Spoiler Warning: This post contains spoilers for Fresh and Daredevil Season 1
Recently, while doing the circuit, Sebastian Stan said something that surprised me. He said he gets recognized for his character Steve in Fresh and that he didn’t understand the women and cannibals thing. I wasn’t sure how he couldn’t get it, and how cannibalism was irrelevant. I tend to think of him as a man written by a woman, so his disbelief confused me. I figured if he didn’t get it, a bunch of folks probably didn’t get it. Allow me to explain.
Of course, part of this is just the actor. No matter how terrible a person he plays, Sebastian Stan is a great actor. And he looks like Bucky Barnes. Sadly, we live in a world where sometimes folks get blinded by beauty and get the character and the actor confused. These people love Steve simply because he is played so well by an attractive actor.
And then you’ve got the folks who can’t get past the meet cute. It was perfectly played. Steve was charming and funny; Noa was cautious and hesitant. He never invades her personal space, he didn’t check to see if she had given him her actual number. When they go on their first date, he’s somehow even more charming, and clearly smitten. She ignores red flags because he has a reasonable explanation, and she likes him. He doesn’t have social media of any kind. He wants to go away on an overnight trip pretty quickly. But they’d decided not to play games, and he’s cute and charming, so Noa silences that alarm bell.
But it isn’t just a hot guy and a flirty interaction. No. What really gets women going is deeper than those things, and actually happens after we know what the nasty bastard is up to.
Noa, starting to understand that Steve truly is interested in her, gets Steve to open up. She asks him personal questions, feigns interest. Steve starts to think maybe she really likes him back. He brings her upstairs for dinner, and during that conversation, he opens up more. He talks about the first time he ate a person, and how alone he felt, how he thought he was a freak. And then he found a community and gained a bit of understanding. Noa, brilliant girl that she is, realizes his weakness. He actually likes her. If she pretends to be truly interested in Steve’s hobby, she might have a chance to get at him. He might let his guard down.
Steve “invites” Noa upstairs for dinner again, even giving her a dress to wear to make the evening feel fancy, romantic. During the second dinner, she coaxes him into opening up even more. He talks about the other women, even showing her what amounts to his trophy case: where he keeps the belongings and pictures of the women he’s butchered and sent to the “one percent of the one percent.” The audience can see the fear and empathy the women Steve brought here before her in her eyes, but Steve is only able to see Noa’s face, and he doesn’t see anything besides her closely studying the trophy case. Steve opens up, and becomes even more infatuated with Noa, simply because she doesn’t react with horror or disgust.
Those are the moments that some women can’t let go of. When Steve opens up, admits to feeling misunderstood, outcast, we respond to that. He’s got this look on his face like he’s revealed his deepest, darkest secret, spoken it aloud for the first time. You can even see his fear that he’s saying too much. I’ll be damned if I didn’t respond to that with a little sympathy when I watched. Because that’s when he becomes vulnerable. Not just to Noa’s scheming. But in general. And we are so starved for masculine vulnerability, we can almost forgive fucking cannibalism.
Don’t believe me? I’ll give you another pop culture example. Vanessa Marianna and Wilson Fisk (Ayelet Zurer and Vincent D’Onofrio) in Season One of Daredevil. I mean, c’mon. Vanessa is an objectively beautiful woman. Wilson is not a conventionally attractive man. Further, he is a bit socially awkward, his sense of humor is barely existent, and he’s a brutally violent fucking murderer. Of course, Vanessa doesn’t know that last bit about him at first. But, she agrees to go out with him despite his awkwardness. Why?
Because when she approached Wilson to talk to him about the painting, he was emotionally unguarded and she immediately saw it. And when she starts asking how the painting makes him feel, he answers without building his walls back up first. That moment is what leads her to agree to dinner with him. She is intrigued, and she wants to find out more.
Hell, on that date Vanessa talks about grand gestures men have made toward her and past lovers. Notice those relationships don’t work out. But Wilson proposes to Vanessa before the end of season one. He needs her, and she loves him, in part, because she knows that he would never do anything to hurt her, simply because he was vulnerable, and she accepted him.
Jesus, boys. Tell us your secrets. Tell us what hurt you in the past. Tell us about your bad day or the girl who broke your heart or how you really feel about your parents or the first girl you kissed. Just tell us something intimate and real about yourself. And do it while actually emoting. Show us how you feel. I’ve always heard men are visual creatures, but so are women. We want to see your joy, your tears, your fear, your honesty. We want to see you geek out over something we care nothing about… except for the fact that you care for it, and we care for you.
Even if you don’t look like Bucky Barnes, we’re going to respond to that. Probably positively. But there’s always a chance we’ll bite your cock off, especially if you’re a cannibal using us like a combination beef cow and side piece.
Oh yeah… Steve was also married. And it makes me a bit concerned that Steve cheating bothers me a little more than all the murdering and butchering and cooking of humans. Look, y’all, everyone has boundaries. Cheating is one of mine. And it just feels more likely that I’d run into a cheater way more often than a cannibal.
