[Meta] On ladies and competence in Iron Man 3

[wallwalker]

I was thinking about Iron Man 3 again, in relation to another piece of meta I'm probably still going to write, and I came to a rather troubling conclusion about how the movie treated its lady characters.

Cut for a variety of film spoilers.
(And as usual, this only relates to the MCU. If there are comic storylines that aren't like this, by all means, tell me about them. I'll check them out.)



I realized today that the only times the major lady characters in the film were allowed to be competent was when there was an action by one of the male cast members enabling them.

Think about it. Pepper was shown to be competent and heroic when she was able to use the suit to save herself, Tony and Maya from being crushed... after Tony gave it to her. And then, much later, she emerged from some flaming wreckage and started fighting with Aldrich and fending off stray suits and basically owning everything around her... because Aldrich had given her Extremis against her will.

Maya was shown to be a brilliant scientist. She was the one who developed the idea and formula for Extremis in the first place... after Tony came up with a fix for a problem after a one-night stand. (I mean, think about that... he was able to figure out the problem in one night, after all of her own work had failed!) Later she developed it into a more stable form that was actually viable for use on some human beings... but only after she joined up with Aldrich and his think tank, who funded her, and as a result were able to push her research into directions she'd never intended.

You see the pattern here? Both of the ladies had their moments of awesome, and their great accomplishments. But all of those moments were enabled by the men in the film. When they were trying to do something on their own, or when they were acting against one of the men without aid (Maya taking herself hostage,) they were immediately shot down. In Maya's case, literally.

Why? Maya's a brilliant scientist who laid the groundwork for Extremis herself. Pepper's a highly competent woman and the CEO of Stark Industries, and apparently doing fairly well for herself in her own right. Why aren't they allowed to be competent by themselves once in a while?

There's not even any relief from it in the minor characters. Chad's mother is constantly drunk since losing her son years ago. All she can do is save the file so that Tony can pick it up, and that's only because Tony is finally able to tell her some small part of the truth about her son. (And yes, I understand her pain about what happened to Chad, as she understood it, but it's the overall pattern that I can't stand.) Likewise, Brandt was a tough woman, but even she isn't able to take Tony down on her own. Savin is the only one who comes close, and the only reason that Tony isn't forced to surrender after he takes the kid hostage is because of something he gave the kid earlier.

I already sense a counterargument to this, the fact that Tony needs Pepper, is dependent on Pepper. He said so, right? Except that's not what the film gives us. When Pepper is separated from Tony, she gets kidnapped by Aldrich (and possibly that was Maya's plan, possibly not. I'll get into that another time.) She was captured, injected with DNA-changing treatments, permanently altered against her will, and basically told that she was a trophy. When Tony is away from Pepper, he manages to put his suit back together under subpar conditions - granted, he's used to that after building an arc reactor IN A CAVE! WITH A BUNCH OF SCRAPS! But then he overcomes his own panic attacks to raid the base of the most dangerous terrorist in the free world with stuff he bought at a hardware store. So who's being portrayed as the dependent one, here? (And he wasn't even trying to rescue her, because at this point I am fairly sure that he didn't know she was gone!)

It's enough to make me miss Black Widow in Iron Man 2. I don't particularly even like the Action Girl archetype (although she was pretty bad-ass,) and the cinematography of her big fight scene bugged the hell outta me with all of the fanservice shots. (I liked her, especially in The Avengers, but I didn't like the way that Iron Man 2 treated her.) But at least she was allowed to be awesome on her own, and was actually shown to be more competent than the other men around her, on either side.

Nonetheless, it depresses me that hers is seemingly the only type of female character that's allowed to be shown as competent on her own.

(Crossposted to tumblr).

Comments

[sholio]

Something about this has been bugging me ever since I read it, and I think I finally put my finger on it.

First off, I don't want to suggest that we shouldn't criticize the way women are written (often badly written) in superhero movies. Of course not! And I do think there are often problematic elements in the way that female heroes' backstories are set up and the way their hero arcs play out. (These stories are mostly written by men, and it really shows a lot of the time!)

But I think that downplaying or discounting a female hero's accomplishments because she didn't do it all on her own -- expecting her to be entirely a self-made woman, saying it counts against her if she took a hand up here and there -- is unfair. It's particularly unfair if the same criticisms aren't leveled against male characters. And they're not.

I mean, look at the men of the MCU. Tony's father was the one who built his fortune and weapons manufacturing empire -- but no one says that Tony's accomplishments don't count because they were merely handed to him. Steve is only a superhero at all because of a drug that was given to him -- but no one talks about Steve being merely "allowed to be a hero because he was enabled" by other characters.

Rhodey, like Pepper, uses a suit that was designed, built and is (presumably) maintained by Tony.

And in a non-comics example, what about James Bond? Everything he does his heroing with, from his guns to his cars to his special gadgets, was built for him by someone else. Does that mean Q, not Bond, is the real hero, because he builds the gadgets that Bond uses?

The point I'm trying to make is not that Tony and Steve and Rhodey and Bond don't count as heroes, that they're deficient somehow. But I don't think Pepper and Maya are either. It's okay if Steve, Tony, et al don't have to do it all themselves. We don't celebrate Steve for being a technical genius ... because he's not! He's brave and dashing and caring -- and that's if that's enough for Steve, then why isn't it enough for someone like Pepper or Maya?

I would really, truly love to see more self-made female superheroes, more female supergeniuses, more women in positions of power and responsibility -- but I have a big problem with suggesting that they have to do it all themselves or it doesn't count, especially when we glaringly don't apply the same standard to men.

[michelel72]

Along similar lines, isn't one of the major themes of IM3 that Tony can't save the day alone? That he needs Happy and Rhodey and Pepper and Harley and JARVIS? While Pepper took what was meant to harm her and turned it into her weapon for striking back. (And earlier, she tried to let Killian down gently with talk of Tony's priorities, but when he kept pressing, she firmly shut him down. Like a boss.)

And I'll agree, wallwaker, that it's frustrating that Maya needed Tony's help ... but I thought the opening scene gave every indication that she specifically sought out Tony because she had hit a roadblock and she then determined the likely best source of progress. (He's a weapons manufacturer giving a speech at a medical conference; I think that even at this point, he's widely recognized as a polymath.) His primary interest was canoodling; hers was accessing a resource to get a job done. She also came up with a promising strategy (kidnap Pepper) to re-acquire that resource for further exploitation while her funder was short-sightedly trying to blow up that same resource.

Which is not at all to say that it's not worthwhile to examine the "male" and "female" roles in the film. I'm actually hoping that our not seeing Maya's actual dead body means she had another trick up her sleeve, and that we may see her again ....

[wallwalker]

Good points, especially about this:

I thought the opening scene gave every indication that [Maya] specifically sought out Tony because she had hit a roadblock and she then determined the likely best source of progress.... His primary interest was canoodling; hers was accessing a resource to get a job done. She also came up with a promising strategy (kidnap Pepper) to re-acquire that resource for further exploitation while her funder was short-sightedly trying to blow up that same resource.

I hadn't gotten that impression, although that could be something that I'd missed at the time, and it does make sense.

(I have to agree, I do hope we see her again. It IS Marvel, so it's at least possible. ;)

[wallwalker]

Thanks for the comment! I've honestly had a hard time answering it, because I agree with what you're saying, and I'm trying to figure out what it is that we're actually disagreeing on. ^^;

I certainly don't want to downplay what women do in the context of such films because they didn't accomplish it on their own. But I feel like they're often downplayed for me, because the canon doesn't recognize what they do on their own, or dooms it to failure. Also there's the fact that when one of the guys does something, the film often presents it as something that he managed to do because of something innate, something he knows and does well. Best example that comes to mind was Rhodey, during the scene where they save the president - he's shown to be a good action hero, even without a suit. He manages to make some great shots and gets the president out of trouble without even needing his suit, and it's all presented very much as him doing awesome things because he himself is competent and cool, even though he did need a boost at the start from Tony. But when you see Pepper, earlier in the film, saving Tony's life with the Iron Man suit, it's very clearly Tony that gave her the suit in the first place, and it becomes less about what she did and more about what he gave her. And I just wish that we could've seen her being competent, not just being given competence to show off someone else's accomplishments, because we know she's a competent woman in ways that we're just not often allowed to see.

You have a great point with the other examples, though, especially Steve! I honestly wasn't thinking outside of Iron Man 3 when I wrote this. It was more a critique of the film's writing and directing, I think, than anything else. Does that make more sense?

[sholio]

That does make sense! I think you're right that we're actually much closer together on this issue than far apart, and we both want the same thing: more awesome ladies being awesome on our screen. :D And I also agree that there are often differences in how the same (or similar) storylines play out with male vs female characters (with male characters getting more agency than equivalent female characters), and we definitely SHOULD be critiquing that and talking about it!

[metanewsmods]

Hi, can we link this at metanews?

[wallwalker]

You may, thank you.