I’ve just returned from seeing Age of Ultron, which proved to be both formally a shambles and so ideologically toxic on every level that I found it difficult to enjoy even those isolated moments that provide competent entertainment.

There are several central areas that I want to explore in talking about this movie. I want to start with a question: on a structural level, what figures in this movie function as engines, and what figures function as fuel for those engines? What I mean is: there are characters in this movie that exist to drive the stories forward, and there are characters in this movie that exist to fuel those characters’ driving. To me, it seems very clear that all of the engines in this movie are white men. Every other character in this movie exists as to fuel a white man.

The most strikingly obvious example of this is Natasha. It’s strikingly obvious, of course, because this was so strikingly, obviously not her role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. There, she was not an accessory to Steve; the reason for her participation in the story was that her own journey and goals intersected with his. A significant part of that story, in fact, dealt with Natasha and Steve’s struggle to accept their need to work together in the face of their intersecting goals, and with their growing mutual realization that these intersecting goals spoke to some more essential foundation for trust.

In Age of Ultron, Natasha is in love with a dude. We’re not exactly sure why she’s in love with a dude— it’s never explained or given any justification— she just is, okay, because she’s a girl and he’s a dude and that’s how the story goes, apparently. Her entire story centers around her desire to be with this man. He feels like he can’t be an Avenger? No problem, no biggie; Natasha will just quit the Avengers and they’ll run away together. Never mind the life that she has committed to serving S.H.I.E.L.D. and working for justice; never mind the profound importance and intensity of her relationship with Nick Fury, which we saw laid out in CA:TWS; never mind her friendship with Steve; never mind her friendship with Hawkeye (which is, again, here fabricated out of nothing, but which is positioned as one of deep and extreme trust)— never mind the constellation of relationships to principles, institutions, and individuals that make up an actual person’s life. Instead, she will jettison literally all of this if the man she loves wants to run away. And if he doesn’t want to be with her because he can’t have children? Well, that’s not a problem either, because she can’t have children!

Much has already been written about this movie’s viscerally unpleasant and irresponsible treatment of fertility in the scene in which Natasha reveals that she is a “monster” because she has been sterilized. However, this scene also connects to a vein of aggressive and sexist heteronormativity that extends beyond that scene. Clint’s “safehouse—” a rustic little postcard of Americana— comprises a beautiful farm that is kept by his heavily pregnant wife and two children. We learn nothing about his wife beyond her name; she exists in the story plainly and purely to be Clint’s wife: a pure incarnation of the domestic sphere who is literally set off from the rest of the world in order to provide her husband peace. So idyllic is this version of life, apparently, that by the end of the film, Tony has decided it might be what he wants— he mentions, in a throwaway line, getting a place like that for Pepper.

Let’s pause for a moment to examine this “throwaway” line. Tony Stark has just casually, with no evident clue that this is a joke, imagined putting Pepper Potts— one of the world’s most powerful people, presumably, as the CEO of a megacorporation, and a woman who, when we last saw her, had just taken out a supervillain with fire that she could create from her body—not to mention a woman who by every appearance thoroughly enjoys the cosmopolitan worlds of modern art and fashion— on a farm in the country, so Tony could retire there and keep her safe. This is an astounding.

Yet this extreme of heteronormativity— the happy nuclear family, with a mom and dad and kids— is presented, uninterrogated, as the dream of virtually all of our characters. Not only does Natasha view herself as “monstrous” because she is incapable of bearing children, but Bruce assumes that a woman would not want to be with him because he can’t provide her with children. The Maximoff twins are made monstrous by the destruction of their nuclear family. Even Steve— kept from realizing this dream by time, apparently, though its potential is summoned up once again in his vision of Peggy— and the sterile Natasha must symbolically enact a “home” in which they act as parental figures to “kids:” the new Avengers-in-training, among whose thus-infantilized number, it must be noted, are no white men. (Even Helen Cho does not wholly escape the maternal! In her brief scenes, her role is to midwife the gestating Ultron/Vision.)

A clear message emerges: the right role of women is to bear and raise children. The right role of men is to ensure that they are able to do this. Here, this frequently takes the form of protecting them— even for a Joss Whedon production, Age of Ultron features some truly blatant scenes of tiny women cowering before exaggeratedly enormous men. (I cannot fathom why it was felt necessary for Ultron to take an almost parodically hypermasculine robot “body,” then destroy it in favor of an even larger and more parodically hypermasculine body.) Both Natasha and Wanda are specifically made to look small and physically helpless before Ultron and the Hulk— Natasha in a kidnapping sequence that has, essentially, no purpose except to provide us with scenes of Natasha in captivity, and to then allow Bruce to rescue her from her Medieval cell. (”I adore you!” she says breathlessly.)

On a structural level in this story, the “right role” of women is to help and support our heroes (”Now go be a hero,” Natasha literally says to Bruce at one point). It’s also to fuel the story by providing a sense of danger and threat (thus the cowering scenes). This is also the role of the nonwhite population of the film.

There are three major scenes of mass destruction in Age of Ultron. One takes place in an unspecified location in Africa, one in Seoul, and one in a fictional Eastern European nation that is coded as Balkan (going largely by the dual use of Roman and Cyrillic scripts that’s visible, though the people are also dressed in a vague and stereotypically Eastern European fashion). Buildings are destroyed; people are killed; there are scenes of suffering. This is destruction and suffering used to produce an affective response: we, the audience, are shown nonwhite or “ethnic” suffering so that we understand how high the stakes are for our white heroes. (In the case of Africa, it’s also so we can understand how high the stakes are between our white heroes.) This is extraordinarily distasteful, to say the least, particularly when the only members of these populations to whom we’re introduced as characters are the barely-present Helen Cho and the ambivalently sinister Maximoffs (played, very uncomfortably, by white actors with fake accents).

(I was particularly disturbed by the invocation of Wakanda in a film that goes on to draw a picture of Africa as primitive, colorful, and apparently rife with rusting metal cargo ships where arms dealers make weapons. Wakanda, for those unfamiliar with the comics, is an incredibly sophisticated and technologically advanced nation. Here, it comes up because an arms dealer has been branded with a Wakandan pictograph— which uncomfortably falls back on racist tropes about brutal justice and funny writing.)

The film’s attitude towards Africa in particular can almost be summed by another throwaway line: when Tony Stark is about to drop the Hulk through a building under construction, he tells Jarvis to buy the building. See, it’s funny, and also he’s such a responsible guy, because he doesn’t want to destroy someone else’s building! Except that it’s not just a building: it’s the people it falls on, and the people who have to live in the debris, and the people who lost their jobs, and the people who might have lived or worked there, and the economy of the city. At least, that’s what it would be if the locale had any significance except as set dressing. But it doesn’t: just as the Avengers fly in and are gone, so too the film (and we as the audience) simply go somewhere else once the action’s over. (In a magnificent demonstration of the neoliberal NGO attitude and complex, we’re assured that the Maria Stark Foundation is going to take care of it all.) The effect of this is to code Africa (and the Balkans— to a lesser extent Seoul) as the place where violence happens. That is: it is a violent place (because we only ever see it gripped by violence), and it is the place where violence is contained. There, violence is normal; in the West, it is an aberration. (This kind of coding also takes place here with regard to Nazism. Where CA:TWS gave us American Nazis in heart of Washington, D.C., Age of Ultron gives us Nazis holed up in Balkan fortresses.)

The tl;dr on all of this is that Age of Ultron is, in many ways, a bad movie. (I also find it to be a bad movie in other ways; Whedon is long on snappy quips and short on anything resembling a coherent or well-developed idea, and at this point the accelerated pacing of the MCU is starting to cause character relationships to strain credibility.) Do I think that Joss Whedon is a bad person? I don’t. I think that he is a well-meaning person, but a person of average intelligence and insight who has been told repeatedly that he is brilliant and groundbreaking, and who thus has never had to do the hard work of thinking through the origins and implications of what he writes. The effect is that he continually regurgitates poisonous tropes because they seem clever or because they attract his eye, and refuses the responsibility of examining his choices and understanding them as shaped by and shaping a larger social world.

I’m at least glad that he’s left the franchise. It was glaring how many of Age of Ultron’s best moments came about because they could rest or build on the superior work of CA: TWS— about which, more soon!