Like Nick Fury, here I am assembling the three pieces in our ‘Finding the Slayer in the Avengers’. Yes I know we promised four, but work got it in the way. Thanks to Leloy for writing this with me and to everyone who read it, we got a lot of good feedback the past week!
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A Hellmouth in the Sky
by: Leloy Claudio
Who is the Buffy of the Avengers? There’s no easy answer to this one because the film does not have a single lead character. When the Avengers converge beneath Stark Tower and Captain America dictates the plan of attack (“Call it Captain,” Iron Man defers), he plays the quarterback role that Buffy assumed in the latter seasons. Both Thor and Willow are able to harness supernatural forces, and are able to fly, but it’s the tacticians with level heads who take the lead. Like Buffy, moreover, Captain America’s superpowers are completely physical.
Then there’s the Black Widow. When we first see Natasha Romanov, she is about to be tortured. But it is quickly revealed that Romanov is playing mind games, feigning helplessness to extract more information from her male torturers. Ostensibly helpless women can actually kick ass – this is the premise of the entire Buffy series. Remember that Buffy, before becoming the slayer, was a ditzy teenage cheerleader. The genius of the show was that it made a Clueless character the savior of the world.
But I submit that the real Buffy is Iron Man. Tony Stark and Buffy Summers both begin as self-centered character clichés: Buffy, as mentioned, is the high school cheerleader, while Stark is the narcissistic playboy billionaire. Both are selfish, and both are reluctant to save the world. In season one, Buffy does her best to avoid Giles, knowing that consorting with the watcher means confronting her sacred duty. Iron Man, as Captain America reminds him, has hitherto done everything for himself. The reason why Steve Rogers can’t be Buffy Summers is that the former has always been single-minded about his duties as a hero. He is, as the movie reminds us, too “old fashioned.” The true rebel-hero, and therefore heir to Buffy, is Stark.
When does the reluctant hero realize his/her calling? When the “big bad” decides to open a “Hellmouth” and unleash the forces of darkness, of course. In season one of Buffy, the Master attempts to open the Hellmouth, and uses the armies of the netherworld to conquer the world. Loki does the same, except his Hellmouth is in the sky. Both Loki and the Master are quasi-religious characters, who, for all their pedantic pontificating, simply want to take over the world. Although Loki is possibly the more complex character because he justifies his bid for power through the philosophy of a fascist demagogue: he will free the human race from freedom (no wonder the anti-fascist Captain America interrupts his proselytizing in Germany).
To stop the Master, Buffy must confront him, but, according to prophecy, the Master will kill the slayer. To stop Chitauri, Iron Man has to hurl a nuclear missile into Loki’s portal, but, as Jarvis tells him, the trip is one-way.
The Master kills Buffy, but Xander revives her. After Iron Man sends the nuke to the mother ship of the Chitauri, his thrusters lose power and he falls back to the earth. When he hits the ground, the light in his chest is no longer glowing. The Hulk growls, and this revives Stark. After dying and saving the world, Buffy decides to go to a party. As for Stark, he proposes to take his comrades out for Shawarma.
One characteristic of Whedon’s work is the distinction he makes between two types of power. The first is the power possessed the Chosen Ones– the slayer, the Avengers — which is the physical, superhuman ability that defines them as messianic figures. This is the power that is needed to save the world, whether it be from the threat of vampires or the Chitauri, but it is bestowed on flawed individuals who are burdened by the weight of this responsibility. The more insidious kind of power is the power of the council — the Watcher’s Council, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s faceless superiors — that is designed to oversee and control the chosen ones. The council sees them as tools that they can use to achieve what they think is a socially optimal end, and the bureaucratic power they hold gives them the authority to dictate how the chosen ones should wield their power even if the source of their mandate is unclear.
This arrogance and narrow-mindedness often creates tension between the superhero and the bureaucracy: the former has a much more personal stake in saving the world while the latter comes from a purely utilitarian perspective that overlooks the human costs of their actions. For Buffy, saving the world also means protecting her mother, her friends and the people in Sunnydale. For The Avengers, saving the world means putting aside their egos and personal issues and working together for a common purpose bigger than themselves. But because of the relationship of the two forms of power, the agent which is the most physically powerful ironically has the least control over it.
Thus in both Buffy and The Avengers, there exists a narrative of the chosen ones subverting and liberating themselves from the authority of the Machiavellian council — for Whedon, the perceived weakness of these agents being tragically human and feeling emotions such as guilt, camaraderie and love are actually strengths that put them in the position to make better decisions over the detached, more “objective” bureaucracy.
A key figure in both stories is The Watcher, the authoritative figure assigned to immediately supervise the agents on the council’s behalf. This is of course the role of Rupert Giles in the Buffyverse, and Nick Fury adopts a similar position in The Avengers. They are first required to do the council’s bidding, but they soon come to understand the flaws his superiors. This happens to Giles in the episode Helpless, where he was required by the Watcher’s Council to physically torture Buffy as a ritual intended for slayers on their eighteenth birthday. Seeing Buffy suffer at the hands of the Council, he undermines them by deciding to help her instead. For Fury, this tipping point comes when he saw that his superiors were willing to nuke Manhattan to end the Chitauri invasion. Instead of cooperating, he lets Iron Man intercept the missile. In both cases, the Watcher and the Council have a different sense of what’s right, because the former has been imbued with a deeper sense of humanism because of their proximity and relationship to the Chosen Ones. They, in a sense, are redeemed.
Whedon’s shadowy councils are further dehumanized by the fact that we never get to know who they are — they are never given names or faces and are always referred to as a collective. This is a political statement against opaque sources of power who presume to hold expertise and knowledge without real understanding. The church, governments, patriarchies, traditional figures of authority — they are all being implicated. And in the power struggles between the messiahs and the councils, it is the messiahs who always win, not because of their superhuman powers but because they turn out to be more human than anyone else.
Part 3: A Hellmouth in the Sky
Just a quick introduction to “Finding The Slayer in the Avengers” — this is a three-part series where guest blogger Leloy Claudio and I discuss the thematic similarities and differences between two of Joss Whedon’s most successful creations, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers.
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One of the most enigmatic characters in Whedon’s Buffyverse is Oz, the withdrawn, ironic member of the gang who turns into a werewolf in the show’s second season. What follows is a major story arc featuring Oz’s struggle to contain his animalistic impulses in order to stop himself from hurting the people around him, especially his girlfriend Willow. In his last episode as a series regular (Wild at Heart)*, he meets another werewolf named Veruca who convinces him that he can’t repress his inner beast, that he is “the wolf all the time”. Upon this realization, he breaks up with Willow and leaves Sunnydale in order to truly protect her from his monstrous self.
Wrestling with one’s inner darkness is a theme that Whedon constantly explores in his characters. Willow, Angel, Xander and other characters have at one point or another succumbed to their own dark sides. Whedon paints the Self as a constant tension between good and evil, and in order for the Scoobies to save the world, they first have to save their selves. This theme plays itself in The Avengers most prominently in the character of Dr. Bruce Banner, who battles the same inner demons as Oz. The two even have similar scenes — in the beginning of “Phases“, Oz wakes up naked in a field after a night of being a werewolf, and Bruce also finds himself naked in a warehouse he crashed on after rampaging as The Hulk.
As with all of Whedon’s “heroes”, The Hulk is a problematic one. Like the highly intelligent Oz, he can contribute to the team as Dr. Banner, a man whose research on gamma rays proved to be indispensable in locating the tesserract, but he is most useful when he taps into his beastly self and uses his superhuman physicality against the enemy. This means taking on the risk of becoming a volatile, unpredictable creature capable of hurting the other Avengers. This is similar to Oz’s ordeal — when Veruca as a werewolf tried to kill Willow, Oz had to transform into the monster he’s afraid of becoming in order to save her. In order to be a hero, they have to bring out the worst in them.
The complexities of Whedon’s moral landscapes is one of the reasons why people are drawn to his narratives. In the case of The Hulk and Oz, the bigger point that he makes isn’t about vanquishing their evil side because ultimately, the monsters inside them are untamable. When Oz returns in “New Moon Rising” claiming that he has control over his werewolf instincts, he is proven wrong when his jealousy of Tara for Willow’s affections brings out the wolf again. Despite Dr. Banner’s philanthropic efforts in India and attempt to control his transformation, anger easily triggers him to become The Hulk. Instead, what Whedon shows us is that sometimes, it is necessary to draw power from one’s inner darkness in order to do what’s right.
Part 2: Power and Authority According to Whedon
*This piece erroneously mentioned Oz’s last appearance was in the episode Fear, Itself. It has been corrected, thanks to reader April.
