Super Visions: Sheroes and monsters

• Courtesy Fox
• BAD GIRLS CLUB: Jada Pinkett-Smith as Fish Mooney in "Gotham."

When Super Visions was new I had the excellent fortune to meet someone who, without realizing it, became the patron saint of this blog. Jasmine Amussen, the communications director for Living Walls, engaged me in one of those conversations that geeks like she and I are wont to have. As we talked about why she doesn’t like Batman, I imagined a caution light rising in the distance for this column. Without trying to quote her, because my memory doesn’t work that way, I’ll try to sum up what I carried away from the conversation: Heroes, especially superheroes, can be dangerous emblems from which to dangle entertainments. One big reason is such narratives’ erection of a pedestal upon which the emblematic hero stands, hypercapable and more than human. Do such stories make life-altering action seem out of reach for mere mortals? Maybe. Another reason is the cryptofascist nature of many a modern comic book hero, a vast irony when one considers the WWII roots of such characters as Wonder Woman (who used to spend lots of time fighting Nazis) and Captain America (ditto). Frank Miller at least appeared to be exploiting this conundrum to great satirical success in The Dark Knight Returns, though the joke may have been on the readers in that instance.

Where Jasmine and I found common ground was in a mutual appreciation of monsters. The Great Brit has devoted ink aplenty to the frequent inability of us mere mortals to tell the difference between heroes and monsters, especially in his various League of Extraordinary Gentlemen tales. The tail in the mouth of those hilarious Marvel Zombies comics, wherein everyone from Cap to Iron Man becomes a gruesome and super-powered brain-eater, is that superheroes already rise from the dead. On a regular basis.

The caution light I alluded to earlier came into sharp focus this week because of a variety of influences, including the occurrence of Veterans Day and a recent tweet by a friend. Is violence an appropriate element in entertainment? Maybe not. But replacing it between pages or on screens with more benign activities is an unglimpsed outcome in a distant land on the far side of my caution light. And how that violence affects or involves women is of concern to many who consume and think about of the stuff of this blog, not just me. Longtime comics readers may know the trope of women in refrigerators, a shorthand for objectifying violence that afflicts female characters in the medium, often as a way of motivating some concomitant violence by a male protagonist.

? ? ?
Violence, and particularly violence involving women, was central to "Arrow" and "Gotham" this week. Some other time we’ll address what sort of monster Alfred seems to be creating at stately (and more than slightly creepy) Wayne Manor. Right now I have, among others, Fish Mooney and Felicity Smoak on the brain.

Supreme white-hat hacker Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) doffed her Stetson to show off some Goth-dark roots in this week’s "Arrow" ep. A flashback to the character’s college years shows her at play in the fields of cyberspace, breaking into federal databases and trying to bring some restraint to the behavior of her more aggressive boyfriend. That intervention doesn’t go so well, but I won’t spoil the way the other shoe drops in response to the kick Felicity and her friends take from the powers that be. Suffice to say that I saw it coming, again, but the real payoff was Felicity’s layered response, so the predictability was no failure. What this ep showed was that emotional violence — I’m thinking of the callousness of this ep’s antagonist — can be as brutal as the physical variety. What all the ep’s creators got right was Felicity’s simple statement of how the betrayal she suffered made her feel. The fact that (spoiler, but c'mon) she extracts herself from the villain’s clutches, even as the show’s titular vigilante points his titular weaponry at said villain, was kind of the only way a remotely aware writer could handle the scene. And the gun-versus-bow-and-arrow moment being undone by an unarmed Felicity tied things up in a nice “While you boys were comparing killer phalluses, I solved the problem without killing anyone” bow. Bravo, "Arrow," and welcome back to respectability.

In the "Gotham" ep, things were way more complicated.

A criminal inspired by the Batman foe Black Mask is busy pitting potential “employees” gladiatorally against each other. His underlings watch these matches in the office, via closed-circuit video. I’ll just point out now that, in all those scenes of bloodthirsty office drones at seats’ edge, I felt that producer Bruno Heller was holding up a mirror to his audience.

After an intensely brutal death match that opens the ep, we catch up with Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett-Smith), Gotham’s (I hope) most sociopathic nightclub owner, playing pin the brooch on the traitor (brr). Smith is convincingly icy, though at times a bit too studied, as this ambitious monster, whose undertakings, pun intended, reflect and invert what went on in Arrow. She is commiting violence of physical and emotional varieties, sometimes simultaneously. Fish has some potent agency on "Gotham," but we can see its terminus even now (all the mobsters in Batman’s town get crowded out by more exotic criminals, who take their cues from a guy dressing as a flying rodent to beat the crap out of them).

The infectiousness of this ep’s violence is shared all around, too, whether by a drunken Barbara Kean, taking aim at the wrong man, or by Oswald Cobblepot’s deranged mom, bragging about the person she ratted out to the secret police in whatever European hell bred her.

To my mind, everybody won this week. Women gave as they got, saved the day, pushed it toward ruin, and sidestepped refrigerators — that is, these characters felt human in all those ways, heroic and monstrous, that real people do in the course of being human.