University of Baltimore to offer course on Marvel's cinematic films

I’m a fan of comic books.  That’s no surprise to anyone that knows me to any great degree.  At the age of 38 (I’ll be 39 in December), I’ve been reading comic books since I was ~5 years old. I’ve been collecting them since I was a teenager who rode his bicycle several miles from our home at Redstone Arsenal (in Huntsville, AL) to the comic book store.  As a teen, I was drawn to the Uncanny X-Men though at the time I didn’t know why (looking back, it makes sense as mutants were a metaphor for the disadvantaged, oppressed, and marginalized members of society, and between my ethnicity and sexuality, well let’s just say I’m part of those groups in more ways than one, so mutants likely resonated with me on some level). As I got older, my interests expanded; I read all manner of books, from the Amazing Spider-Man to the Incredible Hulk, from the Avengers to the Fantastic Four.  I even branched out and started reading DC titles like Action Comics, Justice League America, and Wonder Woman.  I remember reading comics and thinking how cool it would be, if not virtually impossible, to see my favorite characters on the big screen, and despite my affection for DC Comics, my favorite characters have always been Marvel heroes.  Specifically, the Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

Fast forward more than a decade to the year 2008, and the debut of Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, a movie that was a risky move for the fledgling Marvel studios.  Despite the success of Fox’s X-Men franchise, and Sony’s Spider-Man movies, the new studio (which is not affiliated with Fox or Sony, which is why you won’t see Spider-Man crossing over with the Hulk, or the X-Men and Avengers together on the big screen), there was no guarantee that an Iron Man movie would be profitable. Following an opening weekend that saw the movie bring in $100.7 million at the box office, and buckets of praise for Downey Jr’s performance, Marvel realized they had a hit on their hands.  Over the years, audiences have been treated to two Iron Man sequels, two Captain America movies, two Thor movies, and as far fetched as it once sounded to me, a movie with a talking tree and a raccoon.  As of this writing Guardians of the Galaxy boasts box office sales (in the US) of >$313 million.  All of this is fantastic of course.  For this comic book fan, seeing characters I love and grew up with on the big screen is like a dream come true.  Nowhere, and I mean nowhere is this dream more exciting, thrilling, amazing, fantastic, and fanboigasm inducing than the spectacle that was 2012’s The Avengers.

Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and the Hulk were brought to the big screen under the direction of Joss Whedon (who’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of my absolute favorite pop culture creations and one of the best tv shows I’ve ever seen).  Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johanssen, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L Jackson, and Tom Hiddleston came together (along with many other actors) to create a blockbuster film that took in domestic sales of over $623 million dollars (it grossed more than $1 billion worldwide).  The success of that movie paved the way for Guardians of the Galaxy, and showed that Marvel Studios was here to stay.  I’ll never forget walking out of that theater after watching the movie and being shell shocked. Dumbfounded.  Boggled.  Gast was flabbered.

That movie rocked my world.  In all the right ways.  Going by the sales, it seems like I wasn’t alone in that.

The Marvel movies have become a phenomenon that hold up a mirror to our culture.  In a press release from the University of Baltimore, it was revealed that a new course is going to be offered in 2015:  “Media Genres: Media Marvels”.

The course, “Media Genres: Media Marvels,” will examine how Marvel’s series of interconnected films and television shows, plus related media and comic book sources and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the “hero’s journey,” offer important insights into modern culture. The course is believed to be the first of its kind in the country.

Taught by Arnold T. Blumberg, D.C.D. ’04, an adjunct faculty member in UB’s Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, the class will uncover the unprecedented efforts by Marvel to establish a viable universe of plotlines, characters, and backstories that leave no question unanswered, no story or character abandoned or otherwise unexplained. Blumberg says this critical look will encourage students to better understand the culture’s fixation on superheroes, fictional global threats, and other “widescreen” novelistic tales that have pushed the comic book-to-film ethos into new territory.

Yes please.  I’ll take that class.  Why are we, as a culture, fixated on superheroes?  Are we obsessed with fictional global threats?  As I thought about these questions, I realized that these movies-especially The Avengers-reflect our cultural zeitgeist.  We live in a post-911 culture where many view the enemy as being nameless, faceless, unknowable, unreasonable forces bent on eradicating our Western civilization.  These forces, led by a charismatic man of tremendous power, and near godlike levels of disdain and apathy toward those he deems less than him present a grave threat that we want our heroes to overcome.  No, I don’t think that Joss Whedon wrote the Chitauri as being Islamic terrorists and Loki as Osama bin Laden, but you can see the cultural influences.  Those influences continue when you recognize that the Avengers represent America’s military might and the heroes we wish truly existed who could protect us from outside threats. There looks to be plenty of material from Marvel’s Cinematic movies to discuss and deconstruct, enough perhaps, to feature in a second course.

What would such a second course look like? It would need to be one that while drawing from the same material, analyzed it in a unique manner.  What else can Marvel’s Cinematic Universe tell us about our culture? Does the MCU reflect more than our cultural values?  Does it also reflect our cultural attitudes? What does the MCU say about institutionalized sexism or racism?  What does the MCU say about our attitudes towards LBGT people?  The fact that the main cast of The Avengers featured only one woman and one black person, while featuring no LGBT people does indeed reflect our culture. As in the comic book industry or the video game industry, LGBT people, women, and People of Color have become increasingly vocal about their lack of representation.  They want to be heard. They want to be seen.  The message is clear-white, male, cisgender, and heterosexual has been the default for pretty much the whole of human history, and it’s time to change that. It’s time to recognize that there is no default gender, race, or sexuality for humanity, and that if our popular culture is going to reflect our values, perhaps it ought to reflect more than a narrow slice of the humanity pie.

Yeah, I think that would be a decent foundation for a 202 level course. Don’t you?

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University of Baltimore to offer course on Marvel's cinematic films
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2 thoughts on “University of Baltimore to offer course on Marvel's cinematic films

  1. 1

    I like your analysis and thoughts about what this course (and a 102 course) might entail. I hope they don’t forget Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D on television is part of the MCU. Regarding adding POC and LGBT characters to the movies, they might be just a little bit stuck with what’s in the comics for the named movies, but in Agents, they have Ming Na as an ass-kicker and two women in STEM fields, though one is probably self-taught (Skye as the hacker, but it seems there isn’t much she can’t do with a computer). And since the male ass-kicker of the group turned out to be a bad guy and got his butt arrested, it looked like the end of last season they were going to move an African-American into the group as the new male ass-kicker. LGBT are still missing as far as I can tell, but it’s only about to begin its second season, so I hold out hope.

  2. 2

    Thanks. It’s funny that that post came almost fully formed. It was very stream of consciousness like, where other posts I have to think hard to come up with something to say.

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