Figure 1: Texturally rich costuming of Matt Murdock character in Daredevil.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands.

How far are Marvel Studios’ film and television franchises visually coded for homogeneity? How insistently, that is to say, is brand identity maintained at the levels of design, cinematography, editing and post-production processing? This question seems worth pursuing in relation to Marvel’s Daredevil (Netflix, 2015), which has already been critically positioned as divergent from prior entries in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” super-franchise. All the MCU films since 2008 have been rated PG-13, while the ABC television series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–) and Marvel’s Agent Carter (2014-15) are consistently anodyne, even at their darkest. Daredevil, by contrast, is already notorious for its frequent and intensely graphic violence, which earned it a TVMA certification, and for the conflicted nature of its anti-heroic protagonist. This shift in tone is not the only departure from the prior Marvel norm. Much more assertively than Agent Carter, and even more than the DC offerings on the CW, the new show emphasizes that its protagonist is one of Marvel’s “street-level” superheroes, with the action never straying beyond Hell’s Kitchen and the narrative focusing heavily on the socially disadvantaged and marginalized. While it is not the first Marvel property to introduce comic-book characters without their familiar costume trappings and idiosyncrasies of grooming, Daredevil has arguably gone further than its predecessors in this regard. For example, the series reduces the comics’ hirsute, flamboyantly coiffed and green-ulster-clad Leland Owlsley (Bob Gunton) to a deceptively avuncular elderly man with thinning hair and a short back and sides, dressed in earth-toned tweeds. Indeed, Daredevil even deprives Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) of his red superhero suit until the climax of the final episode.

Showrunner Steven DeKnight has underscored the ways in which Daredevil differs visually from network series like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., noting that he and his D.P., Matt Lloyd, “wanted to be able to do a show that was literally darker than what you would see on a network,” where series tend to be “very bright, very evenly lit,” and further that they “wanted to take more of the color palette of the classic movies of the ’70s, the Dog Day Afternoon and French Connection and Taxi Driver.” The series’ production designer, Loren Weeks, also emphasizes Daredevil’s departure from the sleek, well-appointed and technology-rich environments that typify Marvel’s cinematic tales of billionaire playboys, demigods and super-soldiers. Tellingly, Weeks claims: “We’re more The Wire than other Marvel movies. It’s not the stuff you see in Agents of SHIELD, it’s the stuff you see every day.”

Stress on the quotidian, invocation of the ultra-realist Wire, insistence on chiaroscuro lighting (with its inevitable noir associations), and reference to the subdued palette of dour seventies thrillers all serve to distance Daredevil not only from other Marvel properties but also from other broadly cognate television shows. They rhetorically position the series as something “grittier” than the quasi-realist narratives of street-level superheroes in Arrow (CW, 2012–) and The Flash (CW, 2014–). Indeed, if there is a DC comparison to be made, it is with the notoriously tenebrous and bleak Dark Knight films. So, if we are to take Weeks’ and DeKnight’s remarks at face value, how does the visual style of Daredevil fulfill the branding imperative of offering variety within identity and novelty within continuity?

A number of recurrent or repeated visual motifs both in Daredevil’s paratextual materials—posters, publicity stills, and so on—and in the episodes themselves serve to weld strongly to Marvel’s other film and television, and to its comic-book lineage. Use of strong color in Daredevil represents the most interesting variation on established Marvel brand elements. MCU style in toto is defined by chromatic intensity and richness (in contradistinction to the DC film and television “multiverse” that has gradually developed since Batman Begins). Dominant color values have varied, with Phase Two movies and the second series of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. frequently exhibiting lower values and lower-key lighting than Phase One. Even so, selective, punctuative use of high-intensity colors is endemic to Marvel’s television and film offerings. Only the environments and personnel of S.H.I.E.L.D. are stripped of high value and saturated color; otherwise, the heroes and villains and their worlds are as bright as the Marvel logo, and the comic-book pages we glimpse in the animated version of that logo that heads each film and television show from the MCU. In most cases, focal points of vibrant color are typically located one way or another on the bodies of the protagonists, from Iron Man’s scarlet and gold livery to Peggy Carter’s blue suit, white blouse and red hat (used so extensively in publicity materials for Agent Carter), and from Thor’s flaxen hair to the Hulk’s green skin.

Figure 2: Superficially neutral costuming of Wilson Fisk character in Daredevil

Daredevil largely displaces intense color from bodies, except in the case of the saturated red costume worn by the “ninja” villain, Nobu (Peter Shinkoda), in a watershed fight scene. As befits a faux-realist television series, and especially one that unfolds over thirteen instantly reviewable episodes, the devil is in the details in Stephanie Maslansky’s costumes; bold gestures are correspondingly few and far between. Thus Matt Murdock’s suits are mostly mid-value monochrome but his clothes are texturally rich—shirts, for example, are nubby oxford rather than smooth poplin—suggesting the blind man’s heightened reliance on tactility (Fig. 1). By the same token, wisecracking Foggy Nelson (Eldon Hensen) is also superficially neutral in his dress, but the printed shirt fabrics and animal-motif ties reward leisurely, close inspection and add a “quirky but not flamboyant” note – and so on. Unmodified strong color is eschewed in inverse proportion to the dominance of all these surface nuances, a choice that is most notable in the reimagining of principal antagonist Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). The white suits and ascot of the comic book Kingpin are relegated to an “Easter egg” joke in the fifth episode, while Fisk’s open-necked silk shirts and mohair-tonic, three-piece suits for the series are either black, gray or muted blue, the surface of the latter sometimes broken up with self-stripes that further mitigate saturation (Fig. 2).

Figure 3: Vivid lighting in Daredevil.

Vivid color is mainly a property of environments, and more specifically the illumination of environments, in Daredevil. Murdock speaks of experiencing “a world on fire,” and in addition to a couple of livid-red POV shots simulating this for the audience, the idea is echoed each episode in the opening credits, which show New York landmarks and finally Daredevil himself forming viscously out of a red haze. A no-less insistent leitmotiv is the acid yellow and green light suffusing the panes of the picture windows that are endemic to the various warehouse and loft spaces in which so much of the nocturnal action takes place — including Murdock’s own apartment (Fig. 3). This sickly glow can in most cases be rationalized as light pollution from neon signage and street lamps (the now celebrated hallway fight from the second episode is one of the exceptions), but this is ultimately beside the point. The device is surely used chiefly because the grid of glazing bars in these windows provides a strong, stylized, quasi-graphic backdrop to action – and perhaps because both the strong color fields and insistent linearity recall the simplified backgrounds beloved of comic-book inkers and colorists (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: Example of simplified backgrounds of classic comic books.

Figure 5: Netflix’s posters for Daredevil.

Very little of this disembodied color creates as potent an effect as Netflix’s Hopperesque banner and posters for Daredevil (Fig. 5), which feature a cityscape bathed in the super-intense blue that hyperbolically represents nighttime in screen media as well as some comic strips. It is in these paratextual images that the “Marvelness” of Daredevil is perhaps most economically and powerfully expressed. Even so, and notwithstanding analogies with The Wire and Dog Day Afternoon, Daredevil’s imagery consistently reflects the fact that, as Loren Weeks puts it: “We didn’t want to be too literal with the real. It is the Marvel universe, after all.”

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013).

In 1980, American light artist James Turrell’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, “Light and Space,” reportedly caused “injury” not to one but to several spectators, resulting in two lawsuits filed against the Whitney. The first lawsuit was filed in Federal Court in 1982, by retired judge of the Oregon State Supreme Court Ralph M. Holman, on behalf of his wife, Louise, who charged that Turrell’s show created an “illusion” in which she became radically “disoriented and confused” and, as a result, was “violently precipitated to the floor.” The lawsuit sought an unspecified amount of damages from the artist. Also in 1982, a second suit was brought in front of the New York State Supreme Court by Mrs. Blanch Robins of New York, who charged that Turrell’s same exhibition caused her, after “stepping back against what she thought was a wall, to fall and permanently injure her right wrist.” Robins requested $250,000 compensation from the Whitney Museum. As extraordinary as these cases seem, they are not isolated incidents. In 1999, a pirated clip of Turrell’s artwork was inserted into a Pokémon cartoon which was then played on television in Japan, reportedly “setting off a rash of seizures and nausea that sent more than 700 people to the hospital,” many of whom were children and elderly people. Moreover, Turrell’s work with the medium of colored light is not alone in eliciting such responses.

In these examples, where does liability rest? Is the artist responsible for causing these injuries; the museum; or the spectator? The question is key not only because it forces a consideration of liability but also of the problems that lie at the heart of theorizing media aesthetics. Where and how do we begin to speak about media artwork? Where does it begin and end, and where and how does the subject fit into it all; extending from it (McLuhan), or rather, defining himself or herself against it? If a media artwork remains exclusive to a physical art-object, then one could argue that the artist or museum is responsible for the content they put on public display. But on the other hand, perhaps responsibility falls on the spectator, which is to say that art and aesthetics reside in subjective experience. Certainly this has been the answer for many in art and science since Goethe’s 1810 Theory of Colors.

Josef Albers, from Interaction of Color (1963).

These polarized positions delineate the two general ways in which color has traditionally been theorized in Western art and culture. On the one hand, it is argued that color inheres in things in the world, as an objective, physical, or quantifiable phenomena. For instance, “this oil pastel is yellow,” or “this apple is red.” Followers of this school tend to include theorists like Aristotle, the classical opticians (including Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton), factions of modern science, technology industries, chemistry, physics, and certain industrial color ordering systems. On the other hand, it is argued that color is a subjective phenomenon that alters according to the physiology of the perceiver. For example, in the above image from 20th century colorist Josef Albers, he showed how the same neutral brown changed its hue and value based on its surrounding colors. Traditionally, artists, modern philosophers (including Goethe), and certain sub-sections of modern science, like psychophysics and psychology, tend to follow this view.

At the same time, as a phenomenon of subjective experience, color becomes strange and estranged; inconsistent, unreliable, and, for some – a deceptive simulacra. Such a fear and distrust of color dates back to the origins of Western metaphysics. Sophists, rhetoricians, and painters – i.e., those who write with color – deemed “creator[s] of phantoms,” Plato argued; “technicians of ornament and makeup.” But by far the most poisonous of simulacra is color: a cosmetic and false appearance that, like the sophist’s “gaudy speeches” and “glistening words” seduce the listener with their ambiguity and sparkle, but unlike words, carry no representational value beyond itself. Color holds to nothing and to no one. This elusiveness has given numerous philosophers license for its romanticization, from Goethe to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, and even Adorno. (Benjamin in 1914: “The imagination can be developed only by contemplating colours… pure vision is concerned not with space and objects but with colour”; Heidegger in 1935: “Color shines and only wants to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone”; and Baudrillard in 1995: “No analysis of the vibrations of light will ever explain the sensory imagining of colours…”). In short, the denial of subjective responsibility in aesthetic experience no doubt contributes to the problems with a theory of media aesthetics (not to mention legal liability).

From the “James Turrell Installation at Crystals” in Las Vegas, 2013.

Moving forward, Turrell’s work (alongside others in this genre that must be discussed at length elsewhere) embodies the paradoxical tensions between subject and object at the heart of media art. Many factors – an artist’s intention and conception, installation, audience reception, the relation to the museum architecture, the number of people in the museum, and the cultural and physiological background of the viewer, which shapes their perception and color vision – all count. All of these factors work together in what must be called “media aesthetics.” Future theories of media aesthetics need to note such ambivalences and crossovers.

This is the third post in Antenna’s new series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. The first two posts were written by series guest editor Kyle Conway. If you missed either of those, they can be read here. Look out for regular posts in the series (most) every other Wednesday in December, January, and beyond.