Sam Raimi's Mary Jane problem

[beehammer]

Because I went back and rewatched Spider-Man, because whyyyyyyyyyyy did Amazing Spider-Man have to make so little sense, you're getting a breakdown of why I don't like how it handled Mary Jane.

So, the problem I have with Sam Raimi's Mary Jane is basically 90% "pretty is not a character trait" and 10% "does this character ever get to do anything but suffer?".  And I'm willing to let some of the last one go, because Raimi's Spider-Man can be described as "everyone suffers, all the time" without much inaccuracy.

After all, MJ's rotating slate of disrespectful, asshole dudes is not that much different from Peter's rotating slate of tragic father figures, with the caveat that MJ's dudes try to kill her dreams while Peter's fathers are more into the literal death thing.

But the "pretty is not a character trait" part of it?  Pretty is not a fucking character trait.  That should be like Writing 101.  If your answer to "Why should the audience care about this character?" is "She's a knock-out," you need to sit in a corner until you understand where your parents went wrong in raising you.

Harry wants to introduce her to his dad and starts picking at her about the fact that she's not dressed how he wanted?  "It'll be fine.  You think I'm pretty, don't you?"  Not "You love me" or "I'm awesome" or "How big an asshole could he possibly be?", but "He'll think I'm suitably attractive to be your girlfriend."  When Aunt May talks about the first time Peter and Mary Jane met, it's "You asked if she was an angel."  When Norman ruins Thanksgiving, he snarls at Harry about her looks and what she could possibly want with a guy like him outside of his bank account.  When she's attacked in the street, her assailants pick her because she's pretty.

Is she funny?  Kind?  Weirdly angered by grammatical errors on signs?  Did she go joyriding in Flash's fancy car after they broke up because he can go to hell, but she's really going to miss those wheels?  The movie does not expect us to give a damn.  Peter's set up as the natural choice of boyfriend not because she's attracted to him or has a great rapport with him or because they have a long-standing friendship that's deepened into love, but because he's the only dude in her life who doesn't treat her like a toy.

And then the script seems to go out of its way to dump on her for not being good at anything else. 

Peter runs into her in town?  Let's have her asshole boss chase her down the sidewalk to yell at her for being a shitty cashier in public.  Peter asks her how her audition went?  Let's talk about how she not only didn't get the part, but that a) the part she didn't get was low-rent and b) they told her she sucked and needed to go pump gas for a living.  The only real outside interest she's given is acting--nothing else is on the horizon as far as the script is concerned--and she doesn't even get to take joy in that or be recognized as having talent.

It's not enough to set her up as a damsel in distress once Osborn starts rocketing around town and blowing shit up.  The script takes the time to set her up as a figure of suffering, which is doubly sleazy when the whole point of most of that suffering, in terms of plot, is to give Peter something to comfort her over.  Mary Jane has bad things happen to her; Peter rescues/comforts her.  Eventually, we understand, Mary Jane will fall in love with him because he's patient and kind and no one else will ever treat her as well.  It's gross, and cliched, and aggravating.

And none of this would have been difficult to avoid!  At all! 

You can absolutely accomplish the same plot goals without humiliating the character into the bargain.  After all, Peter gets to be fired over his spider-manning and wind up working for a guy who tries to get him arrested/stoned by an angry mob without it being treated as a morale-killer.  He can cop to having less than $8 to spend on dinner in New York City and still have a stupid smile on his face, but MJ's stuck spending 90% of her time on-screen looking like she's about to burst into tears.

There's no reason--absolutely none--that Mary Jane couldn't have landed her part.  She can be disappointed that shitty roles and spotty gigs don't pay the bills and she still has to waitress to make ends meet.  There can be friction between her and Harry because he's dating a girl with two embarrassing ad-spots on her resume who's temping to pay her rent, or because he doesn't see her successes as something to be excited about.  Her boss can be a jerk who won't let her trade shifts with a co-worker so that she can do a call-back.  But she'd be doing the thing she loved, and actually getting her shot.  The sacrifices or setbacks would make some amount of emotional sense and be tied to something important to her.

And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to establish them not just as having known each other for a long time, but having been reasonably close friends.  Instead of Peter being the (borderline stalker) guy she winds up with by sheer dint of him not being completely awful, you can tweak a few lines and establish that they've been consistently involved in each other's lives.  A long history of solidarity and companionship that turns into an awkward flirtation once they're adults requires very little extra effort from the script and would make more narrative sense than "I've loved this girl I barely know for over a decade, and now she's been beaten down enough by life to settle!".