Scarlett Johansson in a Gorilla Suit: The Superhero Mundanes Don't See

by Doctor Science

In my previous post about reviews of "The Avengers", I said Black Widow seemed to be "The Superhero Men Don't See". I've now done some more research and am pretty sure the cognitive problem isn't with men, it's with mundanes -- non-fans or Muggles, that is. It's an instance of the Invisible Gorilla problem; sexism comes in only as the easiest way for the reviewer's brain to patch the hole in hir perceptions.

I was already thinking about the Invisible Gorilla when Porlock Junior brought it up in the comments to the previous post, because I had just finished reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is about all sorts of cognitive biases or illusions.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment is one of the best-known such illusions. The subjects were told to count the number of times the basketball is passed between black-shirted players in the following video:

YouTube link

A truly astounding number of the subjects never noticed the guy in the gorilla suit, because they were concentrating so hard on the basketball.

I'm cutting for length, and because I'm going to be spoiling the heck out of "The Avengers".

In googling about, looking for more information on this experiment, I ran across The effects of eye movements, age, and expertise on inattentional blindness, by Daniel Memmert. Memmert re-ran the experiment to include some subjects (children, teens, and adults) who are on basketball teams, and so can be said to have "expertise" at watching basketball.

While only 40% of adult non-players noticed the gorilla, over 60% of adult basketball players did. Experts don't have to concentrate as hard on the main task, so they're better able to notice the unusual, intrusive event.

Now, this is rather strange, because I used reviews from RottenTomatoes.com's "Top Critics" to construct my first table. These people all see hundreds of movies a year, so they certainly should qualify as "expert" movie-watchers -- far more than I. Yet maybe a third of them made basic, did-not-see-what-was-onscreen mistakes.

I wondered if perhaps there is a special expertise needed to watch *this* movie. I collected a list of "geek" reviewers by googling "Avengers movie review" plus various geek-specific terms ("comics", "fandom", "boingboing", "reddit", and "metafilter") and taking reviews that turned up on the first 2-3 pages of hits. When I collated the results, I found that:

• The geek reviews aren't, in general, as well-written from the wordsmith POV as the Top Critics' reviews. Few of them are witty or have any well-turned phrases, many have fundamentally clunky sentences.
• A substantial fraction didn't mention Scarlett Johansson or Natasha/Black Widow because they didn't mention any specific actor or character. Instead, they talked about the movie's overall structure and significance in the Marvel movieverse, the special effects, the writing and plotting in general. None of the Top Critics failed to discuss particular actors, Robert Downey Jr. at least.
• Many of the geeks talked about Natasha but never mentioned Scarlett Johansson. Usually, they called her "Natasha" instead of "Black Widow" -- just as they talked about Tony, Steve, and Clint instead of Iron Man, Captain America, and Hawkeye. Geeks are on a first-name basis with these characters.
• There were no 420s, my abbreviation for dude, what are you smoking? The geeks, male and female, saw what was onscreen.

My theory, then, is that "The Avengers" was a much more difficult movie than the Top Critics were expecting. Like all sf-action-adventure movies, what is onscreen is as visually and aurally distracting as possible: it is loud and full of exciting or startling images, while including many unfamiliar details (in the setting, costumes, weaponry, and species). This is the sort of complex environment that makes even more people fail to see the gorilla, because you have to concentrate so hard on the assigned task.

All sf-action movies are distracting; what makes "The Avengers" different is that it includes a very large number of major characters, but introduces very few of them. There are at least *9* characters with significant parts (six Avengers, Loki, Nick Fury, and Coulson), which is an enormous number for an action movie, where so many screen minutes will have to be dialogue-free to accommodate the fights and explosions.

The only way most action movies can give the audience a hope of keeping the characters straight is to make them stock figures, who can be easily stored in memory. Just imagine how hard it would be to remember which of 9 characters had a particular personality trait if you could only learn about them in the non-action parts of a 2 1/2 hour action movie.

What Joss Whedon realized was that he didn't have to do that: he could rely on almost all of the audience remembering the basic personalities, abilities, and appearance for at least three of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and The Hulk, and a considerable number would know enough to identify even Maria Hill or Agent Coulson when they showed up.

In other words, enough of the audience would be fans that Whedon didn't have to make everyone a stock character if he didn't want to. And when it came to Natasha, he clearly *really* didn't want to: he wanted to make another in his continuing series of "women who surprise people by kicking ass and taking names".

But I think this is where a number of the Top Critics fell into trouble. I'm sure they'd all seen the earlier Marvel movies, but they can't afford to remember details about every movie they see, their brains would explode. Unless they already cared -- that is, unless they were fans -- they came into "The Avengers" remembering a bit about "Iron Man", knowing Robert Downey, Jr., had top billing, and expecting (because that's their experience with sf-action movies) his character and maybe few others to be the only non-stock ones around.

And in particular, it's usually a safe bet that if there's only one woman with a major role in a male-focused action movie, she'll be the stock sex symbol. So I think the Top Critics saw Scarlett Johansson as Natasha, tagged her as "the girl who's pretty but doesn't do much, you know, like Megan Fox", and then felt free to ignore her as they tried to keep track of what was going on (the basketball game, as it were) in a maximally distracting environment. When it came time to write their review, they looked at the list of actors, said, "hmm, what did Scarlett Johansson do?" and all that came back was the tag -- they never realized her character was the gorilla.

By which I mean, that as Ian Grey, Alyssa Rosenberg, and Matty Carville have argued, Black Widow is the central hero of the movie, the POV and the one we can most easily identify with.

It's possible, in fact, that the Top Critics even worse than normal at watching "The Avengers". They see so very many movies, most of which are bad (per Sturgeon's Law), that they may have come to rely on the expectation that action-movie characters will be stock. We could maybe test that, if we could come up with a way to collect Avengers reviews by people (a) who don't watch a great many movies and (b) aren't fans. Unfortunately, such people don't write many movie reviews, either.

If Top Critics (and others) don't want to be fooled by their brains like this, the easiest thing to do is to go into the movie intending to pay attention to female characters. Just as we can no longer watch the invisible-gorilla experiment and *not* notice the gorilla, once you think "I wonder how the female characters will be treated?" you can't *not* notice what happens with them.

Top Critics -- and anyone else with influence in Hollywood -- can also start talking about how the Smurfette Principle [warning! TVTropes link!] isn't really a good way to think about movies, or the world.

I couldn't find a picture of Scar-Jo in a gorilla suit, but I did find Frida Kahlo's self-portrait with monkey. This particular painting is owned by Madonna, and I don't blame her: if I had her kind of money, I'd own great art, too.

Comments

[Hartmut]

You could have tried http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzLP_2Wi_nY>Marlene Dietrich dancing in a gorilla costume.

[Countme-In]

I don't know who's wearing the monkey suit, but that's not Frida Kahlo, it's Johnny Depp.

[Laura Koerbeer]

Maybe the Top Critics spent the whole movie thinking about the clever phrases they'd write instead of watching the movie.

John Cole has a post about how he just can't imagine why anyone would vote for Romney. I'm making a jump here from watching a movie to watching a Presidential debate. You know the annoying way the Media Talking Heads will talk after the debates about their fantasies about wha they saw and tell us watchers what our reactions must be? One year they had some sort of audiance reaction meters that appeared on the ascreen that were consistantly different from what the Talking Heads kept telling the audience our reaction was.It didn't matter to the Talking Heads, though. They just kept right on telling us what our reactions were even with the meter right there controdicting them.

Debates are visual events, not auditory ones. The winner is the candidate who appears the most confident, cool, poised, but warm and approachable. But that's a matter of filters, too. I could never see Bush as someone I'd like to have a beer with. I always thought he looked like a creep. I mean skin-crawly creep, like the guy you DON'T want to be sitting next to anywhere.

My point being that TV Talking Heads who are sort of the Top Critics of the political scene are often just as much stuck watching the inside of their own eyeballs and unable to see the politics thhey are supposed to be observing.

[liberal japonicus]

I wonder if there is any way to get a fix on what percentage of the population knows the Avengers to some reasonable degree and if that knowledge is completely absent in Top critics.

[Doctor Science]

lj:

I've been wondering that too, especially given that the movie is being successful world-wide, not just in the US.

But what I've noticed, in listening to people talk about it, is that complete mundanes in the general population usually go to the movie along with a fan in their life (significant other, child, etc.). The fan will give the mundane enough crucial info ("who's that?") to help them keep basic track of the characters as they appear.

I also wonder how much of the tremendous take is due to re-watches. I've noticed that my fannish friends are going back to the theater repeatedly, much more than they did for other movies in the Marvel series -- because the very large number of significant characters makes it hard for even dedicated fans to noticed *everything* in the first viewing.

[liberal japonicus]

I'd also note that the movie hasn't come out in Japan yet and I wonder if it there was some marketing information about the penetration of Marvel fandom in various countries/markets. My purely anecdotal take is that Japanese don't really glom on to the Stan Lee universe, and the data here suggests that is correct, in that a Marvel movie with Avengers characters has never been the top box office draw. On the other hand, in China, Iron Man was top for 4 weeks and The Incredible Hulk for 2 or 3 (though their China data seems to have some problems) On the other hand Spiderman and X-men have been number one, though I'd argue that while those two occupy the same universe, they are discreet and therefore it is possible to separate them out. Still, if it is possible to work your data magic on the box offices in various locations, I'd love to see what you come up with.

[Mattmcirvin]

There was a Japanese Spider-Man TV show in the late 1970s that, I think, was one of the major predecessors of the Super Sentai genre.

But the Spider-Man mythos was considerably modified: Spider-Man is a motorcycle racer who gets his powers from an alien spaceship that can transform into a giant robot.

[Mattmcirvin]

...While Spider-Man and the X-Men occupy the Marvel Universe in the comics, it's not clear that they exist in the Avengers movie universe. Probably for contractual reasons, I'd guess.

[skippy]

i've read a few blogs trying to make the case that crtics are en masse chauvinist sexist pigs because nobody mentioned scarlette/natasha/black widow.

now, i'm not saying critics aren't chauvinist pigs, but i think their failure to highlight this character is less about thousands of years of institutionalized misogyny and more about which characters alreadybhad their own movies before the avengers.

i' m not a heavy marvel reader, but i love comic book movies. i myself was more of a daredevil fan, and you can imagine my disappointment at the ben affleck fiasco. what i'm saying is, whereas i had heard of the main avenger characters in my comic book reading youth, i'd never heard of black widow or hawkeye before seeing this movie.

i think that if marvel studios had bothered to (or been able to convince the marketing boys it would be profitable to) make a black widow/hawkeye film released last summer or fall, there would have been more hoopla surrounding johansen's (and even renner's) participation.

all in all, it was a good film. a little noisy towards the end, but still thumbs up.

[Michael Moricz]

I think Black Widow came off as fully as significant as any other Avenger in the film, but I too had never read a comic about her back in my antique past, so I had basically no context for her other than what the new film gave me. If I ended up thinking of her more as "Natascha" than as "Black Widow," that's because that's what everyone called her for the entire film. (Similarly, I think of Tony Stark as Tony Stark, because that's "who he is" whether he has the suit on or not).

Also, she was ultimately the only one of the Avengers with no identifiable "costume" or personalized weapon, so that, combined with her gender, her nationality and my total lack of a back-story context for her, made her somewhat unique in my perceptions of the film and somewhat the cipher among the team. I really appreciated the scene between her and Loki, because it filled in a LOT of needed exposition where she was concerned, it made me more invested in her history, her story arc, her relationship with Hawkeye.

As far as Ms. Johansson's performance goes, she was as memorable as anyone else. The film boasted a pretty high level of acting chops, but I definitely walked away from the film not really knowing the names of most of the actors, since I'd basically never heard of most of them before (I don't go to a lot of mainstream movies, perhaps this explains it). Downey, Ruffalo, Johansson, Jackson, yes. The rest I'd have difficulty naming even now, without Googling, and yet I thought they all did a great job, and there was some seriously cool acting from Loki and many others.

But I did notice Jenny Agutter's name go by in the credits, and both myself and the person I was with (we're both "old") said, aloud, "Jenny Agutter!" Apparently she was one of the three council members who advised Nick Fury badly from dimly-lit Skype monitors throughout the film.

So, as a guy, I'd say that Mr. Johansson definitely made a strong impression in this movie, despite the fact that I'd never heard of Black Widow before and knew nothing about the character. It's to Joss Whedon's credit that he was able to make this film so compelling to a viewer (like me) who has not seen a single one of the other Marvel superhero films. I'd seen the old TV shows (a bit), I'd grown up on the comic books. But I'm not really part of "the Marvel Universe" any more, and it all made perfect sense to me. And what I didn't know about the Black Widow character didn't prevent me from fully embracing her value to both the fictional team and the film.

[jake the snake]

Scar-jo in a gorilla suit, that might be the gorilla my dreams.
I am really disappointed that no one else went there.