With the new season coming out and the sort of emergence of the new DC movie continuity, I was like…oh, I should watch Peacemaker. I had seen The Suicide Squad and Creature Commandos, so it was an easy show to roll into, already being familiar with the character. Binged it up through the first episode of season two.
Love it. Holy shit.
So I’m telling my husband about it and talking about how you can see some of the narrative shift in the new season coming into the DCU. And running him through the Guy Gardner and Hawkgirl scene and the approach to the characters in an MA vs a PG-13 production etc etc. Now we’re both brown coats to a degree, but I’ve personally been a face of Nathan Fillion since Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place (as I was typing out the title, I realized that show had two lead actors who would go on to play Green Lanterns. Weird right?).
And we were talking about Fillion as an actor, and I was relating how much I love when he gets to go truly into the total asshole category of character. Because he’s just so damn charming, that even his dickhead characters are impossible to truly hate. He really nails that lovable rogue archetype and everything sort of around it.
Then my husband says, “oh that’s the kind of character Peacemaker strikes me as from what little I’ve seen.”
And I corrected him there because they aren’t quite the same archetype.
Then that made me sort of think about Peacemaker and why and how he works in the context of the show. Because if you push a character too far into shitheel territory they aren’t fun. Likek Rick Sanchez is right at the edge, and he’s pretty strongly tempered by the rest of the cast and the circumstances of the overall story.
So really trying to break down what makes Peacemaker interesting and what makes his dickery sort of palatable is this counterbalance with naivete. Not childishness or innocence but rather a sort of simpleness to his thinking process. Like he’s a little bit stupid but mostly his emotional intelligence and complexity is just extremely underdeveloped at the start of the story, and he doesn’t realize it.
He sort of self-proclaims this peace at any cost approach to his work, and he really feels like he genuinely believes it. That, at some point, he can kill the right person, and that will be The Thing that finally ends it all and no line is too strong to be crossed. I can’t speak to his comic appearances, but the screen adaptation reads as someone who’s maybe never really thought about his actions.
Compare that to the spectrum of the comic version of Frank Castle. That strikes as a guy who just…likes killing. He looks for trouble and applies morality to it afterward a lot of times sort of depending on the run.
Whereas Chris Smith presents as this guy who’s just kind of Id-forward, and can you equally apply the paintbrush of morality to a man who’s barely in touch with the influence of the Superego
Let’s say we’re looking at one of his early interactions with Harcourt at the bar. He propositions her for sex. And while he’s blunt and brusque and obviously this is an interaction intended to paint him in a rightfully negative light, if we’re moralizing on him, is he really all that “bad” compared to how this might have gone down in real life. He’s straight forward, states his needs, pushes too hard on it, of course, but backs off when Harcourt shoots him down. When he hooks up with the 80s styled metahuman, it’s fully consensual, they have a good time, and he seems pretty complimentary to her. He treats her with relative kindness and friendliness before she tries to kill him.
James Gunn is using a bit of hedonism here to sort of moral shortcut us into “he’s kind of a douche,” but is he really a “bad” guy here?
And then that all plays into his shift in perspective after killing Flag in The Suicide Squad and how he responds to suddenly being asked to kill children while not really knowing or understanding why for Project Butterfly. For the first time’s actually interrogated his own motivations and came up wanting in terms of deeper intent.
And it’s only then he can actually confront what his father had turned him into. This leads us into season two.
That, I think, is what makes Peacemaker compelling going forward and will hopefully have much longer legs than a number of characters in the same vein. He has a lot of things to grow into and he wants to do it. At least as presented in the show. I think that’s something a lot of writers miss. Assholes are boring afterawhile. Relentless killing machines get old. The catharsis of watching a character dole out justice has a limit.
So I’m really excited to see this actual dickbag of a human being become less of that.
Also, Chris and Adrian need to kiss just….like….one time.
Pixels and Pins Studio 