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→ Download Episode 203 (MP3)

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Further Reading

Naval officer ranks

Starfleet ranks

NBDC Dial-a-bouy

The TRUE meaning of Battleship on IMDb

Related Posts

• Episode 193: InuYasha-ish
• OTI Movie Night: BATTLESHIP!

We’re taking suggestions for TFT Summer School. What should be on the syllabus? Leave a comment below.

(Streaming audio is available on the site.)

→ Download TFT Episode 64 (MP3)

Reactions to the show? Email us or call/text (203) 285-6401.

Please like the TFT Podcast Facebook Page. We like you.

Want to download new episodes of the TFT Podcast automatically? subscribe in iTunes or via RSS. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

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Related Posts

• Episode 62: Bart Lives
• Episode 61: Testater Hater
• Episode 60: Reasons not Rules
• Episode 56: Spoilers for The Princess Bride
• Episode 54: Pascal’s Wager

Better late than never, here’s the information about this weekend’s OTI Movie Night meetups.

On the heels of a successful inaugural OTI Movie Night, we’re re-upping for another tour. Please join us this weekend for a series of live, in-person meetups all across the country to watch and discuss this summer’s seminal new release Battleship. Get your tickets early and find us outside the theater!

Boston

Saturday, May 19, at 7:15 [facebook event]
at AMC Loews Harvard Square [map]

Join Fenzel, Sheely, new father Shechner (!), and guest podcaster Cognac

The Boston Meetup will include an EPIC BATTLESHIP TOURNAMENT featuring five authentic Battleship Board Game sets from of 1970s to early 2000s vintage. Boston Overthinkers—even if you can’t make the movie, don’t miss the post-movie meetup starting around 10pm at Clover HSQ to play a game. [facebook event]

Los Angeles

Saturday May 19, 4:50pm [facebook event]
at Pacific Culver Stadium 12 [map]

Join Wrather, guest writer (and actual USN badass) Ben Adams

New York

Saturday May 19, 6:20pm [facebook event]
at AMC Loews 34th Street [map]

Join Lee and more Overthinkers TBA. Look for Lee wearing his Overthinking It t-shirt and meet in the lower lobby at 5:50pm.

Watch this post for more info, including the staging area and after-film meetup location (in case you just want to hang out, drink, and discuss).

Related Posts

• Episode 203: 2 Fast 2 Battleship
• Episode 193: InuYasha-ish

It is with this backdrop of high business drama that Overthinking It has obtained a confidential Kabletown internal presentation that details bold options for the company’s response to the IKEA challenge:

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First off, we can take Fury’s ominous declaration as a means of rallying his team, not an actual, legal declaration of war. In the U.S., war can only be declared by Congress, though that restriction has been relaxed of late. Then again, Fury isn’t committing traditional military resources to this conflict, so there’s less to worry about.

But even if SHIELD is the only force at Fury’s disposal, this raises another question: does SHIELD have the power to conduct a war? What is their remit?

SHIELD has gone through a number of revamps and rebrandings since Nick Fury took the helm in 1965 (Strange Tales #135). The current incarnation, as patiently explained by Agent Phil Coulson several times in 2008′s Iron Man, is the “Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.” Their role is never explicitly spelled out, but it seems to involve stopping superpowered crises (Intervention), preventing superpowered folks from breaking the law (Enforcement) and transporting things like frozen super-soldiers and mystical hammers from place to place (Logistics).

I’m not clear on whether SHIELD in the movies is a U.N. agency (as in the comics) or a U.S. agency. The official Marvel.com Avengers website (WARNING: huge, terrible Flash intro) lists SHIELD as an “international peacekeeping agency” in Nick Fury’s bio. Additionally, Spencer Ackerman’s take on SHIELD in Wired describes them as an international agency – and that’s the take his contacts in the DoD had on it, since they bailed on participating.

However, the use of “Homeland” suggests that they’re a domestic agency in the movie universe. Plus, Fury and Coulson clearly have some domestic authority, as evidenced in Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. It beggars belief that the U.S. would let a U.N. agency run around American soil and scoop up superweapons. Suffice it to say, SHIELD’s role re: the American military is ill-defined.

Using the Marvel comics as backstory – always a bit of a risk when crossing over to the big screen, but what else do we have? – SHIELD has its roots in intelligence. Their chief job seems to be monitoring: finding crises or interesting things around the world, then dispatching agents to contain them. We’ve seen it in prior movies, when Agent Coulson shows up in a post-credits teaser to radio in to his superiors. We see this in The Avengers, too, where Fury boasts of the power to use everything in the world with a wireless signal as a listening device.

So SHIELD is a cross between an intelligence-gathering / law-enforcement agency. One would think they don’t have the power to conduct a war, anymore than the FBI or CIA would. Then again, the CIA has engaged in warlike activities for years, such as deposing foreign rulers, financing foreign armies, and assassinating demagogues. So it’s not unreasonable for an intelligence agency to make war on a hostile power.

In any event, there’s no disputing that the U.S. is, in fact, at war. A foreign force (the Chitauri aliens, under the command of the Asgardian Loki) invades the continental United States and lays waste to the infrastructure and populace. But this isn’t the sort of war where the President calls up the Army and the Navy to defend the coast. This is part of the new era of warfare, where the enemy is a stateless actor, hiding in the shadows and striking at unpredictable intervals to cause civilian casualties. This is a war of intelligence first, where finding the enemy is as much the challenge as breaking his ability to make war.

WHOSE WAR IS IT, ANYWAY?

Fury and SHIELD take charge of tracking down Loki and his weapons. But when the actual invasion begins, who are the frontline fighters?

We have Captain America, an infantry officer whose field command experience is seventy years out of date. The last war he fought in was the invasion of Europe, a massive movement of men and weaponry that took years to coordinate and execute. In his cryogenic coma, Steve Rogers has missed out on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. More importantly, he’s missed out on the lessons of those wars as well.

For one thing, contemporary soldiers in the U.S. receive very different forms of training, for very different purposes, than doughboys in the 40s did. The current institution for overseeing training and Army doctrine, TRADOC, didn’t exist before 1973. And the differences aren’t just in practice. S.L.A. Marshall, a combat historian active in WW2, claimed that fewer than 25% of all soldiers in action ever fired their weapons directly at the enemy. This ratio of fire climbed to 90% by Vietnam. (Note that Marshall’s figures have come under question in the last 25 years, but more accurate numbers have yet to appear) Soldiers from the WW2 era and the post-Vietnam era are different sorts of fighters.

Combat readiness aside, the U.S. hasn’t engaged in a war like WW2 since WW2. The invasion of Europe was a coordinated effort to break the capacity of a hostile power (Germany) to make war. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, have been wars of counterinsurgency, “hearts and minds” campaigns in foreign territory. This leads to an entirely different set of strategies. Nuking cities as a show of strength, for instance, is a no-go. The rules of engagement for Berlin would be completely different than the rules of engagement for Fallujah.

Cap is eminently qualified to punch aliens in the jaw and deflect their blasts with his shield. As a commander, though, we might have reservations about the effectiveness of his leadership in the modern era of war. The Chitauri are an invading force, so many of those objections can be overlooked. But if SHIELD went to war with Genosha or Latveria, would Cap be the best man to put in charge?

Speaking of “hearts and minds,” the 21st century has already proven that it’s tough for a foreign national to show up in a country, claim to be its appointed defender, then set about slaying foes with a weapon known to inflict collateral damage. Yet that’s exactly the position Thor finds himself in. He takes the role of “defender of Midgard” in order to prove himself worthy to his father, Odin. But he also wields a hammer that hits with the force of a mortar shell and can call down lightning. His battle with the Destroyer in his titular movie levels a small town, as several people point out in The Avengers. Clearly Thor’s presence on Earth has the ability to attract harm as well as bring good.

Tony Stark, as owner and operator of the Iron Man battlesuit, is the most clearly qualified to fight in a modern war. But his presence raises a few questions about incentives. Stark Industries was, up until the events of Iron Man, a leading American defense contractor. When defense contractors and intelligence agencies work hand-in-hand, there’s a noted tendency for the agencies to escalate their tactics to take advantage of their new toys. Part of this may be due to the new opportunities that skilled professionals present, but part of it may also be due to lobbying by the contractors. And for all of Tony’s claims that Stark Industries is out of the weapons business, he is putting a flying, armament-laden battlesuit at the disposal of an immensely powerful intelligence agency. SHIELD might be fine forgoing Stark weaponry if they have Stark himself at their disposal. When all you have is a repulsor beam, everything looks like a Chitauri.

And finally, there’s the Hulk.

As I mentioned in the Avengers podcast, there’s something ironic about Nick Fury objecting to nuking Manhattan, yet deploying the Hulk. A nuclear weapon would cause trillions in property damage and inflict hundreds of thousands of casualties, but the Hulk has the demonstrated potential to do the same. He’s an indestructible monster that gets stronger as he gets angrier, and everything makes him angrier. A nuclear launch has one huge advantage over the Hulk: it can be aborted. Once you “turn on” the Hulk, you’re relying on Dr. Banner’s willpower to turn him off again. From a policy perspective, a nuke is predictable, disposable and replicatable. Compare that to a megaton temper tantrum that can trade body blows with the God of Thunder.

I’m omitting Hawkeye and Black Widow from my analysis because, as capable as they are, they’re intelligence officers first and foremost. Barton even makes this observation to Romanov while they’re recuperating. They acquit themselves mightily, but it’s obvious they have the least impact on the front-line fighting.

Fury wasn’t wrong to deploy the Avengers – look at how well they did. But this is a judgment in hindsight. Defense doctrine relies on tested theories, predictable factors, and extensive briefings. The four heavy hitters of the Avengers are all sensitive elements that could be misused if not governed by sound policy.

So what policy should govern them?

THE FURY DOCTRINE

Defense policies in the U.S. are typically referred to as “doctrines,” meaning a set of rules that dictate when military assets should be put to use. They’re not laws; they’re not even regulations. They’re rarely codified in a set of bullet points until after the fact, when a historian or journalist can point to the decisions made and find the common thread. They’re typically named after the person in charge at the time: the Monroe Doctrine, the Weinberger Doctrine, the Bush Doctrine, etc.

We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his gamma-irradiated super soldier program

Nick Fury has at his disposal the most powerful and most unstable individuals ever to put their talents in the service of a government body. He deploys them against an intergalactic threat of unprecedented proportions. What are the governing principles that Fury follows when putting the Avengers to use?

1. Operational decisions are delegated as close to the field as possible.

In traditional warfare, strategic decisions are left to the highest ranking defense minister (the Secretary of Defense in the U.S.) and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces (in the U.S., the President). The major military departments and the regional commands will certainly lend their input, and some wonks might say that their influence dictates strategy (e.g., note how battleships fell out of favor in the 20th century, or the continuing turf wars between land power and sea power, or between armor and infantry, etc). But the farther away from the press of battle you get, the more of a say you have in strategy.

That’s not how SHIELD and the Avengers fight their wars.

Nick Fury reports to a shadowy council that holograms into his command suite to demand updates and issue orders. However, the decisions about where to direct resources, and to what end, are his alone. It’s his call to scour the Earth for the stolen tesseract. It’s his call to bring the Helicarrier to New York when the aliens invade. And since the Helicarrier frequently comes under attack – it is an aircraft carrier, after all – this puts the command element in danger.

Once the Avengers hit the streets of Manhattan, they have a tremendous level of operational control. Captain America dictates where and how the Avengers are to be deployed. Making the call that Hawkeye and Black Widow should stay with him to repel the aliens and help civilians escape isn’t a controversial call. But no one dictated where civilian safety fell in the list of priorities. Obviously, the Avengers want to save civilians, but is that more or less important than driving the Chitauri back? That’s typically a policy decision made at the strategic level, but Cap makes that call in the field.

And consider Iron Man’s fourth-down audible: hijacking SHIELD’s nuclear missile and flying it through the dimensional portal to the Chitauri fleet. That’s a significant policy decision! The last time nuclear weapons were used in warfare, it took the Commander-in-Chief to sign off on their deployment. We would object if the pilot of the Enola Gay had sole authority over whether or not to nuke Japan – or, even worse, if it were his idea in the first place. Yet Iron Man takes the fight to the enemy with few objections.

Neither Captain America nor Iron Man made a bad call in those circumstances. But those decisions typically aren’t made by combat personnel.

Why would Fury allow such a level of autonomy among his forces?

As observed above, this is a very different type of war. The enemy’s capabilites are completely unknown to SHIELD and the Avengers. Nobody knew about the skyscraper-sized bugs, for instance, until they showed up. The only person who has any data on any hostile is Thor, and he shows up too late for his briefings on Loki to be that useful. The intel for this war is being gathered in situ; the Avengers only learn about the Chitauri’s strengths and weaknesses once the Chitauri arrive. Operational decisions are made in the field because they can’t legitimately be made any higher.

2. No policy choice or tactic is off the table if it serves the interest of defeating the enemy.

While Fury’s fighting a smarter and more agile war than his predecessors, he’s also fighting a far more ruthless one. He wants to drive these aliens off of Earth by any means necessary. This is a level of extremism we rarely see in history, and which we typically don’t associate with the good guys.

What kind of extreme measures does Fury take?

First, even before Loki arrives on the scene, Fury is already hard at work repurposing HYDRA weapons to arm his agents. As we saw in Captain America, these weapons were powered by the same energy source as the Tesseract, which explains why Fury is studying it in a secret underground bunker. While there’s historical precedent for whitewashing the work of WW2 enemies, this reHYDRAization appears to have fewer civil and more military aspects.

Second, Fury himself is personally devious, using Agent Coulson’s bloodsoaked trading cards as emotional blackmail against Captain America. It’s a calculated appeal to Steve Rogers’s pride and love of service, and it works perfectly. As Maria Hill points out, it’s also staged – Coulson kept his trading cards in his locker, not on his person. Even the most hardened general might blanch at lying to his most trusted officer about the recently deceased – especially if that same officer had just caught him in a lie (see the above paragraph) – but not Fury.

And third, to reiterate a point made earlier, Fury brings the friggin’ Hulk to the battlefield. His stated intention is just to use Dr. Banner as a gamma ray expert in tracking the Tesseract. But Fury is devious enough that we have to discount his stated intentions. Banner may be the world’s expert on gamma radiation, but he’s also a walking weapon of mass destruction. Wouldn’t the world’s second-most knowledgeable radiologist do? It only makes sense that Fury would recruit Banner, and all the risks that that implied, because he wanted to use “the big guy” as a trump card.

(Given the dangers inherent to the Hulk, why does Fury balk at the council’s decision to nuke Manhattan? Because it violates point #1 of the Fury Doctrine. The decision to nuke New York can only be made by folks close to the action, not mysterious figures in a shadowy office)

Strategists should question the means used in a war just as much as philosophers do. General Curtis LeMay said (according to Robert McNamara) that, if the Allies had lost WW2, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals for what they had done. Fury, himself a veteran of WW2, must be aware of this. And yet he still commits himself to the most extreme measures. If the Chitauri win their invasion, a war crimes tribunal will be the least of SHIELD’s problems.

3. No standing armies will be maintained.

Given the militarism of the first two points of the Fury Doctrine, this is an odd one to end on. Yet Fury clearly refuses to maintain a standing army in times of relative peace. The SHIELD agents aboard the Helicarrier are all armed and trained, but there’s no SHIELD Army supporting the National Guard in Manhattan. SHIELD is an intelligence / law-enforcement agency, a role that requires its members to carry weapons but not to invade or defend. And, of course, Fury ends the movie by disbanding the Avengers and telling the council (honestly or no) that he doesn’t know their whereabouts.

Why wouldn’t Fury want a full-time, professional army? Why not keep the Avengers aboard the Helicarrier and dispatch them to global crises?

For one, that level of power draws a significant amount of attention from the rest of the world. The Avengers are already coming under scrutiny by American authorities after one deployment in Manhattan. Imagine if the Avengers had a bigger media presence – if there were a super-soldier in American colors parachuting into Yemen to throw an unbreakable metal shield at terrorists. That would draw a lot of critics and several enemies. Whether Fury doesn’t want to deal with that hassle or whether he recognizes he doesn’t have the resources to, he’s staying out of it either way.

For another, he simply might not be able to. Tony Stark is a multi-billionaire who can hack into SHIELD’s networks with trivial ease. Thor can fly with the aid of a magic hammer. And the Hulk is the proverbial five-hundred pound gorilla who can sit wherever he wants. You try telling those three that they’ve been conscripted.

FIGHTING TOMORROW’S WARS

In the Avengers, the world has a fighting force that’s not meant to handle conventional threats. They exist not only outside the command structure of any existing army, but outside the hierarchy of most nation-states. Their capabilities and hang-ups are wildly disparate. And they’re governed by a doctrine that limits their use to a very small set of extreme circumstances.

These are the big guns. You call them in only when the stakes are global in scale. And you do so very carefully.

Related Posts

• Episode 202: Putting on the Meat Dress
• Red on the Ledger: The Avengers and Sexual Violence
• Episode 201: A Smash Rate of A New Yorker per Second
• Marvel’s The Avengers: Meetup, Roundup, and Open Thread
• “The Avengers” vs. “The Revengers”

(Streaming audio is available on the site.)

→ Download Episode 202 (MP3)

Want new episodes of the Overthinking It Podcast to download automatically? Subscribe in iTunes! (Or grab the podcast RSS feed directly.)

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call (203) 285-6401 to leave a voicemail.

Further Reading

Mount Erciyes

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(Streaming audio is available on the site.)

→ Download TFT Episode 63 (MP3)

Reactions to the show? Email us or call/text (203) 285-6401.

Please like the TFT Podcast Facebook Page. We like you.

Want to download new episodes of the TFT Podcast automatically? subscribe in iTunes or via RSS. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

Logo by Varouhas Design.

References

Attachment Parenting on Wikipedia

These Suckling Toddlers

Some Other TIME Cover Options

Esther Duflo on “Human Values and the Design of the Fight against Poverty”

James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

I Say This As a Durkheimian, Not As An Angry Teenager T-Shirt

The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Food Politics by Marion Nestle

Style in The Wire on Vimeo

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You’re going to lose. It’s in your nature… You lack conviction.”

— Agent Phil Coulson

Heroes as iconic as The Avengers always participate in discourses of power. They model, and therefore advocate, notions of strength, value, money, power, good, bad, right, wrong, identity and behavior, and the way we look at heroes affects and reflects our politics. In The Avengers, this discourse is all about the heroes finding what drives them forward despite  what holds them back, and making a case for the former.

Agent Phil Coulson hands us that key to the movie shortly before he dies. He says to Loki, “You’re going to lose. It’s in your nature… You lack conviction.” Each Avenger and the Avengers as a group resonate with convictions — attitudes that resist dissuasion and compel action. Some of these attitudes are based in abstract concepts, some in psychological or physiological states, some in archetypes, some in life experiences.

Today, rather than pick apart each Avenger, I want to focus on Black Widow, whom I see as an attempt by Whedon (and of course Scarlett Johansson and all the other major collaborators on the project as well as its collective body of readership – the author is dead and all that) to advance heroic symbolism and political discourse around survivors of sexual violence.

Take my love, take my land…

While there is plenty of nostalgia and a surprising amount of sincere conservatism in the film, the core conversations in The Avengers are as progressive as would be expected from the auteur of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. We all know Joss Whedon subverts his teenage-boy-friendly fantasies with strong female characters; type-cracking men; and explorations of the warlock queerscape. Doing that while keeping things light enough to lift, energetic and faithful to the spirit of the genre is kind of his thing, even more than banter. And the man loves banter.

Black Widow in her pre-Whedonesque days.

In this regard Black Widow is as Whedonesque as River Tam on prom night. Just as Buffy makes the horror genre about her experiences as a high school teenager, Black Widow makes being a superspy working among volatile superhumans about the invisible life of the global rape crisis. I would normally default to saying “American,” as it seems wise to apply one’s inevitably reductive judgements to a slightly smaller absurdly large subset of humanity when possible, but Black Widow is a transnational character and The Avengers is a worldwide movie, and it’s certainly a worldwide problem, so might as well go global with it.

I won’t waste time in this article making the case for the statistics or engaging in the various endless arguments that are among the unhappiest things on the Internet (after this we can all go to reddit and argue about it, then we can hit each other in the face with bricks — the two are equally fun and affirming of humanity). Suffice it to say that at Scarlett Johansson’s own age of 27, it’s a relatively fair guess that a third to a half of Black Widow’s female peers have been victims of sexual violence at some point in their lives — and the overwhelming majority of them haven’t told too many people about it or seen meaningful redress. It’s present in Black Widow’s life as a looming threat and cultural norm — invisible in plain sight — just as it is in the lives of most women.

Joss Whedon knows this crisis exists; it’s all over Buffy. And Scalett Johansson almost certainly knows it exists because, well, she’s on the knowing side of the social information asymmetry (sorry boys), which is pretty much the euphemisticalliest euphemism I’ve ever euphemed. Oh, and because she talks about it in Ghost World 11 years ago, and, um, it hasn’t been fixed or anything.

Aaanyway, even if we drop the reality of the crisis in the real world and just look at The Avengers, sexual assault is a constant presence in Black Widow’s world. Heck, it comes after her several times during the movie. At the beginning, we find her tied to a chair in a low-cut cocktail dress, no doubt about to be raped and murdered by Russian mobsters — Or so they think! Spinning Sumo Chair Attack!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OJqPJRjHkE

Sure, Black Widow is never in any actual danger, and sure, there is no actual sexual contact, but the mobsters don’t know that’s in the cards. They have every intention of exploiting, dominating and abusing her, and every reason to believe it will work and won’t be traced back to them. The representation here is pretty clear — Black Widow knows what the bad guys intend to do, and she knows the bad guys think they will get away with it, so she takes advantage of that knowledge and arrogance to extract information from them. She stays unscathed, because she has the power to take care of herself better than they think she can.

Yes, this character's arc is about sexuality. You might even say it's "tied" to it.

While her strength and agility are useful, her main weapon is that she knows what is happening, and she knows who the bad guys are — and thus can anticipate dealing with them. In her case, it’s literal — she has dossiers on them and is targeting them for intelligence gathering. In her real-world analogue — the metaphorical tenor for which she is the vehicle, the correspondent reality that she symbolizes — she knows assault is the fault of those who assault, and fights to resist the societal pressure to blame herself or her trauma or her shame for the things that people have done or are trying to do to her.

This is the big interaction with the broader discourse of power — the true weakness of rapists and those who commit sexual assault is that people will figure out they are the bad guys. If that happens, they can’t hide among their peers anymore. In practical terms, the vast majority of them are protected by societal, political or discursive barriers, as well as the circles they run in — that guilt or shame their victims from identifying them, protect them from public accusation with social support, and prompt society to look the other way.

But Black Widow is a superspy who looks past these shrouds and finds out the truth, which if you ask me is a very cool way to turn a very bad experience into a superpower. The way in which her own guilt and shame over past experience compels her to do this her Agent Coulson-style “conviction” — a conviction shared by many people who have been victimized by sexual violence, who dedicate themselves to spreading intelligence on it, exposing it and deconstructing and disarming the social constructs that allow it to continue on such a large scale in obscurity.

This is not an accidental insight, based off one scene, and it is only half the ledger, so to speak. Black Widow encounters situations that map onto this experience a bunch of times through The Avengers. The few key instances that draw it out clearly for me:

• The two “Hulk Trigger Warning” scenes
• Her prison interrogation of Loki
• Her relationship with Hawkeye and the Budapest incident

The Male Smash

She spends much of this scene literally pinned to the ground.

Black Widow’s first two encounters with The Hulk in full force show how scared she is of being overpowered and victimize and pull back the curtain on her calm persona showing responses with the intensity and emotional edge of somebody being triggered by past traumatic experiences. The first one is fairly harmless, but still presents the Hulk as a looming, pseduosexual menace (how Whedon/Ruffalo’s Hulk arcs throughout the movie is another story for another article — suffice it to say that Hulk turns out to very much not be a bad guy, but at this point in the story Black Widow thinks he might be, so we get to see how she reacts to a violent, aggressive masculine presence, gaining some insight into how she might have experienced them the past):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KQMFMZnhGM

The most important thing we learn from this scene is that Black Widow is not naive to the threat Hulk represents here. This is character development for the Black Widow — she’s been through some rough stuff, and it’s definitely affected her psychologically.

The second scene is much darker and more violent, where, though Loki’s machinations, Hulk goes on an uncontrolled rampage through the U.S.S. Impossible Physics, spending a lot of that time chasing Black Widow. The way the sequence is shot — with Black Widow cowering in a corner in tears and the Hulk snarling at her, breaking things, and looking to scare her and toy with her as much as smash her, strongly suggests that Hulk is representing sexual abuse and Black Widow is representing the psychological affects of sexual abuse.

In an interview back in March, Whedon described his vision of the Hulk as, among other things, “A Hulk who feels dangerous, who might hurt somebody we care about, who belongs in a classic horror film.” So I’m not making up this dynamic.

Pass the Bud, and Stay Loki

Don't base your self-worth on the opinions of guys like this.

In the scene where Black Widow interrogates Loki inside the Hulk cage, we learn about the “red on her ledger” — referring to past crimes, presumably murders, Black Widow committed in her previous life of crime before turning into a good guy superspy. Red on ledgers of course represent resources or liabilities — differences between the sides of the ledgers that must be transferred or otherwise compensated for in order to even out the account. If there is nothing to offset that red ink, it becomes a loss.

Loki attempts to gain dominance and control over Black Widow by shaming her over her “red ink” — especially with regards to her relationship with Hawkeye, which has romantic undertones. And Black Widow seems affected, to a degree, even if she is feigning some of her hurt and outrage into order to trick Loki into revealing why he allowed himself to be captured.

It might seem a stretch to associate this red ink with specifically sexual shame — the sort of shame that so often forces victims of sexual violence into silence. But the use of red ink can’t be coincidental. Red stains in English literature are intimately and indelibly associated with female sexuality and particularly the loss of sexual innocence — due to the longstanding European tradition of publicly displaying a sheet with a red stain on it the day after a wedding to prove the loss of a wife’s virginity during a wedding night (and, by extension, demonstrating her “virtue” beforehand).

This symbol plays heavily in Shakespeare in particular, also giving rise to the famous “damned spot” of Lady Macbeth — a bloodstain that marks the guilt of murder in such a way that Lady Macbeth virtually goes mad with her inability to ever clean it again. The spot and the irreversible guilt felt by Lady Macbeth is connected through the symbol of the red spot with the less of female virginity and social “virtue” in a horrifying way. Here is Dame Judy Dench, whom you may know as the Elemental from The Chronicles of Riddick (As well as many other more respected if marginally less see-in-the-dark-space-armada-ish works, great and small), performing the famous Act V Scene I of Macbeth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4o1r2noI3s

Black Widow’s story arc in The Avengers is built around this “red ink” and whether it will lessen the conviction she needs to be an Avenger (spoiler: it doesn’t).

Slings and Arrows

Learning to relate to one another again.

The place where Black Widow’s guilt and conviction reach their synthesis is in her relationship with Hawkeye, who has been mind-controlled by Loki for much of the film, but comes around after a blow to the head. At some point in the past, Hawkeye, himself not an especially good dude for quite a while, spared Black Widow’s life. While Loki claims that Black Widow cannot ever truly pay back the debt represented by the “red on her ledger,” Black Widow resolves to save Hawkeye, and they bond over their shared experience and the guilt they both share over the things they have done.

The Avengers is smart in creating this symbol for female sex/violence guilt (the red ink) and giving Black Widow a legitimate cause to believe it is her fault — she cannot simply wake up one day and not feel this guilt anymore. She must instead find her power and conviction to do what is important despite the guilt.

One of my favorite exchanges in The Avengers is right around where I see Black Widow and Hawkeye moving past this problem.

Black Widow: Just like Budapest all over again.
Hawkeye: You and I remember Budapest very differently.”

It turns out that Black Widow and Hawkeye don’t really aim to get rid of the “red ink” on the ledger — they want to move forward and work together — both with The Avengers and with each other, despite it, because their conviction to do what they value is more important than the power their red ink has to shame or limit them.

And there it ties into discourses of power and behavior modeling — heroes with relationship baggage.

Scratch what I said earlier: Banter isn’t the most Whedonesque thing there is. That’d be heroes with relationship baggage. He loves that stuff even more than witty one-liners and pop culture references.

Assemble!

In the end, The Avengers is among the rare popcorn action flicks (along with, for example, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) that not only resists perpetuating the discourses of power that sustain pandemic sexual violence, but that advances discourses of power that provide an alternate model with the potential to changing the narratives that shape behavior in a positive way.

Of course I am highly skeptical of attributing praise or blame for the aggravation or alleviation of broad social problems to individual pieces of art, and I am especially reluctant to do so in this case — so think of this as one person’s reading as it relates to one interpretation of the current crisis, and leave your thoughts on your own reading below.

And for more analysis of the Coulsian “convictions” that either arise from us or reach out to us and drive the Avengers, keep tabs on Overthinking It. We love this stuff.

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Further Reading

Kurt Busiek’s Astro City on Wikipedia

Astro City: Life in the Big City on Amazon

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One of the more intriguing elements of That 70’s Show is the status and nature of Fez within the series. Unlike the other regulars he lacks two signs of concrete identity. He’s the only member of the basic cast to lack either a given name or a surname. “Fez” is not a name, it’s a poorly spelled acronym taken from the words “foreign exchange student.” Though he is not an American, the show goes to great lengths to obfuscate his actual nationality. The show portrays him as a foreigner, but neither the audience, nor the other characters in the series, are allowed to know precisely where he came from. He is, in short, nameless and placeless; and aside from his personality traits, he appears to be distinctly lacking where the tangibles of identity are concerned.

Now how might we explain this rather peculiar circumstance? In terms of the name, conceivably his name might simply be unpronounceable in English, or it might be inconveniently long. Conceivably Fez might come from some ultra obscure country with which the average person in Point Place Wisconsin could hardly be expected to be familiar. But there’s another explanation: Fez doesn’t exist even within the context of the show. This is not about how That 70’s Show is basically a palette swapped Fight Club. No, Fez is not a mere contemporaneous delusion: he is a construction after the fact, created and use for different reasons by Eric Forman and Jackie Burkhart.

That 70’s Show has a serious continuity problem. If we treat the series as a chronicle of events taking place between May of 1976 and December of 1979, the show’s sequence simply does not work. There is sometimes a distinct lack of consistency in the series, there are a variety of contradictions and counter contradictions over the course of the show’s eight seasons. Characters are occasionally recast, and occasionally re-imagined entirely as was the case with Jackie’s mother, and the show features too many Christmases.

There are two obvious explanations. The first is sheer denial that any such problem exists. The other, more interesting, explanation is that the events of the show are not contemporaneous. Meaning, the audience is not shown events as they happen. Instead the audience is shown events and people as they are remembered and discussed years after the fact. According to this explanation the fog of distant memory explains all of the show‘s continuity issues. If we presuppose that this option is accurate, Fez’s lack of a name or homeland suddenly stops being inexplicable. The initial conclusion engendered by the presupposition is that the characters have simply forgot his name and his home country. This conclusion seems unlikely. Fez is simply too close to the other characters for that explanation to hold water.

He actually marries Eric’s sister, albeit out of a desire for citizenship rather than any kind of romantic attachment towards her. And, somewhat controversially, the series ends with he and the longtime object of his affections, Jackie Burkhart, in a romantic relationship. Perhaps his name cannot be transliterated into English, but it defies credulity that neither Jackie, who actually dated him for at least a time, nor Eric, his onetime brother in law, would have no idea where he had actually come from in the first place. In short, the fog of memory alone doesn’t explain why he lacks the signs of identity. However, the distance of time does point towards a more interesting explanation, one worthy of this site’s stated purpose. The distance of time allows for the possibility that he is a construction, a matter of wish fulfillment on the part of other characters. Fez is someone they wish had been there, but wasn’t.

Fez as construction begs the question of constructor; if Fez is imaginary, who imagined him and why? Given the presuppositions inherent in the theory–if we assume that he is indeed a construct rather than an individual–the most likely creators within the rest of the cast are Eric Forman and Jackie Burkhart. Of the regulars Fez is the only one who is a bigger nerd than Eric, and he is the only one who fawns over Jackie. There are occasional auxiliary characters who fit the “more of a loser than Eric” role, and he is the last of three characters to date Jackie. However, within the main group of protagonists he takes the “loser” role, a role that arguably would otherwise belong to Eric. And while other members of the group date Jackie, she is consistently treated as the junior partner in all of those relationships. She is more endured than loved. And while she might be loved, she is hardly respected or admired by anyone aside from Fez.

Eric is a nerd. He is obsessed with Star Wars, he reads comic books, and he’s a toy collector. And yet, even leaving aside the show’s central relationship, he’s rather romantically successful. The show demonstrates several one time rivals for his affection. Despite his interests, Eric is never portrayed as romantically unappealing, with one notable exception. After he breaks up with Donna, one episode concerns what amounts to an extended dream sequence which in turn is little more than an extended It’s a Wonderful Life parody. In the world where the show’s central relationship never happened, Eric is essentially Fez.

This suggests that Fez acts as a kind of compensation for Eric’s less appealing qualities. Without Fez, Eric takes his place. Fez, therefore, at least partially exists to make Eric look less odd.

Fez has a narrative arc throughout the series, but that arc is not particularly connected to Eric. His arc is about Jackie, and he is just as much her creation as he is Eric’s. Fez’s arc is a kind of modern replication of the Frog Prince story. On a symbolic level, the Frog Prince story is the tale of a girl growing to admire what she once found disgusting. Before the concluding metamorphosis, the Frog is continually begging to join the Princess’ side, and she is continually being forced to acquiesce until he is revealed to be a prince. Similarly, the terms of the Fez and Jackie relationship are established fairly early on the series. Sure, he’s at times almost disturbingly strange, but in his scenes with Jackie, he’s presented as a good dancer and a better kisser. In other words, he’s secretly a Prince disguised as a frog.

The Frog Prince hints at the central difference between Fez and Jackie’s other boyfriends. He admires her, where they tolerated her. In her two previous relationships, however much Kelso and Hyde cared for her, she was the junior partner. Kelso routinely cheated on her. If we take Hyde at his word, he seemed to care for Jackie against his own instincts. At times he claimed his interest in her was purely physical claiming that his interest in her grew if he imagined her mute.

Jackie’s status as the Junior partner extends beyond her romantic relationships. She’s the youngest member of the group, and in the show’s first episode Kelso’s friends beg him to abandon her. This disdain for Jackie remains a constant theme for much of the series. It is easy enough to imagine why Jackie might feel the need to imagine someone who actually admired her, and did not merely tolerate her presence. Fez’s at times worshipful attitude towards Jackie is almost certainly a reflection of that desire.

Fez’s personality is at times divided between extreme oddity and covert desirability. He’s strange, but he has attractive traits. That divide suggests a tug of war between Jackie and Eric over who this imaginary person was. Eric wants to present his teenage self as cooler than he was by comparison; Fez was the nerd, not him. In contrast Jackie wants to imagine herself falling for someone who actually looked up to her.

Eric constructs Fez out of pure embarrassment. Jackie’s motivation is hidden in her surname. The name Burkhart is very close to the words “broke heart.” The other men in her life either abandoned her, cheated on her, or were incapable of committing to her. It is easy enough to imagine Jackie decades later, broken hearted and alone. Why wouldn’t she pine for the admirer who was never really there? Fez is her attempt to turn a tragedy into a fairy tale, but even she knows that her wish can never come true. This is why she can never give him a real identity. He’s naught but a shadow of what should have been.

[What do you think, Overthinkers? Was Fez a narrative device to add depth to a handful of self-absorbed stoners? Or is there conclusive proof of the man's existence that we've overlooked? Sound off in the comments!]

A recent graduate of the College of Wooster, Will O’Connor’s last great work was a 102 page paper on the ideological evolution of fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

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