This article is 6 years old

The Punisher’s Lack of Innovation Keeps Action Genre Stagnant

Entertainment

Illustration by Gemma Fa-Kaji

The Punisher doesn’t disappoint, but that may be because the bar for action television series is so low. The violent scenes feel tasteful, there are compelling female characters and characters of color, the plot is engaging, and the titular character’s crimes in the name of vigilante justice are cast in the morally uncomfortable light they deserve. It’s hard to get too excited though, because shouldn’t that be the norm for all action shows?

For those of you who haven’t watched Marvel and Netflix’s joint production,  in it, army veteran Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, has gone underground after government agents murder his family. With nothing else to live for, he has made it his life’s goal to kill every single person who had a hand in killing his wife and children. As the show goes on and Castle tries to find information to help him in his mission, the audience becomes privy to an enormous government conspiracy about illegal operations centered in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

What The Punisher gets completely right is how it portrays Castle. The audience knows why he murders people, and they empathize with him, but the violence,  and his refusal to show mercy even when some of his victims beg to let them live because they have families, is never glorified. Even when he beats up goons unquestionably loathed by the audience, the violence is a gruesome, painful, deliberate choice, not a scene that pumps the audience up. He’s not a hero. This isn’t a series about a hero (super or otherwise). He’s a man plainly in the moral gray from the opening scene of the first episode when he chooses to run over motorcyclists after safely incapacitating them, using lots of determination and military training he’s not at all hesitant to use off the battlefield. That’s a recipe for a morally uncomfortable protagonist, not a “hero” the audience perceives as the perfect good guy, always in the right. It’s  surprising to see a show produced by Marvel tackle violence in a way that doesn’t overly glorify the brutality as the end-all solution and the show uses it to show how disturbed the hero is.

The show’s secondary plot centers around Dinah Madani, a Persian-American government agent trying to find out who tortured and killed her partner Ahmad Zubair. In a genre swooning over hyper-masculine white men, she’s a breath of fresh air. She’s a strong character and a strong woman, a sadly rare phenomenon in television, especially in this genre typically written by and for men. “Wow. That was sexist, racist, and demeaning of my abilities all in one sentence, sir,” she responds coolly when her supervisor tries to steer her away from pursuing the Zubair case in one of the most insulting ways possible.

No matter how boss Madani comes across as being to the audience, it doesn’t mean that the scene in which Castle’s son callously refers to “kill[ing] a bunch of hajjis” left something to be desired. Sure, Castle tells his son “don’t you ever say that,” but he doesn’t explain why — that it’s degrading to a group of people based on their religion. After all, one ostensible reason for American military troops’ deployment in Afghanistan and the Middle East, in general, is to create a stable, equitable form of government for the people who live there, the people his son writes off as “hajjis,” like a middle school boy calling the nerds he doesn’t like “gay.” Castle just yells at his kid without any clarification and then silently broods until the end of the flashback. The takeaway isn’t necessarily clear to his son, or to the audience.

The Punisher isn’t every awful cliché action series are infamous for being, and it does vary from the mold in considerable ways, but it’s not doing anything particularly daring either. The protagonist is a white man whose wife and kids got fridged. Comic writer Gail Simone coined the term, “Women in Refrigerators” because of how pathetically common it is for Marvel and DC to kill off female characters to motivate the male hero to action. The trope’s name originates from Green Lantern, in which the villain Major Force leaves the corpse of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend literally stuffed in the refrigerator for him to find.

The Punisher didn’t trip over the low, low bar set for action entertainment. It’s trying, but it didn’t try putting literally anyone other than a white man, motivated by his female partner’s murder, at the forefront of its stories. It could benefit from a more nuanced and complex conversation about Islamophobia or gun violence. Just because something doesn’t suck doesn’t mean it’s worth raving about. Although it isn’t nearly as cringe-worthy to watch as most other action shows, if Marvel really wants a glistening review, it’s going to have to do more than just above the bare minimum.