Black Widow and Pamela Halpert
So I recently came upon a series of tiktoks denouncing Pam Beesly from The Office. As a concept, I absolutely love the idea of deep diving and challenging our previously held beliefs about beloved fictional characters (there are countless cries to reevaluate Jim, also from The Office, as an unmotivated time waster rather than the cool guy we used to think he was). But this creator and plenty in the comments touched on things that, while they may make her a flawed person at worst, do not make her a bad character.
I am by no means saying that she is wrong for her assessment and at the end of each video she does encourage discourse which is good. This just sparked a primal need in me to give my amateurish take on how we treat female characters in the media.
Pam, like every other character on The Office, is flawed. She does bad things, she has a shitty attitude, and, one could argue, she cheats on her fiancée. That being said, that is no reason to denounce her as a character and I actually think it’s important to have characters like that.
One of the biggest complaints most people have with her is that she constantly flirted with Jim while being engaged to Roy. As younglings, we all thought it was cute and that justice was served when they finally got together, but growing up, we realize that it was kind of a shitty thing to do. But I would like to counterpoint and ask... is it?
I mean, yes, actively making googly eyes at another potential suitor especially when it’s clear that he has the hots for you when you are committed to someone else is bad, but it ignores greater context: Roy’s treatment of Pam and Jim’s own autonomy.
Roy was undoubtedly neglectful of Pam and was initially supportive of her friendship with Jim SO THAT SHE WOULDN’T BOTHER HIM FOR ATTENTION. Is it truly a crime that she sought solace from the one person in the office that she could get along with? If we changed the scenario to make Jim female (we’ll call her Jill) would their friendship then be considered flirty? If Pam and Jill were doing everything she and Jim were (nix the one or two kisses they had) then they would just be the two mean girls in the office playing pranks on the uptight assistant to the regional manager. Of course, it is fact that they were indeed flirting with each other (or more accurately and it is my personal belief that Jim was flirting while Pam was simply being friendly UNTIL it grew into something more.
A lot of people also tend to think of Pam as manipulating Jim’s feelings for her to gain, basically, a second boyfriend while her shitty fiancée was an ass to her. This might very well be true, but heck if Jim didn’t have a part to play in it. This idea of “manipulating his emotions” is ludicrous because Jim is a grown man who should know better and, at some points (such as when he started dating Katie and Karen) we see that he does. At best he is culpable in feeding the fantasy that he and Pam could be together despite her engagement and, at worst, he is too naïve to live. Pam didn’t manipulate him. She didn’t hide her relationship status or anything and, in fact, told him more than he needed to know about it. Several times, she would leave with Roy or act relationship-y with him in front of Jim. He was her friend, and if there was ever a chance of them being more then Jim was just as responsible for that.
So where does Black Widow fit into this?
Well, she didn’t kill Dreykov’s daughter and I’m still salty about it.
The idea that a flawed female character cannot be rooted for seems ingrained in our enjoyment of TV. See, the worst thing we know that Natasha has done (in the MCU not the comics) is, you know, murder a little girl. At this point she was not brainwashed, she did it because a job needed to get done and what’s a little collateral damage. What makes it worse is that her target survived so she basically just murdered a literal child for no reason. Bummer. She’s grown since then, and the knowledge that she did something like that will forever haunt her. No matter how many good deeds you do, or how many worlds you save, how do you cope with the fact that you set off a bomb point blank on a child?
But they backed out of it. In the end, turns out, she’s okay. Slightly charred, but otherwise vibing. The idea that Dreykov turning her into a weapon was Natasha’s fault is laughable because I would like to know what shred of evidence led us to believe he wasn’t going to do that anyway. Girl was destined to become a Widow whether she was his daughter or some orphan. That fact that she had to be mentally subjugated cemented that for me. I’ve complained about this before, but the identity of Taskmaster didn’t matter when they had no goals of their own. If it were that the girl survived but dedicated her life to killing Natasha for what she did and keeping the Widow program going, then that would be a suitable trade-off, but she didn’t care. As it stands, the worst thing Natasha has done... doesn’t exist anymore. The kid didn’t die and now that the brainwashing has been erased, she’s going to be taken care of.
Did I just want to complain some more about Black Widow in this rant about Pam? Possibly.
That being said, a realistic depiction of a flawed woman should not be decried. Especially when, and let’s be honest, Pam really isn’t that bad. When all is said and done, Pam is no more mean nor petty than the rest of us. In the aforementioned tiktok, her cattiness to Kathy was cited and... so what? I’m sure there are plenty of us who thought of being or even were catty to whoever our best friends were dating because we wanted them to ourselves (whether it be platonic or romantic).
Audiences tend not to like when women who are TOO flawed but still called good. Not that it’s always done right and discourse around this type of thing is important, but when there calls to cancel Pam, an ordinary woman whose list of crimes include being snarky to her best friend’s girl, kissing her best friend while super drunk and bullying the office joke, it’s time to evaluate why. It’s not so much that I think Pam is good, but I don’t think there’s enough wrong with her to call her bad.
