The New York Effect: Marvel's The Avengers

"Superheroes in New York? Give me a break!"

Marvel's The Avengers is a triumph of cinematic storytelling and redefined what it meant to be a summer blockbuster. Not since 2000's The Matrix (or 1993's Jurassic Park before that, or 1977's Star Wars before that) has there been an action movie that so thoroughly captured the public's imagination. Not to be outdone, it was also the tipping point when Marvel Studio's experimental cinematic universe started gaining real traction, causing Warner Bros. to commission an equivalent movie franchise for their DC properties, and for other studios to seriously consider creating their own shared universes. It more or less revolutionized the way that modern blockbusters are made. Soaring action, amazing visuals, fantastic characters, and a narrative predicated on its ability to make you root for the heroes: it's a perfect storm of elements that create a movie that will preserve itself in the cultural landscape for years, even decades, to come.

But that's not all. As much as this movie is just plain good filmmaking, it also does something that very few comic book superhero movies had done up to that point. It wholly, unironically, and unabashedly embraced its origins as, exactly that, a comic book superhero movie. It faithfully translated decades worth of characters and story in a way that made it easy for a moviegoing public to consume. Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk all look like they walked off of the pages of a comic book. Even things like the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier seemed like they were put in just because the creators loved the source material so much that they made a giant floating fortress priority one for ILM's visual effects department. Of course, that's not everything. There is one element that manages to ground the movie as real, as taking place in a world comparable to ours - even through all of this grand sci-fi fantasy. It's a place that transcends its medium, but is so integral to the Marvel Universe that, for a time, nearly every single one of their comic books took place there - and The Avengers, of course, had no other place they could set their half-hour long action-scene-to-end-all-action-scenes.

New York City.

"It was life or death, it was grand opera, it was the greatest show on Earth, and we - every single one of us - we had the best seat in the house." -Phil Sheldon, Marvels (1994)

Marvel Comics is based in 135 W. 50th Street, basically in the heart of New York. For nearly a hundred years, Marvel has been producing comic books from their offices in the greatest city in the world. Being centralized in NYC meant that most of the writers from the city which meant that, when stories of fighting Germans in World War II got old or they realized you couldn't set every comic book in a new fictional setting each month, they started writing about locations that they knew and what they knew was NYC. When the first issue of The Fantastic Four came out in 1961, it began a trend of setting the more realistic superhero stories (i.e. those of personal loss, struggle, and difficult of being accepted for who you are) in the gritty concrete metropolis that these writers lived in. So, when Spider-Man, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, X-Men, The Avengers, and many, many others started coming about, they too were similarly based in NYC (or, at least, close to the city). Soon, being set in New York effectively became a staple of Marvel Comics - and you'd nary find a comic book out today that references NYC without also referencing how there are hundreds of superheroes flying around.

This love affair with New York naturally bleeds over into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even if Marvel Studios tried their hardest to diversify the locations we see in the films. When it came to their big gangbuster The Avengers that brought all of their previous heroes together for a rock-'em-sock-'em brawl, there was really only one place they could set it.

Before we can talk about how the main film uses New York, one has to talk about the deleted scenes featuring Captain America that were excised to make sure the movie didn't feel overlong with unnecessary bloat. It features Captain America's Brooklyn apartment, walking around the heavily-commercialized streets of modern day Manhattan, drinking some coffee at the Grand Central Cafe while sketching out the looming Stark Tower (and being waited on by Critical Role's Ashley Johnson before being called a moron by Stan Lee for not asking for her number), taking the subway, and renting out use of a fight club for the night. There's an air of melancholy throughout the proceedings, the internal disposession of a man who's been thrown into a world both familiar and unknown. Yes, Steve is back in New York, but it's not the same New York that he left back in 1945. Instead, he's in a heavily consumerized and computerized New York that only marginally resembles what he left. It's an interesting, gripping sequence - at least it is for someone who loves New York City (like me). Seeing Steve at so many iconic New York locales, navigating the streets and public transportation, and even staying too long at a cafe just gives his character so much grounding that it feels like such a shame that this sequence was cut from the movie.

The first real glimpse we see of New York is when we see Iron Man installing what I assume is some sort of Arc Reactor node into the power lines at the bottom of the Hudson River. Now, this scene makes me think a couple of things, but foremost on my mind has to be the negotiations that Stark Industries had to make to ConEdison and the mayor about replacing their natural gas and hydroelectric sources with this newfangled tech. I'm just thinking about ConEd scrambling to try and stop Stark but he shoves them aside with the power of his massive amounts of money. It does make me wonder where the other power lines he's replaced with Arc Reactor nodes are since the city has so many different sources of power. Also, why the heck is Tony doing this personally when he's got employees? He doesn't need to get the Iron Man's fancy paint job drenched in super filthy Hudson River water when he can get literally any one of his thousands of workers to do it for him. I don't know, maybe Tony just wanted to do it himself, but when has he ever been that sentimental?

Anyway, Tony flies up and out of the Hudson (dangerously close to the Staten Island Ferry, though it's not like I would've minded if he'd sunk the boat by accident) and starts cruising through Manhattan towards Stark Tower. Now, earlier, in the deleted scene, it's implied by Ashley Johnson that Iron Man flies through the city pretty regularly. Now, Stark Tower is located where the MetLife building is in real life which is just at the end of Park Avenue. To bring this to practical application in my life, I used to go to school on Park Avenue which means that, if I lived in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, my daily commutes would have been filled with Iron Man careening through the sky towards a high-tech art-deco skyscraper with his name plastered on it. I would have been totally fine with this.

Also, can I just say how much I love the idea that Stark Industries bought the MetLife building and built on top of it to create Stark Tower? It just gives it that extra layer of realism that it needs to cement this as taking place in New York. So many movies just place fictional buildings wherever there's a vacant spot that no one will miss but Tony makes sure to put it smack dab in the middle of Manhattan for the whole world to see. As Tony calls it, "Stark Tower is going to become a beacon of self-sustaining, clean energy."

A side note: Tony mentions later on in the movie when he's trying to invite Bruce to come and visit Stark Tower that the "top ten floors are all R&D." Is this a thing that happens in New York? In big skyscrapers, you've got people working on research and development? That sounds odd to me; usually nothing gets developed in New York anymore.

Another side note: In a deleted scene, Bruce Banner has an extended conversation with the guy (janitor? repairman?) that found him. During the course of this scene, we see that Bruce has landed somewhere that has a pretty good view of the NYC skyline, which makes me think he probably landed in Jersey. But one has to wonder: where the hell was the Helicarrier flying that the Hulk got ejected THAT far out and so close to New York? Later dialogue seems to make it seem like they were pretty far from New York, and where Thor landed looks closer to Maryland or something than anywhere near NYC. But I digress.

We don't really get back to New York until the big battle at the end, but let's talk about the big battle because the entire third act of the movie basically is just the big  battle. It's centralized around Grand Central Station because that's the nearest landmark to Stark Tower. In fact, you can see the road that splits in half then goes into a "freeway" as the main battleground between the Chitauri forces and Captain America/Black Widow/Hawkeye. That's the same location - which is right in front of Grand Central Station - that we see the famous team circle shot. Also, Hulk and Thor crash one of the leviathans into Grand Central later. Oops.

Because the Avengers are good at being superheroes, they actually try to contain the alien threat to a specific area. They're mostly successful, keeping them all locked in somewhere between 39th and 42nd street (although we learn in Daredevil that the damage reached as far as Hell's Kitchen which is on the other side of the city, implying that ALL of Midtown was assaulted). Pretty impressive considering the Chitauri are incredibly mobile fliers with plasma bolt weaponry. We see some NYPD officers doing their job, as well as U.S. Army reservists (probably the ones stationed in or around the city, likely from Penn Station). Either way, we see quite a lot of Hawkeye stationed on top of a building which I'm guessing is one of the many hotels that surround Grand Central. Thor also flies to the top of the Chrysler Building and turns it into a giant lightning rod to shoot massive volumes of thunder at the Chitauri forces, even toasting a couple of leviathans in one go. Of course, Thor breaks all of the windows on the Chrysler Building. I'd love to see the workmen trying to reinstall all those windows after the fact.

Of course, Gideon Malick decides to shoot a nuke at New York because, hey, let's kill the Avengers and the alien threat all in one go, why don't we? Who cares if millions of people die in nuclear hellfire? So, the World Security Council overrides Nick Fury's authority as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and sends a jet that fires a nuke. It flies over the George Washington Bridge before Tony catches it, redirects it into the Chitauri mothership (which, for some reason, kills all of the Chitauri below Phantom Menace-style), before narrowly escaping with his life. All in all, a job well done considering the center of civilization could've been wiped out if Tony had miscalculated when to start boosting up into the portal. It does make wonder where eleven-year-old Peter Parker was during all of this. We do see Iron Man boost past Queens on his way to Manhattan, so maybe he was watching all of this go down from the relative safety of his apartment building. Also, it makes me think that Doctor Stephen Strange was probably super busy in the aftermath, and Matt Murdock must have been out of town or something, 'cause he probably would've mentioned punching a few aliens during his series.

Yet another side note: In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Skye mentions that S.H.I.E.L.D. had managed to clean the whole incident up in a matter of days. What the hell kind of construction crews does this spy organization have working for them that they can sweep a major extraterrestrial disaster like this under the rug?

One last side note: There's quite a bit of 9/11 imagery at play with the Battle of New York, the event even gaining a mythic status in the narrative of the MCU going forward. I don't know how I feel about this, but it makes sense that such a paradigm-shifting event would claim that sort of status in a world that suddenly realizes how small it is in the grand scheme of the universe. Still, like the real world, there are heroes - however imperfect - that come to protect those in need. And that's no small thing.

Anyway, we get a nice little ending tag with Stan Lee where he proclaims his disbelief that there are superheroes in New York because meta humor is always fun.

So, how well does The Avengers use New York City, cradle of all civilization? Pretty damn well. Not only does it call back to its roots by using the city of the Marvel Universe as the setting of its huge finale, but it does so in a way that faithfully translates the comic books to the silver screen. Being a New Yorker does make the experience even better, since big disasters always make me wonder about how citywide officials respond to events like these. And, hey, any big budget movie that makes me think about how ConEdison is scrambling for the woodwork should definitely receive a five-star rating in my book - setting aside, of course, it being one of the most culturally significant movies of all time.

Now that's what I call the New York Effect.