The truest sign of my indifference to Captain Marvel

The further I’ve gotten away from Captain Marvel, the less I like it/think about it. Actually, I can’t say I don’t think about it, because I’ve been listening to it discussed at regular intervals on my podcasts as each of them gets to it, or as I get to listening to them. And in fact, one particular podcast finally gave me the balls to admit what I should have admitted straight away: I don’t really think it’s all that great. Genevieve Koski of The Next Picture Show, who I tend to think of as a champion of responsible depiction of women at the movies, gave a number of reasons she didn’t love it, all of which I agreed with. If it’s okay for Genevieve to say she didn’t love Captain Marvel, it’s okay for me to say it too.

One of the things Genevieve and I agree on is the piss poor usage of 90s music in the movie. It’s not that the songs they choose aren’t good, because they are. It’s that they are applied so indifferently, so haphazardly, that they exist only as broad signposts of 90s nostalgia, nothing that feels organic to the movie or the scenes in which they are deployed.

There’s a weird extension of this problem that I never thought would have been a problem for me, because it involves my favorite band of all time.

For a good portion of the movie, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, Carol Danvers wears a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. It immediately put me in mind of the Public Enemy t-shirt the young John Connor wears throughout Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Whenever I thought of him wearing that t-shirt, I thought of it as a case of the two things mutually boosting each other up. The fact that he likes Public Enemy speaks well of John Connor, and the fact that the future leader of the human resistance against the machines wears a Public Enemy t-shirt speaks well of Public Enemy.

I should feel this – in fact, I should get a surge of pride – with Carol Danvers and Nine Inch Nails, as they are indeed my favorite band. But like many of the other signifiers in this movie, this one is pretty empty. Carol is, or at least thinks she is, an alien from another planet. Her choice of a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt is not based on an acquaintance with their music. It’s random and inspired by nothing other than its proximity to her at the time she was looking for clothing (they mentioned she grabbed it off a mannequin in the discussion on The Next Picture Show, though I don't remember that happening).

Whether Carol consciously adopted Nine Inch Nails as some kind of symbol or not should be irrelevant. If it’s not her endorsing the band, then it’s the movie endorsing it, and that should be good enough. But I treated Carol wearing a shirt emblazoned with the iconic NIN logo -- something that should have been aimed directly at me, appealed directly to me, and in all ways been an easy win for the movie to score with me -- with little more than a shrug. It doesn’t only represent her not making a conscious choice, but the choice feels just as arbitrary for the filmmakers as their choice of which music to drop in which scene that doesn’t go with that music.

I did like the fact that the movie endorsing it, and by extension Brie Larson endorsing it, was proof positive of what I’ve thought for ages: that Trent Reznor is a feminist. Larson has spent a good portion of the press leading up to Captain Marvel talking about gender equality and #MeToo-related subject matter, after all. Reznor, the lead singer and in fact entirety of the band, has written some really angry lyrics and music over the years, the type that could make a fan defensive. But the people who know have never confused that anger with misogyny, even though some of the lyrics could broadly be interpreted through that type of filter.

The thing is, Reznor received a pretty high endorsement of his feminist credentials a full quarter century ago. None other than Tori Amos asked him to join her for a duet on the chorus of “Past the Mission” on her album Under the Pink, this after including the words “nine inch nails” in her song “Precious Things” from her solo debut album Little Earthquakes. Her follow-up to Under the Pink contains the song “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” which name-checks Reznor’s own debut album, Pretty Hate Machine.

In other words, I don’t need Captain Marvel or Captain Marvel to tell me I have good reason to like Nine Inch Nails.

If I felt the character of Carol Danvers and the music of Nine Inch Nails were in some way in conversation with each other -- as I do with John Connor and Public Enemy -- then it might mean something. But alas, the character herself is as poorly defined, as poorly delineated, as the character's connection to whatever symbolism Nine Inch Nails is supposed to have for her, or for the movie.

And I'm not going to include a bunch of language here reassuring you of my own feminist credentials. I hope you know I support the idea of Carol Danvers, just not so much her execution in this particular film.

Hey, Genevieve Koski said it was okay.