Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: Comics, dc, entertainment, suprgirl, tv

What Supergirl is Really About – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

Supergirl had a major drop in its ratings since its pilot premiered. It's being criticized for bad plotting, clichéd storylines and plot holes, hoary comic book dialogue and reveals. It has all kinds of clunky flaws. The action can be clumsy and not well-staged, even if the FX are light years better than those in the Christopher Reeve movies. They're definitely better than the FX for Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. The feminist points it wants to make are often explicitly stated and rather on the nose. It's really a show for little girls and their mothers to watch together.

Yet underneath all the flaws, I noticed the scenes between Cat Grant and Supergirl's civilian identity Kara Danvers almost stood out separately from all of that.  It's there that there's actually something interesting and feminist going on in the show.

Cat Grant is the real hero of the show.

She's the smartest character on the show. She has the bitchiest and funniest lines, and is often the writers' mouthpiece for feminist criticism of gender and the plight of women in the workplace, and the evolution of Cat's mother-daughter relationship with Kara is actually subtle and organic. Of course Cat would figure out so quickly that Kara is really Supergirl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiDjNl9Klek

The most interesting part of the show is Cat falling into becoming mother figure to the most powerful heroine in the world completely by accident.

Even before she began to give a damn about Kara or Supergirl, she already claimed ownership over her by naming her and "creating" her to shore up her media business. She took pity on Kara when Kara tells her she's an orphan and it triggers her maternal instinct. The evolution of their relationship is the one part of the show that's subtle and organic and the most resonant. When Livewire attacks them in the office, Cat put herself in front of Kara and told her to run, a point the writers left there without hammering on.

Pilots tend to paint characters in broad strokes, and there's never a guarantee the series would be picked up. Once a series is commissioned, it tends to evolve as the writers try all kinds of ideas to find what the heart of the show really is, the central relationship that keeps audiences hooked, even if they already thought they knew what it was. The actors might not have chemistry. The writing might not work. That might call for a rethinking and a retooling. There's also the fact that Calista Flockhart is the most biggest star in the cast and the highest-paid, and her senior position in the cast hierarchy means they would need to write interesting things for her to play, and she would not have wanted to play a character who was just nasty and a stereotype through the entire series. It's no wonder that they started to temper Cat's bitchiness with some nuance and started to soften her as the series went along, just as they changed course with Hank Henshaw and chose not to make him Cyborg Superman but to reveal him as J'onn Jonzz the Martian Manhunter as they also softened his character after the pilot to make him a father figure to Supergirl and Alex Danvers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqqJan-0zPQ

And the show gives Kara an emotional inner life in ways Man of Steel tried and failed to with Clark Kent. It acknowledges that she has survivor's guilt and adolescent rage she never had a chance to vent when she was a kid because she was too busy being grateful to her adopted family and needing to not draw attention to herself. I think that's what Melissa Benoist uses as a baseline to play the character beyond just a bland goody-goody. Her child-like goofiness makes sense because it suggests she was emotionally arrested at the age of 13 when her parents and home died. Again, this character point isn't spelled out but expressed entirely in her performance. When she's Supergirl, she lowers her voice and straightens her body language to appear more authoritative but the goofiness slips out when she's with people who know her. Cat is the mother figure Kara needs to teach her how to grow up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca1W1h9jILQ

I suspect Cat is the character the showrunner relates to most. The scenes with her are the most natural while the superhero stuff feels awkward, like she's not really comfortable with the genre. Despite the show propping up the relationship between Kara and Alex's relationship as the heart of the show, the most interesting part is really the mother-daughter relationship between Cat and Supergirl. And with J'onn Jonzz/Hank Henshaw becoming surrogate father to both Alex and Kara, that's how the family structure of the show is evolving into.

At this moment, Supergirl feels like a companion feminist superhero show next to Jessica Jones, though the latter is a darker adult show about surviving rape and trauma while Supergirl is a kid's show about teaching young girls about coming of age and how to be mature. You could argue that Jessica Jones is the better-written show, but the landscape of superhero shows feels more complete and nuanced with both shows out there rather than just the one of them.

Social X-Ray vision at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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