Week 1

Hello, my name is Justin Edwards and I am working with Caroline Hyde on our senior project investigating the cultural impacts and representation of race and gender in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We chose this project as we both enjoy and are fascinated by films and television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We also noticed that marvel has not always been the best with representation of people of color and women and we think it would be interesting to see how representation has evolved in the films and to discuss and write about it. Not to mention we both also took Tony, our mentors, Fighting the Power: African-American Film class, and thought that this project would allow us to expand on some of the aspects that we learned in that class.

Marvel has four phases with movies and tv shows. Each week we will be watching one phase worth of movies. This week we watched phase one which consisted of: Iron man, Iron man 2, Captain America the first avenger, Incredible Hulk, and Captain Marvel. The majority of these films were made between 2008 and 2011 with the expectation of Captain Marvel which was made in 2019. 

(Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126887033)

While watching the Iron Man films we noticed that the films lacked representation of women and people of color, and the representation was not good. The first Iron Man movie was made in 2008 and was Marvel's attempt to avoid bankruptcy after already selling all of their most popular characters. It is pretty obvious that both of these films are targeted for the male audience. The only prominent character of color in this film is Tony Stark's best friend Rody who arguably follows many stereotypes that are seen in the media. Overall both these movies have many misogynistic elements such as he treatment towards his assistant and the secualization of Black Widdow. Throughout the film Tony Stark is shown with many female dancers dressed in bikinis/ or little to no clothes, inspired by the Iron man design arguably using them as a tool to demonstrate his lavish lifestyle and amazingness. 

The Captain America movie had better representation of women than the Iron Man movie, however lacked representation of people of color. The film takes place sometime towards the end of World War 2. Throughout the Movie the rimar characters are white men with the exception of Agent Carter who is a white woman. Agent Carter was a high ranked officer in the film and would wear mostly non revealing clothes unlike the depiction of most women in the Iron Man Movies. There were only two characters of color in the entire film, one was an African-American man and the other was a East-Asian American man.They both only had about three lines each throughout the film and yet we they were able to somehow implement the fact that the Afrcian-American man went to a popular HBCU Howard University. It could be argued that the lack of representation of people of color was intentional as it would be more historically accurate as the military was segregated. However, since this is a superhero film about fighting Nazis who have alien technology I do not believe that this is the case.

(source:https://www.out.com/film/2019/5/24/captain-marvel-directors-insist-theres-no-gay-stuff-their-movie)

Unlike the two other films Captain Marvel's representation of people of color as well as women was strong. The two primary characters were a white woman named Carol Danvers and a black man named Nick Furry. Not to mention there are many other characters who are both people of color and women. Overall Nick Furry breaks many common stereotypes that we see throughout the media and that I have learned in my film class. Even though Nick Furry made humorous comments and in a way could be childish he was not represented in the same way of the racist and stereoptical sambo caricature. It is, however, important to note that in the original comics Captain Marvel was a black woman and not a white woman. This was changed in a later version of the comics not just in the movie, however, the movie depicted this version of Captain Marvel instead of the original.