MARVELLOUS REVOLUTION
BY INCLUDING A FEMALE SOUTH ASIAN SUPERHERO IN ITS RANKS, THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE IS SHOWING HOLLYWOOD HOW DIVERSITY MUST BE EMBRACED
OOver the past decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has tracked a series of tectonic shifts in popular culture. For one, it marked a generational change in perspective about films and TV. Last-generation giants like Martin Scorsese might sneer that superhero movies “aren’t cinema”, but it’s equally fair to point out that his is the perspective of an elderly white man, a group easily caricatured—think Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump—as addicted to the alpha-male mythos and unwilling to engage with any culture but their own. The fact is, if white male shootem-ups were the reveries of Scorsese’s time, multicultural fantasy fiction is how this generation dreams. How else does one explain the growing mainstreet dominance of cinema like The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Avengers
and Game of Thrones?
Another tectonic shift was the end of the era in which only white males played leading roles. This was on visible display at the end of Avengers: Endgame, with the symbolism ladled on with a bucket—as a battered SpiderMan handed the Infinity Gauntlet to Captain Marvel, he turned to face Thanos’s charging horde and said, “I don’t know how you’re going to get through all of that.” Cue the arrival of six more superheroes—all of them female, two of them black—with Okoye grimly replying, “Don’t worry. She’s got help.” It may have been Iron Man who saved that day, but that was clearly a last hurrah—by the end of Endgame, Tony Stark was dead, Steve Rogers had handed his shield to a black man and Thor had departed the Earth to become a seventh wheel in the Guardians of the Galaxy.
With non-white male leads finally taking the spotlight in the MCU—both in front of the camera and behind it—there has been a mushrooming of female and ethnically diverse
Given quasi-racist depictions like The Simpsons’ Apu, Ms Marvel marks a watershed in the portrayal of South Asians in western pop culture
personalities, perspectives and storylines. African Americans and white women, the spearheads of this cultural revolution, quite naturally took the stage first, with Black Panther and Captain Marvel exploring colonialism and patriarchy, respectively. A step behind, however, are the stories of other minority communities—such as South Asians.
Ms Marvel, a series being launched this year as part of the MCU’s Phase IV, highlights this trend. (Phases I-III include the films from 2008’s Iron Man to 2019’s End Game; Phase IV is the postThanos universe.) Based on a comic book character rebooted in 2014, it tells the story of a 16-year-old PakistaniAmerican school girl in Jersey City—Kamala Khan—who becomes a superhero courtesy a Marvel MacGuffin, in this case, a mist that ‘awakens her latent powers’. Among her powers are the ability to change form (think Mr Fantastic) and super healing. While there are supervillains aplenty, the comics also explore what it means to be a brown Muslim in a white world through a coming-of-age narrative set in an American high school. Taking this project to the big leagues, in late September last year, Marvel announced a Ms Marvel TV series, to launch in late 2021. The title character is played by Iman Vellani, a round-faced Pakistani-Canadian newcomer who will also have a role in bigger projects like Captain Marvel 2, currently slated to launch on November 11.
These developments mark a watershed in the depiction of South Asians in western pop culture. It’s been a long journey from the quasi-racist depiction that is The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, marked by achingly slow progress— even Deadpool’s Dopinder, coming almost 30 years after Apu, was little more than a shallow caricature of the accent and employment of choice of many South Asian immigrants to the United States. ■
—Aditya Wig