The first sequence we see in Hawkeye is an origin story for Kate Bishop, the person who will eventually (spoiler alert) become the second Hawkeye. We find out that as a kid, she lived in a Manhattan high-rise during the Battle of New York, and that her dad died during the Chitauri attack. We’re meant to understand that this loss of security, combined with a chance viewing of Clint Barton kicking alien ass, pushes Kate to develop the skills she’ll need to become a superhero. It’s honestly the origin story equivalent of missionary: very vanilla, gets the job done.
But the moment we catch up to Kate in the present, I immediately forgot about dead dad. I understand that there are other flavors of grief besides guilt and angst, but it just doesn’t seem to drive her the way an Uncle Ben drives a Spider-man or a Thomas-and-Martha drive a Batman. When Kate Bishop writes her, “Why I Became a Superhero” essay, I will absolutely not buy it if she talks about her dead dad. But the weird thing is that there is a thing that did explain her whole deal to me: within the first two episodes of Hawkeye, Kate Bishop uses a lockpick twice.
Kate Bishop is a lockpick kid.
If you’re all like, “What the fuck’s a lockpick kid?,” don’t worry, it’s a term I’m officially minting now. But it’s very possible you already know the kind of person I’m talking about.
To start, lockpick kids are kids who become interested in learning how to pick locks. Not all people who learn how to pick locks are lockpick kids, but all lockpick kids know the basics of how to pick a lock. Whether a lockpick kid ends up owning a lockpicking kit is a question of means, but they definitely spent some time figuring out how it works. Do you know what it means to “rake” a lock, or what a “pin” is, and what you need to do with it? If you answered no, then you’re not a lockpick kid.
Lockpick kids tend to have other overlapping interests; they’ll usually be interested in combat skills like fencing and archery, and potentially some sort of martial art. They’ve probably flirted with parkour, and they probably love puzzles and problem-solving, too. Basically if it’s a thing that feels like it would come in handy on an “adventure,” a lockpick kid has, at the very least, googled the basics.
The skills a lockpick kid spends time on are not about practicality or survival. A lockpick kid never focuses on learning how to swim really well, for instance (although they may know how to swim). Lockpick kids don’t go out of their way to learn CPR, or first aid, or triage. A lockpick kid probably doesn’t know how to shoot a gun.
There’s a very good chance that at some point in their life a lockpick kid has adopted an atypical fashion accessory, like goggles, or a bandana, or weather-agnostic gloves. Lockpick kids may be boys and men, but they’re rarely very masculine. Lockpick kids were probably in high school band. Lockpick kids have been called weirdos at least a few times in their life, possibly by themselves.
And now, I have to raise an important point: the type of person I’m describing is decidedly “uncool.” And while we don’t know how much swimming she does or whether or not she was the second chair violin at her Manhattan Prep School, we do know that Kate Bishop is undoubtedly cool. I mean, just look at this shit:
So I think it’s important to qualify that Kate Bishop is a lockpick kid in the way only a fictional character can be: she is both aspirational and an impossibility. Similar to how the MCU asks us to suspend our disbelief that geniuses can build nanotech armor, and boys can become Spider-Men, Kate Bishop’s superpower is her ability to be “cool,” despite being a lockpick kid.
And to be clear, in real life, a lockpick kid is never cool. They don’t become alt-cool kids or cool theater kids or punk kids who become cool in retrospect; they’ll never be the person who gets She’s All That‘d. Lockpick kids don’t find other lockpick kids and make a cool lockpick kid gang. Lockpick kids understand that there’s a whole secret social language swimming around them, but also know it’s unintelligible to them for unintelligible reasons. And the whole thing really just doesn’t make sense to a lockpick kid—after all, they can pick locks!
The ironic thing is that a lockpick kid has never had the chance to apply their lockpicking knowledge in a real situation. For one thing, lockpick kids aren’t in the game for theft. But even beyond B&Es, no lockpick kid has ever been in a scenario where they were, say, locked out of a house, and the one way to get in was by using their trusty lock picking kit. They may have picked a few locks on their own, but only for practice. A true lockpick kid has never been in a situation where their knowledge about picking locks saved the day. And they might not know it, but in the back of every lockpick kid’s head is the quiet, yearning fantasy that this exact scenario will play out, that there’ll be a day where their lockpicking skills will be vitally important, and they’ll get to hear someone say something like thank God you knew how to pick a lock. That day would be the best day of their life. It never comes. If that sounds kind of sad, it’s because it is.
Most of them don’t realize it, but lockpick kids are lonely.
” … People don’t want that cynical, cool thing anymore, they want sincerity. Not self seriousness, but heart-on-your-sleeve sincerity. You [Clint] are very contained. You keep your cards close to your vest, which… you wear over a suit of armor and like sixteen other layers of self-protection, all of which, under, finally, is your heart. So, not exactly on your sleeve.”
I agree with Kate’s general vibe here; I’m exhausted by cynicism and over-invested in sincerity. And I’m also hyperaware that, for a certain type of person—maybe even a certain type of kid—sincerity can be just as much of a suit of armor as she claims Clint’s stoicism is here. There’s a specific kind of demoralization that comes with not understanding the social rules of the world and knowing that this ignorance makes you kind of worthless. And there’s a specific type of coping that tells you if you’re loud and sincere enough about yourself, you can drown it all out. And then there’s one more type of coping that kicks in after that, when you realize that it’s all still insufficient. And it tells you that if you focus, and work at it, then through sheer force of will, you can collect the right aptitudes, and participate in the right things, and it’ll make people finally look your way, and they’ll see you for who you are, and things will make sense, and then maybe, after all that, you can finally unlock the value in yourself that everyone else seems to have, innately.
Other Thoughts:
- Or maybe I’m projecting
Rei Dot Soy 