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The White Space of the Metropolitan Battlefield in the Avengers." Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City

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The White Space of the Metropolitan Battlefield in the Avengers. Höglund, Johan. "The White Space of the Metropolitan Battlefield in The Avengers." Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City. Ed. Stefan L. Brandt and Michael Fuchs. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2018. 65-88. ISBN 978-3-643-50797-6 (pb). THE WHITE SPACE OF THE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN THE AVENGERS JOHAN HOGLUND One of the most popular tropes in Hollywood alien invasion films of the past fifteen years is the spectacular demolition of large and preferably North American cities by alien forces.War of the Worlds (2005), Cloverfield (2008), Battle Los Angeles (2011), Bat­ tleship (2012), the Transformersseries (2007-2014), Godzilla (2014), Man of Steel (2013), The Avengers movies (2012; 2015), and Inde­ pendence Day: Resurgence (2016) are some of the more prolificex­ amples. This destruction of urban territory is not exactly a new trend. Large cities have been sites of alien invasion ever since the Martians wreaked havoc on the streets of London in H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1897), and invasion narratives were also relatively common in American drive-in cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet these recent movies redefine the genre because of advances in digital visual effects that make it possible to portray global warfare and the crumbling of iconic buildings with remarkable realism. This realism not only emblematizes contemporary invasion cinema's turning away from the acci­ dentally or intentionally comical effectsof earlier invasion mov­ ies, but it also enables the use of a visual grammar reminiscent of the events of September 11, 2001 and the televised invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. From this perspective, the socio-historical context of these post-9/11 movies connects with the many anx­ ieties that have haunted American society and U.S. war efforts since the events of 9/ll.1 66 JOHAN HOGLUND Accordingly, my chapter will first argue that the destruction and defense of metropolitan spaces in the alien invasion filmis intimately related to post-9/11 geopolitical concerns. However, my chapter's main focus will be on the racial and sexual imag­ eries that direct and help fuelthese concerns. With this in mind, my contribution to this volume will consider how The Avengers, the commercially most successfulof these movies, creates urban spaces in which ritualized performancesof idealized white mas­ culinity occur in front of a dual audience, one existing within the film itself and one outside of it. The essay will thus suggest that these invaded and bravely defended metropolitan territo­ ries constitute white spaces in the sense that they are sites where a particular conception of whiteness is produced through the spectacular performance of violence. WHITENESS AND WHITE SPACE In White (1997), Richard Dyer observes that whiteness is not a skin color but rather an imagery that organizes the modern world. Race in itself, the skin that covers our bodies, refers only to "some intrinsically in ignificant geographical/physical differ­ ences between people" and is thus not "in play" in this organiza­ tion (1). Instead, it is the construction of racial categories that help determine social, economic, political, and international rela­ tions, including "at what cost regions and countries export their goods, whose voices are listened to at international gatherings, who bombs and who is bombed, who gets what jobs, housing, access to health care and education, what cultural activities are subsidised and sold" (I). Building on Edward Said's foundation­ al work in Orienta/ism (1978) and Toni Morrison's continuation thereof in Playing in the Dark (1992), Dyer describes whiteness as a social and massively privileging category. Whiteness is produced in many different discourses, includ­ ing the practice of law, medical writing, sociology, and ethnol­ ogy. As such, the construction of whiteness, and the conferring of whiteness to certain bodies, is also tied to the discursive for­ mation and understanding of space. As Henri Lefebvre ha ob­ served, space is both produced in society and capable of con­ structing political, social, sexual, and racial identities. Whiteness THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN THEAVENGERS 67 is certainly one such identity and certain spaces are perceived as more white than others, as they privilege whiteness in various ways. In the Southern States of the United States and in South Africa, forexample, physical spaces such as train compartments, restaurants, parks, and schools were fiercely stratified until the latter half of the twentieth century. This cultural practice con­ ferred certain privileges (and thus generated cultural meanings) onto the bodies of those that were allowed to enter. While space is less obviously stratified in the West today, racial privilege is still mediated and created through spatial configurations. Still today, spaces such as museums and airports function differently, depending on whether a visitor is black or white. Indeed, people considered white are privileged in these spaces by being made to feel at home or by not being harassed (see Venugopal; Hart et al.). While actual, geographical, and political places and institu­ tions help produce whiteness through ritualized inclusion and exclusion, imagined white spaces are also discursively construct­ ed in literature, film, and other media. One of the most import­ ant sites where whiteness becomes powerfullyvisible and, at the same time, powerfully defined, is cinema. In Performing White­ ness: PostmodernRe/Constructions in the Cinema (2003), Gwendolyn Audrey Foster claims that the performance of whiteness may be viewed as a sort of cultural, repetitive stress disease, a place where we can re­ turn to the repressed, the disordered, and the destabilized; whether that be whiteness, class, or compulsory heterosexuality, the cinema is a factoryof identity performances. It is the garment center of white fabrication. (2) In other words, cinema furnishes spaces in which particular formsof whiteness are produced through performance. This no­ tion relies on Judith Butler's influential observation that gender is not an essence but something individuals do; a practice con­ sisting of certain speech acts and other forms of ritualized be­ havior. Likewise, race must not be understood as an essence that resides in the body, but rather a quality achieved through per­ formance. As Nadine Ehlers argues in Racial Imperatives (2012), "all racial subjects can be said to execute a kind of performative racial passing" (3). 68 JOHAN HOGLUND Again, whiteness is not a skin color, but an institutionalized privilege granted to those who can successfully claim member­ ship in this category. Having white skin automatically constitutes such a claim, but whiteness is increasingly tied to strategic and ritualized behaviors and performances. These performances take place in everyday life, but are also, as Foster has demon­ strated, central to cinema. Thus, Hollywood cinema often re­ volves around ritualized (and oftenstereotypical) performances of both blackness and whiteness. An often discussed example of how blackness is constructed in early cinema is The Jazz Singer (1927) in which white actor Al Johnson, his face blackened into a grotesque caricature of the non-white visage, performs blackness as a form of preposter­ ous entertaining servitude, thereby making the phenomenon of "black minstrelsy [safe] within white cinematic space" (Foster 47). In this case, it is easy to see that blackness is produced through performance. The actions of white Hollywood stars are similar­ ly performative. However, these performances of whiteness are naturalized and, thus, made invisible. In order to make these invisible performances visible, Foster introduces a concept she terms the 'space of whiteface'. She regards this whiteface as a space where representation that demands class-passing, class othering, giving up ethnic identity to become white, and insists that the human race, especially in America, is white. In short, most mo­ tion pictures are spaces of whiteface. Whiteface is about space own­ ership and identity claims. (51) ln this way, Foster argues, most motion pictures produced by Hollywood are spaces of whiteface, and these pictures seek to acquire ownership of space by removing other racial categories fromthe narrative. This understanding of the containment or erasure of black­ ness in Hollywood cinema is a starting point for this article. Building on this notion, I want to suggest that white space is not merely a backdrop to the performance of whiteness, but rather a specific, imaginary, and highly transformative stage that makes the performances of equally specific and imaginary forms of whiteness possible. Thus, there are many different,yet intimate­ ly related, white spaces in cinema, and these white spaces afford THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN THEAVENGERS 69 different performances of whiteness. For instance, the frontier geography as constructed in the Western novel and film is such a white space. Without this specific imaginary space with its vast wildernesses, its frontier settlements, and its unruly Mexi­ can bandits and Indians, the pe1formance of moral violence as an exclusively white practice would not be possible.2 Places as different as the American middle-class home and the New York shopping arcade are also white spaces that facilitate the re-en­ actment of different forms of idealized whiteness. These white spaces are territories that enable particular formsof whiteness to be performed. These performances make visible a certain form of idealized whiteness, so that this whiteness can be internalized by the audience, and then re-enacted in the real world. The notion of white space as a stage where whiteness is per­ formed makes it possible to describe many Hollywood films as revolving around what may be termed spectacles of whiteness. There is a striking similarity between this racialized spectacle and what Amy Kaplan has termed the 'spectacle of masculini­ ty' in her study of popular American historical romances of the 1890s. As Kaplan shows in her article "Romancing the Em­ pire" (1990), an integral part of this romance was the violent engagement by a white protagonist with a native other before a white, female gaze.
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