There is a part near the end of "Captain Marvel" where a supreme being of the Kree tries to undermine Captain Marvel's current cause against "her" by reminding her of how badly she needs the current Kree structure--it's what saved her, by teaching her about competency and self-success, from feeling like an essential, an-always victim: so don't rail against what you can't live without, sister! The audience for a moment is reminded that, oh yeah, we were shown memories of her in positions where she was certainly encouraged to doubt her ability to thrive all by herself; and we likely cooperate with the film in agreeing that the narrative is one of someone who'd once been maligned by being made to doubt her ability to succeed by herself, denied being possessed of that kind of due self-love, who emerged into someone who knew without doubt this was a lie--she's got a kick-ass core, in a dual sense. This said, like the saying goes... "the body knows the score": that is, we never really had any sense of her as belonging to this narrative patterning at all, actually, and that the only experience any one watching the film could possibly have of her is as a reverberating field of certain force that moves along the time-span of the film, much like an invicible destroyer robot would range across from one side of a corridor to the other. It might be that the only thing that convenes against her in the film, then, is perhaps the sense that phenomenologically she might be read as more the golden road of assurance and power that clears through a muck of landscape, that others traverse to assist, make use of, in layering up their own selves.
Some people are concerned that "Captain Marvel" effectively neuters Fury, the head of Shield, the powerful spy organization. Everything he can do, she can do better, sort of thing. It is true that when he for a moment defaults his attention away from her onto a cat that's entered his life, it does feel a bit like someone who's just been shown what the real pro league is about, deferring to something more within range -- the drop in prestige, the encouragement for mockery, notwithstanding: in comparison to "you" I'm farting around with child's toys, yes, but nevertheless THIS REMAINS better. But what this take misses is that what Captain Marvel innocently really ends up showing up is just how much tedium for genuine interest on our part she possesses in being the ultimate superhero, the undiluted fireball of ranging explosive power that she is. In one instance, for example, Fury is shown taking measure of exactly what might be available to him to unlock a door he does not have high-enough level ranking to open himself. He cognitively transforms an incident that was about presenting identification, and that was experienced as proving a match for the authority required, so that it is understood, instead, so that it becomes an open delineation of materials from which a fingerprint that might permit the pass he seeks could be secured; that tones down one that aroused feelings of authority, refusal, self-doubt, into one that is chilled into that of a level playing field of the scientist who belongs there, working focussedly within his own lab. He makes elegant work of the lock problem, and she, not he, is diminished when she demonstrates immediately afterwards she has no need of his finesse, for any and all of his skill and abilities at all, actually, for possessing neutron star-level powers that can smack through the like of huge alien ships, not only mere metal doors: he "gets" "art," he "gets" the delight of experiment, the adventure of it, and she doesn't... everything she achieves is with the same redundant total-overmatching of obstacle present, and to her, there is nothing absent with that. And with that, no wonder he is drawn immediately afterwards to the cat: compared to her, it's high pedigree; can value distinguishing enough to be finicky, whereas for her any damn hamburger can make the belly full.
The film is set in the 1990s, but we dip back a bit to the 1950s when it comes to the refugees: perhaps because the Skrulls are made to represent our current sense of refugees, which often come from cultures which "endorse" some patriarchal strictures we'd oblige, niggle within our own natural humane sympathies, from no others, the "alien" phenomena of a traditional family... father as head of household, is encountered "there"--specifically with the head of the Skrulls, Talos (his wife chides and teases him, but by no means "steers the ship": it assists in delineating him as almost a Norman Rockwellish dad... the adoring wife, with no other obvious occupation other than wife and mother). Otherwise, Captain Marvel's background is mostly with her father; Fury is attendant to his mother; and Captain Marvel's best friend is a single mom. They are unvalenced neutrons, we sense. Captain Marvel involves herself with a "mom"-figure, digs into that now-present but once-absent figure with a fury, split into both good and bad entities in the film (there are two notable bad-mother representations in his movie, actually, and if there is a character arc for her that actually registers in us, it may be, in being shown to have birthed the whole Avengers agenda/universe, it's of the spurned daughter showing her mother what she once did and failed at, she can achieve with furious total success). Fury, as mentioned, becomes more and more deeply involved with a cat (cat got his eye, not his tongue... Captain Marvel took care of that organ, rendering him the caught-out -- read: speechless -- earthling astray from the nine-to-five familiarity, from the get-go), something that is a reflection of one's own intractable self-sufficiency. The single mom tries to re-instate her best friend, Captain Marvel, into the role of her true core adult life partner--the one that completes her family picture. It feels thin, a Plato's shadow, to the bond between Talos and his wife, however... which alone has the latitude of immunity to any need to salute as resplendent that which our culture had once deemed off-balance, diverted, perverse, the sad case. Something artificial is being implanted into the role of the real, and we feel it, even as we're doomed to only follow those who aren't the ostensibly sideshow. How often does a superhero film argue that simply to be one of the rescued is to embody in the fullest and most convincing form... something that rings of possessing the true power core of authority?
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