Relationship Spotlight: Gamora & Peter Quill (Guardians of the Galaxy)

I think seeing Vol. 2 helped me get enough context to understand Peter and Gamora a little better, especially from her point of view – while I wouldn’t call them John and Aeryn, there is a bit of a similar idea at play there.  Before, it felt a little too been-there-done-that, but I’m starting to see it now.

On first glance, I wasn’t overly impressed by Gamora and Peter.  It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, the quippy minor rogue/burgeoning hero and the stone cold warrior women.  He’s jokey, she’s all business, he makes small flirting overtures, she threatens to snap his neck, but all the while they grow ever closer – that sort of thing.  By the end of the first movie, he hasn’t romanced her, but he has earned her respect and (relative) trust.

Looking back on it, it’s actually noteworthy how few overtly-romantic beats there are between them in the film.  Peter saves Gamora, a couple times (a complaint I have with the first film is that I wish Gamora had more solid victories of her own,) they have a kinda-moment with Peter’s cassette player (although, at its heart, that scene is about introducing Gamora to Peter’s world through his music,) and Peter’s initial reaction to meeting her – before she robs him, mind you – is to come on to her.  But really, through much of the movie, their teamwork/arguing/getting to know each other isn’t all that different specifically from what Peter does with any of the other Guardians.  Instead, it’s mostly by virtue of the fact that Peter’s the clear lead and Gamora is the only female Guardian that we know this storyline is inevitable for them.

It’s in the second film that they get a bit more John-and-Aeryn with the proceedings.  By this time, the team has been traveling and working together for a while, and they’ve all started to figure each other out a little more.  And that’s where we start to see what’s going on – or, more accurately, not quite going on – with Gamora and Peter.  It’s here that the “quippy hero”-“warrior woman” dynamic gets fleshed out more distinctly.  We see that their relationship has progressed but stopped short of what they both likely want it to be.  Although they support one another through hard personal stuff, whenever Peter tries to broach the subject of where they’re headed, Gamora throws up road blocks.  It’s deep understandable, since she was raised by a genocidal war lord who destroyed her planet and then brought her up to be his living weapon.  She has trust issues, to put it lightly, and she’s learned to bury her emotions as a survival tactic.  As a result, even though on some level she wants to let Peter in, she can’t bring herself to do it.

On Peter’s side, he keeps trying to get her to take down her walls, but he gets tired of always being the one to put himself out there.  Sometimes that makes him angry with her, and sometimes it makes him pull back just as she’s ready to move forward.  And so, they’ve been on this staggered path where they never quite get ahead.  Both need to make concessions – Gamora to trust more, Peter to be patient with her – and both are trying in their own way (that the other doesn’t always see,) but it’s not until the chips are really down that they’re able to make much headway, to get past their own hindrances and start moving towards each other.

Favorite Characters: Peter Quill (Guardians of the Galaxy)

If we’re ranking guardians, Peter is #3 at best, but that’s to be understood.  He’s the protagonist, after all, and in any ragtag-band-of-misfits ensemble, being the protagonist requires at least a degree of Everyman-ness that supporting characters like a machine-gun-toting raccoon and a sentient tree don’t have to deal with.  As such, he’s not the most interesting of the bunch and his character beats are perhaps the most familiar.  That’s okay, though – for what he is, he’s incredibly well-done and rootable (a few Peter-related spoilers.)

As a quippy outlaw in space, Peter is cut from similar cloth as the likes of Han Solo and Mal Reynolds.  He’s a junker who rolls with a fairly unsavory crew from time to time, and he’s not above double-crossing when it suits him.  He’s always out to make a score and his desires can really get in the way of his conscious, but when the chips are really down, he can be counted on to do the right thing.  Like other quippy outlaws in space before him, when he gets it in his mind to help, there’s nothing he won’t do to make it happen, risking his life to a startling degree for the sake of others (one could potentially argue that even taking on Ronan is a bit self-serving, since Ronan can use the orb to destroy the entire galaxy and Peter kind of lives there, but that doesn’t mean he has to be the one to stop Ronan.  I’m definitely putting this in the “score one for character growth” column.)

What sets Peter apart from other characters like him, however, is his background.  While Han and Mal are products of the interplanetary society around them, Peter wasn’t born to this.  He’s from Earth, abducted by aliens as a child (the crew he now occasionally rolls with/double-crosses) and coming of age as the only person he knows who’s like him; I’m assuming that pretty much all the humanoid folks we see are just that, humanoid rather than human.  As such, he still carries around the memories of his home planet.  He turns Footloose into a legendary piece of Earth mythology, because who’s there to tell anyone otherwise, and he clings to the battered old mix tape his mother made for him when he was a kid.  I love the moment when he and the others are arrested in the first film and he gets so angry at a guard for listening to his tape, because he’s so jealously possessive of “Hooked on a Feeling” and the very, very few other things he has to remind him of Earth.  “That song belongs to me!” he yells, an amazingly poignant remark about the franchise’s nostalgia-laden soundtrack.

But unlike, say, John Crichton (in general, more of a fugitive than an outlaw, but he still fits the pattern,) while Peter isn’t from the galaxy in which the movie is set, he hasn’t just arrived there, either.  This isn’t a story about grownup Peter getting abducted and flailing to adjust to the strangeness around him.  It’s one about grownup Peter who’s had years to get his flailing and adjusting out of the way, who guards his small pieces of home but who’s largely assimilated to his new culture.  He interacts with everyone as a person first, not an alien curiosity – as unique as Groot apparently is (he flummoxes the Nova Corps people,) Peter doesn’t make anything unusual of Groot until he starts twigging that “I am Groot” is the extent of the tree’s vocabulary.  He’s comfortable with spaceships and other non-Earth tech, and he has no qualms about hooking up with alien women (though, if there are tentacles involved, he’ll need a good incentive.)  This gives a nice mix of a character, someone who’s lost and at home, rooted in the past and looking to the future.  It speaks to how adaptable he is, and it also shows why he’s the natural choice to be the one to rally his fellow “losers” to help protect the galaxy that’s taken him in.