Government remains the antidote and the cure for all illnesses, and should be
trusted on all counts. In this manner, the Government is saved and emerges from
the whole situation stronger as a reliable institution. (2013: 14)

Yet in a similarly categorical argument, Benton Bond comes to very differ-
ent conclusion, suggesting that the series is ‘grounded in the rhetorical space
of anti-war patriotism that was palpable during the Iraq war’ (2013: 80) and
Max Erdemandi stated that it ‘critiqued the American hyper-nationalism of
the time by portraying Captain America’s alienation from American patriotic
ideology, which had previously been his character’s foundation’ (2013: 214). A
decade later critics also connected Captain America: Civil War to the prevailing
cultural climate in which it was made: so Alex Abad-Santos expressed that is
was a ‘cautionary tale about American retaliation and vengeance. It’s a progres-
sion about what happens to American responsibility and policy in the wake of
9/11’ (2016) and Justin Chang, writing in Variety, suggested that the film ‘feels
sincerely invested in the questions it raises about freedom vs. responsibility,
heroism vs. vigilantism, and what those distinctions say about the heroes mak-
ing them’ (2016). While the film version has several differences to the comic
narrative, which we will consider in more detail later, their premises remain
fundamentally similar. Both feature a superhero mission which goes terribly
wrong in their opening scenes, causing the loss of many innocent lives and in the
aftermath of the tragedy governmental representatives come to the conclusion
that superheroes have been left unregulated for too long and need to be brought
under some sort of legislative control. Tony Stark agrees to support the idea,
but Steve Rogers considers it both counter-productive and an infringement on
the civil liberties of the superheroes who have done so much to protect those
in need.
II.
After a brief prologue set very specifically on 16 December 1991 in which the
Winter Soldier, formerly Captain America’s friend Bucky Barnes, is shown
undergoing brain conditioning treatment by his Russian-speaking HYDRA
guards, then completing a mysterious mission which involves the assassination
of unknown individuals and the retrieval of what appears to be the Super Soldier
Serum in their possession, the film moves to the present day with an intrusively
large onscreen caption, as if to categorically demarcate between the past and the
present. However, the subsequent narrative, which is deeply rooted in trauma
and loss, will make it very clear that no such easy juxtaposition is possible as
the past bleeds into the present for multiple characters in the film. The incident
which initialises the path to what will become known as the Sokovia Accords be-
gins with a regular Avengers mission in Lagos, the likes of which have populated
the MCU since Iron Man. Captain America, Falcon, Black Widow and Scarlett
Witch are in Nigeria in order to prevent the former S.H.I.E.L.D./HYDRA agent
Brock Rumlow (now known as Crossbones) from securing a biological weapon
from the Lagosian Institute for Infectious Diseases and selling it ‘to terrorists’
according to the Nigerian newspapers The Daily and The Spot shown onscreen.
In locating the scene in Lagos, the MCU continues the practice of what we have
described as ‘virtual terror tourism’ as the superheroes have been shown to inter-
ject themselves around the globe with seemingly no consideration of the wishes
of foreign governments and only limited awareness of the impact on those who
live in the region at the same time as demonstrating their altruism and spectacu-
lar abilities. The choice of Lagos, as that of other places like Afghanistan in Iron
Man, Puerto Rico and Bahrain in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Pakistan in
Iron Man 3 and the favelas of Brazil in The Incredible Hulk, is not a random one.
The year before the film’s release the Global Peace Index had placed Nigeria 151st
out of 162 countries analysed, one of only twelve countries around the world to
have been assigned the RED rating of ‘Very low’ and stories about Boko Haram,
one of the world’s deadliest terror groups, were regularly reported by the news
media.
After Rumlow and his team of mercenaries steal the biological weapon they
deliberately flee through the crowded Lekki market, which is full of people going
about their daily business. In always presenting their narratives from the point of
view of their American superheroes, the MCU has shown the distinct challenges
they face in their confrontations against antagonists who have little regard for
civilian casualties and even actively seek to cause them. One of Rumlow’s hench-
men threatens to release the virus into the crowd but Black Widow and Falcon
are able to stop him, saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. Confronting
Crossbones, Captain America engages him in hand-to-hand combat and when
the villain attaches a sticky grenade onto Captain America’s shield, the superhe-
ro throws it high above the innocent people who have gathered to watch before it
detonates, again saving many. When Cap finally subdues Rumlow he is momen-
tarily distracted by the mercenary’s talk of Bucky Barnes: ‘He remembered you.
I was there, he got all weepy about it… ’Til they put his brain back in a blender.’
While Cap is preoccupied, Rumlow discharges an explosive suicide device hid-
den under his armour which is only prevented from killing Cap and many in the
crowd by Scarlett Witch who, using her telekinetic powers, contains the blast and
propels it (and Rumlow) into the air. Unfortunately, she is unable to direct it away
from a nearby office building where, we learn later, it kills numerous civilians
including eleven citizens from Wakanda, who had been visiting Nigeria on an
outreach mission. Scarlett Witch holds a hand up to her face, devastated at what
she has done and Captain America looks to the building with an exclamation of
‘Oh my God!’ His first thought, as always, is of rescuing civilians. The moment
is a shocking one as the MCU has refused to acknowledge the deaths of civilians

in its narratives while the traumatic events unfold in the films: no innocents were
shown or said to have been killed during the Battle of New York in The Avengers,
nor in the destruction of the Helicarriers in Washington DC at the end of The
Winter Soldier, not even during the extinction level event at the conclusion of
Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Even though no one is physically shown onscreen to be killed in Lagos, the
impact of these deaths is considerable. Back at the Avengers Compound, both
Captain America and Scarlett Witch are deeply moved by what has transpired,
and importantly they both claim responsibility for it. Scarlett Witch says, ‘People
died … it’s on me’ and Cap tells her, ‘This job… We try to save as many people
we can, sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody, but if we can’t find a way to
live with that, next time maybe nobody gets saved.’ It is the traumatic event in
Lagos, described by Kevin Feige as ‘the straw that breaks the camel’s back’ (qtd.
in Johnston 2016: 65), that acts as a catalyst for the narrative of the film which
follows.4 In the aftermath of Lagos, an international outcry leads to the demand
that superheroes become regulated by an external governmental group for the
first time in the MCU. On the news we hear a newsreader ask the question, ‘What
legal authority does an enhanced individual like Wanda Maximoff have to oper-
ate in Nigeria?’, raising an issue which has been something of a taboo within the
MCU films until then, and T’Chaka (John Kani), king of the small but wealthy
reclusive African country of Wakanda and father of T’Challa aka Black Panther
(Chadwick Boseman) states, ‘Our people’s blood is spilled in foreign soil, not
only because of the actions of criminals but the indifference of those pledged
to stop them. Victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all.’ Yet the
audience, having witnessed the scene in Lagos in its entirety, knows that this is
not true. The Avengers, as they have always done, put themselves in harm’s way to
save innocents and even though some civilians were tragically killed, many more
were saved by their actions.
The impetus for the comic book equivalent of the Sokovia Accords, the
Super-human Registration Act, is very different although it is similarly impact-
ful and even more catastrophic. In a seven-page prologue in Civil War #1 a team
of small-time superheroes called the New Warriors, who are the stars of a reality
television show, try to catch a group of dangerous super-powered villains live
on air in an attempt to boost their falling ratings. Confronted on the streets of
Stamford in Connecticut, the most powerful of the villains, Nitro, triggers his
explosive superpower which incinerates the surrounding buildings and a bright
yellow school bus, killing, as we later learn, more than eight hundred people. It is
the death of civilians in both the comic and cinematic versions of the narrative
that triggers the furore which leads to the SHRA/Sokovia Accords, but unlike the
irresponsible and reckless New Warriors, in the film Captain America, Falcon,
Black Widow and Scarlett Witch are shown to have done all they could to protect
the innocent residents of Lagos.
In Captain America: Civil War the Avengers are called to a meeting by
Thaddeus Ross, last seen trying to apprehend Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk
eight years before. He has now left the military and become Secretary of Defense,
claiming to have found ‘perspective’ after a heart attack. Bringing Ross back into
the MCU is one of a myriad of ways the film is able to draw on the tapestry of
events in the previous twelve films discussed in this monograph: returning to
plotlines, characters and thematic motifs without the burden of having to intro-
duce time-consuming back story for the majority of its key players, considering
audiences have already, by the time of Captain America: Civil War, spent so much
time with them. Yet their perspective on the events portrayed in these twelve
films is altered somewhat. On a large screen the superheroes are confronted with
footage of the collateral damage caused by many of the incidents they have par-
ticipated in from the past few years, which until then the MCU had portrayed
rather unproblematically. As well as the events in Lagos the screens show both
the casualties and the financial costs from the Battle of New York at the climax
of The Avengers (with onscreen figures stating that there were seventy-four dead
and a financial cost of $18.8 billion), the destruction of the Helicarriers at the end
of Captain America: The Winter Soldier in Washington, DC (twenty-three dead/
$28 billion) and most recently the incident in Sokovia from Avengers: Age of
Ultron, which is shown to have been the most destructive of all (one hundred and
seventy-seven dead/$474 billion).5 The screened images of the events shown are
themselves striking and not taken from the original films; instead it is comprised
of hand-held footage seemingly from the perspectives of civilians caught up in
the turmoil. Perhaps for dramatic expediency not all incidents the Avengers have
participated in are featured: there is no mention of the battle between Hulk and
the Abomination in Harlem in The Incredible Hulk, the destruction of Greenwich
in Thor: The Dark World, or Hulk’s Johannesburg rampage in Avengers: Age of
Ultron, in which, as in all of those included in Ross’s presentation, not a single
civilian was shown being killed or seriously injured onscreen at the time.6 Yet by
consciously showing these events the MCU acknowledges, for the first time, both
the diegetic ramifications of their actions and non-diegetic criticisms of the genre
which arguably intensified with the release of Man of Steel, a film which seemed
to show such a blatant disregard for civilians that it could no longer be ignored
within the frames of either the MCU or the DCEU. What this shift from revelling
in the ‘disaster porn’ elements of the superhero film to an explicit acknowledge-
ment of it (while at the same time largely continuing to practice it) might tell us
about the genre and the cultural moment in which they are being produced is
uncertain. However, accountability, in some form or another was at the centre of

the two highest profile superhero films released in the summer of 2016: Captain
America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.7 Of course, the
issue of accountability had been raised by Tony Stark back in 2008 in Iron Man,
although his observation that ‘I saw young Americans killed by the very weap-
ons I created to defend and protect them’ proved to be a questionable one. The
perspective of innocent civilians has rarely been portrayed (or considered) in the
MCU and it is they who might be regarded as the most prominent Other of the
genre: for the most part only present to be saved by the superheroes or bear wit-
ness to the spectacular heroics. A true reverse focalisation in the genre would be
to see the events from the perspective of the civilians which Captain America:
Civil War very briefly offers, and the deaths of innocents provide the impetus for
the Sokovia Accords, but after this very little consideration is given to them.
The concerns that Ross articulates are both relevant and timely, and he begins
by thanking the Avengers for their service – ‘The world owes the Avengers an
unpayable debt. You have fought for us, protected us, risked your lives…’ – before
he comes to the central thrust of his argument – ‘…but while a great many people
see you as heroes, there are some who would prefer the word vigilantes.’ This has
been left largely unspoken in the MCU and if expressed quickly disavowed by fo-
cusing on the humanitarian and often self-sacrificing actions of the superheroes.
But here Ross explicitly confronts the idea that the Avengers (and by implication
all of the superheroes throughout the MCU) have operated with no oversight,
jurisprudence or even legality, enabling them to do, in effect, anything they want,
as they have been largely portrayed as quite literally beyond the law. With the
question, ‘What would you call a group of US-based enhanced individuals who
routinely ignore sovereign borders and inflict their will wherever they choose
Fig. 35: Captain America: Civil War confronts some of the unspoken taboos of the superhero
genre: their endorsement of vigilantism, the America-centric nature of their heroes and the
collateral damage their activities often result in
and who frankly seem unconcerned about what they leave behind?’, Ross chal-
lenges two of the essential tenets of the superhero genre in a single sentence:
by his categorisation of the Avengers as American (although using the words
‘US-based’) and the fact that they have routinely ignored sovereign borders since
2008. As Ross elaborates,
For the past four years you have operated with unlimited power and no su-
pervision. That’s an arrangement the governments of the world can no longer
tolerate… It [the Sokovia Accords] states that the Avengers shall no longer be
a private organisation instead they’ll operate under the supervision of a United
Nations panel. Only when, and if, that panel deems it necessary.8
The individual Avengers are faced with a simple choice, to agree to abide by the
Sokovia Accords (which is signed by one hundred and seventeen countries in-
cluding the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany and
Sokovia) or they will be forced to retire, and if they do not do so they will be
regarded as criminals.
While many of Ross’s points are certainly valid it is perhaps unfortunate
that they are expressed by a character so compromised by his previous actions
within the MCU. As most who have written about the comic book and the film
have suggested, it is not inherently unreasonable that there should be some form
of oversight concerning superheroes and their relationship to society, but the
way it is framed in both versions and who it is framed by, proves significant.
Just as criticisms of the behaviour of the Avengers by the likes of Senator Stern
in Iron Man 2 and the US government committee at the conclusion of Captain
America: The Winter Soldier are rendered unconvincing by who they come from,
the formation of this debate by Ross (and the later reveal that it was all part of
an anti-superhero power play) skews the balance of objectivity concerning the
Sokovia Accords immediately against it. Furthermore, Ross’s assertion that the
superheroes ‘seem unconcerned about what they leave behind’ contradicts what
we have already seen just moments before as both Captain America and Scarlett
Witch were shown to be intensely distraught by the events in Lagos and accepted
responsibility for their actions. The film does not acknowledge, but we as an au-
dience know, that despite the deaths and destruction featured in all the events
Ross shows on his screen, without the presence of the superheroes the losses in
every single one of them would have been much greater.
The prospect of the Sokovia Accords immediately polarises the superhero
community, or rather the slightly restricted part of it we see in the film, and an
impassioned debate then emerges between the two sides, which is the eponymous
civil war of the film’s title. Somewhat ironically the pro-Accords argument is led

by Tony Stark who, given his previous rejection of government intervention into
his affairs, at first seems an unlikely figure to welcome such an intrusion. Equally
ironically perhaps, considering his military background and the fact that he was
created by a government programme, it is Steve Rogers who stands in opposition
to them. This then is the ideological fracture at the centre of the film: one side
led by the man from the past and the other led by the self-proclaimed futur-
ist. Both Stark and Rogers are patriarchal figures within the Avengers who have
clashed over their methodologies and ethics before, but who had seemed to have
resolved their differences and recognised the worth of each other’s contribution
to the team by the end of Age of Ultron. Rogers is very clear as to why the Sokovia
Accords will prevent the Avengers from doing good around the world and his
rationale – ‘If we sign this, we surrender our right to choose. What if this panel
sends us somewhere we don’t think we should go? What if there is somewhere
we need to go and they don’t let us?’ – does not sound too far removed from the
claims of those like John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations,
who commented after 9/11 that, ‘It’s a big mistake for us to grant any validity
to international law, even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so
– because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international
law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States’
(qtd. in Power 2005). The MCU has repeatedly shown politicians to be inherently
untrustworthy and Cap questions the ability and motives of those who would
decide for them what they should and should not do, like Alexander Peirce from
The Winter Soldier, Senator Stern from Iron Man 2, Vice President Rodriguez
from Iron Man 3 and even the World Security Council, who targeted a nuclear
weapon at New York at the climax of The Avengers just four years earlier. If the
World Security Council functioned as a proxy for familiar American suspicions
of the United Nations, Captain America: Civil War offers the intrusion of the
UN directly in the form of a panel which will decide when, where and how the
Avengers are permitted to act, and this is something Captain America cannot
countenance.
Yet Cap’s decision in the film, while sincere and passionately articulated, is
ethically ambiguous for a variety of reasons: he might be right to suggest that
‘governments have agendas’ but it is equally fair to make the case that superhe-
roes have agendas too. His rejection of the Sokovia Accords is based on his belief
that ‘We may not be perfect, but the safest hands are still our own’, and the films
prior to this one have proven that his hands are the safest, but there are many
other superheroes out there who are considerably less reliable than him both in
the film versions (for example Tony Stark) and the broader world of the MCU
television narratives. One might suggest that the rigidity of his beliefs, which
seemed unproblematic in the mythopoetic recreation of World War II in The
First Avenger and in the symbolic recreation of that same conflict against Loki
and the Chitauri in The Avengers, might not be as easily compatible with the
complexities of the post-9/11 world, even in its diluted sense in the arguments
created by Captain America: Civil War. Karl E. Martin stated, ‘As a consequence
of his origins, Captain America does not deal with the moral ambiguity faced by
many of his fellow superheroes’ (2015: 100). The potential problems of this inflex-
ibility and his unshakeable moral compass were briefly hinted at in Age of Ultron
with his refusal to accept compromise in the later stages of the Battle of Sokovia,
but quickly erased by the film’s denial of the vulnerability of Sokovian civilians
and thus resulting in his unwavering determination being ardently endorsed
rather than questioned. Whether Steve’s certainty and intransigency (which is
accurately replicated from the comic) is supposed to be regarded critically by au-
diences is ambiguous, but Mark Veloso and John Bateman’s assertions that, ‘The
values embodied by Captain America are therefore progressively discursively
constructed as obsolete and no longer applying to the problems heroes need to
deal with in the twenty-first century: the new threats demand new combative
strategies and, consequently, new laws’ (2013: 12) are too boldly stated when ap-
plied to both the comic (which they are originally directed at) and the film.
Those who favour the Sokovia Accords are just as convinced of the legitimacy
of their positions and each seems to have a logical reason for their support of
it. James Rhodes aka War Machine (after having his name changed back from
Iron Patriot in Iron Man 3) even challenges Steve on his dismissive reaction to
the prospect of being overseen by a United Nations panel, suggesting that his
stance is ‘dangerously arrogant, this is the United Nations we are talking about
here, it’s not S.H.I.E.L.D., it’s not HYDRA!’ He also praises Secretary of Defense
Ross, talking about how many medals the former general has won, but whether
he would say the same if he were party to the knowledge we audiences have of
him after having seen his actions in The Incredible Hulk is perhaps doubtful. It is
understandable that a military man like Rhodes would be more likely to follow
orders proposed by a former general and the government he represents, but the
fact that Black Widow joins the pro-Registration side is surprising. At the end of
The Winter Soldier we had seen her perform the Snowden-like act of uploading
S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA secrets onto the internet, including everything about
herself, an action that saw her threatened with imprisonment. Yet her reasons
seem more pragmatic than Rhodes’ sense of duty as she suggests: ‘We have made
some very public mistakes, we need to win their trust back … maybe if we have
one hand on the wheel we can still steer…’
It is the principled android Vision, who we had seen worthy enough to wield
Thor’s hammer in Age of Ultron, that formulates the most persuasive argument
for the regulation of their superheroic activities. He suggests:

In the eight years since Mr Stark announced himself as Iron Man, the number
of known enhanced persons has grown exponentially and during the same pe-
riod the number of potentially world-ending events has risen at a commensurate
rate… I’m saying there may be a causality, our very existence invites challenge,
challenge insights conflict and conflict breeds catastrophe…
Whether this is true or not is debatable: Steve Rogers refuses to acknowledge

the possibility of anything other than the fact that ‘we’ve done good’ and the
Avengers have undoubtedly saved hundreds and thousands, if not millions of
lives, but many of the incidents in which they have participated have arguably
been directly caused if not by their actions then by their presence. It is relevant
that it is Tony Stark who has, more frequently than not, played the primary role
in this: without the Iron Man suit in Iron Man there would have been no Iron
Monger; it is hatred for Stark that motivates Ivan Vanko, Justin Hammer and
Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3; and the Sokovia disaster would
never have happened if he had not conducted experiments on Loki’s sceptre and
created Ultron. Vision’s words bleed beyond the frames of the screen and also
address both the escalating levels of destruction seemingly necessitated by the
superhero genre as film after film attempts to show more spectacular and exces-
sive sights of destruction onscreen and America’s foreign policy decisions before
and after 9/11 which have been said by some to have contributed to global in-
stability rather than prevented it (see Bacevich 2002; Butler 2006; Kinzer 2006;
Chomsky 2007).
It is Tony Stark who leads the pro-Accords side of the argument and emerges
as its strongest proponent. One might ask, how did the Randian figure of Iron
Man 2 who told the government ‘I have successfully privatised world peace!’ be-
come a signatory of the Sokovia Accords, which would effectively tell him when
and where he was allowed to be Iron Man? From the very beginning of the MCU
Stark has rejected all forms of outside interference, be it the requests of the Senate
Armed Forces Committee or even refusing to listen to other members of the
Avengers in what he characterised as their ‘don’t meddle medley’, an act which
culminated in the creation of Ultron, something he pointedly refused to apol-
ogise for during the films. However, as we have seen, each of Stark’s ethically
dubious choices have been ultimately overturned by the films’ narratives, which,
after cursory levels of criticism, embraced Stark’s lone wolf vigilantism and even
rewarded him for it by the time of their end credits. Yet the Stark of Civil War,
to the credit of the Russo brothers, the screenwriters and the performance of
Robert Downey Jr. believably changes his mind, as he once had about being a
weapons contractor after his moral epiphany in the caves of Kunar Province
in Afghanistan. The primary reasons for this are his pronounced feelings of
guilt and his psychological state in the aftermath of the events of Age of Ultron.
Towards the beginning of the film he had presented a generous gift of funding to
students from his alma mater, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), af-
ter which he was confronted by Miriam (Alfre Woodward), the parent of a young
American killed during the Battle of Sokovia.9 She poignantly tells Stark that her
son had graduated from university and decided to spend some time doing chari-
table work in Eastern Europe. Handing him a photo she adds, ‘His name was
Charlie Spencer. You murdered him … in Sokovia. Not that that matters in the
least to you. You think you fight for us? You just fight for yourself. Who’s going
to avenge my son Stark? He’s dead and I blame you.’ Her blame of Stark is itself
ambiguously presented as she never clearly expresses what she blames him for: is
it for the fact that he could have saved Charlie but did not? Or because, as Vision
suggested, the very existence of superheroes has escalated the occurrences of
catastrophic events? Or is it because of the fact that Stark created Ultron, which
is not mentioned, nor is it entirely certain whether this is public knowledge in
the film’s diegetic world. The comic offers a variation of this scene as Stark is con-
fronted by the same Miriam (who is white rather than African-American in this
version) at the funeral of the victims of the Stamford Incident, of which her son
Damien was one. Unlike the private moment in the film, it is a very public display
in front of the press who record her condemnation of Stark and her spitting in
his face while yelling ‘Who’s been telling kids for years that they can live outside
the law as long as they are wearing tights?’ (Civil War #1). In the film version
Miriam never reappears, but in the comic she becomes one of the figureheads of
the SHRA and later hands Stark a toy Iron Man figure which used to belong to
Damien in order to ‘remind you why you are doing this’ (Civil War #4).
In the meeting with the rest of the Avengers Stark tells the team: ‘He [Charlie
Spencer] wanted to make a difference, I suppose, but we won’t know since we
dropped a building on him while we were kicking ass.’ He also acknowledges that,
‘There’s no decision-making process here, we need to put in check. Whatever
form that takes, I’m game. If we can’t except limitations we’re boundaryless, we
are no better than the bad guys.’ Yet of course he has spent most of his time in
his three standalone Iron Man films and two Avengers outings refusing to ac-
cept or place limitations on himself and on a few occasions skated perilously
close to being ‘the bad guy’ before being redeemed by the results of his violent
actions. Like Black Widow he is also pragmatic about the reality of their situa-
tion and has realised that the Sokovia Accords are inevitable no matter how they
feel about them, so it is better to participate and have some sort of control than
exclude themselves from the process. He states, ‘If we don’t do this now it is going
to be done to us later. That’s the fact.’10 It is clear that both sides have legitimate,
if exaggerated, claims and also that their dispute is intrinsically connected to

real-world debates in the first decades of the new millennium, echoing the policy
decisions which were undertaken during the Bush era, but continued through-
out the Obama administration and, after the release of the film, that of Donald
Trump.
It is relevant to observe that both Captain America and Tony Stark’s decisions
are being made not just for ethical and political reasons, but also for very private
ones too. Arguably it is this dimension, largely absent from the comic version,
which gives the film greater resonance and, interestingly, raises the stakes in a
way that few MCU films have been able to achieve. This is not done by increas-
ing the levels of destruction on display but by making the drama more personal,
similar to what the Russo brothers were able to achieve with Captain America:
The Winter Soldier. Stark admits to Rogers that Pepper Potts has left him: ‘A few
years ago I almost lost her so I trashed all my suits [at the end of Iron Man 3],
then we had to mop up HYDRA, and then Ultron, my fault, and then and then
… and then I never stopped, because the truth is I don’t wanna stop. I don’t
want to lose her and I thought maybe the Accords could split the difference.’
This is the first time Stark has acknowledged his responsibility for the creation
of Ultron and also the first time he has verbalised how important being Iron
Man is to him. Captain America is also personally involved, as the signing of
the Sokovia Accords in Vienna had been interrupted by a bombing which in-
jured seventy people and killed thirteen, including King T’Chaka of Wakanda,
which the press reports was perpetrated by none other than Captain America’s
childhood friend, Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier. When the authorities are
sent to apprehend Bucky in Bucharest and are given a shoot-to-kill order, Cap
is compelled to intervene, not just to save his friend, but also to save the lives of
the police officers tasked with the mission. Coming face to face for the first time
since Bucky saved his life by pulling him from the Potomac at the conclusion of
The Winter Soldier, Steve realises his old friend is no longer the Winter Soldier
and did not commit the terrorist act that he is accused of. Over the course of the
film Bucky is revealed to be a much more reflective character, in many ways, than
either Steve or Tony. Unlike Tony, Bucky is filled with remorse for his actions,
even though his brainwashing and torture by HYDRA means he cannot be held
directly responsible for them. He tells his friend, ‘I don’t know if I am worth all
this’ but Cap reminds him, ‘What you did all those years. It wasn’t you, you didn’t
have a choice.’ Bucky says ‘I know … but I did it’ and when Steve implores him
to stop fighting, he answers: ‘It always ends in a fight.’ It is the introduction of
Bucky to the narrative of Captain America: Civil War which, more than anything
else, marks the film as the conclusion of the Captain America trilogy rather than
Avengers 2.5 as many referred to the film (see Mendelson 2016; Romano 2016). In
the comic book Bucky is not featured, but given his centrality to the MCU Captain
America narrative arc it is fitting that he becomes an integral part of the film. In
Bucharest, aside from the police officers, Bucky is also targeted by Black Panther
(Chadwick Boseman) in his sleek vibranium-weave suit, desirous of revenge on
the man who he believes killed his father. Because of his failure to submit to the
Sokovia Accords, Captain America’s actions in Romania are deemed illegal and
when War Machine arrives, now as a fully-signed Accord member and an official
representative of the United Nations, he states ‘Congratulations Cap, you’re a
criminal’ and arrests him.11
III.
The next time Iron Man and Captain America come face to face, those who make
up what is referred to as Team Cap are fugitives and are now regarded as out-
laws by the international community. For the confrontation that takes place at
Berlin Airport, which, it should be added, is conveniently entirely free of civil-
ians, both Cap and Stark have recruited additional superheroes to join them.
Hawkeye has renounced his retirement, giving no ethical reasons for leaving his
idyllic homestead and joining the conflict other than the words ‘Cap needs us’
and the declaration that he owes ‘a debt’ to Scarlett Witch, in an allusion to her
brother, Quicksilver, who saved his life in Age of Ultron. Cap also enlists the help
of Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, who brings some levity to the proceedings with his
unabashed admiration of the iconic hero. Cap explains to him, ‘We’re outside of
the law on this one so if you come with us you’re a wanted man’ to which Scott
replies, referring to his criminal past, ‘Yeah well, what else is new?’ However, it is
Tony Stark who introduces the most significant new superhero into Team Stark,
Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, and Tom Holland’s portrayal of the character as a
fifteen-year-old science prodigy is the first time as a minor in his cinematic histo-
ry. Marvel had leased the cinematic rights to the character to Sony in 1999 which
resulted in five films (where he was played by two different actors), but came to
an agreement which resulted in the character’s appearance in Captain America:
Civil War and then Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017. Peter Parker gives a speech
on why heroes have a moral responsibility to intervene, ‘If you can do the things
I do and you don’t, and then the bad things happen – then it’s because of you’,
which is perhaps not as memorable as the Raimi era’s ‘With great power comes
great responsibility’, six words which arguably framed the role of the superhero
throughout the decade. However, Peter Parker’s reasons for joining a potentially
deadly conflict seem as ambiguous as the ethics of Stark’s recruitment of a child
(even if he does possess super powers) and lying to his legal guardian, Aunt May
(Marisa Tomei), especially in the light of the film’s earlier focus on the death of
Charlie Spencer as a motivation for Stark’s pro-Registration beliefs.12

In the Civil War comic, Spider-Man also joined Team Stark and even agreed
to remove his mask live on television to prove his commitment to the cause, be-
fore later becoming disillusioned with Stark’s extreme actions and siding with
Team Cap. In fact, the teams in the comic version are considerably different
(and much more populous) compared to their cinematic counterparts given the
fact that Marvel has a more extensive use of its characters in print than in the
cinematic medium, as many of them have been licensed out to other studios.
The pro-Registration side in the comic not only features the Fantastic Four,
with Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, being one of the architects of the SHRA,
but also characters like Stature (Cassie Lang, Scott Lang’s daughter), Blade and
even Deadpool. The comic’s anti-Registration forces include Hercules, a still liv-
ing Quicksilver and, in a reversal of the film, Black Panther. No one in Captain
America: Civil War is portrayed as remaining neutral, but in the comic the
X-Men refuse to join either side and Dr Stephen Strange, who would get his own
cinematic origin story a few months later in October 2016, does the same with
the declaration, ‘There is no right or wrong in this debate. It is simply a matter of
perspective’ (Civil War #6).13
The absence of two of the Avengers Prime, Thor and Hulk, does not go un-
commented on within the film’s diegesis and once again this is a rarity in the
genre where questions like ‘Where was the Hulk during the events of Winter
Soldier?’, ‘Wouldn’t Stark have called on Captain America to help him fight the
Mandarin in Iron Man 3?’, or ‘Why does Thor not ask another Avenger for help in
his battle against Malekith in Greenwich?’ instead of relying on Erik Selvig, Jane
Foster and Darcy, have to be ignored. This was addressed briefly in Ant-Man,
with a rather startled Scott Lang telling Hank Pym, ‘The first thing we should do
is call the Avengers!’, but Hank’s mistrust of the Stark family made his rejection
Fig. 36: Whose side are you on? Team Iron Man: those that chose to sign the Sokovia Accords and
be supervised by a United Nations panel
of this idea somewhat plausible. However, in Civil War, Ross puts the absence of
Bruce Banner and Thor into his argument in favour of the Sokovia Accords and
even suggests: ‘If I misplaced a couple of thirty megaton nukes, you bet there’d
be consequences.’ This is later followed by Stark asking Black Widow if she knows
the whereabouts of Hulk and whether she might be able to persuade him to join
their side. She answers with her own question: ‘You really think he’d be on our
side?’ Banner has understandably not trusted the government or the military
since the events of The Incredible Hulk and might be especially reluctant to work
with Ross given their troubled history; however, his guilt and trauma as a result
of his Hulk rampages, which caused him to leave the Avengers at the end of Age
of Ultron, might lead him to be more open to some sort of oversight. In the case
of the Norse God Thor, given his literal otherworldly status and his affection for
Captain America, it might be seen as unlikely that he would be in agreement
with the Accords.14
The ensuing clash at Berlin airport is the central narrative set piece of the
film and certainly the most important single action sequence in the MCU until
that point. It is one which resonates not just because of its spectacle and physi-
cality, but the fact that the reasons that the individuals are fighting have been so
firmly established and that we have spent so much time with the characters in
the build up to it. As a result of this, the battle between Cap and Stark is imbued
with their personal rivalry, and the fight between Black Widow and Hawkeye
with the history of their friendship. When Captain America comes to blows with
Spider-Man, once one moves past the fact that Captain America is fighting a
child, Spider-Man’s glee at meeting and then fighting his hero is the kind of in-
teraction between beloved and iconic characters that film audiences have been
waiting for decades to see onscreen. Some reviewers criticised the Berlin airport
Fig.37: Whose side are you on? Team Cap: those who choose to reject the Sokovia Accords and
thus become regarded as outlaws by the international community

scene for having the superheroes quite obviously holding back from really hurt-
ing one another, which is true, but this reluctance is entirely appropriate due
to the motivations of both sides, who are not there to kill or even to harm one
another, but to achieve their desired goal: in the case of Team Iron Man, to appre-
hend those they regard as outlaws and in the case of Team Cap, to escape Berlin
and undertake what Falcon calls ‘the real fight’, that is the pursuit of the architect
of many of their problems, the ‘Sokovian terrorist’ (O’Sullivan 2017: 1) Helmut
Zemo (Daniel Bruhl), in Siberia.15 While this might somewhat mediate the sense
of threat, it is not ignored but rather integrated into the dynamic of the scene: so
War Machine brandishes a non-lethal stun baton and informs Captain America,
‘Sorry Cap, this won’t kill you, but it ain’t gonna tickle either’, and when both
Black Widow and Hawkeye seem to be holding back, Scarlett Witch intervenes
using her powers to propel Black Widow across the tarmac, scolding Hawkeye:
‘You were pulling your punches!’ This is rather different to the much more bru-
tal scenes of violence in the comic where it seems that many of the superheroes
are out to do serious harm to one another and the pro-Registration superhero
Goliath is killed at the hands of the clone of Thor. The film’s only casualty is the
accidental shooting of War Machine by Vision, who does not die but is paralysed,
Vision having been momentarily distracted in a very human way by his affection
for Scarlett Witch. This human cost of the conflict is in some ways more impact-
ful given how deaths in the MCU are almost always impermanent (for example
Loki in Thor: The Dark World, Nick Fury in Captain America: The Winter Soldier,
Pepper Potts in Iron Man 3 and Coulson in The Avengers).
Despite having offered a reasonably balanced argument thus far in the film
and allowed both Captain America and Iron Man the opportunity to present
their perspective and the audience to choose between two empathetic heroes
who they have followed across several previous adventures, it is in the Berlin
Airport scene that it arguably becomes apparent that the film itself has sided
with Rogers. Captain America had revealed himself open to a revised version of
the Sokovia Accords, but after witnessing Bucky’s mistreatment (not only in the
form of the shoot on sight order, but also the refusal to allow him legal represen-
tation) and Scarlett Witch’s involuntary incarceration, which he describes with
the loaded term ‘internment’, it became untenable for him. At this point in the
narrative both Captain America and the audience know that much of the conflict
has been engineered by a Sokovian intelligence operative by the name of Helmut
Zemo who had orchestrated the Vienna bombings to make them look like they
were committed by Bucky. Zemo now seems to be in possession of an army of
Winter Soldiers (about which Bucky informs us that they ‘can take a whole coun-
try down in one night’) which he intends to unleash on the world. Cap tries to
tell Stark about this plot at the airport, but he refuses to listen, instead telling
his former friend, ‘Your judgement is askew. Your war buddy killed innocent
people yesterday!’, but the audience know this is not true and it appears that if
Cap acquiesces to Stark’s demands hundreds, if not thousands, might be killed.16
Cap’s position has been further validated by the fact that two members of the
pro-Accords side have assisted him instead of Stark in defiance of the law, Agent
13 (Emily Van Camp) who gives him information and weapons (including his
shield) and Black Widow who switches to his side in the middle of the Berlin air-
port scene allowing him and Bucky to escape. Furthermore, after those on Cap’s
side are apprehended (Falcon, Scarlett Witch and Ant-Man) they are imprisoned
in an undersea prison seemingly far from the jurisdiction of any government,
known as the Raft, and Ross’s ‘perspective’ is shown to have been a cynical power
play rather than a true embrace of accountability. Despite his undeniable intran-
sigence, Captain America’s refusal to sign the Accords in the manner in which
they were presented to him has been shown to be correct and shortly after, when
Stark learns that Bucky was not responsible for the Vienna bombing after all,
he not only admits his culpability for the second time in the film – ‘Clearly I
made a mistake, Sam [Wilson], I was wrong’ – but he too chooses to disobey
the Sokovia Accords just a matter of days after signing them by lying to Ross,
disobeying the government and flying to Siberia to join Captain America. This
event is presented in a rather offhand fashion but it is significant in a variety of
ways; Stark agreed to abide by international law as long as it suited him, and the
very moment it did not he opted out, entirely fitting for the way the character has
been portrayed since Iron Man.
The film’s climax is quite fittingly set in an abandoned Soviet nuclear mis-
sile silo in Siberia and both the characters within the diegesis and the audience
have been led to believe it will involve Captain America, Bucky Barnes and Iron
Man putting aside their differences to unify against a much greater threat, in
this case, an army of Winter Soldiers. This is very similar to what happened at
the conclusion of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice released in the same year,
as the eponymous battling heroes realised they had been manipulated by Lex
Luthor and combined forces to fight the powerful Doomsday. Captain America:
Civil War subverts these diegetic and non-diegetic expectations with the reveal
of Zemo’s motivation and plan. Like Miriam, he too had lost loved ones in the
Battle of Sokovia and as a result has sought revenge on the Avengers. He explains
that,
My father lived outside the city, I thought we would be safe there. My son was ex-
cited he could see the Iron Man from the car window. I told my wife don’t worry
they’re fighting in the city, we are miles from harm. When the dust cleared and
the screaming stopped. It took me two days until I found their bodies. My father

still holding my wife and son in his arms. And the Avengers? They went home…
I knew I couldn’t kill them, more powerful men than me have tried, but if I could
get them to kill each other...
Zemo, for a brief moment, personifies the role of the ignored civilian in the film’s
narrative, and it is easy to understand his pain, especially given Bruhl’s under-
stated performance, but his killing of innocents makes it hard to empathise with
him and he joins the long line of critics of the superheroes whose accusations are
largely invalidated by their actions. Instead of unleashing the Winter Soldiers,
quite unexpectedly, Zemo has killed them all and instead directs Stark’s atten-
tion to an old-fashioned video monitor as a grainy CCTV tape begins to play.
The footage returns the film to its ambiguous prologue set very specifically in
1991 that had earlier seemed to be a routine Winter Soldier mission, which, in
a startling act of narrative legerdemain, is now revealed to have been the assas-
sination of Tony Stark’s parents, Howard and Maria. The film had effectively
foreshadowed this moment on a number of occasions, chiefly with Stark’s pre-
sentation to MIT showcasing his $611 million technology, Binarily Augmented
Retro Framing (BARF), which had enabled him to relive his last moments with
his family and tell his father ‘I love you Dad, and I know you did the best you
could’ in an attempt to mediate his trauma at their loss.17 The scene’s reveal of
the nature of the murder of Stark’s parents is an intimate moment from more
than twenty years ago and an emotionally potent one for those who have be-
come invested in Robert Downey Jr.’s characterisation of Tony Stark, who had
by then appeared in six separate films, especially for a genre about which direc-
tor Alejandro González Iñárritu remarked, ‘They have been poison, this cultural
genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit
that doesn’t say anything about the experience of being human’ (qtd. in Fleming
Jr. 2014).
Earlier Zemo had suggested that, ‘An empire toppled by its enemies can rise
again but one which crumbles from within … that’s dead, forever’, and this
emerges as the reason why he had deliberately orchestrated the conflict between
the superheroes. Stark is understandably grief-stricken and enraged with the per-
son he sees as responsible standing in front of him. Even though Rogers protests
that Bucky cannot be held accountable for his actions considering he was brain-
washed by HYDRA at the time, Stark is unable to see the distinction. This is made
worse by the further revelation that Captain America had known about it and
chosen not to tell Tony. So, the film’s final battle is not between the superheroes
and an army of Winter Soldiers, but two friends, each with very human reasons
for their actions. As opposed to the battle at Berlin airport it seems as if they are
not holding back at all and for the first time since Gulmira in Iron Man there are
no quips or witty one-liners from Stark. Barnes, once again, emerges as more
emotionally reflective than those around him; when asked by Stark, ‘Do you even
remember them?’ he answers, ‘I remember all of them’, referring to all of those
who were victims of his life as the assassin Winter Soldier and accepting the re-
sponsibility for his actions in ways more sustained than Stark has ever done.18
The entire narrative of Civil War has been shown to be immersed in trauma:
from Zemo’s tragic loss of his family during the Battle of Sokovia, Barnes’ post-
traumatic stress disorder after freeing himself from his identity as the Winter
Soldier, to Miriam’s loss of her son Charlie and Tony Stark’s loss of his par-
ents. Black Panther, who had attempted to kill Bucky Barnes in the streets of
Bucharest, believing he was responsible for the murder of his father, is able to do
what Stark cannot, and work through his trauma. Instead of killing Zemo, who
was the one responsible for his father’s death, he prevents the Sokovian from
committing suicide and tells him, ‘Vengeance has consumed you, it is consuming
them. I am done letting it consume me…’. In a film with such a large cast, Joe and
Anthony Russo are still able to give the Black Panther, a character who many in
the audience would not have heard of before, a genuine character arc even with
his limited screen time, due in large part to Chadwick Bosman’s sympathetic
performance, which primed audiences for his solo adventure released two years
later, Black Panther.
As their battle comes to a conclusion Cap explains to Stark that he cannot
turn his back on Bucky, because ‘He’s my friend’; to which Stark answers, ‘So was
I’ with a different inflection to that used in the trailer which, after its release on
10 March 2016, was the second-most viewed online video of all time, securing
almost one hundred million views in the first twenty-four hours (then second
only to Star Wars: The Force Awakens which achieved a staggering 128 million
views). Stark’s repulsor beam blasts off Bucky’s metal arm and he seems to have
overpowered them both, but as we have seen before Cap never gives up and in a
call back to The First Avenger, tells Stark, ‘I could do this all day’ before finally
defeating him. It is strange to see Stark, who over the course of his film appear-
ances has never lost a fight, finally be defeated, and when Cap turns away to leave,
Stark cries out to him, ‘That shield doesn’t belong to you, you don’t deserve it! My
father made that shield!’ Captain America – although whether he still goes by
that name after refusing to sign the Sokovia Accords is unclear – drops it to the
floor as Marshal Will Kane once did with his badge in High Noon, similarly disil-
lusioned with those he had been charged with representing. It is left ambiguous
as to whether Zemo’s plan actually worked, as the Avengers end the film still di-
vided, but Captain America sends Stark a conciliatory letter in which he assures
Stark if he is ever needed he will return.19
The ending of the comic version of Civil War is very different to that of the

film given that the Bucky character is not involved with the narrative. The mur-
der of Goliath at the hands of the Thor clone and the use of supervillains on the
pro-Registration team led many superheroes to lose faith in the cause champi-
oned so vociferously by Tony Stark and Reed Richards: including Spider-Man
and Mr Fantastic’s wife, Sue ‘Invisible Girl’ Reed, who both switch sides to join
Captain America’s anti-Registration forces. The final confrontation between the
two sides is on the streets of New York and, as in the film, it appears that Cap has
got the better of Stark before, out of nowhere, a group of civilians try to restrain
him. At first it is unclear what they are doing and when Cap tells them he is not
trying to hurt them one of them answers, ‘It’s a little late for that, man!’ (Civil
War #7). It is then Captain America who realises that even though he feels he was
right to stand by his convictions, he had lost sight of who and what the superhe-
roes ultimately fight for, as the panels around him show the destruction that the
events of Civil War have caused. He drops his shield, as he does in the film, and
gives himself up to the authorities who lead him away in handcuffs.
Captain America: Civil War is further evidence of Marvel Studios’ acknowl-
edgement that the MCU needs to adapt to continue to resonate and an attempt
to, in some ways, deconstruct some of the essential tenets of the genre, at the
same time as continuing to provide the prerequisite spectacle demanded by au-
diences. It is a film which interweaves the events of twelve previous films in the
franchise in the last eight years together in a way which no series has ever done
on such a scale. While it is true of the film, as Veloso and Bateman suggest of the
comic, ‘Its splitting into two sides is presented as essentially Manichean, almost a
constitutive feature of superhero mainstream comics, and so appears to overlook
the complexity of reality placing things on a two-sided coin, where one automati-
cally excludes the other’ (2013: 5), much is done within these parameters and for
the first time, for much of the film at least, there is no right or wrong answer to
the ethical dilemma at its centre, and for many members of the audience, the
possibility was there for them to choose to side with Tony Stark or Steve Rogers.
One might suggest that if Stark and Rogers had been less obdurate and extreme
in their positions the conflict could have been resolved without the need for the
‘civil war’ of the film’s title, but, of course, this is not allowed within the para-
digm of the genre. As Bucky Barnes said, ‘It always ends in a fight’ because the
genre and perhaps even the culture which it services, demands it. Zemo, and the
Russo brothers themselves, exploit the refusal of the superheroes to negotiate,
their disdain for diplomacy and the belief that the only solution for problems is
violence. In this way the genre is grounded in reactionary conservative fanta-
sies, elements that it may very well always struggle to transcend. The differences
between the comic and the film are revealing and represent more than the transi-
tion from one medium to another, as they also reflect the shifting coordinates of
the cultural climate in the ten years between 2006 and 2016. Even though recre-
ations of the contentious issues at the heart of the narrative were not as heated as
they were in 2006, the film’s debates, coming as they did during the run up to the
2016 presidential elections, were again on the cultural landscape as both Team
Clinton and Team Trump articulated the direction America needed to take in
the future on matters of security and freedom, which are at the centre of the film.
Notes
1 The Stamford Incident is also described by Kevin Michael Scott as a ‘9/11-like trag-
edy’ (2015: 6) and the Civil War comic was called ‘a fairly transparent effort to parallel
the debates over the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, the Bush domestic surveillance
programme’ by Benton Bond (2013: 75–6).
2 For a more detailed legal analysis of the Superhero Registration Act in the comics see
The Law of Superheroes (2013) by James Daily and Ryan Davidson.
3 Mark Millar himself asserted that the series was designed to be even handed, but sug-
gests that, in his opinion, it leaned more towards Iron Man’s position (see Millar and
McNiven 2007: 169).
4 Kevin Feige here echoes the description of the Stamford Incident by the superhero
Daredevil, who does not feature in Captain America: Civil War, when he remarks
‘Stamford’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back’ (Civil War #1).
5 In the directors’ commentary, the Russo brothers made it clear that these figures only
included civilian casualties and not police officers, soldiers or other governmental
workers. The comics had their own similarly tragic but different events which lead up
to the Stamford incident: the bombing of Philadelphia by the Winter Soldier (Captain
America #6), and a destructive Hulk rampage in Las Vegas (Fantastic Four #533–535).
6 It is the exclusion of this last event which is perhaps the most significant for the narra-
tive of Captain America: Civil War in many ways, but it is one that is entirely ignored.
Hulk’s rampage in Age of Ultron was directly caused by Scarlett Witch’s decision to
use her powers on him and she is more responsible for these deaths (which are not
named or numbered) than she is for those in Lagos. However, a return to this act
would certainly have had an impact on audience sympathy for the character and thus
is erased from the narrative.
7 There are considerable similarities between the two films. Both concern superheroes
clashing with one another on a matter of principle who are being manipulated behind
the scenes by someone else who does not engage with them physically. Additionally,
both films rely on the past trauma of their superheroes to motivate their actions in the
present.
8 This is not the first time heroes have been regulated in comics or in films: it was a cen-
tral element of the Keene Act in Watchmen (2009) which made costumed vigilantism

illegal, the forced retirement and relocation programmes for superheroes featured in
The Incredibles (2004), but perhaps most often in the X-Men franchise and the Mutant
Registration Act which involves the enforced registration of every mutant.
9 Alfre Woodard is one of the few performers who have played more than one role in
the MCU: she plays Miriam here in Civil War and in the same year the duplicitous
politician Mariah Dillard in Luke Cage.
10 The film’s representation of the debate, arguably, has more nuance than aspects of
the comic book. The Sokovia Accords are a measure of oversight and if the super-
heroes choose not to sign they are allowed to retire (even though none of them do).
In the comic, anyone who does not sign is immediately arrested and imprisoned.
Furthermore, Stark’s actions in the comic book are even more extreme than those in
the film: he secretly clones Thor, who murders one of the anti-Registration side, par-
ticipates in the construction of the Negative Zone (a Guantanemo Bay-esque prison
facility in another dimension) and also hires super villians to apprehend those who
do not sign.
11 None of the superheroes are physically shown signing the Sokovia Accords. The
first to do so was Agent Elena ‘Yo Yo’ Rodriguez in the web series Marvel’s Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. Slingshot (2016) during the episode ‘John Hancock’ (1.02).
12 This was made even more interesting by the four-minute-long video diary recorded
by Peter Parker included in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Peter tells the camera: ‘No one
has actually told me why I’m in Berlin or what I’m doing. Something about Captain
America going crazy…’
13 Interestingly Daredevil, the Punisher and Luke Cage, who have each appeared in the
Netflix shows discussed in the previous chapter, all join the anti-Registration side.
14 During the course of the filming of Thor: Ragnarok, the director Taika Waititi and
star Chris Hemsworth released a three-minute-long humorous paratextual video for
fans called What Thor was doing during Captain America: Civil War (2016) to inform
Marvel where Thor was at this time. The answer was that apparently he was living in
Australia with his new flatmate Daryl anxiously waiting for either Captain America
or Iron Man to contact him; or, as it is revealed in Thor: Ragnarok he was on the planet
Sakaar fighting alongside (and against) the Hulk.
15 In an excellent example of how every succeeding MCU film comments on those
which preceeded it, in Spider-Man: Homecoming Tony Stark informs Peter, ‘Trust me
kid, if Cap had wanted to lay you out, he would have’, adding a layer of complexity to
Stark’s decision to bring along Peter.
16 Of course, for those that have already seen the film and know the twist, they are aware
that Zemo has no such army and that if Rogers and Stark had stopped fighting they
might have been able to resolve things by having a conversation.
17 These final words to his father are different to those presented in the MCU comic
book Iron Man 2: Public Identity (2010) which were ‘I know what I am doing old man’.
18 It might be regarded as ironic that the death of the mother of a superhero plays such
an important role in both Civil War and Batman v Superman (as it also does in Thor:
The Dark World and Guardians of the Galaxy), but while in the MCU film it acts as a
catalyst for violence, in the DCEU the widely derided revelation of the shared names
of Batman and Superman’s mother leads Batman to recognise the humanity of the
man he had thought of as his enemy.
19 In Spider-Man: Homecoming Coach Wilson (Hannibal Buress) suggests: ‘The guy is a
war criminal I guess, but whatever.’

EPI LO G U E
The Superhero as Transnational Icon
We do not copy the Hollywood production [sic], we create our own mythology,
based on our own historical cultural code. In our case it is a common Soviet past
of tens of millions of people. That’s why we have several characters that represent
different republics of the former Soviet Union… In order to [ask the] question:
‘Who of the superheroes do you like most?’ The answer of our child, for example,
was ‘Russian Arsus’ rather than Superman or Batman.
– Sarik Andreasyan (qtd. in Sahay 2017)
What bothers me most, is that it’s always here to show the supremacy of America,
and how they are great. I mean, which country in the world would have the guts
to call a film, ‘Captain Brazil’ or ‘Captain France?’ I mean, no one. We would be
so ashamed and say, ‘No, no, c’mon, we can’t do that.’ They can call it ‘Captain
America’ and everybody thinks it’s normal. I’m not here for propaganda, I’m here
to tell a story.
– Luc Besson (qtd. in Gunderman 2017)
Writing a monograph about something as expansive and as contemporary as

the superhero films and television shows created by Marvel Studios, as one might
expect, presents a variety of challenges, chief of which might be an acknow-
ledgement of the remarkable pace with which new texts are added to the MCU.
In 2008, Marvel released only two films, their first as a fully-fledged and inde-
pendent studio, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, but by 2017 the frequency
of additions had become almost overwhelming, with a major new release in
nearly every month of the year. Between January and May of 2017 audiences
were able to watch the twenty-two episodes of Season Four of Marvel’s Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D., which were divided into three distinct but overlapping ‘pods’;
then in March the much criticised Iron Fist, the fourth and arguably least suc-
cessful of Marvel’s Netflix collaborations; in May James Gunn’s Guardians of
the Galaxy: Vol. 2 which was even more financially successful than the original
and made close to a billion dollars world-wide; in July Spider-Man: Homecoming
brought the iconic web-slinger firmly into the world of the MCU and also fea-
tured Robert Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark/Iron Man for the seventh time
(eighth if one counts his cameo in The Incredible Hulk) in ten years and in a
major film for the third straight summer in succession; in August Netflix’s The
Defenders, featuring the stars of all of its four previous shows onscreen together;
in September The Inhumans (ABC, 2017–), which, even though it was a televi-
sion show, debuted its first two episodes in IMAX cinemas all over the globe; in
October Thor: Ragnarok, the conclusion of the Thor trilogy which had started
in 2011, bringing back Loki but also integrating the Hulk into its narrative in
ways which would have considerable ramifications for Avengers: Infinity War to
be released the following year in 2018; and in November the Netflix series The
Punisher, in which the brooding antihero originally introduced in Season Two of
Daredevil returned to the television screens in his own series. All of these films
and television programmes, more than fifty hours of screen time, are set in the
same diegetic world, one which was established by Jon Favreau’s Iron Man back
in 2008.
It is Marvel, more than any other production company, that has fuelled what
we have seen described both as a ‘resurgence’ (Chermak et al. 2003: 11) and a
‘renaissance’ (Green and Roddy 2015: 2), but also a ‘cultural catastrophe’ (Alan
Moore qtd. in Flood 2014) and a ‘cultural genocide’ (Iñárritu qtd. in Fleming Jr.
2014). In 2011 Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamanidou called the phenom-
enon a superhero decade (2011: 1), but given its longevity we need to acknowledge
the necessity of turning their use of the singular ‘decade’ into the plural ‘decades’.
This volume has attempted to outline and interrogate the ideological parameters
of the MCU, but also provide a critical framework designed to transcend the films
and television shows contained within it, with much of its analysis just as appli-
cable to future Marvel productions and to other entrants to the superhero genre,
whether it is the films of the DCEU (2013–), the X-Men series (2000–), or even
those made in other countries, many of which engage with the motifs explored in
EPILOGUE: THE SUPERHERO AS TRANSNATIONAL ICON 263

this book in compelling ways. While we have correctly categorised the superhero
renaissance as being a primarily American one, its audience has been extraor-
dinarily global and only the first three MCU films made more money in the US
than in international markets, something that is highly unlikely to ever happen
again. As a result of the genre’s tremendous financial success and cultural impact
it comes as no surprise that other national film industries have sough to create
their own superhero films in an attempt to return domestic audiences to indige-
nously produced narratives. Japan’s Ultraman: The Next (2004), Casshern (2004)
and Gatchaman (2013), Finland’s Rendel (2017), Malaysia’s Cicak-man (2006),
Denmark’s Antboy (2013), Thailand’s Mercury Man (2006), Italy’s They Call Me
Jeeg (2015), and Britain’s SuperBob (2015) and iBoy (2017), to name just a few, are
superheroes as intrinsically connected to their own cultures as the MCU is to
the turbulent new millennial decades of the United States. They are texts which
should be understood as manifestations of their own unique national identities
and monomyths, but impacted upon and influenced in complicated ways by the
domination of the superhero form by the American cultural industries which
undoubtedly stands at the very apex of the genre. In this understanding the re-
lationship between, for example, a Russian and an American superhero film, or
an Indian and an American superhero film, is a distinctly transnational one that
should be considered, as Anurima Chanda commented, not as an example of
‘marginal cultural production’ based on ‘mimicking’ (2015: 70), but rather as a
process of transcreation or cross pollination understood as ‘a transnational and
translational instantiation of the superhero embedded in familial and vernacular
conventions’ (Kaur 2013: 293) of their own cultures.
Thus, the Russian superhero film released internationally with the English
title of Guardians (2017) is quite palpably a response to the deluge of American
superhero films which have flooded Russian multiplexes in recent years and was
billed as ‘Russia’s answer to Marvel’s superhero adventures’ (qtd. in Ryan 2017).
Made on a budget of just $5 million dollars, not much more than the cost of a
single episode of Daredevil, Guardians features a team of disparate superheroes
as co-protagonists created by a secret Soviet organisation called ‘Patriot’ during
the Cold War, but, as one might imagine, its enemies and the fears and anxiet-
ies it dramatises are quite different to those found in films like Iron Man and
The Avengers. The four superheroes at its centre are self-consciously designed as
representative of the different nationalities which comprised the former Soviet
Union and are shown to embody what is commonly regarded as the qualities and
traditions (and even the natural resources) of the region where they are from.
Therefore, the Armenian Ler (whose name means mountain in Armenian) has
the ability to manipulate stone and soil and is first seen meditating at Khor Virap
at the foot of Mount Ararat; Khan is the proud and mysterious Kazakh who
is said to have killed his brother in a blood feud, but can command the wind,
teleport and is a master with all forms of blades; Ksenia, the only female on the
team, has the power to become invisible and mould her form to any substance
that she touches (she even jokes that her extra superpower is ‘I make an excellent
borscht!’); finally, Ursus, the Bruce Banner-like genius Russian scientist, is able
to transform into a huge bear, the most potent Russian symbol of all. The film
embraces the thematic tropes of the superhero film but offers its own variations
on them and is inextricably connected to Russian culture and ideology with its
evocations of World War II, the Cold War and its Moscow-set climax, a city with
perhaps an even more vivid and traumatic history for Russian audiences than
New York has for Americans. It is not a coincidence that the film was released on
23 February, the Russian public holiday known as ‘День защитника Отечества’
(‘Defender of the Fatherland Day’), and the film’s title could just as accurately
have been translated as Defenders. The film opened at number one at the Russian
box office with respectable earnings of $3.7 million in its first weekend, but was
quickly eclipsed by a wave of American superhero films released in the weeks
after, starting with Logan which earned $7.7 million across the same time period
and those other guardians in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, which opened to
$12 million in their opening weekend. These cases are examples of the issues
facing many national film industries and markets all around the world, where
audiences overwhelmingly tend to prefer American films to those produced in
their own country. In 2016, Russian films occupied just 17.8% of the national
market share (up from 15% in the previous year) and only a single Russian film
appeared in the Russian top twenty-five box office in 2016 (see Holdsworth and
Fig. 38: Guardians (2017) offers Russian variations on the superhero narrative with its band of dis-
parate heroes from all corners of the former Soviet Union united against an apocalyptic threat

Kozlov 2015; Barraclough 2017). In the UK, the situation is even worse, despite
annual assurances by the British Film Institute that the British film industry is
booming, as independently produced British films were only able to secure 7.4%
of the total box office in 2016, down from 10.5% in 2015 (see Anon. 2017b).
In the last decade it is the Indian film industry which has, outside of the United
States, produced the most superhero films and for Indian audiences the genre has
been largely defined by the phenomenal success of Koi... Mil Gaya (2003), Krrish
(2006) and Krrish 3 (2013). The films, directed by Rakesh Roshan and starring his
son, Hrithik Roshan, have become one of the biggest franchises in Indian film
history, expanding beyond the cinema to television, comics and video games. As
we have habitually seen with the American film industry, the films have become
bigger as the series progresses: with larger budgets, more characters, increas-
ing amounts of special effects and more and more elaborate action sequences.
The trilogy draws extensively and fairly explicitly on American superheroes like
Spider-Man, Superman and Batman, but also on American films as diverse as
First Blood (1982), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and The Matrix, with even their
soundtracks leaning rather heavily on Alan Silvestri’s score for The Avengers and
Hans Zimmer’s for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
for inspiration. Krrish and Krrish 3 follow the adventures of the pure-of-heart
Krishna, who inherits superpowers from his father (who had been gifted them by
an alien), as he moves from a rural Indian countryside idyll to embrace his desti-
ny as a superhero in the modern metropolitan of Mumbai. However, its depiction
of India is very different to that of The Avengers with Banner’s sojourn to the
slums of Kolkota. Krishna becomes the masked superhero known as Krrish, who
is constructed as a particularly Indian superhero who embodies and articulates
Indian religious beliefs in ways very far removed from the secular humanism of
the MCU superheroes. Hinduism not only informs Krishna’s name, but also his
values and what he comes to represent to the local community who he serves
and who come to revere him. He tells those he saves, who are most often women
and children, that they too are Krrish and that ‘Anyone who takes away tears and
spreads happiness is Krrish’, which culminates in a remarkable scene in Krrish 3
when a statue is erected in his honour with the inscription ‘Superhero of India’ at
its base in English. While offering some similarities to the statue of the Avengers
at the end of Age of Ultron, the film shows a large crowd assembling around the
figure breaking into the song and dance number, ‘God, Allah, Aur Bhagwan’,
with the three gods in its title embodying the extent of the film’s immersion in re-
ligion. The lyrics of the song suggest, ‘He’s in me too. He’s in you too. Somewhere
or the other, he’s there in all of us’, but whether they refer to Krrish himself or
broader Hindu deities, remains ambiguous, as even though Krrish is portrayed
as godlike throughout the series (his appearance is often prefaced with lines like,
Fig. 39: “Anyone who takes away tears and spreads happiness is Krrish”: The Hindu “Superhero of
India” in Krrish 3 (2013)
‘God, please help us!’) the implication that Krrish and Krrish 3 offers is not that
Krrish is a deity, but rather he is an instrument of god and a living embodiment
of the religious faith of the Indian people.
Krrish 3 mounts an impressive spectacle on its, by Hollywood standards,
very limited budget of $15 million dollars, about the same as the pilot episode
of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. released in the same year. But unlike the case
of films like Guardians or SuperBob mentioned above, which were unable to
compete financially with American superhero films, Krrish 3 was embraced by
Indian audiences to the tune of around $45–50 million at the Indian box office
in the same year as Iron Man 3 made only $11.1 million and Man of Steel $6 mil-
lion in the same region. India is a rare market where, unlike Russia, the UK and
most other countries, Hollywood films receive a minority share of the box office
revenue of only around 10% per year (see Bhushan 2014).
Krrish 3 and Indian superhero films are certainly more melodramatic and
light-hearted than their American counterparts. With their outlandish plots
and extravagant dance numbers they eschew the veristic turn embraced by most
American films of the genre and are not mired in trauma, even though India
has had more than its own share of tragedies in the last few decades. But unlike
the MCU superheroes, Krrish does experience the deaths of civilians first-hand;
in one sequence he carries a dying, plague-infected girl in his arms as he runs
through the contaminated streets of Mumbai, a city where people are shown to
be hurt and even die onscreen, leading the hero to admit to his father: ‘I can hear
their screams and I am helpless…’ David Chute at Variety wrote that Krrish 3 was
not ‘an audience-pummeling industrial product like most of Hollywood’s super-
hero films. It has the off-hand, anything-is-possible spirit of a children’s book
or fairy tale’ (2013), and his description of the film as a fairy tale is a relevant
one not just for Indian superhero films, but those of the MCU which we have

Fig. 40: Moving into its second decade, the MCU released Black Panther (2018), ten years after Iron
Man (2008)
explored throughout the course of this book. Thomas Elsaesser has described the
contemporary blockbuster film, of which the superhero genre is without a doubt
the superlative example, as ‘the natural, that is, technologically more evolved,
extension of fairy tales’ (2001: 17) and Stan Lee himself, the creator of many of
the characters discussed in this book, saw the allure of the superhero narrative
in similar terms: ‘One reason people like these superhero stories so much is just
about everybody reads fairytales when they’re young. Well, when you become
older, you don’t read fairytales anymore, but I think you never outgrow your
love for stories of people who are bigger than life and can do things that normal
people can’t do’ (2016a: 96). It is important to note that the adoption of the term
‘fairy tale’ by both Elssaesser and Lee here is not employed in the casual and pe-
jorative sense it is used by many. We can choose to see fairy tales or their modern
incarnations, the blockbuster, as stories only suitable for children, or we can see
them as a richly-textured tapestry of cultural mythology and ask what they are
able to reveal about the societies which form them and very often seem to need
them. As Jack Zipes offered in his remarkable study of the form, Fairy Tales and
the Art of Subversion, ‘The fairytales we have come to revere as classical are not
ageless, universal and beautiful in and of themselves, and they are not the best
therapy in the world for children. They are historical prescriptions, internalized,
potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by
mystifying them’ (2006: 11). Similarly, superhero films are historical prescrip-
tions formed by the ideologies of the times in which they are made and should
be considered as resonant cultural artefacts rather than disregarded as ‘just a
movie’. If the superhero genre revealed anything at all to new millennial audi-
ences, it was that we in the real world need fictional superheroes just as much as
the diegetic populations of the films they feature in.
FI L M O G R A PH Y
12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) [in the U.K
2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2012) Avengers Assemble]
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) The Avengers (Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1998)
Act of Valor (Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968)
2012) Batman (Tim Burton, 1989)
A Good Day to Die Hard (John Moore, 2013) Batman & Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997)
Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004) Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005)
The All-Star Bond Rally (Michael Audley, 1945) Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992)
The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012) Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Marc Webb, 2014) Snyder, 2016)
AmericanEast (Hesham Issawi, 2008) Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin,
American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) 2012)
American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014) Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001)
Antboy (Ask Hasselbalch, 2013) Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007)
Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015) The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2016)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018) The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, 2016)
Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018)
Arrow (The CW, 2012–) The Boss Baby (Tom McGrath, 2017)
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass,
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015) 2007)
FILMOGRAPHY 269
Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Fantastic Four (Tim Story, 2005)
Johnston, 2011) Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Russo Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lynne, 1987)
Brothers, 2014) Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo Brothers, Firefly (Fox, 2002–3)
2016) First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982)
Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, The Flash (CW, 2014–)
2019) Flash Gordon (Frederick Stephani, 1936)
Casshern (Kazuaki Kiriya, 2004) Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013)
Chaplin (Richard Attenborough, 1993) Fury (David Ayer, 2014)
Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963) Full House (ABC, 1987–95)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) Footloose (Herbert Ross, 1984)
Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012) Futurama (FOX, 1999–2003, Comedy Central,
Cicak-man (Yusry Abd Halim, 2006) 2008–13)
Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Gatchaman (Toya Sato, 2013)
Spielberg, 1977) Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper, 2009) The Goldbergs (ABC, 2013–)
The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985)
Daredevil (Netflix, 2015–) Gotham (Fox, 2014–)
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) Grace is Gone (James C. Strouse, 2007)
The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2010)
2012) The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016)
Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978) Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, Guardians (Sarik Andreasyan, 2017)
2014) Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014)
The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 (James Gunn,
2004) 2017)
Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016)
Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998) Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008)
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) Harsh Times (David Ayer, 2005)
Defendor (Peter Stebbings, 2009) Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990) Hellboy (Guilermo Del Toro, 2004)
Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Guilermo Del
Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) Toro, 2008)
The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967) High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952)
Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016) A History of Violence (David Cronenberg,
Dracula Untold (Gary Shore, 2014) 2007)
House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–)
Elf (Jon Favreau, 2003) Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003)
Entrapment (John Amiel, 1999) The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
The Empire Strikes Back (Irving Kershner,
1980) I am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, iBoy (Adam Randall, 2017)
1982) The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier, 2008)
Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004)
Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John
In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007) Ford, 1962)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip The Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1972)
Kaufman, 1978) Margin Call (J.C. Chandor, 2011)
I, Robot (Francis Lawrence, 2004) Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC, 2013–)
Iron Fist (Netflix, 2016–) Marvel’s Agent Carter (ABC, 2015–16)
Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) Mercury Man (Bhandit Thongdee, 2006)
Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010) Melinda and Melinda (Woody Allen, 2005)
Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013) Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
It (Andrés Muschietti, 2017) Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (Vladimir
Menshov, 1980)
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Kenneth Branagh, The Mummy (Alex Kurtzman, 2017)
2014)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, 2016)
Jessica Jones (Netflix, 2016–) Oldboy (Chan-wook Park, 2004)
Jewel of the Nile (Lewis Teague, 1985) Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–)
Jericho (CBS, 2006–8)
The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)
Kick Ass (Matthew Vaughn, 2010) Pearl Harbour (Michael Bay, 2001)
King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976) Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black, 2005) Luske, 1940)
Koi... Mil Gaya (Rakesh Roshan, 2003) Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black
Korengal (Sebastian Junger, 2014) Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003)
Knowing (Alex Proyas, 2009) Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
Kong: Skull Island (Jordan Vogt-Roberts, 2017) Predator (John McTiernan, 1987)
Krrish (Rakesh Roshan, 2006) Primal Fear (Gregory Hoblitt, 1996)
Krrish 3 (Rakesh Roshan, 2013) The Punisher (Jonathon Hensleigh, 2004)
The Punisher: War Zone (Lexi Alexander,
The LEGO Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017) 2008)
The LEGO Movie (Phil Lord and Christopher The Punisher (Mark Goldblatt, 1989)
Miler, 2014) Push (Paul McGuigan, 2009)
Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987)
The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scot, 1991) Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
Leaves of Grass (Tim Blake Nelson, 2009) Rambo: First Blood Part Two (George P.
Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970) Cosmatos, 1985)
Logan (James Mangold, 2017) Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007)
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Rendel (Jesse Haaja, 2017)
Superman (ABC, 1993–97) Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007)
Lone Survivor (Peter Berg, 2013) The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)
Luke Cage (Netflix, 2016–) Restrepo (Tim Hetherington & Sebastian
Junger, 2010)
Made (Jon Favreau, 2001) Rocky IV (Sylvester Stallone, 1985)
Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) Edwards, 2016)
Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013) Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984)
The Manchurian Candidate (John
Frankenheimer, 1962) Salt (Philip Noyce, 2010)
FILMOGRAPHY 271
Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949) 2007)
Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) They Call Me Jeeg (Gabriele Mainetti, 2015)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack,
Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005) 1975)
Sesame Street (Various, 1969–) Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011)
Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998) Thor: The Dark World (Alan Foster, 2014)
Six Days and Seven Nights (Ivan Reitman, Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)
1998) Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)
Sky High (Mike Mitchell, 2005) Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986)
Slither (James Gunn, 2006) Transformers: Age of Extinction (Michael Bay,
Smallville (The WB, 2001–6, The CW, 2006–11) 2014)
The Singing Detective (Keith Gordon, 2003) Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007)
Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson, 1970) The Transporter (Louis Leterrier, 2002)
Sons of Anarchy (FX, 2008–14) Transparent (Amazon Studios, 2014–)
Special (Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore, Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2009)
2006)
Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) U-571 (Johnathan Mostow, 2000)
Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) Ultraman: The Next (Kazuya Konaka, 2004)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017) United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)
Split (M. Night Shyamalan, 2017) Unleashed (Louis Leterrier, 2005)
Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009)
The Sum of All Fears (Phil Alden Robinson,
2002) Veronica Mars (UPN, 2004–6, the CW 2006–7)
Star Trek: Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, W. (Oliver Stone, 2008)
2015) Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008)
Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–) Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987)
Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, 2008) The Wars of the Roses (Danny DeVito, 1989)
Suicide Squad (David Ayer, 2016) War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011) Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)
SuperBob (Jon Drever, 2015) Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017)
Supergirl (CBS, 2015–) The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) World War Z (Marc Forster, 2015)
Superman II (Richard Donner and Richard
Lester) X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000)
Superman III (Richard Lester, 1983) X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer,
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (Sidney J. 2014)
Furie, 1987) X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Gavin Hood, 2009)
Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2008) Zathura (Jon Favreau, 2005)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
1974)
There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson,
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INDEX
9/11 17, 23, 36, 129, 203 Argentina 2

films, 8, 19, 41, 85, 94, 99, 107, 111, 119, Arnold, Martin 72, 73, 76, 81
121–4 Asano, Tadanobu 75
post-9/11 period, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16–18, Astrada, Marvin 54, 216
23–32, 57, 239 Auster, Albert 49
Avengers, The (film) 3, 5, 78, 80, 109–25,
AC/DC (band) 43, 58 143, 146, 151, 192, 246, 249
Affleck, Ben 83 Avengers: Age of Ultron (film) 3, 5, 6–7, 11,
Afghanistan 17, 18, 86, 233 25 fig. 3, 27, 28, 32, 34, 63, 82, 94, 98, 119,
Avengers 78, 80 130, 133, 138–42, 167, 180, 186–204, 208,
Iron Man 18, 37n5, 43, 44, 45 fig. 5, 81, 227, 238, 242, 243, 246–53, 266
102, 131, 189, 190, 241
Kunar Province 17, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 193, Bacon, Kevin 175
248 Badreya, Sayed 52–3
Stark 27, 28, 31, 46–60, 87, 88, 90, 113, Baldwin, James 230
133, 151, 192, 248 Bale, Christian 83
veterans 153, 233 Batman (film) 2
War on Terror 17 Batman & Robin (film) 83
Alford, Matthew 22 Batman Begins (film) 1, 12, 29, 78, 83, 90,
Alkhateeb, Firas 10 230, 233
Al Qaeda 48 Batman Forever (film) 2
Althusser, Louis 16, 35 Batman Returns (film) 2
Amanpour, Christine 64 Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (film)
American exceptionalism 16, 23–4, 25 fig. 2, 8 fig. 1, 32, 83, 168, 169, 244, 255
3, 57, 60, 124, 151 Bazin, André 20, 106
Anderson, Benedict 16 Berger, James 101
Ant-Man (film) 167–85 Bin Laden, Osama 9–10, 19, 30, 37n5, 111,
Ant-Man and the Wasp (film) 35, 183–4 135, 146
INDEX 303
Bixby, Bill 84, 96n10 Catalan, Cristobal Giraldez 51, 55, 56–7
Black Panther (film) 5, 35, 257, 268 fig. 40 CGI (computer-generated imagery) 5, 56,
Blake-Nelson, Tim 84 65, 93, 94, 199,
Boden, Anna 35 Cheadle, Don 61, 65, 140
Boseman, Chadwick 35, 140, 242, 251 Chechnya 78
Bowyer Bell, J. 24 China 6–7, 63, 90
Branagh, Kenneth 24, 74, 75, 95, 143, 145 Chomsky, Noam 165n5
Braudy, Leo 32 Clinton, Bill 30
Brazil 88–90, 155, 241 Cold War 15, 16, 30, 42, 62, 158, 163, 201,
Brewer, Michael 93 265
Bridges, Jeff 44, 50, 141 Ant-Man 179
Britain 19, 159, 244, 264, 265, 267 Guardians of the Galaxy 264
London 27, 144, 147, 208 Incredible Hulk 18, 82, 89
Buchanan, Kyle 19, 112 Thor 73
Burke, Jason 17 Top Gun 21
Burrell, Ty 91 Winter Soldier 159
Burton, Tim 2, 32, 45 Colucci, Lamont 54, 81
Bush, George H. W. 24, 30 Comolli, Jean-Louis 35
Bush, George W. See Bush administration Congress. See US Congress
Bush administration 9, 20, 22 Coogan, Peter 7, 82
9/11 10, 21, 24, 111, 164 Coogler, Ryan 35
Bush Doctrine 61, 76 Corliss, Richard 58, 111, 196
films, reflected in 18, 24, 51, 54, 77, 78, Costello, Matthew 8, 24, 29, 42, 53–4, 239
122, 160 Croce, Benedetto 31
Iraq 77, 134 Cronenberg, David 3, 4
policies 156, 239, 250 Cruise, Tom 23, 42, 140, 171, 181
Powell, Colin 61 Cuba 158, 214, 215 fig. 26
rogue states 61 Cuban Missile Crisis 42, 158, 159
Rumsfeld 55 Cullen, Jim 23, 100, 101
War on Terror 47 Curtis, Neal 22
Butler, Judith 49, 66
Damon, Matt 49
California 22, 44, 134 Dargis, Manohla 21, 119, 135
Campbell, Joseph 84, 188 Dark Knight trilogy 56, 83, 164
Canada 94 Dark Knight, The (film) 2, 12, 29, 57, 119,
Captain America: Civil War (film) 2, 5, 26, 201, 230, 233
27, 28, 36, 60, 62, 64, 83, 94, 98, 162, Dark Knight Rises, The (film) 3, 83
187, 189, 194, 196, 199, 200–1, 237–61 Daughtry, J. Martin 43
Captain America: The First Avenger (film) David, Peter 68n3, 94
9, 18, 27, 28, 30, 50, 97–108, 109, 112, DC Extended Universe (DCEU) 8, 29, 56,
138–40, 142, 218, 220 142, 210, 243
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (film) Deadpool (film) 2, 9, 252
19, 27, 62, 67, 106, 111, 130, 150–66, 168, Defenders (series) 35, 223–35, 263, 265
179, 189, 208, 213, 227–8, 232, 238–57 Defense Department. See US Department of
Captain Marvel (film) 35,141 Defense
Carter, Sean 27, 49, 56 Delcroix, Oliver 21
Deleuze, Gilles 87 French, Philip 18
Dennings, Kat 75 Füchtjohann, Jan 4
Depp, Johnny 80
D’Esposito, Louis 95 Gaine, Vincent M. 75
Disney 3, 4, 158, 207 Garfield, Andrew 83
Dittmer, Jason 20, 60, 97, 99, 151 Germany 27, 100, 115, 189, 244
Doctor Strange (film) 2, 5, 20, 67, 148, 231 Nazis 31, 73
DOD. See US Department of Defense Weimar 15
Dodds, Klaus 27, 49, 56 Gilmore, James N. 85
Donner, Richard 5, 32, 66 Godzilla 82
Douglas, Edward 66 Goldblum, Jeff 67
Douglas, Michael 5, 141, 179, 181 fig. 21 Goyer, David 32, 124n2
Downey Jr., Robert 5, 17, 29 fig. 4, 42, 44, Graham, Mark 53
50, 56, 57, 65, 80, 110, 130–1, 140, 192, Grant, Barry Keith 9
193, 199, 248, 256, 263 Gregg, Clark 56, 114, 211
Doyle, Patrick 78 Guardians of the Galaxy (film) 5, 31, 35, 67,
Durkheim, Émile 35 75, 130, 139–42, 167–85, 232, 238
DuToit, Kim 80, 98 Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 (film) 5, 21,
34, 67, 178, 263, 265
Eastwood, Clint 9 Guatemala 90, 158
Eaton, Mick 60 Gulf War 55
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 42, 68n9 Gunn, James 34, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176–7,
Elba, Idris 75 263
Ellison, Larry 43 Gunning, Tom 5–6
Ellison, Ralph 230
El Mundo (newspaper) 21 Haberman, Frank 1
Elsaesser, Thomas 4, 267–8 Hagley, Annika 75
Engelhardt, Tom 30, 201, 202 Hancock (film) 2, 230
Escape From New York (film) 5 Hanks, Tom 49, 101
Evans, Chris 80, 101, 104 fig. 10, 140, 198 Harrison, Michael 75
Hart, Tom 46
Fairey, Shepard 20 Hassler-Forest, Dan 55, 56, 151
Faludi, Susan 3, 4, 24, 199 Hellboy (film) 2
Favreau, Jon 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 57, 62, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (film) 9
66, 73, 131, 179, 263 Hemsworth, Chris 80, 140, 147
Feige, Kevin 84, 92, 94, 143, 179, 242 Hercules 7, 122, 252
Fernandez, Charmaine 8 Hitler, Adolf 30, 98, 102, 103, 192
Feulner, Edwin J. 75 Hodgeson, Geoffrey 23
Fingeroth, Danny 7, 81, 84 Holland, Tom 83, 251
Finke, Nikki 3, 164 Hollis, Dave 3
Fiske, John 33 Holloway, David 15, 85
Fleck, Ryan 35 Holocaust 31, 108n2, 115
Flynn, Errol 43 Honeycutt, Kirk 58
Ford, John 53, 196, 197 fig. 22 Hopkins, Anthony 74, 141
FOX News 64 Howard, Terrence 44, 45, 51
Franich, Darren 78, 151, 158, 164 Hughes, Howard 43, 70n29
INDEX 305
Hulk (film) 32, 82, 86 Iron Man cont.
Hurd, Gale 83 military 111
Hurt, William 85, 141 patriotism 59
Hussein, Saddam 30, 86 Stark 193, 244, 263
suit 34, 49, 52, 54, 59–61, 63, 65, 116, 147,
IMAX 59, 263 189, 248
Incredible Hulk, The (film) 2, 32, 57, 81–95, Winter Soldiers 255
112, 182, 195, 208, 243, 263 wit 143
Abomination 26 Iron Man (film) 2, 6, 11, 14, 17, 18, 20–2,
actors 140, 141, 191 41–71, 73, 82, 110, 112, 130, 179, 182,
Avengers 110 238, 263
Banner 78 actors 140–1
Brazil 241 Afghanistan 53, 54 fig. 6, 81, 87, 102, 113,
Bush administration 20 189–90, 241
Cold War 18 Captain America 97, 254
India 113 Cold War 264
military 36, 247, 253 Coulson 211
Rio 113 dialogue 156
Stark 67 father 115
violence 151, 188, 229 Iraq 75
War on Terror 111 military 36, 37n5, 43, 50, 55, 89
women 138, 142, 144, 178, 197 Nigeria 240
World War Two 7 PTSD 31, 132
Incredible Hulk, The (television) 82 science 90
India 6, 112–13, 266, 267 Stark 78, 192, 194, 248, 250, 255, 256
Invincible Iron Man, The (comic) 64 stereotypes 200
Iran 17, 61, 63, 135, 158 Team Iron Man 252 fig. 36, 254
Iraq 37n5, 75 villain 135
Bagram Air Base 47 War on Terror 136, 239
Bush 17, 134 women 138, 142, 178
deaths 51, 57 Iron Man 2 (film) 20, 28, 41–71, 76, 78, 95,
displacement 51, 52 103, 112, 114, 130, 180, 182
invasion of 61 actors 140
veterans 153 Black Widow 110
war 43, 46, 53, 69n18, 77–8, 86, 152, 158, Captain America 97
240, 259n1 father 115
Iron Fist (series) 35, 90, 209, 210, 223, 225, military 36, 89
226 fig. 33, 228–31, 235, 263 science 90
Iron Man 5, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 20, 24, 55, 89, society 245, 246
92 Stark 134, 196, 220, 248
Avengers, 249 women 138–9, 178
Captain America 116, 123, 237, 239, 251 Iron Man 3 (film) 6, 7, 19, 28, 48, 67, 110,
CGI 93–4 119, 129–49, 227, 267
Cold War 82 Afghanistan 131
creation of 98 Captain America 252
masculinity 107 military 37n5, 247
Iron Man 3 (film) cont. Lee, Stan 29, 43, 82, 92, 159, 191, 237, 268
Pakistan 241 Le Figero (newspaper) 21
PTSD 26, 31, 153 Le Monde (newspaper) 19
society, 246 Leone, Sergio 53
Stark, 191, 192, 200, 248 Leterrier, Louis 32, 82–8, 93–5, 113
women 33–4, 38n17, 145, 147, 250, 254 Lev, Peter 15
Italy 100, 104, 105, 121 LoCicero, Don 14, 72
Lucas, George 172
Jackman, Hugh 11 fig. 2 Lucasfilm 4
Jackson, Samuel L. 62, 141, 157 fig. 19,
James Bond franchise 1, 19, 188 Maguire, Tobey 83
Jameson, Fredric 16, 173–4 Maher, Bill 10
Jeffords, Susan 24, 25, 74, 80, 169, 176 Man of Steel (film) 29, 32, 66, 119, 168, 169,
Jenkins, Henry 84–5, 155, 167 196, 243, 267
Jenkins, Patty 142, 187 Martínez, Luis 21
Jenkins, Tricia 22 Marvel Entertainment 4, 207, 224
Jessica Jones (series) 34, 35, 209, 210, Marvel’s Agent Carter (television) 31, 34,
223–35 62, 63, 139, 195, 207–22, 223, 228,
Jewett, Robert 8, 10, 15, 19, 55, 99, 186–8 Marvel Studios 14, 18, 43, 44, 46, 73, 94, 95,
Johnson, Andrew 133 98, 110, 129, 130, 155, 179, 187, 207, 208,
Johnson, Chalmers 46, 77, 132 258, 262,
Marx, Karl 18
Kaes, Anton 15, 16 McDowall, John C. 31, 199
Kaller, Brian 3 McQueen, Steve 101
Kaplan, E. Anne 55, 109, 121 Mexico 90
Keaton, Michael 28 Middle East 32, 78, 86, 135, 162, 165
Kellner, Douglas 15, 22, 129, 163 militainment 22
Kennedy, John F. 42, 129 Military Industrial Complex 36, 42, 52, 56,
Killian, Aldrich 26, 28, 37n5, 63, 132–7, 86, 89, 92, 94, 111, 151
238, 248 Mills, Anthony R. 76
King, Geoff 10–11, 17, 53, 119 Mirrlees, Tanner 21, 52, 55
Kirby, Jack 82, 98 Moore, Alan 2, 263
Klein, Naomi 51 Morrison, Grant 32, 72
Kord, Susanne 47, 169 Motion Picture Association of America 12
Korea
Japan 108n1 Narboni, Jean 35
North Korea 17, 61, 63 NATO 16
South Korea 103, 155, 198 New Mexico 67
Kosovo 27, 189 New York 29, 30, 63, 129–34, 208, 216, 217,
Krimmer, Elisabeth 47, 169 219 fig. 29, 265
Avengers 5, 111, 112, 117, 119, 122, 123,
Labuza, Peter 76 143, 146, 151, 192, 246
Lacan, Jacques 48–9 Battle of New York 19, 73, 110, 114, 122,
Lawrence, John Shelton 8, 10, 15, 19, 55, 99, 156, 191, 203, 213, 242–3
186–8 Captain America 107, 258
Lee, Ang 32, 82, 86 Defenders 225, 228, 229, 230, 232–4
INDEX 307
New York cont. Punisher (film) 233–4, 263
Ground Zero 10 Punisher: War Zone and Wanted (film) 2
Incredible Hulk 93, 113 Purse, Lisa 25–6, 50
Iron Man 59 Pym, Hank 5, 90, 141, 179–80, 181 fig. 21,
Iron Man 2 65 182, 183, 252
New York Post (newspaper) 62, 121
New York Times (newspaper) 105 Raimi, Sam 11, 251
Nigeria 6, 240–2 Reagan administration 23, 74, 75, 105, 165,
Lagos 240–3, 246 176, 192
Nixon administration 75 Reeve, Christopher 45
Nolan, Christopher 8, 12, 29, 32, 56, 83, Reeves, Keanu 80
164, 230, 233, Reilly, John C. 176
Noonan, Peggy 10, 25, 26, 80, 98 Reinhartz, Adele 79
Norris, Chuck 25, 80 Renner, Jeremy 78, 198
Norse mythology 24, 67, 73, 76, 78, 79, 112, Robb, David L. 22
115, 253 Rockwell, Sam 58
Norton, Edward 83–4, 87, 91 fig. 9, 92–4, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (film) 5, 6
113, 140, 191 Rojek, Chris 7
Romero, George 78
Obama administration 10, 14, 20, 21, 23, Rommel-Ruiz, W. Bryan 57
24, 163, 164, 250 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 116
drones 150, 162 Roosevelt, Theodore 46
security 156 Roth, Tim 89, 93
Roublou, Yann 26
Pakistan 62, 78, 134, 135, 160, 241 Rourke, Mickey 28, 58, 62
Paltrow, Gwyneth 44, 50, 140 Ruffalo, Mark 87, 93, 94, 110, 113, 140, 191,
PATRIOT Act. See USA PATRIOT Act 198
patriotism 32, 46, 56, 98, 99, 153, 161, 239, Russell, Kurt 5, 178
240 Russia 27, 62–3, 103, 112, 152, 155, 214, 220,
Pearl Harbor 22, 30, 98, 101 244, 264, 265, 267
Pearlman, Nicole 35 Ryan, Michael 15, 163
Pease, Donald 23
Pentagon 65, 134 Sanderson, Peter 29
Peru 6, 171, 214, 215 fig. 25 Saunders, Ben 72
Pheasant-Kelly, Francis 17, 49, 56, 61, 94, Schjeldahl, Peter 20
121, 174 Schlegel, Johannes 1
Pitt, Brad 80, 101 Schmidt, Hugo 62
Pixar 4 Schumacher, Joel 2, 32, 45
Pollard, Tom 17, 49, 85 Schwartzel, Eric 6
Portman, Natalie 74, 140, 142, 146 fig. 17, Schwarzenegger, Arnold 25, 80
147 Scott, A.O. 21
Pratt, Chris 80, 140, 171, 180 Secker, Tom 22
Prince, Stephen 45 Shaheen, Jack 45, 133
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 132, Shandling, Gary 61
231, 233 Shelley, Mary 82
Stark, 19, 26, 31, 51, 111, 131, 132, 137, 190 Siegel, Jerry 7
Singer, Bryan 11, 66 Time (magazine) 58
Skarsgård, Stellan 73, 141 Toh, Justine 78
Slotkin, Richard 16, 26, 58, 170 Tompkins, Jane 9
Smith, Kyle 62 Top Gun (film) 22–3
Snyder, Zack 66, 169 Tracey, Brian 75
Solo: A Star Wars Story (film) 6 Trump administration 10, 21, 75, 160–1,
Sotinel, Thomas 19 163, 250, 259
Soviet Union 42–3, 48, 100, 159, 165, 220, Conway, Kelly, 21
262, 264, 265 Tucci, Stanley 102
Spanakos, Antony Peter 88, 94, 113 Tyler, Live 86, 140
Spider-Man (film) 7, 11, 41, 42, 43, 82, 118,
136, 239 UK. See Britain
Spider-Man 2 (film) 83 Ukraine 103
Spider-Man 3 (film) 83 United Kingdom. See Britain
Spider-Man: Homecoming (film) 28, 29 fig. United Nations (UN) 16, 123, 210, 244,
4, 251, 263 246–7, 251, 252 fig. 36
Iron Man 5 WMD 61–2
Spider-Man, The Amazing (film) 83 Upton, Bryn 24
Spider-Man, The Amazing (comic) 233, 252 US Air Force 23
Spielberg 12, 21, 49, 101, 119, 167–8, 169, USA PATRIOT Act 36, 61, 152, 156, 157,
170, 181 239
Stallone, Sylvester 24, 25, 26, 27, 80, 176 US Army 18, 85, 104, 105
Star Wars franchise 1, 6, 155, 172, 173 US Congress 105
Star Wars: A New Hope (film) 15, 173 US Department of Defense (DOD) 21–2,
Star Wars Missile Defence system 192 22–3, 37n10, 45
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (film) 6, 141, US Department of Homeland Security 63
187, 257 US Navy 22, 23, 44
Stevenson, Robert Louis 82, 92
Stone, Oliver 78 Valenti, Jack 12
Stork, Matthias 67, 85, 122 Variety (magazine) 6, 240, 267
Suicide Squad (film) 2, 177 Venezuela 6,
Superman (film) 5, 7, 32, 45, 66 Vietnam War 16, 20, 42, 43, 48, 53, 158, 201
Superman II (film) 2 Hulk 85
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (film) 83 images 129
Superman Returns (film) 11, 83, 136 Punisher 233
Switzerland 48, 131 Stark 54
Thor 73
Tasker, Yvonne 5, 24, 80 Vignold, Peter 6
Theroux, Justin 58
Thing, The (film) 5 Walderzak, Joseph 33–4, 138, 147
Thor (film) 5, 17–18, 24, 67, 72–81, 85, 91, Walters, Ben 20
93, 95, 103, 109–12, 140–4, 151, 168, War on Terror 7, 8, 16, 17, 19, 23, 28, 29, 30,
176, 178, 263 32, 43, 47–9, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 62, 85,
Thor: Ragnarok (film) 5, 67, 195, 263 89, 111, 114, 123, 133, 135, 136 fig. 16,
Thor: The Dark World (film) 27, 34, 67, 73, 151, 152, 153, 157 fig. 19, 161, 202, 230,
81, 129–49 237–61
INDEX 309
Wayne, John 9, 24–7, 38n14, 101, 196, 203 World War II 7, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26, 27, 30–1,
Weiner, Robert 30, 238, 42, 48–50, 62, 86, 97–108, 111–16, 153,
Weisberg, Jacob 78 157–9, 161, 162, 191, 192, 193, 201, 203,
Wertham, Fredric 33 209, 214, 218, 219 fig. 29, 246, 265
Westwell, Guy 66 Wright, Bradford 17
Whedon, Joss 3, 21, 32, 42, 110, 112, 114, Wright, Edgar 179, 187
115, 119, 124, 187, 188, 193, 196, 198,
203, 109, 213, 234 X-Men (film) 8, 11 fig. 2, 263
Wiseman, Len 42 X-Men (comic) 252
WMD (weapons of mass destruction) 17, X-Men: Apocalypse (film) 2
43, 48, 52, 62, 85, 86, 89, 94, 103, 114, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (film) 20
115, 132
Wolverine 8, 11 fig. 2, 20, 201 Zemeckis, Robert 17
Wonder Woman 8, 9, 141, 142, 201 Zimbabwe 2
Wood, Michael 36 Žižek, Slavoj 36, 48–9
Wood, Robin 15, 147
World War I 101

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¾VENGERSA S S E M B L E !

Prologue: The Heroes We Need Right Now?:

Conclusion: ‘Whose side are you on?’: Superheroes Through

The only real superheroes

The Heroes We Need Right Now?:

THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 1

THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 3

THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 5

A large amount of this increasing revenue is due to the expanding influence of

THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 7

THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 9

as Geoff King commented: ‘The traditional generic western may be in a state

THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 11

THE HEROES WE NEED RIGHT NOW? 13

Superheroes in the New Millennium

To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our

We of the twenty-first century, although unable to believe in the literal reality

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 15

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 17

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 19

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 21

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 23

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 25

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 27

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 29

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 31

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 33

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 35

SUPERHEROES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 37

‘That’s how Dad did it, that’s how

American contributions to international security, global economic growth, free-

THE STARK DOCTRINE 41

THE STARK DOCTRINE 43

Favreau’s remarks, of course, are directed at Peter Parker/Spider-Man and by

THE STARK DOCTRINE 45

THE STARK DOCTRINE 47

THE STARK DOCTRINE 49

THE STARK DOCTRINE 51

If there is a common denominator in all of these Hollywood films, it would be

THE STARK DOCTRINE 53

comments about Stark’s early interventions in Vietnam might be equally applied

THE STARK DOCTRINE 55

Prone to self destructive tendencies … text book narcissism … recruitment as-

THE STARK DOCTRINE 57

THE STARK DOCTRINE 59

THE STARK DOCTRINE 61

THE STARK DOCTRINE 63

THE STARK DOCTRINE 65

THE STARK DOCTRINE 67

THE STARK DOCTRINE 69

THE STARK DOCTRINE 71

Of Gods and Monsters:

The Americanisation of the God of Thunder: From ‘Boy Emperor’

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 73

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 75

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 77

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 79

Making a ‘monster into a hero’: The Incredible Hulk

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 81

While Leterrier’s remarks imply a film more self-consciously aimed at a younger

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 83

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 85

THE ALLEGORICAL NARRATIVES OF THOR AND THE INCREDIBLE HULK 87