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Sam Raimi's Mary Jane problem

2018-12-09T21:19:44Z

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!".

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On the many permutations of female characters

2018-12-09T21:17:57Z

I think one of the biggest problems I have when it comes to writing about female characters is the difference between the character herself and the handling of the character by the (usually male) writer/director/etc.*

You criticize a particular writer or director's handling of the character, and it very easily gets read as a critique of the character herself. (Which may or may not be warranted, but it's a little besides the point in that particular moment.) I mean, I've actually seen a few essays now that complain about the fact that a director's paid a fair amount of attention to making a female character a meaty character instead of a literal prop (yay, right?), but then hasn't bothered to actually do anything character-y with her. Like, "Yeah! You've got a complicated backstory and a morally ambiguous motivation and relationships that don't involve the hero! Why don't you go stand in a corner until the action is over and you can kiss somebody?"

It's an improvement, but it kind of misses the point of asking for female characters that work as characters instead of just some sort of weird ambulatory reward system for the male protagonists.

I think one of the most recent examples is Gamora, who's a fantastic character. I mean, the script literally gives her a hero's journey. She is unambiguously the moral center of the film. She's the most selfless and noble character in the entire movie. Like, the Novas? At least are defending their home planet. She's just out to save billions of strangers at great personal cost because fuck letting the genocidal maniacs win. She's getting her crew together and going to save the goddamned galaxy, in the face of her entire (death-cult) adopted family. Everyone she actually knows and cares for personally is lined up against her. Or at least, that's what's going on with the script.

The director somehow seems to find it way more interesting to focus on whether or not a space-age dude-bro gets to kiss her.** We're stuck watching "I May Not Have Explained The Consequences of Failure to This Primate Well Enough, As He Keeps Being Distracted by the Possibility of Mating with Me: The Gamora Story."

And none of that is actually an indictment of the character! The treatment of the character is another story. Which, honestly? I get it. This can be a weird conversation to have. Most of us are used to dealing with a sort of closed system, where the person writing the character and the person who created the character are the same person.

But once you're talking about corporate-owned characters, the bets are kind of off. If JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien or Anne Rice fucks up their characters, there's not a lot of daylight between authorial intent and what's on the page. But with television and movies and comics, you're dealing not just with authors and artists and producers and directors, and all of them having something to say about how a character is presented. The studios and networks are throwing their weight around, too.

You get a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist running DC, Lois Lane's going to act very differently than she did before he took over. You get a writer who's into women's lib doing storylines for Fantastic Four, Susan Storm's going to be a lot less interested in cleaning up after the boys and giggling ineffectually when Reed forgets they have kids because Science!.

One executive can be the force behind a show having this Amanda Waller:

instead of this one:

(Apologies for not being able to find a screenshot of her personally ordering that President Luthor be arrested for treason immediately after he tries to make out with her/recruit her to his evil plan for post-apocalypse world domination. Because that happened.)

The original creators for both characters can start spinning in their graves for all DC or Marvel care; they're the ones running the show currently. Hell, look at Gene Rodenberry's treatment of Kirk and Uhura compared to Abrams's.

And it is difficult not to hear "This character sucks" when someone says "This director's portrayal of this character sucks." We're primed to hear that. Female characters get bagged on all the time, for pretty much every reason under the sun. Too feminine/not feminine enough? The same character can be both! Did the exact same thing an immediately-forgiven male character did? What an irredeemable bitch! Sexy-lady mouthpiece for the dude-writers' anti-femme misogyny? Ugh, Strong Female Characters are awful. Everyone's a Mary Sue!

But it's not especially difficult to write a script that avoids lazy misogyny or being super-shitty to your female characters, so I'm probably going to keep complaining about directors and writers who pull some bullshit at female characters' expense for no real reason.

*Which isn't to say that this is a problem unique to female characters. I mean, god knows how many pixels I've spent over the years talking about this effect with pretty much any long-standing character. I think my personal favorite that this shows up with most frequently is Batman, for fuck's sake.

**Yes, Peter Quill. I've also written an embarrassing amount about Peter Quill. But that doesn't alter the fact that the movie shortchanges Gamora's character to focus on his arguably less interesting character for no apparent reason.

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