“The Eternals” and Representing Difference
Makkari, a powerful leading superhero in the new movie Eternals, is a skilled designer and technician who, under the guise of Thoth, taught writing to the Egyptians. Makkari can run at the speed of light, and the speed at which she can travel allows her to run both on water and up 90 degree walls or cliffs. A speedy-superhero-scientist-god-impersonator, Makkari is a deaf woman of color. Kaylyn McKenna at Accessibility.com praised the creative steps the producers and director of Eternals took, simultaneously pointing out that the moviegoing experience in and of itself remains inaccessible or poorly accessible. McKenna points out that Makkari is the MCU’s first deaf superhero ever, that the MCU has been conspicuously active in improving cast and character diversity, and that Makkari, played by Lauren Ridloff — who is deaf — is an example of a well-rounded and complex character with a disability. Deafness isn’t the first or even fifth important thing about Makkari.
Eternals opened to negative reviews: whereas for some it’s a beautifully awkward film, for many its awkwardness is not beautiful, and its blatant commitment to diversity is part of an aesthetic “pH test” that Walt Disney and other studios are relatively safely inserting into their commercially strong productions. Producer Victoria Alonso thinks that the diversity depicted in the film generated some of the negative reviews, telling Bleeding Cool that “Diversity and inclusion is not a political game for us. It is 100 percent a responsibility because you don’t get to have the global success that we have given the Walt Disney Company without the support of people around the world of every kind of human there is.” Marvel’s willingness to take some hits certainly helps, and Marvel can do so because it’s got other movies in the pipeline for very quick release — four movies came out between July and December of this year.
None of the existing analysis views Eternals as an actual piece of art, though, and I think that’s because such analysis remains focused on the “bottom-line.” This attitude, I would argue, induces its own failure, promoting a market martyrdom of sorts “for the sake of diversity.” It has a “lie back and think of England” feel to it. If, on the other hand, we viewed Eternals as a vital expressive performance first and foremost, and if we saw the film’s radical emphasis on difference as a political argument in itself, I think appreciation for the film would grow.
Diversity is a critical element not only in Eternals’ story, but in its backstory and Marvel historical canon. Implanting DNA structures in early Earth primates, the Celestials created the Eternals alongside “normals” and the beastly Deviants. In doing so, the Celestials inadvertently generated a random variant that makes some “normals” manifest as mutants or superheroes. It makes both narrative and metaphysical sense that a genetic operation creating wide classes of beings would result in diversity. And the emergence of what is nominally a disability alongside powers suggests the arbitrary line between neutral ability, “super” ability and “dis-”ability. This in turn suggests that a truly egalitarian society would begin its architecture, its very material functionality, in difference — that the very design of things would be front-end accessible.
The content and background stories within Eternals are also full of diversity and difference and are very self aware. Ajak, the leader — played by Salma Hayek — is older in ways that make her more vulnerable. Hayek’s portrayal of the team leader avoids claims or displays of invincibility and instead features considerable spaces of vulnerability. Another character, Sprite, considers her perpetual physical appearance as a 12-year-old child to be a disability, and we easily understand why. Thena (AKA Athena) suffers from a psychotic break in the story. There are other incursions into diversity too; Super-inventor Phastos is the first depicted-as-gay superhero in an MCU film. But these are all easy to ignore if one is cynical and views the movie first and foremost as a product rather than a complex piece of collaborative art.
Part of the reason people are cynical about major studio attempts doing diversity justice is that the relationship between activism and art is consistently depoliticized, and film is treated as simply people exchanging ideas in a marketplace. But the relationship between social justice and art — of which film is just one component — is political, not in a partisan sense but in the sense that social justice campaigns require contact, lobbying, and canvassing across the spaces they want to affect. (Such campaigns might pursue these objectives using data and email append services, like those offered by my client Accurate Append, which help fill in data gaps to ensure seamless and cohesive activating.)
Campaigns around disability access, particularly in the cultural realm, require communication between networks of activists and artists. The communication needs to be more than nominal, checklist-guided consultation. There needs to be synergism between the activist and the artist so that art and politics both remain authentic, but mutually influential at deep daily practice/praxis levels. There must be solidarity — vastly different than either the transactional relationship of artistic consultation or the super-intimate relationships of friends or family; rather, solidarity is a commitment to be interested in, curious about, and committed to others.
I’m also surprised nobody has pointed out that Jack Kirby — the iconic comic writer and artist who originally created the Eternals team and backstory — also created the Silver Surfer, a being who belonged nowhere and one of the most iconic modern age comic book characters widely known as a sexy and, at times, extremely depressed loner. An accompanying point is that for Marvel (and at times, playing catch up in the realm of emotional labor, D.C.), to be a superhero is often to experience severe alienation, dysfunction, and social discrimination. Eternals, by making the factors in such problems more explicit, is really just dancing on a stage designed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but which is now a transcendent truth: it sucks, in varying degrees, to be excluded because of difference, even if you’re also very powerful in other ways.
Eternals is an important film because it introduces new superheroes into a pool of established ones, and because those superheroes have been developed by creative writers who are making a good-faith effort to represent difference, wide variants, and a character complexity tied to the real world.
