starlady | Brief Agent Carter thoughts

I really liked it. I really, really liked it. That said:

A number of people have talked about the ways in which the show's narrative w/r/t feminism is simplistic. I liked meganbmoore's review of the first two episodes from that perspective quite a lot because it seemed pretty thorough.
It seems pretty clear to me that the show's Feminism 101 narrative also ties in to its other major oversight, which is that it is so relentlessly white--the only characters of color so far have been servants or musicians in the background with the exception of the guy who gets shot in 1x01. I will be the first to tell you that I don't know where I would go looking for people of color in professional New York City circa 1946, but that is due to my own abysmal ignorance, not because they weren't there or because racism and de facto segregation didn't exist in the North. (The book to read on this topic is Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty, though if you want to read about civil rights struggles outside the North and the South, you need to read Mark Brilliant.) The lack of women of color in particular is kind of glaring.
The thing is that this lack also ties in with the fact that the show's take on 1946 is…simplistic at best. It's summer or early autumn from what limited contextual clues I can see in the show thus far, and yet there are no discussions or background shots of either a) continuing wartime price controls or b) striking workers. 1946, for those who don't know, was the year that Americans got so fed up with Truman's continuing to keep wartime price controls in place, and with widespread worker strikes throughout the country over the summer, that they elected to Congress the Republican supermajority that in 1947 passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which dealt a body-blow to the American labor movement from which it has never really recovered. In its own forgotten way 1946 was epochal, and the show has absolutely no idea about any of that.
The inattention to history also ties in with the show's simplistic take on the sexism that Peggy and her friends experience in the workplace. It's crude, although not unrealistic, but in some ways it feels about five or ten years too early and in others it's just painfully heavy-handed--very little of this has gone away, it's just turned into microaggressions, glass ceilings, and persistent pay gaps. If you watch a movie like White Christmas (1954), you will see how society regarded female servicemembers ten years on from the war, and you will also see that very few of the lines are actually as crudely sexist as Peggy's colleagues'. The sexism and gendered expectations are baked into the worldview and basic assumptions of the movie, not surfaced as baldly as they are in the Captain America radio serial, as clever TV as that was. Tl,dr; Mad Men did this better, although I like to read the scene in 1x02 where the agents don't want to drink because it's 10:30 in the morning as a bit of a joke on how it's not the 1950s, when everybody who had the American dream started self-medicating with alcohol and lithium to cope with its soul-sucking side effects, quite yet.
Both these things tie into what I think is really interesting on a meta-media level, namely that the TV shows are where Marvel's actually really good media mix (aka transmedia) strategy thus far have broken down, albeit in different directions. I continue to think that Marvel is the best example on the opposite side of the Pacific of media mix, and its painstaking phase rollouts of the MCU films has boosted all of its other media properties. (Sidenote: people who blame Marvel and comic book movies for the decline of movies [sic] and the rise of sequel-itis are totally wrong. They need to lay the blame where it belongs, namely at the feet of informational capitalism.) Agents of SHIELD, however, was unplanned in those phases, and fitted very badly in with the MCU universe prior to Winter Soldier, and now in S2 it's being used to explain their no-really-they're-not-mutants-I-swear licensing issues. Agent Carter, by contrast, has really nailed the fun parts of the MCU experience in TV format thus far, but it's also the place where you can see all the cracks in Marvel's "let's rewrite WWII the way we want it to have been!" strategy, up close and personal. Captain America: The First Avenger is pure wish-fulfillment about WWII, complete with an integrated military unit in the form of the Howling Commandos, lady operatives taking part in open combat, no mention of the Holocaust, and the myriad actual evils of the Nazi regime displaced by evil HYDRA scientists who are too fringe even for the actual Nazis. Ironically, the best demonstration of that aspect of the MCU I've seen thus far is settiai's vid The War Was in Color, which ironically (and I love that vid, make no mistake) makes exactly the move the song itself warns against by taking the MCU at face value. I love Peggy, but the transition from the wish-fulfillment of the movie to the "let's ignore some parts of history and overemphasize others!" attitude of the TV show is especially jarring.
I meant to say, and got sidetracked, that the SSR bullpen is the place specifically in the show where MCU vs actual history meet. In pefect postwar America, Captain America-style, you'd expect some of the Howling Commandos to be popping in and out, if not actively working for the SSR. But Agent Carter isn't quite following the MCU line on history--it wants to have its feminist cake and eat it while ignoring racism too--and so it's actually difficult to know how the show wants us to interpret Peggy's male colleagues. The guy with the suspenders is canonically said to have fought in the Battle of Okinawa--and it has to have been the Battle of, because this is 1946 and he's working with the SSR in New York, so he's not part of the Occupation--but I have no idea what that is supposed to signify to us in the audience or what it's supposed to signify to everyone around him. Is his taking part in the Battle of Okinawa linked to the fact that he happily beats up suspects during interrogation? Does the show know that the Battle of Okinawa lasted three months and left 250,000 people dead, 150,000 of them Okinawan civilians, and that Okinawa was U.S. territory for the next 27 years? Does anybody care except the people in the audience who do know these facts? Are we supposed to hate the guy because he beats on suspects, or because he's a sexist jerk, or both, or is this a weird postcolonial Freudian slip on the writers' part? It's all totally unclear.

All that being said, I really liked it, and I'll be watching it every week until the end. I really love Peggy & Jarvis playing off each other--their actors are both very pretty and they are very fun together. I don't actually want Peggy/Jarvis because Peggy/Steve and Jarvis/his wife (is it me, or are they going out of their way to get his wedding ring prominently into certain shots?), but they are very pretty together, and I love James D'Arcy almost as much as I love Hayley Atwell.