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escritoireazulYou guys, more than 15 years after his work brought me into online fandom, I'm pretty sure I flat out hate Joss Whedon's work.
Going into Age of Ultron, I was already infuriated by the whitewashing of the Maximoff twins, and the "dress her like a gypsy" crap of Wanda's costuming in particular. Not to mention, the clusterfuck of a media circus in which everyone said shitty, shitty things, and made it really hard to separate my anger at them from my feelings for their characters. Yes, even RDJ. Yes, even Mark Ruffalo.
Walking out of AOU, I'm infuriated that Joss Whedon is touted as this feminist god of amazing creations, because, you guys, I'm pretty sure he doesn't give a flying fuck about the fact this movie takes place in a shared universe with other movies that have things like character development. Continuity? Whedon doesn't believe in goddamn continuity.
(And by the way, WHEDON, cracking a fucking joke about how few women are in the movie and how the Avengers is basically a big sausage fest DOES NOT ACTUALLY FIX THE PROBLEM. That prima nocte joke was DISGUSTING and felt like it carried the same fucked up glee you had for the mewling quim bit in the first Avengers.)
At best, AOU feels like a really poorly written, badly paced second movie in a trilogy, sacrificing actual good storytelling and character development in order to shoehorn a bunch of elements needed to transition from phase two to phase three. It had fun moments, it had some pretty action scenes, it had a couple of great character details. That frustrating but acceptable version is buried under the absolute shit show of Whedon's offensive, toxic character choices and direction.
I am too tired, to worn down by the sexist, racist, ableist crap that led into this movie and that I experienced while watching this movie to come up with a coherent, thoughtful, balance response. I wanted to love this movie, and instead Whedon shit all over the things I adore about the franchise, while managing to be terribly sexist, racist, and ableist. Awesome. Good job.
So instead, I'm linking to a bunch of reviews that interested me in some way or another, behind the cut for spoilers. (Though I link, there are parts I strongly disagree with, too, I just found the overall discussions interesting.)
septembriseur over at tumblr:
A clear message emerges: the right role of women is to bear and raise children. The right role of men is to ensure that they are able to do this. Here, this frequently takes the form of protecting them— even for a Joss Whedon production, Age of Ultron features some truly blatant scenes of tiny women cowering before exaggeratedly enormous men. (I cannot fathom why it was felt necessary for Ultron to take an almost parodically hypermasculine robot “body,” then destroy it in favor of an even larger and more parodically hypermasculine body.) Both Natasha and Wanda are specifically made to look small and physically helpless before Ultron and the Hulk— Natasha in a kidnapping sequence that has, essentially, no purpose except to provide us with scenes of Natasha in captivity, and to then allow Bruce to rescue her from her Medieval cell. (”I adore you!” she says breathlessly.)
On a structural level in this story, the “right role” of women is to help and support our heroes (”Now go be a hero,” Natasha literally says to Bruce at one point). It’s also to fuel the story by providing a sense of danger and threat (thus the cowering scenes). This is also the role of the nonwhite population of the film.
and
Do I think that Joss Whedon is a bad person? I don’t. I think that he is a well-meaning person, but a person of average intelligence and insight who has been told repeatedly that he is brilliant and groundbreaking, and who thus has never had to do the hard work of thinking through the origins and implications of what he writes. The effect is that he continually regurgitates poisonous tropes because they seem clever or because they attract his eye, and refuses the responsibility of examining his choices and understanding them as shaped by and shaping a larger social world.
marina's post:
On a more serious note than this movie deserves, I continue to enjoy the MCU's exploration of Tony Stark's weapons manufacturing/trading past, and remain... extremely annoyed by essays on tumblr about how Tony is an unexamined problematic character who stands for US imperialism while Steve is none of those things.
From my perspective Steve is the unexamined symbol - he's the unironically patriotic one, the one who ~supports the troops~ no matter what, the one whose backstory is STEEPED in US exceptionalism and US rewriting of history to place itself in the center of events. Tony is as examined as US imperialism gets in the MCU. He was accused of "war profiteering" in the first movie! In this one we find out he knows black market weapons dealers! (I can't explain how much I love the touches of realism in Tony's arms dealing storylines - it's true! There are conventions, and you do meet people.) None of this is presented while patriotic music plays in the background. Tony actively engages with his mistakes, his assumptions, the narrative continually questions and undermines his opinions and decisions. The same has never, ever been true for Steve.
Steve is a trope played straight, and there's no room in that trope for "btw, the ideals you stand for are used to make people miserable in many parts of the world". I mean, in his last movie, set in 2014, Steve was still busy uncovering fictional Nazis. Tony Stark's past is treated with so much more realism and relevance compared to that.
Pretty much everythingmusesfool said here, good and bad:
I can only hope the Russos do better, but I'm already dreading that Cap3 is really just IM5: Tony turns into a fascist and then has to fix it somehow. Bleh. DO NOT CARE AND DO NOT WANT.
And then we end with the Avengers being SHIELD again and just no. It's bad enough they disregard CATWS on Agents of SHIELD, but to do it here is just terrible writing and planning. Ugh ugh ugh.
staranise here:
Also why is Nat the only one who can do the lullabye with the Hulk? Why not his BFF Tony? Making it so only one person can do it, and that person is one of the most fragile, is BAD PLANNING and frankly reeks of, “Nat, you’re the girl, you go handle Bruce’s emotions for him.”
minim_calibre here:
Things I liked more than I expected
Wanda, who wound up being far more sensible and grounded than I expected given the Whedon history with a certain type of brunette.
The implication that they were signing up as volunteers for something that still branded itself as SHIELD.
and
Things I disliked but now feel vindicated about
Joss Whedon has no idea how to handle Steve Rogers. None. It's especially irritating when Steve Rogers is your favorite male character in the franchise. Any excuses made for the first movie being him just out of the ice, blah blah blah, do not hold water. Language? Jesus Christ, Whedon. Did you even watch any of the movies other than your own? Stupidest and most forced-feeling running gag, I swear. Fuck that noise. (We have, in fact, seen Steve Rogers swear, and have seen him next to someone exclaiming "SHIT!" and not say anything about language.)
synecdochic here:
* On the other hand, Sarah pointed out that she really liked the bit where Tony was insisting that they needed to wake up Vision; she thought it was a really good example of Tony's iterative engineer mindset, where, okay, the last version crashed and burned but we'll do it better this time. Which I totally agree with, but I think it would have had a lot more impact with a bit more self-introspection from Tony beforehand; Tony's entire character arc has been him learning to do that self-introspection and this movie felt like a giant leap backward.
and
* Aforementioned "thing I hated" about the Bruce/Natasha thing was the conversation at Clint's farmhouse where Bruce tells Natasha he can't be with her because he can't offer her the farm and the kids, and Natasha counters with, I can't have kids either because the Red Room made me sterile, and ugh, there are layers and layers of how fail that was and it would take me a week to unpack them. First, because it works directly against that thing where Natasha gets to exist in the MCU as a woman who gets the stories women don't often get; second, because up until now she's been presented as the sort of woman who both Sarah and I thought should have the response of "uh, Bruce, what in our entire relationship so far has made you think I'm the kind of person who wants to settle down with a farm and kids"; third, because it would be really nice to have at least one woman in popular culture who is childfree by choice and not because of biology; fourth, because oh my God, adoption, it is a thing that exists, as Sarah said it's not like the Marvel universe has a shortage of orphans, I can go on for days. Bruce's half of the conversation made perfect sense for him -- we've seen plenty of evidence for his desire for kids and home and hearth and stability and family -- but for Natasha, not at all.
and
* On the other hand, I really loved Clint's moment with Wanda -- the whole, it is perfectly okay if you decide you can't cope with this, but decide that right the fuck now, because if you get up and get back out there we need you to be 100% in the game. It really cast him in this great light as somebody who knows he's not superpowered, but does this anyway because he feels like he has to. (I also loved the "there are robots and the world's ending and I have a bow and arrow" or whatever that line was.) In that moment Clint really felt like somebody with his shit together, somebody who's used to encouraging junior agents and really good at being a father/mentor/etc, which I know goes against a lot of the characterization in 616 and against a lot of popular fanon, but it still really worked for me.
and
* I did really like the note they ended on. (Aside from the thing with Tony retiring, which I could write another five thousand word entry on: that should have happened either last movie, or two movies from now. Yes, I know RDJ is out of contract and really expensive, but the end of IM3 would have been a perfect chance to let Tony move more into a behind-the-scenes/backing role; if you're going to position him as an active member of the team at the start of the movie after the end of IM3, you need to tell me a) why he went back on his decision to retire after IM3 and b) why he changed his mind again at the end of AOU, and you didn't tell me either of them.) ...wait, this was going to be a positive point. Ahem. Okay: I really like that they ended with the next generation of the team. I really like that the next generation of the team is two black guys, two women, one AI, and a single white guy. I hope Marvel is going to use this to make some more strides towards diversity.
And from a comment to this post,marzipan77 says:
For what it's worth, here's my main problem with A2, and I say it with must trepidation. It's Joss. He didn't give us A2, he gave us Buffy and Angel and Friends. BW has been turned into the Chosen One in love with the Monster who cannot have a minute of joy (excitement) or he'll turn into a Monster. BW is not a super hero in this movie. She's a damsel in love and in distress. She gets kidnapped and rescued by her man. Remember her first scene in A1? Kidnapped on purpose and rescues herself. I miss that BW. And Hawkeye is certainly now Xander. The only human who wonders why he's in this group of sooper guys. Best friends with Buffy, er, BW. Normal life guy who is too busy redecorating the dining room to save the world and stuff. Spike and Drusilla turn up as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. And it's not even a good Buffy episode - it's like the Adam season all over again. Way too much monologuing with no point.
Going into Age of Ultron, I was already infuriated by the whitewashing of the Maximoff twins, and the "dress her like a gypsy" crap of Wanda's costuming in particular. Not to mention, the clusterfuck of a media circus in which everyone said shitty, shitty things, and made it really hard to separate my anger at them from my feelings for their characters. Yes, even RDJ. Yes, even Mark Ruffalo.
Walking out of AOU, I'm infuriated that Joss Whedon is touted as this feminist god of amazing creations, because, you guys, I'm pretty sure he doesn't give a flying fuck about the fact this movie takes place in a shared universe with other movies that have things like character development. Continuity? Whedon doesn't believe in goddamn continuity.
(And by the way, WHEDON, cracking a fucking joke about how few women are in the movie and how the Avengers is basically a big sausage fest DOES NOT ACTUALLY FIX THE PROBLEM. That prima nocte joke was DISGUSTING and felt like it carried the same fucked up glee you had for the mewling quim bit in the first Avengers.)
At best, AOU feels like a really poorly written, badly paced second movie in a trilogy, sacrificing actual good storytelling and character development in order to shoehorn a bunch of elements needed to transition from phase two to phase three. It had fun moments, it had some pretty action scenes, it had a couple of great character details. That frustrating but acceptable version is buried under the absolute shit show of Whedon's offensive, toxic character choices and direction.
I am too tired, to worn down by the sexist, racist, ableist crap that led into this movie and that I experienced while watching this movie to come up with a coherent, thoughtful, balance response. I wanted to love this movie, and instead Whedon shit all over the things I adore about the franchise, while managing to be terribly sexist, racist, and ableist. Awesome. Good job.
So instead, I'm linking to a bunch of reviews that interested me in some way or another, behind the cut for spoilers. (Though I link, there are parts I strongly disagree with, too, I just found the overall discussions interesting.)
septembriseur over at tumblr:
A clear message emerges: the right role of women is to bear and raise children. The right role of men is to ensure that they are able to do this. Here, this frequently takes the form of protecting them— even for a Joss Whedon production, Age of Ultron features some truly blatant scenes of tiny women cowering before exaggeratedly enormous men. (I cannot fathom why it was felt necessary for Ultron to take an almost parodically hypermasculine robot “body,” then destroy it in favor of an even larger and more parodically hypermasculine body.) Both Natasha and Wanda are specifically made to look small and physically helpless before Ultron and the Hulk— Natasha in a kidnapping sequence that has, essentially, no purpose except to provide us with scenes of Natasha in captivity, and to then allow Bruce to rescue her from her Medieval cell. (”I adore you!” she says breathlessly.)
On a structural level in this story, the “right role” of women is to help and support our heroes (”Now go be a hero,” Natasha literally says to Bruce at one point). It’s also to fuel the story by providing a sense of danger and threat (thus the cowering scenes). This is also the role of the nonwhite population of the film.
and
Do I think that Joss Whedon is a bad person? I don’t. I think that he is a well-meaning person, but a person of average intelligence and insight who has been told repeatedly that he is brilliant and groundbreaking, and who thus has never had to do the hard work of thinking through the origins and implications of what he writes. The effect is that he continually regurgitates poisonous tropes because they seem clever or because they attract his eye, and refuses the responsibility of examining his choices and understanding them as shaped by and shaping a larger social world.
marina's post:On a more serious note than this movie deserves, I continue to enjoy the MCU's exploration of Tony Stark's weapons manufacturing/trading past, and remain... extremely annoyed by essays on tumblr about how Tony is an unexamined problematic character who stands for US imperialism while Steve is none of those things.
From my perspective Steve is the unexamined symbol - he's the unironically patriotic one, the one who ~supports the troops~ no matter what, the one whose backstory is STEEPED in US exceptionalism and US rewriting of history to place itself in the center of events. Tony is as examined as US imperialism gets in the MCU. He was accused of "war profiteering" in the first movie! In this one we find out he knows black market weapons dealers! (I can't explain how much I love the touches of realism in Tony's arms dealing storylines - it's true! There are conventions, and you do meet people.) None of this is presented while patriotic music plays in the background. Tony actively engages with his mistakes, his assumptions, the narrative continually questions and undermines his opinions and decisions. The same has never, ever been true for Steve.
Steve is a trope played straight, and there's no room in that trope for "btw, the ideals you stand for are used to make people miserable in many parts of the world". I mean, in his last movie, set in 2014, Steve was still busy uncovering fictional Nazis. Tony Stark's past is treated with so much more realism and relevance compared to that.
Pretty much everything
musesfool said here, good and bad: I can only hope the Russos do better, but I'm already dreading that Cap3 is really just IM5: Tony turns into a fascist and then has to fix it somehow. Bleh. DO NOT CARE AND DO NOT WANT.
And then we end with the Avengers being SHIELD again and just no. It's bad enough they disregard CATWS on Agents of SHIELD, but to do it here is just terrible writing and planning. Ugh ugh ugh.
staranise here:Also why is Nat the only one who can do the lullabye with the Hulk? Why not his BFF Tony? Making it so only one person can do it, and that person is one of the most fragile, is BAD PLANNING and frankly reeks of, “Nat, you’re the girl, you go handle Bruce’s emotions for him.”
minim_calibre here:Things I liked more than I expected
Wanda, who wound up being far more sensible and grounded than I expected given the Whedon history with a certain type of brunette.
The implication that they were signing up as volunteers for something that still branded itself as SHIELD.
and
Things I disliked but now feel vindicated about
Joss Whedon has no idea how to handle Steve Rogers. None. It's especially irritating when Steve Rogers is your favorite male character in the franchise. Any excuses made for the first movie being him just out of the ice, blah blah blah, do not hold water. Language? Jesus Christ, Whedon. Did you even watch any of the movies other than your own? Stupidest and most forced-feeling running gag, I swear. Fuck that noise. (We have, in fact, seen Steve Rogers swear, and have seen him next to someone exclaiming "SHIT!" and not say anything about language.)
synecdochic here: * On the other hand, Sarah pointed out that she really liked the bit where Tony was insisting that they needed to wake up Vision; she thought it was a really good example of Tony's iterative engineer mindset, where, okay, the last version crashed and burned but we'll do it better this time. Which I totally agree with, but I think it would have had a lot more impact with a bit more self-introspection from Tony beforehand; Tony's entire character arc has been him learning to do that self-introspection and this movie felt like a giant leap backward.
and
* Aforementioned "thing I hated" about the Bruce/Natasha thing was the conversation at Clint's farmhouse where Bruce tells Natasha he can't be with her because he can't offer her the farm and the kids, and Natasha counters with, I can't have kids either because the Red Room made me sterile, and ugh, there are layers and layers of how fail that was and it would take me a week to unpack them. First, because it works directly against that thing where Natasha gets to exist in the MCU as a woman who gets the stories women don't often get; second, because up until now she's been presented as the sort of woman who both Sarah and I thought should have the response of "uh, Bruce, what in our entire relationship so far has made you think I'm the kind of person who wants to settle down with a farm and kids"; third, because it would be really nice to have at least one woman in popular culture who is childfree by choice and not because of biology; fourth, because oh my God, adoption, it is a thing that exists, as Sarah said it's not like the Marvel universe has a shortage of orphans, I can go on for days. Bruce's half of the conversation made perfect sense for him -- we've seen plenty of evidence for his desire for kids and home and hearth and stability and family -- but for Natasha, not at all.
and
* On the other hand, I really loved Clint's moment with Wanda -- the whole, it is perfectly okay if you decide you can't cope with this, but decide that right the fuck now, because if you get up and get back out there we need you to be 100% in the game. It really cast him in this great light as somebody who knows he's not superpowered, but does this anyway because he feels like he has to. (I also loved the "there are robots and the world's ending and I have a bow and arrow" or whatever that line was.) In that moment Clint really felt like somebody with his shit together, somebody who's used to encouraging junior agents and really good at being a father/mentor/etc, which I know goes against a lot of the characterization in 616 and against a lot of popular fanon, but it still really worked for me.
and
* I did really like the note they ended on. (Aside from the thing with Tony retiring, which I could write another five thousand word entry on: that should have happened either last movie, or two movies from now. Yes, I know RDJ is out of contract and really expensive, but the end of IM3 would have been a perfect chance to let Tony move more into a behind-the-scenes/backing role; if you're going to position him as an active member of the team at the start of the movie after the end of IM3, you need to tell me a) why he went back on his decision to retire after IM3 and b) why he changed his mind again at the end of AOU, and you didn't tell me either of them.) ...wait, this was going to be a positive point. Ahem. Okay: I really like that they ended with the next generation of the team. I really like that the next generation of the team is two black guys, two women, one AI, and a single white guy. I hope Marvel is going to use this to make some more strides towards diversity.
And from a comment to this post,
marzipan77 says: For what it's worth, here's my main problem with A2, and I say it with must trepidation. It's Joss. He didn't give us A2, he gave us Buffy and Angel and Friends. BW has been turned into the Chosen One in love with the Monster who cannot have a minute of joy (excitement) or he'll turn into a Monster. BW is not a super hero in this movie. She's a damsel in love and in distress. She gets kidnapped and rescued by her man. Remember her first scene in A1? Kidnapped on purpose and rescues herself. I miss that BW. And Hawkeye is certainly now Xander. The only human who wonders why he's in this group of sooper guys. Best friends with Buffy, er, BW. Normal life guy who is too busy redecorating the dining room to save the world and stuff. Spike and Drusilla turn up as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. And it's not even a good Buffy episode - it's like the Adam season all over again. Way too much monologuing with no point.
