(S)hero

My daydreams have always centred around heroism – I didn’t skip around the playground pretending to be a horse as a child, I tore around pretending to be Cheetara. I ignored Barbies and My Little Pony in the large plastic box of toys I shared with my sisters, rummaging around in the container until I found a second-hand She-Ra action figure, who went on to rescue the oversized and hapless Ken. I didn’t watch Batman and dream of him rescuing me, I instead saw myself as a Pfeiffer-esque Catwoman, or Thurman’s Poison Ivy – both morally ambiguous villains. Even to this day, if I can’t get to sleep at night, I will play music and envision complex fight-scenes, choreographed to the tracks and suitably distracting for my brain to switch off and allow me to drift off. I have always been drawn to female superheroes and villains, and it’s no coincidence my office walls are decorated with Wonder Woman and Catwoman prints I bought from Etsy artists. They inspire me.

There is something irresistibly compelling about heroes. We all know that comics and superhero films are escapism from the mundane, allowing the most-average of human beings to ascend to heights of ability, strength and courage beyond reality. It’s even more compelling for me, when the mechanism of escapism is female. I feel there is an argument that even a slight meta-human enhancement for a woman is more compelling to me than the most complex of male abilities. I think this is because the ability for women to feel powerful does not need to be exaggerated and overpowered to be a contrast to actual female experience, given the long, oppressive history the gender has suffered. In trying to explain this point, I realised I get the same sensation of admiration when I think of the Suffragettes as I do when I think about She-Hulk. Perfectly ordinary women, taking extraordinary action is heroic to me. There’s no need to leap a building in a single bound, when you can claim the vote, withheld by men for so long. Or be faster than a speeding bullet, when hunger strikes can further your cause.

It’s fair to say that now, more than ever, the female superhero or super villain, is taking centre stage in modern media. We are now starting to see ever more diverse and inclusive line-ups for team-up films, incredible changes in comic literature and leading ladies in reboots of TV staples like He-Man. I continue to be frustrated by the portrayals though. I still find them incredibly problematic, and in some of the worse cases, they perpetuate damaging and old-fashioned stereotypes that I feel move the cause backwards, not forwards.

Take for example, the current series of Supergirl. I lasted one series, and I struggled even getting to that point. For those of you not familiar with this one, Supergirl is a cousin of Superman called Kara Zor-El. My enduring memory of her origin story was that she’d landed on Earth, some time after Kal-El arrived and had stayed hidden, long into adulthood. The series was like a suped-up version of The Devil Wears Prada, presenting the viewer with two female stereotypes; the young and underconfident Supergirl, and a much-maligned powerful professional, admired and feared in equal measure. I nearly detached a retina I rolled my eyes so hard at the unoriginality of this. Throughout the first series, Kara is constantly suffering from a lack of self-belief and confidence, a bad case of the too-kinds, and makes mistake after mistake which is not so subtly blamed on her emotions. I grew up watching Smallville, and never saw Clark Kent wrestle with this issue, if he made a mistake it was running too fast, or being too strong, or throwing something too hard. I was incensed at the handling of the issue around gaining power, being split so badly by gender.

Interestingly, I saw this partially tackled in Captain Marvel. She is constantly told she’s too emotional, and that she needs to get this under control and restrain her powers, and it’s later revealed to be a technique employed by her manipulative, male mentor, to ensure he could keep her under control. He knew he couldn’t beat her in a fair fight, so convinced her that it showed immaturity and lack of self-control were she ever to unleash her full power. If I return to Supergirl, she has everything Superman has (plus more if you count having to wear skirt over the tights) but for some reason was being depicted as an emotional, insecure, over-thinking poor relation (literally) to Kal-El. Needless to say, I gave up on the series shortly after I realised it wasn’t getting any better. Watching it made me feel disempowered, the opposite of the point of superhero escapism.

This leads me on to team-up franchises. Sadly, they still have the look of tokenism, if you look at the Avengers and Black Widow, and Justice League’s Wonder Woman. Both women are used in their films as a pseudo-conscience for the team, occupying roles of seduction or integrity. Anyone familiar with the creation of Wonder Woman will know that Marston lived an unconventional lifestyle for the time, and his taste for BDSM and powerful women seeped into the comics. His other notable achievement (the lie-detector) bursts through in Diana’s lasso of truth, but I remain incredibly amused that outside of her use of this item to compel honesty, it was always her that was shown bound in the comics, when captured by a villain. Even in the most recent, female-directed iteration of Ms Prince, she is still plagued by emotive responses to situations, and is led around on “her” mission by a heroic male spy. There are jokes made about the suitability of clothing when it comes to fighting, but she still ends up in a flattering, barely-there leather ensemble.

One of the earliest, if not the first encounter we have with Black Widow, is in what turns out to be a reverse-interrogation with some big, burly men. She’s in a little black dress, slips off her high-heels and has been using her womanly charms to extract information out of the gang. There’s an argument to say she’s played a blinder here, as the men assume she’s a dumb woman and speak freely in front of her, but I remain frustrated that she’s a spy, with no real special ability, other than some Russian spy-training and some good gadgets. Batman got to be in charge with his tech, Ironman is just a billionaire, playboy philanthropist without his suit, but post Civil War is also the man in charge, opposing Captain America. Black Widow is there to infiltrate, interrogate and so they can put her backside on film posters. It’s all so frustratingly secretarial in it’s subtext. Post-Marston, they ACTUALLY demoted Wonder Woman to the position of secretary to the Justice League. I am not making that up.

Having just recovered from retinal severance during Supergirl, I detached them again watching Endgame. There had been a scene in the film preceding Endgame, where one female hero, Scarlet Witch is cornered by a female villain, Proxima Midnight and taunted that she’s going to get beaten because she’s alone. Only for Black Widow and Okoye to join her in the trench in an act of sisterhood that just beats you over the head. I have an issue with films always pitting the woman against the woman in ensemble casts (it’s like they’re frightened to show a man fighting a woman, at any level of ability and I find it patronising) and the subtext of this scene, for me, was that one woman is not enough to succeed. Hollywood tells women they’ve got to stick together, but bloody loves a moody, male lone wolf, taking out wave after wave of bad guys. Anyway, back to my eyeballs, after some positive responses to this scene, another was absolutely shoe-horned into Endgame, at the final climatic battle. I saw a particularly evocative shot of the fight. Captain America, shield broken and body battered, drags himself to his feet, and is a tiny, singular silhouette framed against the horde of Thanos’ army. I loved the shot, it looked like a biblical, renaissance painting of good versus evil and if I can ever find a print of it, it’s going up in my office. I loved the single act of brave defiance in the face of insurmountable odds. It was real fucking hero stuff.

Later in the skirmish, as Dr Strange is able to flood the battlefield with heroes in support, the infinity gauntlet ends up in the hands of Captain Marvel, passed to her by Spider-Man and is tasked with getting it, and the infinity stones through the fight. Spider-Man is concerned about her achieving this. For anyone who has not seen the film, Marvel has just been fired upon by Thanos’ ship when she enters the atmosphere of Earth, as she’s considered a bigger threat then the entire fucking army. She is arguably the most powerful being in the universe. At this moment, the writers/directors decide that another sisterhood-team-up is needed, cause us girls just can’t do it alone, and drag in every single, no matter now minor, female character to help her. Stick together girls, it’s tough out there, you are not enough on your own.

And so continues the problematic portrayal of the female hero. It’s lazy, and damaging and it’s not how male heroes are treated in the same films/shows and comics. I still feel there is a huge amount of work to be done to give women like me a proper female hero, who doesn’t have to wear a metal bikini, struggle with her emotions, or team-up to be effective. I know she’s out there, and I know she can be written, cast, directed and acted by women who can get the tone right. Please, please allow women to be remarkable, for just their remarkable abilities and stop treating them like sidekicks, emotional wrecks and dependent on others around them. Let them beat the shit out of male opponents, let them brood and it be cool, not moody. Let them be more than a femme-fatale in killer heels, and let them be villains without being mentally unhinged sociopaths. Let them be more than love interests, and be motivated by more than love and motherly-instincts.

I know this hero is out there. I’ve been daydreaming of her for decades.