Daredevil on Netflix. Dayton and its Wilson Fisks

Daredevil on Netflix teaser imageIt isn’t often I make media recommendations on this site. The last one (out of the 2500 or so posts on this site) that I remember, was to go see “An inconvenient truth” and that was in 2006.

And now, I’m going to recommend you watch Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix. All 13 hours of it. Forget “House of Cards” as the examination into the depths of our failed political system, so much more can be said with allegory.

For those of you who never read comic books, Daredevil was a sideshow in the Marvel metaverse, almost a novelty character. He was a blind lawyer, who after losing his sight at 9 while saving a man by pushing him out of the way of a speeding car, gained incredible powers of using his other senses to “see” the world around us- right down to listening to your heartbeat to see if you were telling the truth. He wasn’t out to save the world, just to turn his community around, Hell’s Kitchen in NYC. He didn’t use a gun, just his hands and martial arts tools, to bring bad people to justice.

The story, once you get past the idea that a blind man can see with a sonar sense, is that of good vs evil, and the way that the line between the two can be foggy. The demarcation is often in the eyes of the beholder.

The story line of the Netflix version of Daredevil is the struggle between an all-powerful man behind the curtain, also a native of Hell’s Kitchen, who has his vision of a “Better tomorrow” for this down-on-the-luck community. Although he’s never referred to as “The Kingpin” in this season, Wilson Fisk, played by Vincent D’Onofrio is a believable bad guy, which is part of what makes this show so worth watching. In advertising as in almost everything else, when it’s believable, when it’s based on fundamental human truths, it has a much deeper emotional connection with those who experience it.

D’Onofrio will be nominated for Emmy awards for his performance, channeling his inner Marlon Brando, commanding the screen with his expressions and posture as much as his words and actions. The others in the cast, seemed resoundingly human, compared to other Marvel Epic Productions, where the right words, the wink and the nod, gave away that this was fantasy fiction. Daredevil is not campy, it isn’t funny, and the good guys get hurt both physically and emotionally. This is Marvel at both its darkest and brightest at the same time.

Comic books were traditionally short, 18 pages of art, 18 pages of ads for things like Xray vision glasses and sea monkeys. The static art would leap off the page, and often say more than the words that were in the thought bubbles, speech bubbles or the third person narrators voice- often that of Stan Lee- with his “Welcome fearless readers.” (Note, of all the naming projects I’ve done in my real world job of advertising- one of the companies I’m most proud of naming is “Fearless Readers,” a comic book shop in East Dayton). To read a comic book didn’t take very long- but to understand it- took a whole backstory/history lesson. Not much different than understanding how Dayton and Hell’s Kitchen got to be the communities they became. It’s not a short newspaper story that really tells you much, it’s the accumulation of that back story- of the understanding of all the plots that twist and weave into the fabric of where we are today.

With every Marvel story told in movies, I felt shortchanged. All my history lessons in the Marvel universe weren’t needed- it had been condensed, compressed and manipulated into an action packed box office powerhouse- that took years of reading and shoved it into a 2-hour box. XMen, Iron Man, Captain America and even the Avengers left me feeling like I’d just bought the Cliffs Notes instead of reading the classic. Not so with Daredevil over the course of 13 hours. (Thank the recent hernia operation for giving me the time to watch it all in 3 days).

This story has been repeated across our country, where money

UPDATE

13 April 15 (this post was over 1300 words when I completed it. Somehow- the second half is missing. I’ll take another stab at it later- sorry)

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