(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I've been thinking about movie SHIELD. Specifically, I've been thinking about the nature of the institution in the pre-Iron Man era. What was its charter? Things like "Nick Fury's Big Week" and tiny bits of Iron Man 2 and Avengers canon suggest that before the Avengers Initiative, SHIELD wasn't big in the superhero game. The implication I got is that the sudden confluence of Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, led a sleepy think tank-type agency focused on gameplanning unpredictable homeland threats and trying to prepare the government to respond to them suddenly reconfigure to respond to those homeland threats. On the other hand, there's Nick Fury's line at the end of Iron Man, when he suggests "Mr. Stark, you've become part of a bigger universe." The implication of that line is that SHIELD has long been involved in dealing with other superhero-related threats, etc...

But in Marvel movieverse, what are those threats? There's the Hulk, but that's clearly not under SHIELD purview initially, as "The Consultant" shows. I try to figure out what else SHIELD was doing and I come to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and maybe tangential involvement in Spiderman. Before ~2008, SHIELD must have basically been an agency that supported the Fantastic Four and surveilled mutants it considered potentially dangerous. With a major part of their resources dedicated to trying to dig up Captain America.

So this raises questions I think are interesting. As the Avengers Initiative starts to take up more and more of Nick Fury's focus, what does that do to the Fantastic Four's relationship with the agency? Does Reed's toy budget see cuts? How does Ben feel about the Hulk just being out there? Do Johnny and Tony get into superhero fights at clubs all the time, or only every other week? Ultimately, the overly cute crackfic writer in me is going to want to read Johnny meets Steve, but we already knew I'm a bad person.

But beyond these simple questions about fitting the FF movies into the Avenger movieverse, what I find interesting is SHIELD itself, and the reconfiguration it must have had to do to reorient itself for its new mission statement in the Post-Thor world. "Every Hero" hypothesizes that Coulson was recruited for SHIELD only a year or two before Iron Man, and I think given his quip about working on the name, that's likely true. Natasha obviously also, as someone relatively young and with the backstory she shared with Loki, joined SHIELD fairly recently, and while Hawkeye has been with SHIELD longer than her, his skill-set speaks of significant military special-ops experience. This is a group of agents that is incredibly competent, incredibly comfortable with each other, and yet they haven't been together for all that long.

My best explanation for this is Nick Fury, leave it at that. You have to figure SHIELD was some sort of internal exile for Nick Fury. He was too competent and held too many secrets to just get rid of, but they wanted him out of the way so they dumped him in a sleepy agency charged with dealing with problems most people thought of as jokes. "Ha ha, we put Nick Fury on the Roswell Project." But Nick Fury was so competent and so compelling that he figured out how to sell his agency to competent people who were frustrated with other government agencies. He told them that yes, all they'd be doing was dreaming up imaginary threats, or maybe they'd be babysitting the Fantastic Four for the inevitable cock-up, but they'd get to develop all their own tools, work the way they wanted to work alongside other smart, competent people, and somehow he got people like Coulson and Hawkeye and Sitwell and Maria Fucking Hill to work for him, and with people like that, when the shit hits the fan and suddenly you're leading a group of loose cannons with superpowers against an alien invasion, you're ready to figure out how to change everything on the fly. I think the way SHIELD responds to the rise of the Avengers is a story worth telling in more detail than the movies do. Maybe the rumored Nick Fury movie will deal with some of that.

Comments

[hatman]

I think you're drawing some pretty heavy conclusions from a few throwaway lines.

My understanding is that SHIELD has been around for decades. (In Marvel canon, it started somewhere after WWII.) They've got the helicarrier and all this advanced technology and some really highly trained agents. Clearly, they've been doing a lot more than trying to hunt down Captain America. FF, X-Men, and Spider-Man movies predate the shared Marvel continuity. (In fact, that was part of the point of the line at the end of Iron Man: It's not just Tony's introduction to the wider Marvel Universe, it's ours.)

Spider-Man is being rebooted. New origin story, which will likely be tied into the Marvel movieverse, or at least acknowledged as part of it. So Spider-Man hasn't been around before.

I don't know how they'll deal with FF or X-Men or any other additions going forward. But Stark lives in New York. If the FF were around, he should have heard of them. The X-Men have trouble fitting into the Marvel Universe. There's been no hint of mutant powers in the movieverse so far. The idea is that people love superheroes like Iron Man and the Avengers. But the idea of the X-Men is that people hate and fear people with super powers, even if they're fighting for good. It doesn't mesh right.

I could see a new FF movie series down the line, where we find that Reed Richards has been working for SHIELD. Maybe one of the eggheads working on the Cosmic Cube. And then he goes up into space to develop their new orbital platform, and takes his family along...

But I think up until now they've been dealing with covert ops. We see Widow "interrogating" a man (about international arms shipments, was it?) at the beginning of Avengers. A small piece of what's doubtless a much larger picture. Something too big for the CIA or Interpol. But still, it's a fairly routine mission for Widow. (Traditionally, Widow was trained by the KGB and then defected to SHIELD.)

Hydra was established in Captain America. They have super science and maybe some super powers. And Cap worked in semi-secret to stop their plans to destroy or take over the world. I think SHIELD grew from that. An MIB-style covert ops organization dealing with super-scale global threats under the public's nose. Hydra. Possibly AIM. Maybe even some supervillains. Stopping wars and terrorists and so on.

The question is who runs SHIELD. Fury answers to some mysterious board of directors. Are they part of the US military? Or is it some international coalition? Or something else?

(Also, will the recently revealed alien threat cause that mysterious board to create SWORD? Or does SWORD already exist?)

[seekingferret]

Yes, I'm definitely reading a lot into a little. There isn't much to go on. It's also hard because the rebooted Spiderman won't be integrated into Avenger movieverse because it's being made by a different studio. I can hypothesize all I want about Spiderman-Avengers crossovers, but they'll never happen except in fanfiction.

I'm well aware of 616 SHIELD's history, but lots of little details about movieverse's presentation suggest a much newer origin for movieverse SHIELD. It has every indication of being a post-9/11 pop-up security agency, from the use of 'homeland' in its new name to its mish-mash of agents with very different training experiences. If SHIELD did exist before 9/11, it looked very different than it did after.

The X-Men/Fantastic Four tonal tension has been a thing that Marvel writers have had to struggle with since the beginning. They've done so in a number of ways, but by and large the methodology begins with a theory that humans adapt much easier to people transformed by technology than people who were born different, which is funny and problematic but at this point it's a core assumption of the Marvelverse. Ultimate Marvel has characters who are mutants but pretend to have developed their powers through lab accidents, notably the Wasp.

The idea that SHIELD has been some sort of CIA/Interpol backstop for a long time is plausible to a certain extent, but it sort of raises the question of why have a CIA if you think it can't handle global threats. If the CIA can't handle threats, the solution isn't to backstop it with a more competent agency, it's to fix the CIA. The idea you suggested when you called SHIELD "an MIB-style covert ops organization " to me points us a little differently. MIB, after all, wasn't chartered to do covert ops that CIA couldn't hack. It was chartered to deal with aliens. I think the most likely scenario is that SHIELD was chartered to deal with superheroic/weird threats. And I think our canon mostly suggests that until Hulk and Iron Man, that kind of thing didn't really happen all that often.

If SHIELD has been around for decades, it's been developing amazing technologies that are mostly pretty showy. The helicarrier is pretty awesome, but stealth or no stealth, if they had actually deployed it in a combat setting before this people would start asking questions. One possibility that bears consideration is that the reason SHIELD's purview includes superheroes is because they've commonly been using 'superheroes' as the cover story for their implausible covert ops actions.

As to who runs SHIELD, Fury in the movies answers to the 'World Security Council', clearly something ambiguously modeled on the UN Security Council, but with more teeth. This is very strange, and the geopolitics of it don't really bear careful thought.

[hatman]

"Homeland" doesn't necessarily mean anything. With SHIELD, they make up the acronym first and fill it in later.

If SHIELD answers to a "world security council," then that answers much. They're not part of the US government/military. Therefore, they don't replace the CIA. The CIA is the US intelligence service. SHIELD is international. Perhaps it replaces Interpol. (And, being international, I don't think that 9/11 - assuming 9/11 even happened in that universe - would have affected them nearly so much as you're thinking. Except that maybe it got them more funding from the US.)

In any case, like I said, Hydra has been around since WWII, and messing with things like the Cosmic Cube. That's what SHIELD is for. (Also, Captain America was a superhero long before Iron Man.)

The helicarrier? (a) It's the most iconic thing SHIELD has. It has to be there, just as much as Cap's shield or Hawkeye's improbable arrows. For that, it gets a special pass. (b) It serves as SHIELD's HQ. If you're dealing with super-level international terrorist threats, there's reason for a base that's not only secure, armed, and defensible, but mobile. (c) Captain America:TFA ended with Cap trying to stop a giant flying doomsday weapon. Iron Man 2's climactic battle involved an army of robotic drones. There's something to be said for the ability to drop out of the sky with a giant gunship loaded with advanced fighter planes.

SHIELD prefers to operate in secret (or, now that super heroes are becoming a thing, to use them in public). But they will crank out the big guns in public if they have to. They'd just rather avoid panic (and notice).

(Remember: The Avengers was Fury's pet project, not looked on favorably by the Council. SHIELD was a well-oiled machine before the first Iron Man movie. I don't think superheroes have been their thing until very recently.)

[seekingferret]

No, that's the thing. SHIELD use to stand for several things, including Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division and Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate. The movies added the word homeland, which I think is highly suggestive.

It's clear that Fury doesn't answer to the council, though they have significant political oversight. I think it's most probable that's treaty-related oversight. An agency whose grasp is as global as SHIELD would need channels for working on a multinational/transnational level. I don't think that changes how Amero-centric the institution is. It looks, works like, and appears to be a US government agency.

SHIELD was a well-oiled machine before the first Iron Man movie. I don't think superheroes have been their thing until very recently.

That's my point! Superhero supervision isn't a field you just decide to get into. It takes a lot of coordination and a lot of thought to build an organization capable of smoothly working with superhero problems, and SHIELD is that organization even though we have next to zero evidence of any superhero oversight they did before Iron Man. And here's the big smoking gun on this: If SHIELD had actually had pre-Iron Man superheroes, why wouldn't they incorporate them in the Avenger initiative? World-threatening alien strike and you don't bring out the superheroes who have the most experience working with you, who already trust you?

I understand the HYDRA point, though as a Jew with Holocaust sensitivities everything about HYDRA makes my skin crawl. The idea that the comic book writers needed something even more vicious than the SS... I appreciate their threat, but surely the US Army was tasked with fighting HYDRA's weapons? Why do you need a new agency? Both the Hulk and Captain America, as parts of the Super Soldier project, were developed by the Army, not by SHIELD. That is clear in canon.

[hatman]

I don't know if you're finding this interesting or frustrating. I was having fun, but it seems like we're at an impasse. We're looking at the same few facts and making very different assumptions.

The way I figure it, SHIELD has been around for decades. The Air Force grew out of the Navy. Spy agencies have grown and developed as new needs and specialties have arisen. I don't know how, exactly, SHIELD came to exist, but it probably grew out of a combination of existing programs (like the army super soldier project) and the creation of a new international coalition (whether officially sanctioned by the various governments or put together by some unofficial shadowy group of powers behind the thrones I can't say). They've been doing spying and covert ops. Dealing with big global threats in secret. Using agents like Widow and Hawkeye for the field work. And then Iron Man came along. And made a huge public splash. And others started popping up. And Fury decided to expand into superheroes. One more tool in the kit. His bosses^* didn't like it, but they were reluctantly willing to let him try it. And then they decided they didn't like the way it was shaping up, so they nixed it. (This is all described in the movie.) But Fury called them together anyway as expert consultants, and the team formed from there.

^*It's clear to me that Fury does answer to the council, though he isn't afraid to disobey orders when he thinks it necessary. He reports directly to them. They have final say over his projects (like the Avengers). They ordered him to nuke NYC. When he refused the order, they went down the chain of command and got someone else to send the planes.

Your view is fundamentally different. I'm not sure if it's worth continuing the debate. Happy to if you want.

As for Hydra - I'm also Jewish, and the grandson of survivors. (And closely related to many who didn't survive.) I have mixed feelings about Hydra. It's a way for them to have Cap on screen as a WWII hero without having to get into actual Nazi imagery. In a way, that's a cop-out. But, really, I much prefer that to what we saw in X-Men: First Class.

Shaw was a Nazi scientist who did things that were not nearly as horrible as the things actual Nazi scientists did. But then he was revealed as a cartoonish over the top supervillain (with a strong reference to the Adam West Batman movie) who had considered Nazis to be nothing more than convenient patsies and certainly nothing historically unusual. We already have more than enough people trying to claim Nazi horrors as fictional and/or grossly overstated.

Hydra is the flipside of that. It allows for comic book "Nazis" - cartoonish caricatures with giant robots and sci fi weapons and super powers - while explicitly marking them as fictional and not real Nazis. Yes, it's a dodge. But when you're mixing comic book action with serious history, a dodge may well be the best move you can make.

[seekingferret]

I find it interesting. I never mind arguing, even if we're never going to convince each other. I've gained a lot of clarity about the specifics of how I understand movie SHIELD from talking with you, and that clarity will certainly improve my fic, so I don't mind that we're at fundamental disagreement.

I thought XMFC's portrayal of Shaw was magnificent in its way, actually. I'm so used to seeing movie Nazis who pretend they're not really Nazis- the example I keep using is the Nazis in Indiana Jones, who have no connection whatsoever to the camps and who only affiliate themselves with the Nazi party because it lets them corruptly steal antiquities. The movies suggest they are evil, but it lets them get away with pretending they had nothing to do with the atrocities in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and the like. And it's not just limited to Indiana Jones. Most World War II movies do the same thing in some fashion.

Compare that to Shaw, a Nazi scientist who did things just as horrible as the things Nazi scientists really did, who we watch torture an 8 year old child's parents in front of him, and yet who tries to claim that he is not really a Nazi. And the movie doesn't let him get away with it! The movie lets Erik kill him with a Deutschmark, lets Eric declare to the world that this man is evil because of his affiliation with an evil system. Shaw dies protesting to the world that he is not really a Nazi, and everyone in the theater knows that this is hollow nonsense, because the movie was willing to let Erik call him out on it.

Compared to that, resorting to HYDRA just seems cowardly. Especially the moment where they try to make you think that Schmidt is worse than Hitler because Schmidt is targeting both New York and Berlin. Captain America essentially suggests that there is something admirable about Hitler's embrace of the nation-state.

If you want to watch comic book Nazis, cartoonish caricatures with giant robots and scifi weapons, watch the Aussie TV series Danger 5. It manages to pull it off with real Nazis and make them look genuinely evil while still being hilarious and exciting. HYDRA is nothing but a dangerous dodge.

[hatman]

Fair enough, and glad to hear it.

Don't have much to add on Shaw vs Hydra. I've stated my view, you've stated yours. You do make some good and interesting points about Shaw, but my general views remain. Good to know, though, that there is a valid way to look at it that isn't quite so upsetting.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, my read on XMFC is full of intense focus on the metatheatrics the movie engages in, especially in the way they work with Post-War Jewish symbolism. Erik exposing his tattoo before killing the Argentine Nazis... Erik dressed like a kibbutznik or stereotypical New Jew... Erik invoking the powerful "Never Again," which resonates with me as Meir Kahane's JDL motto, but also resonates with me as the chorus of Remedy's late-90s Jewish rap anthem. They did a lot of subtle work in coding Erik as a Survivor, and letting him kill the Nazi in the way they did after that build up spoke very clearly to me.

I'm aware that at the same time the non-meta reading of the narrative is problematic in that the story seems to cast Erik as the one on the path to villainy and Charles on the path to heroism, when the reality is closer to the opposite. I think the movie tries shockingly hard to subvert that narrative, but it's unavoidably still there.

[hatman]

I think they did a good job with Erik generally. Up until the climax of the movie, where he suddenly does a 180. He essentially declares that mutants are the inherently superior master race, and that they are at war with the rest of humanity. And then proceeds to casually attempt mass killings. With no apparent irony or self-awareness whatsoever.

[seekingferret]

I've been screaming at people for the past year that this is not what happened in the beach scene, but they all disagree. I may be wrong. But as I see it, 'mutants are an inherently superior master race' is not the essence of that declaration, though he certainly believes mutants are at war with humanity.

I'm not sure exactly what Erik's understanding is- either he has rejected his Judaism in favor of his Mutant identity, with the former teaching him about the latter but no longer being an operant part of his identity, or he has found a way to be both a Jew and a mutant, and embrace the common ground between both. Judaism brings to Erik two principal things that he has internalized deeply, either way. The first is the sense of persecution. He learned both as a Jew and later as a mutant that They, the amorphous majority, will always hate Us, the persecuted minority. The second is a sense of chosenness. Jews have always believed they had a special calling to perform God's work in the world, and I think Erik feels that his mutant gifts similarly mark him out as specially chosen for greatness. I think this second point is his common ground with Charles, while the first point is his distinction from Charles.

Erik believes he has learned, first from the Holocaust and then in his travels since the Holocaust, that humanity will always persecute him, and along with him, his family. The First Class represents a second attempt at family for him, and he's willing to do anything, hurt anyone, to protect them. Think what happened to his first family, while he was unable to stop it. Think of what family means to a Jewish boy from the shtetl in 1930s Europe. He believes they will never stop hating him because he has thirty+ years of experience telling him that.

And the movie proves him right. Charles insists it won't happen, but the US government turns on them as soon as they're done saving the world. This moment is Erik's told you so moment, and despite Charles's insincere moralization, Erik would be well within his rights to have killed everyone on those navy ships who targeted him with intent to kill. Who is the innocent there? Who among Erik's targets is not an enemy combatant at that moment?

And Erik's been telling Charles all movie, "You don't get a choice. You're a mutant, and they will persecute you for it, just as they persecute Jews," because this is a movie that is not about metaphor. Mutants in this movie are not crypto-Jews or crypto-gays as in the past three X-Movies. Being Jewish is something that is clearly different than being a mutant, but one identity can teach you about the other. "You are a mutant, and that is not something you can give up and assimilate out of. You are a mutant, and that is something you should be proud of, and something you should fight for, and fight for the right to stand up in public and proclaim that you are a mutant."

And that is a lot of stuff, but that is only a few of the layers I got out of the beach scene that nobody else did.

[seekingferret]

Your theory is possible. I don't want to dismiss it out of hand.I still struggle with Fury's line in the Iron Man 1 tag "You think you're the only superhero in the world??" There are a few explanations I can think of, with varying levels of problem with them.

Fury may just have been trying to bluff Tony. He may have been trying to contain the Tony ego problem by making Tony feel small. If Iron Man really did shake things up at SHIELD, Nick Fury is scrambling to figure out the new landscape, and anything he can say to put Tony off balance is to his advantage.

Fury may be speaking of Hawkeye and Black Widow. After all, Tony, unlike Bruce, Steve, and Thor, is still baseline human. We think of Tony as being in the same class as Thor and Steve, because as we saw in Avengers when he's in his suit he can hold his own against them, but if we imagine Fury's perspective to be "A superhero is a baseline human who uses technology and training to act like a comic book character", Hawkeye and Black Widow certainly count.

But I'm not convinced by this because whatever Fury's definition is, that can't be Tony's definition. Can you imagine Tony being surprised that a spy agency has a guy like Clint or Natasha? Impressed, sure, but not surprised. Fury's not hinting at well trained spec-ops agents, he's hinting at things that make the Iron Man suit look normal. And his failure to deliver on that muddies the waters. Maybe he was talking about Steve- maybe somehow even back in Iron Man 1 era, he expected that in a couple years he'd be digging out Cap from the arctic ice, and between Bruce and Steve he would have real superhumans to stack next to Tony. (This is kind of plausible when you remember the writer's strike delayed Captain America, which otherwise would have been out closer to Iron Man)

[hatman]

It's possible Fury meant people like Daredevil - street-level heroes Tony might not have heard of. Or Black Panther - someone far enough away that Tony might not have heard of him.

Or it's just a throwaway line telling us that the Marvel Movieverse is going to be a shared universe, which doesn't otherwise make much sense because Tony was the only active superhero at the time.