Hi, welcome back to normal blogging! I hope you enjoyed the Polar Bear Winter Festival but now Christmas is over and we’re back to the regular non-winter-related twice-a-week posts.
I don’t talk about TV much and when I do, it’s either about Iceland or somewhere suitably Nordic. But today I’m talking about Marvel’s Hawkeye miniseries. It’s the archery, you see. Well, of course you see. I gave this post a stupid, clickbait title! I’m an archery instructor and it only dawned on me after watching the first two episode back-to-back that Hawkeye is pretty much the reason for that.
Before we get started, there are obviously going to be spoilers here but this mostly isn’t about plot, it’s about sport.
I did archery as a Guide. It didn’t go well – I tried to pull the arrow out of the target and nearly pulled the target itself, a great big roll of straw, off the stand. In fact, when I did my Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, I was offered the choice of archery or caving and because of that failure, I opted for caving. Goodness knows what my life might have looked like if that arrow had come out easily and I’d joined an archery club at uni instead of caving. I credit that caving club with really pushing out my competent, practical, level-headed side and making me the person I am today.
Anyway, I became a Ranger leader in 2007 and a Brownie leader in 2009 and we did various events, which included semi-regular archery, which must have gone a bit better than that attempt when I was a teenager. Then came 2012 and the release of The Avengers. Like Kate Bishop, I took one look at Hawkeye and a month later, I was at an archery club near Salisbury doing a six-week beginner’s course, the necessary precursor to joining a club (although I never did because there was never a convenient one for me to join).
But with that background, I took a fancy to doing my archery instructor qualification in 2016 and then my fencing coach qualification in 2018 and now I have three boxes of arrows in the cupboard under the stairs and a bag of swords in the back bedroom. They’re green and orange and they’re made of plastic, but still. Bag of swords.
By the end of the first episode of Hawkeye, I realised that here, at last, is my superhero. No, not Hawkeye. Kate Bishop. I mean, I’m not a New York millionaire, I’ve never done martial arts and I’m definitely not national level-good at anything. But I looked at Hawkeye and decided to take up archery and I have been known to describe myself as a warrior, even if it’s only in the context of “I’m trained to teach two different weapons, which means my CV says I’m a warrior” and using the word warrior as seriously and accurately as the pretty girls in pink trouser suits who call themselves girlbosses.
And so I’m going to talk about the archery in Hawkeye.
Small aside: the first appearance of Hawkeye in the MCU is in Thor, when he appears about halfway through with a compound bow. A right-eyed compound bow. I don’t object to the fact that he uses a recurve bow in all future appearances; the Thor thing is that he’s a sniper and I can see that a compound might be better for that – that’s the Olympic kind with all the wheels and pulleys on it – and that a simpler recurve, which is what he’s used ever since, probably is better for battle.
It’s the fact that forever after, he shoots left-eyed – bow in the right hand, draw the string with the left, the opposite of the Thor appearance. It doesn’t matter at all which you use, it’s a personal thing just like which hand you write with, but anyone past their first or second lesson is going to be consistent with it. Why isn’t Hawkeye consistent? I’m right-eyed. I can’t even hold an imaginary bow in my other hand, let alone a real one, let alone actually shoot.
In a group of twelve kids, I generally get between one and three who start the lesson left-eyed and there’s always one who does so badly that I give her a right-eyed bow after a few ends and discover she’s been right-eyed all along. I’ve had kids who’ve gone from being unable to even land the arrow in the same field as the target at the beginning to winning the little tournament that I tend to finish lessons with, once they’ve got a right-eyed bow.
Being right-eyed is a lot more common, in the same way that being right-handed is a lot more common. Your shooting eye is not related at all to your dominant hand – you’ll get plenty of archery instructors who’ll give a “left-handed bow” to a left-handed participant but it’s not about your hand, it’s about your eye. In this case, I believe Jeremy Renner happens to be left-handed as well as apparently left-eyed but that’s entirely coincidence.
Kate’s first archery scene is interesting. Putting the tennis ball on the end of the arrow should absolutely wreck its balance and she’s going to have to adjust her aim hugely to compensate. Arrows are aerodynamic and that extra weight is going to pull it right down. Oh – look! I don’t know what the sharp thing is she sticks on front on the second attempt but look, she’s adjusting her aim hugely! I still think there’s a chance in a million of even hitting the tower, let alone cutting the rope but I’m willing to give her a little disbelief because of the way she visibly made even a half-hearted effort at compensating for the weight. Well done, Hawkeye.
The original draft of this post had a long digression into the fencing scene from episode one. Episode two? One of the early ones, anyway. I wasn’t expecting swords and there’s far more to obviously criticise in the fencing scene than in pretty much all the archery in the entire series. In short: that hall isn’t big enough for swordfighting, get Mommy Bishop out of sword’s reach and put that damn hand behind your back!
As for the archery. On the whole, you don’t actually see a whole lot either up close or at the sort of speed where you can take in what’s happening. There’s plenty of fantasy/action archery – Hawkeye’s thing where he can shoot people right through the head/hand when they’re behind him continues but I’m going to let that go because he’s a superhero, despite the number of times that this series specifies that he’s not a superhero.
Archery from a moving car or on ice I’ll let go too. I can’t see how you can possibly aim from a moving vehicle or while trying to keep your balance on ice in ordinary shoes but if you can shoot something behind you with 100% accuracy without even looking, why shouldn’t you be able to shoot while moving? Anyway, it looks good and shooting from a car/while running/jumping etc is a staple of action movies, and that’s what we’re doing with our sticks and string, putting medieval technology up against future technology and still making it look both plausible and cool.
I love the trick arrows! I know they’re implausible and I know they should throw the balance off so much that Kate shouldn’t be able to hit anything with them – Hawkeye, fine. He’s used to them – but they’re fun and the building of the new set is possibly my favourite scene in the entire series. If Tony or Bruce knew that Clint could solder like that, they’d have had him in the lab helping build Ultron. I also love that they do special things courtesy of Pym and Stark technologies. This series is tying in and calling back to all sorts of things, what with this and that, and various characters and it’s fun to see the resident tech nerds involved behind the scenes of the trick arrows.
In fact, there’s only one thing I have a problem with. Most of the archery is either too fast, off-screen or too fantastic for me to really quibble about but I have two problems when Kate picks up Hawkeye’s bow. I teach with training bows that have a draw weight of about 16 or 18lbs and we can shoot about ten metres. That means how much force it takes to pull the string back the standard distance as marked on the bow, typically 28″. If your arms are shorter or longer and you pull it back further or not as far, there’s a formula for figuring out what weight you’re actually drawing, so if you draw an 18lb bow 30 inches instead of the 28 marked, you’re actually drawing 20lbs (I didn’t do the sums; it’s all set out in my archery instructor handbook).
A grown and experienced man like Hawkeye probably pulls 40 or 50lbs. Kate is supposed to be a really good archer but she’s small and young and she’ll use a much lighter bow. Yet at one point she picks up Hawkeye’s bow and shoots with it with no problem. It should be far too heavy for her. To put this in perspective, I shoot 18lbs no problem but could hardly touch a 24lb bow. It’s perhaps not a great comparison, since the 24lb that gave me so much trouble was a compound bow, which is a very different beast to a recurve but still, that’s an extra six pounds and I couldn’t pull it at all. Kate will probably use a 25-35lb bow, probably the higher end, but Hawkeye’s will still be noticeably heavier. I’d expect her – not necessarily anyone, but Kate Bishop is supposed to be technically a good, well-trained archer and warrior – to be able to shoot it but I absolutely wouldn’t expect the 100% accuracy she always displays. It’s too heavy and it’s also just too big. Her arms are shorter. They just are.
Not only that, but did I mention that Hawkeye’s left-eyed and Kate’s right-eyed? It’s a rather beautiful detail that Kate uses that bow left-eyed throughout the car chase except in the occasional close-up – well done for catching that, Hawkeye, that’s a wonderful detail that really sells that she’s using his bow rather than her own. But I’ve never met anyone who was as good with their off-eye than their good one. I had a whole rant about how bows aren’t symmetrical and you can’t just swap sides, unless you use your finger as an arrow rest, in which case your arrow starts off going in the wrong direction and you’re not going to have any accuracy, and instead I have to rant about how unlikely it is that Kate’s as good with either eye, to say nothing of her aim using trick arrows, which aren’t going to have the same balance as ordinary arrows, because this is the first time she’s used them and she isn’t accustomed to compensating for the odd weight yet. But now I’ve checked that detail, I downgrade from two problems with Kate using Hawkeye’s bow to only one and a half problems with Kate using Hawkeye’s bow.
I was expecting to gleefully criticise and pick the archery apart but actually, I’m very happy to ignore the more ridiculous bits as part of it being a, you know, superhero franchise and I’m impressed with the small details that most people probably don’t notice. You did pretty well, Hawkeye. I enjoyed the bonus swords and I did enjoy having a fencing scene to tut over. 9/10 for the archery in Hawkeye!