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. This engagement, Kaplan argues, engineers "defeat of the native insurgent by effacing his contesting agen­ cy" (675). In alien invasion movies, the confrontation between idealized white masculinity with both a displaced native insur­ gency and a form of failed whiteness are likewise turned into spectacles before an admiring audience. In fact, in many cases, two audiences observe this spectacle. The first audience exists within the imaginary space. This audience is composed of the intradiegetic characters within the filmthat observe and approve or disapprove of the performance. The second audience exists outside the film and consists of the people watching the action in the theater or in front of the television, computer, tablet, or smartphone. In many cases, the intradiegetic audience functions as a model for the film viewers and encourages, successfully or not, the extradiegetic audience to also approve (or disapprove) of the main characters' performances. Such approval, if it is grant­ ed, legitimizes the performance of whiteness on the screen. 70 jOl·IAN HOGLUND THE POST-9/11 SUPERHERO ANO WHITE MASCULINE CRISIS In The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure Amer­ ica (2007),3 Susan Faludi describes the way U.S. media under­ stood the 9/11 terror attacks as an attack on U.S. masculinity and virility. To many commentators, Faludi argues, the collapse of the Twin Towers was an indictment of U.S. masculinity, even a form of proof that the metrosexual urbanite who now roamed the U.S. streets (instead of the cowboy) was unable to protect the ontological, epistemological, and territorial boundaries of the U.S. As one commentator put it, Ground Zero appeared as "a large smoldering vagina, the true symbol of the American cul­ ture" (manaction.net qtd. in Faludi 12). The attack thus seemed the final collapse of a masculinity that had been perceived as suffering a crisis at least since the 1960s. Eroded by feminism, pacifism, environmentalism, the gay movement, and multicul­ turalism, US masculinity no longer served to protect the borders of the nation against virile foreign aggression. The obvious reaction immediately after9 /11 to this perceived acute crisis was, Faludi argues, a return to a traditional type of masculinity, especially as manifested in the 1950s Western. While the Western certainlyseeks to discipline gender, it is just as con­ cerned with notions of whiteness. To rally around the televised image of John Wayne rescuing white maidens from the Indians was not only to seek the restoration of a lost masculinity, but also of a supposedly vanished and aggressive whiteness. Wayne's cinematic authority, his location in often morally unambiguous frontier territories, and his great and assuring propensity for moral violence allowed fora decidedly nostalgic resurrection of the white male. However, when the dust settled on the streets of New York and the US embarked on its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it was not to the Western that Hollywood and its audience turned for stories about the resurrection of whiteness. Instead, white masculinity was explored and recuperated firstin (historical) war filmssuch as Black HawkDown (2001) and We WereSoldiers (2002). Here, white, Anglo males fight native insurgents and conquer against all odds. To use Foster's terminology, these movies take place in spaces of whiteface. In the moment of national crisis, they help bring whiteness to the foreand insi t that to be Amer- THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN Tl-IEAVENGERS 71 ican is to be white, and that to be white is to practice massive, moral violence. While these war movies managed to restore faith in white masculinity (and perhaps also encourage enthusiasm for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq), this faith and enthusiasm suffered a setback in mid-2004 when images of torture in the U.S.-controlled section of the Abu Ghraib prison were released. By 2006, when it was widely recognized that the invasion had been conducted on false grounds, when the civilian death toll in Iraq steadily increased, and when the costs of the continued war and occupation effort made funding increasingly difficult, the war reached what novelist Justin Cronin has described as a "crescendo of gore and confusion" (Owens n.p.). Accordingly, the finalyears of the firstdecade of the new mil­ lennium were an era characterized by several crucial failures: the failure to protect white America from global terrorism, the (in­ evitable) failure to conduct an ethical invasion and occupation of the Middle East, and the failure to preserve white economic privilege as the war effort helped cause the collapse of the U.S. economy in late 2007. The crisis that these failures produced concerned not only the notion of American national identity, but more directly and importantly the dominant notions of race and gender upon which this identity is partially founded. As a consequence, the final years of the George W. Bush presidency witnessed a disturbance of the constituent myth of whiteness on which American national identity partially rests. Donald Rums­ feld, who had to resign in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, was one of many powerful politicians who failed to live up to the moral standards imagined as somehow endemic to white­ ness. While the Taliban were likened to Nazis shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration were tied to fascism and Nazism (see Rich) as well as practices of imperialism and colo­ nialism in a series of critical historical and sociological texts (see Chomsky; Johnson; Harvey). If the failure to protect the U.S. against terrorist aggression was a miscarriage of masculinity, the attempt to restore this masculinity by invading Iraq constituted a different, and perhaps even more problematic, failure of white­ ness. A number of movies that appeared after 2006 furtively ad­ dressed, and oftentried to rehabilitate, this whiteness. While the 72 JOHAN HOGLUND morally unambiguous picture of white America-and of white American warfare, which had been communicated so effectively by the Western and the historical war movie-was problematized in some post-Iraq war superhero movies such as Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (2005-2012), most filmsbelonging to the genre seemed intent on restoring whiteness. The Marvel movies produced at the time do contain failed white characters, but ul­ timately, they tell stories about how whiteness is restored to its formerglory. Tellingly, these filmswere even more successful at the box officethan Nolan's Batman series, with The Avengers and The Avengers:Age of Ultron occupying the fifthand seventh spots on the list of the movies that have generated the highest revenue in the history of cinema worldwide as of August 2016.4 Masculinity is a crucial category in the superhero genre, but race is arguably even more central. While most superheroes are certainly male, there are a number of important female char­ acters and, unlike the historical war film, women do feature on the battlefieldsof superhero narratives. For example, The Aveng­ ers includes the former superspy assassin Black Widow (Scar­ lettjohansson) in a central role. Black Widow has an interesting personal history going back to her early childhood in the Soviet Union. This backstory is told through flashbacks in Age Ultron,of which portray her early lifeunder a cruel and totalitarian regime that trains her into a ruthless killer. The violence she performs as a child in the Communist USSR lacks the moral center that grants access to true, regenerated and regenerative whiteness. In this way, Natasha's early national and cultural identity manifests as a trauma. Transferred to the US and recruited by the govern­ ment organization S.H.I.E.L.D.,5 she remains secretive and un­ reliable, but appears to have found the moral center that fully realizes her whiteness. While S.H.I.E.L.D. is sometimes driven by dubious motives, the violence Natasha practices as an Avenger is morally righteous. Since she is a central member of the Aveng­ ers, masculinity is not, I would argue, the group's most import­ ant definingtrait. Rather, the category under which all characters may be subsumed is whiteness.6 The significance of whiteness to the superhero narrative has received some critical attention. In Enter the Superheroes (2013), A.lex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci observe that the super­ hero comic book has always shunned both gender and racial di- THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN THE AVENGERS 73 versity (133-140), an idea echoed in Marco DiPaolo's book War Politics and Superheroes (2015; see p. 238, in particular). As Jef­ frey Brown points out in his essay "Superdad: Luke Cage and the Heroic Fatherhood Ideal in the Contemporary Marvel Uni­ verse" (2015), the "default figure of American masculinity has always been assumed to be a white male: Davy Crockett, John Wayne, Rambo, Superman" (131). While black and (highly sex­ ualized) female superheroes appeared in the 1960s, the super­ hero narrative again turned increasingly white after 9/11. In the words of Brown: "With the exception of Hancock (2008), all of the post-9/11 feature film superheroes have been white males. The predominant whiteness of these characters reflects a consistent bias within the genre over the years, and in American cultural concerns more generally" (131).7 The Avengersbuilds on this foun­ dation to the extent that it can be argued that what is 'avenged' in this movie is whiteness.

THEAVENGERS AND WHITE SPACE TheAvengers brings together a host of characters familiar to the readers of Marvel comic books. While many of the heroes that make up this group first appeared in the mid-twentieth century, they are still popular today. In fact, three of the Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor) have active film franchises of their own. The first installments of these reboot franchises tell strikingly similar origin stories of these superheroes. To connect with the sense of crisis that marked the post-Iraq invasion era, these superhero narratives describe an initially failed, but ulti­ mately restored, whiteness. In Iron Man (2008), Iron Man's civil­ ian identity Tony Stark fails morally by manufacturingand sell­ ing weapons to warlords and terrorists. Similarly, in Thor (2011), Nordic god Thor arrogantly provokes an unnecessary and cost­ ly war with a species called the Frost Giants. Finally, in Captain America: The First Avenger (20ll), the eponymous hero initially fails to assume his role as moral champion of the U.S. in its con­ frontationwith the renegade Nazi cult HYDRA. While the Nazis are a formally white organization (and, in­ deed, may be considered champions of whiteness), in popular culture they are frequently understood as worshipping 'dark- 74 JOHAN HOGLUND ness'. Since Nazi violence is portrayed as profoundly immoral, Nazis embody a perverted form of whiteness that has morally failed beyond reckoning. In many popular culture narratives about the Nazis, they are not even truly white. This phenome­ non is perfectly illustrated by Captain America: The First Avenger, for the head of HYDRA, Johann Schmidt, takes the serum that has given super powers to Captain America. This serum is said to augment the powers of the individual, and it transforms the moral and righteous white Steve Rogers into bulging mass of white muscle and power. By contrast, the same serum reveals Schmidt's inner nature as non-white by turning his body bright red, earning him the nickname Red Skull. In this way, popular culture tends to depict the Nazis as representatives of a false, rather than failed, whiteness. Unlike the whiteness Rogers pos­ sesses, Schmidt's whiteness is only skin-deep. Underneath the veneer of whiteness, a non-white subject resides. To return to the three superhero franchises, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America initially performa flawed whiteness. How­ ever, this is not a false whiteness because it can be restored when the white heroes realize their true destinies as moral champi­ ons of the world. Thus, the opening sequences of these filmsfirst show whiteness performed as a parody or a tragedy (or whiteness is not performed at all). The violence Iron Man/Tony Stark un­ leashes and Thor practices initially causes ruin and death, even forthe heroes themselves. Similarly, Captain America, placed in the presumably morally unambiguous conflict of World War II, initially fails to perform moral violence. I stress the 'initially' here because first he lacks the physical strength and once he has taken the serum, he avoids the battlefield. To be sure, effective stories require the initial downfallof the hero so that he can rise by overcoming his own shortcomings and surmounting external adversity. However, these particular failures recall recent U.S. history so strongly that it is difficult to read them as simply the development of heroic characters. Indeed, Iron Man is partly set in the Middle East. In addition, the movie explicitly and extensively comments on terrorism and its relation to the military-industrial complex and U.S. security concerns. Similarly, Thor' invasion of the land of the Frost Gi­ ants is rash and based on false evidence planted by an internal enemy of the semi-divine Asgard state he inhabits. In a post- THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN Tl-IEAVENGERS 75

9/11 and post-Iraq U.S., these narratives speak to a palpable sense of failure where the violence wielded by the white, male agent lacks a moral center. Accordingly, white power produces inse­ curity rather than security. The white male protagonists of these movies thus experience, on an individual level, a similar crisis in whiteness that the entire American nation felt at the end of the firstdecade of the twenty-first century. It is against this crisis of whiteness that The Avengers is most effectively read, for TheAvengers ultimately tells the story of the nostalgic restoration of whiteness. The superheroes who per­ formmoral violence which aids this restoration are all white, but there are non-white characters that assist in this development. Indeed, one of the most central characters in TheAvengers is S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury. A white character in the comics, Fury is played by the African-American actor Samuel L. Jackson in the Marvel reboots. This transformation does not interfere with the film'sattempt to recuperate whiteness, however. Despite organizing the Avengers, Fury is not a superhero or an agent of moral violence. Rather, he is one of many who recognize the need to restore whiteness and who, despite his black skin, works hard to bring about this restoration. TheAvengers tells the story of a tremendously powerful object termed the Tesseract, which is stolen from a S.H.I.E.L.D. research facility. The thief is the Nordic demigod/supervillain Loki, who works on behalf of an extraterrestrial species, the Chitauri. In exchange forthe Tesseract, the Chitauri will furnishan army that will allow Loki to conquer and enslave humanity. To counter this sudden and terrible threat, Fury brings the Avengers together. They begin looking for Loki and the Tesseract, and attempt to thwart the Chitauri's invasion plans. The encounters between the Avengers and the villains take the form of two spectacular confrontations set in urban battle­ fields.It is in these urban spaces that the narrative of whitefaceis most effectivelyacted out. In the film, the Avengers firstencoun­ ter Loki, and later Loki and the Chitauri in two differentmetro­ politan spaces, firstin Germany and then the streets of New York. Loki and the Chitauri become the obstacle the Avengers must vanquish, but they represent two slightly differententities. Even though Loki is an adopted Asgardian, the son of the alien race of the Frost Giants, he appears to be white. By contrast, the Chitau- 76 JOHAN HOGLUND ri are decidedly non-white and fulfill the same challenge as the Indians in the Manichean Western film, or the Somali in Black Hawk Down. The Chitauri are a soldier breed addicted to war, they have dark skin, are aggressive and powerful, communicate only in grunts, and although they are in possession of advanced technology, there is something strangely primitive about their appearance and way of warfare. They ride flying chariots into battle, they revel in hand-to-hand combat, and their weapons look like spears.9 The Avengers must thus publicly conquer both the failed or false whiteness that Loki represents and the alien, native, and non-white challenge that the Chitauri pose. As I will show, the (public) spaces that the film furnishes are designed around these dual challenges. The first confrontation between Loki and the Avengers is a gala event at the Stuttgart Museum. 10 A glamorous and predom­ inantly white audience has gathered around a grand and ancient statue while a string quartet plays Franz Schubert. The placement of the white crowd in (and close to) the museum is important. As David R. Roediger has noted, museums are protected and pro­ tective white spaces." The sophisticated string music, the long dresses, the champagne, the ancient artifacts, and the religious altars that the context transforms into art all signal whiteness as culture, history, modernity, and privilege. When Loki enters in the same elegant type of outfit as everybody else, only his swag­ ger separates him from the rest of the crowd. Thus, his sudden eruption into bloody violence is utterly disturbing. The direc­ tor of this gala evening is thrown onto the main exhibition item and his retina is forcibly copied with what the shooting script describes as an "optical torture device." Once the white space of the museum has been made unsafe by Loki's presence, the shocked crowd runs outside into another type of white space: the public square. As Alan Nadel has argued, public space itself may be considered 'white,' for the space is in­ formed and structured by a whiteness that, although unspoken, still regulates who can enter this space and what they can do there. Loki commands this white space just like he commanded the museum space, forcing everyone to kneel beforehim, asking the cowed crowd loudly and gleefully if this is not their natural state, if it is not true that humanity craves subjugation. As he rev­ els in his sudden power, an old white man stands up defiantly THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN THEAVENGERS 77 and explains in broken English that he will not kneel beforemen like Loki. The old man's defiance and his advanced age mark him as a holocaust survivor. This scene aligns Loki with fascismand Nazism, and thus with a false and violent whiteness that lacks the moral foundation that Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America eventually achieve in their films.12 As a false white male, the violence Loki exercis­ es throughout the film is immoral and destructive. Just like the HYDRAorganization, which keeps challenging the heroes of the Marvel Universe, his whiteness is only skin-deep. In fact, Loki is not of the race of gods that produced Thor, but the child of the alien people called Frost Giants. At times, Loki's true skin color shines through. This is an alien, bluish and strangely scarred or patterned visage, with eyes shining crimson like the skin of Red Skull. Thus, his apparent whiteness functions as a mask which camouflages a non-white body. To return to The Avengers and the Stuttgart scene, Loki is irritated by the old man's refusal to kneel down and aims his powerful scepter towards the rebellious individual. However, when the beam of light leaves the weapon, it strikes the shield of Captain America, who appears out of nowhere to protect the old man (see Illustration IV.I). Captain America furthercements the World War II context that informs this particular scene by saying, "You know, the last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing." Iron Man and Black Widow soon join Cap in the fightthat en­ sues, transformingthe German urban public space into a battle­ field. The spectacular violence is played out in front of the very crowd that was made to kneel before Loki just seconds before the American heroes arrived. They are now the audience of the performance of white masculinity that the fight acts out. Iron Man and Captain America manage to subdue Loki and thus al­ low the intradiegetic audience to get up from their kneeling po­ sitions. Standing up, they can observe, and thus bear testimony to, these white heroes' ability to set the white masculine record straight by confrontingand subduing, at least temporarily, Loki and the false whiteness he represents. The open and public space where the prelude to the violence, and then the violence itself, are acted out is crucial here. It is this populated public space that makes the theatricality that charac- 78 j OIIAN HOGLUND

Illustration IV.1: A large crowd witnesses the Avengers' heroic deeds in Stuttgart Screenshot taken from The AvengersBlu-ray © Marvel,2012. terizes the performance of whiteness in this movie possible. In TheAvengers, this theatricality is overt. In front of the observ­ ing public, Loki and Captain America exchange as many witty one-liners as they do punches, and when Iron Man enters the stage, he does so to AC/DC's "Shoot to Thrill." Since the song comes out of the gunship Black Widow pilots, it becomes both a soundtrack forthe cinema audience watching the filmand stage music playing for the intradiegetic audience that marvel at the arrival of the white heroes.'3 The Stuttgart fightfunctions as a prelude to the finaland even more clearly staged Manhattan sequence that constitutes the movie's final showdown. This sequence forms the core of the movie and is triggered by the intradiegetic realization that New York is precisely a theatrical stage. Pondering the theatricality of the encounter set in Germany, Loki's apparent desire to perform his mastery beforean audience, Iron Man/Tony Starknotes that Loki "knows he has to take us out to win, right? That's what he wants. He wants to beat us and he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience" (my italics). "Yes," Captain America replies, "I caught his act in Stuttgart." This remark prompts the following analysis from Stark: "Yeah. That's just a preview, this is opening THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD I THE AVENGERS 79 night. Loki's a full-tilt diva. He wants flowers, he wants parades, he wants a monument built in the skies with his name plastered... sonofabitch!" The concluding profanity signals that Stark, cer­ tainly also a full-tiltdiva, has gathered that the opening night will take place around his own monument, the Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name. The important realization, now existing both intradiegetically and in the mind of the extradiegetic audience, is that Manhattan will be the stage forthe finalbattle. The Avengers quickly travel to New York only to discover that Loki has used the Tesseract to open a portal to the Chitau­ ri world. Tempestuous dark clouds gather over Manhattan and through the great, black rift that has opened up in the sky, mon­ strous humanoid creatures on strange vehicles stream down. Un­ mistakably masculine and with dark, scaly complexion, they let fire rain onto the urban territory that surrounds them; gigantic, insect-like, nightmarish beings wreak havoc in the streets. Like Stuttgart before, New York City transforms into a metropolitan battlefield. If the German scene allowed the Avengers to establish a form of moral genealogy by connecting the narrative to the US role in vanquishing Nazi Germany during World War II, the New York scene places the Avengers, and the whiteness they represent, in relation to two other historical and geographical spaces. In this long sequence, Manhattan is transformed from a modern me­ tropolis, a technological utopia as represented by Iron Man's self-sustaining Stark Tower, into a battlefield where a mostly white, wide-eyed population runs screaming from the streets and outdoor cafesinto the glass-walled interiors of the skyscrap­ ers to watch in awe as the Avengers vanquish the invaders. This city-turned-battlefield builds on two complementary imaginar­ ies: it references the frontier landscape of Western cinema and it cites the spectacular and televised trauma of 9/11 (see Illustra­ tion IV.2). The images of wounded, coughing, ash- and dirt-cov­ ered civilians, of police officers trying to establish order, of gi­ gantic beings colliding and collapsing skyscrapers, and people putting up hand-written notes asking for news about lost loved ones powerfullyrecall the events of 9/11 as disseminated by the media and popular culture. At the same time, the strangely obso­ lete vehicles of the invaders, partly flyingmotorcycles and part­ ly Roman chariots, their awkward ray guns, and their ferocious, 80 JOHAN HOGLUND

Illustration IV.2: The Avengerstaps into the visual repertoire of 9/11. Screenshots taken from TheAveng ersBlu-ray

Illustration IV.3: New Yorkers marvel at the Avengers' display of power in the metropolis. Screenshot taken from TheAvengersBlu-rayI Marvel, 2012. invaders. These invaders are initially led by the nee-fascist Loki, but he is eventually conquered and captured by the Avengers. This leaves a scene where the heroes can engage in supremely moral violence, in authoritative leadership as they give orders to civilians and the New York police, and in sudden and successful rescues of trapped and threatened civilians. In the battle's finale, Stark/Iron Man even attempts to sacrifice his own white body to save the wide-eyed urban population (see Illustration IV.3). This event positions The Avengers as a cross-generic sacrificial film as defined by Claire Sisco King in Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (2011). The sacrificialfilm revolves around the notion of national trauma and posits the "violent death of the victim-hero as the most significant indicators of such trau­ ma" (6). Thus, these films"imagine sacrificeas a regenerative and salvificritual aimed at healing perceived wounds both within the diegetic worlds of the filmsand within their cultural contexts" (6). In The Avengers, the perceived wound is arguably to whiteness as such, and Stark/Iron Man's sacrificial gesture the finalproof that whiteness has been restored. The moral violence performed by the heroes, and the com­ plementary willingness to sacrifice themselves, the film ulti­ mately suggests, is 'how you do whiteness.' Within this imagined, 82 jOHAN HOGLUND catastrophic yet comforting space, and only within this space, perfect whiteness can be performed perfectly. The intradiegetic audience, the people running from the violence, staring through office windows as the Avengers perform their heroic deeds, serves the dual purpose of observing and approving of this form of aggressive yet morally defensible violence. Their collective approval is voiced by a white waitress who features in a num­ ber of scenes and who speaks out when order has been restored: "Captain America saved my life.Wherever he is, wherever any of them are, I just wanna say, 'Thank you."' 14 The explicit expression of these sentiments presents a form of instruction directed at the extradiegetic audience watching the film's performance of whiteness in the movie theater. The approval of the intradiegetic audience encourages identification with this whiteness and assures them (and the extradiegetic au­ dience) that it can be relied upon. It is just as efficient, as wary of collateral damage, as supremely powerfuJ, and as remarkably altruistic as we could have ever hoped it would be. Here, at last, and perhaps also when we leave the theatre and the white space it depicts, we can forget about the blood and gore that white US ambition has actually brought about in the recent past. Both the alien threat and failed whiteness have been exorcised through the performative violence we have observed and been taught to applaud.

In 1997, Dyer wrote that we

may be on our way to genuine hybridity, multiplicity without (white) hegemony, and it may be where we wam to get to, but we aren't there yet, and we won't get there umil we see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and limitedness, put it in its place and end its rule. This is why studying whiteness matters. (4)

In the space of time that separates the late 1990s from the pres­ ent moment, scholars have continued to discuss and make vis­ ible the category of whiteness, but to little avail, it seems. The category of whiteness is possibly even more dominant and hege- THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN THE AVENGERS 83 monic in popular culture today than it was before the new mil­ lennium. 9/11, the catastrophic invasion of the Middle East, the civil war in Syria, the millions of migrants and refugees fleeing war, starvation and IS, terrorist actions in Europe and the Mid­ dle East, and, in the U.S., racially motivated violence between African Americans and the police and increased xenophobia in the wake of the 2016 Trump election campaign-these risks (and constructions of risks) have made whiteness even more central to a divided global society and further cemented its predomi­ nance as a(n invisible) cultural category. The turn toward nation­ alism apparent in many western nations often feeds offnotions of normative whiteness, and the construction of new walls and borders that the logic of whiteness legitimizes furtherreinforces the dominance of whiteness and white privilege. TheAvengers does not openly condone these racist epistemol­ ogies or the construction of borders between 'white' and 'black' categories. However, the film pretends that such categories are exclusive to twentieth-century fascism and it never recognizes its own interest in avenging whiteness. In fact, the Marvel reboot filmsjoin other popular culture texts in suggesting that the white fascist is not truly white at all. Rather, fascism appears as black­ ness masquerading as whiteness, a ruse that may mislead the white moral champion until he (and in the odd case she) finds his way again. In The Avengers,whiteness manifestson the screen in spectac­ ular fashion, as the metaphysical connection between whiteness and moral violence is restored. Simultaneously, this restoration insists that blackness can only exist as the Other of whiteness. This occurs through a formof misdirection repeatedly noted by scholars of whiteness. As Dyer has pointed out, "If the invisibility of whiteness colonizes the definitionof other norms-class, gen­ der, heterosexuality, nationality, and so on, it also masks white­ ness itself as a category" (46). Thus, identifiedas the self of (West­ ern) culture, whiteness is protected by a paradoxical invisibility that allows it to operate without being interrogated. By drawing on the tradition of whitefacecinema, The Avengers makes it diffi­ cult to imagine the U.S. as not emanating fromthe white mascu­ linity that seemingly radiates fromCaptain America's chest, clad in the blue, white, and red of the star-spangled banner. My point has been to emphasize how crucial the construe- 84 JOHAN HOGLUND tion of white spaces is to this process. The absurd, and absurdly moral, violence that is practiced by the white heroes becomes rational when acted out on the metropolitan battlefields of cit­ ies. Set within this space, the notion that to be white is precisely to perform moral violence becomes particularly infectious. The alien invasion film as exemplified by The Avengers is one of the more telling examples of this process. Its overt theatricality and its intradiegetic and admiring audience ultimately play into the color-coded societal stratificationthat is mobilized in Europe as well as in the U.S.A. It couches its ratification of such stratifica­ tion within a spectacular, fantastic, nostalgic, and often humor­ ous narrative of struggle, strength, and hope, but this struggle, this strength, and this hope revolve around a masculine white­ ness that never existed outside the imaginary, theatrical stage that Hollywood whiteface cinema constructs.

NOTES This development has earned a great deal of attention from popular culture scholars, including Aviva Briefel and Sam Miller's collection Horror after9/11: World ofFear, Cinema of Ter­ ror (2011), the collection Reframing 9111: Film, Popular Culture and the 'War on Terror' edited by Jeff Birkenstein and others (2010), and my own The American Imperial Gothic: Empire, Vio­ lence, Popular Culture (2014). 2 'Moral violence' refers to violence perceived to be socially co­ hesive. Thus, moral violence helps to preserve and stabilize the central societal structure of a particular narrative. 3 This book was also published as The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9111 America. 4 See http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/. 5 The letters in the acronym have referred to different words since S.H.l.E.L.D. saw the light of the day in 1965. In the cur­ rent, cinematic universe, it stands forStrategic Homeland In­ tervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. The whiteness of Bruce Banner/Hulk deserves a brief discus­ sion, as this composite character's whiteness is more ambigu­ ous than that of the other members of the Avengers. Clearly, THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEf!ELD IN THE AVENGERS 85

Banner is white and his deeply scientific mind is related to the Enlightenment tradition that has served as an engine of racial difference. In his Hulk form, this rationality disappears with his whiteness, replacing it with a hypermasculine, violent green bulk. In his Hulk form, this character is not white and in the early stages of the film, he turns on his white friends. His lack of control and the danger he poses to the team makes Banner leave the Avengers. However, before the film's final battle, he returns to join the battle against fascist Loki. This choice provides the Hulk with a modicum of rational thought, as he only battles Loki and the extra-terrestrial invasion force. Thus, even in his non-white form, Banner/Hulk ultimately serves the restoration of whiteness in the movie. It should be noted that Will Smitl1's impersonation of Han­ cock resists the white, male hero stereotype. Instead, Smith embodies the black male stereotype by being alcoholic, abu­ sive, and careless. In addition, I would like to point out that Captain America: Civil War (2016) allows the black superhero sidekicks more space than previous Marvel movies did. Final­ ly, it seems noteworthy that Disney has announced the first film focusing on a black superhero, Black Panther, for release in 2018. 8 A plethora of texts tie Nazism to 'dark forces'. In particular, the (oftensensationalist) fictionor non-fiction works that link Nazism with the occult make this connection, including Den­ nis Wheatley's They Used Dark Forces(1964) and Paul Rowland's The Nazisand the Occult: TheDark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich (2007). The Chitauri are dark-grey-skinned, humanoid, lizard-like creatures that seek to dominate the universe. Interestingly, the leader is named 'the Other'-signalling that he is indeed a repository of all things considered as the antithesis of the democratic, freedom-loving, morally righteous white West. In addition, the insistence that the Chitauri are a different species re-activates many of the eugenicist tropes on which nineteenth-century colonial discourses on whiteness rested. 10 This scene was actually filmedin Cleveland, Ohio, like most of the film: http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/Aveng­ ers_2012.html. 11 Tellingly, previous first lady Michelle Obama has voiced the same concern: http://www.wnyc.org/story/museums-white- 86 JOHAN HOGLUND

spaces/. 12 It would have been quite possible to have the same scene play out in, for instance Birmingham, Alabama, but that would force a focuson U.S. race relations that Disney may be reluc­ tant to acknowledge, especially since that would clearly sabo­ tage, rather than support, the notion that U.S. whiteness in the middle of the twentieth century stood for freedom. 13 Before the final battle, the heroes engage in two more fight scenes. However, on these occasions, the Avengers fight each other rather than an extra-terrestrial threat to Earth. In the first sequence, Thor arrives to bring justice to Loki, causing Captain America and Iron Man to confrontand fighthim. This conflict and a later struggle with the Hulk out of control are not public. The first takes place in an empty forest landscape, while the second takes place on the gig-antic flying S.H.I.E.L.D. base. Both of these scenes lack a ov1lian intradiegetic audi­ ence that can obse1·ve and approve of the demonstration of moral white violence performed. Indeed, the violence played out cannot be defined as moral, since it serves no discernible purpose. It is a conflict between the Avengers themselves, all supposedly moral agents. An intradiegetic audience would be misplaced here. This is not a performance of white moral vi­ olence, but a re-enactment of internal tension, a sorting out of moral imperatives and relations within the group before the end battle. 14 It should be noted that politicians speaking out on television also voice concerns and are critical of the Avengers at the end of the movie. WORKS CITED Briefel, Aviva and Sam J. Miller. "Introduction." Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror. Ed. Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller. Austin: University of Texas Press, 201 I. Print. Birkenstein, Jeff, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, ed. Reframing 9111: Film, Popular Culture and the 'War on Terror'. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print. Brown, Jeffrey A. "Superdad: Luke Cage and the Heroic Father­ hood Ideal in the Contemporary Marvel Universe." Marvel Comics'Civil War and the Age a/Terror. Ed. Kevin Michael Scott. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. 130-141. Print. THE WHITE METROPOLITAN BATTLEFIELD IN THE AVENGERS 87

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminismand the Subversionof Iden­ tity. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival:America's Quest for Global Supremacy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Print. DiPaolo, Marco. War, Politics and Superheroes. Jefferson, NC: Mc­ Farland, 2015. Print. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Ehlers, Nadine. Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles Against Subjection. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2012. Print. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogynyin an Insecure America. New York: Picador, 2007. Print. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Rel Constructions in the Cinema. Albany: SUNY P, 2003. Print. Hart, Jessica L., et al. "Racial Profiling: At What Price1 " Journalof Forensic Psychology Practice 3.2 (2003): 79-88. PsycINFO. Web. 26 April 2016. Harvey, David. TheNew Imperialism. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Print. Hoglund, Johan. The American Imperial Gothic: Empire, Violence, Popular Culture. Farnham, VA: Ashgate, 2014. Print. Jackson 11, Ronald L. "White Space, White Privilege: Mapping Discursive Inquiry into the Self." Quarterly Journalof Speech 85 (I 999): 38-54. Taylor & FrancisOnline. Web. 12 September 2015. Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows ofEmpire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Print. Kaplan, Amy. "Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s." American Literary History 2.4 (1990): 659-690. JSTOR. Web. 12 August 2013. King, Claire Sisco. Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Print. Klavan, Andrew. "What Bush and Batman Have in Common." The Wall Street Journal. 25 July 2008. Web. 5 June 2013. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Print. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992. Print. Nadel, Alan. "August Wilson and the (Color-Blind) Whiteness of Public Space." Theater 27.2-3 (1997): 38-41. Duke UP Journals. Web. 28 Ap1il 2016. Owens, Jill. "Justin Cronin: The Powells.com Interview" Powells- 88 j OHAN HOGLUND

Book.Blog. 15 June 2010. Web. 4 May 2016. Rich, Frank. "Donald Rumsfeld's Dance With the Nazis." The New York Times. 3 September 2006. Web. 2 May 2016. Roediger, David R. "'I Came for the Art:' Exposing Whiteness and Imagining Nonwhite Spaces." Art Papers 27.3 (2003): 22- 27. Print. Romagnoli, Alex S., and Gian S. Pagnucci. Enter the Superheroes. American Values, Culture, and the Canon of Superhero Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. Print. Rowland, Paul. TheNazis and the Occult: TheDark Forces Unleashed bythe ThirdReich. London: Abacus, 2007. Print. Said, Edward. Orienta/ism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Print. The Avengers. Directed by Joss Whedon. 2012. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios. DVD. Venugopal, Arun. "Museums as White Spaces." Online podcast. WYNCNews. WYNC, 4 May 2015. Web. JO May 2016. Wheatley, Dennis. They Used Dark Forces. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Print.