The recent dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the box office has been accompanied with some attempts at achieving similar wonders on television. After a shaky start Marvel’s Agents of Shield has managed to be a consistently entertaining show set in a world were some people have super powers. However Agents of Shield is not groundbreaking television – it is an action show that almost feels nostalgic for a past age of television. It is like a 21st century Six Million Dollar man but with our modern taste for ensemble casting and on-going story arcs.
Daredevil is different. Firstly is available via Netflix and streamed over the internet. Netflix, as is there current model, made all the episodes in the series available at the same time. Consequently watching the show is more like watching a box set of DVDs and that presents its own challenges – cliffhangers at the end of an episode can be resolved immediately by the viewer for example. This gives the whole show a book like feel, with episode more like chapters at which the viewer can take an optional break.
Unlike the lighthearted fare of Agents of Shield of the Marvel movies, Daredevil is not easy viewing. The title character is presented as a violent vigilante who beats information out of criminals. The chief villain has an unspeakably violent temper. People are decapitated, beaten to death, strangled and executed. This is a violent series.
The center of the series (well episode 8 so a tad after the exact middle) contains one of the most difficult episodes of television I have seen. ‘Shadows in the Glass’ takes the story to its heart by concentrating not on Matt Murdock aka Daredevil but rather the big-bad of his universe Wilson Fisk aka The Kingpin (although not named as such in the series).
This is a brutal and disturbing episode but it is utterly unlike anything ever made regarding a superhero comic book arch-villain. Vincent D’Onforio does not play Fisk as a cartoon psychopath or a megalomaniac. Instead he plays a man who is, if anything, hypersensitive to emotion. He plays a man who finds the world and people confronting and difficult. Fisk is a sensitive, introverted man and this episode takes us into his childhood where he is brutalized (i.e. made brutal) by his father. The story arc of this series has also given Fisk a genuine love interest and in this episode we are shown how that relationship is becoming a genuine one. Some of the events are deeply shocking – particularly while Fisk is being portrayed by a child actor but the net result is to induce in the viewer deep sympathy for Fisk as a character. He is a man who cares – he is also a brutal murderer (not much of a spoiler).
Daredevil season 1 would work almost has a simple tragedy about Wilson Fisk. Instead Fisk’s arc is just a reflection of Matt Murdock’s.
When the season starts, both Fisk and Murdock are in play. Fisk (not named yet) has his crime empire and Murdock is already beating up villains at night while lawyer by day. By the end of the season Murdock will be clearly Daredevil and Fisk will be clearly a comic book villain but both has to go through physical and emotional trials to get there.
Fisk is motivated by love – at first a dysfunctional love of the city which drives him to seek power, money and influence but also a love for his friend Wesley and later a more romantic love. Murdock on the other hand is motivated by conflicting feelings of guilt. Fisk v Daredevil (the man in black for most of the season) is a conflict of dysfunctional love versus misplaced guilt. Guilt is the good guy.
Guilt is a strange emotion to build a hero on. It isn’t a specific guilt about a dead loved one (although his father’s death plays a part) but rather a mess of unresolved responsibilities. Central to that is Catholicism. Daredevil as a show is openly Catholic – not a preachy or even Theological Catholicism but a cultural and psychological Catholicism. Murdock is conflicted by sins of omission (not stopping Fisk) and sins of commission (the possibility of having to kill Fisk to stop him). Consequently a local priest plays an important role and the opening credits mix candle wax and Catholic imagery with aspects of New York.
There are issues. Crime and fear of crime reflects 1970-80s perspective of cities spiraling out of control. This is partly explained as New York being a city still recovering from the alien attack from the Avengers movie but it still feels oddly dated. Understanding Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil helps the season’s aesthetic and viewpoint make more sense – particularly the Miller mini-series The Man Without Fear which acts as Miller’s revised origin story for Daredevil. This ties the Daredevil show to DC’s re-iteration of Batman. Modern cinema takes n Batman have repeatedly turned to Miller’s Dark Knight Returns as the canon of Batman angst and to center Batman in a world of social-pessimism. Narratively this makes a lot of sense in so far as Daredevil really is a violent vigilante in a way much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe heroes are not.
Ethnic diversity is not well handled. This again arises out of a kind of narrative logic, borrowings from the comic book plot lines, that 1980’s Frank Miller vibe and possibly some laziness. Fisk’s allies in crime are a Russian gang, a Chinese Triad and a Japanese Yakuza like group. The lead Japanese gangster is also a ninja, the head of the Chinese heroin gang is never called “inscrutable” but is played pretty much that way, the Russians are child-kidnapping thugs with thick accents. However these stereotypes start as a kind of basic material for the show. The writers then build on them. The Russian gang is led by two brothers and the show takes some pains to give them a backstory with more emotional depth. The lead Japanese gangster, Nobu (played by Peter Shinkoda ) is left enigmatic and likewise Madame Gao (played by Wai Ching Ho) only becomes more mysterious as the season passes. In Nobu’s case this is clealry part of set up for future ninja themed stroylines for Daredevil. Madame Gao’s cryptic hints also may be seeds of future plots. A positive aspect of both Nobu and Gao is that in most episodes they speak their native language and even Fisk accepts that as reasonable. The show does deal in cliches about Japanese and Chinese culture (ninja from Japan, opium/heroin from China) but doesn’t confuse the two (lampshaded occasionally by characters who confuse the two cultures and languages).
Beyond the villains the supporting characters include a very plausible Ben Urich played by Vondie Curtis-Hall and Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) as nurse who is drawn into helping Daredevil primarily by stitching him back together again. The stitching back together again is important as this is a physically very violent series. Daredevil doesn’t use guns but that mean he has to regularly beat up people and naturally they tend to fight back. The show attempts to show the fights as having real consequences for Murdock/Daredevil but it is here that the realism and fanatsy elements don’t gel well. While some claim is made that Murdock has learned some meditation tricks that help him heal faster, it is also clear the the cumulative effect of the injuries that he is shown to have received (and needed treatment for) should be close to crippling. Still the connection here with Murdock’s childhood and patching up his own boxing father fits in well with the themes of penance and perhaps a kind of “mortification of the flesh” notion.
Overall compelling television.
Camestros Felapton 