Hawkeye and Escapism

Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye in Marvel's The Avengers

For Hawkeye's character bios and more, please head to this site. 

Yeah. That fellow on top. Jeremy Renner plays Hawkeye in the latest Marvel Studios movie offering, The Avengers.

Now, I confess I am not an avid fan of the Avengers. Never paid much attention to Hawkeye, even when he was mentioned in passing. I am more of the X-Men reader. However, seeing the movie made me realise Clint Barton aka Hawkeye is more broken than the rest of the team. In the comic book, he is almost always a loner, being a sniper. He most certainly had his share of dark dealings and underworld due to his abilities. In the latest The Avengers movie, he is shown to be extremely vulnerable to suggestions and Loki exploited that weakness to bring down a hi-tech ship and his friends.

Now, let's take a step back. 

In the movie. In the comic book.

These phrases should be enough for any reader to realise that Hawkeye is a fictional character, in a fictional world about fictional events. 

In one take, it was shown clearly one of his arrows actually turned to follow its target. I was pretty sure the arrow was no heat-seeking sort, nor was it GPS-tagged to its target. In another instance, he sighted a target, looked away, loosed his arrow and calmly picked up another while the loosed arrow hit not one, but two targets.

Impossible? Yes, clearly. Erroneous? Of course.

How many errors did Hawkeye made? Somebody, somewhere in the internet, pointed out not one, not two, but an astounding - wait, I'm not gonna count, because I am not an expert and I don't want to be taken out on that point. It is also written in the same site that a young amateur could do better than what Hawkeye showed in the movie. And that Hawkeye could have made better effort to get it right - the posture, the arm, the bow, the string, the whole nine yards. (I get it if the writer wants to come across as funny, but reading through it, it feels more of a blatant criticism and less funny. Scratch that. The writer IS NOT FUNNY AT ALL.)

Gosh, it sounds like Hawkeye's about to play Bach's Partita No 2: Chaconne instead of shooting an invading alien army. And that requires even less precision and more readiness.

This is a movie. Gods and aliens fight in it. Ships disappear and fly. A black hole appears in the middle of the New York skies. A Thunder God commands a hammer that calls out endless lightning. A man becomes a meaner, greener and bigger version of himself and yet, somehow, his pants doesn't tear up at the most critical junctures. Another man, who should have been on life support years ago, instead is alive and flying with a new element that keeps the deadly stuff away from his heart. 

(There, bad science! But I don't hear a physicist complain!) 

An amazingly beautiful but lethal assassin kills aliens with her bare hands. A 70-year-old man who looks like a twenty-year-old and impossibly handsome, fights like a tank with the help of a shield that will never tarnish nor break, ever. 

And the so-called bothersome finale: an archer who, as the experts say, doesn't shoot like a real archer should, and must, shoot.

Final word again: this is a movie. If you want real accurate descriptions on how to handle bows, arrows, and the differences between shortbows, longbows, compound bows, combat archery, Olympic archery, practice shots, whatnot - watch a documentary.

The myth of Hawkeye is more important than all the technicalities put together to disclaim his ability. Click this link to read another favourite blog of mine that further illustrates the simple distinction of being human in a team full of heroes with superpowers.

One petite point: Hawkeye was self-taught. So all those technicalities are for naught.