The image makes sense later, I promise
“Your ego seeks conflict; it loves nothing better than to win battles for you, sadly as it wins, you often lose respect and friendships. If you wish problems to persist, keep blaming everyone and everything but yourself, for he who persistently blames and criticise only fans the flames of hatred and controversy……..so from now [Clint Barton] and [Sung Kang] [and Kate Bishop] both are my [Hawkeyes]…..”
—paraphrased from Asif Raza Rana, Best Friend of Mudasir and Salman
Y-you guys… I-I think… I think I might like Hawkeye. Like, not just new, Kate Bishop Hawkeye. Clint Barton Hawkeye. I mean, I’m still imagining Sung Kang sometimes, but even when I’m not…
This episode was maybe the first time I felt like we really got to see what Jeremy Renner could bring to the character. I think it helps that Kate is carrying the comedic load, letting Renner play something that he excels at: a straight man tightrope walking between just barely emotionally vulnerable and stoic.
It creates an interesting tension, because as of this episode, Hawkeye is also the most fun superhero in the MCU, and he just absolutely does not engage with it. It’s like watching a goth kid who stubbornly refuses to have a good time on a rollercoaster. And I think most importantly, he’s not doing it because he’s a jerk who’s feels like he’s above it all. He does it because he’s just very dedicated to whatever his mission is, whether it’s saving Kate or escaping the tracksuit mafia. He doesn’t have time to engage with the whimsy. He uses a teddy bear to knock out a dude because it’s the closest thing on hand. He hands out acid arrows like he’s passing the salt because it’s the thing that needs to be done right now. He built an arrow with a plunger on it not because it’s fun or silly, but because it’s practical.
And it made me wonder at the time, “why the fuck is this the first time we’re really seeing Hawkeye let loose with the trick arrows?” I would’ve been on board day one if he was ganking Chitauri with an arrow that released bees or something. But besides the occasional explode-y arrow and grappling hook arrow, he’s mostly been using his bow like a really slow gun (one without trick bullets).
I think the hidden truth of what makes this honestly a very good episode of television is that it takes that character history and really hangs it all together thematically. Which means I’m going to have to do a thing I never thought I’d really do: take seriously Hawkeye’s character history and hang it all together thematically.
“My job is to be … a ghost”
So, Clint started out as a top-level assassin for SHIELD, before taking a hard pivot into the sword-happy vigilante Ronin, and then took another hard turn into an attempt at reform. As a black-ops agent, it absolutely makes sense that his quiver didn’t have many trick arrows: imagine he’s on a top-secret mission in South America to overthrow a democratically elected progressive president or something; it’d be weird if the corpse was covered in goo from his goo arrows, right? He’d definitely stick to the lethal, pointy kind. Then, in his Thanos angst, he ditches the weapon he’s most comfortable with for a much more murder-practical sword and goes on a killing spree. Finally, as part of his own shift away from his “bloody” phase, he focuses on fun, toylike arrows, and is, as much as possible, decidedly non-lethal.
[Rei’s note: Please prepare yourself for the sweatiest transition I’ve ever written]
It’s very appropriate then, that in an episode that’s one long escape sequence, Clint is also internally trying to run from something: his past.
Over the first three episodes, it’s become pretty clear that Clint is trying to perform some sort of penance. He’s personally haunted by the Ronin suit and the parts of his life it represents, and his major motivation so far has been to minimize all the splash damage from the things he did in that costume. Which brings me to a kind of big question that I ask myself all the time, one that Clint himself seems to be working through: what do we owe to the people we’ve hurt?
The day before this episode dropped, I stumbled upon this piece by visual artist Dana Variano, and it kind of knocked the wind out of me. In a very small, simple package, it put into focus ideas I’d been thinking around for a while, but which had remained blurry in mind. Basically, it’s this: in restorative action, telling the person you hurt that, yes, you did the thing that hurt them is a vital step. It’s not the only thing that needs to happen—those other checkboxes under the egg like context and intent are important too—but you’re also leaving out a critical part if you’re not accountable. I personally don’t know that restorative action can really happen without it.
And it’s the hardest part! I think even beyond the social pressure that gets hammered into us from day one that says making any mistake is the worst thing you can do, there’s probably also a little chimpanzee in us that just knows the consequences of hurting one of the other chimps is isolation (and death). But we’re not chimps anymore, and I even think we’ve grown beyond the need for punitive social pressure. But the fear is still real, and it continues, and it’s a thing Clint is grappling with.
I’ve gone a long time in this piece without really talking about Maya, which feels kind of crazy because Darnell Besaw and Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez is right up there for me with watching Kate threaten a dude with a USB arrow. I think different writers will have great and more substantial things to say about her, but it does feel clear to me that Maya has been told her whole life that despite living in an entire world that’s hurting her every day, she’s owed absolutely nothing. Instead, she needs to learn to adapt, or die. For a lot of people, this kind of assimilation becomes a mark of success, not a failure of a system. Maya’s like that, too. She stops questioning the requirement that she “[jump] between two worlds”; she even turns assimilation into a kind of superpower (if “assimilation” seems like a weird word here, I mean… what else do you call an ability to observe and mimic the people around you in order to survive?)
And then, Clint, as Ronin, kills her dad.
It’s not clear that he knows who Maya is and his connection to her father, but nevertheless, every time he refuses to admit that he was Ronin, Clint is denying her the chance at his own accountability.
” … I’m not a role model to anyone. Never have been.”
It feels impossible to Clint that he can ever really be a hero. And right now? Honestly, he’s kind of right. Because he’s still missing a piece. Clint can change his methods, help train a new, better protege, and even understand the weight and context of what he was doing, but he still hasn’t done this key part of owning up to the harm he caused.
And it doesn’t just affect his superhero life. He knows he’s fucking up with his kids, to the point where they expect it, and even say it for him (“It’s okay if you can’t be home for Christmas”). And he’ll explain, and defer, but I don’t think we’ve seen a scene yet where he’s said something like, “Hey, I’ve been missing out on a lot of your lives, I know it’s led to a lot of hurt, I’m sorry.“
I’ve seen enough MCU products to know not to hold my breath for well-executed thematic catharsis. At this point, the MCU storytelling style is like this weird game of bowling where they love to set up the pins but never knock them down. So with Hawkeye, right now I’m at the same point that I always feel like I end up at with these shows: halfway through, saying, “I’m interested in where this could go.” I don’t know where Clint’s story takes him, and honestly, I’m not optimistic that we’ll ever see the kind of real restorative action I’ve been describing here. Which is disappointing to me, but also sucks for Clint. Because unfortunately, there’s no trick arrow…
…for accountability.
Other Thoughts:
- That Asif Raza Rana quote was originally just a joke, but let me tell you, dude knows from accountability.
- A key thing to the Clint/Kate dynamic that really works here, that I didn’t really get to mention above, is that Kate plays everything the exact opposite of Clint. While he’s just trying to get them to safety, she’s extremely jazzed with everything. Classic buddy-comedy/odd-couple writing is a classic for a reason.
- Sorry to the evolutionary biologists, I know that’s not how evolution works. I willingly used shoddy science to write a metaphor. This is me also being accountable.
- I linked their work like three times above, but I can’t say enough that you should check out more of Dana Variano’s work. Here is their site. Click it!
- In the first episode, I joked a little bit about how every scene Clint had with his family felt very weird, in an unintentional way. And I stand by it! But it also made another part of this episode really surprising to me, in that I was actually really invested and along for the ride during the scene where he’s on the phone with his son.
- I was kind of half joking about “Ronin only hunts minorities” in that last piece, but I mean… after this episode… Plus, his own protege is a ridiculously wealthy White girl? But really, I do think there’s enough here to think about a variation of the themes above, which is this: what do those who benefit from a lopsided system owe to the people who get hurt by it?
- The development title on this one was “Sick Arrows, Bro,” but I changed it to part of one of the sweaty lines that I cut: “There aren’t enough goo arrows in the world to outrun your past.” I need to take a shower.
Rei Dot Soy 