I just saw the new Iron Man movie last night, and while it is overall one of the best superhero movies ever made, there is one element that stands out as unusual: Pepper Potts. (Spoilers follow.)
Virginia “Pepper” Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is Tony Stark’s personal assistant, whose responsibilities range from handling Stark’s everyday needs to shipping off the women Tony has one-night stands with so that he doesn’t have to deal with them. She is clearly very fond of Tony despite his many, many character flaws.
On Tony’s part, he clearly trusts Pepper more than anyone else, to the point of having her replace his life-sustaining generator (in a comically icky scene) when his robotic assistant proves unequal to the task. While she is concerned about Tony’s personality changes following his captivity, she continues to act as his assistant even after discovering his Iron Man project. Interestingly, while Tony does not tell her about the project, he doesn’t try to hide it from her, as she retains security access to his workshop.
There are two particular areas where Pepper really shines. The first is the expected romantic angle. There are certainly hints of attraction between her and Tony, culminating in Tony pushing her to dance with him at a benefit. While this clearly makes her uncomfortable (and she tells Tony as much), she also nearly kisses him shortly afterwords before thinking better of it. At the end of the film, Tony decides that a superhero like himself should have a worrying girlfriend, and not-very-subtly reminds her of the night of the dance. Pepper reminds him that he also unthinkingly left her behind afterwords, and that she has no intention of changing their boss-assistant relationship.
This is really unheard of in a superhero movie. Pepper turns Tony down, not because he is a superhero, but because she recognizes that because of his character flaws a relationship would be a really, really bad idea. Not to mention the whole “dating your boss” angle.
Pepper also takes an unusually active role in the action. The final act of the film is set up when Tony asks Pepper to hack into his office computer to find out what his treacherous underling Obadiah Stane has been up to, and Pepper refuses, declaring that she quits. She changes her mind when Tony persuades her that this is about doing the right thing and helping the people that they had previously put in harm’s way. Pepper successfully hacks into the office computer, discovering even more about Stane’s dirty dealings than Tony had suspected, but is interrupted by Stane. At this point, my expectation is that Stane will take her hostage and Tony will have to rescue her, as we have seen in so many other movies.
Not so. Pepper successfully bluffs her way out with the data, and by the time Stane realizes what she was doing she has already made it to the lobby where she runs into a government agent who has been trying to get an interview with Stark regarding his captivity. And what does she do? She goes with the agent and tells him everything, as well as calling Tony and filling him in, successfully putting Stane on the defensive instead of acting like the standard imperiled woman.
Because of Pepper’s actions, Stane is forced to don his prototype armor to escape arrest and go after Tony personally. When Tony’s proves unable to defeat Stane’s superior armor, he has Pepper overload the Stark lab’s generator to take Stane out. The usual role of the female supporting character in the climax is reversed – here, Tony distracts Stane until Pepper can finish him off with the desperate plan. And she does all of this without screaming, even when faced down by a lunatic in a ten-fuit war machine.
I never expected to see a superhero movie in which the female lead evades getting captured by her own wits, takes out the bad guy, and turns down the hero because of his personality. Amazing.
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Wow – I had a totally different take on the whole Pepper Potts character, but I really like some of the points you made here. I also expected Pepper to be taken hostage, and was relieved when she instead played some roll in saving the day. I really didn’t see Pepper as ‘turning down’ the hero at the film’s end, although I had heard rumors that she did reject him. I felt that her line about being left on the balcony was supposed to be more like a ‘maybe,’ keeping the tension between them going for future films.
habladora(Quote) (Reply)
Thanks – I came out of the movie not very impressed with a character I had never heard of, and your discussion (and character background) has added a lot of depth. I’ll go back to fully recommending this movie to others
Will Budreau(Quote) (Reply)
This was a great post; thanks much! I saw Iron Man a couple of weeks ago, and while I enjoyed the film greatly, I couldn’t absolutely love it because of Pepper Pot’s character, and to a lesser extent, many of the female characters (the news reporter disappointed me the most). Some of Pepper’s behavior I found incredulous (the skipping away from evil tottering on enormously high heels was just beyond the point of unbelievability to me).
And midway through a rant to a bud, he brought up the point that maybe she was like that in the comic, so it’d be unfair to blame the film for the flaw. I thought he had a point. So I actually found this while stumbling around on the net.
I think Iron Man did a great job of mimimizing what was apparently not that great of a character (to me at least, from the scant searching I did), but still left the model intact. She wasn’t held hostage, but I definitely got the sense that much of the motivation for him getting a new power source was so that he could keep Pepper from dying. She was able to do more, which is good, but at the same time, her at times constant whining minimized the coolness of that; she was just really starting to irk me at the climax.
I must say though, I am surprised by all the un-love for X3, which I think is not the greatest film ever, but was definitely better in terms of female portrayals. It really was heads and shoulders above the first two films, and I usually pretend that the first one doesn’t exist, and the second one…well it depends on my mood.
But all the female characters were given so much more to do than the first two combined. I admit I could be biased, since I read and loved the comics (at least certain eras), so I knew what paltry shadows of clones of the characters those people were. And I think Bryan ends up looking like roses by default. The women of X are not only some of the most powerful on the team, but they are among the most powerful in the marvel universe. Unlike the other two, X3 actually showed powerful women. Jean Grey is supposed to, at her apex, absorb the energy of a star. And Jean’s shredding people apart like paper is much closer to that than a Jean who couldn’t even get some slimy goo off her face in 1, or could barely contain the dam in 2. And Storm…well she had like what, 5 lines in X1 – most of them bad! – and in the 3rd one, she is actually running the mansion. To me that sounds like a lot to do, even if we don’t see it because it comes at the end. And Storm couldn’t even focus wind in the first one, but in Ratner’s version she was generating focused lightning and focused tornados. We even see the emergence of Kitty Pride doing what she does the best – using her powers but also her brains. And unlike Mystique which seems to be a follower of Magneto, at least in Callisto (and Jean too actually) we have a female villain who I fully believe is following her own agenda) The only character who seems uniformly and equally lame in all three is Rogue – she was never ever close to her true self. Pretty sad.
It’s hard for me to say what a definitive comic film is for me (in terms of female roles), since so many have positives and negatives, which could cancel each other out. My fave would have to be Daredevil. Before the chorus of boos begin, I’d better be quick.
But Elektra was a woman who was just about Daredevil’s match, and he not only wasn’t scared by it, he seemed to grow attracted to her because of it. She had a fleshed out character, with her own set of baggage, although a little ambiguous, I think you can make a case that it’s not just her being overpowered that causes her downfall, but her walk down the wrong path pushed by her own flawed choice, and what that meant. She had skills that gave the villain a run for his money, and she managed to stay alive at the end. She had help as we learned, but in the Daredevil film, all we see is the locket in braille dangling on the rooftop (antenna?). There she also did not choose the hero, although he very much wanted her, but chose to stay away because of her own demons. I loved one of her last lines in the film: Daredevil says he doesn’t want to lose her, and she says I’ll find you.
But like a couple of others, you did see Pepper (going back to Iron Man), in a way I hadn’t thought about, so I’ll have to mull it over a bit.
Thanks for the review!
d(Quote) (Reply)
habladora:
As others have noted in response to my article, a lot of one’s response to Iron Man tends to come from their expectations. I love superheroes, but given the superhero genre’s generally abysmal treatment of female characters, I wasn’t expecting Pepper to be anything more than a Distressed Damsel a la movie Mary Jane. So my response to Pepper was positive because my expectations were so very, very low for a movie that I really wanted to enjoy.
Could (and should) Pepper have been treated better? Certainly. But I willing to praise the film because it still treated her better than nearly every superhero or action film out there would treat a female supporting character.
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
d:
In the comics, Pepper mainly existed to fulfil one of Stan Lee’s favored love triangles. (While I love Stan Lee for how he revolutionized superhero comic characters and narratives, not to mention his hyperactive hyperbole, his takes on gender were very much a product of the time and a background writing romance comics.) I was very pleased to see the long, drawn out Tony-Pepper-Happy triangle completely left out.
Regarding the X-Men films: While X-Men 3 did give Storm a much bigger part, the rehash of the Dark Phoenix plotline was really, really bad. Yes, it showed an incredibly powerful woman, but that powerful woman was explicitly dangerous, had no control and killed two men she loved, and had to be killed by a man who loved her. It was practically a textbook on fear of female power.
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
“I must say though, I am surprised by all the un-love for X3, which I think is not the greatest film ever, but was definitely better in terms of female portrayals.”
I haven’t seen Iron Man, so I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s mostly:
hype vs. reality – we were set up for the Phoenix storyline, which would have made Jean Grey the star, and we got “can’t decide what story to focus on” combined with “powerful women are too scary and dangerous to not be caged” crap instead. HUGE disappointment.
and
reputation – we weren’t just expecting Jean to star, we were expecting the movie to be well written, ‘cuz the last two were. Iron Man, though, who knew what to expect. Kinda like the difference between some random new show and the new show that Whedon is working on. We have very different expectations for Whedon than for the guys that work on shows like The Big Bang Theory.
Plus, X-3 sucked, in all kinds of ways. From what I hear, Iron Man didn’t. Which makes people feel more charitable towards Iron Man’s faults that they do towards X-3′s
Mickle(Quote) (Reply)
Considering that Big Bang Theory was created by Chuck Lorre, the guy behind Two and a Half Men, I’d say expectations for that show’s take on gender were low indeed.
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Ide Cyan { 05.08.08 at 7:55 pm }
Thank you! I actually had to outline Bechdel’s Law for my husband and brother-in-law, with whom I saw Iron Man. My viewing of Iron Man may have been tainted by the preview I saw for Frank Miller’s version of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, though. It looks exactly like Sin City, down to the Spirit looking and speaking like Clive Owens’s character, albeit with a red tie instead of red converse. I’m guessing it will have none of the sophistication but all of the sexism – perhaps even some excellent Miller misogyny! *headdesk*
redblossom(Quote) (Reply)
You aren’t the only one expecting that.
MaggieCat(Quote) (Reply)
Patrick – heh.
The problem is that I don’t pay attention to who does the shows I don’t like, so I don’t learn to avoid what they make.
But then, I usually decide to avoid them based on their ads, so it all works out anyway.
Mickle(Quote) (Reply)
low expectations allowed me to focus on the positive, like getting to watch tony stark get fisted –in the chest– by pepper potts. just thought i’d add one more reversal, that of penetration, to the list.
cub(Quote) (Reply)
Patrick, not only is she Bad Evil Scary Female Power embodied in the way you described, but for most of the whole friggin thing she just stands around like a zombie waiting for Magneto to point her at something to destroy!!!
This is supposed to be the scary Id unleashed? I have major problems with the original Dark Phoenix storyline (hint: when your own characters are all going around shouting over and over ‘This DOESN”T MAKE ANY SENSE!?!” maybe you should actually *listen* to them!) and even more with the progressively depowering retcons to Jean (the whole ‘Xavier had to damp down her power to save her from herself’ which they borrowed for the excuse for why Phoenix appeared in the films was a late retcon) similar to what they did with Moira (who also gets the ‘going evil makes girls horny!’ treatment) but X3 turns Dark Phoenix even *more* unreasonable and PASSIVE!
Seriously, compare with the not-unproblematic Dark Willow storyline, which was a deliberate homage to the original Dark Phoenix plot, and ask who’s scarier, Willow Rosenberg or 3rd-Movie Jean Grey?
(Not to mention that the original Dark Phoenix commits suicide – that is, nobly and heroically makes an autonomous sacrifice to save the universe – instead of having to be killed by a male Hero, because nobody in the galaxy is bloody well strong enough to STOP her! Argh!)
I actually had a long rant partly written not too long ago when I finally got around to seeing it, but my computer crashed and I haven’t had the energy to reconstruct it, because the whole thing was so demoralizing.
bellatrys(Quote) (Reply)
Plus – and even the actresses complained about this – all that Rogue did (ie was allowed to do) in X3 was sit around and whine and mope after a guy and be jealous of another girl, after her star turn in X1; Storm’s characterization was taken away and given to Wolverine – she’s the supposed deputy leader now, but he doesn’t listen to her, and he’s right; he’s supposed to be the antisocial people-hating one due to his misfortunes, she’s supposed to be the serene ideallist, but he gets woobiefied and made all Luke Skywalkerish for no reason while her ideallism just evaporates for no reason either. Mystique is depowered and given the ‘woman scorned’ role – and line, her support for the Cause all being dependent on Magneto’s professed love for her! X3′s treatment of women stunk all round.
bellatrys(Quote) (Reply)
First and foremost, thank you for verbalizing a lot of what I really, really enjoyed about Movie-Pepper. You really nailed it when you pointed out that, in comparison to other superhero movies, she had a lot to do and did it well. She did, and it was glorious to see on a mainstream moviescreen.
Were there problems? Definitely, but I can’t think of a single work of fiction or nonfiction that I haven’t had one or twelve issues with. I’m hoping this is a building block to work from and that in the next movie we get this level (or much better) of Pepper-awesome. And there are so many places that they can go with this that would be so interesting and excellent to watch. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.
A.j.(Quote) (Reply)
What I’m really hoping to see is Pepper Potts, agent of SHIELD.
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Isn’t that why Rachel turns Bruce down at the end of Batman begins? Because being “Bruce Wayne” makes him act like a jackass?
Natalie(Quote) (Reply)
Not quite. Rachel turns him down because she realizes that he has become a very different person from the man she knew, and even “Bruce Wayne” is now just a mask.
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
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