The Marvel phenomenon escapes me. And that, for me, is a problem. For a film and series analyst, not fully understanding the brand on which much of the audiovisual industry’s turnover depends is a serious handicap. Generationally and culturally, I belong to the pre-Marvel world.
There is a non-negligible percentage of viewers like me. This means that Disney, the company that controls Marvel, and Disney, the platform that hosts its products, have a market left to cover. One of the purposes of the recently released Echo is supposed to appeal to them. Appeal to us. Echo is not, as I have read somewhere, an adult series, but there is something about it that wants to be more like Jessica Jones than Guardians of the Galaxy. It fails to be neither one nor the other.
What Echo does manage to do is highlight certain cracks in Marvel’s cultural and productive model. One of those leaks is the brand’s strange idea of what is adult and what is not. The way in which Jessica Jones (whose career as a series began on Netflix) was today is astonishing. Halfway between Morticia Addams and Chrissie Hynde, Jessica (Krysten Ritter) loved, hated and fucked like an adult human being. And she handed out trash like the superhero she was. Echo (Alaqua Cox) does the latter, but the other not so much, placing herself as a character in an absolutely indeterminate age range. In Echo, time stops making sense because her characters seem to live apart from it. And it’s not part of the narrative of the series. Echo is not that ambitious.
Or if. Because the series tries to convert the limitations of its protagonist into an audiovisual experience… and fails. Echo, the character, is deaf and has a prosthetic foot. Both features open up a world of television experimentation that Echo, the series, approaches in a very clumsy way. And another of the scratches on Marvel’s album is, increasingly, the sloppiness conveyed by the finishes of its latest productions. The embarrassment of the digital effects of the latest Ant-Man installment is not in Echo because, in a maneuver as shameless as it is tacky, the series avoids at all costs having to depend on post-production in many shots that cry out for a little bit of media boast. The viewer is spared Echo’s “bad” leg in an almost insulting way. Her deafness is integrated in a somewhat more elaborate way, but far from what they could have done with it in, surprise, Jessica Jones. Echo and Jessica are part of the same Marvel sub-universe, but they are not supposed to coincide at any time. They do go through Echo Daredevil (Charlie Cox) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). The first series, also from the Marvel-Netflix era, can boast of not being another Marvel nonsense to pass the time. The second one is the best example of how Marvel and Disney sometimes seem to not watch their own series before releasing them. I’m afraid Echo hasn’t seen her either.