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Home , Daniel Sousa, David Hayter, Phil Coulson, Red Skull, Wasp (character), Zack Stentz

Kelly Kane

December 1, 2018

Hyper-Normative Heroes, Othered Villains: Differential Disability Narratives in Movies

and Shows

Superheroes and “Moral Pornography”: Judging By Appearances

Superhero stories are often portrayed and enjoyed as a form of escapism, whether in the form of comics typically classified as “low-brow” or less cultured literature (Gavaler 76) or in the form of science fiction films and shows that must be vigorously defended against charges of inanity. In fact, social psychologists David Pizarro and Roy Baumeister go so far as to assert that stories are a form of “moral pornography” because “much like the appeal of the exaggerated, caricatured sexuality found in pornography, superhero comics offer the appeal of an exaggerated and caricatured morality that satisfies a natural human inclination toward moralization… built to satisfy our moralistic urges but ultimately unrealistic and, in the end, potentially misleading” (20). They characterize superhero stories as appealing because such stories remove the complexities of actual moral decision-making while nevertheless portraying the triumph of clearly marked moral agents over clearly marked immoral ones.

The key characteristics of superhero stories that make them morally pornographic according to this framework are such stories’ focus on simple, satisfying endings and high rates of success (Pizarro and Baumeister 22). Just as pornography features the most enjoyable aspects of sexuality with unrealistically nonexistent risk of sexual rejection, superhero stories depict moral struggles with extremely low risk of failure and unambiguous answers about who is right and who is wrong. Superhero stories must thus have clearly demarcated heroes and villains, in order to signal to the reader who the moral and immoral agents will be. Ergo, some of the most popular comic book characters of all time include , a self-described “agent of chaos” (Lee 1) and , of the “Brotherhood of Evil Mutants” (Lee and Kirby 8). Pizarro and

Baumeister point out that in the early stages of most literary forms, “the villain could be seen twirling his mustache, cackling, and rubbing his hands together… Later, such overtly wicked characters were dismissed from serious literature as not being sufficiently realistic. But their perennial popularity in comic books is indicative of the appeal of moral clarity” (24-25.) If superhero stories at least partially derive their appeal through portraying simplified moral conflicts, then by necessity they rely upon these overt markers of heroism and villainy. Even as other visual markers of villainy have lost popularity within superhero stories — the film version of Magneto simply leads a “” with no mention of evil, and the silver screen Loki claims to be motivated by the good of his realm rather than a desire for destruction

— one especially troubling visual symbol has persisted: that of disability and its portrayal marking a character’s morality or lack thereof (X-Men: Last Stand; .)

In order to understand how disability so often functions as a visual symbol of a fictional character’s alleged virtue (or lack thereof), it is illustrative to look at the evolutionary psychology of moral judgment. Contrary to popular belief that natural selection prioritizes a

“kill or be killed” system of morality, evolutionary psychology has overwhelmingly discovered that humans, both ancestral and contemporary, are motivated to make quick judgments about whom to trust in order to invest enormous altruistic efforts toward assisting those individuals deemed trustworthy (De Waal 299). Cognitive psychologists Aldert Vrij and Mark Baxter find that humans have a “truth bias” wherein they are inclined to believe all assertions as true unless given reason to disbelieve those assertions (27), and evolutionary psychologist Frans De Waal finds that contemporary human cultures almost universally value helping those in need of assistance. However, natural selection did not favor absolute trust in all conspecifics; humans have always had to decide who to trust and who to avoid. Therefore, Pizarro and Baumeister argue, the act of engaging in moral judgment is inherently pleasurable for the same reason that the act of sexual intercourse is inherently pleasurable: it increases the odds of survival for both groups and individuals. Given that “individuals so easily arrive at conclusions about the dispositions of others (and are motivated to do so) with only minimal information” and the act of deciding who to trust conveys intrinsic pleasure to the judging individual, superhero stories thus provide the same category of unrealistically simplified pleasure offered by pornography (27).

As disability scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder discuss in their analysis

Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, disability has been treated as an external marker of one’s moral status at least as far back into human history as Aristotle’s writings, and perhaps even earlier (57). This specific human bias, also known as the “what is beautiful is good” effect, leads to the automatic assumption that individuals who are physically attractive according to the conventions of their society are more trustworthy and moral than those who are less physically attractive (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster 285). The oversimplified and pornographic nature of superhero stories often leads to a reliance upon such stereotypes to signify moral judgment: the heroic is traditionally masculine and traditionally beautiful while the villainous Jigsaw is more feminine and facially scarred; the heroic achieves normative masculine beauty while the villainous loses his traditionally masculine appearance in the process of becoming a villain (Punisher: War Zone; Captain

America: The First Avenger). One can even see such shifts manifest within the design of a single character: Barnes appears as a traditionally masculine and traditionally beautiful hero with short hair and a nondisabled body in Captain America: The First Avenger, shifts to a more feminine and nontraditional appearance with long hair and a highly visible prosthetic arm when he appears as the antagonist of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and then hybridizes his appearance with moderate-length hair and a de-emphasized prosthesis during his morally ambiguous role in Captain America: . Thus, the obvious signal of normative beauty then becomes synonymous with literal goodness of character.

Although empirical investigation of disability has definitively refuted the assumption of the physical body as a reflection of the moral character of an individual, superhero stories especially nevertheless demonstrate a frequent bias against the moral character of individuals with disabilities. One reason for this persistent prejudice derives from the implicit bias of the system of moral judgment. Evolutionary psychologists David Buss and Douglas Kendrick posit that humans have evolved to judge one another rapidly on the basis of appearance, and that this system of judgment can be prone to error to the extent that it perceives evidence of untrustworthiness where none exists. Specifically, human perception is the product of many

“good enough” mechanisms, ones that lead to errors as well as accurate judgments but which usually prioritize avoidance of the more serious class of error. This “smoke detector principle,” thus called because of the parallel with smoke detectors which are designed to be too sensitive in order to prioritize the less-costly error of detecting fire where none exists over the more costly error of failing to detect fire when it does exist, biases humans toward mistrust for any individuals whose outward appearance potentially signals unfamiliarity or contagious disease.

This framework most certainly does not excuse the “armchair psychologists” in their judgment that external disability must necessarily reflect internal moral failings, but it does help to explain why humans will often make snap judgments to avoid individuals perceived as physically unusual, including those with non-normative physicality or gait (e.g. individuals using wheelchairs or crutches, individuals with scars, or individuals with mobility impairments).

Humans not only can but should overcome this immediate impulse to avoid individuals with disabilities — just as we usually overcome the impulse to seek copulation with every physically attractive person we encounter.

Nevertheless, it can be easy to fall prey to the temptation to justify these impulses through individual-level and systemic ableism, both of which act to exclude disabled individuals from public spaces. A dark corollary of the fun “pornography” of superhero stories is that they appeal to lazy human impulse through not only marking villains with mustaches or black hats, but also through marking them with disabilities. The especially makes heavy use of these types of metaphors. In his book , Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver

Age and Beyond, disability scholar José Alaniz traces the history of the major superhero comics lines, and notes that Marvel, more so than its competitor companies such as D.C. Comics and

Dark Horse Comics, has frequent representation of disabled heroes among its headliners. Alaniz notes that D.C. features disabled heroes such as the Doom Patrol and Oracle, but that Marvel has a wide plethora of disabled characters including A-list heroes such as , Thor, , and . One possible explanation for this discrepancy is the relative influence of Greek mythology (which informs the mythos of the D.C. universe) and Norse mythology (which informs Marvel to a similar degree): whereas the ancient Greek pantheon values physical perfection and features dozens of normatively beautiful gods with the single arguable exception of Hephaestus, the ancient Norse pantheon is filled with amputees such as , visually impaired deities such as and Hodr, and selectively mute trickster Loki. Ancient Greek philosophy emphasized that “what is beautiful is good,” whereas ancient Norse philosophy was far more likely to regard disability as a signifier of honor earned through surviving injury. To a large extent, Marvel narratives have also embraced disability as ubiquitous, for all that their portrayals of disability are not always positive.

However, Mitchell and Snyder problematize the “symbolic manipulation of bodily exteriors” that literature so often employs when portraying disability (59). To treat disability as a metaphor is to remove its potential to localize the fictional character within a community of disabled individuals. To localize disability within the individual is to avoid troubling the social order that creates disability through privileging certain types of abilities and experiences over others. In short, disability as a metaphor rather than a social identity is a deeply comfortable type of portrayal: it affirms the existing social order and offers no challenges to existing stereotypes. This type of portrayal is, in its own way, as comfortingly unrealistic and as immediately gratifying as pornography.

Disability as Metaphor

These portrayals all fail to engage with disability as a social category and as an individual identity through instead casting disability as a metaphor rather than a reality. Historian Brian

Cremins points out that contemporary consciousness has partially moved away from other problematic parallels of physical appearance and internal character, perhaps most disturbingly present in early Captain depicting the sole black character in the series as unintelligent and incompetent because of his identity as an African-American man, but that problematic connections between bodily disability and moral character have stubbornly persisted. Even relatively positive metaphors, such Thor and depicting one-eyed characters as more discerning because of their lack of connection to worldly cares, nevertheless fail to engage with disability as a social identity through casting it solely as a literary device.

The Iron Man films largely neglect the potential consequences of cardiac injury on the heavy alcohol consumption or active lifestyle of Iron Man himself, instead literally framing his prosthetic as “proof that Tony Stark has a heart” in a world that often accuses him of heartlessness. makes no attempt to push back against the judgment that Wade Wilson faces after he develops a skin condition, instead using his appearance as an impetus for the character to recuse himself from society and reject its norms.

Unfortunately, progress is not linear and some initially well-rounded portrayals of disability have been reduced to mere metaphor. In the 2000 X-Men film and its sequels X2 and

X-Men: The Last Stand, Professor X is an intelligent and competent character whose superpowers do not run directly counter to his paraplegia. He remains competent even when accepting his students’ assistance with navigating difficult terrain in X2 and subtly calls out a

Congressional meeting hall in the opening of X-Men for having poor accessibility for wheelchair users. However, prequels X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past revert to portraying disability as a metaphor when they cast Professor X’s paralysis as a physical manifestation of his fractured relationship with his former friend Magneto, and later as a burden he must assume in order to acquire his telekinetic superpowers.

This treatment of disability as a metaphor for characterization persists in superhero stories throughout Marvel adaptations. In the 2016 film Captain America: Civil War, superhero

War Machine incurs a permanent spinal injury resulting in paralysis while fighting on behalf of his best friend Iron Man. Later on, rival superhero places blame on Iron Man for having caused the fight when he declares “You gotta watch your back with this guy… there’s a chance he’s gonna break it.” In the 2014 prequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Nick removes his eye patch to uncover his blind left eye as he explains “if you want to stay ahead of me, Mr. Secretary, you need to keep both eyes open.” The Marvel films thus explicitly present disability as a metaphor for inner morality and characterization. War

Machine is not only physically disabled through his spinal injury, he is meant to be read as emotionally “disabled” by the damage to his social standing he has incurred through his friendship with Iron Man. is not only visually impaired, but portrayed as possessing additional secret “sight” because of his having concealed his blind left eye with an eye patch.

These and other portrayals use disability not as an identity or a social classification, but rather as a merely physical manifestation of qualities that otherwise would remain abstract qualities of the individual.

Other metaphorical uses of disability abound throughout Marvel movies and shows.

Thor: uses Thor’s partial blindness to connect him to his deceased father Odin, and in the process fails to examine the way that the loss of an eye could affect his fighting style or ability to pilot spaceships. The X-Men film series contains several characters with non- normative physicality, such as Hank McCoy who has unusually large hands and feet, or Scott

Summers who requires prosthetic sunglasses to prevent harm to himself and others, but most often examines these physical experiences solely as metaphorical manifestations of inner character struggles. In the most egregious cases of disability being only a metaphor, disability itself becomes a marker of moral judgment from higher powers, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Disability as Moral Judgment Several Marvel film and television adaptations directly connect disability to one’s morality through differentiating the outcomes for disabled heroes and disabled villains.

Generally it features disabled heroes who experience various “cures” for their disability that render their experience once again nondisabled, whereas villains are more likely to develop disability in the first place and then more likely to be killed once they are disabled. Nowhere is this dichotomy more explicit than in the Captain America film series.

In the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger, the wise Abraham Erskine tells future hero Steve Rogers that he will undergo a fantastical transformation, describing it thus: “The serum amplifies everything that is inside, so good becomes great; bad becomes worse.” The manifestations of “bad” and “good” are located within the body later on in the film itself. Steve Rogers, a virtuous and self-sacrificing defender of justice, undergoes a transformation that acts to “cure” his various disabilities. Whereas he was previously barred from enlisting in the Army because of asthma, arthritis, partial deafness, and a congenital heart defect, Rogers transforms into the physically “perfect” (i.e. nondisabled) Captain America after treatment with the serum. According to Erskine, this is because Rogers is “not a great soldier, but a good man.” However, when the wicked and homicidal Johann Schmidt is treated with precisely the same serum, he incurs a disability where none previously existed. The transformation renders him the physically deformed Red Skull, absent a nose and most of the skin on his face; the film explicitly states that this transformation has occurred because of the serum’s ability to amplify one’s moral character in one’s physical form. Thus, Captain America:

The First Avenger juxtaposes the morality of Captain America and Red Skull through casting

Captain America’s hypernormative physicality as proof of his moral superiority and Red Skull’s non-normative appearance as proof of his moral bankruptcy. This specific metaphor, of outward physical appearance reflecting inner morality, recurs to present direct contrast between heroes and villains. In the television show , both protagonist Jessica Jones and antagonist Alisa Jones are involved in the same car accident when their minivan crashes and they are dosed with phantasmagorical chemicals. Jessica Jones, the altruistic private detective, emerges unscarred and normatively attractive; notably, she retains the slender physique of normative femininity in spite of her enormous physical strength. Alisa

Jones, the impulsive and often-enraged serial killer, incurs extensive facial scarring from the same accident; she also loses all her hair and her appearance is thus rendered far less normatively feminine. Like Captain America and Red Skull, they have approximately the same superpowers, set apart only by the protagonist’s normative beauty and the antagonist’s lack thereof.

The same dichotomy occurs between hero and villain . In Captain

America: The Winter Soldier, both characters are narrowly rescued from the same collapsing building, but as of the sequel Captain America: Civil War, Falcon is as normatively beautiful as ever whereas Crossbones is extensively scarred. Reinforcing the negative stereotype of disabled individuals as seeking self-destruction, Crossbones self-immolates within minutes of appearing on-screen (Alaniz 98). This pattern continues to manifest throughout Marvel adaptations. Both protagonist Daredevil and the unnamed antagonists of Madame Gao’s empire become blind after chemical exposure; Daredevil retains an unscarred appearance while the evil minions have visible facial scarring (Daredevil 2015). After being caught in the same explosion, virtuous

Spider-Man escapes unscarred while villainous New Goblin develops facial scarring and blindness in his right eye (Spider-Man 3). Thus, Marvel adaptations invite the viewer time and again to judge individuals based on their appearances, and to assume that individuals who are less normatively beautiful are also less moral. Even when Marvel portrays heroic characters as disabled, it often does not fully embrace the disabled experience in its depictions.

Superpowered Supercrips: Hypernormative Disabled Heroes

Although analysts such as Alaniz have rightly praised Marvel for foregrounding so many disabled characters, it is important to note the ways that these portrayals fall short. Many depictions of disabled Marvel heroes fall into the curious space that Mitchell and Snyder describe wherein a protagonist’s disability is simply stated to exist, and then has an inexplicable lack of impact on the individual’s life any time it is not convenient for purposes of characterization or literary device (56). Sami Schalk expands the term “supercrip,” a colloquialism for a narrative wherein ableist media tout the abilities of a disabled individual with unusual skill levels, to include specifically the “superpowered supercrip” (74). Drawing on

Alaniz’s work, Schalk describes this type of supercrip as a character from speculative fiction whose superpowers operate in direct relationship to or direct contrast with the individual’s disability, thereby acting to remove the influence of disability on the character’s personal narrative (81).

Daredevil is perhaps the most notable superpowered supercrip in the Marvel canon. The heroic Matt Murdock becomes blind as a child when exposed to harmful chemicals, but trains himself to use his other senses to compensate for his lack of sight to the point where he is more skilled at spatial navigation than most sighted individuals by the time he becomes Daredevil

(Smith). Alaniz points out that Daredevil exists in a strange state of being whereby he functionally acts as a sighted person throughout his comic appearances, and yet also blind individuals through co-opting his prostheses — dark glasses and a collapsible cane — as the tools of his superheroism (69).

However, the lived experience of Daredevil is not that of a blind person; the comics, film adaptation, and television show all portray the character as navigating the world through senses comparable to sight. The 2003 Daredevil film perhaps comes the closest to portraying the complexities of navigating disability in an ableist world in that it shows Daredevil folding money to compensate for the lack of differentiation in American dollar bills and experiencing annoyance with noxious sounds and smells. However, it also portrays Daredevil as relying on his extra senses to use street corners without walk signals rather than pointing out the problems with the number of street corners lacking walk signals. The comics often overcompensate for

Daredevil’s disability through simply adding a new superpower to his repertoire any time blindness would otherwise change his lived experience, until eventually he can walk on a tightrope using his “radar sense,” read standard-printed newspapers through running his fingers over their surface, and detect colors by simply holding fabric in his hands (Smith 3). Thus,

Daredevil’s superpowers always act to ensure that his lived experience is that of a nondisabled person, setting his disability aside any time it is not convenient for the plot and localizing it within his body rather than calling upon society to change.

Perhaps the most excruciatingly self-aware moment in the Daredevil canon comes in the episode “Nelson v. Murdock,” when finds out that his best friend Matt

“Daredevil” Murdock has been fighting hordes of ninjas in the middle of the night. Angry at the deception Daredevil has been perpetrating, Foggy angrily demands “How many fingers am I holding up?” and Matt correctly answers “One.” It is, of course, Foggy’s middle finger. The

2015 Daredevil series proves willing to criticize the character of Matt Murdock for (among other deceptions) pretending to be unable to play pool to lure a love interest into helping him and acting helpless when confronted by law enforcement in order to use their stereotyping to cover for his illegal activities. However, it stops short of self-awareness that portraying a character as blind and yet not having the experience of a blind individual is itself problematic. It is unclear that the plot of Daredevil would be negatively impacted in any way if Daredevil genuinely could not play pool or navigate unfamiliar rooms without assistance, except in that portraying disability realistically would undercut the hypernormative narrative of Daredevil as a superpowered supercrip.

Once again, the motif of the superpowered supercrip is writ large throughout Marvel adaptations. Captain America’s sidekick loses his left arm in Captain America:

The First Avenger, and yet by the time he reappears in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he has already been equipped with a fantastical prosthetic that gives him even greater manual dexterity and physical strength than he had with his original arm. Heroic cop Misty Knight does have a few commendable scenes where she operates without the use of her amputated arm in

Luke Cage, albeit scenes that rely on the eugenicist principle of conveying competency through physical fighting prowess. Nevertheless, she receives a robotic prosthesis within very little story time of her original injury and once again acquires the normative experience of non-amputees through its powers. Her story closely parallels that of , who loses a hand but almost immediately acquires a prosthetic arm with fantastical abilities that prevent his experiences with disability from ever meaningfully impacting the plot or his identity (Agents of ).

These types of portrayals are specifically problematic in that, like all supercrip narratives, they suggest that disability can be “overcome” through willpower alone. As Schalk points out, implicit in these narratives are both the low expectations underpinning the assumption it is extraordinary for any disabled individual to engage in activities like raising a family or holding down a job, and also the high expectations that underpin the assumption any disabled individual can have a family or a job through willpower alone rather than the breaking down of barriers

(74). Like the system justification inherent in the “what is beautiful is good” bias, this type of narrative comfortably assures ableist society that the problem lies not in the many barriers standing between disabled individuals and full participation in society, but within the disabled individuals themselves. These narratives present a single blind individual able to play pool as implicit proof that all blind individuals should be able to play pool if they try hard enough, rather than calling for adaptations to pool tables that would make it easier for visually impaired users to play. However, even in the absence of compensatory superpowers, Marvel heroes will often

“overcome” disabilities through self-discipline alone.

“Overcoming” Disability: Glorified Supercrip Narratives

In addition to discussing the superpowered supercrip, Schalk’s analysis delineates the glorified supercrip. The glorified supercrip narrative portrays a disabled individual engaged in extraordinary feats such as climbing Mount Everest or winning an international chess competition, generally adopting condescending language which focuses on the effort exerted by the individual to employ personal characteristics such as determination and willpower toward personal success. These types of narratives often make mawkish appeals to common humanity that implicitly cast most disabled individuals as Other (e.g. not like the speaker or the assumed listener) through holding up a single individual who has achieved extraordinary feats of mental or physical prowess (Schalk 77). Most troublingly, these narratives once again cast disability as a personal failure through suggesting that anyone who cared enough to do so would be able to overcome all societal barriers against disabled individuals and go on to participate in the

Paralympics or win a Nobel Prize. Not only that, but Schalk points out that these narratives frequently overlook other privileges afforded to the disabled individuals—who are frequently wealthy, white, and male—that can account for their success as much as the “willpower” to

“overcome” their disabled status.

This type of glorified supercrip narrative drives much of the plot of Season 2 of the television series . In the episode “The Dragon Dies at Dawn,” protagonist Danny Rand breaks his leg during a fight; subsequent episodes portray medical professionals such as doctors and physical therapists assuring Danny that the injury is serious enough to be permanent.

However, Danny refuses physical therapy and drug therapy alike, insisting instead that he can train himself to regain all his extraordinary skill at martial arts through meditation and effortful exertion of will. The framing of this narrative arc makes much of Danny’s willpower, dwelling on long sequences where he pushes through exhaustion to continue training with his girlfriend and on individual moments of his ignoring pain to accomplish his goals. It thus localizes the success of this training — Danny does regain the ability to fight with swords and with his fists — within the character of Danny himself. In the process, this glorified supercrip narrative neglects much of the same intersectionality that all such narratives do. It fails to recognize that Danny

Rand, an extremely wealthy white man with a full-time romantic partner willing and able to act as caretaker, has privileges that most disabled individuals lack. In order to accomplish his goals,

Danny quits his job, rents a practice space in Manhattan, puts his romantic relationship on hold, hires a team to 3D-print him a custom knee brace, and devotes hundreds of hours to training over a handful of weeks. Iron Fist does not acknowledge that Danny’s “overcoming” is as much the story of his intersecting privileges as it is a story about his alleged willpower, failing to examine the ways that individuals who cannot self-train out of permanent injuries might not have the millions of dollars in disposable income that Danny’s strategy requires.

Furthermore, these glorified supercrip narratives derogate the very systems and prostheses that help actual disabled individuals navigate in reality. Not only does Iron Fist portray Danny as heroic and self-disciplined for refusing physical therapy, but the 2015

Daredevil adaptation specifically contrasts Daredevil’s ability to fight ninjas with other blind characters’ use of canes and assistants in a way that implies Daredevil is the only one with the alleged strength of character not to need navigational assistance. Jessica Jones alludes to the importance of mental health services when Jessica uses the cognitive-behavioral therapy tactic of reciting a soothing list to try and prevent a panic attack, but also shows professional counselors as being pitiful or incompetent while Jessica herself is portrayed as heroically suffering through self-medicating with alcohol. While the 2017 Punisher adaptation contains a sympathetic mental health professional who is himself disabled and not a supercrip, it also portrays counselor Curtis

Hoyle as ultimately unable to help either the heroes or the villains as they struggle with their violent urges. Agents of SHIELD, by contrast, simply portrays psychologist Andrew Garner as a murderous who uses his therapy appointments as an opportunity to manipulate his clients into evil. Consistently, Marvel adaptations present mental health services as useless at best and sinister at worst.

Perhaps the most egregious motif of valuing individual willpower over the support of others comes in Marvel’s consistently negative portrayal of support groups. Jessica Jones, the

2017 Punisher adaptation, , and Iron Fist have minor recurring roles for support groups, all of which are portrayed as ineffective. Jessica Jones shows up at a group meeting for survivors of mind control only long enough to mock its members as pathetic before setting out on her own, allegedly more heroic, path of violent revenge. Frank Castle does express a desire to attend the veterans’ support group seen in Punisher, but the show suggests that his desire might be misplaced, since the group meetings act as the setting for young veterans to become politically polarized and disillusioned. Luke Cage meets his wife during a prison support group, but she proves to be yet another evil mental health worker who exposes him to illegal human experimentation based on what she hears during group meetings. Iron Fist does hint that

Narcotics Anonymous might be useful for some attendees, but it also features a sponsor who unethically enters a problematic romantic relationship with her sponsee; the show eventually features protagonist Ward rejecting the group entirely to set out on an independent mission of addiction recovery.

Social psychologist Mikhail Lyubansky argues that this consistent portrayal of mental health professionals as incompetent serves a specific purpose within superhero stories (182).

After all, if mental health assistance is a valid alternative to murder or physical assault for individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorder ( Walker, Iron Fist), violent expressions of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Lewis Wilson, Punisher), or unspecified mental disabilities (, The Amazing Spider-Man 2), then the entire profession of superhero vigilantism is rendered invalid. Lyubansky suggests that mental health professionals must be portrayed as “immoral and corrupt” or else “emasculated and ridiculed for being unable to do their job” for superhero stories to function (181). The alternative would be acknowledging the potential for restorative justice and humanizing the villains of such stories to the point where the entire process of having a man in a cape beat strangers unconscious for acts of petty theft becomes downright morally questionable. Therefore, the superheroes cannot possibly rely upon the assistance of trained professionals, but must “overcome” disability alone, or else the entire narrative of moral pornography becomes nullified.

Disabled Villains: Disability as Embittering and Othering

Supercrip narratives, whether they feature superpowered supercrips or glorified supercrips, define many of the disability narratives throughout the Marvel movies and television shows. However, these narratives are consistently only available to the superheroes in Marvel adaptations; disabled , even within the same works, often receive very different treatment. Alaniz argues that the very introduction of disability into a narrative transgresses hypernormative societal definitions of embodiment, and that this transgression is often resolved at the expense of the individual character (135). This resolution usually comes about through the

“kill or cure” plotline: either the disabled character is “cured” through superpowers or other narrative prostheses that nullify the disability, or the character is simply killed off (Mitchell and

Snyder 18). Notably, the supercrip narratives are most often a form of “cure” in that they act directly counter to the character’s experience with disability. For the superpowered supercrip, the character’s superpowers prevent the existence of disabled experiences. For the glorified supercrip, the character’s willpower leads to excessive compensation for the disability and once again prevents its further expression.

However, when the disabled character is a villain rather than a hero, the character is usually killed rather than cured. These characters are also usually portrayed as embittered outsiders who seek to destroy the nondisabled world, a specific stereotype that Alaniz describes as creating a villain “possessed of traits straight out of the ableist’s worst nightmare: malformed, malevolent, mighty” (57). The Amazing Spider-Man series portrays most of its villains as this type of disabled character. The has a chronic illness that causes him to destroy the lives of the people around him, including his son, in an effort to avoid death, and eventually leads him to kill one of his own caretakers. Electro has a mental disability that initially shuts him from ableist aspects of society, but he eventually responds through trying to destroy the entire city of New York in response. Dr. Curt Connors is portrayed as so greedy for his frustrations with missing an arm that he is eventually punished through transformation into supervillain The . The films in each case portray the character through the lens of the disability, focusing on the ways that these disabilities make the characters frightening and

“other” rather than nullifying the disabilities the way that they do with heroic Peter Parker, who acquires superpowers and immediately stops needing to wear glasses.

Thus, the Marvel adaptations continuously equate specifically the disabled experience and the expression of disability with villainy. Daredevil has a daily experience that in practice parallels that of nondisabled more so than disabled individuals; his antagonist Madame Gao has a mobility impairment that affects her daily experience far more than his blindness does

(Daredevil 2015). Similarly, Ant-Man and the portrays as villainous to the extent that she is embittered by her experience with chronic pain; the moment she is magically cured by

Pym particles, she becomes a sympathetic character who helps the heroes evade law enforcement. Both Punisher: War Zone and the 2017 Punisher series portray villain Jigsaw as punished for his vanity through facial scarring, and then embittered by the change in appearance to the point of actively seeking to kill in revenge. In , villain Aldrich

Killian invents a compound known as that cures his disability but also later brings about his death; once again, the narrative allows heroes Tony Stark and to use

Extremis as a cure without portraying their punishment or eventual immolation. These narratives continue to localize disability within the individual and to show disability as a reflection of inner morality, only now they also invite the othering of the disabled characters in the process.

While the portrayal of Professor X in X2 remains commendably well-rounded, that film also contains another wheelchair-using character, Jason Stryker, whose villainous role recasts his disability. Rather than showing Jason as a competent and also disabled individual, X2 strips him of all agency through using him as merely a living plot device whose presence manipulates his father’s and Professor X’s plotlines. Jason’s onscreen appearances emphasize the medical nature of his disability through continuously focusing on his wheelchair and breathing apparatus at the expense of showing his face, and his emotional expression and verbal lines are all portrayed onscreen through the use of a normatively pretty nondisabled avatar. Eventually, Jason dies when the same heroes that rescued Professor X from a collapsing building choose to leave Jason to his fate; he cannot be cured, and thus the narrative kills him off. Jason may be an antagonist, but he is one notably lacking in agency. In fact, like many disabled characters in Marvel adaptations, Jason also acts as a plot device more so than a fully developed character.

Disabled Characters as Props

Of course, not all characters within any movie can possibly be well-rounded and agentic.

This lack of development for minor characters only becomes problematic to the extent that it reduces certain characters to nothing more than stereotypes rather than allowing them to have demographic characteristics in addition to their minor roles. The consistent casting of disabled characters as unagentic is specifically problematic in light of the stereotype that disabled individuals are helpless and of the society-wide dehumanization of disabled individuals that actively prevents their expression of agency (Alaniz 8). Although Jason Stryker in X2 is one of the most notable instances of a disabled character being used as a prop rather than a character for the striking absence of any agency — he literally speaks other characters’ words, first his father’s and then Magneto’s, uttering only two lines of his own in nearly 10 minutes of screen time — he is one of several disabled characters given similar treatment by Marvel adaptations. In Iron Man 3, villain Aldrich Killian experiments on several dozen disabled veterans in the process of developing the Extremis compound; their only role in the film itself is to die one after another in ways that drive the plot forward. The Amazing

Spider-Man contains a similar plot device wherein The Lizard attempts to dose several disabled veterans with an illegal chemical without their consent, and does not even show any of the individuals on screen. In both of these cases, the audience is invited to feel pity and fear for the disabled characters, reinforcing the assumption that disabled individuals are deserving of these emotions.

Arguably more problematic still is Guardians of the Galaxy’s mockery of its only known disabled character. The film contains an extended joke where the audience is invited to laugh along with the protagonists as they barter for minor character’s prosthetic leg simply for the sake of depriving him of said leg; at no point does the film offer any individuating information about the character outside of the prosthetic, nor does it condemn the heroes’ actions. This motif of protagonist Rocket hoarding unneeded prostheses returns in Avengers: War when he first offers up the cybernetic eye that renders Thor a supercrip with an explanation about having stolen it in revenge, and later attempts to purchase Bucky Barnes’s prosthetic arm simply for the sake of owning it himself. In neither case does the film condemn these actions, outside of the brief look of disgust that Bucky directs at Rocket after hearing his offer. The implied message here, that disabled characters exist to be gazed upon — and mocked — by Rocket and an assumed nondisabled audience, momentarily acts to objectify even a relatively complex character such as Bucky.

Even some of the one-dimensional disabled characters suffer from the “kill or cure” fate in their spare moments of screen time. In , paraplegic Jonathan Pangborn suffers both fates in his only two appearances: during the film itself he is on-screen only long enough to begin walking again due to the mystical “cure” offered by the magic of alternate dimensions, and in the post-credits scene he reappears only to be immediately killed off by villain Mordo. In the first season of Daredevil 2015, Madame Gao’s blind workers also exist largely as set dressing for her heroin production plant until several of them are summarily killed off in a fire. These characters have no identity outside of their disabilities, and thus the disabilities become the sum total of the characters.

Disability Narratives and Narrative Persuasion

Marvel films and television shows, like the comics that inspired them, imagine the fantastical and the impossible. These are stories in which the dead rise, gods walk the earth, humans , and sorcerers travel back in time. Why then does it matter that they also imagine impossibly effective prostheses and disability-nullifying superpowers, given that their viewers all know that such stories are fictional?

Social psychologists studying the impact of stories have overwhelmingly found that individuals in the derive their stereotypes as much from fictional media as from human interaction, if not more so. Melanie Green and Timothy Brock gave a group of participants either a story which contained a stereotypical depiction of a schizophrenic man as dangerously violent, or a story which contained no direct mention of schizophrenia (704). Participants who read the story with the negative stereotypes about schizophrenia rated mentally disabled individuals as more dangerous, and supported involuntarily institutionalizing those individuals more, than participants who read the story unrelated to schizophrenia. Muniba

Saleem and Craig Anderson found that participants who had just played a version of Call of Duty with negative depictions of Arabic characters were far more likely to respond to the prompt

“draw an Arabic person” through drawing violent men with terrorist-like characteristics than participants who played a version of Call of Duty that did not feature the stereotype of Arabs as terrorists (87). Fictional works including the show Twenty-Four, the novel State of Fear, and the show Orange is the New Black have all been used to support arguments during Congressional and presidential debates (Vaughn, Childs, Maschinski, Nino, and Ellsworth 1181; Leggett, 2005;

Bradner and Jaffe, 2015). Much of what contemporary Americans know and think they know has been learned from mass media such as television.

Journalist Manohla Dargis may have said it best: “movies get into our bodies, making us howl and weep, while their narratives and visual patterns, their ideas and ideologies leave their imprint.” Not only do immediate portrayals of stereotypes reinforce these stereotypical beliefs, but they build up over time. If disabled individuals are only shown as virtuous overcomers or embittered villains, then the harmful stereotypes that bar disabled individuals from participating fully in society through failing to provide access will continue to gain new life. Even superhero stories, with all their and glamor, have the potential to be more than moral pornography.

Marvel comics can and do grapple with disturbing questions of morality and personal identity, and Marvel adaptations are already beginning to do the same with films such as Logan and Black

Panther. Marvel must do better in coming films and shows. It must cast disabled actors to play disabled characters, allow disabled characters to have narratives not defined by disability, and break the stereotype of physical beauty as indicating inner goodness. It can look to within its own cast of characters, such as the nuanced portrayal of blind love interest Alicia

Masters in the 2005 film and the narrative of Doctor Strange’s eponymous protagonist adjusting to disability through learning to embrace non-physical talents. It can continue the work of films such as Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War that portray Bucky

Barnes as highly competent even without his fantastical prosthetic, shows such as that give complex agency to disabled protagonist while resisting and even interrogating the supercrip narrative, and films such as Iron Man 3 and Spider-Man:

Homecoming that incorporate Tony Stark’s anxiety disorder into the narrative without attempting to cure it or to kill the character off. The groundwork has already been laid for characters such as Misty Knight and Matt Murdock to become positive disability icons. Marvel only needs to embrace these characters’ disabilities in order to transform these narratives beyond the stereotypes they currently enforce, and to start breaking those stereotypes down.

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