LaaF…Culture!

I tried not to be too anxious about “SHIELD.”  I figured if I didn’t have any expectations, I wouldn’t be disappointed.   That changed one minute into the pilot.  Seeing the Marvel logo on my television screen, knowing that Joss Whedon was behind this and was bringing in old Whedonites like Ron Glass and J. August Richards, combined with the presence of Ming Na, whom I have had a crush on since my parents made me watch “Joy Luck Club,”  was just too much handle. I screamed, “I’m so excited!” and then laughed giddily like child. 

The pilot episode hit all the marks.  We see the characters introduced in their element as a resurrected Agent Coulson recruits a new team.  It was pretty standard, but with Joss Whedon’s sass and dialogue which television has been missing for the last ten years.  As this post-Avengers team assembled to embark on their first mission, I found myself more intrigued by the predicaments of the male characters.  It seemed as if Joss Whedon was turning over male gender roles and exploring what it meant to be a man and suggesting that the definition is changing. 

Let’s start with the impetus of the episode: Richards’ character Mike Petersen has revealed himself to be a superhuman.  He climbs into a burning building and rescues a damsel in distress.  We learn that Petersen is unemployed, divorced, and a single dad.  He’s been injured on the job and now he can’t get work.  His superpowers come from a “medical trial” he enrolls in so that he can get strong enough to work again.  There’s a lot of male anxiety here. Frustrated after losing everything and feeling very insignificant in this new world of superhumans and aliens, he says, “It matters who I am inside. That I’m strong.”  He just wants to be the head of the family again. He wants his house back, his wife to return, and his son to respect him. He wants to be the male breadwinner. 

 Agent Ward is the handsome action hero. He reiterates over and over again that he works alone, and his first scene shows him taking out a bunch of henchmen on his own.  He’s the tough guy.  The man.  He doesn’t need anyone.  But in an amusing scene where Coulson injects him with a potent truth serum, he becomes extremely vulnerable.  He admits he puts up a front when beautiful women like Skye are around, and he confesses to having a soft spot for his grandmother. All of this is used to Skye’s advantage as she does her best to milk information from him using a combination of the truth serum and her feminine beauty. 

Fitz is an interesting character too.  He’s the classic beta male gadget chief.  He’s the antithesis of Agent Ward – competent but diffident, physically smaller, the nerdy sidekick to the deadly sniper.  He doesn’t fight. When he’s under pressure, his partner suggests imagining that they’re taking a test.   It’s his partner that he’s always mentioned with as well, partially undermining both of their individuality. Fitz is mentioned as one with his female partner Simmons.  Together they’re FitzSimmons and the rest of the cast refers to them as one single entity. 

Lastly, there’s Agent Coulson, the everyman who provided consistency in the Iron Man, Captain America and Thor movies.  No one knows what he is or how he escaped death after Loki blew a hole in his chest.  Maria Hill simply says that “he can never know” what really happened to him. Is he even a man?  Some guess that he might be a robot, a Life Model Decoy.

Throughout the pilot, characters continue to discuss the fallout from the events in “Avengers.”  Seeing demigods and supermen has contributed to Mike Petersen’s inferiority complex, and everyone seems to agree that this is a brand new world.  I wonder what commentary Joss is making here.  Are Mike and the other men symbolic of the changes that the 21^st century has wrought on men?  Has globalization, economic downsizing, and the end of the Cold War made men like Peterson’s and Ward’s characters obsolete?  Are we seeing the rise of the beta male embodied by Fitz’s character?  Is the white patriarchal leadership embodied by Agent Coulson dead?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’m so excited for these possibilities. 

Tags: Agent Coulson, Agents of SHIELD, Chloe Bennet, Chloe Wang, comics, gender role, Joss Whedon, Marvel, masculinity, Ming Na