How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up? Marvel, Sci-Fi Escapism, and the Disappearing Disability

For those of you who haven’t seen it, there’s a moment in Marvel’s latest TV series Daredevil where Foggy Nelson discovers that his “blind” best friend can navigate unfamiliar rooms without a cane, win fistfights against dozens of opponents, and even read standard-printed newspapers.  Foggy angrily waves a hand in front of Matt Murdock's face and demands, “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Matt, who still claims to be blind, correctly answers: “One.”  

It is, of course, Foggy’s middle finger.  

The scene is somewhat painfully self-aware.  It sums up how a lot of people feel about Matt's (and the writers') gall in claiming that Matt counts as a blind character, given that he can do everything sighted people can and never experiences any drawbacks as a result of his blindness.

The Daredevil TV series does nothing with the character of Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, that is not already present in the comics.  In the comic series popularized by Frank Miller, we see Daredevil do everything from recognize faces that he has only “perceived” with his radar sense to read standard-printed books by running his fingers over the text to defeat a ninja-trained opponent when his sense of hearing is blocked by the presence of nearby jackhammers.  But the TV show utterly fails to interrogate or update these aspects of the text started in the 1970s, not even incorporating more modern interpretations such as Brian Michael Bendis’s (2008) depiction of Daredevil as unable to use photographs or traditional computers because of his (however partial) blindness.  

Of course, in the Marvel movies* it’s not just Daredevil who has a disability but then gains abilities that do more than compensate for it immediately afterwards.  Steve Rogers has everything from scoliosis to a congenital heart defect at the very beginning of Captain America: The First Avenger, but he takes the sci-fi equivalent of steroids and gets magically fixed by the movie’s twenty-minute mark. Bucky Barnes loses his left arm in The First Avenger--and by the time he pops up again in the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier he already has a prosthetic that not only functions better than any existing prosthetic ever could, but even gives him greater manual strength than his original arm would have had.  In fact, he seems to be better off for having lost his arm!  If only the antagonists such as the facially-deformed Red Skull or the bodiless Arnim Zola could have access to such high-quality treatment.  Instead, they are shown as trapped by (or struggling to conceal) their physical forms.  

In the series Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, the heroic Mike Peterson loses his right leg, right eye, and most of the functioning on the right side of his body in an explosion.  Fortunately, he's found by a group of mad scientists before he ever has to cope with the disability and gets a series of cybernetic upgrades that turn him into a super-soldier.  In the rare example that cannot be justified by the (however flimsy) excuse of having a comic precedent, the teleporter Gordon receives similar treatment: he loses his eyes when he transforms into his Inhuman form... and after no screen time at all regains his ability to see, through no means that are ever explained in the series.  Leo Fitz suffers a traumatic brain injury in the Season One finale that by the midpoint of Season Two has been completely healed, for all that the season started out with a complex and interesting portrayal of his struggles to adjust to his newly limited abilities.

The only mention of disability in Guardians of the Galaxy is an extended joke mocking a man for only having one leg.   I don't think I need to explain why that's problematic.

Iron Man features a protagonist battling heart disease, and actually does portray his struggles with mortality, at least at first... But by the third film (which does deserve commendation for its portrayal of anxiety disorders, in a largely unrelated side note), he has injected himself with a magical sci-fi compound and has completely healed his broken heart.  Thor and Avengers both feature characters who are missing a single eye, and yet neither one is shown struggling with limited vision.  We see Nick Fury shooting and driving with incredible accuracy, suggesting that he suffers no loss of depth perception because of his disability.  Odin is such a minor character--and spends so little time doing anything other than sitting on a throne looking stern--it’s hard to say what his range of vision or ability is or is not.

The X-Men movie series has been roundly criticized for its portrayal of LGBTQ struggles which includes no actual queer characters, but far less so for its nullification of Charles Xavier’s paraplegia in Days of Future Past.  Once again, that plotline comes straight from the comics, where Professor X spent several years walking around unhindered because of... sci-fi magic, essentially.  But hey, at least they’ve left aside the scores (Cyclops, Destiny, Blindfold, Grace) and scores (Madame Web, Nighteyes, Philip Summers, Videmus) of “blind” characters from the comics who demonstrate the ability to navigate the world as handily as anyone with sight.  It’s a start, right?

The Amazing Spider-Man starts out with a complex and sympathetic portrayal of Dr. Connors, who is born with one arm but still becomes a highly successful researcher... and then rapidly transforms the movie’s only disabled character into the villainous Lizard.  Worse, Dr. Connors arrives at his terrible transformation specifically because he is shown as greedy for wanting a second arm.  The final credits scene compounds the issue when it portrays Norman Osborn with melted skin that presumably reflects his twisted personality.  Maybe most offensively of all, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 portrays a man with an unspecified mental disability, Max Dillon, who as a direct result of this disability (and some electric eels, because sci-fi) goes insane and tries to kill the entire city of New York as the supervillain Electro.  As is the case with villainous Red Skull, the film amplifies rather than nullifying this disability, focusing on the ways in which it makes Max Dillon frightening and “other,” instead of fixing it as the series might have if he had been a hero.  It’s not entirely clear what sort of problems Max suffers from--he experiences everything from auditory hallucinations to social blunders--but he eventually dies from his lack of awareness rather than recovering as Leo Fitz does. 

So what’s the big deal?  Science fiction and fantasy are all about imagining the impossible.  They also portray death as reversible (Agents of SHIELD), aging as preventable (Winter Soldier), universes as traversable (Avengers), and gods as tangible (Thor).  Given that mortality is one of the major facets of life and the adage about the only people who stay dead in the superhero world being Bucky Barnes, Jason Todd, and Ben Parker (all three of whom were resurrected, two for good, in 2005) has been effectively subverted, why is the impermanence of death not a big deal as well?

It’s my (utterly inexpert) opinion that where this kind of portrayal of disability becomes problematic beyond the impermanence of death, despite the fact that it’s mere fantasy, is that it does not actually deal with the reality of disability.  Tony Stark is not, in practice, a survivor of cardiac injury, nor is Matt Murdock a functioning blind person.  Charles Xavier’s disability is portrayed as a burden he must assume for love of the rest of the world, and Mike Peterson’s and Bucky Barnes’s are both “fixed” as soon as they occur, at least in cinematic time.  

This kind of writing of disability is actually sort of hyper-normative, because it suggests that having two working arms (to use Bucky as an example) is a requirement for being a successful fighter and a competent person.  We never see Bucky accomplish anything in between losing his original arm and being fitted with a superpowered prosthetic (although, to give Ed Brubaker credit, in the comics Bucky does kill three of his captors and make a nearly-successful escape attempt with only one arm), which suggests that the only way a person can be strong and agentic is through having a body that has two working fists and ten working fingers.  Although it would be possible to remain faithful to the comics and to portray Bucky as a competent person even without his left arm (I can think of half a dozen fights Bucky wins sans prosthetic in various comics), the movies instead never show him without some kind of left arm outside of a single brief flashback where he is helpless in the clutches of his Soviet captors without two working hands.

The Daredevil show contrasts the competent, independent Matt Murdock (whose blindness has been nullified by his hyper-senses) to the genuinely blind workers in Madame Gao’s factory.  These individuals are not only powerless, but also helpless: they rely entirely on others for their survival because apparently they cannot even take care of themselves or live full lives thanks to their disability.  In the only scene that actually features these characters doing anything more than feeling their way around the streets of New York, they stand around helplessly when they are attacked, unable even to defend themselves from fire or assault.  In the universe of Daredevil, then, to be blind is to be a terrible burden to society, and the main character’s great strength is that he has had the good fortune to remove his own disability.  

Although the first several X-Men films all feature a Professor X who is highly competent while still genuinely paralyzed (and do show him overcoming difficulties caused by his disability in X2 when he must rely on his students for mobility after being forcibly removed from his wheelchair), Days of Future Past shows Charles Xavier taking a potion that, for no logical reason, nullifies both his superpowers and his disability.  By explicitly tying Xavier’s telekinesis to his paraplegia, the film undoes a lot of the power of the previous representations by suggesting that the disability is, yet again, just a doorway into greater powers.  Xavier must take on the burden of his paralysis in order to gain his mutant abilities.  One can imagine an old-school divine power in this universe, handing down this disability as punishment for Xavier’s lack of faith in himself.  Again, disability is portrayed as making him “other,” forcing him to be “weird” and to belong in the mainstream world no more.  

Most damningly, it is the heroes who receive these sci-fi fixes, and the villains who must suffer with disabilities.  The heroes are the ones with the muscular, unscarred, magically fixed bodies.  The villains are the ones with the consequences for their disabilities, the ones portrayed as grotesque or untouchable in their exaggerated otherness.  Both Steve Rogers and Johann Schmidt receive exactly the same (*cough* anabolic steroids *cough*) super-soldier serum; Steve Rogers is so good of heart he becomes more traditionally beautiful as Captain America after its use while Johann Schmidt is so wicked that he is rendered unspeakably ugly as the Red Skull.  The pitiful minions of Madame Gao’s empire were not granted the ability to overcome their blindness; the virtuous Matt Murdock (who, it should be noted, retains a set of flawless blue eyes despite allegedly being scarred by radioactive chemicals as a child) can function better after losing his sight than he could before.  Leo Fitz and Max Dillon may not exist in the same universe, but one is loving and therefore gets granted magical recovery from mental disability while the other is selfish and eventually succumbs to  his “madness” and dies.  

Therefore, the message that emerges from all these portrayals is painfully clear: disability in all its difficult-to-handle occasionally-unpretty reality is the sort of thing that is used to punish the wicked.  What is beautiful (or at least unscarred, unblinded, and undisabled) is good.  What is ugly (or scarred, deformed, and mentally disabled) is bad.  The virtuous get granted magical recoveries from on high; the wicked are punished for their sins with disabilities that don’t just go away.  Essentially, the Marvel movies are showing disability as the sort of thing that shouldn’t get in a person’s way if the person tries hard enough.  They are conveying the message that any blind person who can’t beat up half a dozen Russian mobsters (the way Daredevil and Stick can) is not capable of being a competent independent person.  They are suggesting that all fighters must not only have keen vision and wide-ranging skills the way the Winter Soldier does, they must also always, always have four fully capable limbs.  They equate traditional physical beauty standards with morality, suggesting that people are correct to judge others by their appearances.

And that’s where it goes beyond simply imagining a fantasy world where people don’t have to worry about death or distance or disability.  That’s where Marvel is genuinely making a mess and sending a message that has the power to do more harm than good, by imagining the absence of disability in such select ways.  

However, there are signs of hope in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  (SPOILER ALERT)   Agent Carter has a heroic supporting character, Agent Sousa, who lost a leg in World War II and suffers both discrimination and physical difficulty because of his amputation but proves to be quite handy at fighting off opponents and infiltrating secret bases anyway.  The most recent season of Agents of SHIELD features a Phil Coulson who has not only lost his hand, but has a prosthetic with no more special abilities than any standard prosthetic hand from 2015 would offer.  Avengers: Age of Ultron showed Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff dealing with symptoms of PTSD and has continued to imply Steve Rogers’s depression.  Fans are pushing hard for future movies and shows to feature Milla Donovan, who marries Matt Murdock and is portrayed as highly competent in addition to being actually blind, and the recent comic interpretation of Hawkeye as severely hearing impaired but still the world’s greatest marksman.  Marvel Cinematic Universe writers have acknowledged both of these requests, although there’s no sign for sure that they will do anything with them.  

The Marvel comics are ever-expanding their representation, updating old identities such as Captain America to feature an African-American man, Ms. Marvel to focus on a Muslim girl, Thor to portray a female doctor, Hawkeye to focus simultaneously on a deaf man and a bisexual assault survivor, Captain Marvel to feature a female military commander, Miss America to portray a lesbian hero raised in a nontraditional family, the Hulk to heroicize a plus-sized female lawyer, and Spider-Man to include a black and Latino teenager.  They have successfully blended both the old-world idealism of these Golden Age and Silver Age heroes with the complex, diverse, modern awareness of the plethora of American identities.  Although there are still ongoing problems with the disability portrayals of the comics, they are making an effort to move ahead.  One can only hope that the movies will follow their example.  

- Bug

*For the sake of space and time (and because this is a blog rant, not a dissertation), I focus on the Marvel movies and TV shows alone, leaving aside the vast and ever-shifting universes of the comics for the moment.  If there are any disabled characters in the Blade or Hellrider series that I’ve forgotten to mention, I apologize--none came to mind when I did a quick mental search.