A Part Of The Main: Your Empathy And Scorpio's In David Kraft & Keith Giffen's "The Defenders" # 46 to 50 (Part 3 of 3)

In which the blogger concludes his discussion of the character of Scorpio from The Defenders of 1977, the first two parts of which may be found in the March 2011 archive;

9.

Jake "Scorpio" Fury emerged into Marvel's continuity of 1977 claiming to have spent a Biblical span of seven years creating;

" -- The Zodiac Chamber, the Theater of Genetics taken to it furthest imaginings! A new life form for each month of the year - - led by me!"

Like a small and exceptionally unpopular boy responding to isolation by creating a faux-friendship network of sock puppets and charity-shop action figures, Scorpio's final response to his endless failures had been to quite literally make his own friends. And so narrow is the distance between his sense of self and his understanding of others that he hails this programme as " ... the salvation of the world - - and as its creator, I suppose that makes me a savior....". 

            
And since no-one except Jake Fury counts for anything where Jake Fury is concerned, it really does make perfect sense that the creation of a few android super-villains to serve as his duel-purpose chums and footsoldiers would carry with him the status of a world-saving project.

Yet the truly infantile and utterly confused nature of Scorpio's psyche is rather disturbingly revealed when we're shown exactly who and what constitutes the population of this android Zodiac.All but one of them is male, for example, and there's such a clear division of labour laid down between the ten not-men and the single not-woman that it's hard for the reader not to cringe at the thought of what's being learnt about the inside of Scorpio's empathy-less head. When the android that Scorpio's created to act as "Pieces" later dies before his maker's eyes, the "savior" is distraught, although tellingly not for the sake of the barely-born android fighting for his life before him;

"I wanted to share beers and long talks with you and the others, while we tried to get the world sane ..."

             
Putting aside the shiversome prospect of what exactly would constitute the process of getting "the world sane", it's immediately notable that what Scorpio is lusting after is the robot equivalent of a teenage gang to play much-feared and adored alpha male to. It seems painfully obvious that a sense of belonging is an experience that Jacob can only imagine by framing it in terms of a lonely and alienated childhood. Sharing beer and chatting forever with androids who in theory can only ever agree with their master is surely the opposite of society, and no marker of sanity either, but it's all that Scorpio can summon up to aspire to; a captive audience, the status of a beer-sharing big chief, and a grand plan to take over the world and restore its apparently lost sanity.

In this context, it's impossible not to see Scorpio's decisions to create only one female member of his new Zodiac as exceptionally telling, and, of course, thoroughly disturbing too. When faced just before his own suicide with the unborn android shell of his one female-esque creation, he rages that he'll "never hear you sigh, Virgo -- never feel your caress or know your embrace." She was, he declares, "... my last chance to be -- normal. I loved you, Virgo -- even though I never really knew you."

       
The gender roles of this new Zodiac are chillingly laid bare here. The blokes are for mateship, the bird is for physical comfort, and "love" is an emotion granted in return for services rendered. Most worrying of all is the sense that Virgo's perceived task was to bolster Scorpio's ego, to make him feel validated and "normal". No doubt Jake Fury has a concubine's role for Virgo pencilled in too, but in his distress at her destruction, it appears that he most regrets the loss of a soothingly loyal and nonthreatening female partner. In this, Virgo's role seems to have been designed as one far closer to that of a Mother than a lover, and the urge to feel securely psychologically attached appears a far more potent drive with Scorpio than eros. And it's surely telling that his final words to the wrecked mechanical carcase of his "Virgo" are quite different in tone and content to those he delivers to the dying Pieces;

"I'll never hear you sigh, Virgo -- never feel your caress or know your embrace. Virgo, how could you do this to me?"

                  
It's Jake Fury's way, of course, to see other people's suffering in the light of his all-consuming self-obsession. But here his utter lack of concern for anyone else manifests itself in what to us can only seem like a very unpleasant idea indeed of what the role of women, and in particular lovers, should be. There's certainly a disturbing amount of resentment expressed here towards his blameless never-born lovebot, who is inconceivably being blamed for Scorpio's gamble on a premature activation of the Zodiac. Having effectively killed her, he's now maudlin at the thought of her betrayal, at her sinful decision to permit herself to be prematurely and effectively murdered by her maker.

But then, there's a great deal of resentment and anger expressed by Jake Fury at everybody and everything in the world. It's not just that he seems to be suffering from confusion about his sexuality. Rather, Scorpio is confused about everything. Is he for the war or against it? Does he loathe his brother or despise him? Is he a man who refuses to be crushed or a victim who knows that he has been? Scorpio is a man without any kind of calm and fixed sense of self beyond a conviction that he's been picked on, and by the whole of reality too. Most tragically, there's a part of Scorpio which knows that's he lacks such a necessary sense of self, and it's that which seems to drive him to invest a tremendous degree of will and words into denying to himself that any such problem of self-identity exists;

".. to maintain self-esteem, so many such attributes are necessary. Among them, the courage of your own convictions. A sense of purpose and identity. Self-confidence, self-sufficiency, and an especially strong concept of -- self. Otherwise, you fall prey to confusion or despair and are all too easily swallowed by society. Thus, in order to survive, I have become my own creation -- An image, an ideal! I have become Scorpio -- and I shall succeed!"

          
In this, the original emphasis on the question of "Who Is Scorpio?" in Jim Steranko's SHIELD tales is reframed in "The Defenders". Now, instead of the question referring to who it is that lies beneath the supervillain's mask, the question focuses on the fact that Jake Fury himself is a fundamentally disordered man. Everything about him fails to make sense unless it's viewed in the light of his own madness. His taste can seem cultured and informed, and yet his kitchen contains nothing but beer. He claims to loathe "having" to extort money from Kyle Richmond, defining such a business as "undignified", yet his throwing of a can of beer to the soon-to-be-murdered Moon Knight is, he declares, a clear sign of his own "class". Whether it's his sexuality, his morality, his class or his aesthetic identity, Scorpio is simply all over the place, as the distance between his declarations of principle and his actions illustrate. Consider, for example, his criticism of the America he's grown up in, which he damns for taking everyday citizens and brainwashing them;

“...  into the system, the all important economy. Get a job, buy on credit, go to war, do whatever they tell you – or you’re a failure. Exchange your life for a house, car, TV. Work at a job you hate. Make compromises. Be a consumer ... Respect institutions. Be a willing party to your own moral and physical debilitation. Above all –be normal – or feel guilty ... Ask society no questions and it’ll tell you lies …"

And yet, what example does Jacob Fury offer in opposition to this Beat criticism of America? Nothing but murder, torture, theft, violence, and everything else that we might associate with the least knowing and most corrosive of tyrants.

                   
10.

Of course, Jake Fury's words and actions can only be regarded as inconsistent if he's considered in the light of what we might call typical behaviour. As soon as we step away from that and judge his behaviour in its own terms, most of what Scorpio says and does is remarkable in its consistency. He never shows any understanding of, or indeed concern for, the well-fare of others. Moon Knight's execution is important only in that it helps Scorpio to make a point about modern manners. Virgo's stillborn corpse is a mark of an android who didn't care enough about her master to ensure that she was fully active and able to offer him her caresses. Jack Norris becomes little but a potential cheering section for a Scorpio who cannot understand why this man that he's kidnapped, and whose friends he's trying to torture and murder, shouldn't be on Jake Fury's side of the quarrel.

          
So convinced is Scorpio that everyone else - everyone else - is to blame for his own perceived persecution and suffering that he's set on creating a society that functions as he demands, rather than in any way altering his own thoughts and behaviour to adapt to the world beyond himself;

"Are you implying that I’m – alienated? Well – you’re right. I can’t relate to real people, I never learned how, so I’ve manufactured my own - - the Zodiac. They will understand me. They will see things my way.".

And when Scorpio's impulsive, gambling decision to prematurely activate the Zodiac speeds up the disintegration of his great plan, he's quite unable to recognise that he himself might have been responsible for his the collapse of his last great conspiracy against everything else. Instead, the whole of reality is blamed for acting as one in a great Cosmic anti-Scorpio conspiracy;

 "Life is cruel .. It feeds on your hopes and ambitions and enthusiasms -- and uses them to destroy you"

The Jacob Fury of 1944, who saw World War Two only in terms of how it served to make his brother appear to be more important than he was, is therefore fundamentally exactly the same man as the Scorpio of 1977.

              

11.

Quite what diagnosis might be made of Scorpio's disorder is beyond my ability to deduce. I'd be happy to be told that Scorpio's comicbook disorder matches none of the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV-TR at all. Yet, what matters in four-colour terms is not that Scorpio's behaviour can be seen to follow those associated with any specific disorder, but rather the fact that his thoughts and actions can be perceived to be convincingly consistent on the printed page. And that's certainly true with Mr Kraft and Mr Giffen's work here. Not only is Scorpio a character who follows a clearly undeviatingly deviant path from beginning to end, but that path functions to make perfect sense of his backstory too. 

Firstly, Scorpio seems to suffer from a form of mania which appears to typically be followed by recurrent states of despair. Secondly, he is almost utterly without empathy, and only ever once displays the slightest knowledge that his problems are to the slightest degree founded in his inability to integrate with society rather than with society itself. Thirdly, he's clearly delusional, and quite possibly paranoid; he really does believe in fate, and in a hostile universe that's deliberately conspiring to destroy him in what is to him the cruelest fashion possible. Fourthly, his behaviour fulfils just about every single one of the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy according to Dr Hare's PCL-R; from grandiose plans to implusivity, from superficial charm to shallow emotions, from grandiose self-importance to an utter failure to take responsibility for his own actions, Jacob Fury is at least a very strong candidate for testing and long-term detention. (Even the evidence of juvenile delinquency shown in the flashbacks to the family Fury's pre-war history in Strange Tales # 167 and Sgt Fury # 68 would encourage such a diagnosis.)

                    

Whatever diagnosis might be made of Jake Fury's state-of-mind, and there may be more categories of mental disorder in the MU than in our somewhat-less fictional universe, Mr Kraft and Mr Giffen's Scorpio is portrayed as being so constantly and believably disordered that he's clearly not responsible for his actions. Though so much of his behaviour mirrors that of a thousand other supervillains of the period, here we're compelled to see Scorpio as an individual rather than just another antagonist, as a victim of his own psychology every bit as much as he is an undoubtedly disturbed and dangerous manl.

And so, Jake Fury's despair at the end of "Scorpio Must Die"  inspires our empathy not because we recognise an individual who's redeemable, or a man who was pushed in any degree by uncaring others towards his final end. Sympathy for those who threaten order in superhero fiction is usually granted to those from the other side who have shown some kindness, reversed some terrible decision, revealed some possibility for change, stood by the superheroes as the universe threatened to fall. Jake Fury has displayed none of these signs of being the bad guy who we might feel slightly fond and sorry for. He's too obviously and  irreversibly disordered, and he's committed, or tried to commit, too many despicable acts to be added to the comicbook list of bad guys of whom the reader is supposed to think somewhat well of. This isn't Namor or Hawkeye, The Black Widow or The Swordsman. He doesn't even carry the menance and tyrannt's glamour of a Doctor Doom, of an antagonist who we might ever want to see again. Scorpio is instead a helplessly dangerous man who could never be trusted to live freely even in the everyday society of the Marvel Universe. Worse yet, in comicbook terms, he's ultimately a pathetic and disturbing supervillain. It's certainly hard to imagine too many readers of the day clammering for a revival of Jack "Scorpio" Fury as an antagonist for their favourite superperson.

                  

But the reader has been encouraged to understand Scorpio's misery, and regardless of whether we could ever envisage ourselves behaving as he has, we can certainly imagine feeling as helpless and hopeless as he does at the end of "Scorpio Must Die!". And we can certainly grasp that he was indeed always doomed to end up in one form or another of the escapeless situation that he finally traps himself in. Whether his Zodiac had been brought successfully to life or not, Scorpio was surely never going to recreate his life and the world around him in the fashion that he so vaguely, so very imprecisely, desired. He was ill-fated, he was damned, from the very start, and the only question was how many others would he damage as he spiralled down his own destruction.

In that sense, reality really was conspiring to constantly tempt and break Scorpio.

We may be fundamentally different from Jake Fury, and yet, we too probably know  we'd ever want to of what despair is, and we'll possibly recognise something of ourselves in that moment in which the 52 year old Scorpio finally surrenders to the ultimate logic of the disorder in his own mind;

"All my life, every time I've ever believed in anything, or had faith that the future would get better for me, I've had that false hope knocked out of me ... and found myself back on my knees in despair."

In such a way is our own empathy confirmed, which is surely, if I may be forgiven the expression of the thought, one of the most important functions of any fiction, regardless of whether it's trash-popular or some grand and U-Novel opus of great artistry. The irredeemably disordered and profoundly threatening Scorpio may not be able to feel any sympathy at all for the likes of us, but we're shown by Mr Kraft and Mr Giffen that we can feel such for him.

               

12.

There are two final ironies in "Scorpio Must Die!" which serve as rather delicious and touching epilogues to the whole of the proceedings. In the first, Jack Norris and Moon Knight come across the body of the dead Scorpio, his head, we must presume, for thankfully the art is restrained and respectful, blown completely off of his own shoulders. But Norris and Spector completely misunderstand the situation, assuming that the android version of Scorpio's brother Nick had somehow blown "a fuse and -- and just -- killed him!". Even in death, Scorpio couldn't manage to get the world to understood what he was doing. In the end, his suicide is understood by those who come across his corpse as nothing more than the result of a mechanical glitch.Where everyone else is concerned, he was a pathetic victim of random bad luck rather than, as he intended, a brave if hopeless arbiter of his own final destiny.

Nobody beyond Scorpio's faithful LMD would ever know the horror that Scorpio lived with.

The second irony is similarly quite heartbreaking, for we realise, even as The Defenders and their allies don't, that the android Nick Fury had loved Scorpio very much. For all their bickering, and for the rather unpleasant violence that Jacob had inflicted upon it, the LifeModelDecoy had genuinely cared for Jake Fury, and it  despairs at the loss of its partner. The presence of this final twist consolidates the tragedy of Scorpio's suicide, and of the life which preceded it, for Jacob himself had declared of the LMD;

".. he doesn’t have any feelings I can hurt. If it weren’t for the loneliness, I don’t even think I’d keep him around."

             

But the android had very real feelings, and Scorpio's despair and isolation might have been in some way assuaged if he'd known of that fact, although of course the very point of this sorry tale is that Jacob Fury could never have done so. More touching yet, we later learn that Nick Fury himself shares the sense of absolute loss that his android duplicate does.

"Scorpio Must Die" doesn't pretend that the self-slain supervillain could have been saved through therapy or, help us, lashings of love. It doesn't try to shift the blame off onto society, even as many of Scorpio's criticisms of America and the West carry a great deal of weight. It never attempts to convince us that the superheroes are the brutes here, that the law is an ass or that victims are in part to blame for the behaviour of the criminals who prey on them. It's not a tale that's sappy, soft-hearted or idealistic at all. It certainly never suggests that Scorpio is anything other than a profound danger to the public who should be locked away in the most secure of circumstances as possible,.

But what it does express is something which this sub-genre simply doesn't say enough, and which it too often actually works, albeit unconsciously, to deny. It makes us understand that Scorpio, for all his difference and inhumanity, was a human being too. Costumed superfolks and their battles all too often encourage us to glorify in the defeat of the other, and catharsis is so often framed in the moment at which someone we've been encouraged to loathe is very badly hurt indeed, at which point it's too often obvious that we're supposed to cheer. And that's a terrible shame, and something of a secular sin too, because the genre has no need to be so unintentionally cruel, so dismissive and anti-social, as Mr Kraft and Mr Giffen's work in "The Defenders" illustrates.

No man being an island, and asking not for whom the bell tolls, and all of that ... 

        

My very best to anyone who might have made it down to this line, and I wish you a splendid time in recompense for your patience!    

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