Character depth and limited screen time | Worthy of Notice
A few notes on what is one of the best pieces of writing in the MCU.
Even after months, I still come back to this, because it still impresses me: Valentina’s characterization in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. They made her married to Ross and suddenly there’s fifteen layers of depth to her. It’s one line of dialogue. It’s really just —
I also have to apologize for some stuff I said when we we’re married.
— and now we have character. Real character.
While Val does appear in other Marvel works, she’s been a mysterious figure with objectives that are obscure to the audience at large, and Wakanda Forever is first time something significant about her.
With everything else going on in the movie, and this being definitely not about her, there was limited time to actually show who she is, and where she stands. So it’s by contrasting her with Everett Ross that we get to know her. Val is presented as the new director of the CIA, and Ross, who’s been American good boy every step of the way until now, is instantly ambiguous about the decision, not to say outright unhappy about it.
They show Val by her effect on him, by his distrust, by his need to do things behind her back. Because the BP movies go out of their way to make Everett likeable — favorite colonizer — , we trust him, and it brings Val’s gray morality to the forefront: she’s very skilled with political situations and very strict in her understanding of the interests of her country and the Agency. She’s not opposed to back channels so far as it furthers her agenda, and she’ll gladly use the people around her to make it happen.
The audience is not stupid, these are all traits of a good antagonist, and she certainly does the work of one here. Louis-Dreyfus gorgeously fun portrayal make Val her interesting in that way a smart-ass, sarcastic, villain can be, but that’s still kind of plain, isn’t it?
Then comes contrast again, and again with Ross, in the form of a single, almost throwaway, joke about 8h of apology and suddenly we add depth to her. It’s a single decision, two lines of dialogue on the screenplay without the need to use any other character, and it makes all the difference.
Even the most doomed marriage has to, at some point, have been rooted in some kind of legitimate interest — specially if you consider that within the MCU marriage and romance aren’t usually treated lightly — so Good Boy Everett and Poster Girl for American Imperialism have to have some things in common.
Valentina is not just another shadow figure playing shady games with intelligence resources anymore, we know something personal about her. She had a serious relationship with someone we trust. It’s not much, but it’s a crack in the veneer. And where there’s veneer, the audience knows there’s something behind: history — depth. She becomes human.
This new dimension in no way erases her decisions and agenda, on the contrary it makes them clearer, and all the more cruel: she sends someone who she once had a legitimate connection with to jail for treason, and is in direct opposition to him. She refuses his personal appeal to her (“it’s Director de Fontaine”) and shuts down that opening the moment it’s ceases to work for her.
The small curtain we had was closed, but that crack… it’ll always be there, from now on. And I’d love to see the folks at Marvel using it to give us something truly complex. Considering what’s been done so far, I can only imagine the wonders JLD could do with just a little bit more.
Val definitely has the potential to be one of the most interesting characters Marvel has ever presented it’s audience.
