Captain Marvel’s Dismissal of Yon-Rogg
One of the things I adore about the ending of the movie is how after Carol takes on earth destroying missiles and an entire advanced tech space ship, she comes down to Yon-Rogg. It's almost... absurd to see Yon-Rogg preparing to square up to her after the feats she just accomplished. But the cinematography asks us to take the moment seriously, and we prepare for the *emotional* climax of the movie. Carol versus her brainwasher (read abuser). For women/queer folks/POC viewers, the framing might have made our skin crawl a little. I know it did mine! Will she live up to *his* standards? How will she do fighting him on *his* terms? And if you belong to in those groups or have had your own run in with abuse, you know how that feels. You know the spiel and you know the pressure to play the game.
BUT CAROL DOESN'T! She says "fuck your standards. They aren't mine so they don't apply me." And GODDAMN that's so fucking important to see in a mainstream movie that will be viewed by thousands. It is powerful! Now let me take you back to the start here, because the movie does something else really brilliant beyond just this scripting. It plays with these dynamics ON THEIR VIEWERS! They Show Us that Carol has come into her own. We see that she has become her best self and is self affirmed. We feel that she has nothing left to prove to any of the Kree and their ways. But when she comes down, the rules of cinema tell us a different story. The music, the slow mo, the framing. It all tells us "here it is. Here is the final act. Her biggest foe." But when it comes down to it, Yon-Rogg was a product of his society. He was simply perpetuating Kree rules and Kree standards. He is a single bee among the swarm, a swarm Carol just fought off. I remember sitting in the audience in this moment and going 'oh no. Don't do this.' But I believed they were going to, because the framing was walking all the well-tread paths that told me that this was it. This was Carol's big moment. And in a way, it was. But in a bigger way, it wasn't.
Carol is well past the emotional climax of her arc by this point in the movie. We aren't in her head as they square up, we don't know that she isn't going to fall for his manipulations. And in this way THE MOVIE HAS MANIPULATED US. It tells us this is what it feels like to be so certain of something well established that we can expect nothing else despite knowing better. But it either makes us doubt ourselves and/or question the status quo that put us where we’re standing. And damn if that isn't so clever. And what makes it a good method is that it doesn't punish us for doubting it in the end. It plays that trick off as a joke! We’re not the butt. It’s not punching down, but UP! It assures us that we are in our right minds and we read the situation correctly — things that manipulators ultimately strive to prevent.
(above gif is the second gif in the gifset above it) In the end, its in these ways that Captain Marvel is transformative, not the basics of the plot. The core of this movie is the emotion of the characters, which I feel it makes abundantly clear in the primary manipulator of the movie's repetition of emotion being bad, weak, and untrustworthy. If we don't invest in the journey of our characters, we miss what makes the movie truly transgressive. And for all that to be embedded in a mainstream action movie is truly a beautiful thing (not to mention the ways in which the queer subtext is so overt so as to be literally all but obviously canon... a post for another time perhaps). So far all it's flaws (and it does have them), this movie definitely ranks among the bests in my book.
