The One About She-Hulk
I’m late to the game on this, and I’m specifically writing this before I read anything on the internet about it.
I didn’t like the ending of She-Hulk.
I might be thinking too much about this. It didn’t exactly keep me up the night I watched it, but I was still thinking about it the morning after. Which is more than I can say for most of the MCU.
It all fell apart in the last 2 minutes of the second to last episode and then never won me back.
*MAJOR SPOILERS ALERT*
Quick backstory: An online community of (definitely incels) called Intellegencia is determined to destroy She-Hulk because she’s a woman. I was going to add “with power” at the end of that sentence, but the truth is less complicated than that.
Of course, the show knows what it’s doing, right? It’s written by women, it’s very smart.
It’s making fun of a type of men who hate women because they have nothing better to do and they feel entitled/disenfranchised/threatened yada yada. And it’s (if somewhat playfully?) exploring the consequences of when those trolls get organized and dangerous. (It’s only playful because it’s a superhero show.)
The big climax is this group “exposing” She-Hulk while she and like 7 other women are all being awarded “Female Lawyer of the Year” in a bit of satire that was a little too on the nose for my taste.
Intellgencia operatives infiltrate the ceremony and play a nasty video “exposing” She-Hulk that culminates in calling her a “sl*t” and showing a sex tape that one of their operatives made of her and him without her consent.
As an aside: This man had straight up wooed her and they had sex on the 3rd date (ish) which is what every sitcom from the 90s says is reasonable. These men don’t care about “reasonable” though.
Of course, She-Hulk gets angry and smashes the TV screen where the video is playing.
Cut to the scene where she’s in literal prison because she was deemed an “out of control Hulk.” Jen (She-Hulk’s human form) pleads that she was just angry like anyone would have been in that situation. But Mallory (her frenemy?) tells her she’s held to a different standard because she’s not like anyone else. “They were baiting you, and you took the bait.”
This was the moment the show lost me.
Maybe it’s because I’ve also been in situations where I responded with reasonable anger against men/people who provoked me because they thought I didn’t deserve my position/power. And yet, I’m the one they looked at as out of control.
Maybe it’s because this was entirely too real.
I think this is exactly what would happen if we had a female superhero. It’s what’s happening to women in power every day. Forgive me for wanting my comic book hero to not have to deal with realistic problems.
In the last episode, Jen (who’s no longer allowed to be She-Hulk because of this incident) through very convenient plotting stumbles into the rally where these men are celebrating their “victory.”
Now, the show has been breaking the fourth wall the entire time. But this last fourth wall break is too much for me. She becomes She-Hulk and storms the REAL LIFE Disney studios and discovers K.E.V.I.N (an AI robot who is subtly getting blamed for why the MCU has gone absolutely bonkers the last few years).
During this scene, Jen tells the robot that the ending it crafted for her show is unrealistic. Her “real stakes,” she says, are that her life fell apart as she was figuring out how to be both Jen and She-Hulk. So she rewrites the ending for the robot and then goes back and gets exactly what she wants.
Which, is just…not how life works.
I know I’m simultaneously complaining about a show being too real and not real enough, but bear with me.
With the rise of violence against women, the threat of a second term under Tr*mp, and the rise of AI. Something about the ending of this show felt too real and too fake all at once.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
I don’t have an answer.
Does every show that’s about a woman and written by women need to be looked at as a feminist work? I think in some ways that’s unfair.
Maybe we get so caught up in making things mean something, that we forget that art gets to be just for fun sometimes.
Of course, the fact that She-Hulk gets to be so blatantly feminist in the writing is something to be celebrated, especially given the character’s less-than-feminist past at the hands of male creators. More than that, feminist jokes that seem tired to me might be meeting a new generation of women and femmes for the first time.
Somewhat relatedly, I’ve been in several conversations recently where people are expressing their frustrations with the MCU. Most seem to believe the franchise has clearly devolved into a money grab and has no real story right now.
Are we asking too much of superhero movies? Are we asking just enough?
[Note to self: Insert well-packaged conclusion here.]