Review - Agent Carter: "The Iron Ceiling"

This review contains spoilers.

The plot of Agent Carter is heating up as we come into the back half of the series, with several threads weaving together for what will no doubt be an exciting explosion in the next episode, "A Sin to Err." Chief Dooly of the SSR (can I say again how much I love that he is obviously incredibly good at his job?) is onto the fact that there's a lot more at stake than a witch hunt for Howard Stark. Dottie from Iowa, now revealed to be a product of the Black Widow program, is advancing her covert agenda right under Peggy's unsuspecting nose. And Agent Sousa has—as we all knew he would—succeeded in uncovering the identity of the mysterious blond operative. There's a lot to talk about, but perhaps the most intriguing element is the dynamic that has developed between Peggy and Dottie and the way it represents yet another subtle layer of sexism's insidious cultural reach.

For the seasoned television viewer, comic book reader, film buff, etc., the introduction of Dottie from Iowa in episode three ("Time and Tide") immediately raised a ton of plot-twist red flags, which the showrunners were wise not to drag out. The show's reveal of her as a spy in episode four ("The Blitzkrieg Button") probably came as a surprise to very few people. In "The Iron Ceiling," however, the writers did give us something surprising—an exploration of Dottie's backstory in a manner that enabled us to contrast her experiences with Peggy's in a wholly unexpected way. Like Peggy, Dottie is a hardened soldier—skilled not just in warfare but in the ability to disconnect the emotional responses that is intrinsic to the successful pursuit of war missions. And like Peggy, Dottie is being underestimated on the basis of her gender. For just as Peggy's coworkers should have sussed her out ages ago and have not solely because she is a woman, Peggy should have noticed Dottie's maneuvers and did not solely because she is a woman. Internalized misogyny here we come.

Peggy has never really taken notice of Dottie. In fact, she had absolutely no interest in Dottie when they first met as she was lost in thought over her upcoming mission to trace the path of Howard Stark's stolen technology at the time. That motif of not taking notice, of being lost in thought, of inherently—and without even the slightest critical consideration—assuming that she can lose herself in thought around other women because women are safe was repeated in this episode's diner scene. Sitting across the table from an apparently-planning-a-walking-tour-of-New-York Dottie, Peggy loses her focus completely while looking at Jarvis' business card. She loses her focus so entirely that Dottie has to verbally recall Peggy to herself—something that would never have happened if Peggy had been sitting across the table from a man. But just as Peggy has consistently used the sexism of her male coworkers against them, Dottie expertly uses Peggy's own sexism against her. Dottie's method of stealing Peggy's room keys—knocking over her purse and then insisting on picking everything up as a penance—is such an obvious tactic that it's almost unbelievable that an agent as good as Peggy is wouldn't pick up on it. In the end, however, she is no more immune to her own prejudices than Chief Dooley and Agent Thompson were when Peggy botched their interrogation of Jarvis in the most staggeringly incompetent fashion.

Peggy's dangerous dismissal of Dottie, predicated on her internalized misogyny, is presented alongside Peggy's first taste of success at making her way into the boy's club, and the juxtaposition of these two events is significant. This episode presented a radically different view of Agent Thompson that both humanized him and gave him some common ground to share with Peggy—thus laying the groundwork for the rehabilitation of his character that was hinted at in "The Blitzkrieg Button"—but the fact remains that Thompson is an ethically questionable figure. We've seen him beat, berate, and bribe witnesses; we've seen that he's quite capable of, and comfortable with, lying (although, he is—as I've noted before—not one to lie to himself). In short, we've seen that Thompson's desire to do his job, sometimes trumps his ethical standards—as the desire to do the job sometimes trumps many SSR agents' standards. And while that's okay for a government agent, if Peggy Carter really wants to be a hero she may have to rethink her club membership goals.

Just as it significant that Peggy's tentative acceptance into the boy's club has come at a moment when her own sexism is showing, it is also no coincidence that said acceptance came at the moment when the one person who has always respected her—Agent Daniel Sousa—has discovered a reason to doubt her. Right from the very beginning of the series, Sousa's quest to uncover the identity of the mysterious blond operative (Peggy) who was independently investigating—and possibly sabotaging—the SSR's case against Howard Stark has set him apart from his contemporaries. Unlike Thompson, and even Chief Dooley, who expressed frustration at the existence of this operative but otherwise ignored the conundrum, Sousa has been convinced that the identity of the unknown operative was a key to cracking the case. Neither Thompson nor Dooley ever felt that much time should be devoted to the problem because neither of them really thought that it was possible for a woman to be an important player in an espionage case. Sousa, on the other hand, knew that a woman could be an important player—an embrace of gender equality that actually puts him a step ahead of Peggy Carter for the moment.

Thus, in yet another ironic turn, it is not Peggy Carter but Daniel Sousa who has turned out to be the most emancipated thinker on the show.

Whose Girl Is She? The Intensely Problematic Depiction of Mystique in 'X-Men: Days of Future Past'

Warning: Here Be Spoilers.

About a month before X-Men: Days of Future Past opened, I saw a gifset taken from this scene of the film, and I got very, very nervous. The clip appeared to show a Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnscherr (Magneto) who were at odds over a girl—Raven Darkholme (a.k.a. Mystique), retconned to be Xavier's foster sister as of X-Men: First Class—rather than at odds over an ideological difference of opinion. The philosophical difference of opinion that Xavier and Magneto have over how to achieve mutant prosperity is the cornerstone of the X-Men universe, and it is what has enabled the story of the X-Men and their foes to remain consistently compelling since their debut in the 1960s. The crux of the struggle between Xavier and Magneto (and the X-Men and their various foes) is that they essentially want to achieve the same goal, but they have radically different notions about how to do that. Where Xavier and his X-Men favor pacifism and outreach, Magneto and "villains" like Mystique and her Brotherhood of (Evil) Mutants favor vigilantism and revolution.

This distinction between the two factions was admirably maintained in X-Men and X2: X-Men United, but it began to erode in X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: First Class. I was naturally extremely worried by the possibility that the exploration of ideological contention between the main characters might have been abandoned in favor of a two-dimensional spat over a female character—a trope that is both sexist and boring. I began to fear that Days of Future Past was not going to be the triumphant return to the beloved X-Men films of the early 2000s that I was hoping for.

As it turned out, I was somewhat misled by the gifset I saw. Days of Future Past did not simply distill a complex debate down to a fight about a woman, and it would be a gross oversimplification to say so. In fact, Days of Future Past did something far, far worse. For in this film Mystique was not merely the thing that Xavier and Magneto fought over; she was the battleground on which they fought—a blank slate devoid of agency or identity, picked up and used and tossed aside when their need for her was gone. Mystique's entire character arc, if you can call it that, hinged on a struggle between identification with one or the other of two men, and at no point was there ever any indication that she might conceivably have been her own person, capable of making her own, well-informed decisions.

Mystique as she exists in the comic books, and in the first two X-Men films, is an extremely powerful character. She is grounded in deeply-held beliefs about her mission to secure mutant prosperity. She is comfortable in who she is as a person and a mutant. She rejects other people's labels about who she should be and how she should act. She is an unqualified badass.

We see this Mystique in X2, when she disagrees with Nightcrawler's suggestion that she use her powers to hide: "Why not stay in disguise all the time? Look like everyone else?" he asks. "Because we shouldn't have to," she replies. And we see this Mystique again in X-Men: The Last Stand, when she continues to help the cause of mutant prosperity even after she has been depowered—illustrating just how strongly her sense of self is grounded in the belief that her cause is just. In X-Men: First Class, however, this Mystique was erased in favor of a depiction of her as a sheltered, naive girl-next-door, whose acceptance of self hinges entirely on being sexually desired by a man. This marks the beginning of the transformation (completed in Days of Future Past) of Mystique from an autonomous character to subordinate tool.

In X-Men: Days of Future Past, the horrible dystopic future of a world ruled by Sentinels is precipitated by an assassination carried out by Mystique. So far, so good. (This is what caused the dystopic future in the original Claremont/Byrne story arc.) However, unlike in the original comic book, where Mystique's actions were part of a larger vigilante project that was underlined by a specific ideological belief, in the film Mystique is motivated primarily by a surplus of feminine emotion (read: hysteria) over the deaths of her friends. These paper-thin and stereotypical motivations are emblematic of the way in which the writing team of the prequels have pulled Mystique's fangs. She is no longer a powerful force in her own right; instead, she is an erratic, overly-emotive will-o-the-wisp, desperately in need of guidance because she cannot stay grounded without a force greater than herself upon which to orient herself. In other words, she has no real autonomy.

This lack of autonomy makes her the perfect tool for the primary male characters to fight over, and her representation in this manner is part and parcel of a larger problem of representation in superhero films in general. As Monika Bartyzel has noted:

"The female superhero problem isn't just one of reluctance and indifference — it's one of seriously skewed attitudes. The creative teams behind superhero franchises (and much of the media that report on them) simply don't treat female superheroes as superheroes. Instead, they're viewed as objects and used for male support." (1)

The objectification of Mystique in this film could not be more clear. It is the sole basis on which the dramatic tension is built, and it is visually and narrativistically reinforced throughout the course of the film. Mystique is manipulated, physically and mentally by both of the primary male characters at various points. Magneto moves her body (by means of a bullet embedded in her leg) with his power; Xavier freezes her body by seizing control of her mind. Both men do this to her, without her consent, for her own good, and in defiance of her stated desires. Yet even her stated desires are characterized in terms of her alliance to one or the other of these men. Her decision to assassinate or to not assassinate is framed purely in terms of whose girl she is. Is she Charles' girl? Or is she Erik's girl? After all, she certainly is not her own girl.

In the end, Mystique does not actually make a decision. She merely functions as a blank slate onto which the philosophies of the main male characters are projected.

And allow me to repeat that, so that it is clear. In X-Men: Days of Future Past, the desires and worldviews of the two main male characters are literally projected onto the blank-slate body of a woman who spends the majority of the film in a state of virtual nakedness. She is not a character in this film. She is an object to be used by her male counterparts, an object whose meaning and function are defined by them.

This is, in no uncertain terms, horrible. It is indicative of the deeply ingrained misogyny and male entitlement that characterize our society.

And it needs to be challenged in a major way.

Notes:
1) Monika Bartyzel, "Girls on Film: The Superhero Genre's 'Giant Green Porn Star' Problem," The Week Magazine (May 23, 2014).


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The Gendered Perception of Violence.

Recently, I was wasting time rather than pushing ahead with my comprehensive exam reading (much like I am now) by watching a series of specials aired by the cable channel Bravo on the 100 most frightening film scenes. I justified this expenditure of time by telling myself it would provide an interesting counterpoint for the readings I was doing. Color me shocked when this turned out to actually be true.

I had gotten almost all of the way through the countdown when I came upon entry #11 - Miike Takashi's ground-breaking Audition (1999) - and I noticed a very curious phenomenon. The commentators on the movie, almost all of them men, were strikingly disturbed by this film. Rob Zombie (yes, the Rob Zombie who made House of 1000 Corpses [2003] and The Devil's Rejects [2005]) called it one of the few films that actually creeped him out, and John Landis (director of 1981's An American Werewolf in London) actually said that it was "too real" and wondered what the filmmakers were thinking when they made it.(1)

I found this reaction kind of peculiar, particularly coming as it was from two giants of the horror film genre. No other film selected had produced that kind of response from its reviewers. #50 on the list, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972)— a film with a similar level of violence—had generated praise. It was referred to as "taboo-breaking," "a political statement about the nature" of violence, and something that "pushed the envelope." (2) This in spite of, or perhaps because of, its graphic depiction of death by disembowelment. The commentators were horrified by this film, but not profoundly disturbed by it in the way that they clearly were with Audition. So why should that be? Well, the answer may lie in the object of the film's violence and in a gendered perception of violence as whole.

Audition is a film about a mild-mannered, middle-aged widower. His son and his friends have been urging him to remarry for years, as they want him to have someone to take care of him, but he's resisted up until now. In order to find a wife he participates in a fake audition—staged by a film producer friend—where around forty women are brought in under the false pretense of auditioning for a part in a film. The man picks one of the women to date and (if all goes well) to marry. However, the women he picks is completely and utterly out of her mind, and she eventually breaks into his house, ties him up, and tortures him (the torture including, but not limited to, activation of pain points with acupuncture needles and amputation of the feet with piano wire).

The really interesting thing about the way the male commentators talk about this movie is the fact that they classify the main character as a completely likable guy. This is, I think, the key to why they feel so profoundly uncomfortable with this particular brand of violence. They identify with him, and they experience the violence done to him in a way that is uncomfortable to a degree that seeing a young woman stabbed to death is not uncomfortable.

This argument is the basis of an essay on early-medieval Japanese art by the scholar Ikeda Shinobu entitled "Images of Women in Battle Scenes: 'Sexually' Imprinted Bodies." (3) In the essay Ikeda suggests that the predominance of female victims in the famous handscroll "Burning of the Sanjo Palace" in the Illustrated Tale of the Heiji Disturbance (Heiji monogatari emaki), coupled with the depiction of the warriors in the scroll with barbaric, almost comic features, indicates that this handscroll was probably produced by and for a courtier audience. She further suggests that the female victims, some of whom are shown en dishabille, serve as focuses of sexual excitement for the viewers.

While I don't accept the second-half of this argument (for reasons that I will explain below), I do somewhat accept the first-half of it. The notion that a Kamakura period courtier would not have enjoyed visualizing someone who looked an awful lot like himself be trampled and beaten is a fairly sound one. Even the most emphatic horror fans of the modern age have shown themselves to dislike violence perpetrated against the "I-guy" and to only embrace it when there is significant payoff in the end (as in Hostel where the main character takes bloody revenge on his tormenter). Identification with film characters is what makes the horror genre so hard to deal with, and—if I may suggest it—what makes the horror genre hard for many women to appreciate. In the horror film, women are nearly-always the object of lingering violence, which invokes a strange kind of fascination if you can imagine it happening to someone else but evinces utter revulsion if you are made to feel it happening to you.

My belief that psychological impulses operating in the modern period also operated in the pre-modern period is a tricky one to hold, I admit. On the one hand, I feel it is important to ground all historical inquiries firmly within an appropriate context that takes into account as much of the reality of the era as we can reconstruct. On the other hand, I also feel that the human animal hasn't really evolved all that much in the last thousand years. Consequently, even as I struggle for the all powerful holy grail of "proper historicity," I'm haunted by a sense that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

This is actually why I cannot accept the second premise of Ikeda's argument. I don't read horror connoisseurs' appreciation of violence as tied to sexual excitement in any period. A number of films certainly do play upon the horrific qualities of sexual violence—A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Evil Dead (1981), Meatball Machine (2005), Slither (2006), etc.—but these sequences are almost invariably read as fearsomely grotesque rather than titillating. (4) There's no reason to assume that things would have been different at the early-medieval Japanese court. The argument that the representation of horror often involves a gendered gaze, and that violations of the standard trope of male visualization of violence against the female are specifically transgressive and unsettling, is a strong one. But a gendered gaze is not ipso facto a sexualized one.

Nevertheless, the gendered gaze provides a framework in which violence (often sexual in nature) can more easily be done to women as it is invariably more acceptable. And as a good friend of mine recently pointed out, this acceptability of violence trickles out into other genres as well. Just consider what the reaction to a female vampire protagonist stalking a male high school student would be. We all love the oh-so-epic-and-true romance of Edward and Bella, but we'd be shocked and horrified by Edwina and Beau. In fact, we have quite a lengthy record of being complacent in response to male-female aggression in the mainstream while at the same time being censorious of female-male aggression. The noted self-defense specialist Gavin de Becker has pointed out that films reinforce this narrative in countless scenarios. (5) Benjamin Braddock of 1967's The Graduate is a charming oaf, whose annoying persistence ultimately gets him the girl. Evelyn of 1971's Play Misty for Me is a psychopathic bitch, whose terrifying persistence ultimately gets her killed.

The reality of the stalker experience is that both of the above scenarios (male-agressor-female-victim and female-agressor-male-victim) (6) are the same, but the cultural perception of them—filtered through a very gendered lens—results in extremely different media portrayals.

The mild-mannered, middle-aged widower of Audition is the nicest guy in the world according to the male commentators who squirm in response to his protracted torture. But actually, he's not the nicest guy in the world. He's a man who cynically used a fake audition to orchestrate a no-strings-attached, no-risk-involved trip to the meat market. It doesn't mean that he deserved to be tortured, but it does tell us a lot about the way we as a society still think of the role of cause-and-effect in violent acts. If he'd been a mild-mannered, middle-aged widow I suspect that the narrative of what happened to he[r] (and how [s]he participated in bringing it on [her]self) would be very, very different.

---
Notes:
1) Commentary on Audition can be viewed here from the 7:58 mark. Viewer discretion is advised.
2) Commentary on Last House on the Left can be viewed here from the 1:10 mark. Viewer discretion is advised.
3) Ikeda Shinobu, "Images of Women in Battle Scenes: 'Sexually' Imprinted Bodies," in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, ed. Joshua S. Mostow et al (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003): 35-48.
4) For a thought-provoking breakdown of the different "species" of the grotesque, see Noel Carroll, “The Grotesque Today: Preliminary Notes Toward a Taxonomy,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 291-312.
5) Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear (New York: Dell, 1999): 236-37.
6) Admittedly, this argument relies on a hetero-normative binary example. While I recognize that the issue of non-cisgendered violence is equally serious in this day and age, it is outside the scope of this essay.


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