beehammer

I went to see it last night, and I think probably the thing I most appreciated is that they never took the idea of Carol being "too powerful" seriously.  Because this shows up so frequently in comic properties, and it's coming back again with the Dark Phoenix bullshit, and I really, really fucking hate it.

The thing about male heroes is that they get to basically be gods, and nobody looks at that character and thinks "But what if--hear me out, here--what if he couldn't handle being so powerful?  What if being so powerful and being able to do anything broke his brain?  What if being so powerful is secretly terrible and all he wants, deep down, is to not have that power anymore?" is a super-interesting, subversive, clever storytelling move that anyone wants to see.  If you have a male character whose awesome, godlike power comes at a terrible price, or is something that gets dumped on them before they're ready to handle it, or is really a pretty big burden, the story that gets told almost always revolves around finding solutions to those problems that let the character keep wielding those godlike, awesome powers.

Pretty much every time we get a female hero that's basically a god and her title gets any sort of readership, or she gets any sort of fanbase, some dickhole inevitably comes along and proposes this shocking storyline to end all storylines where all that power is just too much for her.  And then enough people that this keeps happening sit back and applaud like this is a great artistic contribution instead of a loud fart during a lull in conversation on a conference call. 

Thor's just Thor, but when Jane Foster takes up the mantle, using her awesome godlike powers makes her breast cancer (because of fucking course it was) worse.  She-Hulk suffers emotional trauma and now she's too afraid to use her own amazing powers.  Emma Frost gets too powerful for a hot second, and when that gets taken away it turns out her hubris in thinking she could use all that power has cost her pretty much all the power she started out with.

Jean Grey gets so powerful that she just sort of... goes crazy and dies. 

Scarlet Witch gets so powerful that she just sort of... goes crazy and dies.

We keep seeing these things presented as deep, moving storylines when they're the same old tired bullshit.  Male characters get to work through their problems without anyone seriously suggesting that there's something inherently and fundamentally wrong with them having them in the first place, that the character's mental disintegration or struggles with their powers are the inevitable result of having too much power or being too awesome.  Female characters are perpetually in need of being knocked down a rung or two, because apparently that struggle with the incompatibility between their humanity and their powers is "interesting." It's sexist, and it's fucking lazy.

So Captain Marvel not indulging in it is a huge relief.  All the lines about how she needs to learn to control her powers, how when she can control her temper and not use the full range of her powers at the drop of a hat she'll be ready, how she needs a hierarchy and external controls on her powers--it's all self-serving shit being shoveled by the bad guys. 

When she finally breaks free of the limits that have been placed on her, accesses her full strength, and attains godlike, awesome powers--that's when she's at her best self.  That's when she saves the day.  That's her natural state.  And at no point in time does the film act like Carol coming into her own and figuring out the full breadth and depth of what she's really capable of is anything other than fucking awesome.

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I feel like now that Daredevil has established that Madame Gao is still hanging around, doing her thing, we could actually maybe get some non-racist, perfectly ridiculous goon-swarms going. 

Like, she’s clearly a charismatic leader, she runs a bustling drug-trade empire with lots of cash and a rolodex full of people up to their eyeballs in debt or wanting a free month’s worth of drugs, and she seems to take at least pretending to be polite about shit pretty seriously.  And Matt just will not fucking stop kicking down her doors and beating up her henchmen and being super-rude about everything.

So, you know, just like once a month, she checks her Annoying Vigilante Calendar and sees what he’s up to, calls in one of her more creative lieutenants, and tells him she wants word put on the street about something Daredevil won’t be able to resist investigating. Also, she wants fifty people they can afford to lose to dress up like the cast of Evil Dead and be waiting for him at the bait-address where the fake dog-napping ring or whatever is supposed to be.  Matt shows up, kicks down the door, and suddenly there are guys with chainsaws and people pretending to be zombies and somebody threw pig’s blood (?!) on him and then ran away and he does not understand what’s going on but there are dogs to be saved, so he’s going to fight his way through it come hell or high water or ten guys who appear to be walking trees okay this has got to be a dream.

Meanwhile she’s just watching this on a livestream and laughing her ass off, and it’s almost as good as the time she got a bunch of shriners, complete with miniature cars, to take him on for what they thought was a charity bout.

After half a year of this, Matt’s about to have a nervous breakdown because seriously, what the fuck is even going on in this town, and Karen keeps insisting that no, Matt, I swear on a stack of Bibles that there isn’t a gang of villainous Harlem Globetrotter-wannabes with attacks based on trick-basketball moves carving out territory in Hell’s Kitchen, I think someone besides you would have seen them by now if they were, why would that even be a thing?  Claire hung up on him after the “evil clowns” call, and Foggy told him to stop falling asleep watching the news after the time with the Sexy Avengers, and Madame Gao’s expanding video library of Daredevil’s Greatest Hits is proving surprisingly popular with all the guys he keeps punching in the face because Daredevil doesn’t do doorbells.

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I just want to see one of those dopey supervillain team-up things where instead of everybody being like “All right, time to fight us some heroes!”, every last one of them has an existential crisis because somebody lumped them in with the rest of these fucks.

Dr. Doom’s all “Doom will usher in a new age, a golden utopia, free from the burden of want or indecision or petty dissent!  Doom knows what’s best for mankind and will bring it about!  These peasants are mere jailbreakers and thieves!  How has it come to be that Doom is numbered among their ranks!”

And like Sandman’s sitting there going “Dude, I just... I steal shit.  Sometimes I team up with guys who also don’t like Spider-Man.  Worst thing I ever did was slap an old dude, and I felt really bad about it for weeks.  That guy’s been sanctioned by the UN three times and counting for running death camps.”

“The skulls of Doom’s enemies pave the road to a better tomorrow!”

Three guys’ve got their hands up like “We literally just fight the Avengers for kicks.  Pretty sure that ain’t even illegal.”

General Ross is sitting there glaring at everyone and going “I’m still a general.  I work for the US government.  I’m being paid, right now, out of taxpayer funds.  You’re all going to super-jail as soon as I get my phone back.”

Everybody’s side-eyeing Kraven like, it’s 2016, bro, stop killing endangered animals for fun, and he’s looking at them like he doesn’t even know what to say to someone if it’s not about hunting.

Wolverine and Deadpool are somewhere in the back, bickering with one of the roster-guys about how it shouldn’t count if the hundreds of dudes you’ve knife-murdered were knife-murdered for good reasons.

It’s just the most demoralizing thing since Osborn got elected president.  Super-crime plummets 50% in the next three months as everyone takes some time to reflect on their lives and try to get their shit together.

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!".