SPOILERS AHOY.
Dear Captain America,
THIS IS HOW IT'S DONE. You know how back in my Green Lantern review I was like "Carol is an awesome character when she's first introduced but sometime during act two/act three she gets turned into someone completely useless" ? Well, I see your supposedly-competent romantic interest and I raise you one badass british science officer. Peggy Carter is what all superhero movie love interests hope they can be. The people at the Bechdel Test can argue all they want about the dancing girls and their upskirt shots (which I honestly saw as an homage to the time period), but my primary focus on this blog when I get to ranting is love interests who are or are not fully developed characters in their own right. The Nostalgia chick has a term for it with a witty acronym and it's something like Love Interest Superfluous to Plot (LISP?) but here, I'm just going to go down the list and think of all the reasons why Peggy is such a cool character (or at least I thought so).
1. She's smart.
2. She's a woman in a male-dominated profession... and still gets shit done. Even in the military during world war II. Like, it's one thing to tell us your female character is an officer. It's another to actually have her go toe-to-toe with a superior and get what she wants because of sheer pluck and determination and not because she flashed him her tits.
3. She is more than capable of Punching You In The Face.
4. She knows how to handle a firearm, and rather than sitting back at base moping manages to help storm the Big Bad's base as part of a fucking assault team.
5. Her and Steve/Captain America's love story is really sweet. Someone got their ratios right, because it doesn't feel like a romantic plot tumor. This was actually something I really thought was kind of refreshing, was the total lack of emphasis on sex in this movie. It's been pointed out that nowhere between 98-lb weaking Steve and (SPOILERS) Down With the Plane Captain America does the hero find time to bed his love interest - and that's okay, because they spend most of the movie playing on this awesome romantic tension where he's still this awkward kid from Brooklyn at heart and she's too classy a dame to throw herself at him, which goes a long way to show that just because he's got the body of a hunk he's still the same person deep down. I really enjoyed that Captain America really has these "Greatest Generation" values and not this modern idea of oversexed masculinity, because that would have probably just turned him into another super-powered douchebag (CoughGreenLanternCough)
6. The way she's written, there's a lot of things she does that could just as easily been filled by some kind of male supporting character, even with very little changes made to the overall script (Well, at the expense of the love story, which would be a pity to lose). However, I don't think the movie would work as well if she were just another soldier - there's the Men In Uniform Maximum, and once you go over that line all of your characters get kind of muddled. Probably why all of the Captain's strike team have such distinct appearances - they get ethnicities instead of names because if he had a platoon of white guys, we'd never learn their names AND we wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Stock the hero's team full of tokens, and they're still tokens but at least we can have a favorite character and get attached to them because we can TELL THEM APART. The fact alone that Peggy is the only woman in this male-dominated environment... and she's there as a capable member of the team, whose capableness is never for a second diminished... is a huge part of her character.
7. The actress is listed next to a picture of Rosie the Riveter in the credits. Which given they were using old War Propaganda posters for their credit design in general was a nice touch. I'm sure someone out there is rolling their eyes, but seriously.
Basically, it's not enough to present a female character in a male occupation to make the audience buy her competence - it's all about what you do with the character, and really it seems like there are two directions to go with this: turn her into a screaming damsel, or continue to prove her competence. She is in that position because she earned it, and she probably had to work harder to get there than the men she's working with. Your female lead is not just a pair of tits, and if you're writing her as such it's probably indicative of a much bigger problem.
There's also the matter of emotional investment in a love story. What I think makes the romantic subplot in Captain America work so well is that it's always there, but at the same time it's seamless. In the final action sequence, who is the captain talking to? Peggy. And it makes the emotional stakes of the scene so much higher than if he were just talking to one of his commanding officers. Why? Because we're invested in this relationship, and we want them to get their dance. If we weren't invested in it, the movie's last line wouldn't have any emotional resonance at all. But then you realize... Peggy is probably dead of old age, and you're like, "Holy fucking shit, this is tragic" and want to hug Captain America.
Contrast this to Green Lantern where Blake Lively just disappears for the whole final act of the movie and you can probably understand why no one had any kind of emotional reaction to Green Lantern besides "I spent my money to see this shit?"
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