The first Avengers movie was shockingly effective. The MCU had been popular, but of the first five movies that preceded it, only the first, Iron Man, could really be called a classic, and perhaps only because it introduced us to the MCU (though from the start, Marvel showed that they were masters of perfect casting - Robert Downey Jr. was a hell of a get). The Incredible Hulk is dour and joyless, Thor has a fun cast in search of a plot without any sense of stakes. I actually really like Captain America: the First Avenger, though it's overshadowed by the other Captain America movies, which are some of the highlights of the MCU. And Iron Man II struggles to be memorable.
But the latter does introduce us to one of the MCU's best characters: Natasha Romanoff, played by Scarlett Johansson, aka Black Widow.
Given that the Avengers is initially comprised of six superheroes, only four of which have movies setting them up, we actually get big supporting roles out of Clint "Hawkeye" Barton in Thor and Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff in Iron Man II before they make the team in the Avengers. (Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner actually works way better than Edward Norton's, even though he's downgraded to supporting player in his appearances.)
Even just watching clips of Iron Man II, though, the "male gaze" is profoundly focused on Black Widow, even as the movie uses that gaze as a plot point when it's revealed that she's not just some super-talented assistant, but a SHIELD plant there to evaluate Tony Stark for the Avengers Initiative. Yes, this is Scarlett Johansson, a strong contender for "most beautiful woman in the world" - I'm not disputing how hot she is - but lines like Tony's "I want one" leave a gross taste in my mouth, and I think the "we're playing with the male gaze" intention gets a bit fuzzy with "we're just exhibiting the male gaze" execution.
Indeed, one of the criticisms of the MCU has been its focus on white, male protagonists. Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Thor (literally a god form Norse/Germanic culture - a mythos that is often, sadly, co-opted by white supremacists) are all very white and very much dudes. (Ok, Drax might dispute my calling Thor a dude.)
And the combination of Black Widow's popularity as a character and Scarlett Johansson's A+ list Hollywood notability, after The Avengers, there was a question lingering in the air: why doesn't she have her own solo movie?
Last year, we were supposed to get it - a movie centered on her, entitled Black Widow, in which she returns to Russia and seems to reconnect with figures from her time as a Soviet assassin. (The timeline here is pretty weird, unless in the MCU, the USSR lasted longer - Natasha Romanoff is established as the same age as Scarlett Johansson, who is in her mid 30s, and thus was born in the mid 80s, meaning that she was under 10 when the Soviet Union collapsed, while the flashbacks to her training suggest that it continued well into at least her teen years).
Marvel has worked on representation, at least on-screen (though Black Panther notably had a lot of Black artists behind the scenes, which I think helped give it the authentic voice which made it connect with such a wide audience) and so we got Black Panther, a non-white superhero, and Captain Marvel, a woman superhero, in Phase 3. With Wandavision giving us another woman-led story and plans for a Captain Marvel sequel, the Ms. Marvel show (starring someone who is, *gasp,* both a woman and not white) and Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, clearly Disney has recognized that diversity is profitable (hey, if we're stuck in a capitalist system, at least as the populace grows more progressive the system will have to accommodate our tastes).
So the arrival of the Black Widow movie is a bit of a case of "better late than never." Still, "late" carries a couple meanings here. And just in case you somehow never saw Avengers: Endgame and care at all about the MCU (such people must exist, right?) we'll do a spoiler cut here (SPOILERS for all existing Marvel movies).
Three of the Avengers see their stories come to a clear ending in Endgame. The two that get the most focus are two characters who have always been seen as central to the franchise: Captain America and Iron Man. And these two get pretty definitive, and moreover satisfying ends.
Tony Stark, in the last sequence of the climactic battle against Thanos, gives his life channeling the power of the Infinity Stones to wipe out Thanos and his forces, saving every living being in the cosmos at the cost of his own life. It's the "sacrifice play" that Rogers claims he won't be willing to make in the first Avengers movie, and while it's sad to see him go, he does so in a complete rejection of his own formerly selfish and self-interested, quasi-Randian worldview. An act of pure altruism at the cost of his ego that allows him to die as hero. Indeed, one wonders if he'll be heralded as a messianic figure across the universe thanks to his sacrifice (we already know from blink-and-you'll-miss-it easter eggs in Spiderman Homecoming that there are people worshipping the Asgardian pantheon in New York. Tony Stark literally saved everyone.)
Steve Rogers, on the other hand, finally decides to do what is right for himself, rather than making everything about service outside of his ego. When his story began, he was frustrated by the world's inability to recognize the worth of his service, but his physical transformation allowed him to help the world the way he had always wanted to. Now, though, he's finally done enough to be satisfied with his service to the world, and so when he is sent back in time to return the various Infinity Stones to close any weird time-travel off-shoots, he decides that he'll stick around in the late 1940s and return to Peggy Carter, his one true love, and live the life he dreamed of before he went into the ice. Sure, it's a selfish act, but he's earned this reward, so we can't blame him for doing this.
But Natasha was never the focus of any film. It's not that she doesn't go through her own growth or change, but to an extent she has been more of a stabilizing or illuminating influence on others, helping them with their transformations more than she focuses on her own. Even if Clint spends much of the Avengers mind-controlled by Loki and causing chaos, to a large extent, the two of them - the most grounded and human-level of the Avengers - tend to act as the mature professionals who get the job done while the others are the outsized, larger than life personalities.
Within Endgame, Natasha's broken by the five years following the failures to stop Thanos, but when it becomes clear that there's hope after such a long period of hopelessness, her energy is restored. This turns tragic when she and Clint arrive on Vormir and discover that, in order to recover the Soul stone needed to complete the set, one of them has to die.
There's a past hinted at with Black Widow that we never really see: while we're introduced to her as a SHIELD agent whose association with the organization is one she sees as a chance at redemption (something that is shattered in Captain America: Winter Soldier, when SHIELD is revealed to be just another tool of Hydra's, though she sort of transfers that sense of confidence in being one of the good guys by moving onto her association as one of the Avengers) she does allude to having "a lot of red in her ledger." She was an assassin trained in some hellish Soviet assassin's school in which her humanity was stripped away to make her this killing machine without agency.
The start of her path to redemption is also off-screen and long ago, when she and Hawkeye met as enemies and Clint recognized her humanity. So, she left behind that past to do good.
The arc doesn't have as much screentime as that for Tony or Steve, but it does come to a solid conclusion. Like Tony, before Tony does, she gives up her life for the greater good. If any act could wipe that red from her ledger, it was this act of self-sacrifice in the name of universal salvation (yep, we've got not one, but two Jesuses in our superhero epic!)
But it always sat a little weird for me. I guess it's that I wish we had more time to explore her arc. Comparing it to the other character who dies to save the universe in Endgame, with Tony, we got to explore his arc from so many different angles: we see his growth toward altruism and his focus on others rather than himself over the course of his own movies, along with a recognition of his worth as a human being. In his relationship with Peter Parker, we see him reckoning with his own issues as role model and father figure and his relationship with his own towering figure of a father. And we have his head-butting with Steve that shows the evolution of his convictions. Tony Stark goes through many arcs, and it's nuanced enough that some of his admirable character growth in certain ways creates new moral obstacles and flaws for him. His final act is a synthesis of all these arcs coming to their conclusions - a resolve toward altruism, a respect for himself, and trust in those who will come after him.
It's not that Natasha Romanoff didn't get a lot of screen time. She has been featured in seven movies, which is seven times as many as most film characters get. But I am glad to see that she'll be getting her own feature, though we'll have to wait for the pandemic to end for us to actually see it (man, I was really geared up to watch it last spring.)
But what are they going to do with her? What is going to happen in her movie?
Prequels and interquels (I think it'll count as the latter, as I think this takes place some time before Civil War but after Age of Ultron) are inherently tough to pull off, because they require some sort of character backsliding, not to mention that they contain within them several foregone conclusions. The result can either be a story that is predictable, or you have a story that is incongruous with what we know already. For example, Han Solo's arc in the first Star Wars movie is his progression from a cynical mercenary to a hero willing to risk his life for the greater good. But when they came out with Solo: a Star Wars Story, this origin story with Han suggested that, actually, he had already gone through that process, which meant that the arc in the original was... invalid?
By contrast, Star War's other "story" movie, Rogue One, was a lot more successful because it was telling a story about entirely different characters we'd never seen before, and while we knew they would succeed in their mission, what was left in the air was how this new cast of characters would fare in their desperate mission.
So here's the thing:
Something that people often think of as groan-worthy in these ongoing franchises, especially comic books, is that nothing is ever permanent. You can kill off a superhero, but you always know they'll come back. Given that movie adaptations of these stories are typically more limited in their scope, they can actually get away with permanence. So yeah, Harvey Dent can become Two Face and die in the same movie. And Ronan the Accuser is truly dead (though Lee Pace got to come back in Captain Marvel, thanks to its earlier place within the MCU timeline.)
But I'll be honest: I want the Black Widow movie to give us an out. I want there to be some way for Natasha to survive or come back. Because as big a moment as her death was, I don't think that it gave her character the satisfying conclusion that we got for Tony Stark and Steve Rogers (the latter of whom isn't dead, but is extremely old, so technically we could get Cap back if Chris Evans is willing to get all that old-age makeup on again - which, by the way, really looked amazingly convincing, and also weirdly like Joe Biden).
It's clear that the next Guardians of the Galaxy will deal with the fact that the Gamora currently running around is a time-travel doppelganger of the one we knew (assuming she wasn't snapped away by Tony as a member of Thanos' forces - I assume there was some sort of omniscience to the infinity stones that could magically identify the real bad guys) but the cryptic scene in Infinity War in which Thanos sees a child Gamora in this weird orange space seems to suggest to me that those who are sacrificed for the Soul Stone might live on in some way - which would mean that Nat is wherever the original Gamora is.
I want the original Gamora back in large part because I think she's a character with her own really good arc, and I don't want to just lose that and reset the character to give the other Guardians angst. And if we can get her back, we ought to be able to get Natasha as well.
But man, I don't know. There are a couple factors at play: for one, Scarlett Johansson has been doing this for over a decade, and while I get the sense she enjoys the character, I also wouldn't be shocked if she's ready to move on (especially after finally getting her solo movie). And I also think that the folks at Marvel Studios need to play very carefully with the sort of comic-book story mechanics that allow these characters to never die, as you run the risk of losing the stakes (it's not like the MCU is running out of steam - they have about three million superheroes, and while Tony Stark and Steve Rogers have completed their multi-movie arcs, folks like Stephen Strange and Carol Danvers are just starting theirs).
I guess all of this is a bit premature. We have yet to see the Black Widow movie, which I would guess has just been in the can for almost a year, waiting for it to be safe enough to open movie theaters again. In the meantime, we're getting our weekly MCU fix with Wandavision, which should be followed by Falcon and the Winter Soldier and then Loki.
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