I was happy to hear yesterday that Kat Dennings will be back in Thor 2, and that apparently, her role, as a research assistant to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, absent from The Avengers) and Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), will be expanded. While I’ll never give up on wanting female superheroines to get equal billing in the Marvel Universe, at their best, non-powered female characters have already contributed a great deal to the franchise, mostly by injecting a healthy dose of sarcasm into a genre that could easily collapse under its own weight.

I think it’s no mistake that Iron Man‘s been the most fun character in the core lineup so far: he’s skittery, grandiose, and a combination of sophisticated and enormously immature. Alone, he might be hugely irritating, a nerd-bro fantasy. But Pepper Potts’ presence means that Tony Stark’s most ridiculous behavior is constantly being called out as utterly ridiculous. He’s charming in spite of, not because, he is a rude, reckless womanizer. In The Avengers, Gwyneth Paltrow does Barbara Stanwyck proud when Agent Coulson comes to call, as Pepper points out that Tony’s immature attempts to avoid the man aren’t just childish—they act against the interest of Tony’s own curiosity. Part of Tony’s arc in the movie is to the recognition that Pepper saw Coulson’s worth more clearly than he did because she bothered to pay attention and get to know the man. He doesn’t just lose a colleague when Coulson dies—he loses a man who might have been in his friend.

Similarly, in Thor, Darcy was a fabulous reminder of how ridiculous it would actually be to end up babysitting an extremely handsome, exceedingly disconcerted man who wanders around trying to buy pets to ride, smashing coffee mugs, eating all the Pop Tarts, and talking like he stepped out of summer stock. When she zapped Thor with a taser or complained that she was being asked to do an awful lot for six college credits, Darcy punctured the occasionally stifling atmosphere Jane’s literal and metaphoric starry-eyed approach to Thor. Part of what’s fun about superheroes—and an appropriate thing to point out as a way to question their power—is their overwhelming incongruity. I don’t want to see Darcy as a buzz-kill if she and Jane take a jaunt to Asgard in Thor 2, but her sense of the absurd, deployed correctly, is another very funny way to express wonder.

Captain America was, tonally, a very different picture, but one of its most fun moments was Natalie Dormer’s brief turn as a gal in uniform who wants to get at Cap. The Marvel movies have essentially hewed to fairly traditional ideas about their heroes and true love—part of Tony’s hero’s journey is his move away from being a womanizing cad. Dormer’s minx was a reminder that you can tell stories about superheroes as catnip for the ladies, too, and the juxtaposition of her clear desire with Cap’s innocence was something that might be useful in a more extended exploration of Steve Rogers’ integration into modern life. Similarly, I think the two recent attempts at Hulk movies have suffered badly from the big-eyed dewiness of Jennifer Connolly and Liv Tyler’s performances as Betty Ross. If Hulk movies do go into production, it would be a lot of fun to see a Betty who can banter with Bruce, even needle him the way Tony did in The Avengers. It’s awfully dull to have a Hulk who’s simply afraid he’s going to hurt this delicate woman he loves, and it would be more fun to have a woman who’s a foil, whose very engagement with Bruce is a risk for him and an incentive to get himself in check.

I’m bored by movies where women reform men, or act as prizes for low-level good behavior. But at their best, Marvel’s managed to give us women around our heroes who at least nod in the direction of the screwball tradition. The men may have the superpowers, but the women are the ones who are grown all the way up, and seeing around corners without even the benefit of enhanced eyesight.

Hero Complex has a long interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick, who is writing Marvel’s new Captain Marvel book which has a woman, Carol Danvers, taking on that mantle. In a particularly interesting section towards the beginning of the conversation, DeConnick goes back and forth on the question of whether, though Danvers was conceived of as an explicitly feminist character, she is writing a feminist book:

I don’t think this is new to my interpretation of Carol. I think that she’s an incredibly driven individual. The single line that I use for her off the top of my head is: Crackerjack pilot races to prove dead daddy wrong. I think Carol’s wound comes from …. well, she comes from a family of three kids, two younger brothers. Her dad was an old-fashioned construction foreman who loved her very much. This book was conceived as an unapologetically feminist book. It happened in the ’70s during the feminist movement and that was very much what the book was about. We’re much more skittish about that today, interestingly. Well, her dad opted not to pay for her to go to school and thought it’d be better spent on her brothers. That’s why she enlisted — to get her education paid for. I think that hurt her, and she’s always been trying to prove to her dad that she’s worthy. But her dad’s gone now, so it’s not a thing that she’s ever going to be able to get closure on…I’m not trying to write a feminist agenda. This is part of who the character is. And I’ve heard people question the Absorbing Man thing, like ‘Since when is the Absorbing Man a misogynist?’ That wasn’t my intent. My intent with him was that he was pushing her buttons. It wasn’t that it was a particular thing with him. Although he is a very old-fashioned character, and I think it’s hilarious. It was trash talk in a fight.

I’d argue that given that the first lines that are spoken in DeConnick’s take on the character are Carl Creel’s snarl “Lucky me! If it ain’t Captain America’s secretary, Mrs. Marvel,” and that he goes on to clock Carol, declaring “I’ll show you smarts, lady!” and to tell to Cap, “You lettin’ the little missus give the orders now? Wouldn’t catch me getting bossed around by no broad,” she’s probably writing a feminist comic. When someone brings gender (or race or sexual orientation or religion) into trash talk, they’re not just joshing someone, they’re setting up a hierarchy where whatever characteristic they’ve singled out is disqualifying, and that someone allied with their target will suffer a worse loss because they’ve inverted the gender heirarchy, etc.—they won’t just be defeated, they’ll be degendered.

Feminism isn’t just about getting women into positions traditionally occupied by men. The second half of the DeConnick response I’ve quoted there is in response to the question from Hero Complex, “We’ve already seen some dismissive behavior from Absorbing Man in the first issue. Will her proving herself as a hero in a male-dominated super-landscape be an ongoing theme?” Feminism is also about what happens when women get there, about the fact that earning the job is often the first step in dismantling sexism, and sexists don’t exactly roll over and die when women obtain positions of power. And fighting sexism isn’t solely women, or superheroines’ purview. Part of what’s thrilling about reading DeConnick’s version of Captain Marvel is watching Captain America joke with Carol about Absorbing Man’s sexism mid-fight and afterwards to encourage her to take up the Captain Marvel mantle, saying “Bottom line is this: you have led the Avengers. You have saved the world. Quit being an adjunct.” Their conversation is just the superheroic version of a mentor encouraging a female mentee to give herself credit instead of deferring it, pitch more ambitious stories, or to ask for that raise.

In other words, just because we’ve moved from one phase of feminism into the next isn’t a reason to abandon that as a framework as a character (or for an actress like Melissa Leo, whose work is clearly feminist, to declaim the label). Sexism isn’t over, in the superhero world, in the real world, or in the places that they intersect. And that sexism’s become more diffuse and complicated just means there are more ways to use gender dynamics to tell fascinating, complex stories about how people, male and female alike, construct their identities and understand their relative positions in the world.

The last year’s seen a lot of efforts to interrogate the way superheroines’ bodies are posed and presented, whether it’s artists drawing male superheroes in the same skin-revealing costumes and poses as Wonder Woman or Jim C. Hines’ series of pictures where he posed like heroines on the cover of urban fantasy novels. Now, Ultraculture, as an illustration of its Captain America: The First Avenger review, has taken to Photoshop to show us what it would look like if a superhero’s comic physique could actually be expressed by a live human being. The results are…unsettling:

If depictions of superheroines reduce them to their breasts, buttocks and vaginas, this kind of illustration turns a human being into a vast, undifferentiated cut of meat. The effects are different, of course. Our positive association with musculature means we can still praise the person who acquired it, which is how we ended up with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a major cultural and political figure, rather than reducing him to parts of his wildly-enhanced body, while a tight focus on accentuated female body parts tends to minimize the humanity of the woman they belong to. But this kind of distortion is still unsettling, whether the person it’s done to is male or female. An overemphasis on traits society have decided are positive and admirable can be limiting and overwhelming, too.

Well, this is kind of a bummer. Apparently Joss Whedon was going to have Captain America give a speech in The Avengers that would have been partially about the loss of the social safety net, but he decided to cut the scene:

One of the best scenes that I wrote was the beautiful and poignant scene between Steve and Peggy [Carter] that takes place in the present. And I was the one who was like, ‘Guys, we need to lose this.’ It was killing the rhythm of the thing. And we did have a lot of Cap, because he really was the in for me. I really do feel a sense of loss about what’s happening in our culture, loss of the idea of community, loss of health care and welfare and all sorts of things. I was spending a lot of time having him say it, and then I cut that.

The timing and the platform would have been amazing, the purest representative of American power in the superhero pantheon standing in for Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in the biggest tentpole of the summer, a month and a half before the Supreme Court’s likely to issue its ruling that will determine the future of the Affordable Care Act. It also would have also created a political firestorm around the movie, something the cheerful blandness of Captain America was careful to avoid. Whedon may have been entirely right that the scene would have interrupted the flow of the movie. But with The Avengers tracking for an absolutely ginormous opening, he also may not have wanted to futz with the prospects of an enormously high-profile opening.

I’m glad to see a conservative group agrees with me that by a broad definition, Hollywood is a pretty patriotic place, comfortable making movies that embrace American values and seeing them do well at the box office. That said, the idea that it’s conservative to want “good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness,” as Movieguide says this year strikes me as a bit of an overreach. In case there was a question about it, just because I’m a professional progressive doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see Walter White end up dead or in the pokey; that I sit around in cahoots with that schemer Satan thinking about how to get inaccurate information about everything from the demographics of the United States to clean energy into popular entertainment; or that I’m dedicated to seeing brutalist architecture dominate movie sets or something.

More to the point, Dr. Ted Baehr, who founded Movieguide, says that “Moviegoers and TV viewers prefer movies and television programs that celebrate traditional American values like liberty, private property, the free market, patriotism, and limited government.” But is that actually what’s reflected in their nominees for top movies? Captain America: The First Avenger is about a wildly expanded federal government that, among other things, performs dodgy experiments on the troops. Thor is part of a larger story that sees entrepreneurial superheroes brought together and brought to heel but government bureaucracy. You could maaaaybe stretch and say that Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is about an enterprising small businessman, but mostly, I think it’s about the boats that shoot things at each other and the zombies and the mermaids and Johnny Depp playing pretty gay. Thor is all about how unmarried lady scientists should fall for dreamy pagan gods and how science validates a non-Christian view of the world. And yes, I’m totally glad to see someone say that the Twilight movies represent“fringe worldviews,” but you know what? Americans love those fringe worldviews if they involve who want to have premarital sex with vampires but who wait because those vampires are just so darn oriented towards family values.

Look, I totally understand the desire to believe that America is secretly hankering after movies and television that reflect a certain set of values and if that darn Hollywood machine would only cooperate, the market would reap rewards and the right priorities would spread throughout the land. But I don’t think there’s conclusive evidence, in either direct, that that’s the case. And if conservatives really want to sell the idea that their values make for better storytelling, they’re going to need more coherent ideas than these, and a more compelling spokesman than, say, Dean Cain. This is a conversation worth having and hashing out—I think someone should do a big, comprehensive study of the ideas and values audiences report taking away from their favorite entertainment. But trying to claim American movies for conservativism, box office evidence to the contrary, isn’t the place to start it.

This is a standard, but silly, argument from Big Hollywood about how the entertainment industry hates the troops:

But patriotism doesn’t sell, right? If it did, Hollywood would be inundating movie theaters with pro-troop films and other tales of American soldiers in heroic action.
“Red Tails” also slices into another depressing Hollywood meme…An even better patriotism test comes next month when “Act of Valor,” a film which boldly toasts American soldiers as heroes, hits theaters. A “Valor” take down of the film competition may open the floodgates for more pro-troop features, assuming the appropriate bean counters are taking notes. Or, will Hollywood executives ignore the numbers and retreat to projects depicting U.S. soldiers in unflattering light? Is there a better chance we’ll see a new installment of “In the Valley of Elah” or “Redacted,” films showing the darker side of the modern soldier, than a “Red Tails” sequel?

I don’t want to spend time explaining why patriotism and unqualified support for the members and actions of the armed forces no matter what they do aren’t the same thing, because I think it’s obvious to everyone here and everyone reasonable why that’s the case. But I think there’s something fundamentally silly about the idea that Hollywood is unaware of the fact that patriotism sells.

In the last 10 years, the following movies with patriotic themes were among the top-10 grossing movies of the year. Last year, one of the top-selling superheroes of the year was Captain America, up there with Pixar’s most middle-American offering, Cars 2. In 2010, Iron Man 2 kept stumbling drunkenly towards public service. 2009 was ruled by Michael Bay’s military Valentine, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, along with the paen to charity and football as mainstreaming experiences, The Blind Side. In 2008, Tony Stark discovered service of country instead of himself in Iron Man. In 2007, Spider-Man 3, the latest installment about the webslinger who became a representative of post-9/11 New York, topped the box office list; the uber-pro-military franchise Transformers made its bow; Jason Bourne kept the idea of an intelligence community with integrity alive in The Bourne Ultimatum; and Will Smith saved human society in I Am Legend. The previous year, Clark Kent resurfaced to keep an eye on Metropolis in Superman Returns, and Hollywood affirmed a kinder, gentler American consumerism in Talladega Nights. 2005 had less obvious themes, though America obviously beats the Martians in War of the Worlds. 2004 reinforced Spider-Man’s ties to New York in that incredible subway scene. 2002 had Spider-Man topping the charts again, a celebration of the immigrant experience in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and more Americans v. the Aliens in Men in Black 2. 2001 was the last year a World War II movie cleaned up at the box office, but no one could accuse Pearl Harbor of being anything less than a big, old-fashioned patriotic weepie.

Even by the standards of military-worshipping conservatism, Hollywood is deeply committed to making movies that both reflect and make bank off that particular strand of patriotism. And if you’re thoughtful enough to have a broader understanding of love and country, there’s even more out there for you.

Someone who knows more than me about this may think differently, but is it really that surprising that Captain America made slightly more money overseas than it did in the United States? America has roughly 4.5 percent of the world’s population. American movies tend to make a lot of money abroad, particularly superhero movies. Iron Man, a movie about a decadent Western arms dealer who helps blow up a bunch of Afghanistan before having a conversion experience, made $582,443,126 at the international box office. Spider-Man 2, which is in some ways an explicit response to September 11, made $410,180,516. Compared to that, beating the Nazis is about as uncontroversial a plot as a movie can have.

And even if the uber-American branding of the main character was the first thing people considered before the plot, there’s not any evidence that America is so despised that people would stay away from a nifty-lookin’ diversion just because the hero is not just American, but an embodiment of American power. In the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey, countries that are big potential U.S. markets all had reasonably favorable attitudes of the U.S.: in Britain, the U.S.’s favorability rating is 61 percent, in France it’s 75 percent, in Brazil it’s 62 percent, in Japan it’s 85 percent, and even in places like China (44 percent) and Mexico (52 percent), it’s not as if the U.S. is uniformly reviled. We’re in less good shape in Turkey (10 percent), Pakistan (12 percent), and the Palestinian territories (18 percent) but these are much bigger concerns for our foreign policy and national security than for our trade policy, including movies. As long as American superheroes don’t behave in totally geopolitically offensive ways, they’re probably going to do pretty well, here and abroad.

As usual, the bridge is yours.

-Have we really not figured out how to keep stages from collapsing?

-I will only watch The Playboy Club if there’s a Rahm Emanuel analogue among the show’s politicians.

-I’m not shocked that a barbarian movie doesn’t have strong female characters.

-It would be nice to see the Falcon in Captain America 2.

-I’m reading Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken right now: this is a cool interview with her.

-I don’t really think that single-player gaming will be dead in three years. At least I hope it won’t! I still have so much to learn!

-Sometimes it takes litigation to make Google not be evil.

-Stephen Soderbergh: secretly filming a chick flick.

-Spoilery footage of The Avengers shooting a fight scene.

-I think I’d be looking forward to this more if it was about how Captain America reacts to being unfrozen. Otherwise, it looks like just another Quirky Lawyer Drama:

-London’s riots claim a major record distribution warehouse.

-I’m going to miss Eureka.

-White men can’t jump.

-Here are all of your television premieres this fall.

-Captain America testifies on his steroid abuse: