Marvel series about an Indian superheroine
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Marvel belatedly gets down on one knee with the indigenous people of America in the Choctaw Indian superheroine series Echo.
Deaf and mute Indian Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) loses her mother, a Choctaw healer, when she is a child – she dies in a car accident because someone cut the car’s brake. Maya was also in the car then, and her leg was amputated at the knee – but the prosthesis did not stop the girl from starting to study martial arts, and now she fights like a god. The tragedy they experienced splits the family: Maya’s grandmother, strict Chula, for some reason decides that Maya’s father (Zan McClarnon, the Hollywood Indian on duty from “Fargo,” “Longmire,” “Dark Winds”) is to blame for everything, and drives him out of the house together with daughter. Lopez works in New York for the sports mafia boss Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) and dies in a showdown – then Kingpin becomes Maya’s father and raises the girl to be a cold-blooded killer. But one day Maya finds out that it was the Kingpin who killed Lopez, and decides to take revenge on her former boss.
Actually, this is where the main plot of “Echo” begins: a deaf-mute killer on a prosthesis declares war on a giant mafioso – in Russian translations, the Kingpin is affectionately called Kingpin, and D’Onofrio in this role looks like an ominously degenerate Brando in the role of Colonel Kurtz. Maya escapes to her native reservation in Oklahoma, where she asks her uncle Henry Black Raven (Cheskey Spencer) to help her attack Ambal and squeeze out his business – she wants to become the new queen of the sports mafia. From the very beginning, the series looks like a “hard-boiled” action movie from the 1990s – in each episode, Maya diligently kicks the butts of a horde of militant thugs, but from time to time they also put the girl on both shoulder blades. At some point, it even becomes unclear – what exactly does superheroism have to do with it, when everyone beats each other up exclusively the old fashioned way? Only in the second episode does a superpower finally emerge inside Maya – the “echo” of Indian women from the Choctaw tribe, who from generation to generation were healers and warriors, protecting the tribe from adversity. This force seems to be reflected in Maya, and the ancestors go out to battle with it.
Marvel is keeping its nose to the wind: the previous year showed that audiences were tired of stories about traditional superheroes with politically correct nods. This year, Marvel and DC will sweep superhero movies under the rug—both will release just one movie each about men in tights, Deadpool and the Joker, on the big screen. As for the small screen, Marvel is also adopting a new policy: television superheroics are now trying to ride the trend towards darkness, authenticity and realism in the spirit of 1990s action films. “Echo” was released under the new Marvel brand Marvel Spotlight – it will specialize in mundane stories, not that without superhero sorcery at all, but so that it does not rule the plot and so that the stories themselves are sufficiently autonomous and the viewer does not need to watch the previous fifty films in the series . Plus bloodshed – the series will not be for children, the rating will increase to 18+. In the history of Maya this tendency can already be seen. The scene where Ambal nearly beats to death in the gateway a salesman who did not sell ice cream to a deaf-mute child (and the child gives the ice cream man a control kick) causes shock – this is not sighs on a bench or walks in the moonlight.
The lack of sentiment, however, does not mean that Hollywood has forgotten about wokeism: Indians are now following its black heroes. Less than a hundred years have passed since Hollywood turned its face to the indigenous people: Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Taylor Sheridan’s westerns, where he turns villains into heroes, Taika Waititi’s Dogs of the Reservation, and so on. In the classic Western of the 1940s and 1950s, the Indian was a bloodthirsty creature who dreams of scalping a white gentleman, and at best, the sheriff did not care about the problems of the Indians. Against this background, the belated dispute with the classic canon of the socialist western of the 1960s from the GDR with Gojko Mitic looked funny: in them the Indian was “a friend of man.” In the 1970s, the Western practically died, and no one cared about the indigenous population of America in Hollywood except Marlon Brando: the Indian Sachin Little Feather, whom Brando sent in his place to give a speech about Indian rights at the Oscars, was laughed at by real cowboys Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. And now, half a century later, Hollywood has finally grown up to Westerns with a good Indian – and the horses are still galloping and galloping, the huts are burning and burning, and the frontier is moving towards the horizon.
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