Ah, summer. Swimming pools, snow cones and a seemingly neverending line of superhero movies. This summer in particular, I can count four movies adapted from Marvel Comics: “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” “Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.” But unlike swimming pools and snow cones, which are pretty much universally accepted as awesome, superhero movies are often polarizing. Personally, I love a good superhero origin story, but I can certainly see why some people, especially those who are not straight white males, could become disillusioned with them. As has been pointed out by critics, Marvel, who earned $623 million with Avengers, according to boxofficemojo.com, and has been bringing in audiences which are nearing 50 percent female, has now released five films with a lead straight white guy named Chris, with no immediate plans to make a movie starring a person of color (POC), woman or LGBT person.
But superhero movies matter. They are the epics of pop culture. They reflect our culture back at us and empower us through larger-than-life characters. People who feel powerless have turned to superheroes for decades as an outlet where they can see characters like Spider-Man and Star-Lord come from humble backgrounds and become empowered and end up obliterating the things that hold them down. That’s why it’s so important that superhero stories begin to represent the entirety of America.
Not all of the superhero movies released this summer did horribly in that regard. There is one very notable scene in “Captain America 2” featuring two white women, two black men and Chris Evans. It seems as if Captain America chooses his allies from, well, America. Now, perhaps the fact that this is progress says more about the state of representation in Hollywood than anything else, because the fact remains that no women of color appear and the span of ethnicities is still quite limited. This is hampered by the fact that the title and subtitle of the movie refer to two white men, one of whom ends up taking control away from Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, in the very scene we just mentioned as progressive. Even so, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie and Cobie Smulders are given kickass roles in the film, with almost enough of an arc for ScarJo to satisfy my need for a Black Widow movie.
Another movie along the lines of “good job, but…” this summer is “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Out of five characters, three identify as POC and one is a raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper. There’s Gamora, played by Zoe Saldana, who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent. There’s second generation Filipino-American David Batista, who plays Drax. And there’s Vin Diesel, who plays Groot, who has described himself as “definitely a POC” and was raised by an African-American step-father. Why are people having trouble seeing the representation in this film? Well, it’s probably because in the movie these characters are, respectively, green, blue with red tattoos and a walking tree. The question becomes, “Does representation count when the races and ethnicities of the actors in question are obscured?”
Though progress is being made, the superhero genre still has a long way to go when it comes to representation. Nicole Perlman, screenwriter for “Guardians of the Galaxy” (do you know how hard it is to get a female screenwriter in Hollywood?) is the locus of hope for many when it comes to getting more women on the silver screen. Perlman has gone so far as to write a script for a Black Widow solo film, though Marvel has no plans to put it into action. As it stands, the idea of a female, POC or LGBT-led superhero film remains a pipe dream. In the meantime, we will continue to hope for big roles for these characters in the ensemble cast.
