[COLUMN] Daredevil: Born Again Gentrifies the Man Without Fear | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Born Again, the first two episodes of which are streaming on Disney+, now.

The premiere of Daredevil: Born Again opens with a conversation about nostalgia.

As Matt Murdoch (Charlie Cox), Foggy Nelson (Eldon Henson) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) leave their office, they pause to reflect on the state of Hell’s Kitchen. “You know Becky’s Diner?” Matt asks. “I love that place,” Foggy replies. “Closed,” Matt informs. “Turning it into a Soul Cycle.” Karen finds herself disinterested in this attempt to mourn the passing of a local institution. “The Hell’s Kitchen nostalgia is running pretty thin with you guys,” she opines. “You realize that?”

The fate of Becky’s Diner provides something of a running thread within the episode. Later on, Matt arranges to have a cup of coffee with former crime lord Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). “I’ve never been in this place before,” Fisk admits of the small restaurant where they meet, indulging in his own strange nostalgia for the Hell’s Kitchen that once was. “I miss Becky’s Diner.” Matt agrees, “Me too.” There is a sense that things are not what they once were. Everything is change.

It's possible to read this as a broader commentary on the gentrification of Hell’s Kitchen. After all, Fisk’s efforts to gentrify the neighborhood were the driving force underpinning the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil a decade ago. Part of what made that first season of Daredevil so special was that it was “a superhero show about the evils of gentrification”, as Fisk schemed to redevelop Hell’s Kitchen to “accommodate a larger, more affluent population.”

There was a sense when that first season premiered, in April 2015, that the horse had already bolted. In real life, Hell’s Kitchen was already gentrified. That same month, The New York Times ran a feature on how the neighborhood had already changed over the previous three decades. Even more than Matt’s super sense or alien invaders, the most fantastical aspect of the Daredevil franchise is the insistence that Frank Miller’s “Fear City” era portrayal of New York is still in any way applicable.

Appropriately enough, Born Again takes place in a version of Hell’s Kitchen that has been completely gentrified. At one point, Matt introduces himself to Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), a therapist and friend of his new law partner, Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James). “Hell’s Kitchen,” Heather repeats. “Tough guy, huh?” Matt replies with a smirk, “Not at all. You been to the Kitchen lately?” There is a sense that Hell’s Kitchen has been fully tamed.

Part of this effort to impose order and civilization on Hell’s Kitchen is the suppression of the vigilantes who operate within its confines. Following the tragic murder of Foggy Nelson at the hands of professional assassin Benjamin Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), Matt gives up his secret life as the superhero Daredevil. Although there are whispers that he is still out there lurking in the darkness, it also seems like Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), also known as the Punisher, has gone dormant.

This feeds into the sense that the gentrification of Hell’s Kitchen in Born Again is less about the restructuring of the real-life neighborhood than it is a metaphor for the show itself. Born Again is the first season of Daredevil to be produced under Marvel Television as a subsidiary of Disney. The previous three seasons had all been produced for Netflix, along with the other franchises that made up The Defenders: The Punisher, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Jessica Jones.

For better and for worse, those shows had a very distinct aesthetic that distinguished them from the movies and television produced in-house by Marvel Studios. They were grounded and gritty, shot on location in New York City rather than on soundstages in Atlanta. They were not obsessed with “comic book accuracy” as an end unto itself. They did not synergistically tie into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU). They favored hoodies and leather jackets over brightly-painted body armor.

However, they also had the freedom to be “about” things in ways that more conventional MCU projects were either unable or unwilling to be. As mentioned, Daredevil was about the soul of New York City being transformed by the wealthy elite, displacing local residents. The first season of Jessica Jones was a very overt exploration of rape culture through its framing of its villainous Kilgrave (David Tennant). Luke Cage was steeped in blaxploitation.

As the MCU has faltered in recent years, subject to criticisms that it was too homogenous and generic, the studio has turned to its acquisition of outside material as a potential lifeline. Deadpool & Wolverine was designed to capitalize on nostalgia for the X-Men franchise produced at Fox. It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that disappointing box office results for The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World were offset with rumors of plans to revive the Netflix franchises.

Born Again has had a troubled road to streaming. Marvel Studios originally hired Matt Corman and Chris Ord to manage their Daredevil revival, only to shut down midway through production and replace the pair with Dario Scardapane.  Corman and Ord reportedly completed six episodes, which Scardapane insists were “super solid.” To get a sense of how fragmented the show is, Scardapane is credited as writer of the first episode, while Corman and Ord are credited on the second.

Scardapane, who had worked on The Punisher, seems to have been drafted in to make Born Again feel more like the Netflix streaming show. By his own account, Scardapane’s top priority was “bringing up the themes and feelings that we loved from the old show and context.” Given how heavily Marvel Studios have come to lean on nostalgia, this is not surprising. What is surprising is the extent to which Scardapane’s script seems to be about the folly of such nostalgia.

Born Again finds its characters trapped between what came before and where they currently find themselves. “I like to think that I – that we - have evolved,” Foggy boasts in the opening line of the show. When Karen calls Foggy out for indulging in nostalgia, Foggy objects to that classification. “Not nostalgia,” he insists. “Reverence for the past, yet hope for the future.” Ironically, Foggy is dead by the end of this sequence, murdered by a character returning from the old show who was seemingly added to Born Again in reshoots.

There is an uncanny valley quality to the nostalgia in Born Again. The show’s fifteen-minute-long cold open is steeped in nostalgia. Foggy boasts that bartender Josie (Susan Varon) keeps a twenty-year-old bottle of O’Melveny’s Whiskey behind the bar. Karen asks Matt whether he’ll consider updating his classic red-tinted glasses, as they are “a little dated.” Even before Foggy dies, the opening scenes of Born Again feel like a wake. Daredevil is about to be gentrified. The beloved diner is about to become a SoulCycle.

This cold open leads to an extended fight sequence which is shot in what is designed to look like a single extended take between Matt Murdock and Benjamin Poindexter, an obvious reference to the original run’s tendency to indulge in technically impressive long-take fight sequences. This is a very obvious piece of fan service, an allusion to an aspect of Daredevil that fans (understandably) love. However, it’s also an illustration of why Disney could never make a show like Netflix’s Daredevil.

The Netflix shows obviously employed trickery and stagecraft to execute these fight sequences. However, they tended to use old-fashioned practical techniques like disguised cuts and the classic “Texas Switch”, where an actor will move offscreen (possibly even just falling behind an object) and be replaced by a stuntman. Those extended long-take sequences in Daredevil were impressive because of the craft of display. They were a celebration of stunt performers as artists.

In contrast, the Disney production model simply does not allow for that sort of showcase of technical craft. So instead of using disguised cuts and actors swapping with stunt doubles, Born Again relies on very obvious digital trickery, which breaks the sense of tactility and tangibility that made those scenes so compelling. Obviously, talented stunt people worked on that sequence, but it’s intentionally framed in such a way as to make it very hard to appreciate the physical craft.

Born Again repeatedly draws attention to the fact that it now exists within the larger Disney machine. There is a very expensive licensed soundtrack, with the first scene after the opening credits of the premiere playing over “Into My Arms” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the episode closing with a montage set to “Staring at the Sun” by TV on the Radio. There is a real sense that Daredevil has Disney money behind it now.

Indeed, lifting a plot point directly from Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s recent run on Daredevil, Born Again finds Wilson Fisk going respectable. In the season premiere, he announces his run for and wins election to the office of Mayor of New York City. Fisk’s power and influence have grown dramatically, there is a much stronger and more powerful machine behind him now, even if he quickly discovers that machine is a lot slower and more cumbersome than the one that he used to run. Sure, Daredevil can bring back Jon Berenthal for old time’s sake, but it has to include Tony Dalton to crossover with Hawkeye.

Fisk’s veteran advisor Sheila Rivera (Zabryna Guevara) warns him that part of being placed in such a position of authority means that he is tasked with “maintaining the status quo.” Fisk’s Mayoral run is obviously here, as it was in the comics, an analogue for Donald Trump. However, it is interesting that the baseball caps that his team wear are not red like those supporting Trump, but the blue associated with the caps worn by Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige.

To give the show some credit, there are smaller touches that seem genuinely nostalgic for the old Netflix model of production. In his victory big speech proposing to ban vigilantes in New York City, Fisk references “a kid in a spider costume” and “a guy with a skull on his chest” rather than naming Spider-Man (Tom Holland) or the Punisher, which feels like a cute nod to the way that the Netflix shows would avoid naming specific characters or events, using vague allusions like “the incident.” However, the series’ bigger nods are the ones that feel unconvincing.

Watching the first episode of Born Again, it’s clear that the show understands the unresolvable tension at its core. The opening credits sequence that imagine a literal reconstruction of a stone stature of the eponymous superhero are not just a metaphor for the stitched together nature of the series as a whole, but an expression of the impossibility of trying to recreate the aesthetics and mood of the original Netflix shows in a completely different production framework.