Social Penetration Theory in Captain Marvel

In the film Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers is the main character who has lost all memory of her past life. She is abducted by people from a different planet and has no knowledge of her past life back on Earth. The people who abducted her from Earth were called the Kree, and they had turned her into a soldier. At the beginning of the movie, she escapes from these aliens called Skrulls who had kidnapped her while she was on a mission. When she escapes, she ends up back on Earth with no prior knowledge that she had grown up and lived a normal life on Earth up until she was abducted. The Skrulls in the movie are able to take on the image and voice of any being they touch, so their strategy to get a hold of Carol Danvers while on Earth was to pretend to be humans. The gif below is an example of how the alien took the form of a person that would not seem to be an evil alien capable of abducting someone. Carol Danvers soon after finds Nick Fury, who is a special agent with S.H.I.E.L.D., and he is able to figure out her story and he is able to help Carol find out who she was before she was taken from Earth.

When a person knows someone well, they are able to share with them more intimate details about their lives. People tend to share information in multiple layers, like an onion. Another term for this is their personality structure, which is the, “onion-like layers of beliefs and feelings about self, others, and the world; deeper layers are more vulnerable, protected, and central to self-image” (94). As we get to know someone, we socially penetrate ourselves further into their personality. Social penetration is, “the process of developing deeper intimacy with another person through mutual self-disclosure and other forms of vulnerability” (94). This process is not something that happens overnight. Getting to know another person on a more intimate level, whether the relationship be plutonic or more romantic, takes a lot of time. There are social norms that exist that say that we get into the inner layers of a person’s personality as we get to know them better. In other words, you do not share your darkest secret or your biggest fear with someone you had met an hour before. This pace is known as the “law of reciprocity,” which is, “a paced and orderly process in which openness in one person leads to openness in the other” (96).

Captain Marvel, or Carol Danvers, is tasked with evading these Skrulls that continue to take the forms of random humans early on in the movie. When she meets up with Nick Fury, they both go to his agency’s headquarters to figure out more information about who she is. The Skrulls end up taking the shapes of other agents and also the director of the agency. However, they are able to figure out that they are not themselves because of their memories. They are limited to the looks of people, so whenever they are asked personal questions about the person they are imitating, their cover is blown. Their inability to replicate the person’s relationship with either Carol or Nick demonstrates how the social penetration theory and the law of reciprocity work. They were not able to replicate that process, and they were left in an awkward position when asked about past events that the two characters had previously shared. Also, the development of Carol’s relationship with her previous best friend before she had lost her memory was another example of how the personality structure works. Carol had basically no recollection of her best friend Monica, who had developed a very close relationship with Carol, and she was shocked when she showed up at her house towards the back half of the movie. Carol seemed uncomfortable at first whenever Monica was treating her like she had known her for their entire lives because Carol did not remember. Although Carol warms up to her as the movie goes on, it took time for them to redevelop that relationship. This demonstrates the law of reciprocity because Carol was not immediately running up to her and hugging her like her best friend because to her Monica was basically a stranger. Many other social issues are demonstrated during the film. This movie demonstrated plenty of relationship issues because of Carol’s memory loss, and the theory of social penetration was highlighted throughout the dialogue.