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.  

Phenomenal Women

I loved The Avengers. Let's start there. I was skeptical going in, because I didn't see how having that many superheroes in one movie could possibly result in anything but a mad mixture of endless fight scenes interspersed with dialogue heavy scenes meant to summarize the plot, but luckily I was wrong. Hiring Joss Whedon (he of Buffy, Firefly, and Toy Story fame) to write and direct was possibly the smartest decision they could have made.

However, I loved The Avengers in spite of a glaring problem I had with the storyline. It's not an overcomplicated plot twist or an unrealistic character motivation. It's a lot simpler than that. In fact, it's obvious without ever seeing the movie. All you need to do is look at a movie poster. Notice how there's only one woman? Notice how many bloggers and critics and fans didn't notice? Yeah. That would be the problem right there.

I had a long discussion with Buggy about whether or not it was fair to accuse The Avengers of being sexist for only including Black Widow when there weren't that many female superheroes they could have picked in the first place. Sexist is a big word, and to be honest I'm not comfortable applying it to the way I feel about The Avengers. Instead, I think The Avengers is an example of a larger problem that exists in popular fiction, television, and especially Hollywood: the Strong Woman has become the Token Black Character. There's one in every story, but only one, and her personality can usually be boiled down to being 'tough.' It's fantastic that there are female superheroes, and doctors, and police officers, and scientists, etc. That's a huge step forward that a lot of people fought for a long time to achieve. But we've made that step, and now it seems like we've stalled. Would it be too much to ask for us to keep walking?

Strong Women Are Everywhere
Think about your own life. Think about the women you know. Is there only one or two who you'd call strong--independent, smart, capable? Unless you live in a black hole, the answer's no. In ten seconds I could name ten women I know personally or who are well know figures who are strong. Give me a minute, and I'll give you fifty. Madeline Albright. Isabel Allende. J.K Rowling. Aung Suu Kyi. Sandra Day O'Conor. Emma Thompson. Margaret Thatcher. Lady GaGa. Angelina Jolie. Cat Cora. Hillary Clinton. Sarah Palin. Hope Solo. Gabby Douglas. Malala Yousufzai. Beyonce. Love them or hate them, it's impossible to deny that each of these women is strong, intelligent, and talented in a way that has nothing to do with good looks. Strong women are everywhere--so why does fiction have such a hard time mirroring reality?

To me, the best example of a story with truly strong women is J.D. Robb's Eve Dallas books. What makes these stories so fantastic in their representation of women is Robb doesn't create Eve, a lieutenant with the NYPSD, in a vacuum. She doesn't make one or two strong women and call it a day, and, more importantly, she doesn't make strong women seem like anything out of the ordinary. The Eve Dallas stories are full of strong women. Within the main cast of a dozen or so recurring characters, roughly half are women. Half. Think about how strange that seems for a second. Try and list as many movies, books, and television shows where that's the case. Now, in how many of those stories are all the women capable and talented? How many cases are the women independent characters in and of themselves--they don't simply serve as 'the love interest' or 'the obstacle in the relationship?' The number I can come up with is depressingly small: Animorphs, Bones, The Descent, Rizzoli and Isles, The Circle of Magic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and of course Eve Dallas.

What really makes the Eve Dallas stories special, however, is that there are an equal number of strong women present in the minor and supporting characters. Whether it's victims' families, other police officers, lawyers, witnesses, etc, there are constant appearances and mentions of women who hold leadership positions, demonstrate their intelligence, and show strength and independence. Of the stories I mentioned above, only Circle of Magic passes that test. We need stories that are filled with strong women--which doesn't mean replace the men with women. Real life is full of strong men and women. Is it too much to ask that fiction live up to the same standard?

A Woman Doesn't Need to Swing a Sword to be Strong
I love Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness series. First published in 1983, Alanna: The First Adventure introduced the world to a stubborn, thick headed, passionate and tough young girl named Alanna, who dreamed of being a knight in a world where only men could earn the title. Alanna was a tough and strong female character in an era where tough and strong female characters were practically nonexistent.

That was thirty years ago.

Alanna embodies an important step in the struggle for strong women in stories. She entered a man's world, defied stereotypes, fought for her dream, showed that a woman could be just as strong as a man, and scoffed at anyone who dared try and stop her. Alanna's journey mirrored the struggle that many women in the real world were fighting at the same time: the struggle to earn respect as scientists, politicians, sports players, etc. But, like Alanna, that struggle has essentially been conquered. It's time to take the next step, but writers, directors, and producers seem unable or unwilling to make the start.

Within the main cast of the Eve Dallas books, the strong women include a therapist, an MD, an ADA, multiple police officers, and a rock star. Eve herself hates the idea of shopping, finds fancy clothes a mystery, and actively avoids cooking and cleaning. In many ways, Eve embodies the 80s idea of what a strong woman looked like.

But this is 2012, not 1983. Strong women come in all shapes and sizes. As they do in the Eve Dallas books, they can love or abhor shopping. They can literally kick ass, or they can be intelligent and wise. They can gush over boys AND take down a perp with a handgun and a pocket full of cocaine. They can cry over sad movies and scream profanities at pushy cab drivers. They can love to sing and dance, or they can love playing soccer in the park, or--shocking!--they can love both.

Scarlett Johansen's Black Widow is an awesome character. But she falls into the same pattern that every strong woman seems to fall into today: she is a woman in a man's world. She is tough and aloof--no feminine weakness for her. She can literally kick your ass and she shows little emotion while doing so. She is serious and does not engage in bickering and jokes with the men on the team--she's above all that.

Women are strong and talented in a multitude of ways--there's no single image of a strong woman. Rosie the Riveter has passed the torch to chefs and artists, leaders and athletes, warriors and doctors. Rosie played her part, as did Alanna. It seems a shame that we can't continue the fight and fill our stories with phenomenal women of all shapes and sizes.

Now It's Personal
There's one final issue I'd like to address, and it's a point where even the Eve Dallas books, even the works of Tamora Pierce, falls down.

I have an awesome younger sister. She's at the top of my list of phenomenal women. She's no Primrose Everdeen--the thought of her as shrinking and shy is hysterical. If I ever tried to pull a move like Katniss and offer myself up to protect her, she'd tackle me into the dirt before the words left my mouth and call me an overprotective idiot. That being said, I'd still try, because I'd do anything for her, and she'd do anything for me.

The list of strong brotherly relationships goes back to literally the dawn of storytelling. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest existing story, deals with the relationship between two men who, while not born brothers, become brothers to each other with all the relationship implies: camraderie, protectiveness, support, trust, competition, love. Moving through time, the examples are endless: Hector and Paris in The Iliad. Jacob and Easu, Jonathan and David, Moses and Aron in the Bible. Caleb and Aaron in East of Eden. The Brothers Karamazov. Death of a Salesman.

Five years ago, there were three different television dramas that featured a pair of brothers: Supernatural, Numb3rs, and Prison Break. And that's only counting shows where the brothers are genetically related, not shows that feature bromances like Psych, Scrubs, and Rescue Me. Two years ago Rizzoli and Isles premiered, and it was treated like a big deal because it featured two female leads and the relationship between them.

I've already questioned why the strong women seem to be missing from much of television, movies, and popular fiction. Here's my personal bone to pick: where are all the sisters? I can't believe--in fact I know for certain--that mine and my sister's relationship is unique. Of the women I know who have sisters, many speak about the relationship as the most important one in their lives. So where are the stories that reflect what it means--what it truly means--to be sisters? We should have left the fairytales and stories such as King Lear behind a long time ago. But all too often, when a show or book does feature sisters, one is given prominence while the other is merely an obstacle or a competitor or an annoyance or an object to be protected.

I'll finish with a quote by Barbara Alpert: “Sister. She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities. She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway. She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark. She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. Some days, she's the reason you wish you were an only child.” 

Reading it over, it really seems a shame to me that there aren't more stories about sisters, because of all the rich possibilities that exist in such a relationship. We need stories that show women as they truly are, not as we've idealized them to be. Women who are sarcastic, smart, reserved, bubbly, amusing, quick-witted, practical, and foolish, wild dreamers and level headed planners. And we need to see women interacting with other women--not as rivals, but as equals. Not as the strong woman who stands out alone, but as sisters who fight and laugh and argue and defend with and for one another.

--Cates