Tag Archives: superhero

Taking the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the (sitcom) suburbs

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The new television show WandaVision is set in the suburbs portrayed on earlier sitcom TV:

Photo by Nothing Ahead on Pexels.com

With “WandaVision,” Feige said that he had wanted to honor the complexity of the title characters and Wanda’s reality-warping abilities but also to leaven the story with tributes to sitcom history…

The series finds Wanda and Vision — now somehow alive — residing in suburban bliss, not entirely sure of why they are cycling through various eras of television history and encountering veteran Marvel performers like Kat Dennings (as her “Thor” character, Darcy Lewis) and Randall Park (reprising his “Ant-Man and the Wasp” role of Jimmy Woo) as well as new additions to the roster, like Teyonah Parris (as Monica Rambeau) and Kathryn Hahn (playing a perplexingly nosy neighbor named Agnes)…

“You enter a sitcom episode with the understanding it’s going to make you feel good and it’s all going to be OK at the end,” said Schaeffer, who also worked on “Captain Marvel” and “Black Widow.”

What “WandaVision” adds to this formula, she said, is an element of “creepiness — the idea of shattering that safety in a calculated way.”

In a recent post, I summarize scholarly work on television depicting the suburbs. It sounds like this new show tries to do something new but it might just fall into already existing patterns.

The suburban sitcoms of the 1950s are often portrayed as providing a common image: the white nuclear family living happily in a single-family home. The episodes revolve around relatively minor issues that are resolved at the end of the show.

By the 1960s, there were some twists to this theme. Lynn Spigel writes of new television characters who provide an edge to the typical suburban image. Think Samantha on Bewitched who with her magic powers and odd relatives provides a new angle to the suburban sitcom.

In the late 1990s, more shows looked to push the suburban sitcom in even further – and often darker – directions. Take The Sopranos: from the outside, the family has the look of a successful suburban family living in a large McMansion in an upscale community. But, of course, the secret is that the gains are ill-gotten and the attempts to find happiness in this suburban lifestyle never coalesce.

Indeed, this darker approach to the suburban sitcom has an extended history in other mediums as well with novels, films, and other narratives suggesting something similar: the suburbs are not what they seem. These products offer a critique of the the suburbs where the American Dream is not what it seems, where all the suburban striving does not amount to much or falls apart spectacularly.

While I have not seen WandaVision, the narrative arc may then fall into familiar territory: the suburban household with a twist or dark secret is already an established genre. These may be new characters in the suburbs and it may be an expansion of the Marvel Universe but it remains to be seen how much new suburban ground it really treads.

Mexico City’s pedestrian superhero back in the news

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Continuing to fight for pedestrians in Mexico City is “The Little Pedestrian”:

The mighty Peatonito (Little Pedestrian) pushes cars blocking the path of pedestrians, creates crosswalks with spray paint, and climbs on vehicles parked on sidewalks — though his mother has begged him to stop stepping on them.

“Pedestrians are happy because they finally have a defender,” Peatonito said, his face covered by a wrestling mask adorned with a pedestrian symbol and wearing a striped cape (sewn by his grandma) adorned with the black and white stripes of a pedestrian crossing.

“We live in a car dictatorship. Nobody had fought for pedestrian rights until some activists emerged a few years ago.”

Meanwhile, below the city streets five clowns are on a similar mission to send up urban incivility, barging into a metro carriage making monkey noises and holding a sign saying “It’s better without pushing.”…

Peatonito aims to reduce traffic deaths in a city where pedestrians account for more than half of around 1,000 annual road fatalities, according to health ministry statistics.

This is a fascinating way to draw attention to the issue. It is one thing to publish statistics or to have more road signs (read about the campaign in Illinois to post the number of driving deaths for all to see) but another for a handful of people to act in public spaces. With the line of “we live in a car dictatorship,” I’m surprised others haven’t taken up similar routines in other cities around the world (including the United States which might be as much as a car dictatorship as one can have). But, two things might be problematic:

1. I wonder if police or local officials could actually arrest them for being a disturbance. In a real car dictatorship, you don’t want fake superheros running around in the way of cars. Might it take some complaints from drivers or others who feel that these crusaders have gone too far?

2. How does one translate these activities into a broader social movement or changes in policies and regulations? If the pedestrians of Mexico City wanted to take over the roads, they certainly could. At the least, this superhero might publicly shame the city but that doesn’t necessarily lead to large-scale change.

By the way, this isn’t the first time Peatonito has drawn international news coverage. See this story from 2013 that discusses what his actions led to:

Peatónito is the alter ego of Jorge Cáñez, a 26-year-old political scientist in Mexico City who has also worked with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP)…

His efforts got him invited to speak at the Walk 21 conference in 2012 and has met with officials from Mexico City’s department of public security to discuss the importance of putting pedestrians first in street design and traffic enforcement. He is hopeful about government efforts to improve infrastructure. At least, he says, they are now talking about giving pedestrians priority — which would only make sense in a city where 80 percent of the population doesn’t drive…

“Once the government has adopted the ‘pedestrian is the king’ in their speeches, I’m going to monitor and help them till the day there’s no pedestrian fatalities nor accidents, and also decent sidewalks and safety crossings in the streets. But even if the government calls me to collaborate, I will always be a non-partisan citizen hero of the public domain.” He has registered Peatónito as Creative Commons, so that anyone who wants can become Peatónito.

Perhaps there really are superheros…

Presenting “McMansion man”

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David Siegel is wealthy and known for building the largest home in the United States (see my review of the film about its construction). Could he be known as “McMansion man”? Read this headline and story:

‘McMansion’ Man Gives Everyone a Raise

You of course remember the head of the Westgate Resorts timeshare billionaire whose efforts to build the largest home in the U.S. were the subject of the documentary “The Queen of Versailles.”

When last we heard from him, he prophesied that the election of Barack Obama would lead to economic ruin. He sent an email to his employees saying that the election of Obama will “threaten your job” and mean “less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.”

It turns out his crystal ball was clouded. In a company-wide email to employees announcing that he was raising minimum wage to $10 an hour, he noted: “We’re experiencing the best year in our history.” It is not clear what he was paying them or how many of his employees will be impacted, but a company spokesman said it numbers in the thousands.

As I’ve argued before, Siegel is building much much more than a McMansion: a 90,000 square foot home is super mansion territory and is unlikely to show up anywhere near a typical suburban subdivision. (Perhaps this is illustrated best by the years it has taken Siegel to build his gargantuan home.) Thus, I don’t think he qualifies.

Who might qualify as “McMansion man”? What might such a superhero look like? Or, given the negative attention often paid to McMansions, perhaps a super villain. If you have read a lot of the press coverage of McMansion in the last 15 years or so, perhaps one of the executives at Toll Brothers deserves the title. (But, they are now into urban building.) Maybe the McMansion protestors in Los Angeles could name such a figure.

Superman, Midwestern superhero

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Superman may be a superhero but he is a Midwesterner at heart:

It’s not a point that’s often made about Superman, who is celebrating his 75th anniversary this summer and starring in director Zack Snyder’s quite Midwestern movie, “Man of Steel,” opening Friday. What with all his universe saving, the intergalactic lineage and the part-time big-city address, the fact that Clark Kent grew up on a Kansas farm has never been the sexiest part of the legend. And yet, for better or worse, his Midwestern-ness is the key to coming to grips with what has for decades been alternately one of the most durable and tedious of cultural icons, a symbol of American can-do albeit delivered with an insistent piety…

Superman is the embodiment of Midwestern character — the well-meaning, the sturdy, the pious and the provincial. In “Man of Steel,” when young Clark realizes he can hear literally everyone on Earth, he runs into a broom closet (a scene shot in Plano’s Centennial Elementary School, in far west Kendall County), presses his hands against his ears and refuses to leave, moaning “The world’s too big.” The response from Ma Kent (Diane Lane) sounds distinctly Midwestern: “Then make it small.”…

Without giving anything away (I swear, there are no spoilers here): “Man of Steel” tells the story of a guy who comes from a place where fracking (or at least the Kryptonian equivalent) creates earthquakes. He settles in a town where expanses are flat, and barns and windmills and water towers stand tall, breaking up the rows of corn. He gets into fights at the IHOP and is reminded by his parents he is better and more upstanding than everyone else but shouldn’t flaunt it — stay modest. He watches college football, wears a Kansas City Royals T-shirt, tends to keep his feelings bottled up. He’s hard to read but turns deeply moralistic, stoic and judgmental, willing to go out of his way to help anyone but eventually siding with the authorities. He heads off for the big city and gets beaten down by hipster jerks who wear a lot of black. But finally he decides that though people outside of the Midwest can’t be trusted, he will be nice to all of them…

Some of the best Superman comic book tales of the past few decades have had an air of repressed heartland stoicism (Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”) or focused on Superman trying to retain a tight, manageable community (Brian Azzarello’s “For Tomorrow”). But in its Midwestern iconography, self-proclaimed American values and locations, none comes close to Snyder’s “Man of Steel.” For instance, Metropolis, usually a substitute for New York City (partly because Superman films tend to shoot there), is more distinctly a Midwestern metropolis now, partly because it’s Chicago you’re looking at.

Fascinating. The virtuous Midwest strikes again. This could lead to a very interesting discussion of how cities become associated with superheroes. New York is the clear leader in the United States with heroes like Batman (operating in Gotham, a thinly disguised NYC) and Spider-Man (born in Queens). But, why aren’t there well-known superheroes in Chicago or Los Angeles? Is there some sort of economic sociology explanation where the comic book industry was centered in New York and they wrote about what they knew and for the biggest market? Does it have to do with the relative status of New York City as the leading global city and symbol of the free world? Do other cities not quite have the combination of glamor and grittiness of New York City? The connections between spaces and the social relationships within and modern myths, superheroes or sci-fi or post-apocalyptic scenarios or otherwise, could be worth exploring.