Captain Marvel – Girl Power Takes Center Stage in the Avengers Universe

This past weekend, one of the great mono-cultural events left in our collective lives occurred: the release of The Avengers Endgame – a record breaking weekend.  The reluctant wife and I agreed to a double feature of sorts, watching Captain Marvel, which we had been putting off seeing, as a way to prepare for the final feast.  As it turns out, we would have better prepared by watching the prequel, Avengers Infinity War.  On the other hand, we could have just skippedEndgame; Captain Marvel was much more interesting – and I agree with the reluctant wife that the Avengers shows that have revolved around one of the characters have generally been more interesting than the ensemble pieces (with the exception perhaps of Age of Ultron).

Captain Marvel, the movie, uses a series of devices to engage the viewer – the first of these is the device of amnesia.  This draws us into an identification with the hero of the movie, Captain Marvel (played by Brie Larson), as she attempts to discover who it is that she really is.  The twist here is that she doesn’t know that she is not who she imagines herself to be, and so she needs to discover that her failure to remember significant parts of her history hides a deeper mystery.  A second device is that her costar is Jude Law.  Mr. Law is the reluctant wife’s mulligan – (she is allowed to have an affair with him without consequence – he replaced Prince when Prince died).  So any movie in which he appears is a good one for her.

So, Captain Marvel, the hero, to disentangle the story a bit, was an All American girl who liked to live dangerously – pushing her body to the limits in baseball, driving go-karts, and, when it came time, playing with the boys by joining the air force to become a pilot.  Of course she couldn’t be trained as a combat pilot, any more than she could play major league baseball or drive go-karts as fast as the boys – girls weren’t allowed to go into combat – so she became a test pilot for a top secret section of the air force.  And there she discovered a mentor – Dr. Mar Vel, who was not, it turns out (though Captain Marvel never knew it at the time), human.  She was a Kree (the race, from another planet, that Captain Marvel believed she belonged to at the beginning of the film).

A quick note on identity.  This movie is partly about identity.  It is about Captain Marvel’s identity as a woman.  She is not, I don’t think, ever referred to as Captain Marvel in the movie, even though I will do that throughout this post for simplicity's sake.  She is referred to by the Kree by the part of her name that survived on the severed dog tag that they discovered her with.  She assumes this to be her name until she discovers her full name when she returns to earth (more on that in a moment).  And she is called many things by different people but not, I don’t think, Captain Marvel – which apparently is a moniker that she takes on as an homage to her mentor.  So while this person is discovering what it means to her to be a woman, she is also discovering, as it were, what it means to become herself – but also to transcend that name and take on an identity that is beyond it, but that acknowledges a debt to a mentor and friend.

Fortunately for Captain Marvel, when she was a test pilot, she also had a best friend who, it is important to note, is African American and  a person who has her back completely.  To fast forward a bit to the beginning of the film, Captain Marvel is being trained by Jude Law to better fight the Skrulls, the enemy of the Kree, but Captain Marvel gets captured by Skrulls and they access her memory.  She escapes from the Skrulls and crash lands on earth in the middle of a Blockbuster, the once ubiquitous source of videos that is now all but gone, and there she runs into Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) who is a functionary for S.H.I.E.L.D. and does not yet know that extraterrestrials, much less superheroes, exist. 

Fury trails Marvel and, importantly, learns from her – demonstrating his lack of knowledge but also subtle forms of intelligence as they become a team – this film is partly about breaking down stereotypes – one of which is that blacks are not intelligent (that this is a stereotype that needs to be addressed in a film is an important issue – and that it is being addressed here – in a way that the writers, directors and actors must rely either on the subtlety of the interaction to bypass the stereotype – or by relying on the intelligence of the viewer to get it and get the underlying message – is an important commentary on the need to drive this message home in this film – but it won’t be the last instance of attacking stereotypes while also, necessarily, portraying them – and thus prolonging them – in order to deconstruct them).

In fact, the subplot involving Captain Marvel’s friend from long ago, Maria Lambeau (played by Lashana Lynch) involves a very old movie stereotype – Maria is a kind of Mammy figure to Captain Marvel.  Does Marvel's subsequent support of Maria’s child, Monica – and mentoring her to follow in her footsteps as a liberated woman – while also allowing her to pick the outfit colors for her superhero suit, make up for the stereotyping of Maria?  Is this a healing moment between the white feminists and young black women?  These and other questions abound as we travel the tricky path from prejudice and marginalization towards becoming gender and ethnicity transcendent.

Fury and Marvel, along with Maria now make the discovery that shifts the entire film – the Skrull are the race that Dr. Mar Vel was trying to help – and the Skrull are the more humane of the races (despite, in their true form, being reptilian – and capable of shapeshifting to take on whatever form they choose).  Captain Marvel as to do an abrupt shift in her identity and, as she does this, she comes to realize that those who have seemed like her allies – including Jude Law – have really been suppressing her – and she further comes to realize that she has greater power than she could have imagined.  Further, this power does not emanate from the Kree high command – quite the contrary.  Instead of fueling her, they have been oppressing her.  When she realizes this and frees herself, we behold the true and awesome power that was driven into her by Dr. Mar Vel’s invention when Captain Marvel attempted to destroy it to keep it out of the hands of the Kree at the very moment that she lost her memory and was abducted by them.

OK, at this point I am hoping that you saw the film, because if you did not, that plot synopsis may have been even more confusing than the film might have been.  If you did see it, I’m hoping that the synopsis squares with and helps organize the experience.  What is of interest from all of this to me psychoanalytically, is that this is a deeply felt and well enacted movie that traces the arc of the women’s movement on a socio-political level (the oppressors are not doing this for my good – and I have a power that they cannot even imagine that will be unleashed when I quit being oppressed by them – see the movie RBG) and the individual level (as a woman comes into experiencing her own power she becomes capable of much more than she herself imagined possible).

But it’s political reach is much further than this – it is also an appeal to realize that we in the U.S. have much more in common with those who would immigrate here and who are feeling lost and abandoned and even tortured – sometimes, ironically, by our own government or by its effects – than we do with the governmental forces that We the People have supported and emulate.  It is proposing that we wake from an amnesic slumber and remember who we are and where we came from and to recognize that those we see as alien are the downtrodden – the underdogs – that we would, when we are our better selves, fight desperately to defend.

Captain Marvel’s power dwarfs that of the other Avengers.  Her relationship with Fury predates anyone else’s as well.  She is called by Fury in the last moments of the Infinity Wars – as he is being disintegrated – in order to help.  We learn that she has been away taking care of the oppressed in other corners of the galaxy.  Hilariously, in one scene in the Endgame, many Avengers have to acknowledge that they have never left Earth’s atmosphere.  She is not only capable of doing this on her own, without a spaceship, but revels in it.  While she is, in some ways, a trump card in the Endgame, the writers were right to limit her role there – it is not really her story.  Her story is started here, in this film – and it is about someone who was disempowered – in not just one but two incarnations – coming into her own and, in the process of doing that transcending whatever limits others would impose – and also learning how to undo the limits she would impose on herself – believing, for instance, that others are helping her when they are not.  She deserves her own story and she gets it here – and it should not get lost in the already overreaching that was the Avengers growing network of interrelated stories intended to be brought to rest by the Endgame.

Despite my enthusiasm for Captain Marvel, it is guarded.  She brings to the franchise what all of the heroes do - a desire to do what is right and, perhaps it is in her U.S. DNA, she believes, as did her mentor, that the road to peace is paved with more power - Mar Vel was building a light speed engine - and the generator for that engine powers Captain Marvel - apparently forever.  And it seems that there will always be an enemy - an oppressor to be overpowered in the name of peace.  But is that really what women should be empowered to do?  Shouldn't we strive for something better than endless war in the name of peace?

I have written also written about The Avengers Endgame, Age of Ultron, Black Panther and, in the DC Universe, the movie Wonder Woman.

Of course, I have written about many other things as well - to access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko: Colonialism with a twist.

Korea and Japan are nations about which I know very little.  The heroes of this book by Min Jin Lee – Koreans who immigrated to Japan during the period when Korea was a Japanese colony (1910-1945) – are people about whom very few people know much.  All that said, the people portrayed in this book have served as research subjects about the nature of prejudice and the heritability of intelligence. 

In the US, there is a pernicious issue with intelligence tests.  African Americans score significantly and consistently lower on IQ tests than European Americans do – the mean score is a standard deviation lower – which is a considerable amount.  As both groups become more intelligent (and this happens – we have to update IQ tests every eight or ten years because the norms are no longer accurate), the differences between the groups remain.  This led a Nobel Prize winner in a field outside of psychology to publish a book, the Bell Curve, in which he maintained that this discrepancy proved that African Americans are inherently less intelligent than those from European stock. 

Psychologists were outraged by this claim and worked to amass data to determine whether this was, in fact, the case, and found that it simply was not so.  We can use data, they surmised, to compare heritability of a trait like intelligence within a culture, but not between two different cultures.  One of the studies that I refer to as a teaching device in explaining this is one looking at Korean-Japanese who, like African Americans, consistently score lower on IQ tests than the dominant culture – ethnic Japanese, in Japan.  The interesting thing is that when these two groups emigrate to the US, where they are indistinguishable to the dominant, European, culture, unlike in Japan where there are multiple markers – from language – to immigration status – to physical characteristics (and this last is emphasized in the study – but not in this book) – that make the Korean nationals as easily identifiable to the dominant culture there as African Americans are here; when the two groups emigrate here, the differences in measured intelligence disappear in two generations.

The conclusion, of course, is a simple one: we should work to make African Americans visibly and culturally indistinguishable from European Americans!  And we should quit being able to visually discriminate men from women, too, I suppose…  In any case, I was interested in seeing whether a novel about the functioning of these discriminated against individuals would help me appreciate them – and in what ways the experience of this minority group would map onto or have some equivalence to the experience of African Americans.  To do that, I had to know something about the author.  Min Jin Lee is, in fact, a Korean American – and she gathered her information for this book largely through interviews with individuals in Japan of Korean descent.  She then wrote a novel – a creative integration of her experiences – from the third person omniscient perspective.  She wisely, I think, chose not to inhabit the first person of people whose experience was vastly different from hers (just as the author of The Help chose not to do this).

The central protagonist in this story, Sunja, is the daughter of a man who was shunned and, by all rights, should never have married, because he was born with a club foot and cleft palate and was slow to speak.  These deformities should have kept him out of the marriage pool in the early part of the twentieth century because it was assumed that his defects would be passed on to his children.  He, in turn was the only child of a lovely couple who ran a boarding house in a coastal village of Korea and who subsisted, quietly but happily, by housing and feeding workers – mostly fishermen.  Because of the Japanese occupation, the steady work and the food of the small plot of land they owned made Sunja’s father very attractive to the parents of three girls and no sons who did not know whether they could feed their children – so her father was arranged to marry one of them and she was born.

She was raised a proper Korean – which means that she was quite proper – we would say shy – and lived in a tiny world peopled with her parents, the boarders, and the two girls who worked for the family.  All of these people lived in a tiny house together and worked all of the time to keep the household running and to be fed.  She fell in love with a handsome import/export man, Hansu, who took a fancy to her at the market and, thinking that he would marry her, she had sex with him, only to discover that he was already married to a woman in Osaka, Japan.  When she became pregnant, her lover offered to make her a kept woman but she refused.  A sickly protestant minister – Isak, the son of a wealthy family – stayed in the boarding house on his way to live in Japan with his brother and sister-in-law and decided to marry her despite her pregancy as the Christian thing to do.  After they moved to Osaka, to live with Isak’s brother Yoseb and his wife Kyunghee, they had her first son, Hansu’s biological child Noa, and then a son together, Mosazu.  (Please note that the brothers and the sons are all biblical names: Isaac, Joseph, Noah and Moses, that have been transliterated into Korean).

It is the second son, Mosazu, who ends up, quite by accident, working in the Pachinko parlors of the title and then owning them.  Bullied and harassed at school for being Korean, he dropped out to work in one of the few places that Koreans could work – a Pachinko parlor – one that was owned by Sunja’s former lover and his brother Noa’s father Hansu – unbeknownst to him.  Pachinko is a game of chance – one in which a ball is dropped into a field of pegs and, as it strikes each peg, it can presumably bounce in either direction.  Based on a cascade of such 50-50 choices, the ball ends up at the bottom of the board in one of a series of bays – each of which has a very different pay out rate.  It is kind of like a Japanese version of a slot machine, and Pachinko, largely unknown outside of Japan, is a huge business, grossing three times what the auto industry does there annually.

1970s Pachinko Game

So, Pachinko becomes a central metaphor of the book.  Who we are – the family we are born into – the genetics that we are endowed with – are a matter of chance.  We could be born into a Japanese family – or into a Korean one.  And we could, like Noa, the son of the import export man Hansu, a man of action who, it turns out, runs the mob, have a very academic bent and want to study English literature.  Or we could, like Mosazu, son of the introverted and scholarly priest Isak, become a man of action – punching the boys at school who make fun of him and other Koreans and going to work in the gang related pachinko shops – and becoming an owner/operator who is quite wealthy and sends his son to school in America.  And, in a further twist of fate, we could, like Noa, discover that our father is Hansu, not the gentle Isak, and we could end up feeling such shame that a mob boss was financing our education that we could drop out of school and become – purely through chance – a pachinko parlor operator too – though one who was doing that while passing as a Japanese national.

The strange twists and turns of chance and genetics – and the two as linked – turn the psychological study I opened this post with on its head.  It’s not that we are genetically superior or inferior, it’s that we are randomly genetically endowed – and we are shaped by the environments that we are randomly tossed into.  Which ends up amounting to the same thing – our measures of people’s functioning with an intelligence test is necessarily a measure of multiple random events – and, if we parse them all out, we find that, regardless of which genetic shaker we use, we end up with the same constituent elements.

But I think the role of culture in shaping the experiences of the people in this book moves to the forefront as the randomness of genetics is asserted.  We discover that the intense self-focus – Sunja’s attempts to be the proper, correct Korean girl and then woman; Yoseb’s attempts to care for his family as a man should; Kyunghee’s and Sunja’s forays into the world of commerce against the tides of culture; that the cultural forces that they face are intent on keeping them in place not only through externally imposed shameful repressive measures, such as insuring that they can’t secure passports to leave the country, but much more insidiously through the internal control of the deep sense of shame – the sense that they are essentially inferior and must do what they can to hide that through industry and, somewhat ironically, self-pride.  And, also somewhat ironically, these internally repressive forces prove able, across generations and through the power of the exertion of will, to achieve forward movement – but also to create tragic limits to that potential for growth.

Without spoiling any more than I already have, I think this long book – and one that does not dive beneath the surface of the actions of its characters – except occasionally to articulate the conscious intent of the actors – ends up painting a picture of the arc of the twentieth century from a very interesting vantage point – and, in the process, the author creates characters about whom we care deeply.  One of the plot devices that she seems to use to do this is, again ironically, the creation of this family as being, in important senses, exceptional: Different from the Koreans who can’t rise above the filth and squalor to which they are relegated.  Just as Mosazu is a successful Pachinko owner in part because he learns the trade of subtly changing the angles of the pins on a daily basis to stay one step ahead of the patrons who are working to detect patterns in the falling of the balls, so we are drawn to characters who stand up to the laws of chance and largely seem to make them work in their favor.  We admire this when it works – and we mourn when it fails – when the sweep of history – or the pernicious effects of a lifetime of being bullied by mean spirited, ugly, and effective attacks leads a character (I just wrote us and revised it – we identify with these characters) to implode.

In the game of life, when we perceive resources to be limited and we need to maintain our power over others, we use similar means to control and suppress those we would have serve us.  Elsewhere I have looked at James Cone’s and Dorothy Holmes' (among others) take on these mechanisms within American culture – especially as it relates to African Americans, and there are more similarities here than we would want to admit as we look through a very different cultural lens at the functioning of a vastly different culture.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.