What We Are Really Talking About Is Saving the World.
Intersectionality, Wanda Maximoff and The Reality of Fiction
Zaina by © Bil Brown
There is a lot I need to unwrap here, and as previous posts I certainly don’t have all the answers. It will take deep dives and multi-tiered, multiplatformed discussions and still I won’t have the answers. The reality of all of this is, it’s all going to depend on the audience, so that is where I will continue. Let’s talk audience, about a BIG audience.
I’m not too sure how many people have been watching Disney+ Marvel or Star Wars or any of that. The platform seems very popular, and since the movies are more or less over or at least longer waits for awhile this is what we have in the fandom, as well as the casual entertainment seeker for something marginally philosophical. Let’s start with how popular films hit, I will start with a quote from Joseph Campbell:
“I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms––"the Force and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say.
The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. . . . The thing to do is to learn to live in your period of history as a human being ...[b]y holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you.
Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity––because that's where the life is, from the heart––or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Knobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions. (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)
Before I go further let me acknowledge I am giving you a long quote here so you can know the context: myth. This post is neither journalism nor academic — so I am going to give you a lot of information in a post and not always close it out or give context before I move on. This is my way of writing about a subject so I can return to a topic and reference what I referenced in this long meta within meta within meta idea. I will write something and then bring it up in another article later. I am no scholar but this is Hegalian logic (when he said he circled an objective idea and tried to find 27 different ways of seeing it), nor am I an expert in anything really but I have experience in the things that I have experience in and can think.
Like all of us I am given a free platform to give freely my ideas — which are more or less distributed to people that either want to hear them or the algorithm decides this is what you want to see because you would look for it or you have been thinking about it. If I make a strong assertion, it’s mine, but it’s not immovable. I’m reasonable and although my wife might say, “you are always right” or “you always have to be right.” I’m wrong, A LOT. When I write, it is the tyranny of my ideas, you are seeing the way I think literally. It however acknowledges your own tyranny of ideas, and I’m willing to bend — sometimes ;) I rarely go back and edit. This is a flow. But I will always move forward.
Back to Disney+, specifically the popular WandaVision MCU TV series on the streaming platform. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t be going into spoilers too much I don’t think but this may be a point to duck out for a few paragraphs. Come back when you’ve seen it. If you don’t want to see it or don’t have the platform and you just want to get the gist of what my observations are that’s something I think you can do. So stick around for the ride.
WandaVision’s premise is pretty simple, or complex according to who you talk to. Here is the long short version:
Wanda Maximoff is a fictional superhero in the Marvel Comics Universe of characters, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe she was first introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron as a character that first was manipulated by the dark forces of an infinity stone along with her brother. They are presented as being from a very small country and having grown up there are introduced to the larger world and universe by fighting the super group The Avengers and then later (after Pietro, Wanda’s brother, died fighting against Ultron) joining them. She then fought in a “Civil War (disagreement, refer to the last Substack)” between two factions of superheroes that had a disagreement about the government’s relationship to the individual power of the superhero. She also ended up in a relationship with the sentient robot Vision that was also created by infinity stone called the Mind Stone. The Civil War went on between the dueling factions, one led by (not Irony) Captain America and the other weapons developer turned good-guy Tony Stark/IronMan, until a larger threat came in the form of an intergalactic baddie named Thanos that thought that the universe’s ills could be thwarted if half the population of the world was “snapped” out of existence. Thanos needed an entire set of Infinity Stones to do this and one was in Vision’s head. Wanda had to destroy the Mind Stone to keep Thanos from it, and Vision was killed. Thanos used another stone to reverse time and take the stone from Vision’s head, killing him a second time (Thanos had gotten the stone from the wizard/doctor Dr. Strange after Strange realized the universe was up against a wall and had only one chance). Thanos snapped, half the sentient life in the universe turned to dust, including Wanda. Fast forward a few years and the remaining Avengers got the stones back through time travel, Hulk snapped and brought half the life in the universe back, including Wanda. Wanda attacked Thanos, almost killing him, he was saved only by distracting her with destroying everything around him. Thanos was finally thwarted by Tony Stark sacrificing himself and snapping Thanos and his legions out of existence and then, with Vision gone, the world having gone through some rather unsettling events, Wanda’s grief brought her to a new illusory reality: a sitcom-based time jumping show where she and Vision were married with two male children in a small town in New Jersey.
Whew.
WandaVision’s first episode set as a 1950s sit-com about a young couple moving into a new neighborhood was in black and white, the penultimate colorless existence but at the same time you have to acknowledge that the show was dealing with the realities of only seeing things in a monochromatic emotional space. The show had laugh tracks and funny moments where Wanda and Vision were trying to fit in but obviously had some existential issues with the fact that he wasn’t human, she had these powers, and they needed to hide them. It wasn’t until the next episode that we started to see that this was no normal sitcom, that there was outside forces alluded to in the first episode. It becomes obvious by this time that Wanda has created a new reality to protect her emotions and that of Vision, for some reason, bringing him back to life. The second episode also introduced the character Monica Rambeau as a new friend of Wanda’s in this small town. One that seemed to be just as out of place as Wanda, who was being led by her neighbor Agnes to understand the community and fit in. By the end of the third episode, where things moved forward to the 1960s sit-com format and everything was in a vibrant broadcast color space, we find out Monica is actually an agent of the global defense network S.W.O.R.D. created from the remnants of the organization S.H.E.I.L.D. that actually brought The Avengers together in the first place — via another Black character, Nick Fury who also was first to meet Carl Danvers as her transformed Kree-self. Subsequent episodes until now (there are two left in this series as of this writing) go forward in time, with sitcoms in each decade leading up to the present.
A little about Monica. She is black. She is the daughter of the founder of S.W.O.R.D. who also happens to be the pilot that flew with USAF experimental air-jokey Carol Danvers a.k.a. Captain Marvel. We have seen Monica before, as a child of the 1990s in the Captain Marvel film.
Don’t think it is lost on me that Monica, who is set as the leader of a small group of S.W.O.R.D. operatives that want to bring Wanda out of her trance and back into our reality, going through history as it were (including being left out of the 70-90s sitcom reality), is a grand motif and metaphor for Black Lives Matter and social justice trying to talk to the white folks that are potentially allies. It’s subtle but it is certainly there, from her Angela Davis hairstyle in the last sitcom episode where she was able to not only deliver Wanda’s two babies but also confront Wanda on her sorted past.
Nor is it lost to me that Thanos was a some version of foreign dictator, of color (purple), and Wanda is an immigrant trying to seem normal in America by what she remembers from some Sarkovian version of Nick-At-Night.
What Monica’s character is, who in the last episode went into Wanda’s reality for the third time and changed her DNA to gain superhero powers, is a transactional hyperreality of intersectional information.
“For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.”
― Werner Herzog
Intersecionality as described by Kimberle´ Crenshaw, the coiner of the obscure legal term, is an irrational fear of both race and sex that has no basis in reality at all. She posited “that once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of impersonally apportioned justice.”
Racism of course didn't just disappear in 1965 when the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, it didn’t just stop because people were ‘woke’ fifty odd years later, nor it was fixed through further laws. No, she thought the irreality/unreal fact of racism (and sexism which I will get to later) existed because for some people to feel comfortable it existed.
This isn’t any sort of rational reality. Kimberle´ Crenshaw wrote, discrimination remains because of the “stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance”— in other words, the American legal and socioeconomic order was largely built on racism. A false dream that was lost to any sort of reality. They wanted to see people one way so they controlled the environment, the very structure of society to make them how they saw them.
This dream world we are in, once revealed, is like what is said about “once you see it you can’t unsee it.” Film and photography has been used as a tool of public relations, propaganda, misinformation and opinion derived as fact since its inception 180 years ago. Especially prominent in the 20th century. Think of the scene above from Arronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, fast cut editing used in storytelling is an obvious trope, but when it is the hertz of a screen and the frame rates, what is happening to your perception.
During the days leading up to and during the Civil Rights era Disney refused to have Black character depictions. It wasn't until the 1960s that . Comics were a lot more independent but the mid-century representations weren’t as careful as the Mouse. Black people were subsequently drawn as demonic cannibals, without social morals, demonized or just plain stupid or violent towards the saintly Caucasians who would of course colonize them over and over again. Tribal people from Africa or other regions (depicted as always black or brown) were easily manipulated by whites. One character Ka-Zar was called "White God" after the supposed reverence the stupid villages gave him. Needless to say, these stories were written by white men and the whole fantasy was a big fucking mess.
THE HERO IS THE CHAMPION OF THINGS BECOMING, NOT OF THINGS BECOME.
Then we have to address those that opposed the heroes, the villains. Avengers #32 in 1966 featured the villainous group Sons of the Serpent (inspired by the real-life Ku Klux Klan) and the introduction of Marvel's, Bill Foster the Black scientist who became Giant-Man. Marvel came of age during Civil Rights and although it took them a few years to embrace a complete anti-racism stance, they did it before basically any other entertainment medium. Racists were demonized, always. Black Panther was born to this era, although when the Black Panthers were a thing they briefly tried to distance themselves by changing his name, they quickly saw it as an asset. Black characters were depicted as scientists, pilots, diplomats and kings.
Let’s just say, before these comics there wasn’t very much in the media or images (even in the press) that gave adequate representations of Black people, and certainly not very many that turned them into heroes. This was a big deal.
The first comic that really embraced the idea of racial relations was the flagship Spiderman, who was an ally for sure, where prominent leaders were Black, Asian, Latino, and more and Spidey was there to help. The X-Men, mutants , were a thinly-veiled minority dealing with Anti-Mutant prejudice and racism. The government was vilified for its intersectionality.
The supers were pretty amazing, but there was another side to the lesson of super heroes, as uncle Ben would say to Peter Parker in Spiderman’s origin story, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Not everyone would understand “the other” but in some ways you had to understand those that thought you were different than them — even if they didn’t bother trying to understand you at all.
Spiderman is the glue, our friendly neighborhood Spiderman. What Spiderman represents is the underdog, the kid that wasn’t rich, wasn’t athletic, wasn’t popular, wasn’t privileged at all and still by some act of fate became one of the most powerful beings in the universe. In fact, he even got his powers from a creepy-crawlier and no one really talks about that. He is not scary at all. In fact, his main super-power is honestly being able to be snide through practically any situation.
When Disney’s Marvel decided to cast Zendya as MJ Watson, Peter Parker’s great love in comic history it was a departure from the redhead pale depiction of her. Everyone loves Spiderman, he is the center of Marvel’s world, its most successful creation but he has yet to have every possible iteration of the hero explored on celluloid.
Even Monica caught the attention of young Peter Parker in one of her comic origins, when she was an iteration of Captain Marvel, from there she met Tony Stark and joined The Avengers, later leading it. What is filtered through Spiderman becomes Marvel canon. Because Spiderman is more America than the Capt. He is the reluctant, sarcastic, voice of “I messed up, lost so much, so I am going to fix it. I am going to use my gift for the good of all.”
My friend (as Kerouac would call Dean Moriarty “the secret hero of these pages”) that I have referenced over and over in this blog always had the affront “well are you down in the streets with these people” (implying he was). When I would talk about this or that so-called “liberal point” most were just points not really associated with a particular ideology) he would say, “are you running for office?” He went as far as to half-jokingly. trickster-wise write me in on the ballot he didn’t take seriously in the first place.
I didn’t call him out for his transactional relationship with me and others, one where his actions and presence talked a lot of promises but never truly delivered. That he was at some survival point that I wasn’t at, currently at least — I have certainly had points where I tried to bleed a client for everything they would give so I could survive, no faulting someone for valuing their worth above others — that is what capitalism does, I get it. I will say, maybe I have accomplished something by taking care of others that only taking care of yourself doesn’t accomplish. Having delusions of grandure and being somehow vunerable at the same time isnt exactly the best look. Ideas point to big things but they don’t always cash that check or pay it forward. If you only do things for yourself you will, in the end, only have yourself. Only you. Only a narcissist would want that.
At the end of the day, I don’t really care. People that do, do. People that talk, talk. I know who I am and therefore I can typically discern who someone else is too.
The difference is, and maybe the most important difference is:
I believe in something.
That’s what I think Monica to Wanda as her cultural therapist is doing when she is bringing her back to reality. That’s what I think Spiderman represents in the maxim of, “with great power comes great responsibility.” A belief that we have a responsibility to society, the greater good. There are so many forces that want to control this and that, enslave us, make us work for them. Evil corporations, evil Governments, big ideas and small ones that want to be bigger than they actually are. Threats on all sides. Spiderman isn’t real, neither is Wanda or Monica or The Avengers but they are a morality tale that has mythic importance to us. Some like the Hulk are incredibly realistic when it comes to rage and the uncontrollable reaction to rage that we can see in basically good people. Some are perfect examples of other lessons like weaponizing tech makes things worse like Tony Stark, but how tech can be used for good. And for Wanda Maximoff we can see the story of how grief can turn into an illusion that can effect all of those around us. That we need to come back to reality, especially after great trauma… like maybe a pandemic?
Some people, and I am guilty of this or have been, say that the algorithm has effectively separated people by ideology. Nope. We can only be manipulated to enact something we already believe. I don’t buy into this brainwashing. We are polarized because some believe in the maxim, “with power comes resposibility” and some don’t. Some don’t want to be held accountable for their actions and some understand all too clearly what they do has consequences.
But we will always have heroes, and some will be unsung, and some will be larger than life. And sometimes, we have to bring them back from their fog, their cloud.
Sometimes the hero is the one who brings the bigger hero back to reality.
Now most people I know that do any sort of image making want their images or films to be remembered. Most of the time you don’t want just other people who do the same thing you do to remember them, to see them, you want to reach out to a much larger audience and a much larger world.
During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 many photographers decided they would take to the streets. Many. Some of the more activist minded decided that they were going to be independent journalists, often they had never had this moniker before but they thought because of the protests this was their way to shine. To show dramatic images from a rather dramatic time. At first I was very in awe and appreciative of it. For the first few days it was amazing to see my social media feeds filled with people in solidarity to the movement or moment of Black Lives Matter. Then something changed.
I think people became sloppy. In the US things started to get kind of weird. I was on the phone with my friend and he started to say things to me like, “I just couldn’t follow you anymore, you are promoting this.” I was like, what? Pointing out the struggle isn’t promoting it… is it? This wasn’t a normal action.
In Germany, a place that more than likely anywhere else understands how civil disobedience and dissent that has the best intentions can inch toward something else with the wrong leadership, has rules of engagement for public protest. Anything that glorifies conflict is strictly prohibited. They have a strong distinction between legitimate media images and non-traditional media, and promoting conflict vs documenting it. If you don’t have a press badge but are wearing a gas mask or kevlar vest you can be cited with carrying a “passive weapon”. Anything that can be used to further conflict, even protection from it, is vehemently defended. Photography is fine, but using your power as a photographer isn’t just activism, its actively pushing an agenda.
Conversely, in Venezula, the press are under constant attack from the police. It’s better to be a protestor than to be an agent of the press. Press hide press badges from the police. The state is oppressive. The state doesn’t want the world to see the truth. If you are a photographer, you get in and get out.
Here in the US, it may not be such a good idea to take photos of people and events with the hyper-surveillance of the police. The police will build a case, sometimes allowing certain things to happen over time, and allow photographers and others to capture it showing faces and identifying marks of people in the photos. Trolling hashtags and other instant responses to events and collecting the data for enforcement later.
In the Panapticon, who is watching the watcher? This isnt an easy response, not is it an easy subject to address. We want to be there, doing the work, but are we understanding our place? Are we taking responsibility when we click the shutter?
“With great power comes great responsibility,” that is something I learned from the comics, specifically from a television show I watched as a child in the 1970s. This American comic-book hero has taken many forms, even some in other languages and other cultures. Spiderman is that universal, the idea that someone that oddly gained a superpower must then use it for good. Even after great loss, and seemingly barely to even make a living.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, both partially responsible for what we consider photojournalism and also activist photography as he was part of the French resistance during WWII, acknowledged that taking a photo was an act of violence. Emblematic of a history of violence toward Black Americans, and of the country’s legacy of white supremacy, when we turn our cameras toward the police oppressors we have to think these are the people that we also look to for simple protections like enforcing traffic laws so we can safely cross the street. It’s no wonder they might be a bit confused when literally hundreds of phones and DSLRs were pointed at them, in some cases at the same time as some more adamant protestors were hurling cans and other objects at them.
If we look at say the life of a photographer like Cartier-Bresson, one who started with art and then conflict photography, ended up being the founder of what it is that any of us do when we are on the street with any conviction with a camera in hand. HCB was quick to change with a changing situation. It is even said that at the height of the 1968 student protests in Paris he was methodical and would take few photos, maybe 4 per hour. Yes, he was that considered, that methodical. That… careful.
“Photography is nothing – it's life that interests me.” – Henri Cartier Bresson
Instead of documenting new reality to live in we may want to go a bit further and notice how this one has more than its fair share of issues, as well as heroes, that we can reveal. I think to be allies to any movement that wants harmony and equity is honorable and just. I think maybe, it’s time to really give some deep stories of heroes that people can really identify with, and this can be enacted with our cameras.
I will suggest something from the documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog, you may know him as “The Client” from Disney+ Star War’s series The Mandalorian, on the rather straight forward realistic, typically documentary style of Cinéma vérité (a style I have seen most street-style indie journalists emulate for protest work). Herzog says:
Cinéma vérité is fact-oriented and primitive. It is the accountant’s truth, merely skirting the surface of what constitutes a deeper form of truth in cinema, reaching only the most banal level of understanding. If facts had any value, if they truly illuminated us, if they unquestionably stood for truth, the Manhattan phone directory would be the book of books . . . Too many documentary filmmakers have failed to divorce themselves clearly enough from the world of journalism. I hope to be one of those who bury cinéma vérité for good.
Herzog wrote this on a 1999 trans-global flight where he saw a bad documentary and then watched some porn and just couldn’t. He is mostly right. The world of journalism is basically, impossibly, hard to swallow. Why? because instead of heroes it makes us think it’s showing us objective reality, when often it’s just subjective opinion.
I add this cued-up quote from Magnum photographer Christopher Anderson for a reason, as a photographer (that I believe originally came from an anthropological background) who has been a celebrated journalist, and one who is part of likely the most revered collective on the planet, to say that journalism is not truth is a serious issue. I also have to agree, I don’t think a photograph, even a journalistic one, can really be devoid of subjectivity. The photographer infuses their own perspective and ideology in each shot, it’s a lie to say otherwise. I am much more interested in making sweeping stories that have some sort of mythic qualities than simply making a documentary moment.
Let me see if I can explain it a different way. Or let me let Chris Anderson do it:
There was a moment when I was photographing, when we honestly thought that we were not going to make it. I assumed that the pictures that I was making were going to die with me. And for a long time after this, reflecting on this moment of, “why make pictures that won’t exist? What was the point of photographing in that moment?” That was the earliest moment where I had this realization of understanding the reason that I made pictures then had something to do with trying to explain something to myself, and it was through that, knowing at that moment that what I wanted my pictures to do was to communicate that experience.
It was not to explain anything, it was not to…dazzle anyone with the “fireworks” of photography, but to make you feel something, that hopefully this emotion could be left on the print that would make someone feel something. I think that was the earliest moment where I had this true sense of, “ah-ha, I know what I’m after! And that’s what I’m gonna go for.”
Now me arguing my point about photography being not ‘mythic’ enough in a Substack that started with a breakdown of a streaming platform’s episodic series about superheroes is what Kurt Vonnegut said about taking any criticism too seriously, it’s “like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.” All of this is a little overkill. As for Chris Anderson’s point of not trying to “dazzle anyone” well, that’s not to say there isn’t skill, style, point. There is, there must be.
There is, after all, an audience.
I’ve often thought of my own editorial work as sort of three tiered. I remember my friend John and I almost 30 years ago talking about a book he was reading about a Hebraic form that the New Testament was written in called Pesher. The way I understand it, which is likely not very technical nor even correct. is that there are three layers of meaning. Layer one is the basic story, for those that follow stories. This is for those that believe. The second layer is more for the initiates, this is technical or stylistic. This is a layer for the ‘wow’ to prove in a sense you know what you are doing or that you made conscious choices. The last layer is historic or a map to something. This is also the layer that can be used to make something relevant to now or to the history of like, everything.
Another way to say this is these are Mythopoetic narratives, or a quality of story used typically in opposition to a purely factual account to tell that story. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have truth, in fact it often has deep truth, emotional truth or deep observation. Fiction is the only lie you can tell that is fact.
What did Godard say, “To photograph a face is to photograph the soul behind it. Photography is the truth. And the cinema is the truth 24 times a second.” I guess with a 4K flat screen QLED its also at 120hz.
Now anyone that is going to watch a show about a superhero isn’t likely going to think they have to have the same suspension of disbelief with cable news. As is said, it will hit different. What I am saying here is maybe we have to think this way in 2021. With the state of how things are, we just ended with a US President who couldn't for the life of him say a straight statement without being defensive. Was he bad? Maybe, or maybe extremely paranoid. Truth comes with consequences. What I’m saying is, if we are going to sit through a fiction, that is obviously fiction, and follow a story that is obviously made up, and get emotional about the characters that are obviously not real… what we are experiencing is just as real as getting all this disinformation from the traditional journalists.
What is missing is truth.
If we take photos of an action that we are there for and don’t like turn away from it and take photos outside of the context of what is happening directly in front of the camera then we are maybe feeding a paranoia and calling it journalism. We are assuming we are contextualizing something and we are charging it with our own bias and our own reality, which is our own subjectivity.
If our subjectivity is truth, then anything that we do is also going to be truth from (Obi Wan Kenobi here) “a certain point of view.”
So, anyway. Midnight tonight we will see if Monica can pull Wanda back to reality and out of her faux version of Americana. One that maybe only Monica can save her from. Maybe it will inspire us to leave our fake reality and look around us, deal with our own pain and get it going.
The power of the story is transformation. Maybe we all just want to save the world.